[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire

by Juliette Benzoni

  'François!' she said weakly, finding his name spring as naturally to her lips as if they had been brought up together.

  He turned and gaped at her, rubbed his eyes and then looked more closely.

  'I've been drinking too much of their damned vodka again!'

  "No, you're not seeing things, my friend. It really is me, Marianne. You've just rescued me for the second time, although you did not know it.'

  For a moment he was speechless, then he burst out with a loud: 'Good God! But what the devil are you doing here? And soaking wet at that!'

  'The cossacks threw me in the river – it would take too long to explain. Oh, my goodness, but I'm cold! I'm so dreadfully cold!'

  'Threw you in the river? My God, I could kill another hundred of 'em for that! Wait a moment—Here, you, woman, take those wet clothes off her.'

  He hurried to his horse, unfastened the big cloak that was rolled at the saddle and ran back again to fling it hastily round her as she stood in her soaking petticoat. Marianne tried to stop him.

  'But you? Surely you'll need it?'

  'Don't you worry about me. I'll pick up another from some cossack. Did you say this cart belongs to you? Where were you going with it?'

  'I was trying to go home. François, for pity's sake, if you should see the Emperor, don't tell him you've seen me. Matters between us could not well be worse.'

  He laughed, not without a touch of bitterness.

  'Why should you think I'll be saying anything to him? You know he hates me – almost as much as I hate him. And this harebrained escapade isn't going to make us better friends. He's destroying the finest army in the world. But tell me, what was it happened between you to put you on such bad terms?'

  'A friend of mine had given him some offence and I helped him to escape. Oh, François, I am being sought for! Haven't you been in Smolensk lately, or in Orcha, or any other town on the road to France? My description is pasted up everywhere.'

  'I never read their damned notices. I'm not interested.'

  Briskly he threw his arms round her, picked her up and carried her to the wagon and set her down inside it, tucking the cloak carefully round her feet which were blue with cold. Then he studied her intently for a moment, his face suddenly grave, bent down and set his mouth to her cold lips, hugging her to him with a kind of passionate fury.

  'I've been wanting to do that for years,' he muttered gruffly. 'Ever since the night of Napoleon's marriage to be precise. Are you going to slap my face again?'

  She shook her head, too much moved for speech. That burning kiss had been just what she needed to bring back the raw taste of life and make her herself again. She wanted to cling for a moment to that manly form and to the passionate lust for life that was in this unrepentant duellist. And she told him as much.

  'Where are you going? I wish I could come with you.'

  He shook his head and his handsome face twisted sardonically.

  'Come with me? I thought you wanted to get out of this hell hole? All I could offer you would be a worse one, because we don't know what is coming to us. We've lost two-thirds of our force and the cossacks are everywhere. And now, instead of going on to Poland we've got to fall back with what troops we have left to join up with Napoleon. So you be off! And as quick as you can, while there is still time. Take a look at that river and the bridge. You must get across at once because as soon as our backs are turned I dare swear there'll be another lot of cossacks here to break it down. And I can't stop them. I've too few men.'

  'But if the Emperor is retreating into Poland, how will you manage? The bridges at Borisov have been destroyed already.'

  He made a tired, angry movement.

  'I know. Well, we shall see. Go now, off with you! I'll see you in Paris – God willing.'

  'And supposing I'm permitted to live. But what about your wounded?'

  'We'll hoist them on to a horse. There's a medical unit not far off. Goodbye, Marianne. If you should happen to see Fortunée before I do, tell her not to start looking for consolation yet awhile because I'll be back. Do you hear that, I'll be back. Russia shall not have my bones.'

  Was he saying that to reassure himself, she wondered? No, he was too sure of himself. It was not even a boast. If there were to be only one man left out of all the Grande Armée, Fournier would be that man. And, one way and another, it was good to know. Marianne smiled. And this time it was she who drew the general down to her and kissed him – in a very sisterly fashion.

  'I'll tell her. Goodbye, François.'

  After piling on top of Marianne everything they possessed in the way of clothes and blankets, Barbe clambered back on to the driving seat and took up the reins. A click of her tongue and they were off, lumbering towards the bridge. The wind had brought the snow with it and it was falling thickly now. Fournier stood by the road and watched the heavy wagon lurching over the uneven surface of trampled earth that covered the logs. He made a trumpet of his hands and shouted through them into the gale.

  'Go carefully! Beyond the bridge the road goes through some nasty boggy ground, and the wind is very strong. Keep to the path! And try to avoid Smorgoni! There was some fighting there yesterday!'

  Barbe waved her whip to show that she had understood and the kibitka rolled on into the white whirlwind on the road to Vilna, some fifty leagues farther on. When it was no longer visible, Fournier-Sarlovèze gave an angry shrug and put up his sleeve to brush away a drop of moisture from his cheek. Then he turned and walked back to his horse and springing lightly into the saddle trotted back to the head of his troop. The last bridge across the Berezina was left alone in the rising storm with only the dead for company. By next day, it was gone.

  In the snow, the road to Vilna proved to be a terrible ordeal for the two women.. On the day after her enforced bathe in the Berezina, Marianne was coughing her lungs out and shivering with fever. By now she had no need to feign illness. She lay in the back of the kibitka, muffled up in blankets and in Fournier's great cloak, enduring the agonizing jolting without a murmur of complaint because she would not add to Barbe's difficulties.

  Barbe's courage and fortitude were quite incredible. She slept for no more than three hours a night and she saw to everything. When they halted for the night she would make a fire and cook the invalid a soup of flour, rice and such few vegetables as they had left, concoct hot possets out of melted snow and heat up large stones that could be slipped inside Marianne's blankets at night to keep her warm. Nor did she neglect the horse but curried him at every halt, fed him, even put a blanket over him and saw that he was tethered out of the wind. By day, she sat stolidly in the driving seat, her eyes fixed on the line of the road, which was inclined to be haphazard except where it ran through trees. She had even used the gun against a pack of wolves, handling it with a skill denoting long practice. Her whole being was concentrated on a single thought: to get to Vilna, where the house where they were to put up belonged to a Jewish apothecary who was also a physician.

  It was not more than a week after their adventure at Studianka that they caught their first sight of Vilna. Nestling in a line of hills, between the arms of two rivers, the Wilia and the Wilenka, it was built around an impressive mound, the long-ago tomb of the earliest Lithuanian princes, and surmounted by a red brick citadel. Streaming from its highest point was the imperial eagle of France on its tricolour ground, and beside it the personal standard of the Duke of Bassano, who governed the city for Napoleon. Here there was no longer any fear of cossacks. The town was undamaged, well-provisioned and well-defended.

  In summer weather, the Lithuanian capital, set amid rolling hills, with its white walls, red roofs, domes and baroque, Italianate palaces and its magnificent churches presented a gay and colourful appearance but now the colours were dulled by the universal covering of snow. Even so, the sight of the lovely city drew a great sigh of relief from Barbe.

  'Here we are at last! Now we'll be able to take proper care of you. All we have to do now is to find out where Moï
se Chakhna lives. And we'll stay there for as long as it takes to get you well again.'

  'No!' Marianne protested, making painful efforts to sit up. 'I don't want to stay – not more than two or three days, so that you can have a rest, Barbe. Then we'll go on.'

  'But it's madness! You are ill – very ill, I think. Do you want to die?'

  'I – shan't – die! We must go on. I want – to get to Danzig as soon as possible – do you understand? As soon as possible!'

  A violent fit of coughing shook her and she fell back, bathed in sweat. Realizing that it was better not to persist, Barbe shrugged and set out to look for their host in the city.

  Moïse Chakhna's house was in the suburb of Antokol, not far from the bank of the Wilia and next door to a pretty, half-ruined Italianate palace which had belonged to the powerful Radziwill family. Unlike the Jewish houses they had seen before, it was a place of some style, for the Jewish community in Vilna was both rich and influential. The majority lived in the centre of the city, in a jumble of dark and tortuous alleyways bounded by the three principal streets, but some of the most eminent dwelt on the outskirts, in houses befitting their wealth and abilities.

  Marianne and Barbe were welcomed there with an almost biblical hospitality. As in the other places where they had stayed, no one asked them any questions, although it must have been apparent that they were not of the people of Israel. Solomon's letters clearly worked as a powerful charm. Moïse Chakhna and his wife Esther did everything necessary for the invalid but when she told them of her wish to continue her journey in two days' time, the apothecary frowned.

  'You cannot do it. You are suffering from severe bronchitis. You must stay in bed and, what is most important, you must avoid all risk of catching cold again, for you would be risking your life.'

  Even then she persisted, with the obstinacy of the very sick. Her determination was strengthened now by fear of these vast, inhospitable wastes of country with their endless snows and sunless, hopeless skies. She wanted to escape from them as soon as she could. The thought had become an obsession with her, fixed in her head like the barbed arrow of some demon archer. To tear it out now might be to tip her over into madness.

  What she longed for was to see the sea again, even in a port so northerly as Danzig.

  The sea was her friend, a friend that had always spared her life, even though it had more than once put it in danger. The sound of the sea washing the shores of England had lulled her through most of her childhood and for years now it had carried all her dreams, her hopes, her love. In the depths of her illness, Marianne was convinced that somehow everything would be miraculously all right, her health restored and her sufferings at an end, as soon as she came safe to a harbour.

  Barbe, worried as she was, could still understand the sick girl's overriding longing to be gone.

  'Do what you can for her,' she said to Moïse. 'I will try to make her stay another two or three days by telling her how tired I am, but I don't think it will be any good.'

  In fact it was five days before Marianne declared that she would wait no longer and by that time the fever had almost left her.

  'I must go to Danzig,' she kept repeating. 'I know I shall be strong enough for that. But I must go quickly – as quickly as I can. Something is waiting there for me.'

  She could not for the life of her have explained just why it was that she felt so certain. Barbe, in any case, put it down to her illness. But as she had lain there with the fever on her, her mind wandering in vague feverish dreams, Marianne had gradually convinced herself that her fate was waiting for her there, in that Baltic port where she had so longed to go with Jason. Perhaps, after all, that fate would take the form of a ship…

  Barbe was no actress but she was still trying manfully, and with no success at all, to portray a woman in the last stages of exhaustion, when she received the first direct order she had ever had from her mistress. She was to have the kibitka ready to leave tomorrow, Marianne told her, and when Barbe tried to argue she was told that Kovno, the next and final stage of the kibitka's journey, was no more than twenty leagues ahead of them. Marianne was in haste, too, to hand over the precious package entrusted to her to Solomon's cousin. It was beginning to weigh on her mind. In her weakened state, her mind had begun to play superstitiously with the belief that those jewels, taken from a church, might be a cause, if not the only one, of all her sufferings. Moreover, those pearls had only narrowly escaped ending in the Berezina along with herself.

  Barbe found her orders all the more distressing because they were interrupted by frequent fits of coughing. As a last resort it seemed to her that the physician's voice might be more effective than her own, but much to her surprise she found, when she went in search of Moïse, that his eagerness to detain them in his house had waned considerably. Unless, that was, they were willing to remain there alone and exposed to possible unpleasantness.

  'I am leaving,' he explained. 'I and my family. We shall quit Vilna very soon for Riga where we have a house and kinsfolk. It is unwise for us to remain longer here if we care for our possessions – and even for our lives.'

  When Barbe expressed astonishment, he told her of the latest news which was going about the country. It was disastrous news for the French, because it said that Napoleon's army, broken and starving after a series of catastrophic engagements, was now falling back on Vilna as its one port in a storm. It was said also that there had been some kind of battle that was more like a massacre when the fleeing army had tried to cross the Berezina at the very spot where Barbe and Marianne had made the crossing. The bridges were all destroyed and but for the heroism of the Engineers, who had succeeded in erecting makeshift ones, the whole army might by then have been destroyed or taken prisoner. Many had got across, including a host of civilians following the army, but since then repeated attacks by the cossacks had caused more tragic gaps in the ranks.

  'As far as I can gather,' Moïse said, 'all this took place on about the day that you reached here. Since then, Napoleon has been making for Vilna as fast as he can, dragging in his train a host of desperate and starving men to descend on us like locusts. They will want houses and huge quantities of food and we shall be ravaged to supply them. And we Jews most of all, for we are always the first to suffer when there is looting or requisitioning. Therefore I would rather take my family and my most precious possessions out of harm's way while there is still time. They can burn my house after that if they please. It will be no more than an empty shell. So that is why,' he went on gravely, 'I must, for my own sake, so far fail in hospitality as to beg you to resume your journey. All I can suggest is that you follow us to Riga—'

  'No, no. We may as well continue on our own road. But can you give us some protection for my mistress, to save her as far as possible from the dangers of a relapse. In this cold weather it is still to be feared.'

  'Of course, of course! You shall have furs, and lined boots, even a stove which you may keep alight in the kibitka, and food, of course.'

  'Thank you. But what of you, will you be permitted to leave? The French governor—'

  Then Moïse Chakhna did something very odd for one of his quiet, even rather reserved, disposition. He shook his fist, as though at some invisible third person present in the room.

  'The governor? His grace the Duke of Bassano does not believe the rumours of disaster. He is threatening imprisonment for anyone who spreads them. He himself is thinking of giving a ball. But I, I know that every word of it is true and I am going!'

  The next day, the kibitka resumed its journey to Kovno and the crossing of the Niemen. True to his promise, the physician had provided the two travellers generously with everything they needed against the cold, nor were his provisions at all unnecessary because now, at the beginning of December, temperatures dropped, suddenly and dramatically. The thermometer fell to 20° below zero, the rivers froze and the carriage wheels no longer sank into the soft snow. The horse, too, moved surefootedly over the hard surface, although they dare
d not travel very fast because of the danger of overturning the top-heavy vehicle altogether.

  To help maintain its balance, Barbe wrapped woollen rags about her boots and resigned herself to walking beside it, for she was desperately afraid of seeing it capsize and throw Marianne out on to the ice.

  Fortunately, quite contrary to her fears, Marianne seemed to be rather better than otherwise. The fever had not returned and her cough had loosened and the fits were not so long. But to be on the safe side, Barbe made her stay wrapped up in her furs, so that only her eyes showed, bright and feverish.

  In this way they travelled for three days and nights before they came within reach of the Niemen. On the evening of the third day, Barbe was so worried by the increasing cold that she refused to stop at all, especially since by this time they were in the midst of an exposed plain with no possible shelter anywhere.

  'We may as well go on now,' she declared, when they stopped as they had to for something hot to eat and drink. Scattering the remains of their fire with her foot, she added: 'Tomorrow morning we shall be in Kovno.'

  And so all that night Barbe walked on, carrying a lantern to light the way. She walked on doggedly until the devil sent a new ordeal to try her. Two hours before dawn, when they were actually within sight of Kovno, one of the rear wheels of the kibitka struck some unseen obstacle and broke. The kibitka lurched violently and ground to a halt.

  Marianne, who had been dozing, was woken by the shock. She poked her head outside and saw Barbe's face, white and shining with mutton fat, loom up, moonlike, in the light of the lantern. In spite of the grease, which was designed to prevent her skin from chapping, little crystals of ice had formed in her eyebrows and under her nose, where her breath had frozen. Her whole face was a picture of despair.