[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire

by Juliette Benzoni

  MARIANNE AND THE CROWN OF FIRE

  By

  Juliette Benzoni

  Contents

  PART I – WILL MOSCOW BURN?

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART II – WINTER

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  Epilogue

  Marianne

  and the

  Crown of Fire

  Juliette Benzoni

  Guarding with her life the secret she carries to save Napoleon, Marianne braves the barren steppes and hostile natives of Russia to deliver her message to the Emperor, who was once her lover. She is accompanied by her lover from New Orleans, Jason Beaufort, who has abandoned the charred hulk of his ship in the harbor of Constantinople to travel with her. Just inside the Russian border, they save the life of a beautiful young gypsy named Shankhala and take her with them. Shankhala offers no gratitude but shows a burning desire for Jason. Failing to allure him, she turns her witchery against Marianne.

  The Moscow they reach has already fallen under siege, and its citizens' fear has turned perversely into self-immolation. When Jason is thrown in prison after a duel with the Cossack who several years earlier had ravished and branded Marianne, she is left alone amid the swarming mass of panicked humanity—or, rather, almost alone, as the gypsy witch embraces Marianne, then stabs her and leaves her to be trampled and swept away by the maddened throng.

  The vicious Russian writer finds Moscow drowned in a sea of fire and Marianne nursed to health by angels in the forms of other French-women trapped in this hostile country. Risking her life to see him, Marianne finds Napoleon suffering from strain and despair and eager to regain Marianne's devotion. Once she has delivered her message, Marianne's life again becomes a series of questions: Will she ever return to her homeland? Will she ever find the child who was separated from her? And her husband, where is he? Does he even live? Marianne: Crown of Fire is an adventure in the truest sense—it is a fascinating torrent of desire, courage, terror, and one woman's struggle to survive. This sixth volume of Marianne's adventures will delight the reader who thrills to excitement and romance. Each of its predecessors has been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of readers around the world.

  Juliette Benzoni was born and educated in Paris, studying at the Collège d'Hulet, then at the Institut Catholique, where she obtained a BA degree in philosophy, a license in law and in literature. She was married to Dr. Maurice Gallois in 1941, and they had two children. Widowed in 1950, she moved to Casablanca for two years. Returning to Paris, she married Count Andre Benzoni di Costa in March 1953. She is in charge of the historical section of the French journal Confidences, is the author of the Catherine series of historical romances set in medieval France, and was awarded the Prix Alexandre Dumas in 1973.

  G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

  Publishers Since 1838

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, N.Y. 10016

  Marianne and the

  Crown of Fire

  Novels by

  Juliette Benzoni

  One Love Is Enough

  Catherine

  Belle Catherine

  Catherine and Arnaud

  Catherine and a Time for Love

  Marianne

  Marianne and the Masked Prince

  Marianne and the Privateer

  Marianne and the Rebels

  Marianne and the Lords of the East

  Marianne and the Crown of Fire

  FIRST AMERICAN EDITION 1976

  Copyright © 1974 by Opera Mundi, Paris

  Translation © 1976 by William Heinemann Ltd. 1976

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Benzoni, Juliette.

  Marianne, crown of fire.

  Translation of Marianne, les lauriers de flammes.

  I. Tide.

  PZ4.B483Marp3 [PQ2662.E5] 843'.9'14 76-10732

  SBN: 399-11798-9

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  Marianne Elisabeth d'Asselnat, now Princess Sant'Anna. The daughter of a French marquis and his English wife, both of whom perished in the French Revolution. She was rescued as a baby by her godfather, Gauthier de Chazay, and taken to England to be brought up by her spinster aunt, Ellis Selton. In 1809 she married Francis Cranmere who, on her wedding night, gambled away both her fortune and her virginity to an American privateer, Jason Beaufort, with whom, in the course of many subsequent adventures, Marianne became involved in a tempestuous love affair. But it was as the ambassadress of her former lover, the Emperor Napoleon, that she made the journey to Constantinople which brought her, indirectly, to Odessa, to rescue the man she loved from a Tsarist prison. Now, with the Sea Witch burned behind them and a vital warning to Napoleon sewn into the bosom of her dress, Marianne has turned her back on her husband and the small son born to her in his Turkish palace, and sets out with Jason to cross the endless Russian steppe.

  Adelaide d'Asselnat. A French cousin of Marianne's, an elderly spinster and devoted companion.

  Jason Beaufort. The man to whom Francis Cranmere lost Marianne's fortune and virginity. He generously failed to claim the second but reappeared later in Paris to become first her friend and then her lover, although not until he himself was unhappily married to the cruel and vindictive Pilar. Still fate, and Napoleon, seem determined to come between them. After a brief reunion in Venice at the start of the ill-fated voyage to Constantinople, Jason fell victim, in mind and body, to the evil Dr Leighton whose attempts to take possession of the brig, Sea Witch, ended in her capture by the Turks. Jason seemed lost, but reappeared, thanks to the good offices of Prince Corrado, in time to see the birth of Marianne's son and persuade her to accept the baby. Then, attempting to return to America, now on the verge of war with England, he seized the brig, once more impounded by the Turks, and endeavouring to fly, was driven into the arms of the Russian fleet, his ship captured and himself made prisoner.

  Gauthier de Chazay, a French Abbé, later Cardinal San Lorenzo, Marianne's much-loved godfather, who rescued her as a baby and was responsible for arranging her marriage to Prince Sant'Anna.

  Francis, Lord Cranmere. Marianne's dastardly first husband. She fought a duel with him and left him for dead in the blazing wreck of Selton Hall, but he reappeared in Paris as an English spy, and was executed by Napoleon.

  Matteo Damiani. Illegitimate son of Corrado's grandfather and steward of the Sant'Anna estates. A gross and sinister figure, given to the practice of black magic, he abducted Marianne and, boasting that he had murdered her husband, forced upon her the child she bore in Constantinople. Prince Corrado killed him in Venice.

  Arcadius, Vicomte de Jolival. A French aristocrat and one of Marianne's staunchest friends. Formerly her theatrical manager, now her business agent.

  Craig O'Flaherty. An Irishman, Jason's friend and first officer aboard the Sea Witch.

  Gracchus-Hannibal Pioche. A former Paris errand-boy and now Marianne's faithful coachman, factotum and self-appointed guardian.

  Prince Corrado Sant'Anna. Marianne's second husband. Corrado lived the life of a recluse and the marriage was one in name only. Marianne had never seen his face until the Prince revealed himself as the merchant Turhan Bey in Constantinople and also as the 'Ethiopian', Caleb, whom she had known aboard the Sea Witch. Corrado's longing for a son to bear his name caused him to insist on Marianne bearing the baby fathered by Matteo Damiani. At last, reluctantly, she agreed and the boy was born i
n 'Turhan Bey's' palace at Humayunabad, on the Bosphorus. Believing that Marianne had rejected her child, Corrado then spirited him away to an unknown destination.

  Sebastiano Sant'Anna. Marianne's baby son by the evil Matteo Damiani.

  Part I

  WILL MOSCOW BURN?

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Banks of the Kodyma

  The plain stretched endlessly in all directions. Its silvery surface rippled gently in the summer sunshine as the light wind sent it rolling in long waves to the horizon. It was as if some fabulous goddess had let down her floating mane of silken hair after a party. Here and there gleamed the red flower of the wild thistle or the plumed heads of feather-grass.

  The heat grew more intense the farther they advanced and by midday was often suffocating, yet Marianne had never been so happy.

  In the week or more since she had been travelling with her companions over this vast sea of grass she had experienced a happiness so deep and piercing that it was almost painful. But she knew that this time of grace could not last and that at the end of the long, northward journey was the war that must shatter her present happiness, and so she snatched at it like a starving man, obsessively searching out the smallest crumb and savouring it to the last.

  By day, they journeyed across the steppe from one stage to the next. The posting houses lay at intervals some fifteen versts, or roughly ten miles, and thanks to Gracchus's miraculously acquired permits they were able to change horses, and drivers also, without finding themselves fleeced. The drivers thought themselves well paid at two kopecks a verst and sang all day long.

  In theory they covered two stages a day, stopping at night to rest, and the posting houses doubled also as inns, which were otherwise non-existent in the great steppes. The travellers found rooms right enough, but for the most part they were unfurnished, except for the inevitable icons on the walls, hence the necessity for the mattresses with which Gracchus had provided them. Sometimes it was possible to obtain food as well but this varied according to the wealth and generosity of the landowner on whose estates the inn was situated.

  The inns, in fact, were a charge on the local nobility, who in the Ukraine and the ancient region of Podolia were mostly Polish. These maintained both horses and staff and for the most part got little enough in return, since paying travellers were few, owing to the ease with which the celebrated permits could be procured.

  In her character as an English lady, Marianne might easily have claimed the hospitality of the nobles themselves and have found in their houses, though few and far between, a degree of comfort and even luxury unknown to the imperial post roads. But these mansions, situated in the midst of vast cornfields which in the rich black earth of the steppes grew as rampantly as weeds in a wilderness, often lay a long way from the road. Besides, she had grown to like the bare rooms, with their clean-smelling wooden walls, where they put down their mattresses and she passed passionate nights in Jason's arms, nights that would have been impossible in a private house where the 'manservant' would have been relegated to the servants' quarters.

  Both of them had suffered too much and had been parted for too long to have a thought to spare for keeping up appearances or for making any sort of pretence to their companions. Jason had laid his cards on the table the very first night, in Count Hanski's posting house. They had no sooner finished their meagre dinner of duck stuffed with mince and sour milk than he had risen to his feet and silently held out his hand to Marianne. With a deep 'goodnight' to the assembled company, he had borne her off to her bedchamber.

  There, still without a word, they faced one another and, not touching but with their eyes locked in each other's, they had proceeded methodically to undress. As two hands meet and clasp, they came together and together they remained, as one, oblivious of the world around them, until morning light.

  Every night after that the lovers lost themselves in their shared ecstasy. By day they abandoned themselves to the endless rocking of the kibitka as it travelled over the highroad. For the most part they slept, despite the jolting and the heat, which both shortened the journey and left them fresher for the night. Twilight falling and the scent of wormwood rising from the steppe would reawaken their desires and from then on they lived only for the magic moment that would lift them out of time, to become once again the first man and woman, naked together in the first night of the world.

  Jason's thirst for this woman was insatiable. With her, he could forget his lost ship, the war that lay ahead and all past bitterness and misunderstanding. While in his arms Marianne forgot the child she had lost, her mysterious husband, the perilous secret she carried and all her past sufferings. Above all, for both of them, came forgetfulness that each day was carrying them deeper into a country rent by invasion, bringing them nearer to the blazing heart of the volcano and to the inevitable moment of parting. For with the feel of the imperial letter moving lightly against her skin under her dress Marianne sensed even then that she would never go with Jason to St Petersburg, that the time would come when she must make the choice that would divide their paths once more, for how long she could not tell.

  Her task was to reach the Emperor and speak to him. And after that she must return to Paris to await the Cardinal's messenger and give into his hand the diamond she carried at her breast, in a little wash-leather bag sewn to her chemise. It was not in her power to go straight to America. Later, yes, but for the present there were things she still had to do in Europe. Even if it were only to make one more attempt at a last sight of her baby, Sebastiano.

  On the evening of the ninth day, the road came to a river. It lay in a shallow valley lined with bushes and small trees, bent by the wind that blew off the steppes, and planted with a patchwork of crops that ranged from grain to melons, and water melons too. The wide blue stream flowed between reedy banks where fishing boats bobbed lazily at their moorings, along with what appeared to be some kind of ferry boat. This was the Kodyma, a tributary of the Bug. A village had grown up on the bank and it was here the travellers came just as the sun was setting.

  It was not a large place, consisting only of a group of whitewashed, reed-thatched houses, each with its vegetable patch and cluster of outbuildings, scattered about an open space facing the church. This too was whitewashed and built in the shape of a cross with equal arms, each with its small pediment, facing to the four cardinal points, so that the priest in charge might look eastward while saying mass. In the centre was a gilded onion dome surmounted by a Greek cross that caught the light of the setting sun. Ducks and chickens wandered at will and rose-coloured kingfishers were swooping low over the river.

  The posting house stood at the roadside some little distance from the centre of the village. The kibitka drew up before it, startling a pair of fat bustards into cumbrous flight. The driver, reining in his horses, said something only Gracchus who, far from wasting his time in Odessa, had acquired a fair smattering of the difficult Russian language, was able to understand.

  'He says this place is called Velikaia Stanitsa,' he translated now. 'It's a cossack village.'

  'Cossack?' exclaimed Jolival, in whom the word had roused a passion for history that was never very far below the surface. 'How can that be? I thought this was the territory of the old Zaporogi, suppressed by Catherine the Great in the last century.'

  'Well, she can't have suppressed all of them,' Craig suggested. 'There must have been some left over.'

  Gracchus essayed a question or two, to which the driver responded with a lengthy speech that came as something of a surprise from one who had so far done little more than sing.

  'What is he saying?' Marianne asked, stunned by this sudden eloquence.

  'I couldn't understand it all by a long way, but I think the gist of it, setting aside a good many appeals to the Little Mother of all the Russias, is that a number of survivors gathered into a few villages. The only thing is, they aren't Zaporogi any more but Black Sea Cossacks.'

  The driver, in the meantime, had jumped down fr
om his seat and was pointing with his whip to the church square. He called out something and this time Jolival needed no translation.

  'He's right,' he cried. 'Look there!'

  The sound of a bell had brought men out from the little gardens, leading horses saddled for a journey. The men were armed to the teeth and wore long tunics of black woollen stuff, caught in at the waist, over baggy trousers of some sort, with tall hats of shaggy fur on their heads. Their weapons consisted of a gun barrel slung over their shoulders, a curved sword, pistol and dagger thrust through their belts and a long lance. Their small, wiry horses carried high, sheepskin-covered saddles.

  All the men wore long beards and their appearance was so alarming that Marianne asked uneasily: 'What are they doing? Why are they all coming out together?'

  'That's not hard to guess," Jolival said gloomily. 'Remember what was happening at Odessa. The cossacks live quietly in their villages, tilling their fields and minding their flocks, until their Ataman sends out his summons over the steppes. Then they put away their ploughs and get out their weapons and set out for the mustering place. That is what these are doing. We've no need to ask what enemy they are going to fight.'

  Marianne shivered. It was the first time since leaving Odessa that she had been reminded so clearly of the conflict taking place so far away on the borders of Lithuania that no news of it had yet come to their ears. Sobered by the sight, she would have liked to retreat at once into the posting house but her companions seemed fascinated by the spectacle.

  The cossacks were gathering before the church, in the doorway of which now stood a priest in full canonicals. After the men came the women, clothed, or rather bundled up, in a kind of woollen shift, tied at the waist and worn over a long skirt. They were barefoot and their heads were covered with red or blue scarves. Last of all came the old women and children. The whole population formed up in a half circle in front of the church, as though waiting for something.