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Outside, the world was cold and distant, but here, together, we had found peace.
When I woke in the darkness, I had lost all sense of time. The zeppelin soared so soundlessly that we could have been moving or moored at a faraway city.
My stomach plunged. Wendel had left in the middle of the night? Maybe it didn’t mean anything significant, but it was hard not to worry.
I dressed, left the cabin, and discovered it was dawn. The night’s chill still lingered in the sky. On the promenade deck, I peered through the tilted windows.
The first blush of sunlight gilded a carpet of amber fields. We flew not more than five hundred feet above the red-tiled roof of a farmhouse, and laughing children chased the zeppelin’s shadow.
We had to be flying over the Ottoman Empire already.
In the dining room, relief crashed over me. Wendel stood by the windows, his hands clasped behind his back. He looked over his shoulder at me and smiled. Sleep had smoothed much of the worry from his face.
“Good morning,” I said.
When I stood by him, he tugged me into the crook of his arm. I rested my cheek against his chest. His steady heartbeat thumped beneath my ear. The sound comforted me, telling me he was here with me, and he was alive.
A city shimmered in the distance. The spires of the mosque Hagia Sophia soared heavenward. I had seen the Hagia Sophia once before, but only in a book, and it looked so much more vibrant and real than the gray, crosshatched engraving in those pages. Anticipation bubbled up inside me like champagne.
Constantinople.
The city where it would all end.
47
We wandered through the Grand Bazaar of Constantinople.
Wendel had bought a black cloak, and he wore it with the hood shadowing his face. I tugged my scarf straight over my hair and clutched a golden Ottoman lira in my hand. The covered streets of the Grand Bazaar no doubt swarmed with pickpockets.
The kaleidoscope of sights dazzled my eyes. On my left, men praised rich Turkish rugs. On my right, glowing glass lamps like fairytale baubles hung from the vaulted ceilings. They hawked opium beside dates and pistachios. Rare and exotic spices perfumed the air—sandalwood, ginger, nutmegs, cinnamon.
Even I blended into this city’s crowds, with so many faces from faraway lands. No one looked twice at me.
A woman with birdlike eyes beckoned me with toy scarab beetles that flicked open their iridescent shells and flew on mechanical wings. I couldn’t tell where the magic ended and the clockwork began.
We found an even more wondrous clockwork beast: a griffin crafted from ivory and brass. When it blinked, its eyes clicked like a camera shutter. A lion’s growl rumbled from its mechanical throat and made me shiver.
Wendel lingered at the edge of the street, waiting.
I hurried to meet him. “I wish we had more time. I would love to get lost here.”
His mouth bent in a smile. Perhaps he had before.
I followed him down a street that echoed with the hammerings of coppersmiths. We rounded the corner and came upon a newsstand. Wendel bought a newspaper. He flipped through it, then tapped a page. I glanced at the text, recognizing it as Turkish. Honestly, it was impressive that he understood so many languages.
I only recognized one word:Hieronymus.
“His obituary?” I asked.
Wendel pointed to his wrist where a watch would be. I knew that we didn’t have much time. We abandoned the Grand Bazaar. He flagged down a hackney carriage and showed the driver the obituary. The driver replied in Turkish before waving us both inside.
We rattled through the crowded streets of Constantinople. Wind corrugated the steely waters of the Bosporus. The hackney stopped outside a small church with a stark white façade. Wendel leapt from the carriage, helped me to the street, and tossed the driver a coin. Then he flipped back the hood of his cloak and strode inside.
The velvety smoke of frankincense sweetened the gloom. At the far end of the nave, an intricate gilded screen glimmered by candlelight and dwarfed a simple wooden casket. Mourners shuffled toward the casket.
Wendel held his finger to his lips and slipped into the procession. I followed in his footsteps, my heart pounding in myribs, and prayed that nobody would recognize us. I bowed my head, hiding my face. We inched closer to the casket, until only a gray-haired woman stood between us and the dead.
Hieronymus lay in eternal sleep. But soon he would be woken.
