Marianne and the Lords of the East

Chapter 4 Pitt's Niece

TOWED by four caïques, each with its full complement of rowers whose colorful rags added a cheerful note to the cold, almost wintry morning, the Sea Witch moved out of the graving docks of Kassim Pasha, rounded the towers of the Arsenal and, crossing the Golden Horn, bore down majestically on the moorings reserved for her on the waterfront of Phanar.

The Turkish shipwrights, working under the direction of a dour Scots foreman, had done a good job and the vessel, with her gleaming brasswork and satin-smooth mahogany and her brand-new sails neatly furled, shone like a new toy in the hazy brightness of the sun which floated like a flat white disc behind light, swirling veils of mist. And Marianne, standing on the quay with Jolival beside her, watched with joy and pride the approach of Jason's ship made new.

The oarsmen knew their work and in a few more minutes would have covered the mile or so from Kassim Pasha to Phanar. The American brig, by the Valideh's command, flying not her own colors but the arms of Sant'Anna so as to forestall any possible international complications, would come to rest among the forest of spars along the quayside, slipping in between a pair of squat, round-bellied Greek polaccas whose nearness served to emphasize her slim, rakish lines, to wait there quietly until her rightful master should come discreetly to claim her.

Discretion was necessary since relations between England and the youthful states of America were worsening rapidly. The conflict which was to go down in history as the Second War of Independence was already in the air and Nakshidil, knowing the vigilance and energy of the British ambassador, Mr. Canning, had no wish to see the vessel she had presented to her kinswoman made the subject of an embargo that could not well be denied.

The rather tricky piece of maneuvering needed to bring the brig's side up against the quay was accomplished to a chorus of encouraging shouts. Marianne and her companion were surrounded by a small crowd of people drawn by the unusual spectacle of a western ship among the Greek and Turkish vessels for whom the Stamboul waterfront was generally reserved, European shipping being confined to the moorings of Galata opposite.

It was a noisy, colorful crowd, made up of seamen and all the various street traders who daily thronged the waterside in the Greek quarter of the city: sellers of fruit and of little cakes dripping with honey, sellers of fried foods with their black caldrons, sellers of raki and rosolio, the rose liqueur so popular with the natives, open-air sweet vendors and itinerant cooked meat vendors, mingling with the weirdly assorted population which haunted the harbor bars by day and night. A fine smell of roast mutton and caramel floated on the morning air and once again Marianne was conscious that she was hungry.

It was almost two months since she had agreed to perform what she had come to think of as her duty to her husband. And ever since that day, as though heaven had only wanted that sign of goodwill to grant her a respite, the painful sickness which had troubled her from the start of her pregnancy had completely disappeared. Instead, she had begun to eat with an appetite which was causing her some alarm about the size of her waistline once the child was born.

"I can't get into any of my dresses," she would wail practically every morning after she was dressed, and generally added in a tragic tone: "I'm going to look like la Visconti!" For Marshal Berthier's stout mistress was famous for the peculiar collection of corsetry with which she endeavored to contain the ebullience of her person.

Whereupon Jolival would assure her that she had never looked so well, that the cosseted life she led had given her a bloom like a camellia, which was true, and that in any case any man worthy of the name much preferred a cozy armful of plump flesh to the collection of bones which fashion all too often demanded.

"Besides," he added, "if we do set sail for America at last, you'll have several weeks of ship's diet to make you as thin as a starved cat if that's what you want."

So Marianne smiled and sighed and, abandoning Monsieur Leroy's elegant creations, fell back on the local style of dress which was a great deal fuller and more comfortable for a mother-to-be.

At that moment, that cultivated nobleman the vicomte was attentively following through his quizzing glass the evolutions of the ship under the command of Achmet Reis, Agathe's husband, from whom the Valideh had purchased her and who had consented to bring her around from the dockyard to her new moorings.

"The Turks are fine sailors," he remarked. "It's a pity they can't bring themselves out of the Middle Ages and start building modern ships which don't look as though they might have fought at Lepanto. God forgive me if that isn't a galley I see over there!"

"Don't be so critical, Jolival. It's not a hundred years since the French put their last galley out of commission. Besides, it's only a matter of time. The Sultan Mahmoud, if Allah preserves him, is determined to introduce reforms and to open his empire to progress. But he can do nothing until he has succeeded in mastering the janissaries and silencing their wretched kettles once and for all. Both His Highness and his mother are waiting their chance and cultivating the virtue of patience meanwhile, but it is their first care—"

Since becoming a guest of the Princess Morousi, Marianne had paid several visits to her imperial kinswoman and a friendship was developing between the two women, as also with the exuberant and talkative Bulut Hanum, who was still mystified by the events at Rebecca's house but as a devoted subject had bowed to it unquestioningly since her mistress approved. All this meant useful information for Marianne which she passed on generously to the unfortunate Latour-Maubourg, who was losing ground more and more, for naturally, and just as Marianne had expected, no reply had been forthcoming from the emperor on the subject of his attitude to the continuance of the Russo-Turkish war.

The Sea Witch had come alongside and her wooden walls loomed over the quayside, like a sea hawk among chickens beside her dumpy neighbors. She was so clean and bright that Marianne's eyes filled with tears and she forgot her irritation.

It was a morning for hopeful thoughts. When Jason came back he would be so glad to find his beloved ship made new again that the clouds which had gathered between him and Marianne would melt away of their own accord. A few quiet explanations and everything would be all right again, the bad dream would fade away… The prince would have the heir he longed for and she who had briefly been his wife would be free to make her life with the man she still loved as much as ever…

Of course, somewhere in the world there was still someone who was legally Mrs. Beaufort, but Marianne refused to think of her, or even to remember. Pilar had chosen Spain, the country of her ancestors, whose dark violence and stern piety she had inherited, and had probably buried herself and her ruthless passions in a convent somewhere. She was no longer a threat. But when would Jason come?

A few days earlier, when "Turhan Bey" had paid one of his courtesy visits to Princess Morousi, Marianne had summoned up courage to mention his coming, expressing a timid surprise that it should be so long delayed. Her heart had beat a little faster as she did so, for she was afraid of hurting the prince, but he had not seemed unduly troubled by the question. He had looked at her with the inscrutable expression of his dark, invariably calm blue eyes which always made her feel slightly uneasy, and had answered gravely: "It's not so surprising. He was gravely ill, for Leighton had left him for dead in the drifting boat where he was found. Moreover, ever since Corfu he had kept him under the influence of a dangerous drug—we think it was ergot—which did not help. Even so, the personal physician of the Pasha of the Morea, who attended him, has assured me that he will live but hinted at a lengthy convalescence. But you may be sure that he is well cared for."

"The Pasha of the Morea's physician?" Marianne had asked. "Then how is it that he is being cared for by fishermen?"

"Because it is infinitely better for him. Hassani Haji is a man of God and my friend, and as such he has been tending Captain Beaufort secretly. The American would not get out of Vali Pasha's hands without a substantial ransom. Remember that Vali and his father, the Pasha of Janina, and also Mehmet Ali of Egypt, for some time have been asserting their independence of the Porte and behaving like independent rulers. Though the time may well come when they will be sorry for it. But to return to Jason Beaufort, I don't expect his convalescence to be less than six months."

Six months! Marianne had been doing rapid mental calculations. Supposing that Jason had been picked up some time early in August, that meant he would not be in Constantinople before midwinter, or even until the spring, according to how long it took him to reach the Bosporus. That meant a long wait still, because it was not yet the end of October. On the other hand, a small voice whispered to Marianne that that might be all the better since the child was due at the end of February.

That would allow her to meet him looking her normal self, for she had not been looking forward to facing him with her present plump cheeks and unattractive barrel-shaped figure.

"Marianne, you really are taking a shocking risk, you know." Marianne started to hear a voice scolding her. "It's cold and damp here on the waterfront and you have been standing here for three quarters of an hour or more, standing in the middle of a jostling crowd. And I told you to take care of yourself."

She roused herself from her thoughts to find that Jolival had left her side and was talking to Achmet on the deck of the Sea Witch. His place had been taken by a fair-haired man of middle height who sported curling sidewhiskers and an air of elegance that was wholly English. He was regarding her with strong disapproval. She smiled and held out her hand.

"Were you really watching me all that time, Doctor? Then you were very patient to wait for three quarters of an hour before coming to scold me."

"I wasn't watching you, Princess, but Lady Hester and I have been all that time over there in consultation with a host of Greek sea captains, each one a more talkative rogue than the last. I kept hoping that we had done and could go home but these fellows can outtalk a whole tribe of Indians! As for Lady Hester, she's the queen of them all! I lost patience at last, but she is still at it. Look at her, standing on the gangway in that outlandish dress of hers, with that huge devil in the red cap and the unforgivable dirt! Upon my word, I'll swear that she enjoys these arguments. If her friends in London could see her now…"

Marianne laughed heartily. It was not the least odd part of her situation that the doctor now should be an Englishman, Charles Meryon, and that he should also have become her friend. Within twenty-four hours of her installation in the house of Phanar she had quite naturally become involved in her hostess's social life, which she had discovered to be altogether cosmopolitan.

Princess Morousi had, in fact, no interest at all in politics and it seemed to her quite natural to open her house to guests who in any other place would not even have spoken to one another. She had no more racial prejudices than she had opinions on the justice of this or that war or private quarrel. Her friends were drawn impartially from Greeks, Turks, Albanians, Russians, Walachians, French or English. All she asked was that she should like them and above all never be bored by them. In return for which she dispensed lavish hospitality and a friendship not to be bought at any price but which, if disappointed, never forgave.

And so Marianne, the friend and secret ambassadress of Napoleon, had found herself thanks to the princess thrown into the very arms of the niece of the great Pitt, the mortal enemy of France and of Napoleon in particular, and between her and the Lady Hester Stanhope there had sprung up an immediate and spontaneous affinity which she had not even tried to suppress.

Lady Hester was surely one of the strangest and most remarkable people England had ever produced. After the death of her uncle, whose support, helper and hostess she had been for several years, followed by that of her betrothed, General Sir John Moore, killed fighting at Corunna, she would ordinarily have been relegated to a discreet retirement. But after queening it as a social and political hostess, Lady Hester, at thirty-four, was in no mind to resign herself to the narrow, stifling existence of an old maid in some English country house.

She had chosen instead a life of adventure and eighteen months before, on the eighteenth of February, 1810, to be precise, she had shaken the dust of her native land from her feet. With no great idea of ever returning she had taken ship at Portsmouth for the eastern lands which had always exercised a powerful fascination over her eager, imaginative mind. But she did not set out alone. With her on the frigate Jason, that old acquaintance of Marianne's, had gone such a retinue as might have accompanied a queen in exile.

After a voyage of several months, they had arrived at last at Constantinople, where the traveler had been settled for a year now, delighted by the charm of the city, receiving and received by the best society including the sultan himself, and living in considerable splendor on the remittances which her cher ami, Michael Bruce, received from his father: for Lady Hester, for all her expensive tastes, had little in the way of fortune. She was also planting a large thorn in the flesh of the British ambassador.

Canning, in fact, was soon of the opinion that Lady Hester was the eleventh plague of Egypt, while for her part the illustrious traveler did not trouble to conceal from the handsome diplomat that she classed him among the incorrigible spoilsports.

On the other hand, she had done her utmost ever since her arrival to obtain an introduction to the French ambassador. She had a strong desire to travel in France after completing her Oriental tour—a desire made all the stronger by the fact that this was something not allowed to English people at that time—and to see for herself the effects of imperial government on a country just emerging from a revolution the principal object of which had been the suppression of the monarchy. Considering that the French ambassador would be the best person to open to her the doors of this peculiar country, Lady Hester had been scheming for months to meet Latour-Maubourg, who had ended by shutting himself up at home in an effort to avoid her. He had hidden himself away in his onetime convent and went out no more than he could help.

His situation was quite difficult and complicated enough without making things even more difficult for himself and risking trouble with Napoleon by requesting a passport for the niece of the late Lord Chatham. It made his hair stand on end even to think of the imperial frown at such an untimely request.

At that moment the thorn in the ambassador's flesh was collecting a crowd almost as large as that gathered around the American brig, to which, in point of fact, she bore no small resemblance. She was very tall, even for an Englishwoman, and was dressed in a peculiar half-masculine, half-feminine attire, consisting of a black ferej lavishly trimmed with gold and swathing a figure which would have done credit to a Roman matron. But instead of enveloping herself completely in this garment, she wore it with the hood flung carelessly back over her shoulders, revealing a proud head with a finely chiseled profile, a haughty nose and sensuous red lips, and swathed in a voluminous white turban.

In this array, which borrowed those aspects of both male and female dress which suited her best, she was confronting a Greek sailor considerably smaller and more excitable than herself. From time to time she let fall on his hairy head a few cool words which seemed, nevertheless, to have the power to send the little man into a frenzy.

Marianne and Dr. Meryon, watching the scene in some amusement, saw the Greek cross himself frantically three or four times, calling heaven to be his witness with rolling eyes and waving arms, then tear off his cap and hurl it to the ground and jump on it, then pick it up again and put it back on his head liberally coated with dust. At last, quite suddenly, he seemed to calm down and something that was undoubtedly a gold coin gleamed in his grimy, outstretched hand.

"God help us!" Meryon groaned. "She's closed with that pirate—"

"Closed? What bargain is she striking? Why has she given him that gold piece?"

"Because we are leaving here, my lady, and for the ends of the earth, I think. Lady Hester has given up her idea of traveling in France but she is determined not to spend a second winter in Constantinople. She was too cold last year, she says, and so she means to go to Egypt. And she's not too nice about the means, as you can see. Finding no honest Christian vessel that would take her, she has turned to these God-forsaken pirates—"

"Oh, come, Doctor, surely not! The Greeks are as good Christians as you and me. Different, perhaps, but that is all."

"I don't care if they are. The fact is that I'm fated to die a thousand deaths on board the hideous discomfort of a polacca in midwinter. I'd prefer a Turkish xebec, even."

"Then you'd certainly be on a heathen ship, my doctor," Marianne observed, hiding her amusement at his tragic tone in the high fur collar of her wide moss-green cloak. But in another moment she was crying: "But my dear friend, are you going away and leaving me all alone? What will become of me without you to take care of me?"

"That is exactly what I have been trying to impress on Lady Hester! I have a great many friends and patients here who are going to miss me very much, for my own sake as well as for my professional services. I've a duty to remain until after your confinement. And I don't know what the noble Turkish dames will say to my sudden departure. I am thinking particularly of the Kapodan Pasha's lady—"

Marianne had been thinking of her also, and again she had to hide a smile, for rumor had it that Dr. Meryon's services to the Ottoman admiral's wife were somewhat more than purely medical. There were other Turkish ladies, too, who placed great confidence in the young English physician and he made no secret of his pleasure in the company of these silken, twittering birdlike creatures.

"And what did Lady Hester say?"

Meryon shrugged. "Nothing—or as good as. She won't listen because she wants to go to Egypt and nothing will do for her but to go at once."

"What? But I thought she was so anxious to meet Monsieur de Latour-Maubourg? Has she given up? I'd never have thought it of her."

The doctor coughed and glanced discreetly about him. "That's just it," he murmured. "She has seen him—"

"She has! Well, here's a piece of news! But where? When? Tell me quickly! The suspense is killing me!"

"Last week, at Bebek, on the shore of the Bosporus not far from where we were staying in a friend's yali.[5] Your ambassador agreed to a private meeting because Lady Hester had been threatening to call at the embassy openly, in broad daylight, and ring the bell until he let her in. Hush! Here she comes!"

Lady Hester was approaching them with the long, mannish stride that had prompted Lady Plymouth to remark that it was a pity women were not eligible for the Grenadier Guards. In another moment she had joined them and was sketching a slight, humorous bow, touching her fingers to her forehead, lips and breast.

"Salaam aleikum," she said. "Something tells me, Marianne dear, that my poor Charles has been pouring the tale of his wrongs into your sympathetic ears. You must pity him, I know."

"My pity is for myself, Hester, not for him. He tells me you mean to deprive me of my doctor and of my friend. I've a good mind to add my complaints to his."

Lady Hester laughed. "The French are past masters at the art of flattery disguised as something else—and vice versa, too! But I hope you weren't taken in by his piteous account of all the poor creatures who'll be languishing at death's door on account of his leaving them? The truth is that all his patients enjoy the best of health, but he is going to miss the lovely ladies Water Lily, Tulip and Morning Star—not to mention your beautiful self, my dear—"

She paused and, dropping her light, bantering tone, continued seriously: "The truth is, also, that I must go." She lowered her voice a little. "Has Meryon told you that I saw Latour-Maubourg?"

"He was just saying so—"

"When my arrival interrupted him. Our encounter was agreeable, but unproductive. The ambassador made it quite clear that there is no possibility of my being able to visit France. Indeed, I knew it already, long before, only it amused me to put the fear of God into that poor man—" She broke off and glanced around, frowning to see a pair of kavas[6] hovering so close that they were practically hanging on her words. She took Marianne's arm. "Surely there is somewhere else where we can talk? I want a private word in your ear."

"Would you like to come back to the Morousi Palace? The princess is at her house at Arnavut Koy, so we can be quite comfortable."

"I'm never comfortable in Greek houses. There are always people listening at every keyhole."

"Then I can think of only one other place. Come with me."

"Where?"

"Here," Marianne said, leading the way to the Sea Witch. "No one will disturb us on board." And after all, she told herself privately, what could be more natural than for her to go aboard her own ship?

Her pleasure in the use of that pronoun was immense. Yet in coming down to the quayside that morning, she had not meant to go aboard. It had seemed to her that Jason's ship should remain inviolate until her master's return, waiting, as it were, to be brought to life again by the ring of his boots on her decks. But now she told herself that this was foolish and that the Sea Witch, built with Selton money and purchased anew by Nakshidil, was as much hers as Jason's. And suddenly she wanted very much to stand once more on the deck where, for good or ill, so much had happened to her.

Leaving Dr. Meryon to stroll gloomily up and down the quayside, the two ladies crossed the gangway and, with a wave of the hand to Jolival, who was chatting with Achmet on the poop, they made their way to Marianne's old cabin, now tastefully restored."

"There," Marianne said with a little sigh, making her friend sit beside her on the bunk. "We couldn't have a better place. No one will overhear us here. You may say what you like."

Lady Hester, however, seemed in no hurry to speak. She was looking about her, frankly curious.

"Does this ship belong to you?" she asked at last. "I saw that she was flying your family's crest. I was not aware that you were shipowners—"

Marianne laughed. "My family is somewhat limited, my dear Hester, and no one goes in for shipping—least of all myself. No, the Sea Witch belongs to a friend of mine, a very dear friend. The ship was captured by the Turks and Her Highness, the Valideh Sultan, who is, as you know, a distant cousin of mine, purchased her and made me a present of her. The flag is a pretty gesture but I can't really think of her as mine—only as in my care for a while."

"Who is her master?"

"Do not ask me that," Marianne said quickly. "I cannot tell you." Then, to soften the abruptness of her words, she smiled and added: "Call it a kind of superstition. I'd rather not mention his name until he comes—"

"And when will that be?"

"I don't know. Tomorrow, perhaps, or not for another six months. He has been very ill and is recovering slowly, a long way from here. But that's enough of that. Tell me about yourself."

But once again it seemed that Hester Stanhope had lost interest in the important communication which had demanded such secrecy to impart. Ever since first setting her high-arched, aristocratic foot on board the Sea Witch, her gray eyes had brightened and her nostrils flared "like a hound on the scent," Marianne thought, watching her. So that it came as no great surprise when Lady Hester took a deep breath and, regarding her companion with a mock severity, said: "Do you mean to say that this ship, which ought to be riding the high seas, is going to stay cooped up in harbor, empty and unused, with her sails stowed, until the problematical arrival of a captain who might be anywhere?"

"Yes, that is precisely what I mean."

"Then let me tell you it's absurd. And dangerous. You'd do much better to engage a trustworthy captain on the spot, let him get together the best crew you can find and then give orders to set sail."

"Set sail? But I don't want to. And wherever to?"

"Egypt. With me. I have to go as soon as possible and I need a ship. In the absence of anything better, I was resigning myself to a wretched polacca, but this brig is a godsend!"

Marianne frowned. She had always known of the English passion for the sea but this time she thought that her friend was going too far.

"I'm sorry, Hester. I don't like to disappoint you, but it's out of the question. Quite apart from my condition, which makes it most inadvisable for me to put to sea, the ship does not really belong to me, as I have said, and she does not sail without her master."

She had spoken almost curtly, expecting argument, but nothing of the kind was forthcoming. Hester's voice held no trace of annoyance as she answered smoothly: "I said that I must leave, my dear—but you, too, would be well advised to quit Constantinople—or else run the risk of serious trouble."

Marianne blinked and stared at her friend as if she had taken leave of her senses. Yet there was no indication of insanity on that arrogant, handsome face, only determination and a slight anxiety.

"What did you say?" Marianne demanded, "I should do well to leave? And why, may I ask?"

"I'll tell you. Charles has told you, I suppose, about my interview with your ambassador?"

"Yes, but I can't see—"

"You will." Passing swiftly over the details of a meeting which, as it had ended in failure, no longer held any interest for her, Hester went on to describe the sequel to her romantic excursion to the remote yali. On the following day she had received a summons to present herself at the British embassy. Mr. Canning wished to see her.

Somewhat disconcerted by this sudden desire for her company, she had gone at once and Canning had not been slow in coming to the point.

"Lady Hester," he had demanded, almost before she was well into the room, "where were you yesterday?"

But Hester Stanhope was not a woman to allow herself to be browbeaten without hitting back and for sheer rudeness her reply was equal to the question.

"Why? Have your spies not told you?"

After this beginning, the interview had soon developed into a battle royal. The ambassador informed his intractable countrywoman that he was tired of her continued intimacy with members of the French ambassador's suite, that he considered the previous day's clandestine meeting as the last straw and that she might thank her position as Pitt's niece that she was not called upon to endure the consequences of her irresponsible behavior—as she surely would be if she did not break off her outrageous friendship with "one of Bonaparte's mistresses, and a notorious spy in the bargain."

"So I told young Mr. Canning that I was quite old enough to choose my own friends and requested him to mind his own business. He did not like that at all, you may be sure, and still less when I reminded him that you were a kinswoman of the sultana's and deserved to be spoken of with more respect. I thought he would have had a fit! 'Lady Hester,' he said to me, 'either you give me your word to break with these people, and with that woman in particular, altogether, or I will have you expelled from this city and put aboard the first boat for England. As to that pinchbeck princess of yours'—I'm sorry, my dear, but those were his words—'I'll soon persuade the sultan to send her back where she came from and then, once her ship has left the Bosporus, we shall be able to get our hands on her and see to it that she causes no more trouble.' "

Marianne gasped and could not speak for a moment. She was both angry and indignant but she kept her temper and even managed a contemptuous smile.

"Surely Mr. Canning is deceiving himself a little about his influence with the Porte? Have the sultana's cousin dismissed like a housemaid! Unthinkable!"

"Less than you might think. Canning means to make you the subject of a secret clause in the treaty he will be concluding with Mahmoud, a condition, as it were. And for once Mahmoud will not be asking his mother's advice about it. You will be expelled with the utmost discretion and put quietly on board ship, so that by the time the sultana asks for you, you will be far away and she will have no choice but to forget all about you."

"But what is this treaty? Do you know?" Marianne asked, feeling the color drain from her face.

"Not precisely, but I have an idea. The rumor is that a Russian fleet is approaching the Bosporus and the Turks are powerless to prevent it sailing right through and bombarding Constantinople if it has a mind to. Canning has asked the Admiralty for assistance and an English fleet under Admiral Maxwell is on its way here at this minute. Do you imagine the sultan will hesitate between the lovely Princess Sant'Anna and half a dozen ships of the line?"

"I thought England and Russia were allies. Or is that only when it comes to fighting Napoleon?"

"Something of that, perhaps. But then there will be no question of the two fleets engaging one another. The mere presence of the English ships should be enough to deter the Russians from going too far against a country under British protection, especially since that country is already prepared to make peace. And so your only chance is to leave with me, you see?"

Marianne rose without answering and went to the brass-rimmed portholes that lit the cabin, where she had stood so many times in the past. But she was not looking at the scene they framed. She had no eyes for the busy harbor and the exotic crowds. She had the curious feeling of being trapped inside a block of ice and her only feeling was a kind of sick and weary disgust.

So the man's world of politics was still harrying her, even after she had abandoned all desire to play the smallest part in it. She was discovering that it was not enough to give up and live as quietly as she had done for the past two months, carrying the child which was her pledge for the future. Even then they would not leave her in peace.

Canning, who from the moment of her arrival in Constantinople had dreamed of sending her back to England as a prisoner to molder her life away in captivity, had not been softened by her condition or the discreet retirement of her days spent in her friend's house. He probably saw it only as a screen for further intrigues, a convenient base for threatening his own standing with the Porte. Marianne Sant'Anna, secret agent, had disguised herself as a pregnant woman in order to spin her somber web more busily than ever…

And he was actually going so far as to make her removal a secret condition of an important diplomatic agreement! It would have been extremely flattering if it had not been so absurd. But it was worrying as well, because to achieve his ends the twenty-eight-year-old ambassador was prepared to make light of the protection of a queen.

Marianne's position was all the more dangerous because it would not be hard for a small group of determined men to enter the Morousi Palace secretly at night, carry her off and smuggle her on board ship. For all its medieval battlements, the palace was utterly unguarded. Its doors were ever open and the servants almost without exception were as old as their mistress. Moreover, its main entrance gave directly onto the Phanar waterfront. The captive could be carried from her bed to a boat while she was still half asleep.

Marianne felt the ship move gently under her feet, tugging at her moorings with a small creaking sound that was like an unobtrusive call, or perhaps an answer. It seemed to be begging her to set sail. After all, why not? Why should she not put to sea in her ship, with her friends? Not for Egypt, no. There was nothing for her there. But for the Morea… Why not go to meet Jason and save him from the necessity to come to this city he had hated instinctively and did not want to see?

"Well? Have you decided? Shall we go?"

Hester spoke a little anxiously, reminding Marianne abruptly of her presence. She gave a little shiver and glanced around quickly, shaking her head.

"No. I can't. Whatever the danger, I must stay here."

"You're mad!"

"Possibly, but there it is. Don't be cross with me, Hester, and please don't think I don't appreciate what you have done for me. I am truly grateful to you for the warning—"

"But you don't believe a word of it! You're very much mistaken if you think Canning threatens idly. I know him too well to doubt that he will do precisely as he says—to both of us."

"I do not doubt it for a minute. I have learned to know him also. Indeed, I may have to go, but not to Egypt. There is no reason why I should, you must see that. The best, the most sensible thing, would be for me to go back to France or to Tuscany—"

Almost before the words were out of her mouth she was regretting them, for a gleam had come into Lady Hester's eyes. Surely that passionate traveler was not going to offer to go with her, perhaps disguised as a man if need be and carrying a forged passport? Much as she liked the tall Englishwoman, Marianne found the prospect less than alluring, foreseeing it as an endless source of trouble of all kinds. But the light in the gray eyes vanished as swiftly as it had come, like a lamp snuffed out.

Hester rose in her turn, unfolding her long limbs and bringing her turban within an inch of the ceiling.

"If that Latour-Maubourg of yours had not pointed out all the innumerable diplomatic complications that could result from my being in France," she said with a sigh, "I would have made you take me with you and reveled in it. But it would be asking for trouble. Only think it over again, my sweet, and ask your friends' advice. In any event, I shall not be going for another three days yet. You still have time to change your mind and decide to spend the winter in the Egyptian sunshine. And now we had better go and find poor Meryon before his patience runs out. The poor boy can't bear to let me out of his sight for a moment."

But when they reached the quayside Dr. Meryon had disappeared, and Marianne, who had some reason for not sharing Lady Hester's belief in her all-powerful charm over the young physician, could not suppress the thought that he had made the best of his opportunity to escape. Perhaps he had gone to pay a farewell visit to the Kapodan Pasha's adorable wife?

One hour later, having left her friend to carry her disappointment back in solitude to her house at Bebek, Marianne was closeted with Jolival in the Morousi drawing room pouring out the tale of all that she had just learned.

Arcadius heard her out in silence, nibbling his mustache as was his habit when he was thinking deeply, but not seeming otherwise much perturbed.

"So there we are!" Marianne concluded. "At this moment, Canning's plan is to have me expelled from the country officially and unofficially to bundle me away like an unwanted parcel."

"I'd worry more about the unofficial side," Jolival said thoughtfully. "However cool his relations with Napoleon, the sultan is going to think twice before expelling a dear friend of his. I'm inclined to think that if you had his words correctly Canning has been overestimating himself a little there."

"What do you mean: 'if I had his words correctly'? Are you trying to say that Hester might have invented it?"

"Not everything, no—but some. What I find so surprising in the whole story is that she didn't come running here to warn you a week ago when this escapade of hers had only just taken place. That would have been the action of a friend. But instead she simply waited until she happened to meet you on the waterfront and then made haste to put you on your guard as soon as she saw that you were the possessor of a much larger and more comfortable vessel than any she could hope to find here to carry her to this eastern dream of hers. Once agree to take her to Egypt and she'll have you going right around the world."

"There's no question of my going around the world or even to Egypt." Then, struck by his reasoning, she added: "Do you really think she could have made it up?"

"That," Jolival said, "is what we have to find out. But whatever happens we had better speak to Prince Corrado before we decide anything at all. He is the prime cause of your being stuck here, as well as being your lawful husband, so it is for him to settle what is to be done. I'll send word to him at once and after that I'm going in search of a friend of mine who has the entree to the British embassy. He may be able to tell me how much truth there is in what Lady Hester told you."

"Jolival, do you really have English friends? You, of all people?" Marianne asked in surprise, knowing he had little love for the country where his wife had chosen to make her home.

"I have friends wherever necessary. But don't worry. This one is not English but Russian. He started life as a page to Catherine the Great and he has more friends in diplomatic circles than anyone I know."

Her friend's quiet good sense had done much to calm Marianne. She smiled at him over the piece of embroidery she had begun to occupy herself with during the long hours she spent resting on a sofa on the orders of Dr. Meryon, as he stood at the table and scribbled a few hurried lines.

"I see how it is. If your friend is as familiar with the insides of embassies as of gaming houses, he must be a mine of information."

Jolival shrugged, adjusted the set of his well-cut pearl-gray coat, picked up his hat and stick from a chair and, bending, dropped a light kiss on the top of Marianne's head.

"The trouble with you women," he said mildly, "is that you never appreciate how much we do for you. Now, just you stay here quietly until I come back and above all don't be at home to anyone. I shan't be long."

In fact he was back again in a remarkably short time but the happy confidence he had displayed on setting out had given way to a tension that was revealed in the heavy crease between his brows and the frequency with which he sought his snuff box. His mysterious and well-informed acquaintance had confirmed the acrimonious nature of that final interview between Lady Hester Stanhope and the British ambassador and also the fact of an imminent agreement between Canning and the sultan, but he knew nothing of British intentions toward the Princess Sant'Anna or whether her expulsion from Turkey was to form part of that agreement.

"There's no reason why it should not be true," Marianne cried. "If Canning is prepared to send packing a woman of Lady Hester's quality, and a niece of the late Lord Chatham also, why should he hesitate to deal with his country's enemy?"

"For one thing, he never threatened to send Lady Hester packing. According to Count Karazine, he merely told her she would do better to leave the city and not persist in making friends with 'those damned French.' Nothing more than that. And I'm inclined to believe he's right. Canning is too much the gentleman to talk of expulsion in connection with a lady."

"That only goes to prove that I am no lady in his eyes. Do you know, Jolival, he called me a 'pinchbeck princess!' "

"I can imagine that rankled with a daughter of the Marquis d'Asselnat but, as I said before, you mustn't overdramatize. As far as our friend is concerned, I'm quite sure of one thing. She'd rather leave the city of her own accord than wait for the results of the letter she wrote to Lord Wellesley in the first flush of her anger after her quarrel with Canning, making cruel fun of the ambassador. Read it for yourself."

Like a conjuror, Jolival suddenly produced a sheet of writing paper and held it out to Marianne. She took it automatically but with unconcealed amazement.

"But how do you come to have the letter?"

"Count Karazine again. He really is a most efficient fellow. This is only a copy, of course, and none too difficult to come by. Lady Hester was so angry that she could not resist the pleasure of reading her vindictive epistle to a few friends. Karazine was one of them and since he possesses an amazing memory… I must say, it's a remarkable document."

Marianne began to read the letter. The very first words made her smile.

"Mr. Canning," Hester had written, "is young and inexperienced, very zealous, but full of prejudice…" There followed a lively account of their differences and the masterly epistle ended: "In conclusion, I would entreat your lordship not to receive Mr. Canning with a mere stiff bow and a forbidding countenance or to permit the ladies to make fun of him. The best reward for all the services he has rendered would be to appoint him to be commander in chief and ambassador extraordinary to those peoples having the greatest need of the suppression of vice and the cultivation of patriotism: this last consisting in tying oneself in more knots than dervishes at the mere mention of the name of Bonaparte…"

Marianne laughed aloud.

"You shouldn't have shown me this letter, Arcadius. It's done me so much good that for a little more I'd take Hester to Alexandria after all! If Canning ever gets to hear of this—"

"But he knows already and lies awake at nights thinking about it, you may be sure. He must be haunted by hideous visions of the red dispatch box going the rounds of the Foreign Office to the general delight."

"Well, the ambassador's sleepless nights won't help me, Jolival. Far from it," Marianne said, suddenly serious again. "If he holds me responsible for Hester's pranks it will only make him hate me more than ever. So the question remains. What am I to do?"

"Nothing for the present, I'm afraid. Wait and let your husband decide for you, because I honestly don't know what to advise."

The answer came that very evening in the person of Prince Corrado, who arrived a little before sunset while Marianne was taking a gentle stroll in the garden on Jolival's arm. The blue mosaic paths were covered now with fallen leaves that rustled with a dry, papery sound as the hem of her dress brushed over them.

Corrado bowed to Marianne with his habitual frigid politeness and then clasped Jolival's hand.

"I was at home when your letter was brought to me," he said, "and I came at once. What has happened?"

In a few words the vicomte outlined to him the gist of what had passed between Marianne and Lady Hester Stanhope and of his own subsequent investigations. Corrado listened attentively and it was soon clear to Marianne that he was not taking the matter lightly. By the time Jolival had finished, the crease between his brows was mirrored on the prince's face.

"Lady Hester may have been exaggerating a good deal," the vicomte said at the end, "but then again, she may not. We have no means of finding out and we don't know what to do for the best."

Corrado thought for a moment.

"Exaggerated or not, the threat remains," he said at last. "We are obliged to take it seriously because with a man like Canning there is never any smoke without a fire. There must be a fair amount of truth in what you have been told." He turned to Marianne. "What do you want to do?"

"I don't want to do anything, Prince, except keep out of trouble. I think it is for you to decide for me, for are you not—are you not my husband?"

It was the first time she had used that word to him and it seemed to her that the shadow of some emotion disturbed the calm of the fine, dark-skinned face. But it was only for an instant, like a fleeting ripple on the smooth surface of a pool. Corrado bowed.

"I am obliged to you for remembering it at such a time. I should like to think of it as a mark of confidence—"

"And so it is, believe me."

"You will agree to abide by my decision?"

"I am asking you to make the decision, because I don't know what I should do. I wondered," she went on a little timidly, "whether I ought not to leave Constantinople perhaps—and sail to the Morea—or to France."

"No purpose would be served by that," the prince returned evenly. "It would be dangerous as well because you would run the risk of meeting the English fleet and this time you would not find it easy to escape. What is more, Captain Beaufort may well have left Monemvasia by now, and you might easily pass one another at sea and not know it."

All of which was depressingly true. Marianne bent her head so that the prince should not see the disappointment written all too clearly on her face. All afternoon she had been hugging the thought of a voyage to Greece that would serve to reunite her with Jason all the sooner.

Jolival guessed at her feelings and it was he who asked the next question:

"What, then?"

"Remain in Constantinople, only not in this house, of course. An abduction from Phanar would be too easy."

"Then where shall we go?"

"To my house—at Bebek."

He turned back to Marianne and, without giving her time to utter a word, continued very quickly: "I'm sorry to force this on you. You cannot wish it and I had hoped to spare you the need to share my roof, but it is the only way. You might ask Princess Morousi to shelter you on her estates at Arnavut Koy, it is true. Indeed, it is quite close to Bebek. But that would not avert the danger. It is the first place they would look for you and if Mr. Canning really has obtained the sultan's help in this the English could turn for help to the garrison of Roumeli Hissar, which is nearby."

"But it's even nearer to Bebek," Jolival objected.

The prince gave him a slow smile and his white teeth gleamed. "Yes—but who would think of looking for the Princess Sant'Anna in the house of Turhan Bey, the rich African merchant who is honored with the sultan's friendship?"

The irony of his words was not without a hint of bitterness but Marianne was beginning to think that where the prince was concerned it was better to keep her imagination under control. It was impossible to guess what his real thoughts or feelings were. Dressed in the eastern clothes which surely became him more than European garments would have done, he was still the same as he had been on Jason's ship—a marvelous figure of stone, with a control that would not break even under the lash. He was one of those who would die without uttering a sound. What he was saying at that moment, however, was not without interest.

"If you accept my offer a Turkish woman will come here tomorrow, at some time during the morning, ostensibly with a message for your hostess. She will have a boatman with her. You will change clothes with her and, disguised in the veil and ferej, you will leave here. The perama which brought her will carry you to my house. You need not be alarmed. The house is a very large one—I owe it to the generosity of the sultan—and my presence there will not intrude on you at all. There will also be someone there to care for you whom I hope you will be glad to see—my own dear Lavinia."

"Donna Lavinia? Here?" Marianne cried, filled with a sudden happiness at the thought of the old housekeeper who had been such a comfort and support to her at the time of her strange marriage and whose advice had helped her so much during those trying days at the Villa dei Cavalli.

The shadow of a smile passed over the prince's face.

"I sent for her when you agreed to keep the child, for it is she, and no one else, who will naturally have charge of him. She has just arrived and I was going to bring her to you. She is very eager to see you again. I—I believe that she is very fond of you."

"I love her, too, and—"

But Corrado was not to be drawn onto such dangerously emotional terrain. Turning to the vicomte, he went on: "I hope that you, Monsieur de Jolival, will also honor me by accepting my hospitality?"

Arcadius's bow was the epitome of politeness.

"I shall be very happy to do so. For you must know, Prince, that I rarely leave the princess, who is pleased to consider me as something between a mentor and a favorite uncle."

"The part suits you to perfection, never fear. Unfortunately, you will be obliged to live as quietly as the princess herself because if Canning guesses that she would never have flown without you he is bound to have you followed as soon as you show your nose in the city. Happily, I can offer you the use of an excellent library, some very good cigars and a cellar I am sure will meet with your approval, to say nothing of a beautiful garden, well hidden from prying eyes."

"That will suit me very well," Jolival assured him. "I have always dreamed of retiring to a monastery. Yours sounds just right."

"Good. Then you will begin your retreat tomorrow evening. Your best way to Bebek will be to go to the French embassy while it is still daylight, as you sometimes do, for a game of chess with Monsieur de Latour-Maubourg. You are in the habit of staying the night there, because no boats are allowed to cross the Golden Horn after sunset except those belonging to the sultan."

"That's true."

"This time you will leave again after dark. I'll come for you myself at midnight. I'll be waiting in the street. You only have to make up some excuse. Say that you are spending the night with friends in Pera or something of the sort. The main thing is to have you out of Stamboul before curfew."

"One more detail—if I may call Princess Morousi detail," Jolival said.

"Once you are both gone, she will make the biggest fuss she can—which is saying a good deal—lamenting your ingratitude in quitting her house in such cavalier fashion without taking the trouble even to inform her where you were going. No, don't worry, she will know all about it. In fact, she will be the only person besides myself and you to do so. I know that I can trust her absolutely."

"I'm quite sure of it," Marianne said. "But do you think Canning will be taken in by her outcry?"

"It doesn't matter whether he is or not. What does matter is that he does not know where you are. After a few days he is bound to think that you have taken fright and run away, and he will stop looking for you."

"I expect you are right. But there is still one thing to be thought of. What about the ship?"

"The Sea Witch! She will stay where she is until further developments. It was a mistake for the sultana to have our crest flown from the masthead. Very kind and thoughtful, certainly, but a mistake all the same. For tonight that flag must disappear. I'll replace it with the one flown by all my own ships."

"The one flown by your ships? Have you ships?"

"I told you I was known here as a rich merchant. In fact, that is precisely what I am. My ships fly a red pennant bearing a lion with a T-shaped torch in its paw. If you are willing for the brig to fly that flag, it will be thought in high places that you have sold her to me in order to obtain the money for your flight. And it will not stand in the way of Mr. Beaufort's recovering his property."

Marianne found herself at a loss for an answer. She was finding out that there was still a great deal she did not know about this amazing man whose name she bore. She had noticed a good many ships, xebecs and polaccas flying that curious flag with the flaming T on it in the harbor of Stamboul, but it had never occurred to her that they could belong to her husband. She began to think that it would be interesting to live for a time with such a man, quite apart from the promise of security it offered and the joy of finding Donna Lavinia again.

As they talked, the three of them had completed the circuit of the garden and found themselves back on the vine-covered terrace outside the drawing room. Autumn had turned it to a wine-red canopy which glowed redder still in the light of the lamps that were now being lit all over the house. But a pervasive odor of roast meat and frying onions emanating from the kitchens robbed the moment of its poetical effect and brought it down to earth. It was dinner time, and Marianne was hungry as always.

An ancient servingman with long white hair came into the drawing room bent under the weight of a lighted candelabrum almost taller than himself. The prince bowed, touching his forehead, lips and breast in the eastern fashion.

"I'll bid you good night," he said, as though concluding an ordinary call, "and shall hope to see you very soon."

Marianne swept him a little curtsy.

"Very soon, indeed, Turhan Bey, if I have my way. Good night to you also."

The aged retainer made haste to open the door and the prince followed him quickly, but he turned in the doorway to deliver one parting counsel.

"If I may be allowed one piece of advice—On no account have any further communication with the lady in question. She is a great deal too intelligent and she has everything to gain from frightening you. Such people make perilous friends."

The following evening, enveloped in a black ferej and veil of the same color, Marianne left the Morousi palace. Behind her, like a shadow, went a tall Albanian with a dagger like a small cutlass stuck in his belt. His drooping black mustache gave him a strong resemblance to Attila the Hun and he glared around him with a fierce black eye that defied anyone to cross him. But there were plenty more Albanians like him on the waterfronts of Stamboul and his gaudy clothes were in harmony with the multicolored crowds that swarmed there from dawn to dusk. He also possessed the added advantage that he was dumb.

With him to protect her, Marianne reached the unremarkable little perama waiting among a hundred others like it at the jetty of Aykapani. In another moment she was gliding over the gray waters of the harbor under a fine, persistent rain which, although unpleasant, was almost as impenetrable as a fog, toward her new home.

Chapter 5 Arcadius Is Angry

RAIN! It had begun just after Christmas, which had been unusually mild, and since then it had not stopped, a thin, persistent drizzle soaking everything in sight. The fishing village of Kandilli, across the Bosporus on the Asian side, showed only as a vague blur with the inevitable minaret standing up like a quill pen. The bright colors of the boats and the houses, painted pink, blue, green and yellow, dissolved in the watery mist to form a kind of grisaille in which even the spires of the cypress trees merged into the general gray. The Bosporus was cheerless, a broad salt river heaving sullenly day after day with seabirds shrieking overhead.

These days were mostly spent by Marianne in the tandour, whose windows, covered with gilded grilles, overhung the gray waters. This was a small circular apartment furnished with a number of divans, their feet converging in the center on a large, tiled stove covered with a brilliantly embroidered woolen blanket, the edges of which could be lifted by the occupants of the divans to cover their feet to help ward off the cold and damp.

The palace of Humayunabad, built by Ibrahim Pasha in the previous century and now by favor of Mahmoud II the property of Turhan Bey, possessed a number of such comfortable chambers, but Marianne had chosen this one on account of its oriel windows overlooking the Bosporus from which she could watch the shipping pass back and forth each day.

The view was much livelier than looking at the dripping gardens which, for all their splendor, were enclosed by high, defensive walls that made them almost as depressing as the fortress of Rumeli Hisar, whose battlemented walls and three round towers rose out of the water guarding the narrows with their guns. So huge and lofty were its walls that they remained visible even through the chill sea mists that rolled in from the Black Sea beyond and smothered the place where two worlds met.

Except for an occasional short stroll in the gardens whenever the rain stopped for long enough to allow it, Marianne would spend hours and hours in this room, resisting all attempts on the part of Jolival and the Persian physicians whom the prince had procured for her in place of Dr. Meryon to persuade her to take more exercise. She was nearing her time now and she felt heavy and sluggish. She could hardly bear to look in the mirror and see her figure, now swollen beyond all possibility of concealment, and her sunken face, entirely dominated by a pair of great green eyes.

The sight of the sea, though, had become like a drug to her, and it was almost more than she could do to drag herself away from it. The nights, when she was forced to leave her divan to go to bed, seemed endless, in spite of the soothing drafts administered by her doctor, who was becoming alarmed at her increasing tension.

With her hands lying idle on the embroidery that she would probably never finish or on a book she did not read, she would lie there from the boom of the morning gun that marked the beginning of the day until the evening one that ended it, enclosed in her glassed-in birdcage resembling the after cabin of a ship, watching the vessels slipping past the palace and the little landing stage with the marble steps going down into the leaden water, always looking for one who never came.

The year 1811 had gone out silently and already the first month of the new year had passed away. Yet still Jason had not come. And every new day ate a little more cruelly into Marianne's hopes, until she had almost come to despair of ever seeing him again. If it had not been for the Sea Witch, she could even have believed that he had abandoned her forever and his love for her was dead. The brig, still riding at her moorings in Phanar under Turhan Bey's colors, was her one hope, and she clung to it with all her strength. He could not ignore the ship he loved even if the woman whose face she bore on her prow was nothing to him anymore.

Weak and ill, with a weight of misery in her heart, Marianne blamed herself for what she privately thought of as her cowardice. The old Marianne of Selton, who had put a sword through her husband on her wedding night to avenge her honor, would have turned her back on any man who treated her as he had. But that had been two hundred years ago and the frail, unhappy woman who lay huddled like a sick cat among her cushions had strength only for the one thought that still kept her going: the longing to see him again.

One of Turhan Bey's merchantmen, on a regular run from Monemvasia with a cargo of Molvoisie wine, had brought news that the American had left the Morea for Athens early in December, but no one seemed to know what had become of him after that. Once arrived in the ancient capital of learning, he appeared to have vanished into thin air.

A hundred times over Marianne had made Jolival repeat to her what the fishermen had told the messenger sent by Turhan Bey with instructions to bring Jason back with him if he so wished. The stranger had read the letter that had been given him, together with a sum of money, according to instructions, as soon as he was fully recovered. Then he had simply put it in his pocket and begun making inquiries about a boat for Athens. After warmly thanking those who had nursed him with such kindness, he had pressed on them half the money he had been given and, early one morning, had embarked on a small vessel trading along the coast as far as Piraeus. By the time Turhan Bey's men arrived, he had been gone for a fortnight.

What had he been seeking in Athens? The tracks of the man who had deceived him, broken him, robbed him and abandoned him to the cruel sea, stripped of everything he cared for in the world: his love, his ship and his illusions? Or the means to reach Constantinople? Or had he done with Europe and its people and simply sought a ship to carry him to Gibraltar and the vast Atlantic?

Alas, as time went on Marianne leaned more and more toward the latter theory. She was never going to see Jason again in this world but perhaps God would have mercy on her and take her life in exchange for that of the child about to be born.

Every evening at the same hour, just as the first lights were shining from the Asian shore, Prince Corrado would come to see how she was doing. He would appear in the doorway of the pavilion which had been set aside for her use and which was divided from his own by the whole width of the garden. For the palace of Humayunabad, in the rambling way of eighteenth-century Turkish buildings, was an amazing collection of pointed roofs, grottoes, swags and moldings, extravagantly decorated kiosks jutting out over the water or the gardens like huge gilded cages, with pools and pavilions for every conceivable purpose, from baths to every other aspect of everyday life, and all adorned with the same painted columns.

The ritual was always the same. As though making clear his determination to avoid the smallest intimacy with his unlikely wife, the prince would arrive in company with Arcadius, having collected him from the library where the vicomte spent most of his days surrounded by a thick cloud of smoke, dividing his time between his favorite Greek authors and the study of Persian. The door of the pavilion would be opened to them by Gracchus, who conducted them with all the dignity of a real butler to the salon where Donna Lavinia watched unobtrusively over the mother-to-be. There, he handed them over to the housekeeper and returned to his post in the vestibule where he had nothing to do but yawn and play cup and ball with himself and keep the door.

Marianne's youthful coachman had left the French embassy on the same night as Jolival and with the same extravagant precautions. Jolival had explained to him as concisely as possible how the Ethiopian Caleb had become transformed into Turhan Bey, and with amazing self-control, Gracchus had refrained from asking any questions or showing the smallest astonishment. Nor, bored though he might have been since his arrival at the palace at Bebek, would he have quitted the door he had been told to guard against the machinations of Mr. Canning for anything in the world.

Gracchus had never cared much for the English. As a good child of the revolution, he hated anything to do with the dreaded "Pitt and Coburg" of his boyhood. He had never approved of his mistress's acquaintance with that same Pitt's niece, but Mr. Canning he had regarded as a creature of the devil and his servants as so many demons. The news that they had dared to threaten his dear princess had sent him nearly frantic. As a result, he was guarding the graceful doors of painted cedarwood entrusted to him like a janissary defending the sultan's treasury. It was all he could do to refrain from subjecting the prince and Jolival to a thorough search every evening, such was his fear that Canningue might have disguised himself as one or other of them the better to reach his victim.

Donna Lavinia, in turn, would lead the two men to the tandour and then she, too, would withdraw to resume her needlework and her vigil, ready to answer her young mistress's call. Her presence, indeed, was among the very few that Marianne could endure, even in her tormented state, and she would often beg her to sit with her. For the silent Lavinia knew better than anyone how to be quiet.

The reunion between the two women had taken place without an unnecessary word. They had embraced like mother and daughter after a long absence, and then Donna Lavinia had resumed her services to the younger woman as though she had never left off. Since then she had surrounded her with every care called for by her condition, but she had never made the slightest allusion to the expected child, nor had she betrayed any of the ill-timed jubilation that anyone else could not have failed to betray. She knew too well what the longed-for heir was costing the young Princess Sant'Anna.

And so she was the only person Marianne would have near her. She bathed her and helped her to dress, did her hair and brought her meals, and slept at night in an adjoining chamber with the door left open, ready to answer the least call.

Sunk in her mental apathy, Marianne was aware of this unspoken solicitude. She allowed herself to be nursed like a child but, as her time drew nearer, she would call for Lavinia more and more often, as though she felt the need to reassure herself that when the time came she would be there to help her through the ordeal.

As for the prince, his visits invariably followed the same pattern. He would come in, inquire after her health and try gently to rouse her from her melancholy with news of the outside world and the day's gossip from the Ottoman capital. From time to time he would bring her a present of a new book, a few flowers, a jewel or some unusual or amusing trinket. The one thing he never brought was scent for which, from the sixth month, Marianne had developed an aversion. Even Jolival would change his clothes completely on emerging from his bouts of smoking in the library so as not to offend her with the smell of Turkish tobacco on his person.

At the end of a quarter of an hour Corrado would rise and bow and bid her good night, leaving Jolival to keep her company. Donna Lavinia would hold back the velvet curtains and his tall, graceful figure would vanish through them to be seen no more until the following night.

"He reminds me of Aladdin's genie," Marianne confided to Jolival one day when she was feeling a little more cheerful than usual. "I always feel that I have only to rub one of the lamps and he will appear before me in a pillar of smoke."

"I shouldn't be surprised. The prince is undoubtedly a most remarkable man," was all the vicomte said. " And I don't mean in his appearance only. He's a person of very high intelligence and a most cultivated, even artistic turn of mind…" But his panegyric had ended there, for Marianne had turned her head away and relapsed again into her depression. And the good Jolival could not help privately wishing Jason Beaufort to the devil. Just then he would have given a lot to be able to root him out of the girl's sick mind.

Her longing for the handsome privateer was killing her slowly and Jolival, helpless in the face of that speechless misery, could do nothing to comfort her. Where were those happy days when Marianne, superficially in love with Napoleon, had committed every kind of folly but without ever, as now, tearing herself to pieces on the thorns in her path?

He dared not question her about her feelings for Corrado. For himself, the deeper he penetrated, not without difficulty, into the prince's strange, secret, self-contained personality, so well protected as to be almost impenetrable, the more Jolival liked him. He found himself deeply sorry for the malign trick of fate which had laid on an innocent and altogether exceptional being an antisocial mask that made him an outcast among his own kind.

If the truth were told, Marianne could not have explained her own feelings toward the man whose name she bore. He fascinated and irritated her at the same time, like a too-perfect work of art, while the instinctive liking she had felt for the slave Caleb had undergone some modification when applied to the Prince Sant'Anna.

Not that she had ceased to pity him as the victim of an unjust fate, but her compassion had been somewhat superseded by her pity for herself. She might even have taken pleasure in the company of a man of his quality if he had not been the one who was making her go through her present ordeal. For as the days went by, she began to blame him for her sickness, her lassitude and the temporary eclipse of her beauty.

"I look like a starving cat that's swallowed a balloon," she wailed, catching sight of herself in the mirror. "I'm ugly—ugly enough to put off any man, however besotted!"

On this particular evening she was looking even worse than usual. The high cheekbones stood out starkly in her face, betraying her listless wretchedness all too clearly. Her long hands were hardly less pale than the full gown of white wool which enveloped her from neck to ankle, so that Jolival found himself wondering how she would survive her approaching ordeal.

Donna Lavinia said that she was eating almost nothing and that little out of duty more than actual hunger. Her hearty appetite was a thing of the past and for three months now Marianne had had no need to worry about her figure once the child was born. She would be downright thin—always supposing she came safely through the confinement itself.

The ritual quarter of an hour reached its end and the prince rose to take his leave. He was bowing ceremoniously over Marianne's hand, as he did every night, when Donna Lavinia hurried in and murmured something in his ear. He stiffened and frowned.

"Where are they?" he asked.

"At the main entrance."

"I will go at once."

The prince's habitual calm had gone. Contrary to his usual custom, he hurried from the room with barely a word of excuse. Jolival watched him go with an uneasy expression and even Marianne was roused to curiosity by such unaccustomed behavior.

"Is it some bad news?" she asked.

Lavinia hesitated. She might have said that the news had been for Corrado's ear alone, but she was incapable of resisting her young mistress's soft voice and melancholy look. So she merely replied as evasively as she could: "Yes and no. There has been an attempt to steal one of the ships in the harbor, but the thief has been caught and brought here."

"To steal one of the ships?" Marianne repeated vaguely. "Do you know which one?"

Before Donna Lavinia could answer, the heavy velvet curtain covering the entrance to the tandour was put aside by the prince's own hand. His blue eyes scanned each of the faces raised to his in turn and came to rest on Marianne. He was evidently under the stress of some strong emotion.

"Madame," he said, using very nearly the same words as Donna Lavinia a moment earlier, "there has been an attempt to steal your ship. My people seized the thief and have brought him here, with three or four of the men he employed to assist him. Do you want to see him?"

"To see him? Why should I? Why don't you see him yourself?" she said in sudden alarm.

"I have no wish to see him. I merely caught a glimpse of him in the hands of my men. And I still think it is for you and no one else to interview him. My presence would only complicate matters and I would rather leave you. He will be here at any moment."

Then Marianne knew why it was that her heart had beat faster and why she was suddenly nervous. She knew now who the thief was. And she felt magically alive again. The will to live revived in her wasted body. She was herself again and no longer simply the receptacle for an alien existence that was consuming her.

And yet there was a flaw in the happiness that flooded her being. The man she was about to see had been taken in the act of trying to take possession of the brig. What if he had succeeded? He was unlikely to have left her anchored secretly in some quiet bay while he returned to Constantinople in search of the woman waiting for him there. It was not easy to hide a vessel of that size. He would undoubtedly have taken to the open sea to escape pursuit and Marianne was afraid of finding out that, to a seaman, his ship could mean more than the woman he loved. It was this fear which made her strive to stifle the small voice within that threatened to spoil her wonderful moment.

She stretched out both her hands to Jolival in an instinctive gesture to seek his support, and he came to her where she lay on the divan and gripped them in his own. They were icy cold and she was trembling in every limb, but the eyes she lifted to Corrado were full of stars.

"Thank you," she said softly. "Thank you… from the bottom of my heart."

She put out her hand to him but he seemed not to see it. His face as he bowed and left her was closed and set. But Marianne was too happy to consider what he might be thinking at that moment. With the unconscious selfishness of all people in love, she was thinking only of the one who was coming.

She turned to Jolival with a look of alarm.

"I want a mirror," she said. "I must look dreadful—shockingly ugly!"

"Ugly, no. You could never be that—but shocking, certainly. I dare say you're sorry now that you didn't listen to your Uncle Arcadius and try to eat a little more. All the same, it's no bad thing that you should look a trifle peaky. But you must try to be calm. Do you want me to go?"

"No, no! Don't go! Only remember how we parted. Who knows if his long illness has made him think differently about me? I might need you. So don't leave me, my friend, I implore you—besides, it is too late."

Quick footsteps rang out in the next room. A voice spoke sharply, and the sound of it made Marianne's senses swim. It was answered by Donna Lavinia's infinitely gentler tones. Then the curtain was lifted once more. The housekeeper in her black dress appeared and curtsied deeply.

"If it please Your Serene Highness, Mr. Jason Beaufort."

As he strode through the door, the small room seemed to shrink. He was so tall that Marianne thought he must surely have grown since she had seen him last. But otherwise he was unchanged. There was still the same masterful face, the same tanned complexion and dark blue eyes, the same unruly black hair. Neither time nor illness, it seemed, had any power over Jason Beaufort. He had returned from the edge of the grave as much himself as if nothing had happened.

Marianne gazed at him wonderingly, forgetting in an instant all that he had made her suffer, as Mary Magdalen must have looked at the risen Christ, with eyes bright with tears and light.

Unhappily, the object of her gaze was not endowed with the same divine serenity. He stopped dead in the doorway, the anger which had driven him into the room cut off short. He had been told that he was going to meet the "owner" of his beloved brig and had been prepared to tell the thief exactly what he thought of him. But the sight of the two faces before him left him wholly thunderstruck. And since Marianne's voice had suddenly deserted her, it was left to Jolival to break the silence. Releasing the girl's hands, which were quieter now and not so cold, he rose and went to meet the privateer.

"Come in, Beaufort. I'm not sure that you are welcome, but you have certainly been expected."

The vicomte's voice was noticeably lacking in warmth. Jolival was the last man on earth to bear a grudge but it was clear that he had not forgotten the time that he had spent in irons aboard the Sea Witch, along with poor Gracchus, or the sufferings endured by Marianne. It was these that Jolival could not forgive. If he had not known how deeply his young friend loved this man, if he had not seen her pining for him all these weeks, it would have given him a very real pleasure to have thrown him out of the door, and the more so because, although he had said nothing, he, too, had been shocked by the attempted theft. His state of mind was reflected in his greeting. Consciously or unconsciously, he was spoiling for a fight.

But Jason's anger had fallen from him as swiftly as the curtain fell into place behind him. He had been staring at Marianne as though at a ghost but now his eyes left her and swung to Jolival, losing none of their astonishment as they took in the diminutive figure drawn up to its full height before him.

"Monsieur de Jolival," he said at last. "What are you doing here? I thought you were dead."

"Very kind of you, I'm sure," snapped the vicomte. "I don't know who put that idea into your head. That you should picture me working a treadmill for some fat slave owner, that I could understand—but from there to burying me! It if interests you, I am in excellent health."

A faint smile touched Beaufort's lips. "I'm sorry. I ought not to have said that. But all this is so incredible. Try and see it from my point of view. I arrive here, recognize my ship and make a bid to win back my own with the help of a handful of men picked up on the waterfront, whereupon I am fallen on by a gang of screaming ruffians and hauled off to the so-called owner, only to find myself face to face with the two of you—"

His eyes, as though drawn by a magnet, had returned to Marianne, a white figure curled up amid a pile of silken cushions in every shade of green. He stepped around the stove and came to the divan, while she watched him in an agony of apprehension. What was he going to do? He was smiling with what looked like real joy, but his reactions were so unpredictable. Had he forgotten all that had passed aboard his ship, or was the memory of that last, terrible scene between them still with him, ready to stand between them once again?

That had been on board the Sea Witch. Jason had been standing on the quarter deck, watching while Caleb suffered punishment for having tried to kill Dr. Leighton, and Marianne had turned on him, wild with rage, and had snatched the bloody whip from the bosun's hands. She saw again the figure of the pretended Ethiopian hanging by the wrists from the mainmast, limp and unconscious. She heard Jason's voice saying coldly: "What is that woman doing? Take her back to her cabin!"

They had faced one another before the whole ship's company. She had hurled defiance at the man who stood there with a face of stone and madness in his eyes, a man, she knew now, who was even then in the power of a deadly drug. But what memories had the drug left in his mind?

None, perhaps. For in the look that Jason bent on her face she saw all the old fire which she had thought never to see again. A wave of happiness swept over her. Was it possible that the memory of the horrible events off the island of Cythera could have faded like a dream? If no trace of them remained in Jason's mind, how gladly would Marianne erase them from her own.

Jason approached until he could rest one knee on the next divan and, bending, offered her his hand as though in earnest of peace.

"Marianne," he said softly. "They told me you were here and that I should find you but I never thought that it would be so soon. I think I must be dreaming. How is it possible?"

She raised herself from her cushions, her hands, her arms, her whole being reaching out to him with unthinking gladness.

"I'll tell you everything! But you are here! At last! That is what is so wonderful! Come and sit by me. Here, at my side."

With an eagerness that she had not shown for many weeks, she tossed aside the cloth that covered the stove and made room for him among the cushions, her condition quite forgotten. She remembered it too late as she saw Jason draw away from her quickly, white-faced, when the gesture revealed her shape all too clearly.

"So that at least was no dream?" he said bitterly. "That was no nightmare brought about by Leighton's infernal drugs. You are with child—"

The light died out of Marianne's eyes, and Jolival saw that once again all was about to be lost and that she was to be made to suffer yet again. He lost his temper.

"Oh, no!" he said fiercely. "Not again! Beaufort, I've had more than enough of your tantrums, your tragedy airs and your insufferable pride! You no sooner arrive than you begin to set yourself up as judge and jury! You come here out of the blue, in the unedifying character of one who has been caught trying to take what no longer belongs to him—"

"What gives you the idea that my ship no longer belongs to me?" Jason demanded haughtily.

"The law of the sea. Your ship, my good sir, was captured by the Turks and brought here as a prize by one Achmet Reis, the man who had taken her. She was bought from him by the Valideh Sultan, given a complete refit, which she badly needed after a spell in your friend Leighton's hands, and presented by Her Highness to her kinswoman, Marianne. In other words, having permitted that damned doctor of yours to rob Marianne and do his best to murder her in the most hideous manner, you now come here to deprive her of everything she has and dare to get up on your high horse into the bargain when you find her in a condition that does not meet with your approval! Oh, no, my friend, it won't do! It won't do at all!"

Jason shrugged. "I don't understand a word you're saying. Leighton acted like a brigand to me but I had not thought that you had cause for complaint—"

"Oh, hadn't you? You did not know that on the night after Caleb's flogging, while you were snoring in your bed sodden with rum and drugs, he stripped this poor child of all she possessed and set her adrift in an open boat with nothing more than a nightshift and a pair of oars, leaving her wretched maid, Agathe, to be raped by half the crew? If the boat had not been found by a man fishing out of Santorini, Marianne would be dead long ago of thirst, exposure and sunstroke. She was saved in the nick of time. And no thanks to you, as far as I am aware. So kindly moderate your transports and spare us your niceties of conscience. Yes, she is with child. In fact she will be brought to bed at any moment. But although you refused to listen to the facts on board your confounded ship, I swear to God that you shall hear them now, in full, if I have to ask Turhan Bey to have you put in chains!"

"Arcadius," Marianne implored him, alarmed by her friend's fury, "please! Calm yourself!"

"Calm myself! Not until I've forced this blockhead here to see the truth. Just you listen to me, Jason Beaufort. You'll not leave here until you have heard the truth, the whole truth about the nightmare Marianne has lived through this past year, and which you in your stupidity have only made worse. You had better sit down because it will take some time."

Scarlet to the roots of his receding hair, Jolival faced up to Jason like a small fighting cock, his clenched fists itching to punch the stern face before him. He could not remember ever having been so angry, except perhaps once, when he was ten years old and a young cousin of his, out of pure spite, had killed his favorite dog before his eyes. The crucified look on Marianne's face as Jason uttered the words "You are with child!" in a voice thick with contempt, had taken him back to that other horrible moment and had unleashed forces that had slumbered in him for years, and Jolival found that, beneath the cynical, cultivated man of the world, there was still the same small Arcadius who could be roused to a primitive and savage rage by an act of wanton cruelty and injustice. Then he had hurled himself on his big cousin and bitten him to the bone like a small wild animal, clinging so fiercely to the murderer's hand that they had had to haul him off bodily. Now Jolival was once more in the mood to bite.

Instinct told Jason he had gone too far and was near to making a deadly enemy of a man who, until now, had been a loyal friend. He gave in and sat down obediently, crossing one long booted leg over the other.

"I'm listening," he said with a sigh. "Indeed, I am beginning to think there must be a great deal I don't know."

He had deliberately refrained from looking at Marianne again, restrained by a kind of embarrassment, and she seized the opportunity to extricate herself from her nest of cushions.

"Jolival, will you call Donna Lavinia, please? I should like to go to bed, now."

Jason protested instantly. "Why must you go? If I have wronged you, I ask only to acknowledge it freely for—for I too have suffered. Please. I'm asking you to stay."

She shook her head, although she saw what this admission of his own unhappiness had cost his pride.

"No. What Jolival is going to tell you would only recall memories that are too painful for me. And I would rather not be here. You will feel less constrained and see things more clearly in my absence. I don't want to influence you."

"You won't influence me. Stay, I implore you! I have so much to tell you also—"

"Then you may tell me another time—if you still want to. If not… you will be free to go away again this very evening and we will never meet again. After all, that is what would have happened, isn't it, if you had succeeded in taking the Sea Witch tonight? You knew that I was here in the city. You had been told—and a hard struggle I had to get here! Yet you would have set sail without even trying to see me—"

"No! I swear to you! I don't know what I meant to do really, but I'd not have gone right away. You see, when I saw my ship tied up amid all that other riffraff of vessels, I think I somehow lost my reason. I had only one idea, to get her back and take her out of there. I felt as if she were trapped in a dreadful swamp… So I got hold of some men I found idling on the waterfront who looked as though they might be useful and set out with them to make the attempt. I didn't think it would prove so very difficult. The watch looked casual enough. I was wrong. But I swear to you that I would never have left these shores without seeing you, without at least learning what had become of you. I could not have done it."

"What would you have done?"

"The coast hereabouts is very rocky. It ought to have been possible to find some secret anchorage—but I tell you, I simply had not thought. I acted on an impulse stronger than myself, and a similar impulse would probably have brought me back to look for you."

He was on his feet now, regarding her anxiously, alarmed by the dull resignation of her tone and the defeat it betrayed. He saw how frail and ill she looked. He saw little in this woman, heavy with child, of the proud, indomitable creature who had known so well how to drive him to distraction with passion or with fury. But he discovered also, for all the revulsion her condition inspired in him, a new feeling, born of an instinctive urge to protect and defend her against the burden of a fate too heavy for her fragile shoulders, to rescue her from the ridiculous pass to which ill luck and her own hotheadedness had brought her.

Watching her as she struggled with painful slowness to rise from her divan, clinging to the arm of Lavinia, who had come at once to help her, he experienced a sudden wild desire to snatch her up in his arms and carry her away from this palace whose Oriental splendors were as shocking to his austere taste as to his native puritanism. He even made a move toward her but she halted him with a look.

"No," she said fiercely. "What you feel now is pity. And I do not want your pity."

"Don't be a fool! Pity? What gave you that idea? I swear to you—"

"Oh, no! Do not swear! When you came in just now I was ready to forget all that passed on board your ship. I believe I had forgotten—but you reminded me! I won't listen to any more. You shall listen, instead, to Jolival! Afterwards, as I said, you will be free to decide."

"To decide what?"

"If you want us to remain—friends. When you know the facts, you will know whether you can still hold me in any esteem. Your feelings are a matter for your own heart."

"Stay," Jason begged her. "I know my own mind."

"You are fortunate. I cannot say the same for myself. I was happy a moment ago, but now I do not know… And so I would rather go."

"Let her go," Jolival said. "She is tired and ill. She needs rest. What she does not need is the ordeal which the telling of this tale would be for her. There are things it does no good to recall. And I shall feel freer to say what is in my mind. Donna Lavinia," he added in a much warmer tone, "would you add to all your kindness by asking them to send us in some coffee? A great deal of coffee. I think we shall both be needing it."

"You shall have all the coffee you want, Monsieur le Vicomte, and something more substantial to go with it. I daresay this gentleman could do with something to eat."

Jason had opened his mouth as though to refuse when Marianne forestalled him.

"You may accept the bread and salt of this house, for it belongs to the friend who has watched over you—and me also—for these past months. There is one thing more I wish to say before I go. Whatever you may have been thinking, you shall have your ship again. Jolival will give you her papers."

"How's this? You told me she belonged to you. Yet she is flying a strange flag."

"The colors are those of Turhan Bey," Marianne responded wearily. "He is the owner of this house. But they are only there to keep the Witch out of the English ambassador's hands. As Jolival has told you already, my kinswoman, the sultana, purchased her as a gift for me but I have never thought of her as anything but a trust."

With a strength surprising in her wasted body, she dragged Donna Lavinia from the room, striving to hold back her tears.

It cost her something to tear herself away from the man she had so longed to see, but it was more than she could bear to listen to Jolival recounting in detail those abominable nights in the Palazzo Soranzo and all that had followed. For although she had been simply a victim throughout, yet there were things it still shamed her bitterly to recall. And she was determined not to be put to the blush in front of the man she loved. Too often in the past he had been inclined to cast her in the undeserved role of the guilty party.

The American's nature was at the same time simple and highly complex. His love for Marianne was probably as great as ever and this was the one comfort she had been able to extract from the few brief moments they had been together. On the other hand, Jason was the product of an almost puritanically Protestant upbringing whose rigid moral principles did not, however, prevent him, in spite of a naturally generous and even chivalrous nature, from being an unquestioning supporter of slavery, which in his eyes was the natural condition of the blacks, a thing with which Marianne could by no means agree.

It was this fundamental division which was at the root of all he said and did. A woman might look for every consideration and respect from him, but let her once err and his reaction would be harsh and complete. The unhappy female would be relegated in his mind to the common herd of creatures whom he must have met in every port on earth and who, in his eyes, deserved less even than the slaves at Faye Blanche, his family's plantation near Charleston. If once a member of this uncertain sex succeeded, as Marianne had done, in inspiring him with a real passion, then the exquisitely regulated machine which was Jason Beaufort was thrown out of gear.

Back in her own room, Marianne eyed her enormous bed without enthusiasm. Tired as she was, she felt no urge to sleep. Her thoughts would keep straying anxiously to the warm tandour where Jason sat listening to Jolival telling the hateful story, without mincing his words, no doubt, because it had been clear that the vicomte meant to spare his hearer nothing.

Marianne could not help smiling inwardly as she thought of her old friend's outburst of rage and she thanked heaven yet again for giving her one person in her turbulent life who would always spring to her defense. In her present state, she was in no condition to stand up to Jason's principles. Her cheeks still burned at the memory of the scene on board the Sea Witch.

Turning her back on the bed which a maidservant had turned down for her, she dropped on to the huge white satin cushion which was set before a low table covered with a vast assortment of pots and jars. Donna Lavinia came behind her and, settling a blue linen towel around her shoulders, began to take out the pins that held her heavy coil of hair in place. Marianne suffered her to finish and then, when her black locks fell freely about her shoulders, checked her as she was picking up the silver hairbrushes.

"Lavinia, dear," she said softly, "I want you to go back to the tandour, or into the blue drawing room, at least. Monsieur de Jolival might need you."

The old lady smiled understandingly.

"I believe I sent for everything he should want. But perhaps you would wish me to deliver a message to him?"

"Yes. I'd like you to ask him—quite privately—if he will come here before he goes to bed. Tell him to be sure to come, however late it is. I shall not go to bed until—"

"But that is very wrong of you, my lady. The doctor said you were to go to bed early and get plenty of sleep."

"That's easier said than done when I cannot sleep at all. Very well, come back and help me into bed but do not close the door or put the lights out. Then you may go to bed. There's no need for you to wait up for the vicomte. The gentlemen may stay talking for a long time."

"Should I give orders for a room to be made ready for Your Highness's friend?"

Donna Lavinia's voice had stiffened slightly with the words. Her loving, faithful heart had made her sense in the tall and all too attractive stranger a danger and a threat to the master who had always been so dear to her. And Marianne was suddenly ashamed of the situation brought about by Jason's untimely arrival. She was a woman bringing her lover into her husband's house—a husband from whom she had had nothing but kindness. In vain she told herself that she was paying a high price for it. The unpleasant feeling remained. The part she had elected to play was certainly no easy one.

The look she gave Lavinia was unconsciously apologetic.

"I don't really know. He may go away at once, but on the other hand he may be glad to spend the night here. At all events, he won't be staying more than a few hours."

The housekeeper nodded. She helped Marianne into her nightdress and put her into the big bed, arranging the pillows carefully at her back. Then she checked the lamps to make sure that oil and wicks were as they should be and went away, with a little curtsy, to carry out the task entrusted to her.

Marianne, left alone, lay still for a moment, savoring the scented warmth of the sheets and the soft light in the room. She tried to make her mind a blank, not to think at all, but it was more than she could manage. Her thoughts would keep returning to the tandour. She pictured the two men there: Jolival prowling around in the small space between the stove and the divans. Jason, sitting down, with his hands clasped between his knees in the way that she had seen him sit a hundred times, whenever he wanted to give someone his full attention. For all the coldness of her words to him, Marianne had never loved him more.

In an effort to distract her mind, she picked up at random one of the books that lay on her bedside table but, although she knew the text almost by heart, her brain seemed incapable of taking anything in beyond the title. The book was The Divine Comedy, one of her favorites, but it might have been written in Hittite characters for all her eyes could make of it. She finished by tossing it aside impatiently, closed her eyes—and was asleep before she knew it.

She woke to a sudden pain. She could not have been asleep for long because the level of the oil in her bedside lamp had hardly dropped at all. Everything about her was in complete silence. The darkened palace seemed to be asleep, muffled in the soft cocoon of its curtains, its cushions and its hangings. Yet it was certain that not everyone could be asleep, for Jolival had not come.

Marianne lay for a moment with her eyes wide open, listening to the beating of her own heart and observing the progress of the pain which had started in the lower part of her belly and spread slowly to invade her whole body. It was not a bad pain and already it was fading, but it was a warning, a foretaste perhaps of what was in store for her. Had the time come to lay down her burden at last?

She lay and wondered what she ought to do and decided to wait for another pain to come and confirm what might easily be a too-hasty assumption before sending for the doctor who, at this time of night, would certainly be fast asleep in his bed. She had just stretched out her hand to ring the bell for Donna Lavinia, to ask her what she thought, when there was a soft tap on the door. It opened without waiting for an answer, and Arcadius looked in.

"May I come in?"

"Yes, of course. I've been expecting you."

The pain had quite gone now. Marianne sat up in bed and settled herself among her pillows, refreshed by the smile on her friend's face, which bore no sign of the anger which had been there earlier. In the shadows of the big bed, Marianne's eyes were bright with the anticipation of happiness.

"Jason? Where is he?"

"At this moment I should think he must be getting into bed. He can do with some sleep. So can I, in fact, because along with the coffee Donna Lavinia sent in a bottle of first-rate brandy. I don't like to think what she'd say if she knew we'd finished it."

Marianne's jaw dropped. It was too much! While she had been picturing them engaged in serious, even tragic conference, there the two of them had been quite simply getting drunk together! There was no mistaking Jolival's beaming countenance, the flush mantling his nose and the glazed look in his eyes. He was in what was commonly called a state of mild inebriation and Marianne wondered whether this temporary euphoria was, after all, a cause for great rejoicing.

"You still have not told me where he is," she said severely. "Although I am glad to see that you appear to have passed an agreeable evening."

"Most agreeable. We are in perfect agreement. But you were asking me where our friend is now? The answer is, he's in the room next to mine."

"He has consented to spend the night here? In Prince Sant'Anna's house?"

"He had no reason to refuse. Besides, who said anything about Prince Sant'Anna? This house belongs to Turhan Bey. In other words, the man whom Beaufort knew as Caleb."

"You were supposed to tell him everything," Marianne burst out. "Why didn't you say—"

"That, like the Deity, these were three persons in one? No, my child. You see—" Jolival dropped the bantering tone he had used so far and became oddly serious. "It did not seem to me that I had the right to reveal a secret which is not my own—or yours either, if it comes to that. If the prince wants Jason Beaufort to know that the man he treated as a slave and almost allowed to die under the lash was your husband, he will say so. But for my own part, I think that, considering Jason's attitude to colored people, it is best that he should continue in ignorance. Since you mean to sever your connection with the prince and resume your own life after the child is born, there is no reason why Beaufort should not go on believing he is dead."

During this speech, Marianne's initial protest died away as she had time to think. Jolival's wisdom, even when drawn from a bottle, could be disconcerting, but it was sound. And very often, against all the odds, he had been right.

"But in that case, how did you manage to explain the fact that I was living in Caleb's house—and that I had suffered myself to remain in—in my present condition?"

Jolival, who seemed to be having some difficulty retaining his balance on his feet, sat down cautiously on the very edge of the bed and, taking out his handkerchief, began to mop his brow with it. He was looking extremely warm and smelled strongly of tobacco, but for once Marianne did not even notice it.

"Come now," she said again. "How did you explain that?"

"Very easily—and without straying very far from the truth. You decided to have the child which was conceived in such frightful circumstances—and I may say it is well for Signor Damiani that he has already departed this life because our friend's one idea at this moment would be to tear him limb from limb. Where was I? Oh, yes. You kept the child because it was no longer possible to be rid of it without putting your life at risk. Beaufort can scarcely object to that, especially since his moral code is so much stricter than yours—than ours, I mean."

"What exactly do you mean?" Marianne asked crossly.

"Just this—that whoever the father and whatever the circumstances, Beaufort believes that any woman who procures herself an abortion is committing a crime. Well, he's a man of principle and that includes a respect for human life and what amounts to a reverence for babies carried to extremes."

"In other words," Marianne said dazedly, "he was furiously angry that I was expecting a child but by no means willing for me to get rid of it?"

"Precisely. What he actually said was that he had truly believed that this was simply one of the bad dreams which had haunted him for so long, but that since it was a fact he was glad I had had sense enough to stop you doing anything so foolish. Women, he said, ought to realize that a child is much more their creation than the man's. Let the father be who he may, there is a bond between the child and its mother which some never realize until it is too late. So you see, I had no need to look for any explanations. He found them for himself."

"And my being here?"

"Just as simple. Caleb owed his life to you. It was natural that, once he had resumed his true identity, he should offer you a refuge from the animosity of the British ambassador in his house, where no one would ever think to look for you."

"And Jason accepted that?"

"Without a moment's hesitation. He is filled with remorse at the thought of having treated as he did a man of his worth—and influence. He is determined to present his apologies tomorrow morning. Don't worry," Jolival added quickly, seeing Marianne's start of anxiety. "I mean to warn the prince before I go to bed."

"At this hour? He will be asleep."

"No. He's a man who sleeps very little and does much of his work at night. He reads, writes, attends to his collections and his business interests, which are very extensive. You know nothing of him, Marianne, but I can tell you he is a very remarkable man."

What had got into Jolival? Was he going to start singing the prince's praises? How could he let his mind wander so easily from the subject which was of such passionate interest to her?

"Jolival," she said a little pettishly, "can we please get back to Jason? What else did he say? What does he think? What is he going to do?"

But Arcadius, whose manners appeared to have deserted him, only yawned, rose and stretched himself like a scrawny cat.

"What did he say? Lord, I can't remember now! But I'll tell you what he thinks. He loves you more than ever and he's fuller of remorse than an overgrown garden is of weeds. As to what he's going to do—he'll tell you that himself in the morning. Because I daresay he'll come running to your door as soon as he's out of his bed. All the same… don't expect him too early."

Marianne was too happy to reproach her old friend for a degree of frivolity which she put down largely to the brandy he had drunk.

"I see how it is," she said, laughing at him. "You think he'll still be suffering the effects of your potations."

"Oh, he's got a sound enough head on him. He's still young. But there, enough is enough. If it will stop you worrying yourself all night, I'd better tell you, I suppose, that Beaufort means to beg you very humbly to go to him in America as soon as your health permits."

"Go to him? But why not go together? Why can't he wait for me?"

She had started up agitatedly and Jolival bent and pressed her shoulders gently down again on to the pillows.

"Now don't excite yourself again, Marianne. The situation in Washington is very grave, because relations between President Madison and the British Government are extremely strained. Beaufort told me that he met a friend of his in Athens, a cousin of that Captain Bainbridge who was obliged by the Dey of Algiers to carry a tribute to the sultan aboard his vessel and so became the first American, before Beaufort, ever to penetrate this city. This man was making all speed back to the United States, for Bainbridge has been appointed admiral in chief of the American fleet and is mustering all the best ships and men. The war which is coming will be fought at sea at least as much as on land. Beaufort's friend wanted him to go with him, but he insisted on coming here to find you first—"

"And to find his ship, of course," Marianne added gloomily. "If America needs captains for her navy, she will need ships even more. The brig is a well-found vessel, fast and well armed—and she fits Jason like a second skin. It's nice of you to try and sugar the pill for me, Jolival, but it makes me wonder if the prince wasn't right that day when he slammed out of the house saying that if it hadn't been for the Sea Witch he doubted whether we should ever have set eyes on Jason Beaufort again… In spite of all I've heard tonight, I still can't quite get that thought out of my head."

"Then just you stop fidgeting yourself about it. Beaufort is not one to hide his feelings, you know that as well as I do. He has made a clean sweep of all his anger and resentment. What do you care for the international situation as long as you have found happiness again?"

"Happiness?" Marianne murmured. "Aren't you forgetting that if there is a war, Jason will have to fight?"

"My dear girl, our country has been at war for ten years or more but that hasn't prevented a great many women from being happy. Forget the war. Rest and relax, give the prince the son he wants so much and then, if you still want to, we will travel quietly back to Italy together so that you may settle the matter of your future. When that is done, there will be nothing to stop us setting sail for the Carolinas."

Jolival's voice droned on soothingly, only a little thickened by alcohol, but Marianne did not miss the telltale phrase. She picked it up at once.

"If I still want to? Are you mad, Arcadius?"

He smiled rather vaguely and made an evasive gesture.

"Women change their minds," was all he said, and made no attempt to explain himself further.

But how could you explain to a very young woman, in her exhausted and exacerbated state, who had suddenly been given a fresh glimpse of life and happiness in the return of the man she loved, that she knew as yet nothing of the surprises of motherhood? She foresaw it as an ordeal and at the same time as a kind of formality. She did not know that putting out of her life and her mind the child she had never wanted might prove unexpectedly painful.

But it would be a waste of time even to try to bring her face to face with the truth. Not until she held in her arms the tiny living bundle that had been born of her own flesh would Marianne begin to recognize her own reactions to that greatest miracle of all human life, the birth of a man or woman.

For the time being her face was set stubbornly.

"I shall not change," she declared with the obstinacy of a child.

The last word ended abruptly in a little gasp. The pain had come again, striking without warning and expanding slowly. Jolival, who had been on the point of withdrawing with a philosophic shrug to seek his own bed, stopped suddenly.

"What is it?"

" I—I don't know. A pain—oh, not very bad, but it's the second time and I was wondering—"

She did not finish. Jolival was already out in the passage that separated Marianne's room from Donna Lavinia's, shouting loudly enough to wake the dead.

He'll rouse the whole house, Marianne thought, but she knew by now that she was going to need help and that the time had come for her to fulfill her great task as a woman.

Chapter 6 "I come of a free people…"

MARIANNE had been in labor for more than thirty hours and still the child had not appeared. Donna Lavinia and the doctor stayed with her in her room while she endured the onslaughts of pain with ever-weakening resistance. As the contractions grew more violent she had set herself not to cry out, making it a point of honor with herself to behave with the stoicism proper to a great lady. Scarcely a moan escaped from between her clenched teeth.

But the ordeal had gone on for so long that in the end the incessant torture of it had made her forget all her resolutions. Writhing like a captive animal, her sheets soaked with sweat, she was screaming now without restraint. She had been screaming for hours and her voice was growing fainter. All she wanted was to die quickly and get it over.

Her screams found an echo in the hearts of the two men who waited in the boudoir adjoining her bedchamber.

Jolival stood at the window, biting his nails and staring into space, as though fixed there until the end of time.

As for Jason Beaufort, his almost British phlegm had flown to the winds at Marianne's first moan. He was pale and hollow-eyed and smoked continuously, in a kind of frenzy, lighting one cigar after another and pressing his hands to his ears from time to time when her screams were more than he could bear. The heel of his boot had worn a large hole in the carpet.

Day was breaking. Neither Jason nor the vicomte had slept since the previous night but neither seemed aware of it. Then, at the very moment when the distant gun proclaimed the dawn, aery from the bedroom ending in a despairing sob made Jason start as if the cannon had been fired at Marianne herself.

"This is intolerable!" he cried. "Can nothing be done? Must she endure this agony?"

Jolival shrugged. "It is nature's way, it seems. The doctor tells me that the birth of a child is often a lengthy business."

"The doctor! Do you trust that pompous ass ? Well, I do not!"

"Is that on account of his turban?" Jolival inquired. "I suppose you think no doctor can be any good unless he's dressed in a frock coat. This one seems competent enough, as far as I have been able to judge from talking to him. Not but what I'm beginning to share your opinion. When I looked in just now he was sitting in the corner with his chin on his chest playing with a string of amber beads and taking no notice whatsoever of poor Marianne, who was screaming her head off."

Jason strode toward the door as though intending to batter it down.

"I'm going to tell him what I think of him," he said wildly.

"You will do no good. It makes no impression on him at all. I tried it. I asked him how much longer this agony would go on."

"And what did he say?"

"Insh'Allah."

Beaufort's bronzed face darkened to brick red.

"Oh, did he! Well, we'll see whether he'll dare to answer me in the same way!"

He was on the point of bursting into Marianne's room when a door which gave on to an external gallery was opened by a woman servant who stood aside to permit the entrance of an extraordinary apparition. The newcomer was a tall woman swathed in black muslin robes and wearing on her head a curious kind of pointed headdress which gleamed with pure gold in the first rays of the morning sun. Gold, too, were the long earrings that dangled against either cheek.

The room was thick with the reek of Jason's and Jolival's cigars and Rebecca recoiled a little as she entered and waved her hand before her face in an effort to clear the smoke. She looked thoughtfully at the two men, who were staring at her as though she had been the statue of the Commendatore come to life to demand an account of their misdeeds. Then, going to the window, she flung it open, letting in the cold, damp air from the garden.

"One does not smoke near the chamber of a woman in labor," she said sternly. "Moreover, men have no business in the women's quarters at such times. Go now."

The two men looked at one another, considerably taken aback by this quelling speech, but Rebecca was already opening the door by which she had just entered and pointing commandingly to the gallery.

"Go, I say! I will call you when it is over."

"But—but who are you?" Jolival managed to ask.

"I am called Rebecca," the strange woman deigned to answer. "Judah ben Nathan, the physician of the Kassim Pasha quarter, is my father. The lord Turhan Bey sent for me an hour past to attend a friend of his who is suffering greatly in childbed."

Satisfied with this information, Jolival turned meekly to the door, but Jason stood eyeing this autocratic female, whose headdress made her taller than himself, suspiciously.

"He sent for you, you say? I don't believe it. He has his own doctor in there."

"I know that. Jelal Osman Bey is a good doctor but his ideas on childbirth are those of a true believer of Islam. The woman must fight her own battle and it is necessary to wait the outcome before interfering. But there are times when it does not do to wait too long and so, if you please, do not waste any more of my time with idle questions."

"Come along," Jolival said, drawing the reluctant American away. "Leave it. Turhan Bey knows what he is about."

Neither he nor Jason had set eyes on the master of Hamayunabad since early the previous morning. He had appeared suddenly in the midst of the confusion caused by Jolival's cries for help and when Jason, who had also been awakened by the servants' clamor, had come to see what the matter was, the two men had found themselves face to face.

The meeting had passed off smoothly, in spite of Jolival's fears and the fumes of old brandy. Jason Beaufort had thanked his preserver warmly and with a perfect self-command. He had also contrived tactfully, and with unexpected delicacy for a man of his temper, to convey his regrets for the somewhat rough-and-ready treatment he had accorded to him when the true identity of the man was unknown to him and he had seen him only in the romantic guise of an escaped slave. Turhan Bey, not to be outdone in courtesy, had assured his erstwhile captain that he bore him no malice for usage which he had brought on himself. Then he had begged the American to consider his house his own and to call freely on his wealth and influence.

He had listened without expression to Jason's halting words of thanks for having taken the Princess Sant'Anna into his house and, in some sort, making up for the grave wrongs which he, Jason, had unconsciously done her, replying merely that it was the least he could do. Then he had bowed politely and withdrawn and they had not seen him since.

When Jolival had presented himself at the door of the pavilion where he dwelt, he had been informed that the lord Turhan Bey was at his warehouse.

After being sent packing by Rebecca, the two men wandered down the long covered passage which ran through the bare, wintry gardens to a brightly painted kiosk that rose up against the surrounding grayness like an outsized and improbable flower. Each was feeling awkward and out of place and neither could think of anything to say, although both of them were secretly relieved to have escaped from the smoke-filled atmosphere of the boudoir and the cries from the next room. The silence of the empty garden seemed to them delicious and each sought to prolong it as long as possible.

But their moment of respite was fated to be a brief one. Jason was just lighting a fresh cigar when the sound of running footsteps echoed along the gallery. An instant later Gracchus appeared. He was out of breath and scarlet with exertion, while the carroty hair stood up straight on his head. Obviously the news he brought was far from good.

"The brig!" he called out as soon as he caught sight of the two men. "She's not at her moorings!"

The color drained from Jason's face and as the boy stumbled, exhausted, almost at his feet, he seized him by the shoulders and hauled him upright again.

"What's that you say? Has she been stolen?"

Gracchus shook his head, opened his mouth, gasping for breath like a fish out of water, gulped painfully two or three times and managed to say: "Put… put her in quarantine, damn them! She's… riding at anchor… out in… the Bosporus, near the Tower of the Maiden…"

"Quarantine!" Jolival exclaimed. "But why?"

The onetime errand boy of the rue Montorgueil jerked his shoulders angrily.

"It seems one of the men on board her took ill and died suddenly of the cholera. They took the body ashore at once and burned it, but the port authorities insist on the ship's being quarantined. When we got there with Monsieur O'Flaherty she'd just put out from her moorings with one of my lord Turhan's men made to pilot her. It's dreadful, isn't it, Monsieur Jason? What are we going to do?"

Gracchus, whose delight at seeing his favorite hero once again—aided by such explanations as Jolival thought proper to give him—had made the harsh memories of their last encounter melt like butter in the sun, had been dispatched by Jason to find Craig O'Flaherty and instruct him to set about assembling a crew.

Unexpectedly enough, Jason's old lieutenant of the Sea Witch had not left Constantinople. Something in his Irish soul had responded to the color and poetry of the city, and also to the possibilities of the contraband trade in Russian vodka and the wines of the Crimea for a man with some small business sense.

Left to himself after Achmet Reis had taken the brig and some of those aboard her to the Ottoman capital, O'Flaherty had at first been at a loss what to do. It would have been possible, certainly, for him to have signed on with one or another of the British vessels which, like the frigate Jason, were frequent visitors to the Golden Horn, and so make his way back to Europe. But once again his Irish soul rebelled at the thought of treading an English deck, even with the object of returning to his native seas.

Furthermore, not only was he still a welcome visitor at the French embassy, where he called frequently to see Jolival, but he was also drawn by something stronger than himself to the American brig. He loved the ship almost like a child and when he learned that the Haseki Sultan had bought her and given her to Marianne, he had settled down to wait for Beaufort, like Marianne herself, with the same complete faith only rather more patience.

The early days of waiting had not been easy. He had no very clear idea what to do with himself but divided his time and what little money he had between the various taverns in the city and the shadow play in Seraskier Square, which delighted his boyish heart. He had gone on in this way until one day his thirst for alcohol had taken him into a certain tavern in Galata which was the haunt of the most fervent devotees of Bacchus of all the European shore.

There he had made the acquaintance of one Mamoulian, a Georgian from the region of Batum who was endeavoring, in the fumes of Greek and Italian wines, to forget the war that was slowly ruining him. For the hostilities between the Porte and Tsar Alexander had effectively put a stop to the profitable import of vodka, since no seaman worthy of the name was willing any longer to run the risks of taking his ship into Russian waters.

A friendship fostered by a few bottles of wine drunk in company had sprung up between the two, and they had agreed to form a temporary alliance. The end of the war was in sight and O'Flaherty for his part was unwilling to engage himself for any length of time, not wishing to outstay the brig in Constantinople.

As a result, leaving word for Jolival that he could be found at the bar known as the San Giorgio, which had become his favorite haunt, the Irishman had plunged happily into two smuggling expeditions, both of which were crowned with success and besides restoring his fortunes in a most agreeable way had made the time hang much less heavily on his hands.

As luck would have it, he had just returned from the second of these voyages and was back in Galata when Gracchus came looking for him with the news of Jason's arrival and his initial instructions. Craig O'Flaherty had promptly celebrated the happy event by downing an enormous glass of Irish whiskey, procured from heaven alone knew where, and had then set off, towing Gracchus after him, to cross the Golden Horn and hasten to the Phanar waterfront, to be greeted with the disconcerting sight which Gracchus had described.

The two of them had spent the whole day running up and down trying to find out where the brig was lying, so that sunset had caught them on the wrong side of the Golden Horn and they had been obliged to spend the night in a Greek tavern at considerable risk of being taken up by the watch.

There they had drowned their sorrows in a resinated wine which had left them both with aching heads, and at daybreak they had flung themselves into a boat to cross the water again and make their report.

Ignoring Gracchus's anguished query, Jason asked merely: "Where have you left Mr. O'Flaherty?"

"With the porter—the kapiji, I mean. He didn't like to come in—not knowing Turhan Bey. He's waiting there for your orders."

"I'll go and bring him in. We must decide what is to be done. And there's the child still not come—"

"Mon Dieu!" Gracchus exclaimed. "What with everything else, I was forgetting the baby! Isn't it born yet?"

"No," Jolival said. "He—or she, because there's no saying it will be a boy, after all—is taking his time about it."

"But—isn't it dangerous, taking so long?"

Jolival shrugged. "I don't know. We must hope not."

Their hopes were justified. For even as the vicomte was speaking, Rebecca's long, supple and experienced hands, reaching right into the body of her patient to turn the child, which was positioned badly, were delivering Marianne at last.

She, poor girl, had suffered so much that the actual birth drew from her no more than a plaintive cry, followed by merciful unconsciousness. She did not hear the baby's first, remarkably vigorous wail as Rebecca slapped it sharply. Or Donna Lavinia's delighted exclamation: "It's a boy! Sweet Jesus, we have a son…"

"And a very fine boy, too," the Jewess added. "He must weigh nearly nine pounds. He'll be a splendid man. Go and tell those two fools who were smoking away in the next room. No doubt you'll find them in the gallery."

But the faithful nurse of the Sant'Annas was no longer listening. She had fled from the chamber, picking up her starched petticoats to run the faster, and was making straight for the prince's apartments. As she ran, she was laughing and crying and babbling aloud, possessed by a joy that must be shared.

"A son!" she was crying. "He has a son! The curse is lifted. God has taken pity on him at last…"

In the meantime, while Rebecca attended to the newborn child Marianne was recovering consciousness under the ministrations of Jelal Osman Bey. The doctor had roused himself at last from his fatalistic stillness and hurried to revive the young mother from her dangerous swoon. The life of a woman capable of bringing into the world such a boy as she had just given birth to was not to be lightly thrown away.

Marianne, opening her eyes, was vaguely aware of a dark face with a little pointed beard which she was able to identify after a moment.

"Doctor," she breathed. "Will it… will it be much longer now?"

"Are you still in pain?"

"N-no. No… that's right. The pains have stopped."

"And so they should have done, for it is all over."

"Over?"

Marianne drew the word out slowly, as though struggling to grasp its meaning. She was conscious of little beyond the blessed relief to her tortured body. Over! The frightful agony was over. The pain was not going to come again and she could go to sleep at last.

But the face was still hovering over her and she could smell the scent of ambergris that clung to his garments.

"You have a son," the doctor said, still more gently but with a hint of respect in his voice. "You should be proud and happy because he is a magnificent boy."

One by one the words were beginning to penetrate, to acquire a meaning. Marianne's hands moved slowly over her body, and as realization broke over her that the monstrous swelling had gone, that her stomach was almost flat once more, the tears welled from her eyes.

They were tears of joy, relief and gratitude toward a Providence that had taken pity on her. As the doctor had said, it was over. Never had the word "delivery" been charged with a deeper meaning.

It was as though the bars of an iron cage which had stood between her and a glorious landscape bathed in sunlight had fallen away all at once. She was free. Free at last! And the very word itself was as if she had newly rediscovered it.

Rebecca, returning with the child in her arms, mistook the reason for the tears that were rolling down her face in a melancholy stream.

"You must not cry," she said gently. "You made the right choice, for it would have been a shame to lose such a child as this. See how beautiful he is?"

She was holding out her arms with their soft burden but even as she did so the reaction came, harsh and sudden. Marianne set her jaw and turned her head away.

"Take it away! I don't want to look at it!"

The Jewess frowned. Accustomed as she was to the unpredictable ways of women, she was shocked by the violence in the girl's voice. Even where the child was not wanted, the most stubborn and determined woman would be softened with pride and pleasure after giving birth to a son. She persisted, as though she had not understood.

"Do you not want to see your son?"

But Marianne shut her eyes tightly with a desperate obstinacy. It was almost as if she were afraid of what she might see. She rolled her head on the pillow and the damp mass of her hair clung like seaweed about her face.

"No! Send for Donna Lavinia. She must look after it. I only want to sleep… sleep, that's all I want."

"You shall sleep later," Rebecca said sharply. "It is not finished yet. Another half hour or so."

She was laying the child down in the big cradle of gilded wood which two women had brought into the room when Donna Lavinia returned.

The housekeeper's eyes were like stars. Oblivious of everything else, she went straight to the bed and fell on her knees beside it, as though before an altar, and pressed her lips fervently to the hand which lay abandoned on the sheet.

"Thank you," she murmured. "Oh, thank you… our princess!"

Embarrassed by a gratitude she could not feel was in any way deserved, Marianne tried to withdraw her hand. She could feel it wet with tears.

"Please! Don't thank me so, Donna Lavinia! I—I don't deserve it. Only tell me—that you are happy. That is all I want—"

"Happy? Oh, my lady—"

Unable to say any more, she rose and turned to Rebecca. Drawing herself up gravely, she held out her arms.

"Give me the prince," she ordered.

The sound of the title came as a shock to Marianne. She realized all at once that the tiny thing which, while it still lay within her body, she had refused even to think of as a child, this formless being had taken on a new identity on coming into the world. He was the heir! The one hope of a man who, from the day of his own tragic birth, had been paying for someone else's sin, a man so wretched that he could be grateful for a son sired by another man—even such a man! On the little bundle of fine linen and lace which Donna Lavinia was cradling to her heart with all the love and worship she might have given to the infant Savior himself, rested the weight of centuries of tradition, of a great name and vast estates and of fabulous riches…

A bitter, resentful voice muttered deep in her heart: "It is Damiani's child! The monstrous issue of an evil man whose life was all wickedness." And it was answered in Donna Lavinia's calm, grave tones: "He is the prince! The last of the Sant'Annas, and nothing and no one can ever alter that now!" And it was the calm certainty of love and loyalty which carried the day, just as when light and darkness meet, the light always prevails.

Standing in a pool of sunlight that poured into the room, Donna Lavinia held up an antique flask which she had taken from a small box and it shone with a gleam of dull gold. She turned a tiny drop from it onto a fine linen cloth and passed it over the baby's lips.

"This wheaten flour comes from your lands, my lord. It is the bread that nourishes all those who are your own, servants and peasants. They make it grow for you, but you must watch all your life that it does not fail them."

She repeated the action with almost the same words, pouring out from another, similar flask the very lifeblood of the Tuscan soil: a wine, dark, red and thick as the vital fluid itself.

When it was done, the old woman turned again to the bed where Marianne sat watching, fascinated in spite of herself, the stages of this curious little ceremony which had the grave simplicity of a religious rite.

"My lady," she said earnestly, "the priest will be here in a moment from the church of St. Mary Draperis to baptize the young prince. What name is it Your Highness's wish that he shall be given?"

Taken unawares, Marianne felt herself flushing. Why must Donna Lavinia force her into a maternal role she did not want? Surely the old lady must know that the birth was simply part of a bargain between her master and the woman she persisted in regarding as her mistress, a bargain that was only the prelude to a final separation. Or was she trying to ignore it? Probably that was it, because she was making no attempt to bring the child to his mother. Yet some answer had to be given.

"I don't know," Marianne said faintly. "I don't think it is for me to decide… Have you no suggestion to make?"

"Yes, indeed! If it is agreeable to Your Highness, Prince Corrado would wish the child to be called by the family name of Sebastiano. But it is usual for him to bear that of his maternal grandfather also."

"But surely Don Sebastiano was Prince Corrado's grandfather, not his father?"

"That is so. But he preferred that the name Ugolino should not be used again. Will you tell me your father's name, my lady?"

Marianne felt as if the jaws of a trap were closing around her. Donna Lavinia knew what she was doing. She was deliberately seeking to bind the child's mother, willy-nilly, to the family she was endeavoring to leave. Marianne had never felt so weak and exhausted. She was tired out. Why did they have to bother her with the baby? Why couldn't they leave her alone even now and let her rest? She had a sudden vision of the portrait that reigned over her salon in Paris. Surely the proud and splendid Marquis d'Asselnat, whose title of nobility went back to the Crusades, in whatever warrior heaven he was now, would be angry to see his name given to a child of the steward Damiani? But even as the thought crossed her mind, she heard herself answering in a dreamlike voice that did not seem to belong to her, as though driven to the capitulation, as it seemed to her, by some power stronger than herself.

"His name was Pierre… Pierre-Armand…"

Her whole subconscious being was in rebellion against what she felt to be her own weakness, but although she tried to fight it the vast weariness overcame her. Her eyelids were like lead and her brain was sinking into a fog. She had fallen into a deep sleep even before Rebecca had finished her ministrations.

Donna Lavinia stood for a moment looking at the slender form, so thin and frail now that it seemed lost in the great bed. There were tears in her eyes. Was it possible for so much strength of will to endure in one so young and so exhausted? Even after all that she had been through, she still retained sufficient presence of mind to reject the child, refusing to allow herself to succumb to the powerful maternal instinct.

The old woman glanced down pitifully at the tiny face nestling with closed eyes in its lace cap, from which a single saucy lock of black hair peeped.

"If she would only look at you, my little prince… just once. Then she could never bear to send you away. But come along then. Let's go and see him… He'll love you with all the love he has to give. He will love you for two."

Leaving Rebecca, aided by a waiting woman to finish doing what was needful for the young mother and set the room to rights, she wrapped the baby in a shawl of soft white wool and tiptoed from the bedchamber. She was halfway through the boudoir when Jolival burst in with Jason hard on his heels.

"The baby!" cried the vicomte. "He has arrived? We've only just heard… Oh, God! You've got him there?"

Poor Jolival was beside himself with excitement. The anguish of the past hours had given way all at once to such a joy as he would never have believed possible. He wanted to laugh and sing, to dance and drink and do a thousand foolish things. Like the prince himself, he had thrust the facts of the baby's conception behind him, and in his love for Marianne he saw the baby only as her son, the son of one who was like a daughter to him. Suddenly he was discovering the marvelous thrill of being a grandfather.

Donna Lavinia parted the shawl with a careful finger to show them the little red face sleeping peacefully, the tiny fists clutching fast to the new life that had just been given to him. Jolival felt the tears prick at his eyelids.

"Oh, my God, he is so like her! Or rather, so like his grandfather."

He had gazed too often at the portrait of the Marquis d'Asselnat not to be struck instantly by the resemblance, even though the child was not yet two hours old. By a merciful dispensation of Providence, the baby had no trait of his real father. The imprint of his mother was too strong to leave room for any other influence, and Jolival thought that it was as well that the little boy should be much more an Asselnat than a Sant'Anna. Nor did he think that Prince Corrado would be at all displeased by the resemblance.

"He's a beautiful boy!" Jason exclaimed, with a warmth in his smile that found its way straight to the housekeeper's reluctant heart. "The most beautiful I ever saw, that I will swear. What does his mother say?"

"She could not help but think him beautiful, could she?" Arcadius said quickly, with a note of pleading in his voice.

Donna Lavinia clasped the baby tighter to her breast and looked at the American with the tears welling up again in her stricken eyes.

"Alas, sir, she would not even look at the poor little angel. She told me to take him away with as much loathing as if he were a monster."

There was a brief silence. The two men looked at one another but it was Jolival's eyes that fell.

"I was afraid of that," he said huskily. "Ever since she first knew she was with child, Marianne has fiercely rejected the idea of the baby."

Jason said nothing. He stood lost in thought, a crease between his brows and another at the corner of his mouth. But when Donna Lavinia, after wrapping the baby again, made as if to go on her way, he checked her.

"Where are you taking the child?"

She hesitated, bowing her head in an effort to hide the color that had flooded into her face.

"I thought—that is, it will be proper to show him to the master of the house."

It may have been the unnatural stiffness in her voice, but Jolival was suddenly aware of an undercurrent he could not define. Neither of the actors in the little scene had stirred but Donna Lavinia seemed to be held rooted to the spot under Jason's searching glance, and her breath was coming in little short, quick gasps, like an animal scenting danger.

Then the American drew back a step to let her pass, bowing politely from the waist.

"Of course," he said gravely. "You are perfectly right, Donna Lavinia. It is a delicate attention that does you as much credit as the child."

When Marianne awakened from the beneficent sleep that had engulfed body and mind, the curtains in her room were drawn and the lamps were shedding a warm golden radiance, for it was already evening. The tiled stove was purring like a big cat and Donna Lavinia was coming toward the bed carrying a tray with something steaming on it. It might have been some slight sound which had woken her, or hunger stimulated by the savory smell of supper, because she felt no wish to leave the quiet haven of sleep. The longing for it still pervaded every fiber of her body.

She opened her eyes all the same and stretched luxuriously like a contented cat, with the sheer physical enjoyment of rediscovered freedom of movement after long months of hampering constraint.

Goodness, what a joy it was to feel oneself again after all this time, when her body had seemed to belong not to her but to an increasingly alien burden! Even the memory of the hours of agony she had endured in this very bed was fading fast, swept away on the tide of time into the thick mists of oblivion.

She shook aside a heavy lock of hair which was tickling her cheek and smiled at the housekeeper.

"Donna Lavinia, I'm hungry. What time is it?"

"Nearly nine o'clock, my lady. You have slept for almost twelve hours. Are you feeling better?"

"Much better. A few more hours' sleep and I shall be quite myself again."

Meanwhile, Lavinia had been busy helping her young mistress to sit up amid a nest of pillows and was bathing her face with a cloth moistened with a fragrant lotion of verbena. That done, she laid the black lacquered tray on her knees.

"What have you brought me?" Marianne asked, finding her interest in food abruptly revived.

"Vegetable soup, roast chicken and fruit stewed in honey, with a glass of Chianti. The doctor says a little wine can do you no harm."

Everything disappeared very speedily, and the modest meal seemed to Marianne the most delicious thing in the world. She was savoring each small physical pleasure of recovery with such intensity that she had no time as yet for the moral dilemmas which would intrude themselves all too soon.

She swallowed the last drop of wine with a sigh of satisfaction and sank back among her pillows, ready to slip back into the sleep which at that moment seemed the most desirable state of being. But then something stirred beyond the curtain which hung over the door. A hand put it aside, revealing the tall figure of Prince Corrado, and all Marianne's sense of well-being was gone in an instant.

He was the last person she wanted to see just then. In spite of the white turban, set with a turquoise stone, which swathed his proud head, she thought he looked a sinister figure in his black caftan, unadorned save for the broad dagger thrust through the silken sash. He was the personification of the dark shadow on her life, the evil genius that dogged her steps. Or was it the symbol of a troubled conscience which would not leave its owner altogether at peace?

Watching him as he came toward her, he struck her as more than ever like a black panther.

He crossed the big room silently with his easy stride until he reached the foot of the bed. Donna Lavinia had dropped a curtsy and vanished, taking with her the empty tray.

For a moment the two partners in this unlikely marriage stared at one another without speaking, and once again Marianne began to feel uneasy. This man had a strange capacity of making her always feel in some indefinable way in the wrong.

Not knowing what to say, she sought for something neither stupid nor clumsy and then, remembering that she had just presented him with what must surely give him pleasure, she decided to smile and make the effort.

"Are you pleased?"

He nodded but his dark face remained unsmiling. And when he spoke it was in the low, measured tones that she remembered hearing for the first time from the other side of a mirror, a voice that seemed burdened with all the sorrows of the world.

"I have come to bid you farewell, my lady. Farewell and thank you for performing so magnificently your part in the contract between us. I must not inflict on you any longer a presence which must revive unpleasant memories for you."

"Never think that," Marianne cried impulsively. "You have been very good to me, and very kind. Why must you leave me so soon? There is no hurry."

She meant it. For the life of her, she could not have said what made her say it. Why was she trying to keep her strange husband by her when all her hopes were now centered on Jason and she looked forward to a life of happiness with him?

The prince smiled, the shy smile which sat with such a curious charm on that face as of a heathen god.

"It is kind of you to say so, but there is no need to pretend or try to make me believe the impossible. I came to tell you that you are free now to live your own life. Thanks to you, I have a son and heir. Now you may follow your own destiny wherever it may lead you. I will help you, for it is my greatest wish to see you happy… Whatever you decide to do, whether you continue to bear my name or whether you wish to be rid of it as soon as possible, be sure that I shall still see to it that you want for nothing."

"Sir!" Marianne protested, her pride stung.

"Do not be offended. I mean the mother of my son to continue to enjoy the position which is hers by right of birth and beauty. You may remain here until you are quite recovered and when you wish to leave one of my ships will take you wherever you wish to go."

She smiled again, with an unintentional touch of coquetry.

"Why must we talk of this tonight? I am still very tired and my thoughts are a little confused. Tomorrow I shall be better and we can consider together—"

He seemed to be on the point of saying something but suddenly thought better of it and instead bowed deeply in the eastern fashion and murmured quickly: "Permit me to bid Your Highness a good night."

"But—" Marianne began in some bewilderment. Then she broke off, understanding the reason for his sudden change of attitude. Trembling with joy, she watched the door thrust open by a masterful hand and Jason stepped into the room.

She realized at once the reason for Corrado's withdrawal and made no attempt to detain him. It would not be fitting for Turhan Bey to pay more than a brief courtesy visit to his guest, the Princess Sant'Anna. In fact, she had ceased to be aware of his presence at all. Her eyes, her heart and her whole mind were focused on the man who had just entered.

The two men, however, greeted one another with the utmost politeness and Jason's voice sounded unwontedly deferential for a slave owner as he said: "I have to thank you, Turhan Bey, for your advice and counsel. If I may, I should like to come and discuss it with you shortly. I must see you before I leave."

"Come whenever you like, Mr. Beaufort. I shall be expecting you."

He went away at once after that. But Marianne had grasped only one thing from this exchange of civilities. Jason had spoken of leaving! Almost before the door had closed behind the prince, she had framed the question—and made up her mind.

"You are leaving? Then I am coming with you."

Jason walked unhurriedly up to the bed and, bending, took her hand and dropped a swift kiss on it. Then, still holding it between his own, he looked at her with a smile which did not reach his eyes or smooth out the anxious creases from his brow.

"We have always agreed that I was to go, and that it would be tonight," he said bluntly, yet with as much gentleness as he could.

"As to coming with me, you know quite well that is impossible."

"Why? Because of my condition? But that is all over! I am quite well, I assure you! To go with you, I have only to be carried down to the landing stage and from there a boat will take us straight to the Sea Witch. Surely you can carry me that far?" she added, tenderly teasing him. "I am not very heavy."

But his face held no hint of a smile.

"Yes, that would be easy enough, but your health is not the only difficulty."

"Then what is it?" she cried angrily. "Your own feelings? You don't want to take me, is that it?"

Her face was very flushed and her eyes a little too bright, as though with a fever. Jason tightened his clasp on her hands, which felt suddenly burning hot to his touch.

"I cannot take you," he corrected her firmly but very gently. "For one thing, you are not as strong as you think and it will be several days yet before you can leave your bed. You have been through a perilous ordeal and the doctor is adamant. But that is not the main reason. I cannot take you because it is quite simply impossible. Turhan Bey has been with you. Did he say nothing?"

"Should he have? I have only just woken up and had my supper. He only came in to say good evening…"

"Then I'll explain what has happened."

Sitting on the edge of the bed to be nearer to her, Jason gave Marianne a rapid sketch of what Gracchus and O'Flaherty had discovered.

"Our host has had inquiries made in the city during the day," he said, "which was perfectly natural since the brig bore his colors and was supposed to belong to him. He didn't like that story of a man dying suddenly of the cholera, or the speed with which the body was burned."

"Why not? So far as I can gather, cholera isn't exactly unusual here."

"No, but it's more usual in summer. And if you have sufficient influence, there's nothing simpler than to get hold of a body and dress it up appropriately and then burn it in a hurry. Turhan Bey thinks it is a ploy invented by the English to keep the vessel under observation, and he knows what he's talking about. So far it's certainly succeeded brilliantly."

"But then you can't go—you will have to wait! For forty days at least."

Her simple pleasure in the fact did nothing to lighten Jason's frown. Moving closer to her, he let go her hands and, taking her by the shoulders instead, spoke earnestly into her face.

"My darling, you don't understand. I must go and go now. Sanders is waiting for me at Messina so that we can try the Gibraltar passage together. If I want to join him, I will have to do what I failed to do the other night. I must steal my ship and escape that way."

"But that is madness! How will you manage without a crew? She's not a fishing boat!"

"I know that just as well as you do. I managed to get together enough men to work the ship out of Constantinople the other night. I'm better off today. Craig O'Flaherty is waiting at Galata with a few men he's managed to round up from the taverns there. They're not first-rate seamen but they are seamen of a sort, Europeans, too, who are tired of the east. And if you will entrust him to me, I'll take young Gracchus also. He wants to sail with me."

"Gracchus?"

Marianne felt a bitter pang in her heart. So Gracchus, too, wanted to leave her? In the time since she had first begun to put down roots in French soil, the urchin from the rue Montorgueil, the grandson of the laundress of the rue de la Revolte, had become much more than a servant to her. He had been a faithful friend, one she could trust and rely on. His devotion to her had been absolute. But it had not taken Jason long to win some of his heart, and Gracchus loved him almost as much as he loved Marianne and admired him deeply. Then the voyage aboard the Sea Witch had finally shown the youthful coachman the path of his dreams. The sea, with all its beauty and its tricks, its splendors and its perils, had become a real vocation and, remembering the boy's eagerness in the skirmish with the English frigates off Corfu, Marianne thought that she had no right to stand in his way.

"Take him, then," she said quickly. "I give him to you because I know he will be much happier with you. But why must you go so soon, Jason? Why not wait a little while—only a few days, so that I can—"

"No, Marianne. It's impossible. I cannot wait. In any case, I shall have to go secretly. There will be risks, fighting, perhaps, for the English will not let me sail out of the harbor without giving chase. I don't want to expose you to those risks. When you are quite better, you can go quietly aboard a Greek ship with Jolival and sail peacefully back to Europe. Once there, you have enough friends among seafaring men to find a vessel willing to dare the English blockade and carry you across the Atlantic."

"I'm not afraid of danger. Nothing can frighten me as long as I'm with you."

"You alone, perhaps, but aren't you forgetting, Marianne? You are no longer alone. Have you forgotten the child? Do you want to expose him when he's no more than a few hours old, to the perils of the sea, of gunfire and the risk of shipwreck? This is war, Marianne."

She broke free of his tender clasp and fell back on her pillows. Her face had gone very pale and there was a painful tightness in her chest. The child! Did he have to remind her? And what need had Jason to trouble himself about the little bastard? Did he seriously imagine she was going to take it with her to that other life, which was to be all clean and fresh and new? That she was going to bring up Damiani's child with his, the children that she longed to give him? In her uncertainty, she burst out angrily to gain time: "It is not war! Even here at the ends of the earth we know that there has been no formal declaration of war between Britain and the United States."

"Certainly. War has not been declared, but incidents are becoming more and more frequent and it will be only a matter of weeks. Mr. Canning knows that. He'd not have hesitated to impound my brig if she hadn't been protected by Turhan Bey's colors. Would you rather it caught me here and left me rotting in an English prison while my friends and fellow countrymen were fighting?"

"I want you to be free and happy… but I want to keep you with me."

It was a cry of despair and in the same instant Marianne had cast herself on Jason's chest and was burying her face in his coat while her thin arms—still so pitifully thin and the skin almost transparent—encircled his broad shoulders.

He held her to him, grieving for the hurt he had been forced to cause her once again, cradling her like a child while his hand caressed the soft curls at the nape of her neck.

"You can't keep me like that, my heart. I am a man, a seaman, and I must live according to my nature. Besides… would you truly love me if I were content to hide behind your skirts when danger threatened? Would you love a coward without honor?"

"I should love you anyhow…"

"No, you wouldn't. You're deceiving yourself, Marianne. If I were to listen to you, my sweet, a day would come when you would blame me for my cowardice. You'd throw it in my face with scorn and contempt. And you would be right. As God is my witness, I'd give anything to be able to stay with you, but I must choose America."

"America!" she said bitterly. "That endless country… with so many people in it. Does she really need you, just one among her countless children?"

"She needs them all. America only won her freedom because all those who wanted it joined together to make one people! I come of that free people… one grain of sand on the seashore, yet that grain, carried away on the winds, is lost forever."

Marianne was weeping now, with little, hard, gasping sobs, and clinging with all her strength to the virile form that was a solid wall to her, a refuge that she was about to lose once more, and for how long? For she had lost, she knew that. She had always known it. From the first words he had uttered, she had known that she was fighting a losing battle, that she could never hold him.

As though he had divined her thought, he murmured into her hair: "Be brave, my sweet. We shall be together again soon. Even if the chances of war mean that I cannot be there to greet you when you land at Charleston, everything will be ready to welcome you. To welcome you both, you and the baby. There will be a house, servants and an old friend of mine to look after you…"

Marianne had stiffened at the mention of the child and once again she avoided speaking of him, concentrating on her own misery instead.

"I know… but you will not be there," she mourned. "What will become of me without you?"

Gently but firmly he loosened the clinging arms which held him and stood up.

"I'm going to tell you," he said.

Before Marianne could recover from her surprise or make a move to stop him, he had walked quickly from the room, leaving the door open behind him. She heard him go swiftly across the boudoir, calling: "Jolival! Jolival! Come here!"

A moment later he was back with the vicomte on his heels. But what made Marianne gasp was the realization that, in his arms, with infinite care, he held a small white woolly bundle from which emerged two tiny, moving pink blobs.

The blood drained from Marianne's face as it came to her that Jason was bringing her the child whose very presence filled her with loathing. She cast about her wildly, seeking childishly for a way of escape, for somewhere to hide from the peril advancing on her, wrapped in a snow-white shawl and carried in the arms of the man she loved.

Coming to the foot of the bed, he tossed back the lock of black hair falling over his eyes with an automatic gesture and beamed triumphantly at the frightened girl.

"This is what is going to become of you, my sweet. An adorable little mother! Your son will keep you company and stop you thinking too much about the war. You can't imagine how quickly this little fellow will make the time pass for you."

He was coming around the bed toward her… In another moment he would be laying the child down on the counterpane… His blue eyes were alight with mischief and in that minute Marianne almost hated him. How could he?

"Take that child away," she articulated between gritted teeth. "I have already said I don't want to see him."

There was a sudden silence, a silence so vast and crushing that Marianne was frightened. Not daring to raise her eyes to Jason's face for fear of what she might see there, she went on in a much milder tone: "Try to understand what he means to me. I—I can't help it."

She had been prepared for an outburst of anger, but Jason's voice remained quiet and perfectly level.

"I don't know what he means to you—and I do not need to know. No, no, don't try to explain. Jolival has done so more than adequately and I am quite aware of the circumstances of the child's conception. But now I am going to tell you what he means to me. He's a fine, strong, healthy little man, something you have made very slowly and brought into the world with suffering that would have served to wipe out the worst of sins, if sin there was, and make it holy. And, most of all, he is your child—yours and only yours. He even looks like you."

"That's true," Jolival put in nervously. "He looks like the portrait of your father."

"Come, look at him at least," Jason persisted. "Have the courage to look, if only for a moment, or else you're not the woman—"

You're not the woman I thought you were. That was what he meant. Nor did his meaning escape Marianne. She knew his demanding private code of honor too well not to have scented danger. If she were to refuse to do as he asked, which he evidently regarded as a perfectly natural thing, a quite normal reflex, she would run the risk of seeing the place she held in his heart shrinking a little. Already she had some reason to think that place less than it had been. For too long life had conspired to show her to Jason in her least attractive light.

She surrendered unconditionally.

"Very well," she sighed. "Show him to me if you insist."

"I do insist," he said gravely.

Marianne had expected that he would show him to her in his arms so that she could take a quick glance, but instead he bent swiftly and set down the trifling burden on one of her pillows, close by his mother's shoulder.

She shrank a little at the unexpected contact but managed to bite back the exclamation of annoyance that rose to her lips. Jason was looking at her, studying her reaction. So she sat up cautiously and turned a little on her side. But when her eyes rested for the first time on her son, the shock was not what she had expected.

Not only was there nothing in the baby to recall his horrible sire, but he was truly such a perfect little cherub that in spite of herself her heart missed a beat.

Swaddled in his absurdly complicated assortment of garments, the little prince was sleeping with total concentration. His tiny fingers lay spread like a starfish against the woolen shawl. A cloud of fine black hair showed faintly under his cap of Valenciennes lace, curling lightly above a small round face which had the downy softness of a peach. He seemed to be having pleasant dreams because the corners of his tiny mouth quivered slightly as if he were already trying to smile.

Marianne stared at him, fascinated. The look of the Marquis d'Asselnat was unmistakable. It came chiefly from the shape of the mouth, the determination about the tiny chin and the promise of intelligence in the high, sculptured brow.

Looking at the small person she had feared so greatly, Marianne felt as if something inside her were struggling to spread its wings and be free. It was as though somewhere, in the secret depths of her being, there was another birth about to take place, unknown to her. A strange force, formed of a conspiracy between mind and heart, was welling up in her whether she would or no.

Almost fearfully, she put out a cautious finger and touched one of the little hands as softly as a butterfly. The movement was too shy to be called a caress. But the tiny fist stirred suddenly. The miniature fingers uncurled and then closed firmly around their mother's with a tenacity unexpected in a newborn baby.

At that something broke in Marianne. As though a window had been violently flung open by a gale of wind, the thing that had been struggling inside her took flight and soared heavenward, flooding her with a joy that was almost painful in its intensity. Tears sprang to her eyes and poured down her cheeks in a refreshing stream, washing away the bitterness and disgust, all the mire which had clogged Marianne's soul for so long and stifled it. What did it matter now how the child had come into her life and, like a tiny, indomitable tyrant, had demanded her very flesh and blood. She discovered with a wondering amazement that he was hers, flesh of her flesh, breath of her breath, and that she acknowledged him for what he was.

The two men standing on either side of the bed held their breath and dared not move a muscle as they watched the miracle taking place before their eyes, the miracle of the awakening of mother love. But when, still held prisoner by her son, she began to cry, Jason bent again and lifted the baby gently to place him in his mother's arms. This time they closed and held him.

The little silky head settled of its own accord against the warm breast in a gesture so instinctively caressing that it took Marianne's breath away. Then she looked up at Arcadius, who was weeping unashamedly, and at Jason, who was smiling with eyes she saw sparkling through her tears like diamonds in the sun.

"You need not look like that," she said softly. "Your little plot has succeeded. You have won."

"It was no plot," Jason said. "We merely wanted you to agree that your son is the most beautiful baby in the world."

"Well, you've done it. I do agree."

Meanwhile, Jolival, who had not shed so many tears since he could remember, was sniffing and fumbling in his pockets from which he extracted, first, a handkerchief, into which he blew with a noise like the last trumpet, and secondly, his watch, which he consulted uneasily. Then he glanced with an anxious expression at Marianne. But Jason, who had observed this proceeding, spared him the role of spoilsport.

"I know," he said quietly. "It is more than time and O'Flaherty must be at the beach already."

The delicate veil of Marianne's brand-new happiness was rent in an instant. Lost in her discovery, she had temporarily forgotten what loomed ahead.

"Oh, no!" she cried out. "Not so soon!"

Feverishly, as though feeling herself suddenly a prisoner, she thrust the baby at Jolival and threw back the covers as if to get up. But she had overestimated her strength and almost before her feet had touched the ground she felt her head swimming and she fell forward with a little cry into Jason's arms as he hurried around the bed to catch her.

He lifted her and held her briefly in his arms, alarmed to find her so light. He was suddenly torn by a parting he had not known would be so painful, and he covered her face with kisses before laying her back with infinite gentleness in her silky nest and drawing the covers tenderly over her trembling body.

"I love you, Marianne… Never forget that I love you. But for God's sake be reasonable! We shall meet again soon, I know… A few weeks, only a few weeks, and we shall be together again and you will have your strength and health again… and then nothing shall ever part us."

He was so obviously overcome that Marianne smiled tremulously at him, but still with a flicker of irony that showed a little of her old fighting spirit.

"Nothing? Not even the war?"

He kissed her again, her nose, her forehead, her lips and both her hands.

"You know very well that no power on earth can divide us forever. Certainly no paltry war is going to do it."

Then, almost as if he were afraid of a tenderness that might sap his courage, he tore himself from her arms and fled from the room, striding straight past Jolival, who stood staring after him, the child in his arms.

Jolival's eyes turned uncertainly to Marianne. He wondered if he ought to give her back the baby. But all her newfound bravery had abandoned her and she was lying face down, with her head buried in her pillows, weeping as if her heart would break. At that moment there was nothing the vicomte could say to comfort her and besides, he wanted to go after Jason and see with his own eyes the success or failure of his rash enterprise.

He left the room on tiptoe and went to restore baby Sebastiano to Donna Lavinia.

The big bedchamber was quiet except for the soft purring of the stove and the sound of sobbing. But outside in the cold night the wind was rising.

Chapter 7 A Night for the Devil

BY the time that Jason, Gracchus and Jolival reached the rendezvous, which was that same unfrequented stretch of shore behind the mosque of Kilij Ali Pasha where the Klepht, Theodoros, had borne Marianne unconscious from the sea, it was so dark, in spite of the obligatory lanterns, that at first they did not see Craig O'Flaherty and his men at all.

A strong wind was sweeping along the beach, tossing up the sand and whipping the sea into heavy, grinding breakers that spattered the darkness with white foam.

The time was that moment just before the dawn when the night is at its darkest and thickest, as if all the forces of darkness were gathering to help it keep possession of the earth and fight off the onslaught of the light. The three were more than fifteen minutes late. Preparations for departure had taken longer than anticipated because Gracchus had been temporarily mislaid, having been locked in a cellar through an oversight of the butler. In addition, the party had been stopped more than once in the two leagues between Bebek and Galata by patrols of janissaries out hunting for a miscreant who had caused sacrilegious disturbances in no less than three separate mosques.

The beach was so dark and empty that for a moment the three men believed themselves alone. Jason swore furiously into the wind, regardless of who might overhear him.

"Perhaps they thought we'd never get aboard in this gale," Jolival hazarded. "Or else they decided that we were not coming—"

"They had no business to think or decide," Jason snarled. "As to the gale, well, they're sailors, aren't they? In any case, I'm sure they can't be far off. I know O'Flaherty."

His previous loud cursing might well have sufficed but to make doubly sure he whistled three times on a particular note and a moment later was answered in an identical fashion. Almost immediately Craig O'Flaherty and his men appeared, dark shadowy figures which the privateer's eyes, accustomed to peering through the blinding spray, were soon able to pick out from the surrounding blackness.

The crew the Irishman had assembled could scarcely have been said to constitute the cream of the world's seamen. There were two Genoese, a Maltese, a Greek, an Albanian and two Georgians whom Craig had ruthlessly bribed away from the service of his friend Mamoulian. But they looked capable enough and stood up to Jason's practiced scrutiny.

"So here you are at last," was Craig's welcome. "We were beginning to give up hope."

"I daresay," retorted Jason dryly. "Several hours without a drink is a long time. Where were you, O'Flaherty? Find a bar somewhere still open?"

"In a safe place, and on consecrated ground, what's more," the Irishman retorted, indicating the vague outline of a small tekke of Whirling Dervishes which made a white blur against the dark bulk of the mosque. "You may not have noticed, but it's blowing fit to skin a cat. It was all we could do to keep our feet on the beach."

"You have a boat?"

"Yes. That, too, is in a safe place—in that fisherman's hut, down there on the shore. Do you see it? And now, if you want my opinion, we had better be moving, unless we want our boarding party to take place in broad daylight. Dawn is not far off."

"Come, then. Run out the boat."

While the men ran down to the hut, Jason turned quickly to Jolival and grasped both his hands in the warm, spontaneous fashion which won him so many friends.

"We part here, then. Goodbye, my friend. Take good care of her. This is not the first time I have entrusted her to you."

"I spend my life taking care of her," Jolival said gruffly, trying to shake off a nasty feeling of impending disaster. "You take care of yourself, Beaufort. Wars are not precisely rest cures."

"Don't worry. I'm indestructible. And look after the baby, too. His mother's love for him is very new and still very fragile, I think. It may be a long while before I am able to take care of him."

The American's hands were warm and strong and firm.

Returning their friendly pressure impulsively, Jolival was troubled by a slight feeling of remorse. Seeing the younger man so ready to be a father to another man's child, he was sorry he had not told him the whole truth. Prince Corrado had certainly approved his decision to conceal his true identity, but at that moment Jolival wished he had not done it. Jason was obviously expecting Marianne to have little Sebastiano with her when she landed in America, and might not be best pleased to find things otherwise.

The men, under Craig's directions, were running the boat down to the sea. It was a long caïque, sound and well built, and looked capable of a pretty turn of speed.

Suddenly the vicomte made up his mind.

"There is something else I want to tell you—something about the child. I've not told you before because it did not seem to me that I had the right, but now—"

"What is there about now in particular to make you decide to reveal a secret which does not belong to you—and which I may very well know already?"

"Which you—?"

Jason laughed. His hand came down heavily on Jolival's shoulder, warmly reassuring.

"Perhaps I'm not quite such a fool as you and Marianne like to think, my friend. So you may be at peace with yourself. You have given nothing away, because you had no need to. Nor, by the way, have I any intention of giving young Sant'Anna my name. And now goodbye."

He was about to turn away when he suddenly gripped Jolival with both hands.

"Kiss her for me—and tell her I love her."

Then he ran to join his men. They were having some trouble in getting the boat into the water. It was as if the sea were trying to throw off the vessel that had the temerity to try to ride it. Jolival could see the dim figures of men moving about against the background of foaming breakers and his mind groped half-unconsciously for a snatch of forgotten prayer.

Then suddenly there came a triumphant shout, and Jolival saw nothing more.

"Here we go, then!" a voice cried in Italian. Already it sounded some way off. "But it's a real night for the devil!"

Left alone on the beach, Jolival shivered. A night for the devil?

True enough, perhaps. The caïque had vanished. The sea had swallowed it, like the dark, gaping jaws of some ravening monster. There was nothing to be heard but the frenzied pounding of the waves and the howling of the wind. Was the gallant little craft still afloat?

Unable to free himself from his sense of foreboding, Jolival turned up the collar of his coat mechanically and climbed back up the slope toward the three bare plane trees where they had tethered the horses. He had no wish to return to Bebek. What was the point? Marianne would only pester him with questions to which he had no answers. At that precise moment he did not even know for certain that the caïque had not gone straight to the bottom.

The wind dropped for a second and he heard a church clock in Pera strike five. It gave him an idea. The French embassy was nearby and, having been built as a Franciscan monastery, it contained a belfry which, although in a somewhat dilapidated condition, commanded a view over the Bosporus and the Golden Horn. From up there, as soon as it was light enough, it would at least be possible to see what became of the Sea Witch and perhaps even something of the gallant band of men attempting to gain possession of her.

Leaving the horses tethered to the plane tree so that the noise of hooves should not wake the whole district, which at this hour of a winter's morning was still shuttered and empty, Jolival turned his steps in the direction of the embassy. He had no difficulty obtaining entrance once he had succeeded in rousing the porter, in itself no easy task. The man stood in some awe of the gentleman who came to play chess with the ambassador and, although it was a considerable time since he had last been seen there, he was admitted without question. It was as much as he could do, however, to prevent them from waking Monsieur de Latour-Maubourg.

"I sat up late at the bedside of a sick friend who is not expected to live," Jolival explained. "The churches are not open yet and I wish very much to pray for him. There is no need to disturb His Excellency. I will see him later. All I want at present is to be left alone in the chapel."

This thundering lie went down beautifully. Jolival knew his man, Conan, the ambassador's doorkeeper, was a good Breton and of a rigid piety which found no joy in Islam. The latter was pleasantly surprised to encounter such lofty sentiments in his master's friend.

"Friendship is a fine thing," he pronounced sententiously, "and the fear of God a finer still. With Monsieur the Vicomte's permission, I will say a prayer or two for his friend myself. For the present, the chapel is not locked. Monsieur has only to enter. There are candles and a tinder box at the door. You will be quite undisturbed."

Jolival asked nothing better. He thanked the doorkeeper warmly, feeling a trifle uncomfortable, for the man was looking at him as though a halo were already sprouting around his head. Then, having strengthened his good opinion by slipping a gold coin discreetly into his hand, he hurried away through the ancient cloister toward the chapel.

The door opened with hardly a creak and he found himself breathing in the familiar smells of melted wax, incense and well-polished wood. The worthy Conan, indeed, took touchingly good care of what he thought of as his chapel. It was his way of striking a blow at the Infidel.

To discover the candles and light one with the tinderbox so that the porter might see the light through the windows was the work of a moment. Seconds later, Jolival was climbing the narrow spiral stair that led up from beside the doorway two steps at a time, with the vigor of a young man.

He knew where to find, in its niche beside the bell, an object of the greatest relevance to his present purpose. This was the telescope, used by the ambassador to survey the traffic of the harbor and also from time to time the movements of his diplomatic colleague and neighbor, his particular bete noire, the British ambassador.

The belfry was not very high but high enough in daylight for a person standing there to be able to see everything that was happening in the vicinity of the Tower of the Maiden. And by the time that Jolival arrived somewhat breathlessly at the top, the night was already beginning to pale.

A lighter strip was showing behind the hills of Scutari, as though the color were being leached out of the sky. Very soon the narrows would be visible but not yet. Jolival tucked the telescope under his arm and leaned against the wall, trying to master his impatience. The morning seemed unconscionably slow in coming.

Little by little, as if a curtain were rising very slowly on a new act in the theater, the majestic sweep of the Bosporus and the Golden Horn began to take shape out of the darkness, still clad in the gray light of early morning which made one color of the sky, with its hurrying shoals of wind-driven cloud, and the sea, with its watery clouds of foam flecking the surface.

Suddenly Jolival seized the telescope and clapped it to his eye with a joyful exclamation. Down below, near the little wooden fort that crowned the ruined tower, the Sea Witch was hoisting her sails. The foresail billowed out, followed by the jib. It was still blowing too hard for her to carry much sail.

"They've done it!" Jolival cried exultantly to himself. "They're away!"

It was true. In the gray light that was clearing and brightening with every second, the brig was veering gracefully, like a huge ghostly bird, setting her course for the open sea. But their bold stroke had not gone unnoticed, for Jolival heard the sound of a shot and saw the little puff of smoke break from the fort, so that it looked like a testy old man smoking a pipe. But the shot fell a long way short. The Sea Witch was already clear of the land and, scorning the efforts of her would-be keepers as contemptuously as the steep seas under her prow, was heading gloriously for the Sea of Marmara and freedom, with the stars of the United States climbing challengingly to her masthead.

Arcadius watched her for a little while with eyes that were full of tears and he was on the point of giving thanks for her escape when all of a sudden it happened… In a moment the sea was alive with sails: tall pyramids of white canvas sailing out from behind the Princes' Islands in line ahead. These were no xebecs or polaccas or any of those antiquated vessels which, however seaworthy, remained somehow pathetic. These were big, modern warships, well armed and formidable.

Jolival swore vigorously as he recognized them. A ship of the line, two frigates and three corvettes: Admiral Maxwell's squadron, moving out slowly, with the serenity of conscious power, to bar the way. What could Jason do, alone against six, even the smallest better armed than he?

Jolival saw that the brig was cramming on all sail regardless of the state of the wind and guessed that the American meant to try and make a run for it. He had the wind with him and by making skillful use of it a seaman of his quality might still succeed in giving his more powerful but less streamlined enemies the slip.

"He's mad," a voice said calmly at Jolival's side. "It takes a fine sailor to try a trick like that. It will be a pity if he runs her aground because she's a beautiful ship."

It was almost without surprise that Jolival looked around and saw the Comte de Latour-Maubourg, clad in dressing gown and nightcap and provided with another telescope, of which he appeared to possess something of a collection.

"He is a fine sailor," Jolival said. "But I've a nasty fear—"

"Me too! Because there's another thing—look there! The wind's changing… Ha, damnation! By God, what wretched luck!"

The ambassador was right. The Sea Witch's sails flapped suddenly and the vessel heeled over to the gale. Meanwhile, the English ships, which had been beating up-channel with the wind against them, now had the advantage of a following wind and were not slow to make use of it. Their tall black hulls seemed to leap over the troughs between the waves and they piled on more and more canvas as they prepared to run down the brig.

It looked as if Jason were bound to be captured. In a fight of one against six he was lost from the start and it was no longer possible for him to get up sufficient speed to outdistance his pursuers.

"But good God," Jolival muttered through clenched teeth, "what is the English squadron doing here at this of all moments? Have we been betrayed? Were they warned in advance?"

The ambassador's shortsighted eyes blinked at the vicomte in real surprise.

"Warned about what? What is this talk of a betrayal, my friend? Admiral Maxwell is on his way to the Black Sea for an inspection of the north coast harbors. The two frigates are going as escort but the corvettes will stop short at the entrance to the Bosporus."

"A tour of inspection? By an Englishman?"

The French ambassador gave vent to a deep sigh which culminated in a violent bout of coughing. He went very red in the face and vanished behind a huge handkerchief which he fished out of his dressing gown pocket. When the coughing had died down, he reappeared, still looking very flushed.

"Forgive me. I have a dreadful cold… But you were saying?"

"That it's queer to find an English squadron inspecting Ottoman defenses."

"My poor friend, can you tell me anything in these times that is not queer? Canning rules the seraglio and has the sultan in his pocket, because His Highness is relying on the English to help him bring about the great reforms he dreams of. He is also hoping for help from London in patching up some sort of decent peace with the tsar. In all of which we are very much in the way. All the old friendship is quite dead. I may well find myself persona non grata before long. The emperor has remembered us a little too late."

Being reluctant to become involved in a discussion of the international situation, Jolival put his telescope to his eye once more and uttered a startled cry. The Sea Witch had extricated herself from her predicament by going about and was now fleeing before the English under full sail, making up the Bosporus toward the Black Sea. Her topsails grew larger and more clearly visible in Jolival's glass.

Latour-Maubourg had also returned to his observation of the vessel's movements.

"May I ask whither she was bound?" he inquired.

"Charleston—in North Carolina."

"Hmm… she seems to be going the wrong way, then. I wonder what her captain hopes to find in the Euxine? I'll admit, though, you were quite right. He is a magnificent seaman."

"I'm wondering, too. Yet he must know it's a dead end. But I suppose he has no choice. It's that or see his ship taken and himself made prisoner. But I think he's simply hoping to scatter Maxwell's pack and try the passage again later, with a following wind."

"I agree. All the same, if I were he I'd haul down that American flag. It's asking for trouble. His only fear now is the guns of Rumeli Hissar."

The Sea Witch was now running fast before the wind and it was clear that she was not only managing to maintain her lead over her adversaries but was actually lengthening it appreciably. Of course, she still had to run the gauntlet of the old fortress which guarded the narrows…

"Bah!" said Latour-Maubourg, shutting up his telescope. "I daresay he'll get away with it. But now, my friend, suppose you tell me where you've been all this time and how I come to have the pleasure of finding you at the top of my tower?"

But the poor ambassador's question was fated to go unanswered because Jolival, with a brief bow and a muttered: "Forgive me, my dear sir," was already clattering down the stairs again at breakneck speed. Latour-Maubourg dashed to the stone balustrade and, leaning over so far that he all but lost his balance, called out: "Hey there! Where are you off to? Wait for me, can't you? I'm coming down!"

He might as well have held his peace, for Jolival did not hear him. He raced full tilt through the cloister, brushing past Conan as that worthy was coming forward to express the hope that his prayers had been satisfactory, tore open the heavy door, shot out into the steeply sloping street and pelted downhill to the clump of planes. As he untied one of the tethered horses, he called out to a passing street porter: "These two horses! Take them to the French embassy and say they belong to Monsieur de Jolival. Here's something for you, and you'll get as much again for your trouble."

A heavy silver coin spun through the air and landed in the man's grubby fist. He hurried to carry out the command, eager to double the unexpected windfall. Meanwhile, Jolival had set spurs to his mount and was riding as fast as the animal could carry him up the steep hill leading to the Buyukdere road. He was in a hurry to get back to Humayunabad. He had to know how Jason fared with the guns of Rumeli Hissar and, above all, he had to warn Marianne. If she happened to catch sight of Jason's brig sailing up the Bosporus instead of down, it might well be enough to throw her into a high fever.

When he reached Bebek after a frantic ride, much of it across country because of the state of the roads, he was surprised to find the place unnaturally quiet. Ordinarily the gatehouse of Turhan Bey's residence was a scene of bustling activity, with messengers arriving, bringing news from the harbor, and servants hurrying about their business, but this morning all was still.

The kapiji was smoking his pipe in the center of a crowd of grooms and stable boys who looked as if they all had been talking at once. However, they turned to greet Jolival and one of the grooms bestirred himself sufficiently to take the vicomte's horse when he dismounted and flung the reins to him.

Within the palace it was just the same. The servants stood about in little groups, chatting among themselves, and in the gardens the bostanjis, the gardeners, were also sitting on their barrows or leaning on their spades, apparently engaged in discussions of equal interest. Of Osman, the chief steward of Humayunabad, there was nothing to be seen at all.

"Perhaps they've gone on strike," Jolival thought irritably. Yet it seemed unlikely that an institution infrequent even in the West should turn up in such an implacably feudal setting as the Ottoman Empire. But if strike it was, it was Turhan Bey's concern and he, Jolival, had other fish to fry.

He went in search of Donna Lavinia, to find out if Marianne was awake and ready to receive visitors. But knocking on her door produced no answer.

The fact that Donna Lavinia was not in her room was not in itself particular cause for alarm. She was most probably with her mistress or busy caring for the baby. So it must have been some kind of premonition that prompted Jolival to open the door softly and risk a look inside.

What he saw brought a frown to his eyes. Not only did the room present that appearance of perfect impersonal tidiness which is the mark of places that are unlived in, with not a single personal object left lying about, no sign of a human presence, but even the bed was not made up. Worst of all, the baby's cradle was gone.

Feeling increasingly worried, Jolival did not waste time going around by way of the covered gallery. Instead, he made directly for the passage linking Donna Lavinia's rooms with those belonging to her mistress and burst unceremoniously in on Marianne.

She was standing in the middle of the room, barefoot and with her hair tumbling about her shoulders, dressed in a long white nightgown that fell to her toes and gave her the look of a creature out of some Celtic legend. She was clutching what looked like a sheet of paper. Her eyes were wide open and set in a strange fixed stare and tears were streaming down her cheeks onto her breast, but no sobs contracted her throat. She was weeping like a fountain, with a kind of desperation that wrung her old friend's heart. And on the floor beneath her bare toes lay something green and sparkling like a slim exotic snake.

She was so much the image of the mater dolorosa that Jolival knew at once that something catastrophic had occurred. Very softly, hardly daring to breathe, he went up to the trembling girl.

"Marianne," he whispered gently, as if he feared that the sound of his voice might exacerbate her pain. "My child, what is it?"

Without answering, she held out the paper she was clutching in her hand with the stiff movement of an automaton.

"Read it," she said simply, while the tears continued to flow uninterruptedly.

Jolival smoothed the paper mechanically and, glancing down, saw that it was a letter.

"Madame," Prince Sant'Anna had written, "as I was on the point of telling you this evening when we were interrupted, it is with the deepest gratitude that I acknowledge the magnificent way in which you have fulfilled your part in the contract between us. Never shall I be able adequately to express my indebtedness to you. Now it is my turn to keep my promise to you.

"As I have said already, you are free—perfectly free—and you will be altogether so whenever it may please you to travel to Florence, where my legal representatives, Messers Lombardi and Fosco Grazelli, will be provided with the necessary instructions for all to be settled in accordance with your wishes.

"I am removing my son this very evening rather than continue to inflict upon you a presence which, as I have been told, is even more painful to you than I had feared. When he and I are far removed you will recover more speedily and, I can only trust, will soon forget what with the passing of time will become no more than a disagreeable incident, the memory of which will gradually fade into insignificance.

"Should it be otherwise, however, and should you one day feel a wish to see the person to whom you have given birth, be sure that nothing can ever take away the fact that you are his mother, a mother whose memory he will be taught to cherish. Even when you bear another name, you will still remain Princess Sant'Anna to your child, as you are to one who will ever remain your friend, your husband in the sight of God and your most faithful servant, Corrado Sant'Anna."

Jolival finished reading and glanced up at Marianne. She was still standing where she had been, still with the same grief-stricken, somnambulistic air. Seeing her fixed in such stony misery, he had thought at first that Jason's departure was the cause of her grief, and now, behold, the thing he had hoped for and feared at once had come to pass and mother-love had wakened in her and was demanding its rights. It was not her lover's absence which was the cause of those tears but the removal of the child whom only yesterday she had hated, yet who, in the space of a few seconds, had carved for himself the lion's share in his mother's heart.

As ill luck would have it, no one could have told the prince of what had taken place in that room and in the heart of Marianne and, believing her still irrevocably set against the infant, he had done what he must always have intended and taken the child away to some unknown destination, unconscious of the despair he left behind him.

For Marianne's sake, however, Jolival forced himself to speak calmly.

"Well, what are you crying for, my dear?" he said, folding the letter and laying it aside. "There is nothing here but what you yourself have agreed to and desired."

She turned her great green eyes on him, filled with an immense surprise.

"But, Arcadius," she said in a small voice, "don't you understand? He has gone… they have all gone… and my son with them."

She was trembling like a leaf in the wind. He went to her and took her gently by the arm to lead her back to bed. Her skin was icy cold.

"But, my dear," he reproached her tenderly, "isn't that what you wanted? Think back. You wanted to go to Jason, to become his wife and begin a new life with him, have other children…"

She passed her hand across her forehead as though waking from a dream.

"Perhaps… yes, I think I did want that, and even nothing else. But that was before."

He made no attempt to elicit a fuller explanation. Indeed, that was before. Before she had held a tiny body in her arms, a little thing that was soft and tender with a tiny fist that had closed imperiously on her finger as though to take possession.

"The prince cannot have gone far," he ventured, helpless in the face of such unhappiness. "Would you like us to try and catch him? Osman—"

"Osman doesn't know where his master has gone. I sent for him when they gave me that dreadful letter after I woke. He knows nothing of his intentions and never asks questions. Turhan Bey is absent frequently and often for long periods. To please me, he promised to go to the harbor and see what he could discover, but I have no great hopes. The prince may be already far out to sea."

"In this weather, with a newborn babe? Nothing of the sort!"

"Then he is hiding and it is a waste of time to look for him. He told me himself that after the birth he would vanish with the child. He has kept his word and I have no right to blame him."

"Did no one tell him last night that you had taken to the child after all? I gather from this letter that you did not see him again after we left?"

"No. Oh, Arcadius, I was so wretched that I didn't think I wanted to see anyone, not even Donna Lavinia. I must have cried half the night."

She was shivering more and more, from a combination of cold and nerves. Jolival went quickly to a chair and fetched her favorite big red cashmere shawl and wrapped it around her. Then he hunted for slippers for her bare feet. Bending to put them on, he saw that the thing which he had taken for a small glittering snake, lying like the serpent's head beneath the foot of the Virgin, was in fact a magnificent emerald and diamond necklace. He took it up and let it hang for a moment between his fingers.

Guessing that it was the final princely gift from her husband, he would have forborne to question her about it, but Marianne moved suddenly and snatched it from him with a sudden blaze of anger and hurled it under a chest.

"Let it lie! It's my payment! I don't want it."

"Are you mad? I'm very sure the prince had no such idea."

"What else? To him I am only a foolish woman to be bought. From there it is only a step to thinking that a handful of jewels will easily compensate me for the loss of my child. Oh, I hate him, I hate him! I hate all men! All they know how to do is follow their own blind, senseless desires and fight and make idiotic wars which they all rush to join in as if they were glorious treats, without a thought for those they leave behind them! Why do they have to have sons only to bring them up the same way?"

"Marianne, calm yourself! You can't change the world and you will only make yourself ill…"

"What does it matter? What does it matter even if I die? Who would care—except you, perhaps? Jason is no better than the rest. He has bullied and misused me to make me forget my duty and my country, he has treated me worse than one of the slaves on his family's plantation and now he leaves me here, abandons me to go running off to a war that is not even declared yet and may never take place. Do you think he cares for my tears and my unhappiness, or even for the simple fact of how I am to accomplish the immense journey across half the world to join him? Who is to say that the ship that carries us won't fall into the hands of pirates like the Kouloughis? But all that is nothing to Jason Beaufort compared to his beloved battles! At this very minute he is sailing off to America without a care in his heart—"

Jolival seized on this as his opportunity to shake Marianne out of her despairing mood. He knew the ups and downs of her volatile temperament in which the French and Italian elements predominated over the English, too well not to be sure that Jason's present danger would sweep away all her anger against him in an instant. For even if the privateer had taken second place in her memory just then to the newer attractions of the baby, Marianne's true feelings could not have undergone a change in that short time. She loved him still and even her immediate anger was only another proof of it.

"I'd not be too sure of that," he said. "Indeed, to be quite honest he's not sailing toward America at all. Quite the opposite, in fact."

As he had expected, Marianne's rage collapsed at once, like the sails of a ship in dead calm. In its place there came the old, anxious look which was certainly by far her most familiar sensation when she thought of her difficult love. But Jolival embarked at once on an account of what had taken place by the Tower of the Maiden, giving her no time to ask questions.

Almost before he had finished, Marianne had rushed from the room, forgetting her weak state and the fact that she was not supposed to be out of her bed yet, and was hurrying in the direction of the tandour, without even pausing to try her strength.

She did not get very far. Out in the covered way she was forcibly reminded of her weakness. She swayed and would have fallen but for Jolival, who had hastened after and was there to catch her.

"Don't be silly. Let me take you back to your room."

Her eyes flashed dangerously.

"If you don't take me to the tandour this instant, Jolival, I will never set eyes on you again as long as I live."

He was obliged to do as she asked. Half-supporting and half-carrying her, the wretched Arcadius succeeded in getting Marianne as far as her favorite lookout place, where they were just in time to see the Sea Witch, light as a seagull, driving under full sail past the gilded lattices of the palace where they stood.

"Oh, God," Marianne groaned, "if they open fire now it will be murder! Look at the towers of Rumeli Hissar! They are crowded with janissaries!"

"If only—" Jolival began. But before he could finish, as if Jason had divined the thought in his mind, the impudent stars were descending swiftly from the masthead. A moment later another flag was creeping up to take their place. With unspeakable relief Marianne and Jolival recognized the lion and the flaming T which had protected the Sea Witch while she lay in harbor.

"Thank God!" Marianne breathed, sinking back onto the cushions. "He had the sense to pocket his pride and do the one thing that could save him from the Turkish guns."

The guns fired nonetheless, but it was only a friendly salute to a vessel of Turhan Bey's. The tiny puffs of white smoke bloomed above the ancient ramparts of Mehmet the Conqueror like waving handkerchiefs held in friendly hands.

The Sea Witch passed on and dwindled. Soon she had vanished into the mist and Admiral Maxwell's squadron hove into sight. But the pursuit seemed to have lost its enthusiasm. With a sigh of relief, Jolival crossed to a small table on which stood coffee things and a pair of decanters. He poured himself a full glass of raki and swallowed it at a gulp.

"Well," he said at last, "that seaman of Jason's was right when he said that last night was a night fit for the devil. The morning has been exciting enough, I must say. What shall we do now? I hope you are going to consent to go to bed and rest at last. I'll call for your women to come and help you back to your room."

But Marianne was already snuggling down among the cushions where she had spent so many hours. She drew the embroidered coverlet up over her legs.

"I can't possibly go back to that room where I can't see anything. I'm staying here, Jolival. As to what we are going to do now, I will tell you. We are going to wait. Sooner or later Jason will have to pass by here again to reach his own country, won't he?"

"He may pass by night—in fact, he almost certainly will. At night and with the ship in darkness."

"It's possible. But one thing I am certain of, and that is that he won't pass by without stopping. There is no need for us to look for a ship, my friend. The Sea Witch herself shall take us to America! Jason will do as he said he would. He'll lie up somewhere and then come back and fetch us."

There was a silence during which Jolival studied his young friend. She was becoming more herself again with every minute. Her eyes were shining, there was color in her cheeks and she seemed to have forgotten all about the despair which had overwhelmed her at daybreak. He dared not tell her his own thoughts upon the likelihood of Jason's stopping but he privately resolved to ask Osman to see that a constant watch was kept on the narrows.

"Upon my word," he said aloud, "anyone would think you were not displeased at Jason's misadventure, eh?"

"And they would be right, my friend. I'm not only not displeased, I'm actually grateful to Admiral Maxwell. In blocking Jason's way he may have been only the instrument of fate, but he has done me a tremendous service."