Guess who watched Love Never Dies for the first time ever last night? ...I really felt like I spent two hours of my life watching the most questionable fanfic ever. I know I'm years late to the party but, wow. Anyway, a few questions will be answered about the little sultana in today's chapter.

Dearest Shadi,

In a moment, I shall write a word down. It will, no doubt, conjure up a slew of absurdly inaccurate images and ideas in your mind. This is perhaps my fault, for I could have educated you more thoroughly, but I did not. Bear with me as I rectify that oversight.

The word is:

Harem.

A long time ago, I learned not to use this word in Europe. All they think of are scenes out of one of Gérôme's paintings: indolent women loitering nude in a bath house. Not to say that there were no lazy women in the Shah's harem, or that they did not indulge in the luxuries available to them. But it is telling that the French created the term odalisque. With it, they turned every chambermaid into a concubine and every concubine into a courtesan.

I want to say the truth is simpler, but we know that truth is never simple. But the truth is different, at least.

Ambition was the byword of the Persian harem. One might attempt to depend on the whims of the Shah's favor, but who would want to build on such quicksand? The surer path was one of hard work.

The ladies oversaw most everything, from running the palace coffee lounges to organizing the Shah's travels to engaging tutors for the royal children. In return for their diligence, they were rewarded. The highest ladies were given their own establishments, had the right to collect taxes—and had a better chance of securing position and power for their favorites.

During my last years in Persia, one of the most powerful women in the land had been born a peasant. She went from being a serving girl to being titled a wife, gaining charge over the Shah's own quarters, even the crown jewels. She had the ability to make and destroy anyone she pleased—and all without ever having been to the Shah's bed. Our European friends would not quite believe that, I think.

Of course, like everything made with that Midas touch of royalty, such prestige was always in danger of disintegrating. The Court was ever false and fleeting, and power was its most persistent deceit.

When I was first introduced to the ladies of the harem, it was the soft-spoken Fatima-Sultan who was just ascending to prominence. The Shah had renamed her Anis al-Dawla, Companion of the Sovereign, and she would go on to be beloved and to hold great power most everywhere.

But most everywhere is not everywhere, and in this case, most everywhere was not Mazandaran.

There, the woman of the hour was a small creature named Soraya.

(Not that anyone ever called her that. Before she had been given to Naser al-Din, she had been a wife of one of the old Kurdish sultans, and she insisted on keeping the title.

"I am a sultana," she would say, "and what are the rest of you?"

I wonder if anyone ever pointed out that the Persian sultans were little to brag about. As a captain of the royal treasury, Feridoon was a sultan—and I certainly never bothered to claim being a sultana.)

Strangely enough, she served as my gateway to the harem world. Feridoon returned home one evening, after he had been at the construction site for Erik's great palace. He was tense and drawn, as usual, and without preamble told me that I was to go to the harem the next day.

"Oh, what have you done?" I laughed at him, thinking that it was some service he had done me. I have never thought of myself as a social creature, but the tight isolation Feridoon preferred to live in had tried even my tendency towards introversion. I missed the company of my sisters, and I thought perhaps my husband had noticed I was growing lonely in addition to being alone.

"Nothing," he replied, in a harsher voice than I was accustomed to hearing from him. "I had nothing to do with this!" He stormed away—well, a bit of an exaggeration there. He trudged off under his familiar rain cloud and locked himself in his library with a water pipe. I did not see him again until the next morning.

He entered into my chambers while my maid was going over the day's wardrobe with me. He dismissed her and also rejected the mantle she had pulled out.

"I will not," I said slowly, trying to break through this dampening gloom he had surrounded himself in, "I will not embarrass you."

He half-smiled, barely laughed. "You cannot believe that is my concern." He pulled out one of my finest jackets—green and gold brocade, I still remember—and handed it to me.

"What then?" I asked. I stared at him, impolitely so, daring him to answer me. Over the last night, it had become firmly entrenched in my mind that he was ashamed of me—or did not trust me—or that somehow, I was at fault. The thought had angered me, and though I had tried for mildness, I found it failing me. "How can I hope to do right by you, if you do not tell me what is wrong?"

He stared back at me, and after a moment kissed me. I never quite knew what to do with him when he kissed me like that—he was part way between a shy lover and condemned man determined to have his last wish. He broke away and whispered, "she will eat you alive."

And he left.

I heard his horse being saddled, and I listened as he rode off to attend to the day's business.

I tried not to allow my anger to bleed over into the rest of the day, but it was difficult. It colored my first real look inside of the Mazandaran Palace, and made me impossible to impress. The luxury of the harem precinct was beyond anything I had personally experienced—some of the high-ranking servants wore costumes that rivaled my wedding trousseau—but I did not care. I was the wife of Feridoon Ali Jah—hellfire, I could have insisted they call me Sultana—and I would not disgrace him, and I would not fail him, and I would not fail myself.

It turned out not to be such a production. I was ushered into one of the tiled gardens, where some of the women were amusing themselves with a little toy boat floating in a fountain. Musicians played off the side, and a group of young children chased butterflies. Servants were carrying trays of beautiful sweets—marzipan in the shape of lions, and little cakes dusted with gold, and plump dates stuffed with almonds.

And in the center of it all, sitting cross-legged on an overstuffed cushion, was the Sultana. I say she was at the center of the activity, but like a fixed axis around which everything else whirls.

They say she was very beautiful, though I know of no one who ever saw her without a double veil. Even at feasts and picnics, she kept her face half-covered, though what I came to know of her made it into a mockery of piety.

She caught sight of me quickly, though I had not even seen her glance in my direction. "You're our little farmer girl!" She called to me, and had me sit near her. "You're much prettier than I would have thought." She did not sound pleased, but it was hard to tell. Her Persian was heavily accented with the more Arabian pronunciations—harsher consonants and more guttural stops. And with the veil—well, who ever knew what the Sultana was thinking?

That first afternoon I spent with the harem was not unpleasant, though I always had the most unnerving feeling, like I was part of a drama and did not know it. I knew nothing of the politics of this kingdom within a kingdom, and I never occurred to me just who I was passing my time with. Sometimes I could just kick my young self for my ignorance, but, really, no one yet knew what the Sultana would become.

How she came to hold the land under such a thrall, I hardly know. She was little more than a child—fourteen, fifteen perhaps— and acted like one even as she used her most womanly charms.

I can solace myself that, at the very least, I left the harem that day with a bad feeling.

The Sultana had led me about the place, introduced me graciously to this person and that person. And her eyes were ever laughing—I could hardly keep myself from looking about, trying to find the joke. Before I departed for home, she took me into one of the more private rooms, where one of the Shah's wives sat with her newborn.

"Another ugly little girl," the Sultana commented, leaning over to look at the infant very closely. "She would have been left on the dunes where I come from. The sand usually smothers them before the jackals arrive—though in summer, they simply burn."

The new mother burst into tears and fled with her child, though she was barely out of the sick bed. It was impossible to say if the Sultana was serious or not—but when she looked at me a moment later, I would have sworn to God she was smiling beneath her veil.

I think I then realized that I was the joke, and that the punch line had yet to come. I left soon after that, and was glad to. But the Sultana let me know, in very few words, that I would be obliged to return. And one day, the joke would finally be finished.

I imagine all the harems of the world are the bad with the good and the good with the bad—because what is a harem but a congregation of people making up a whole? And what are people but black and white muddled hopelessly into grey?

It just so happens that, despite the gracious and good people I would meet in the Shah's harem, the little Sultana cast a very large shadow that tinted the whole of that world dark.

Perhaps, then, it is better if we let the Europeans keep their flesh-toned fantasies. For the more I think on the reality of the place, the less I like to.

Perhaps I shall start up with the truth again in my next letter and for now leave you with a lie:

It was all flowers in bloom and fragrant sweet tea and beautiful dancing girls in chiffon— and we were all happy during those rosy hours of Mazandaran.

Mojgan Khanum

I was tempted to turn the historical Anis al-Dawla into Leroux's Sultana, but by all accounts she was an absolute sweetheart. Not quite what I wanted, so you have the totally fictional psycho Soraya instead.