[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire

by Juliette Benzoni

  All at once there had come into the privateer's voice a sadness so deep and bitter that Marianne was overwhelmed. Instinctively, she clung more closely to him. Never before had she felt herself so close to him, felt how much she loved him. She belonged to him utterly and not for anything in the world, in spite of all the suffering he had caused her, would she have had it any other way, for tears and suffering were the strongest mortar of love.

  Pressing her lips against the firm muscles of his neck, she whispered fiercely: 'Don't think of it, not any more, I beg you. Forget all that… I have told you, I shall not remain the Prince's wife. There will be a divorce. He is in full agreement and there is nothing now stands between me and my freedom, thanks to the Emperor's new laws, but a simple formality. When that is done I can be yours entirely and for ever. All this part of my life will be wiped out, like a bad dream—'

  'And the child? Will that be wiped out too?'

  She jerked away from him as though he had struck her and remained staring. He had a sudden feeling that beneath the soft skin every muscle in the girl's body had tensed. But it was only for a moment. Then, with a sigh that might have been unconscious, she was back in his arms again, hugging him to her with all her might, in a primitive need to assure herself that both of them were really there. At the end of one long kiss and then another, she gave a sigh.

  'I think I've always known that there is no true joy or happiness on earth that does not have to be paid for sooner or later. Old Dobbs, the head groom at Selton, taught me that when I was very small.'

  'Your head groom was a philosopher, then?'

  'Philosopher is too strong a word. He was a strange old man, though, full of wisdom and good sense. He never spoke much and what he said was mostly in proverbs and old sayings he had picked up here and there all over the world, for he had been a sailor in his youth, under Admiral Cornwallis. One day when I was determined to ride Firebird, the finest and most mettlesome of all our horses, and was beginning to throw a tantrum because he would not let me, Dobbs took his pipe out of his mouth – he was always smoking a pipe – and said, quite calmly: "Very well, then, Miss Marianne. If you're set on breaking a leg, or maybe two, let alone your head into the bargain, that's your business. As to that, there's a saying I once heard somewhere comes to my mind. There's God, you see, a-showing man all the pleasures of the world and 'Take all you want,' says He, 'take it and pay!' " '

  'And did you ride Firebird?'

  'Indeed I did not! But I never forgot what Dobbs had said and I've had cause to test the truth of it more than once. I've even come to think that the child is the price I have to pay for the right to be with you. Because, I can confess it to you, ever since he was born I have been longing to ask the Prince to give him to me. So much that I actually considered taking him back without his permission. But that would be wrong, cruel even, because it was he who wanted him, much more than I. I was rejecting him with all my might. He is the one hope, the one happiness in a life of complete self-sacrifice—'

  'And aren't you going to suffer?'

  She gave a sad little laugh. 'I'm suffering already. But I shall try and think that I have lost him, that he did not live. And besides,' she added with a sudden warmth, filled with all the intensity of her secret hopes, 'besides, I shall have other children, your children. They will be both yours and mine and I know that the first time I bear you a son my pain will be eased. Love me, now. We have talked and thought too much. Let us forget everything but ourselves… I love you… You will never know how much I love you.'

  'Marianne! My love! My brave, foolish darling!' The words died as their lips joined and after that the only sounds in the small room were the plaintive sighs and moans of a woman in the throes of love.

  Next morning, as Jason, Craig and Gracchus helped the innkeeper and the driver to manoeuvre the kibitka on to the ferry boat for the crossing of the Kodyma, everyone could see that Gracchus seemed to be in a remarkably bad temper and that he bore the marks of fresh scratches on his cheek.

  'I wonder,' Jolival whispered in Marianne's ear, 'whether our friend did not, after all, take the village priest a lot more seriously than he made out'

  She could not help smiling. 'You think—?'

  'That he tried to assert his marital rights and got short shrift? I'd go bail he did. And I can't say I'm surprised. She's a fine-looking wench.'

  'You think so?' Marianne remarked primly.

  'Good Lord, yes! To anyone who has a fancy for that type of noble savage. Though she's no very accommodating air about her, to be sure.'

  Dressed once more in her proper clothes which consisted of a full skirt and a red bodice with barbaric stripes, with a voluminous black shawl draped over all, Shankala presented an even wilder and more enigmatic figure than she had done in her torn shift the day before. Enveloped in quantities of funereal black woollen stuff as in a Roman toga, with her hair falling in thick braids on either side of her face, she stood apart from the rest at the forward end of the boat, her small bundle wrapped in red cloth lying by her bare feet, watching the farther shore as it approached.

  Her refusal to cast even one single glance backwards at the village she was leaving, probably for ever, was a thing almost palpable in its intensity. Nor was it, all in all, in any way hard to understand, especially since her last action before embarking had been to spit savagely on the ground, like a wild cat, and then, thrusting out her hand with first and fourth fingers extended towards the little cluster of cottages lying white and peaceful under the rising sun, she had hurled some imprecation in a harsh, fierce voice so full of hate that it could only have contained a curse.

  Marianne reflected that she for one would be only too pleased if Jolival's prediction came true and their new companion were to take the first opportunity of parting from them.

  Once across the river, Jolival paid off the ferryman and they all resumed their places in the kibitka. But when Gracchus took Shankala by the arm to help her up into the seat between himself and the driver the girl tore herself free, with the same fierce, angry gesture as on the night before, and springing lightly up under the hood settled herself on the boards at Jason's feet, looking up at him with a smile that was an open invitation.

  'Is there no way,' Marianne said in a voice throbbing with anger, 'of making that woman understand that she is not mistress here?'

  'I'm with you there, Ma—milady,' Gracchus agreed. 'I've a good mind to toss her into the river after all and be rid of her. I'm beginning to see her husband's point, and her mother-in-law's.'

  'Not so loud,' Jason said. 'You only have to know how to deal with her.'

  He bent down and, taking the woman's arm, calmly but firmly obliged her to take her seat on the box, taking no notice at all of the poisonous look she darted at Marianne.

  'There,' he said. 'Now that we are all settled, you may tell the driver to drive on, Gracchus.'

  The man gave vent to a guttural cry to set his horses in motion and the vehicle resumed its northward journey over the same road the cossack horsemen had taken the night before.

  Day after day, week after week, the occupants of the kibitka pursued their way from one posting house to the next, never departing from the main road which would bring them, by way of Uman, Kiev, Bryansk and Moscow, to St Petersburg.

  They could in fact have shortened their journey considerably by going by way of Smolensk, but when they reached the venerable and ancient princely city of Kiev, generally regarded by the Russians as the cradle of their country, the travellers found the place in something like a ferment. The packed churches were reverberating to the sound of public prayers and a perfect forest of candles blazed in front of every glittering iconostasis.

  The reason for it was the grave news brought to the holy city by exhausted messengers galloping weary horses. A few days earlier General Barclay de Tolly and his army had been beaten at Smolensk and had abandoned the city after setting fire to it. The chief city of the Borysthenes, one of the greatest of the Tsar's empi
re, had been virtually destroyed and was now in the hands of Napoleon's Grande Armée, that vast horde of four hundred thousand armed men, speaking several languages, in which Wurtembergers, Bavarians and Danes fought side by side with Schwartzenberg's Austrians, the troops belonging to the Confederation of the Rhine and the Italians under Prince Eugene. And Kiev, the holy city of St Vladimir, mourned for its dead and prayed to heaven to punish the barbarian who had dared to set foot on the sacred soil.

  This news brought about the beginnings of an argument between Jason and Marianne. She was filled with joy at Napoleon's capture of Smolensk and saw no reason, now, to continue her journey to Moscow.

  'If the French hold Smolensk,' she pointed out, 'we can save time and make directly for St Petersburg. We can even beg assistance—'

  Jason's reply was curt and to the point.

  'Assistance? For Lady Selton? Unlikely, surely? Unless you mean to make your presence known to Napoleon? Well, I mean to have nothing to do with him. We had decided to go by way of Moscow and by Moscow we shall go.'

  'But he may be in Moscow before us!' Marianne cried, suddenly defensive. 'At the rate his army is advancing, it is more than likely. What is the distance from Smolensk to Moscow?' she demanded, turning to Gracchus.

  'About a hundred versts,' he told her, after a rapid consultation with the driver. 'Whereas for us it is about three hundred.'

  'You see?' Marianne concluded triumphantly. 'It's no use deceiving yourself. Short of making an enormous detour, by the Volga, perhaps, we can't avoid Napoleon's army. Besides, how do we know Napoleon himself won't take the road to St Petersburg?'

  'You'd like that, wouldn't you, eh? Go on, admit you're longing to set eyes on your beloved emperor again!'

  'He's not my beloved emperor,' Marianne retorted sharply. 'But he is my emperor and Jolival's and Gracchus's too! Whether you like it or not, we are all French and we've no cause to be ashamed of it'

  'Indeed? That's not what's written on your podaroshna, my lady! You had better make up your mind. For my part, it's the Russians I need and I've no intention of making enemies of them by falling into the arms of their invaders. From now on, we travel twice or even three times as fast. I want to get to Moscow before Napoleon.'

  'You want, you want! What right have you to dictate what we do? But for us you would still be held a prisoner by your dear friends the Russians! You seem very ready to forget that they are even more closely allied to England and that your own country is just now at war with your friends' friends. How do you know that these Krilovs you put such faith in are going to befriend you? You are expecting them to help you? Give you a ship? What if they slam the door in your face and will have nothing to say to you? What will you do then?'

  He cast her a fulminating glance, annoyed that she should cast doubts on what seemed to him so certain.

  'I don't know. But it will never happen.'

  'But suppose it did?'

  'Oh, you make me lose all patience. We shall see. There are always ways of finding a ship. If the worst comes to the worst—'

  'You can always steal one? It's becoming a habit with you. Well, it's not always possible, let me tell you. Not even for such an intrepid seaman as yourself. Be sensible for once, Jason, and listen to me. We have nothing to fear from Napoleon and everything to gain. Let us go straight to meet him. I promise you I've no ulterior motive in suggesting it. And indeed,' she gave a bitter little laugh, 'indeed I thought that we had finished once for all with all that, that it was old history—'

  'It won't be old history until you have rid yourself of this overriding obsession to go to him at any cost.'

  Marianne sighed distressfully. 'But I have no obsession, except to get away and go with you, as soon as possible! The only thing is that I have it in my power to do the Emperor a service, a very great service in return for which he will gladly provide me with the best and fastest ship in Danzig – not just a passage, or even a loan, but as a gift! You see—'

  There was no holding her now. In spite of all Jolival's anxious glances, warning her not to show all her hand, Marianne was carried away by her own anger, and by an almost physical need to convince Jason. She was beyond stopping and by the time she saw that she had given too much away it was too late. The inevitable question had been asked.

  'A service?' Jason demanded suspiciously. 'What kind of service?'

  It was said to hurt and she was on the point of snapping back that it was none of his business but she controlled herself and merely reminded him that the question might have been more courteously phrased. 'However, I will answer it all the same, as politely as I can,' she said. 'Naturally, considering the state of your feelings towards the Emperor, I cannot tell you the precise nature of the information I am carrying. I will only tell you that I learned by chance of a grave danger threatening not just the Emperor himself but his whole army and—' She broke off, for Jason had begun to laugh but it was a laughter with no trace of amusement in it.

  'I will follow you to Siberia if you will, you said! And all the time your one object was to reach Napoleon! And I believed you!'

  'And you should believe me still, for I meant what I said, and so I do still. But that does not mean that when fate puts into my hand the means of warning my friends of a danger threatening them that I should do nothing and maybe let them walk into a trap.'

  Jason's brow was set in obstinate lines and he was clearly about to make a sharp rejoinder when Jolival came to his friend's aid.

  'Don't be a fool, Beaufort,' he cried impatiently. 'And don't start behaving again in a way you will be sorry for afterwards! None of us forgets that you have little to be grateful for in the Emperor's treatment of you but you will not remember that Napoleon is not a private person to be dealt with as an equal by us or by you.'

  'I'd have expected you to agree with Marianne,' the American remarked.

  'I see no cause to disagree with her. Far from it. And, if I may say so, this seems to me to be a singularly pointless argument. You want to reach St Petersburg and our way there, whether you like it or not, is almost bound to bring us into contact with Napoleon's army. That being so, Marianne would be betraying her country if she failed to deliver the information she has. In any case, to put your mind at rest, I can tell you, if it will satisfy you, that she will not see Napoleon. I will go to him myself when the time comes. I shall leave you and we will meet again later. If you are willing to wait for me, I may even be able to bring you an order for a vessel, in which case there will be no further problem. Does that satisfy you?'

  Jason made no answer. He was standing with folded arms staring down with a grim expression into the blue waters of the Dnieper, which the Greeks had called Boysthenes, as it flowed southwards in a broad, majestic stream at his feet. The travellers had descended from their vehicle and strolled a little way along the river, past the painted wooden houses of the lower town, newly rebuilt after the disastrous fire which had destroyed the commercial district of Podil, with its church and warehouses, in the preceding year. Above them, on a kind of cliff overhanging the river harbour, which occupied the narrow strip of land between it and the stream, was the old town, enclosed within its medieval walls, with its blue and gold onion domes, its rich religious houses and old-fashioned, brightly-painted wooden palaces.

  Outside the inn built of undressed logs which did duty as a posting house, the driver was unhitching the horses.

  Still Jason said nothing and in the end it was Craig O'Flaherty who lost patience and answered for him. Clapping his captain on the back with a force sufficient to have knocked him into the river, he beamed at Jolival with cheerful approval.

  'He'll be a churl if he's not satisfied. Sure, you talk like a book, Vicomte. And you've a knack of hitting on a solution that suits everyone. And now, if you please, let's be making for that henhouse they call an inn and see if they can find us some dinner. I could eat ahorse.'

  Jason followed the others without a word but Marianne had a feeling he was still not conv
inced. She was sure of it when, after what was certainly the best meal they had eaten since setting out, consisting as it did of a vegetable bortsch to start with, followed by a thick, twisted sausage called kolbassa and vareniki, light, sugared tarts, the privateer got up from the table and announced curtly that they had better get to bed since they would be leaving the city at four the next morning. This was tantamount to a declaration that he intended to do his utmost to beat Napoleon's army to it, and no one made any mistake about it.

  Marianne least of all, for that night she waited in vain for her lover beneath the inevitable icon which, this time, depicted, no less inevitably, St Vladimir. The door of the tiny room with its lingering odours of cooking fat and cabbage never opened to admit Jason.

  In the end, tired of turning over and over on her mattress like St Lawrence on his gridiron, she got up but remained undecided what to do next. She hated the idea of letting a fresh misunderstanding grow between them. This quarrel was a stupid one, like so many lovers' tiffs in which both parties seemed determined to vie with one another in selfishness and unfairness. But with a man as stubborn as Jason, who could carry obstinacy to the point of blind stupidity, it could become protracted. And that, too, was something Marianne could not endure. Their journey was painful enough as it was.

  For a minute or two she prowled to and fro between the door of her room and its small window, set wide open because of the heat which, even at this time of night, was stifling. She was consumed with longing to go to Jason. After all, it was her idea of going straight on to Smolensk which had started the argument and it might be for her to make the first move towards a reconciliation. But to do that she would have to overcome her pride which revolted at the picture of herself going humbly to seek out her lover in the room which he was no doubt sharing with Jolival (which would not be too bad) or, much more awkward, with Craig, and dragging him from his bed to her own, like a she-cat on heat come looking for a torn.