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ignored the calls of the merchants to see their rugs, their weavings, their spices, their candies and stepped unbidden into the dimness of a clothing shop where she studied a rack of dresses whose colors and lightness of fabric seemed to promise that they could transform her. Tonight there was to be another party—why should she not go like everyone else in their group, in a happy and hopeful state of mind? Like Cinderella, she could perhaps be changed by a ball gown from a solid-thighed woman of early middle age to a princess full of beauty and grace, Perhaps (and why not, that was why fairy tales existed, to make the impossible seems possible) she would attract the love of a handsome prince.
    A young Turkish woman came from the back of the store, smiling. “Be free to try on whatever dress,” she said. “Many will be your size.”
    “Thank you,” Lilly said. “I will.” And she seized on one that struck her, that would work the necessary magic.
    *
    After dinner that night, in the heat of the Mediterranean evening, the celebrants, having finished the last of Morat’s delicious food and awaiting further entertainments as promised, collected their wallets from below and followed Izak off the boat and up a hilly street to the center of Kas.
    Now, with dark upon them, the temperature was dropping and the calls to prayer from the minarets in the small town mosque had changed to sounds of night music and celebration from the cafes.
    Lilly walked a little to the side of the others. Morat, the cook, brought up the rear. Barish had been left behind to guard the boat. Lilly’s mother was being helped up the hill by Lance, who took her arm, gallantly. Fiona was between her son, Harrison, and the willowy Gerta, while the others—Marianne, Jane and Jack Cotton, followed in a ragged formation, climbing upward at various speeds, laughing from the effects of too many champagne toasts.
    Jane Cotton, the birthday girl, looked elegant—as always—in her red silk dress and sexy sling-back heels, which she wore with flair, even on these rocky streets. She always managed to look classy and svelte, particularly in her bathing suit. Lilly wondered where, on the boat, Jane could find a steady place to shave her legs or even find a level surface where she might file and shape her fingernails, no less polish them.
    For the café event, Lilly was wearing the dress she had bought in Kas that afternoon. Made not in Turkey but in India, of a gauzy gold fabric, it glowed with tie-dyed shades of orange and brown and flashed sparks from its bodice which had—imbedded in its embroidery—little round mirrored buttons. High- waisted, the dress flowed from her breasts and swirled around her ankles. It seemed a blessed and glamorous antidote to the seersucker striped outfit she’d had made-to-order in Istanbul which—she was certain when she wore it—looked like a pair of pajamas.
    Izak kept ahead of all of them, walking with the power and confidence of one who knows his way. Lilly had never seen him in real clothes. Tonight, after dinner, he had changed into sandals and a crisply creased brown shirt and shorts. He seemed almost formally dressed. Could he have actually pressed his shirt with an iron? Imagining him somewhere below deck, in the tiny space that must be his quarters, Lilly felt a tenderness toward him as she imagined him (out of sight of the rest of the crew) pressing wrinkles from his shirt. Three times a day he set her food before her: she would have been happy, even grateful, to iron his shirt for him had he asked.
    The sky was dark now, and the lights of the small houses of the city lit up the hills. The shopkeepers were out in the streets (the same ones she had seen yesterday afternoon)—the rug-sellers, inviting everyone inside to buy their treasures, the souvenir shop owners, pointing to their shelves filled with teapots and chess sets and tasseled brocaded pillows.
    From one of the doorways, Lilly heard the high cry of a