[Marianne 5] - Marianne and the Lords of the East

by Juliette Benzoni

  Marianne followed her through a tiny entrance hall and found herself on the threshold of a large room, dimly lighted by a bronze lantern hung on long chains from the ceiling, from which came a number of little, flickering flames. Below it stood a tall woman who bowed as they entered but did not speak. Nor was there the smallest hint of obsequiousness in her bow. She bowed and that was all. Marianne stared at her in amazement.

  Without quite knowing why, she had been expecting a short, fat, oily creature, not unlike the secondhand clothes dealers who were to be seen about the Temple in Paris. The woman who stood calmly and silently observing her could not have been more different.

  Rebecca's face, framed in the gold-embroidered headdress worn by Jewish women, was the color of ivory and set in it was a pair of large, black and singularly penetrating eyes. A hooked nose and a mouth rather too heavy could not rob her of a degree of beauty which was derived chiefly from the very real intelligence of her expression.

  Marianne's uneasiness increased as she took her seat automatically on the low divan that Rebecca waved her to. She felt a fluttering inside her that presaged the onset of an inexplicable sense of panic. She felt that she was threatened by some danger against which there was no possible defense and she forced herself to fight it while Bulut Hanum made the first move in the conversation, for it was surely ridiculous. What had she to fear from this quiet and all in all rather distinguished-looking woman, when she had come here prepared to submit to the dubious practices of some dirty, evil-smelling crone? Where was her courage and her will to be done with the intolerable burden within her?

  But the more she tried to reason herself out of it, the more insistent grew her fear. There was a buzzing in her ears, preventing her from hearing what Bulut was saying, and a mist before her eyes, blurring the outlines of the shelves of books and of pots and bottles of every size and shape which alternated with the panels of stamped leather on the walls. She gripped her icy hands together as hard as she could to fight off the nausea that was creeping over her and at the same time, paradoxically, a wild urge to run away…

  A firm, warm hand slipped something between her cold fingers and she sensed that it was a glass.

  "You are sick," said a voice, and the deep musical tone of it surprised her, "but more than that, you are afraid. Drink and you will feel better. It is sage wine…"

  Marianne put the cordial to her lips. It was sweet, strong and mild at once. She took a few cautious sips and then emptied the glass and handed it back with a grateful smile. Her surroundings had become clear again but so too, unfortunately, had Bulut's voice as she chattered on incessantly with expressions of sympathy and compassion for the French princess's obviously exhausted nerves.

  Rebecca stood beside her, studying Marianne. Suddenly she smiled.

  "The noble lady is right. You had better rest for a while before I make my first examination. Lie back on those cushions and relax. We will go into the next room for a moment while we decide what is to be done. Meanwhile, try and tell yourself that no one here wishes you harm, quite the reverse. You have only friends here—more friends than you know. Trust us, and rest."

  Rebecca's voice had a strangely persuasive power and Marianne, soothed as by a miracle, did not even try to resist. She stretched herself out meekly on the silken cushions, from which came a scent of ambergris, and let comfort steal over her. Her body no longer felt heavy, and her fears of a moment ago had fled so far away that she could hardly believe they had been real. She watched Bulut Hanum's green ferej and the Jewess's gleaming headdress melt into the shadows at the far end of the room and spared the sultana a grateful thought for sending her to Rebecca…

  Before going out, Rebecca had opened the three small windows which lighted the big room during the day—no doubt just as feebly as the bronze lamp was doing now. But they let in the scents of the garden, and Marianne breathed them in with deep delight. They spoke to her of the earth, of life and all the quiet happiness that she had been seeking for and never found. Could it be that this frightful house was after all the harbor and refuge where all her troubles would melt away and the chains fall from her at last? When she left it again she would be free, freer than she had ever been, relieved of all her fears and the threats hanging over her.

  In place of the hanging lamp, extinguished by Rebecca so that her patient could rest more easily, a small oil lamp had been set on a low table at the foot of the divan. Marianne found herself fascinated by its tiny flame and the night-flying insects that were already being attracted to it. She looked kindly at the brave little flame, fighting gallantly against the surrounding darkness and driving it back.

  The scents of the garden, the darkness and the slim, bright flame moving above the brass bowl of the lamp came together in Marianne's mind to form a symbolic portrait of her own life. But the flame especially seemed to her the embodiment of her own tenacious love and it held her eyes while the rest of her body melted formlessly into the insidious softness of the cushions. It was a long time, months even, since she had felt so comfortable.

  Then, little by little, the wonderful feeling of well-being became a great languor. The eyes that watched the lamp closed very slowly—and then, just as she was on the point of sinking into sleep, Marianne saw a white shadow detach itself gradually from the darkness filling the greater part of the room.

  It was like a ghost, draped in snowy white or veiled in smoke, which grew and grew until it filled all her vision—something huge and terrifying.

  Marianne tried to cry out. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. It was as though she were already in the grip of a nightmare. She fought desperately to keep her eyelids open against the weight that was on them. And still the phantom went on growing. It was bending over her… She made a frantic effort to escape from the power of the drug that paralyzed her and to tear herself from her couch, but the deep cushions held her as if she had been welded to them. Then, softly, the shadow began to speak.

  "Don't be afraid," it said. "I mean you no harm. Far from it. I am your friend and you have nothing to fear from me."

  The voice was low and toneless and infinitely sad, yet even through the mists that enveloped her Marianne seemed to remember, through some tenacious thread of memory in her brain, another voice, very like it, heard once from behind a tarnished mirror, the voice of a man without a face, a shadow like this. Could it be the same? Could the ghost of the husband who had died in his tragic loneliness have followed her here, to the very edge of Asia?

  Then the power of thought, like that of movement, deserted her. Marianne's eyes closed and she sank into a curious, almost trancelike sleep that left her not wholly unconscious of her surroundings. Voices were speaking hurriedly nearby in some foreign tongue and she thought she recognized Bulut Hanum's high-pitched tones, sounding very much alarmed, and the Jewess's lower ones, alternating with the deep voice of the phantom. Then she felt arms around her, lifting her strongly and surely without even a jolt. There was a pleasant smell in her nostrils of the Turkish tobacco called latakia mingled unexpectedly with the fresher smell of lavender, and her cheek was pressed against some fine, soft, woolen material. Half-consciously, Marianne understood that she was being carried away…

  Once again there was the fragrance of the garden, the cool night about her, and then a slight dipping motion as the arms which held her set her down on some kind of mattress. By the sort of violent effort of will that a sleeper will make in an unconscious effort to escape from the grip of a nightmare, she managed to open the dragging curtain of her eyelids and saw a man holding a long pole that could have been an oar silhouetted against a starry sky. But then the dark mouth of a tunnel loomed up ahead, with the points of a raised grille hanging down like monstrous teeth, and the smell of the willow trees gave way to a stench of mud and refuse. A bird trilled briefly from a tree nearby but the faint, mocking sound was lost at once, smothered by the sheer weight of the walls that imprisoned the Nightingale River, on whose bosom Marianne was now being borne
away, a captive like itself. The stream was no longer free to run beneath the open sky since men had decreed it so, the stream…

  In the thick blackness enveloping her on all sides, Marianne gave up the struggle at last and let herself slide down into the abyss of sleep.

  She awoke from it as suddenly as a cork popping out of a bottle to find herself in a strange room filled with sunshine. It was a magnificent bedchamber decorated with flowered silks in tones of blue and mauve, and but for the flood of sunlight, which took away any suggestion of the mysterious, might easily have been mistaken for a chapel, from the collection of gold and silver icons covering the whole of one wall.

  Candles, a petrified forest of them, were burning before the holy images, their flames swamped by the brightness of the room, and standing in their midst, engaged in replacing the burned-out stumps with fresh ones, was a figure dressed in black.

  Marianne took it for a priest at first, but then she saw by the long hair coiled beautifully under a lace veil that the figure was that of a woman, and a remarkably impressive one.

  This was due less to her height, although she was tall and slim and very upright despite the years that showed in her gray hair and lined face, than to the erectness of her carriage and the strong, autocratic features which, for all the determined set of the chin, were entirely Hellenic in form.

  When the last candle had been renewed and the old stumps put away in a leather bag, the unknown woman took up the gold-headed cane which had been propped against one of the candlesticks, crossed herself rapidly in the orthodox fashion from left to right, and then, turning her back on the shining icons, came toward the bed, her gait making light of what was evidently a pronounced limp. A yard or two away from it she stopped and, leaning both hands on her cane, studied Marianne gravely.

  "In what language would you like to converse?" she asked in a lilting but otherwise faultless Italian.

  "This one will suit me very well," Marianne replied in her best Tuscan, "that is, unless you would prefer to speak in French, English, German or Spanish?"

  If she had been hoping to impress the other woman with her accomplishments she was quickly disappointed. The stranger only chuckled.

  "Not bad," she conceded, in French this time. "I speak all those, and six or seven others besides, including Russian, Walachian, Serbo-Croat, Chinese and Turanian."

  "I congratulate you," Marianne retorted. Not for anything in the world would she have shown that she was impressed. "But now that that is settled, would you think me very stupid, Madame, if I asked you who you are and where I am?"

  The old lady came closer so that Marianne could smell the scents of incense and ambergris and gave another of her sardonic chuckles.

  "You are in my house," she said. "In my house in Phanar.2 And I am Princess Morousi, widow of the late hospodar† of Walachia. I am happy to welcome you as my guest."

  "Thank you. It is very kind of you to make me welcome, Princess, but I should like to know how I come to be here at all. Last night, I went with a Turkish lady, a friend of the Sultan Valideh, to—"

  "I know," the princess interrupted her. "But I also know that there are places to which no woman has the right to go without her husband's permission. You are here, therefore, because he brought you here."

  "My husband? But there must be some mistake! My husband is dead. I am a widow!"

  The old princess gave a compassionate sigh and struck the ground with her stick to give emphasis to her words.

  "I think, my dear, that the mistake is yours. Unless you are not the Princess Sant'Anna, wife of Prince Corrado?"

  "That is who I am, but—"

  "Then we are not at cross purposes and I tell you again that it was Corrado Sant'Anna himself brought you here, to this house, last night."

  "But that's impossible!" Marianne cried out, on the verge of tears. "Unless—"

  A dreadful thought had crossed her mind, but so fantastically improbable had been the whole course of her life since the burning down of Selton Hall that not even this could surprise her very much. If she had really come to this strange place in her dead husband's company, then it must be that she herself had died and both this unaccustomed room and this woman with her ability to speak every known language must exist in the next world. The Jewess, Rebecca, had simply poisoned her, and she had gone to sleep on earth never to wake again except in this rather luxurious kind of purgatory, watched over by a distinctly unconventional angel. But then how could anyone possibly know what the life after death was going to be like?

  In her bewilderment she was half expecting the door to open and admit a patriarch or some other long-dead person, or perhaps even her own father or mother, when her companion went over to the icons and fetched a candle which she brought to Marianne.

  "Feel the flame," she told her. "When it burns you, you will know that you are just as much alive as I am. Nor, unless I'm much mistaken, are you in the least ill. I trust that you slept well?"

  "Yes, thank you," Marianne acknowledged, putting her finger unhesitatingly into the flame and withdrawing it at once. "Indeed, I feel better than I have for a long time. But I still can't understand what you mean by saying my husband is alive—and here, in this house. Does that mean that you know him—that you have seen him?"

  "When he has never permitted you to do so?" the princess agreed tranquilly. "That is quite true." She drew a chair, a curious, X-shaped thing with a goatskin seat, up to the bed and continued: "My child—my age allows me to call you so, for you are not really very old, you know—it is natural for you to be full of questions regarding your peculiar situation. I think I may be able to answer some of them, but not all. I have known the Sant'Anna family for a long time, you see. Don Sebastiano, your husband's grandfather, was a frequent guest of my parents when I was a child. He was a great friend of ours and that friendship has been passed on to his descendants. After the tragedy that struck his family, young Corrado spent much time away from Italy, where he could not live a normal life, and naturally found his way back to us, sure of finding a welcome and understanding in his dreadful plight."

  Curiosity, abruptly reawakened, drove out every other feeling in Marianne, including all the fears she had experienced since waking. Surely this woman held the key to the mystery surrounding her invisible husband, and at the least she wanted to possess that key herself. Unable to control herself any longer, Marianne broke in on her hostess.

  "So you know?"

  "What do I know?"

  "The reason why my husband shuts himself away like a hermit in his ancestral home? The reason why I know him only as a voice in a mirror, a hand in a white glove parting a black curtain, a horseman in a white mask glimpsed from afar? The reason why he married me, a stranger, already pregnant by another man, because that other was the emperor, instead of getting an heir of his own body?"

  Princess Morousi inclined her head gravely.

  "All these I know. In each case, the reason is the same."

  "Then, tell me! I want to know. I have a right to know."

  "That is so. But it is not for me to tell you, for you have asked me the one question which my conscience will not allow me to answer. All I can tell you is that, in spite of what that devil Damiani told you, Corrado is not dead. I think that at the last moment something stronger than himself stayed the wretch's hand. He missed his stroke and Corrado was only wounded. Then he dared not strike again but chained him in a dungeon, deep under the old Soranzo Palace in Venice, expecting him to die there. But the prince did not die. He recovered from his wound and escaped—"

  Suddenly Marianne saw again the wide hall of the Venetian palazzo in which she, too, had been imprisoned. She saw the black servants lying dead and Damiani's huge body sprawled across the marble staircase, still clad in its golden robe, with the blood oozing slowly from it and a pair of iron fetters and a length of chain upon its breast. She had pushed all these mysteries to the back of her mind because of the hideous memories with which they were bound up, but now t
hey rushed out again in a new light.

  "So it was he—" she said slowly, as though still trying to grasp what she was saying. "So it was he who killed Damiani and his slaves that terrible night in Venice?"

  "It was he. But it was not done for revenge, but simply out of the most elementary justice. He held Damiani's life forfeit for all the crimes that he had planned and executed. It was both his right and his duty."

  "I am not the one to deny it. But then, why did he run away? Why not come to me and tell me what happened? I, too, was a prisoner in that palace. He must have told you that?"

  "He did," the princess agreed.

  "Instead of which he opened my prison door and then vanished without waiting to wake me even! Yet he was in his own house and no one could touch him. We could have got rid of the bodies and waited for the officers together—oh, I don't know… He set me free and then by his very flight put me in danger. I could have been arrested."

  "No, because you, too, were in your own house. As for him, he was obliged to remain in hiding since he could no more show his face in Venice than in Lucca. Had he done so, no one would have believed him. The military governor's men would have taken him for an impostor, and he would have been taken and put to death for sure. Believe me, he could not have stayed."

  Here again was the same tiresome riddle that Marianne came up against every time. She wondered if she would ever meet anyone who would be prepared to treat her as a grown-up person, a woman in her own right, and reveal to her a secret which was already shared by a good many other people. True that most of those were dead…