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dinghy down there, bobbing on the waves.
    Charlotte made the rest of the descent with her eyes firmly closed, and was relieved when she felt a man’s hands take her by the waist and set her in the boat. She watched Patrick’s deft climb with an expression of obdurate defiance.
    The line anchoring the smaller craft to the ship WAS disengaged and pulled up over the railing, and Patrick andthe other man took up oars and began rowing. Charlotte watched the colorful fish navigating the bright coral reef beneath the surface of the water, wonder-struck. She’d wanted an adventure and she’d gotten one, which only went to prove Lydia’s old adage that a person had to watch what she wished for because she just might get it.
    The palace soon drew her gaze, and she studied its arched doorways and windows, its pillars and porticoes. Two people awaited them on the shore, wearing colorful robes and turbans.
    Charlotte moved a little closer to Patrick, since he had his back to her and wouldn’t see, and hoped she could trust him to keep his word and take her with him when he left the palace.
    “Just let them take care of you, and whatever you do, don’t talk back,” Patrick warned her when they reached the beach and the men in turbans came to pull the boat up onto the sand. “When it’s time to leave, I’ll come for you.”
    Patrick was greeted with great goodwill and ceremony, but when the taller of the two men took in Charlotte’s rolled-up trousers and sagging shirt, his dark face was pinched with disapproval. He clapped his hands together and shouted something, and two women swaddled in silk, with only their hands and eyes visible, rushed out to collect her like so much debris washed up on the beach.
    They shuffled Charlotte across a cobbled courtyard, surrounded by high walls and boasting a beautiful pink marble fountain at its center, and into the palace. Their dark eyes held wondering consternation as they hurried her along a hallway and under a great arch decorated with gold-painted carvings.
    One of them clapped her hands together, as officiously as the man on the beach had done, and all over the huge room, women rose from couches and mats to surround Charlotte. They stared at her trousers and bare feet and touched her tangled, dirty hair cautiously, as though expecting something to come scurrying out.
    Charlotte couldn’t remember a time when she’d been so insulted
or
so intrigued. She was scared, and with good reason by her reckoning, but she was also the only youngwoman in her circle of acquaintances to set foot inside a sultan’s palace. “Do any of you speak English?” she asked, with all the dignity she could manage.
    The response was another burst of indecipherable chatter. Charlotte was taken in hand again, and firmly led to the edge of a large pool of water lined with painted tiles. In the next instant, she felt her borrowed clothes being removed, and though she had an impulse to fight, she knew it would be no use, for there were a dozen or more women surrounding her, and they were strong.

3

    T HE WATER IN THE LARGE, TILE-LINED POOL WAS DELICIOUSLY warm, and aromas of musk, cinnamon, rose, and gardenia scented the steamy air. Because Patrick had promised Charlotte she would be safe in the palace, she submitted quietly to the forced but not ungentle ablutions.
    Every inch of her skin, with the exception of her face, was scrubbed with pumice. Her hair was washed with egg yolk, rinsed, and washed again, and then Charlotte was half led and half carried from the pool, in a state of such intense relaxation that she nearly fell asleep on her feet.
    She was dried with soft towels, laid facedown on a low couch upholstered in cloud-soft red velvet. While someone carefully combed the snarls from her hair, another person began massaging fragrant oil into her skin. She sighed as the last tautness was kneaded from the muscles in her shoulders and back.
    Charlotte was as intoxicated as if she’d been given ardent