At that point the last of the warriors appeared. He was clothed and bearded like his fellows but distinguished from them by the expression of brutal rage that disfigured his flat features and by one thing more. Instead of his horse, he was dragging after him, by her long, tangled black hair, a screaming woman clad only in her shift. Behind these again came an old, grey-haired woman of impassive countenance, carrying a large sack made of heavy canvas.
The woman being so roughly used was young and might have been pretty had her face not been distorted by weeping and screaming. She was doing her utmost to wriggle free from the man's ruthless hand that was dragging her in the dust. When he came in front of the church, the man released the handful of hair in his grasp and sent her sprawling in the centre of the circle of villagers.
There was a murmur of appreciation from the men and a chorus of abuse from the women which the priest silenced with a gesture of his hand. Then the man stepped forward and, in a voice that sounded curiously calm in contrast to his recent behaviour, delivered himself of a short speech which the driver did his best to translate for the benefit of his passengers.
'What is he saying?' Jason asked.
'Well, all I can say is that these people here have some peculiar habits,' Gracchus answered. 'As far as I can gather, the man speaking is the husband of the woman on the ground. She has been unfaithful and he is casting her off before he leaves for the war so that she shall not soil his hearth with the fruit of her misdeeds.'
'He need not cast her off so brutally,' Marianne said indignantly.
'That's not the half of it,' Gracchus went on. 'If there's another man in the village willing to take her, she may live. If not, she'll be tied up in that sack that the old woman, her mother-in-law, is carrying and be thrown into the river.'
'But that's scandalous!' Marianne exclaimed fiercely. 'Why, it's nothing more than criminal! Where is the man who was her lover?'
'It seems he was some vagabond, a wandering fellow of the steppes belonging to the woman's own people. She is a gipsy and she'll not have many friends in this village.'
Certainly a deep silence had fallen. The woman still lay on the ground. She tossed her head to throw back a lock of long hair that trailed across her face. Her anguished black eyes searched the faces that stared back at her body, barely hidden by the torn shift, and at the weals and the darkening bruises showing on the brown skin. The husband had folded his arms and he too was staring about him, as though defying his fellows to take up what he had cast off. At his back a group of women clustered about the mother-in-law who, like some avenging fury, was already busying herself shaking out the sack.
'Surely there must be one,' Marianne breathed, aghast, 'a very young one, perhaps, or else an old man for whom such a girl would be a gift…?'
But there was neither old man nor young boy not yet of an age to bear arms who was willing to buy himself endless trouble for the sake of a guilty woman not of his own people. The woman's doom was clear in every glance. The priest, standing like a glittering statue at the entrance to his church, seemed to understand it, for he traced the sign of the cross in the air a number of times with the cross he carried and began intoning a prayer. The husband uttered a short, harsh laugh and turned away while the women advanced with a horrid eagerness. Another moment and the condemned woman, who was howling now like a wolf in pain, would have been seized and tied into the sack and thrown into the river which, for all its beauty, was to be the instrument of her death.
Then it was that Gracchus leapt forward and without a second's thought rushed at the group, crying out 'Stoi! Stoi! Stop! Stop!' with the full force of his lungs.
'Good God!' Marianne gasped with horror. 'He'll get himself lynched! Go after him!'
She had no need to ask. Already Jason, Craig and Jolival were running, dragging with them the driver, more dead than alive, and lurching grotesquely in the American's strong grip.
For a moment the situation was fraught with danger. In their fury at seeing their victim snatched from them, the women fell upon Gracchus, shrieking like hyenas over their prey, and the men, at this unexpected intervention, were on the point of joining in when the priest plunged in to the young man's rescue, brandishing his cross.
This had the effect of instantly arresting the cossacks. The women reluctantly released their hold on Gracchus and his friends gathered round him with the air of men determined not to be browbeaten.
With the priest as mediator, the long, laborious argument began. There were shouts and threatening gestures, especially on the part of the wronged husband, who evidently meant to witness the death of the woman who had betrayed him. Marianne, who had not moved from her place by the coach, wondered what she ought to do. If the danger began to look urgent, the best thing might be to drive the kibitka full tilt into the crowd and try to use its weight and the effects of surprise to snatch the four men from certain death. For not one of them had thought of such weapons as there were inside it.
She had climbed into the driver's seat and was already grasping the reins, preparatory to turning the vehicle, when the hubbub subsided suddenly. The women, the old men and the children, began to drift back to the houses. The men returned to their horses. The only people left in the middle of the square were the condemned woman, whom Gracchus had helped to her feet, the priest and the foreigners. The priest raised his cross again to point the way going down to the river. Gracchus took the woman by the hand and, followed by the three others and the coachman, still more dead than alive, came back to the posting house and their coach.
The generous impulse which had prompted the young man's action had cooled somewhat during the discussion and he approached Marianne with a faintly shamefaced air.
'The priest says that she is now my wife! Her name is Shankala,' he muttered, sounding so downcast that Marianne smiled at him comfortingly.
'Why are you looking so miserable, Gracchus? You could not have stood by and seen the poor creature murdered,' she said gently. 'You acted splendidly and for my part I am proud of you.'
'And so am I! From a humanitarian point of view, at any rate,' Jolival agreed. 'But I am wondering what we are going to do with her?'
'I can't see that the question arises,' the Irishman said cheerfully. 'The woman should go with her husband and since this wild cat is now Madame Gracchus…'
'Oh, as to that, I didn't take the holy man too seriously.' The bridegroom broke in with an air of would-be carelessness. 'I'm not really married, of course. Besides, I'm for liberty. I don't go much for priests and if you want the truth I've more faith in the Goddess of Reason than in God the Father. Not that she wasn't a handsome wench—'
'Well, Gracchus,' Marianne exclaimed in amazement; 'this is certainly a profession of faith! I've always known you for a child of the Revolution but I wonder what the cardinal would say if he could hear you?'
Gracchus hung his head and fidgeted a little.
'Forgive me, Mademoiselle Marianne. I said more than I meant. This business has me in a proper whirl. But after all, surely the girl could always make a maid for you. She'd never be as good as Agathe, of course, but still better than nothing.'
Jason, so far, had said nothing. He was gazing at the rescued woman with a curious expression, as though she were some strange animal. At last he gave a shrug.
'A ladies' maid? That girl? You don't know what you're saying, Gracchus. It seems to me that she'll be more trouble to tame than a she-wolf. Nor do I think she will show us much gratitude for saving her.'
Marianne was inclined to agree with him. Even in her present wretched state, with her torn shift and her bruises and covered in dust, the gipsy girl was not an object for pity. Her black eyes gleamed under their heavy brows with a savage fire that was more than a little disturbing. Seen from close to, she was in fact quite beautiful, in spite of a rather flattened nose and high cheekbones. Her rather slanting eyes betrayed traces of mongol blood. Her skin was smooth and her hair a deep blue-black, but the wide mouth with its ful
l, red lips betrayed a latent sensuality.
She stared insolently from one to another of her rescuers and when Marianne smiled kindly at her and held out her hand, she pretended not to see it and turned away quickly to snatch away the bundle wrapped in red cloth which her mother-in-law had tossed at the driver out of her doorway and which probably contained the girl's belongings.
Craig laughed softly. 'Well now, to be sure, it's a pleasant journey we'll be having with this colleen—'
'Bah!' Jolival said. 'I'll be surprised if she stays with us long. She'll be off at the first opportunity as soon as she's put sufficient distance between herself and her friends in the village here. You heard what Gracchus said? She's a gipsy, a born traveller.'
'Oh, let her do as she likes,' Marianne said with a sigh, nettled by the girl's contemptuous attitude. 'Gracchus is the only one of us who can talk to her. Let him try what he can do.'
She had had more than enough of the business and if she was not precisely sorry they had saved the gipsy girl from drowning, she certainly wanted to put her out of her mind as far as possible. After all, Gracchus was a grown man and old enough to be responsible.
She turned her steps towards the doorway of the inn where the familiar figure of the postmaster stood cap in hand to greet them. Jason followed her but when Gracchus took Shankala by the arm to lead her inside she twisted out of his grasp like a snake and, running after Jason, took his hand and pressed it to her lips with fierce intensity. As she released it she spoke some words in a low, guttural voice.
'What does she say?' Marianne cried with rising irritation.
Gracchus had turned scarlet to the roots of his carroty hair and his blue eyes flashed.
'She says that – that if she must have a master she will choose him for herself. The hussy! I've a good mind to call back her husband and hand her over to the women again.'
'It's too late now,' Jolival said.
Indeed, the cossacks, after a final blessing from their priest, were already beginning to cross the river. Heedless of wetting themselves, they rode into the water at a place known to them which must have been a ford because the horses, guided by their sure hands, were never more than breast deep in the stream. The leaders were already mounting the farther bank. The rest followed in their turn and before very long they were all forming up again in perfect order on the other side. Two by two, the black-clad riders vanished into the gathering darkness.
That night, in the little boarded room beneath the icon of the Virgin and Child, both of them sporting the most atrocious squints, Marianne failed to recover the perfect happiness of earlier nights. She was nervous and irritable and unable to respond wholeheartedly to her lover's caresses. Her mind still dwelled on the woman who was sleeping somewhere beneath their common roof. In vain she told herself that she was little more than a wild animal, a creature of no importance who could never affect her own life; still she could not rid herself of the notion that the gipsy was a danger, a threat that was the more formidable because she could not tell what form it would take.
Tired of clasping an unresponsive body and of kissing lips that did not take fire from his, Jason got up suddenly and, fetching the candle that burned before the icon, brought it close to Marianne's face. In the light her eyes were wide open and shining, with no hint of amorous softness in them.
'What is it?' he murmured, laying a finger softly on her lips. "You look as if you'd seen a ghost. Don't you feel like making love tonight?'
She did not move her head but her eyes, as they looked at him, were full of sadness.
'I'm frightened,' she said.
'Frightened? What of? Are you afraid those village harpies will come and sit down outside our windows to get Shankala back?'
'No. I think it is Shankala I am afraid of.'
Jason laughed. 'What an idea! She's no very friendly look about her, I'll agree, but then she doesn't know us and from what we've seen she's had no cause so far to love the human race. Those old witches would have torn her to pieces if they could. Her beauty can't have helped her there.'
Marianne was conscious of a nasty little tug somewhere in the region of her heart. She did not at all like to hear Jason speak of the woman's beauty.
'Have you forgotten she deceived her husband? She's an adulteress—'
The sudden harshness that came into her voice made her feel as if the words had been a scream. Or perhaps it was the silence that followed them. For a moment Jason studied the sharpened lines of his beloved's face. Then he blew out the candle and drew her hard against him, holding her so close that it was as if he would have crept inside her very skin. He kissed her, a long kiss that sought to warm her cold lips and instil into them something of his own passion, but in vain. His lips moved to her cheek, then nibbled at her ear before he whispered at last: 'But you, too, are an adulteress, my love. Yet no one has suggested drowning you…'
Marianne leapt as if a serpent had stung her and struggled to draw away but he held her firmly and, the better to immobilize her, imprisoned both her legs between his hard thighs, while she cried out: 'You are mad! I, an adulteress? Don't you know that I am free? That my husband is dead?'
She was panic-stricken, seized with a terror she could not control. Guessing that she was on the point of screaming aloud, Jason spoke more tenderly than ever.
'Hush! Be quiet,' he murmured against her lips. 'Don't you think it's time you told me the truth? Don't you know yet that I love you – and that you can safely trust me?'
'But – what do you want me to tell?'
'What I have a right to know. I know I may not have given you much cause to think that I will understand. I have been brutal, cruel, violent and unjust. But I have been sorry for it, Marianne! All through those days when I lay like a corpse in the sunshine at Monemvasia, waiting for the recovery that seemed to elude me, I thought only of you, of us two – and of all that I had so wantonly destroyed. If I had helped and understood you then, we would not be here now. You would have carried out your mission and at this moment we would be sailing back to my country, instead of journeying endlessly over these barbarous steppes. So let us have no more foolishness, no more lies and pretence! Let us cast off everything but ourselves, as we cast off our clothes to love one another. I want to see your naked soul, my love… Tell me the truth. It is more than time if we want to be able ever to build up a true happiness—'
The truth?'
'Yes. I will help you. Where is your child, Marianne?'
Her heart missed a beat. She had always known that, sooner or later, Jason would ask her that question but until that moment she had tried to ward off all the possible answers, perhaps from an unconscious weariness at all the lies she had been forced to tell.
She knew that he was right, that they must make an end, once and for all, of all misunderstandings, and that only then would all things become possible. Yet she still shrank, unaccountably, from uttering the words, like a little girl trembling on the brink of a deep ditch.
'My child…' she began slowly, halting over the words, 'he is…"
'With his father, is he not? Or at least with the man who would be a father to him? He is with Turhan Bey, or rather, with your permission, with the Prince Sant'Anna.'
Once again, there was silence but this time there was a different quality in the air. A sudden relief, a clear note of release rang in Marianne's voice as she asked, almost timidly: 'How did you find out? Who told you?'
'No one – and everyone. He, most of all, I think, a man who could choose slavery by going aboard my ship. He had no reason to bear what he did from me and from others unless it was to protect some other person, and that someone you. To be sure, I did not guess it all at once. But the thick web that was woven so closely about you became amazingly clear one morning at the palace of Humayunabad, when I met the Sant'Annas' faithful servant bearing the last of those princes with such triumphant joy and pride to be presented to a simple merchant, of no very certain nationality, who, in the ordinary way, cou
ld not have had so pressing an interest in the child that all else must make way for it. But you, Marianne? When did you learn the truth?'
She told him then. Eager to complete the tale he had already heard from Jolival, she told him everything, emptying her heart and her memory once and for all with an inexpressible feeling of release. She told him all about the nocturnal visit to Rebecca's house, about the Prince's demand and her stay at the Morousi palace, about the bargain she had made with her husband, the peril she had been in from the English ambassador and her installation in the palace by the Bosphorus, culminating in the Prince's sudden departure with the child, believing that its mother had rejected it, at the very moment when she had come to know her own heart. Last of all, she told him of her fears as to his own reactions when he should learn that she had been married to a black.
'We had agreed to part,' she said, 'so what was the good of telling you all this at the risk of making you angry again?'
He uttered a mirthless little laugh.
'Making me angry? So, in your eyes, I am nothing more than some kind of slave trader?' he said bitterly. 'I suppose you'll never understand that I grew up among black people, that I owe some of the best parts of my childhood to them, and that to me it seems quite natural that I should be their master and love them just the same? As for him—'
'Yes, tell me. How do you think of him?'
He thought for a moment and she heard him sigh.
'I don't really know. With liking, certainly, and respect for his courage and his selflessness. But with anger, too – and jealousy. He is altogether too great a man. Too noble, too remote from other men, from common or garden adventurers like me! And a darn sight too good-looking also! What's more, in spite of everything, he is your husband. You bear his name in the sight of God and men. And then he has your child, flesh of your flesh – something of you! So you see, there are times when I think that for all his willing sacrifice, he has the luck…'
[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire Page 2
