The guards recognized me from my previous visit, and I was led into a formal reception room in the center of which stood a table big enough to seat twenty in comfort. It drew me in at once, and I reached out to touch the smooth, inlaid surface, feeling the thread-thin grooves between tortoiseshell and oak, mother-of-pearl and ebony. I had traced the entire circumference of the piece and still no one had come to me. I crossed to a window and pulled open the shutter, looking at the woods that stretched below me, dark evergreens blocking all but lacy cutouts of light.

“Lady Emily?” A eunuch poked his head around the open door. “His Imperial Majesty will see you.”

He took me through corridor after corridor until we were outside, standing before a small building in which we found Abdül Hamit II, bent over a bench, rubbing a piece of sandpaper on a chair that lay on its back before him. He was not tall, though not strikingly short, but slim. Piercing dark eyes and a large, aquiline nose stood out from his black hair and neatly trimmed beard. His face was heavy with fatigue.

“It is my greatest pleasure to see you, Lady Emily,” he said, bursting with youthful energy that I’d not expected from a man his age. His voice, however, was quiet in its exuberance, low, almost like a song. “My thanks to you for coming all this way.” He swept his hand in front of his chest, gesturing to the space around him. “What do you think of my work?”

The room swam with the clean smell of fresh wood. Along the walls stood cabinets, tables, chairs, and chests piled one in front of the other, all, I assumed, made by the sultan’s own hands. “It’s exquisite,” I said, forgetting myself and walking away from him to inspect a tall bookcase fashioned from golden-stained cherry.