Theodoros, still pulling at the oars, began to smile suddenly. Though the wind was cold, the night was clear, calm and beautiful.
It was not a night for tragedy. There was some mistake somewhere. What it was he could not tell, but his instinct, the instinct of a man brought up among mountains and used from boyhood to looking at the sky and the stars, told him now that for the woman lying unconscious in the bottom of the boat, the sunshine and the happiness were not gone for good, and Theodoras' instinct had never betrayed him yet. The longest road winds to an end at last, and the longest night must pass and see the dawn.
For the Emperor's envoy, this voyage at least was done and the time come to set foot on the soil of the Grand Signior and the fair-haired Sultana.
With a decisive gesture, Theodoras the rebel sent his boat into the calm waters of a little bay and drove it hard up against the sandy shore.
***
The Comte de Latour-Maubourg, French ambassador to the Sublime Porte, stared with stupefaction at the scarecrow figure of the giant who had invaded his embassy and dragged him from his bed by thundering on his door, bellowing like a bull, and then pushing his way past the porter.
Next, his perplexed and myopic gaze went to the young woman whom the intruder had deposited, quite unconscious, in a chair, as tenderly as if he had been her mother.
'You tell me this is the Princess Sant'Anna?'
'Herself, your excellency! But this moment escaped from the English vessel Jason by whom we were picked up, she and I, on the high sea, but where they were seeking to keep her prisoner. The ship was to have sailed at dawn to take her back to England.'
'A most extraordinary story! Who was attempting to detain the Princess?'
'Your diplomatic colleague from England. He came aboard this morning and recognized her.'
The ambassador smiled thinly.
'Mr Canning is a gentleman who knows his own mind. But you, my friend, who are you?'
'Merely her highness' servant, excellency. I am called Theodore.'
'Damnation! Is she travelling with a retinue? It must be an accomplished one. I notice you speak Turkish. By the way, isn't that faint of hers lasting a rather long time? For I am assuming she has fainted. There hasn't been an accident, I hope?'
'She suffered a shock, excellency,' Theodoros said blandly. 'I greatly regret that I was obliged to – render her unconscious, in order to spare her grief.'
The ambassador's grey eyes looked thoughtful, but not in any way surprised. Years of diplomacy at the Ottoman court had taught him not to be surprised at anything, and especially not at anything that concerned the vexed question of female psychology.
'I see,' was all he said. 'There is water and cognac on that table. See if you can revive your mistress while I go for some salts.'
He returned a few moments later, bringing with him someone else who, as soon as he entered the door, gave vent to a joyful exclamation.
'My God! Where did you find her?'
'So it is she? Ginning was not mistaken?'
'No doubt about it, my dear Comte. By God, it makes me wish I hadn't forgotten how to pray!'
Arcadius de Jolival, his eyes bright with tears of joy, hurled himself at the still unconscious Marianne, while the ambassador, following more slowly, began to wave the sal volatile under her nose.
She gave a long shudder, groaned and made an instinctive movement to thrust away the penetrating smell, but she did open her eyes.
They wandered a little at first and then, almost immediately, fastened on the familiar face of Jolival, who was now weeping unashamedly from sheer relief.
'You, my friend? But how?… Where am I?'
It was Theodoros, standing very correctly in the background as befitted the servant of a noble house, who answered her.
'At the French embassy, your highness, where I felt it best to bring you after your accident.'
'My accident?'
Marianne's brain was still struggling to catch up with recent events. The comfortable, elegantly furnished sitting-room was reassuring, as was the tear-stained face of her old friend, which was comfortingly real, but what was this accident… Then, suddenly, the veil was rent away and once again she saw the battered ship, the door with the red seals on it, the bloodstains and the fierce faces of the janissaries glimpsed in the light of the lantern, and she flung herself against Jolival's chest, and clung to his coat.
'Jason? Where is he? What has happened to him? There was blood on the deck… Jolival, for pity's sake, tell me, is he—?'
Gently, he took her hands in his, feeling them tense and very cold still. He held them close to his breast to warm them, but he did not meet her eyes. The beseeching look in them was too much for him.
'Honestly, I don't know,' he said, and there was a break in his voice.
'You don't… even know?'
'No. But I am being equally honest when I say that I believe with all my heart he is alive. Leighton could not afford to kill him.'
'But how?… Why?'
The questions rose to Marianne's lips so thick and fast that she could not utter half of them coherently.
The ambassador decided it was time to intervene.
'Madame,' he said, 'you are in no state to listen to anything at the moment. You have had a shock, you are exhausted, bruised and very likely hungry. Let me take you to your room and send a little supper up to you. Afterwards, perhaps—'
But Marianne was already on her feet, thrusting aside both the chair and Jolival at once. Only a short while ago, on that empty deck, she had believed that there was nothing in this world left for her to love or hope for, and had felt the life drain away from her like wine out of a leaky cask. She knew now that she had been wrong. Arcadius was here, looking at her, alive and well, and he said that Jason might not be dead.
In a moment all her vitality and fighting spirit was restored to her. It was like a miracle. As though she had been born again!
'I am most grateful to your excellency,' she said in her normal tone, 'for your kind welcome. I shall not hesitate to trespass on your hospitality, I am afraid. But, please, before I go to rest, let me hear what my old friend has to tell me. It is something that matters greatly to me, you understand, and I shall not be able to sleep, I know, until I know what has happened.'
Latour-Maubourg bowed. 'My house and myself are yours to command, Princess. In that case, I shall merely order a light supper to be brought to us here. You will not deny that you could do with it, and so could we. As for your rescuer…'
His not imperceptive gaze went from Theodoros' rigidly controlled face to Marianne's anxious one. Ashamed at having thought only of herself, she instantly besought him to see that her 'servant' was properly looked after, whereat the ambassador smiled fleetingly.
'I hoped that I had deserved your confidence, madame. This man is no more your servant than I myself. The French embassy is neutral ground for such as you – Monsieur Lagos. You are welcome to my house, and you shall sup with us.'
'You know him?' Marianne said wonderingly.
'But of course. The Emperor has great admiration for the courage of the Greeks, and has always urged me to keep myself fully informed concerning their affairs. There are few men as popular among the Phanariots as this klepht from the mountains of the Morea. Or few who could answer to his description. A mere matter of size, my friend. You are welcome here.'
Theodoros bowed courteously, without speaking.
Leaving his visitors to recover from their surprise, the Comte de Latour-Maubourg left the room with a dignity not in the least impaired by his Indian dressing-gown of flowing design and the green silk nightcap on his head.
When he had gone, Marianne turned at once to Jolival.
'And now, Arcadius,' she begged, 'tell me everything that has happened since – since our parting.'
'You mean since that villain overpowered us and took possession of the ship, after as good as throwing you into the sea? Seriously, Marianne, I can still hardly believe m
y eyes. Here you are alive, thoroughly alive, when for weeks now we have hardly dared to think that you could have survived. Can't you see I'm dying to know—'
'And so am I, Jolival! And dying of apprehension, too, because I know you. If you had anything but bad news to tell, you would have been half-way through it by now. Is it – so very dreadful?'
Jolival shrugged and began pacing up and down the room, his hands tucked under his coat tails.
'I don't know. Weird, more than anything. Everything that has happened since the moment I last saw you seems to have been totally irrational. But listen and you'll see.'
Marianne sat curled up in an armchair, listening with all her ears, and as Jolival proceeded, she soon ceased to see or hear anything but the story he had to tell, which was certainly a very strange one.
After criminally abandoning Marianne, the Sea Witch had turned aside from her original course and set sail for Africa. On the following night she was at a point midway between the Morea and the island of Crete when, just as darkness was falling, she was sighted by the corsair xebecs of Veli Pasha, the formidable son of the Pasha Ali of Yannina.
The Epirote's flotilla had easily overcome a vessel in no better or more experienced hands than those of a megalomaniac doctor and a handful of ruffians. At least, so far as the prisoners lying in irons below decks had been able to deduce from the short duration of the fight. One thing, too, they were now certain of, and that was that Jason Beaufort was no longer in command.
'Then how can you think he may be still alive?' Marianne burst out. 'Leighton must have killed him to gain possession of the Witch!'
'Killed him? No. But deprived him of his senses, drugged him to the eyeballs. And I don't think that we need look much farther for an explanation of a great deal in his behaviour which seemed to all of us who knew Beaufort well to be utterly unlike him. Not everything can be explained by jealous rage, and I know now that our captain had been in the man Leighton's power ever since Corfu. We were not sufficiently wary of that man.
'O'Flaherty told me in the end that Leighton had long been engaged in the slave-trade and had learned various secrets from the witch-doctors of Benin and Ourdah. After his betrayal of you, he encouraged Beaufort to drink heavily, but what he drank was not honest spirits.'
'Then, if he was not killed, what did Leighton do with him?'
'He escaped with him, in the launch, during the fight. It was pitch dark and everything was in total confusion. A boy who was behind one of the guns saw them go. He recognized the captain who, he said, was like a man walking in his sleep. It was Leighton who took the oars. He also took your jewels, I may add, as a kind of insurance, because we couldn't find them with your things, although we looked.'
'Jason desert his ship when it was in danger! Jason run from a fight!' Marianne said incredulously. 'It's just not likely, Arcadius! He would never get calmly into a boat while his men were being killed.'
'Of course not, but I thought I told you he was not himself. My dear child, if you stick at every piece of unlikelihood in our tale you are going to have a hard time of it. Well, down there in the orlop, we were convinced nothing but death awaited us at the hands of the pasha's devils, that or slavery at best. Nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Ahmet Rais, who was what you might call the commodore of the fleet, treated us with perfect courtesy.'
'Surely that's only natural? You and Gracchus are French, and the Pasha of Yannina daren't quarrel outright with the Emperor. His son must be of the same mind.'
Arcadius gave a lopsided grin.
'If there'd been nothing but the fact of being Frenchmen to save us, I'd not be here today to tell you about it. It was touch and go whether we'd lose our heads when a whole pack of ruffians came bursting into the orlop, foaming at the mouth and waving their scimitars about in a highly dangerous fashion. But – and this is the most extraordinary part of it – Kaleb only had to say a few words to them in their own language to stop them in their tracks. They even bowed to us most politely.'
Marianne was staring at him as if he was delirious.
'Kaleb?'
'You can't have forgotten the bronzed young god you defended so magnificently when Leighton was trying to have him flogged to death? Well, I have to confess that it was he who saved us,' Jolival declared, blandly helping himself to the glass of champagne offered by a servant who wore a curious garb of white flannel below his ordinary French-style coat.
The ambassador had returned a moment or two before and was now sunk in a chair, missing nothing of what Jolival had been saying, or of the impromptu but delicious cold supper which his household staff had been called out of their beds to prepare and serve.
Marianne herself had drained the contents of her glass at a single gulp, as though the better to assure herself that this was all quite real.
'He saved you?' she cried to Jolival now. 'But Arcadius, that's absurd. He was an escaped Turkish slave himself!'
'It looks absurd at first sight,' Jolival agreed. 'But to tell you the truth I've been thinking a good deal about our runaway. According to Beaufort, who I must say seems to have been more credulous than one would have expected, this Kaleb was escaping from his Turkish masters on the waterfront at Chioggia, in other words at a respectable distance from Ottoman territory. To further his escape, he then joins the crew of a vessel belonging to a nation notorious for the practice of slavery, and later doesn't turn a hair when he hears that the ship is on its way to Constantinople, of all places. After which, we find out that he possesses a certain influence over the Turks and their associates. It makes you think.'
'You're right. It is very strange. What do you make of it?'
'Either that the man's mad, which I can't believe, or that he is serving the Ottomans in his own way. Don't forget there are plenty of negroes and those of allied races holding important posts around the throne. Even if only in the harem.'
Marianne had a vision of the Ethiopian's lithe figure and his rich, deep voice. She lifted her brows.
'A eunuch? That one? Really!'
'I did not suggest he was. It's only a theory. At all events, he certainly got us out of Veli Pasha's clutches. We barely touched the coast of the Morea, and were not obliged to leave the brig, but allowed to resume our original quarters. Then the xebec escorted us to the Bosphorus, with a prize crew belonging to Ahmet Rais on board.'
'But what became of the remainder of the crew?'
'The mutineers are dead, and the pasha's methods must have made them long for hanging. The rest have no doubt been sold as slaves. O'Flaherty, of course, shared the same clemency as ourselves and we brought him here with us.'
'And – Kaleb?'
Jolival spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance.
'From the moment we dropped anchor at Monevasia in the Morea, we have not set eyes on him, and no one would tell us where he was. The last time we saw him, he said good-bye very politely and then simply vanished, like a genie out of a bottle. Nor would he consent to answer any of our questions.'
'This gets stranger than ever.'
Marianne's thoughts dwelled for a moment on the Ethiopian slave. Had he even been born in the country of the Lion of Judah? Was he ever a slave? He did not look like one. No, Arcadius was probably right and the man was some secret emissary of the Grand Signior's, an agent of some kind, perhaps. But he had been friendly, and she was glad, even if he had been keeping some secret from them, that he was free and safe, and out of Leighton's clutches. Very soon she turned from brooding on Kaleb, with his dark skin and light eyes and his perfect physique, and fell again to pondering the one subject which preoccupied her most passionately: Jason.
Her feelings, she discovered, were queer and complex. The thought of him deep in the power of that evil man was horrifying and revolting, and yet at the same time it brought with it a kind of paradoxical happiness. Now that she knew with what diabolic cunning the doctor had gained possession of his mind, she could forgive him his rages, his injustice and all that he had done to
her, because she knew now that he had not been responsible for his actions.
She swept away the past and turned to the future. She had to find Jason, she had to get him away from Leighton and to cure him… But where was she to look? And how? To whom should she turn to try and pick up the trail of two men who had vanished in the middle of the night in a small boat, somewhere between Crete and the Morea?
Latour-Maubourg's voice, heavy with sleep and stifling a yawn, brought her the answer:
'With the exception of your jewels, Princess, you'll find all your belongings here, your clothes and your credentials from the Emperor and from General Sebastiani. May I approach the Seraglio in the morning with a view to obtaining an audience for you with Nakshidil Sultan with the least possible delay. Forgive me for seeming to press you like this when you must be in need of a rest, but time presses also, and it may be several days before we hear anything.'
Life was beginning to exert its claims again, and among them that alarming mission the Emperor had charged her with.
Marianne looked up over the rim of the glass into which she had been gazing as though to prise the secrets of the future from its golden depths, and bent on the diplomat a gaze brilliant with hope.
'By all means, Comte. The sooner the better. You cannot be as eager as I am. But will I be admitted?'
'I think so,' Latour-Maubourg smiled. 'I have seen to it, by little rumours spread about, that the Haseki Sultan knows all about the French lady traveller, a kinswoman of her own into the bargain, who was braving great perils to visit her but mysteriously disappeared. She has already expressed a wish to see you, should you by any chance be found. So you will be sure of an audience, for curiosity's sake, if nothing else. It is up to you to make good use of it.'
Marianne's eyes returned to her glass of champagne. It seemed to her that she could see a face now, floating nebulously in the cloud of tiny bubbles. The features were vague, but the face was framed in a cap of golden hair, as deep and liquid as the wine itself: the unknown face of one who, long ago in the island of Martinique, had been called by the sweet name of Aimée and now ruled, unseen but all-powerful, over the warlike empire of the Osmanlis. Nakshidil. The French Sultana, the golden-haired, and the one person in the world with power enough to bring her back the man she loved.
Marianne and the Rebels Page 40
