Yet, as he turned to go, she called him back:
'Mr O'Flaherty, just one thing more. How is the man who was flogged?'
'Kaleb?'
'Yes. I know the thing he did was very bad but – that terrible punishment…'
'He was spared the greater part of it, thanks to you, ma'am,' the lieutenant said gently, 'and a man of his strength doesn't die of twenty-five lashes. As for the thing he did – well, I know two or three more'd be glad to do the same. Until this evening, then, ma'am.'
This time, Marianne let him go. She entered the cabin thoughtfully, to be greeted with something not far short of rapture by Agathe who had evidently been expecting Jason Beaufort to hang her mistress at the yard-arm for daring to interfere.
Marianne told her in a few words what had taken place and then withdrew into a silence which lasted until evening. Her brain whirled with such a confused multitude of thoughts that it was all she could do to sort them out. There were so many questions that she did not give up until her head was aching. Overcome at last by weariness and the pain in her temples, she decided to try and sleep.
It would help to build up her strength and, in any case, sleep was quite the best way of making the time pass quickly when one was consumed with curiosity.
She was roused from her sleep by the sound of gunfire which sent her dashing breathlessly to the porthole, fearing an attack. But it was only the frigates of their escort firing a farewell salute. Cythera had vanished. Westwards, the sun was low in the sky and the two warships, their mission accomplished, were going about for the return journey to Corfu. They could not go any farther for fear of offending the Sultan, who was not friendly to France. The British squadrons were equally cautious, to avoid damaging the recently improved relations between their own government and the Sublime Porte. In the normal way of things the Sea Witch should have been able to make Constantinople without further trouble – if her captain had not decreed that the voyage was to end at Piraeus, whence he would set a course for Africa.
It was this mention of Africa that tormented Marianne more even than her own predicament. O'Flaherty, if Marianne had understood him correctly, had implied that Jason intended to sail for the Bight of Biafra to pick up a cargo of slaves. Yet that could not possibly be true, since Jason's one object in going to Venice had been to meet the woman he meant to make his wife and take her with him to Charleston. It was to be a lovers' trip, almost a honeymoon. A cruise on board a slave ship could scarcely be expected to appeal to a young woman, and certainly no man worthy of the name would inflict such a voyage on the woman he loved. Then, what?
She remembered suddenly what Jason himself had told her on their first day out. Leighton was not to make the whole voyage with them. They were to put him ashore somewhere. Was it only the sinister doctor who had business at Old Calabar – or was it Jason who had not dared to tell her the whole truth? The bond between him and Leighton was not one of friendship, or not of friendship alone. There was something else. Pray God it was not a plot between them!
As the afternoon drew on to evening, Marianne waited for O'Flaherty with growing impatience. She prowled about her cabin, unable to sit still, and continually asking Agathe what time it was. Still the lieutenant did not come, and when she tried to send her maid for news, she found that this time she was really a prisoner. Her cabin door was locked on the outside. A fresh period of waiting began, a time of nervous fears that grew worse with every hour that passed.
Still the lieutenant did not come. Nerves stretched to breaking point, Marianne could have screamed, banged, clawed, anything to relieve the anger and alarm which threatened to choke her. There was no reason for it that she knew but, like a wild creature, she sensed the approach of some new danger.
What came, at last, when dawn was not very far off, was the sound of the key being turned in the newly-mended lock. John Leighton entered, with a group of seamen at his back amongst whom Marianne recognized Arroyo, carrying a lantern. Contrary to his usual habit, the doctor was armed to the teeth, and an extraordinary expression of triumph, which he seemed unable to hide, shone through his livid countenance, giving it a sinister vitality. Clearly this was the great moment of his life, a moment for which he had been waiting for a long time.
Marianne reacted instantly. Reaching for a wrapper she slid out of bed and faced them.
'Who gave you leave to enter here?' she demanded with dignity. 'Oblige me by getting out at once!'
Ignoring this, Leighton came further into the cabin. The seamen crowded into the doorway, craning their necks eagerly to get a glimpse into the unfamiliar prettiness of the women's cabin.
'I'm desolated to disturb you,' the doctor said, with heavy sarcasm, 'but I fear that it is you who must get out. You must leave this ship at once. A boat awaits you.'
'Leave the ship? In the middle of the night? Are you mad? Where do you expect me to go, may I ask?'
'Where you like. We are in the Mediterranean, not the Atlantic. Land is not far off, and it will soon be dawn. Prepare yourself.'
Marianne folded her arms, hugging her wrap more closely round her, and looked at him, unmoving.
'Fetch the captain,' she said. 'I am not stirring until I hear it from his own lips.'
'Indeed?'
'Yes, indeed! You have no authority, Doctor, which entitles you to give orders on board this ship. Least of all such orders as that.'
Leighton's smile grew, acquiring an added venom.
'I fear,' he said, with horrid smoothness, 'that those are the captain's orders. Unless you wish to be put into the boat by force, you will obey at once. I repeat: make your preparations. Put on a dress, a cloak, what you will, but do it quickly.' He glanced round the cabin. 'You cannot, of course, be permitted to take your trunks, or your jewels. You will not need them at sea and they would only be useless clutter in the boat.'
There was a pause while Marianne digested this astonishing speech. What did it all mean? Was she to be robbed of all her baggage and set adrift on the open sea? It was incredible, horrible and unimaginable, that Jason should have decided suddenly to get rid of her, in the middle of the night, after relieving her of everything she possessed. It was still more inconceivable that he should have chosen Leighton for his messenger. It was so unlike him… it must be so unlike him, surely? Yet even as she asked herself the question, the seeds of doubt were planting themselves in her anguished mind, reminding her of another night, long before, the dreadful night of her wedding to Francis Cranmere, when Jason had left Selton Hall, taking with him every penny of Marianne's fortune.
Seeing that the man before her was showing signs of impatience, she turned her rage on him.
'I thought this vessel was an honest privateer,' she said, with all the scorn at her command. 'I see now that I have fallen among thieves! You are no better than a common pirate, Doctor Leighton, and the worst kind of villain, for you attack defenceless women with force. Well, I'm too weak to oppose you. Pack our things, Agathe. That is, if this gentleman will kindly tell us what we are allowed to take.'
'I did not say,' Leighton countered blandly, 'that you might take your maid. How should you need an abigail in a boat? Any more than you will need your fine dresses? Whereas she may be useful here. You look surprised? Did I omit to tell you that you were to go alone? I must ask your serene highness to forgive me.' Then, with an abrupt change of tone, he added: 'Jump to it, you men. We've wasted too much time already. Take her away!'
'Villain!' Marianne screamed wildly. 'I forbid you to lay hands on me!…Help!…Help!'
But already the men were swarming into the cabin, transforming it in an instant into a miniature hell. Marianne fought bravely, hemmed in by eyes that gleamed like red-hot coals, foul breath that reeked of rum and greedy hands that pawed at her furtively under the guise of dragging her away, but resistance was useless. Yet she redoubled her efforts at the sound of frantic screams from Agathe who was being held down on the bed by two seamen while a third ripped off her nightgown. There
was a gleam of plump, white flesh that quickly vanished into the curtained recesses of the bunk, hidden beneath the body of the man who, urged on by his companions, was now energetically raping her.
Meanwhile, although she kicked and scratched with all her might, Marianne was overpowered and with a gag thrust in her mouth to stifle her cries, was manhandled out on to the deck.
'You see,' Leighton told her piously, 'this is what comes of not being sensible. It is your own fault that we have been obliged to use force. Nevertheless I hope you will do me the justice to admit that I have held my men in check. I might easily have let them deal with you as they have with that girl of yours. These good fellows do not love you, Princess. They blame you for changing their captain into a spineless weakling, but they'd be quite willing to enjoy your dainty person, all the same. So thank me properly, instead of spitting like a wild cat. Away with her, you men!'
If sheer blind rage could kill, the doctor would have dropped dead on the spot, or else Marianne herself might well have died. Driven half out of her mind by the sound of Agathe's shrieks, feebler now but still audible, so beside herself with anger as to be scarcely conscious of what was happening to her, Marianne fought with such fury that they had to tie her hands and feet to carry her to the side. There a rope was slung under her armpits and she was lowered with a bump into the open boat bobbing gently on a line from the ship's side. As she made contact with the wooden thwart, uttering an involuntary cry of pain, someone severed the line. The sea carried the boat away at once and, looking up, Marianne saw, far above her, a row of heads gating down. Leighton's voice sounded mockingly in her ears:
'Happy landings, your highness! You'll have no trouble freeing yourself. The ropes are not too tight. And there are oars in the bottom of the boat, if you can row. You need not worry about your friends and servants – I'll take care of them!'
Sick with fury, with a burning head and a sharp pain in her back, Marianne watched the brig sail past her boat, veer gently and then draw away, still hardly able to realize what had happened to her.
Soon, before her wide, tear-drenched eyes, appeared the graceful, brightly-lit stern windows, surmounted by their three lanterns. Then the vessel went about and altered course. Gradually the tall pyramid of sails receded and was lost in the surrounding darkness, until it was nothing but a vague shape marked by tiny twinkling lights.
Only then did Marianne begin to grasp the fact that she was alone on the wide sea, set adrift without food or water, practically without clothes, and doomed, coldly and deliberately, to die unless a miracle occurred.
There was the ship, hull down on the horizon, taking her only friends with it, the ship that belonged to the man she loved and to whom she had sworn to devote her life, and who not so long ago had vowed that he loved her above all else. Yet he had not been able to forgive her for concealing her misery and shame from him.
CHAPTER NINE
Sappho
True to Leighton's mocking assurance, Marianne was able to free her hands and feet and get the gag from her mouth without a great deal of difficulty but, except for the small satisfaction to be gained from the unrestricted use of her limbs, she did not find herself very much better off.
All round her was the empty sea. It was still dark, with the awesome, impenetrable blackness of before dawn, but it was a moving darkness, lifting and tossing her as a child plays with a toy in its hand. She was cold as well, for her thin cambric nightgown and light wrapper offered little protection against the early morning chill. A white mist was gathering, thick, penetrating and horribly clammy.
Her groping hands found the oars underneath the thwart but, although she had learned to row as a child, she knew that her efforts would be useless in the absence of anything to steer by. She could only wait for daylight to dispel the darkness and the mist. Pulling her thin garments round her as best she could, she huddled in the bottom of the boat and let it drift, choking back her tears and forcing herself not to think of the others she had left on that fatal ship: Jolival and Gracchus in irons, and Agathe at the mercy of the drunken seamen… and Jason. God alone knew what had become of Jason by now. O'Flaherty had said that he was in the power of a demon, but for Leighton to be so obviously master of the brig, backed up by that handful of brigands, Beaufort must surely be a prisoner, or worse. As for the jovial Irishman, he had probably shared his captain's fate.
To stop herself thinking too much about them, and in a desperate effort to help them, if there were still time, Marianne started to pray as she had never prayed before, with a frantic, terrified earnestness. She prayed for her friends and for herself, abandoned to the mercy of the sea with no other protection than a flimsy boat, a few yards of cambric and her own courage and fierce instinct for survival. In the end, she fell asleep.
She woke, chilled to the bone, with an aching back and her inadequate clothing wet and clammy from the mist. It was light, although the sun had not yet risen, and the mist had thinned. The sky was faintly blue except in the east, where it was dyed a pinkish orange. The sea lay calm as a millpond, extending in an unbroken expanse as far as the eye could see, without a sail or sight of land. There was hardly a breath of wind. The breeze would get up later in the morning, reaching its peak at about ten o'clock.
Marianne stretched her cramped limbs and set herself to consider her position as calmly as she could. She concluded that, though bleak, it was by no means desperate. The study of geography had formed part of the broad education planned for her as a child by her aunt Ellis, and geography, in England, had included the use of the globes. She had laboured for hours, too, over boring maps of mountains, rivers, seas and islands, loathing it all because outside the sun was shining and she was longing to be free to enjoy a good gallop across country on her pony, Harry. She had never been fond of drawing, either. Now, in her trouble, she sent up a prayer of thanks to her aunt's ghost, thanks to whose efforts she had been able to follow approximately the course taken by the Witch, so that she now had some vague idea of where she was.
This was in the region of the Cyclades, the constellation of islands which makes the Aegean Sea a kind of terrestrial milky-way. If she went on in an easterly direction, she was almost bound to come across one or other of the islands before very long and there was always the possibility of encountering a fishing boat. After all, as the unspeakable Leighton had said, this was not the dreaded Atlantic Ocean, where she would have faced certain death.
As much to warm herself and provide a distraction from the terror induced by the vast loneliness around her, as with any very real hope of hastening her salvation, Marianne got out the pair of oars from the bottom of the boat, fitted them to the thole-pins and began to row energetically. The boat was heavy and so were the oars, designed for the calloused hands of seamen, not for the soft palms of a lady, but the physical exercise did provide a kind of comfort.
As she rowed, she did her best to sort out in her mind what must have happened on board the Sea Witch. When they had carried her on deck, she had certainly been blind with rage, but not so blind that she had not registered the fact that Leighton had only a handful of the men with him: not more than thirty or so out of the hundred or more who made up the crew. Where were the others? What had the doctor done with them? A strange kind of doctor, who seemed as well able to make men sick as to cure them! Were they prisoners under hatches? Drugged… or worse? The villain must have had a whole arsenal of diabolical potions at his disposal to enable him to get the better of normally strong, intelligent men. Her own experiences in Venice had taught her how a potion, a philtre, or whatever such devilish brews should be called, could break the will and unleash buried instincts, bringing a human being to the verge of madness. There had been a strange look in Jason's eyes during those last hours on the ship.
That there had been mutiny aboard, Marianne was now quite certain. Leighton and his supporters had made themselves master of the ship. She refused to believe that Jason, however hurt or angry he might be, could have changed
in an instant, so radically, into a rapacious freebooter, scheming to take both her jewels and her life. No, he must be a prisoner, and powerless. Everything in Marianne's mind rejected the idea that Leighton could have struck at the life of a man who was his friend and who had welcomed him aboard his ship. In any case, Jason's skill as a seaman must make him indispensable to the navigation of such a vessel. He could not possibly be dead. But… what of his lieutenant? And the prisoners?
As she thought of Jolival, Agathe and Gracchus, Marianne's heart contracted. The evil doctor could have no pressing reason to spare their lives, the Vicomte's and the young coachman's at least, unless he suffered from any qualms about adding further needless crimes to an already overburdened conscience.
As for poor Agathe, the use they had for her was all too clear. Kaleb, who since his attempt on Leighton had been numbered by Marianne among her own people, had, because of his commercial value, nothing immediate to fear beyond the prospect of being sold back into slavery at the first opportunity. Yet that was bad enough, and Marianne felt an overwhelming pity for the dark and splendid being. His nobility and generosity had made a deep impression on her, and now, once again, he was to know the chains of slavery, the cruel whips and fetters of men who differed from him only in the colour of their skin.
Marianne rested breathlessly on her oars. The sun was up now and beat down on the sea with a glare that hurt her eyes. It was going to be a hot day, and she had nothing to protect her from the burning rays.
To guard against sunstroke, she tore off a strip from her wrapper and wound it round her head like a turban, but this did nothing to shade her face which was already starting to burn. In spite of it, she rowed on doggedly, eastwards.
There was worse to come. By midday, thirst was beginning, slowly and inexorably, to make itself felt. At first it was no more than a dryness of the lips and mouth. Then, little by little, the dryness spread to her whole body. Her skin grew hot and parched. She made a feverish search of every corner of the boat in the hope that food and water might have been stowed aboard in case of shipwreck, but there was nothing, only the oars: nothing to quench the thirst which was becoming a torment, nothing… only the blue immensity of water which mocked her.
Marianne and the Rebels Page 26
