Leyla: The Black Tulip

Anticipation

Princess Fatma’s wedding is scheduled for the last two days and two nights during the full moon of April, to coincide with the Tulip Festival. It is to be more lavish than any other spectacle in İstanbul. The festivities will also celebrate the finishing of the Sadabad Palace and the Padishah’s youngest sons becoming men. And everyone in the city is invited to celebrate. Women will be allowed to uncover their faces and speak in public. The Sultan’s harem will be allowed to participate. This will be the first time Leyla could step outside the harem walls.

Master Hyacinth is put in charge of organizing the festivities. He seems to be everywhere all at once. He is constantly instructing various department heads about details of the festival. Leyla hears him say this kind of festival only happens once in a lifetime. People will be coming from all over the empire to celebrate.

The Topkapı gardens are groomed and cleaned. Dancers are brought in to teach the harem dancers the latest dances. Chefs from France train fifteen hundred cooks to prepare the wedding feast. Sadabad Palace is almost complete, and the eunuchs describe it as a cross between the French palace of Versailles and the Taj Mahal. There’s rumored to be forty orange trees from France in the gardens, and twelve hundred tulip bulbs from Holland. Leyla works with the Mistress of the Flowers to unpack package after package of bulbs. The packages have a special writing on them, and a eunuch tells Leyla it is Latin. Leyla can tell the Mistress of the Flowers knows all the bulbs, and if she could talk, she’d identify them by name.

When the tellâls announce they’ll be offering prizes for the best and most unusual tulips, Leyla feels giddy. The Padishah himself has offered one hundred akças of gold for a pure black tulip. A black tulip has never been seen anywhere. The closest has been a nut-brown color, but nobody has succeeded in producing a black tulip, in neither Holland nor İstanbul. Leyla knows she and Cengiz were working on producing darker and darker tulip colors, but she won’t know if they succeeded until the tulips she brought from home flower.

None of the gardeners suspect anything about the unique flowers, since Leyla’s bulbs are growing well and blending in with the other tulips. Perhaps the Mistress of the Flowers suspects what she’s been doing, but in her own way, she lets Leyla be on her own. As Leyla tends the tulip beds, she feels like she can sense every vein of the flowers. Leyla talks to them each day and prays they’ll help her fulfill her dream of reuniting with her family by finding favor with the Padishah. But no matter what, Leyla cannot vocalize her dreams. She fears if she does, they’ll disappear.

The seamstresses are working day and night to prepare ceremonial costumes for the Princess and other court women. Everyone else in the harem is working on their own costume, too. Leyla, however, still doesn’t own any nice clothes of her own, and doesn’t know how to sew. She’s too embarrassed to ask the other girls for help. The bundle ladies visit with lovely fabrics from Damascus, but Leyla cannot afford them. All she has are her secret tulip bulbs and the gold coin the poet at Madam Siranush’s market had given her, and Leyla doesn’t want to spend that gold coin.

Leyla also cannot burden the Princess with her problems, since she’s so busy with wedding preparations. As the Princess chatters on each day about her wedding, Leyla quietly continues the drawing lessons, helping Lena hold the charcoal pencil and showing the Princess how to blend paints. They’re constantly interrupted by somebody who needs to discuss something about the wedding with the Princess. Eventually, one day, the Princess announces she’ll need to pause the lessons. She cannot concentrate on drawing and painting. They’ll resume again once she’s married. Leyla, Semiramis, and the Princess will continue the lessons at the palace İbrahim Pasha is building for her.

After that, Leyla devotes all her time to her tulips. She meditates and focuses on the theories she and Cengiz developed. She believes the tulips most exposed to the sun will be the darkest. She hears that İbrahim Pasha wishes to find a blue pearl tulip for his bride. Perhaps with more time, Leyla could’ve made one. But, she has her heart set on the Sultan’s preferred color.

Each day, Leyla returns in the morning to look at her tulips. When they begin to show signs of opening, Leyla covers them with branches so people cannot see.