'By God, that's better!' he sighed, stretching his long legs to ease their stiffness. Now, let's see if we can get out of here… Can you swim?'
'Yes.'
'You really are a remarkable creature. Come on.'
Thrusting the dagger into his belt, regardless of the blood which stained it, Theodoros led Marianne out of the cell, taking care to shut the door behind them with the dead man inside. As he turned round, his eye was caught by the recumbent figure of Stephanos, making a light-coloured blue at the foot of the steps, and he eyed his companion in some amazement.
'Have you killed him, too?'
'No – at least, I don't think so. Only stunned him. It was from him I got the knife… He was kicking me… I think he meant to kill me.'
'Good lord, you don't have to apologize! You ought to be congratulated! Your only mistake was in not killing him… but it's a mistake that can soon be remedied.'
'No, Theodoros! Don't kill him! He's – he's – well, I think the captain is fond of him. If we don't manage to escape, he would certainly kill us without mercy…'
The Greek began to laugh silently.
'Aha! It's the beautiful Stephanos?'
'Do you know him?'
Theodoros lifted his shoulders in amused contempt.
'Kouloughis and his fancies are common knowledge all through the islands. But you're right when you say he cares for the little scum. It makes a difference, certainly.'
He was just bending over the inert form, to lift it up, when there was a terrible crash. The vessel shuddered through all her length, and a gaping hole appeared in the hull.
'We've struck!' roared Theodoros. 'A reef, probably. This is our chance!'
A veritable chorus of shouts had broken out above their heads and the ship struck again. There was water coming in. With a strong heave, Theodoros hoisted Stephanos over his shoulder as if he had been a sack of flour, letting his head fall forward on to his chest so that the boy's throat was within reach of the curved blade he had taken from his belt. It was clear that his idea was to force a passage through the pirates by threatening to kill Nicolaos' favourite.
Marianne crawled up the steps after him and peered out. The deck was shrouded in mist through which could be seen the ghostly figures of seamen running to and fro, shouting and waving. No one had any eyes for them.
The clamour was deafening. Theodoros crossed himself, backwards in the Orthodox fashion, with the hand that held the dagger.
'Holy Mother of God!' he breathed. 'It's not a reef. It's another vessel.'
Towering above the polacca's starboard side, visible in the smoky glare of the lanterns burning here and there on the Greek vessel's deck, was what looked like a sheer wall of bristling guns.
Theodoros uttered a muffled shout of joy and dumped his burden on the deck without further ado.
'We're saved!' he muttered softly. 'We're going to climb aboard her.'
He started forward but she held him back, saying anxiously: 'Theodoros, are you mad? You don't know what ship that is. They may be Turks!'
'Turks? A three-decker? No, that's a western ship, Princess. It's only in your part of the world they build these floating fortresses. A ship of the line, that's what she is! Can't even see her yards in this fog – although we stand a fair chance of feeling them!'
The rigging of the two vessels seemed to have become entangled in some way, despite the difference in height, and one way or another there was a good deal of debris falling out of the invisible sky.
'Come on, before we get our brains knocked out!'
Theodoras dragged Marianne through the apocalyptic scene towards the after end of the ship. The pirates were mostly gathered round the place where the polacca had struck, which was fairly far forward, but all the same, the Greek was obliged to knock down two or three who loomed up out of the mist and tried to stand in their way. His great fists could deliver a blow like a hammer.
The light near the stern was much better, mainly on account of the stern lanterns of the other vessel and the tall stern windows which threw an aura of light into the milky fog.
'There's what we want,' said the Greek, who had been looking for something. 'Climb on to my back, put your legs round my waist and hold on tight round my neck. You'd never manage to climb a rope on your own.'
He was already bending to take her up. Close by, no more than arm's length away, a rope was hanging down, its upper end apparently lost in the sky.
'I used to once,' Marianne said, 'but whether I could now…'
'Well, we've no time to try experiments. Jump on and hold tight.'
Marianne obeyed and Theodoros took hold of the rope. He shinned his way up the side of the ship with what seemed incredible ease, as though his burden had weighed nothing at all.
The panic on board the pirate ship had reached its height. There must have been grave damage to the hull and it was clear the vessel was already going down. The shouts of the seamen getting the boats into the water were overridden by the voice of Kouloughis bellowing frantically: 'Stephanos! Stephanos!'
'Let him look on the deck under his feet,' Theodoros muttered. 'He'll soon find his precious Stephanos!'
On board the big three-decker there was also activity, but a disciplined activity. There was a rapid patter of the seamen's bare feet about the deck but, apart from a single voice speaking in a curiously accented Greek to the men on the polacca and a faint background hum of men talking quietly together, there was no noise.
An order came abruptly from the unknown quarterdeck, amplified by the speaking trumpet. The order itself meant nothing to Marianne, yet at the sound of it she started violently and almost let go her hold of her companion.
'Theodoros!' she whispered. 'This ship – she's English.'
He too was startled. It was not good news. The cordial relations which had existed recently between Britain and the Porte was enough to make her the natural enemy of the rebel Greeks. If he were known, Theodoros would be handed over to the Sultan just as readily as by Kouloughis. The only difference would be that the operation would not cost the Sultan a penny, thus effecting a considerable saving.
The entry-port for which they were making was not far off now. Theodoros paused for an instant in his climbing.
'You are French,' he whispered. 'What will happen if they find out who you are?'
'I'll be arrested, imprisoned. Already, only a few weeks ago, an English squadron attacked the vessel I was travelling in, to capture me.'
'Then they must not know. There's one person at least on board who speaks Greek – I'll say that you're my sister, deaf and dumb, and we were taken by Kouloughis in a raid and ask for asylum. In any case, we've no choice. When you're escaping out of hell, Princess, you don't stop to worry if your horse is running away with you!'
He resumed his climb and a few seconds later the two of them tumbled on to the deck of the English vessel, at the feet of an officer who was strolling along by the side of a man in an impeccable white suit, as tranquilly as though they were enjoying an agreeable cruise. Neither of them showed any undue surprise at the sudden appearance of two dirty, unkempt foreigners. Their reaction was more of faint displeasure, as if something rather improper had occurred.
'Who are you?' the officer demanded sternly. 'What are you doing here?'
Theodoros launched into a long and eloquent explanation while Marianne, suddenly oblivious of her peril, stared about her in amazement. She was conscious of an indefinable sensation, as if the England of her childhood had risen up before her all at once, and she was breathing it in with a totally unexpected delight. Everything, the two beautifully dressed men, both as neat as new pins, the spotlessly holystoned deck, the gleaming brasswork, it all seemed extraordinarily familiar. Even the face of the officer (who, judging by the amount of gold lace he wore, must be the captain), with grizzled side-whiskers half-concealed by the shadow of his great cocked hat, was oddly like a face she knew already.
The man in the white suit was now deep in
conversation with Theodoros, but all this time the captain had said nothing. He was watching Marianne, standing in the light of one of the lanterns, and she felt his eyes upon her as strongly as if he had placed his hand on her shoulder.
The man who had been talking to Theodoros turned to the officer.
'The vessel that struck us belongs to one of the Kouloughis brothers, notorious renegade pirates. This fellow says that he and his sister were carried off by him from Amorgos and were on their way to Tunis to be sold as slaves. They managed to escape in the confusion and are asking for asylum. I gather the young woman is deaf and dumb. We can scarcely throw them back into the sea, can we?'
The captain made no reply. Without a word, he reached out and, taking Marianne's hand, drew her up on to the quarterdeck, where a powerful lantern was burning. There he fell to studying her face as the light fell on it.
Sticking to her part, Marianne said not a word. Then, suddenly:
'You aren't Greek, nor are you deaf and dumb, are you, my child?'
At the same time, he swept off his cocked hat and revealed a full, high-coloured face in which was set a pair of laughing eyes as blue as periwinkles, a face that surged up so unexpectedly from the depths of the past that Marianne could not help giving it a name:
'James King!' she cried. 'Captain James King! But this is incredible!'
'Not so incredible as finding you here, sailing about on a pirate ship in company with a Greek giant! All the same, I couldn't be more delighted to see you, Marianne my dear. Welcome aboard the Jason, bound for Constantinople.'
Whereupon Captain King put both arms round Marianne and kissed her warmly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
An Irascible Antiquary
To find oneself suddenly, halfway across the world, on board the same vessel as an old family friend who, besides being one's accidental rescuer, has all unwittingly become a wartime enemy is an experience of singular awkwardness.
Sir James King had been a part of Marianne's life as far back as she could remember. In those rare intervals when he was not away at sea, he and his family, whose home lay within easy reach of Selton, were among the few callers permitted to cross the sacred limits of Aunt Ellis's carefully guarded threshold. This fact was probably due to her finding them both estimable and restful.
To the fierce old lady, ruling her vast estates with a rod of iron and tending always to carry about with her a faint aroma of the stables, Sir James's wife Mary, with her pretty dresses and big frothy hats, and her perpetual look of having just stepped out of a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was a continual source of interest and amazement. Even life's hardest knocks seemed to roll off her, baffled by her charming smile and the exquisite good manners that were second nature to her.
Marianne, giving her all a child's whole-hearted admiration for something perfect in its kind, had seen her come through an epidemic of smallpox, to which her two youngest children had fallen victim, and wait with unfailing constancy for the return of a husband long believed lost at sea, with the serenity of her sweet face apparently quite undisturbed. Only, her eyes had lost a fraction of their delicate blue, and her smile acquired an indefinable tinge of melancholy to betray the anguish she was suffering. She was a woman who would always hold her head high and never give in to circumstances.
Marianne had always been glad to see Lady King, thinking, as she looked at her, that her own mother, of whom she possessed only a single miniature, must have been very like her.
As ill luck would have it, Lady King had been out of England at the time of her young friend's marriage, having been summoned to Jamaica to the bedside of her ailing sister, where she had been obliged to undertake the management of a large plantation. Her husband, too, had been away, at Malta, and their eldest son at sea. So Marianne had been deprived of the happiness of having those she considered her best friends among the few people present at a ceremony which she was so swiftly to consider a disaster.
Had they been at home, things would almost certainly have been very different and Marianne would not have been forced to seek asylum abroad after the tragic events of her marriage night, since the Kings would have opened their house to her unhesitatingly.
Now and then, in the difficult times which led up to the moment when she had found a haven and a kind of home in her ancestral mansion in the rue de Lille, Marianne's thoughts had gone out to the English family she would probably never see again, now that an impenetrable curtain had been drawn between herself and England. She had continued to think of them a little sadly until, as time went by, they had faded gradually into the mists of her past life, so far back that she had almost forgotten them.
And now, quite suddenly, here they were again, in the person of this elderly naval officer who in so few words had reforged the chain that had been broken.
The rediscovery was not without its problems for Marianne. She knew, of course, that Sir James must have heard of her marriage to Francis Cranmere, but what did he know of the subsequent events?
It was clearly impossible to embark on an explanation of her present prestigious but highly dangerous persona. She knew his forthright nature, his uncompromising sense of honour and deep love for his country. How could she tell such a man that she was the Princess Sant'Anna whom a British squadron had attempted unsuccessfully to capture off Corfu, without placing him in an altogether intolerable position? That Captain King would not hesitate, she was certain. The little girl of Selton Hall would be put firmly out of mind, however much it might cost him to do so and Napoleon's most serene envoy would be instantly incarcerated in a cabin, with the prospect of quitting it only for an equally strict confinement in England.
Thus it came as something of a relief to her to hear him inquire, after the first excitement of recognition had worn off:
'But where have you been, all this time? I learned of your disastrous marriage on my return from Malta, and I know that had my wife been at home she would have advised your aunt most strongly against it. I was told that you had fled from home after gravely wounding Francis Cranmere and killing his cousin, but I could never bring myself to believe ill of you. In my own view, which is that of a good many other sensible people, they came by their just deserts. His reputation seems to have been notorious, and only someone as blind as your poor aunt would have dreamed of matching such a child as you were with a gazetted fortune-hunter.'
Marianne smiled. It amused her that she should have forgotten how talkative Sir James could be, unusually so for an Englishman. It was probably his way of compensating for the long hours of silence at sea. True, he was a good listener too. He seemed to be very well informed about her catastrophic marriage.
'How did you come to hear all this? Was it from Lady King?'
'Good God, no! My wife only came home from Kingston herself six months ago, and in poor health at that. She got a fever out there and she has to watch herself. She don't go gadding a great deal nowadays. No, I heard of your misfortunes from Lady Hester Stanhope, Chatham's niece, y'know. I took her on board last year on the voyage out to Gibraltar. She was pretty badly cut up after her uncle's death and took it into her head to travel about a bit, visit the Mediterranean and all that. Don't know where she is now, of course, though she talked a good deal about the lure of the East. But when she left England this business of your marriage was only some three or four months old and still a good deal talked of. Francis Cranmere came in for some sympathy – he was slow recovering from his wound – and so did you.
'I'd not been long at Portsmouth myself and not much time to spare for gossip while I was there. It was Lady Hester brought me up to date with all the news. She was quite on your side, by the by. Swore that Cranmere had got no more than he deserved and it was a wicked shame ever to have married you to the fellow. But there, I dare swear your poor aunt thought she was doing all for the best, remembering her own youth.'
'I made no objection,' Marianne admitted. 'I was in love with Francis Cranmere – or I thought I was.'
&
nbsp; 'It's understandable. He's a handsome shaver, by all accounts. D'ye happen to know what's become of him? There's a rumour abroad of his having been taken up for a spy in France and put in prison and heaven knows what else.'
Marianne felt the colour drain from her face as she saw again the red-painted instrument erected in the snowy ditch at Vincennes, and the chained man twitching with the fear of death in his sleep.
Once again, the terrible cold of that winter's night seemed to creep into her bones and she shivered.
'N-no,' she managed to say at last. 'No, I've no idea. If you please, Sir James, I'm dreadfully tired. We, my companion and I, that is, have been through a terrible experience.'
'Why, of course, my dear. You must forgive me. I was so happy to see you again that I've kept you standing here in all this bustle. You shall come and rest. We'll talk later. This Greek of yours, by the by – who is he?'
'My servant,' Marianne replied, without hesitation. 'And quite devoted to me. Is it possible for him to be lodged near me? He will be lost otherwise.'
The fact of the matter was that she was not entirely easy in her mind about Theodoros' possible reactions to this total change of plan, and she was anxious to confer with him as soon as possible.
She had drawn no very cheerful conclusions from the heavy frown and general air of mistrust with which he had been following, without understanding, this evidently very friendly exchange between the noble French lady and an officer of His Britannic Majesty's Navy. Foreseeing trouble, she preferred to face it quickly.
In fact they were no sooner alone in the quarters assigned to them – a cabin with a kind of lobby provided with a hammock adjoining it – than Theodoros opened the subject on a note of suppressed violence.
'You lied!' he said furiously. 'Your tongue is false, like those of all women! These English are your friends—'
Marianne and the Rebels Page 35
