Two days after the burial — September 18, 1814.
The harem was quiet.
Aisha sat by the cedar chest where she kept the state correspondence — the letters from provincial governors, the reports from qaidships, the documents that passed through her hands as Ḥammūda’s wife and partner.
She was sorting through Ḥammūda’s personal effects.
The amber prayer bead from Kairouan, smooth and warm in her hand. He had carried it for forty years, since his father gave it to him as a boy.
The miniature portrait of Mohamed, their son who had died in 1798, painted in his twenty-fourth year. Ḥammūda had kept it in the lowest drawer of his desk, taking it out only on the anniversary of the boy’s death.
And a four-page parchment covered in Ḥammūda’s handwriting.
Aisha recognized the seal — the same seal that now hung around Uthman’s neck. She broke the wax and unfolded the parchment.
It was a charter for succession. Not blood succession, but institutional: councils that would choose, scholars who would advise, processes that would prevent the very chaos that now threatened the palace. The document proposed that the state might choose its leaders not by blood, but by merit — by the consensus of men who had served Tunis all their lives.
Aisha read it once. She did not weep.
She closed the parchment carefully, as if it were still alive — a possibility that had lived in Ḥammūda’s mind, if not in his deeds.
She opened the cedar chest. She placed the parchment inside, beneath the letters from governors and the reports from qaidships. She closed the lid.
She stood and walked to the window, looking out at the palace gardens where the olive trees Ḥammūda had planted were still growing, their roots deep in the earth.
In the corner of the room, on a high shelf, the cedar chest sat with the parchment inside.
The charter was in the chest. It had been there since summer, waiting for someone to open it.
No one did.
[Continue to PART II: THE AFTERMATH in EPILOGUE_PART2.md]