[Marianne 4] - Marianne and the Rebels

by Juliette Benzoni

  However, the women had not seen her, and so took no notice of her. The procession swung away towards a fig tree, in whose shade Marianne could make out a figure, a statue of Aphrodite, mutilated but undoubtedly ancient. The left arm was missing but the torso was undamaged and the right arm bent in a graceful attitude of welcome. The head, whose profile was turned to the girl by the rock, was perfect in its beauty and purity.

  The flutes continued playing while the offerings were laid before the statue. Then the other girls prostrated themselves, and the tall dark woman stepped forward and addressed the goddess in the noble tongue of Demosthenes and Aristophanes, to the amazement of Marianne who still stood clinging breathlessly to her rock. Forgetting her own wretched plight for a moment, Marianne listened, wonderingly, to the language she had learned as part of Ellis Selton's plan for her niece's education, letting the woman's warm, grave tones sink into her being:

  Deathless Aphrodite, on your shining throne,

  Beguiling daughter of Zeus, to you I pray.

  Do not with pain and anguish like a stone

  Crush my poor heart.

  But come to me, as you would come of old,

  Hearing my cries of passion from afar,

  Leaving your father's dwelling-house of gold,

  To bear my part.

  The bright-winged sparrows harnessed to your cap,

  Flew swift from heaven through the midway air,

  A myriad flutterings brought you from afar

  To this black earth.

  Soon, soon they came. And you, O Blessed One,

  Your glorious face illumined with a smile,

  Would ask what new grief, what insane desire

  Consumed my heart.

  What was it made me call to you again?

  Whom must Persuasion lead back to your love?

  Who is it, Sappho, who now gives you pain?

  Who wrongs your heart…?

  The music of the words, the inexpressible beauty of the Greek language, entered into Marianne and took possession of her already half disembodied spirit. She felt as if the burning prayer were pouring from her own heart. She too was in anguish; she too was suffering from wounded love, a love debased, disfigured and deformed. The passion by which she lived had turned against her and was rending her with its claws. The woman's complaint made her fully conscious of her own unhappiness which had been almost driven from her mind by her physical ordeal and by the violence of her hatred for John Leighton. Now she was brought face to face once more with the realities of her own situation: a very young woman, abandoned, grieving and bitterly hurt, and tortured by the childish need to be loved. She had been maltreated by life and by men, as though she were strong enough to stand up to their cruelty and selfishness. Everyone who had loved her had tried to make use of her, to dominate her, all of them, except perhaps the passionate, enigmatic lover of that night in Corfu. He had asked nothing but pleasure he had rendered back a hundredfold. He had been gentle… gentle, and tender. Her body remembered him with gladness, as in the torments of thirst it had remembered all the sweet water it had known. She had a sudden curious intuition that happiness, plain ordinary happiness, had come near to her and passed away again with the stranger.

  The tears were pouring down her hollow cheeks. She lifted her arm in its ragged sleeve to brush them away and, loosing her hold on the rock, fell to her knees. Then she saw that the girls had paused in their invocation and were looking at her.

  She tried to run away, to hide herself in terror in the shadow of the bushes, for to her bruised spirit any human creature seemed an enemy, but she was too weak to stand and could only sink back on to the sand. Already the girls were all around her, bending over her curiously and talking rapidly in a tongue which bore little resemblance to ancient Greek. The tall woman approached more slowly, and the chattering circle parted respectfully before her.

  Bending over the castaway, she put aside the tumbled mass of dark hair, sticky with sand and sea-water, and lifted the waxen face down which the tears still coursed. Marianne did not understand the question put to her but she murmured, without much hope:

  'I'm French… lost… be kind to me…'

  A gleam shot through the kneeling woman's dark eyes and, to Marianne's astonishment, she whispered quickly in the same language:

  'Good. Be quiet now. Do nothing. We will take you with us…'

  'You speak—'

  'Be quiet, I said. We may be watched.'

  Swiftly unfastening the golden fibula that clasped the classical peplos of white linen that she wore over her pleated tunic, she put it round the other woman. Then, still in the same low voice, she issued a number of orders to her companions and they lifted Marianne, silently now, and held her upright, supported by the shoulders of two of the strongest of their number.

  'Can you walk?' the woman asked, and answered her own question at once:

  'No, of course you can't. Your feet are bare. You would not get past the first bend in the path. We'll carry you.'

  All the girls set to with remarkable speed and efficiency and constructed a kind of litter made of interlaced branches tied together by the fillets from their hair. They laid Marianne upon it, and then six of her new friends raised her on their shoulders, while the rest plucked trails from a wild vine that grew nearby, and asphodels, and some of the strange silvery weed that straggled all over the beach, and arranged these over her just as if it were a funeral bier. When Marianne's eyes turned inquiringly to the strange priestess, she smiled briefly.

  'It is best that you should feign death. It will save us from the possibility of awkward questions. The Turks think us mad and fear us on that account… but moderation in all things!'

  As a further precaution, she laid a fold of the peplos over Marianne's face, without giving her time to protest. All the same, the latter's curiosity impelled her to whisper:

  'Are there Turks here?'

  'They are never far off when we come down to the shore. They wait for us to leave before they steal the jars of wine we put by the goddess. Now be quiet or I'll leave you here.'

  Marianne took the hint and made herself lie as still as possible as the procession of women returned by the way they had come, chanting another hymn, this time with all the solemnity of a funeral dirge.

  The journey was a long one, over a route that seemed remarkably steep and difficult. Lying on her uncomfortable stretcher of branches, with her head often lower than her feet, and the cloth over her face making breathing difficult, Marianne felt one of her attacks of nausea coming on. Her bearers, however, must have had unusual stamina because they did not once falter in their pace in all that interminable ascent, nor interrupt their singing. All the same, she could not help a sigh of relief when at last they put her down.

  A moment later she was lying on a mattress covered with some rough fur which seemed to her the height of comfort, and the linen cloth was removed from her face. At the same time the heat that beat down out of doors gave way to an agreeable coolness.

  The room in which she found herself was long and low, and a pair of narrow windows opened on to a blue vista that might have been the sky or the sea or both. It seemed to have undergone a good many vicissitudes down the centuries. Two sturdy Doric columns supported a cracked ceiling on which were traces of old gilding, radiating outwards from the central figure, probably representing a saint, with a thin, bearded face, a halo and huge, staring eyes. Fragments of old frescoes still clung to the brick walls, as incongruous as the pictures on the ceiling. On one side the remains of a pair of ephebes pranced, long-legged, towards a row of flaking Byzantine angels, stiff and unbending in their striped robes and all squinting atrociously. On the other side was a whitewashed wall with a simple niche containing a magnificent funerary vase of black and white on which a wistful god in a green cloak with a lance sat brooding on a slate-blue throne. A gilt bronze masque lamp with multicoloured glass hung from the ceiling, just below the beard of the hollow-cheeked saint. Besides the bed c
overed with goatskins on which Marianne was lying, the furniture consisted of a few stools, and a low table holding a big earthenware bowl heaped with fat grapes.

  Standing in the midst of all this, the worshipper of Aphrodite, in her long white tunic, no longer looked quite such an anachronism.

  Her arms were folded over her splendid bosom and she was considering her find with obvious perplexity. Marianne sat up and saw that the two of them were quite alone. The girls had gone. The woman saw her staring about her and interpreted the look.

  'I sent them away. We have to talk. Who are you?' The tone was hard and far from friendly. The woman was suspicious of her.

  'I told you. A Frenchwoman. I was shipwrecked and—'

  'No. You're lying. Yorgo the fisherman left you on the beach before dawn. He told me he had found you last night, just as you went into the water from a boat. You were half dead from thirst and exposure. What were you doing in that boat?'

  'It's a long story…'

  'I've plenty of time,' the woman said, pulling up a stool and sitting down.

  It was strange, like talking to an antique statue come to life by magic. The woman was herself the epitome of her extraordinary room. To begin with, it would have been hard to tell her age. Her skin was smooth and unwrinkled but her gaze was that of a mature woman. More than anything, she looked like an incarnation of Athena, yet her almond eyes were almost as disproportionately huge as those of the Byzantine face on the ceiling. She had said that she was reputed mad, and yet there emanated from her a quiet strength and assurance that impressed Marianne and certainly did not strike her as in any way alarming.

  'I was in that boat,' she said simply, 'dying of thirst, as you yourself said, and the reason I let myself slip into the water was to make an end the sooner.'

  'You had not seen Yorgo and his boat?'

  'I was past seeing anything. There was something red, but I thought it was only another mirage. Do you know what it means to die of thirst?'

  The woman shook her head but there had been a revealing tremor in Marianne's voice on the last words, and she lay back, white-faced. The stranger frowned and rose quickly.

  'Are you still thirsty?'

  'And hungry…'

  'Wait, then… You shall talk afterwards.'

  A few minutes later, after swallowing a little cold fish, some goat cheese, bread, grapes and a cup of a remarkably heady wine, Marianne felt restored to life and able to satisfy her hostess's curiosity, in so far as that was possible without running into fresh perils.

  The woman was Greek, an inhabitant of a country under Turkish occupation, and she herself was an envoy sent to those same Turks with the object of reviving the ties of friendship between their two nations. Marianne hesitated a moment, not knowing quite how to begin her story. In the end, she asked a perfectly natural question which, besides allowing her more time for thought, would also test the ground a little.

  'Can you tell me, if you please,' she asked softly, 'where I am? I have no idea…'

  But the woman refused to be drawn.

  'Where did you come from, with your boat?'

  'From a ship bound for Constantinople, from which I was set adrift on the open sea a little before dawn. That must have been three days ago.' Marianne sighed. 'We had sailed past Cythera that morning…'

  'Of what nationality was this ship? And what had you done to make them set you adrift like that? And in your nightgown?'

  The woman's tone was deeply suspicious and Marianne thought wretchedly that her story was really rather improbable and it would not be easy to make anyone believe it. However, the truth was always likelier to ring true than any made-up tale, however well-intended.

  'The vessel was American. A brig, out of Charleston, South Carolina. Captain – Captain Jason Beaufort.'

  It was all she could do to utter the name. It came out as a kind of strangled sob, but had at least the unexpected advantage of making the woman's stern face relax a little. The heavy eyebrows, so dark they might have been drawn in Indian ink, rose slightly.

  'Jason? A fine Greek name for an American. But it seems to cause you pain. Are you by any chance the Medea to this Jason? Was it he who abandoned you?'

  'No – not him!'

  The cry of protest sprang straight from Marianne's heart. Her face clouded and she went on in a deadened voice: 'There was a mutiny on board… I think Jason is probably a prisoner – but he may be dead, and my friends with him.'

  Omitting only her own adventures in Venice which could do nothing but add to the unlikelihood of her whole situation, she told the story of the Sea Witch's fatal voyage as best she could. She told how Leighton, to obtain possession of the ship for use in the slave-trade, had done his utmost to set Jason against her, how, in so far as she had been able to reconstruct the course of events, he had succeeded in getting hold of the ship and, finally, how he had set her adrift in an open boat, without food or water, and with no possible hope of rescue. She told of her fears for those she had left on board: for Jolival, Gracchus, Agathe, and for Kaleb who had been flogged for trying to rid the vessel of the devil who coveted it.

  She must have put enough real passion into her account of the experiences of those dreadful days for it to carry conviction, because, as she talked, the look of suspicion faded from the other woman's face and was replaced by curiosity. She sat with her long legs crossed, her elbow on her knee and her chin resting on her hand, listening with the deepest interest but in complete silence.

  At last, unnerved by this lack of speech, Marianne ventured to ask:

  'Does it – does it seem to you very improbable? I know my story must sound like a novel – but it is the truth, I swear it.'

  The woman shrugged.

  'The Turks have a saying that the truth floats and will never be put down. Yours has a strange sound, like all truth, but do not be alarmed. I have heard far stranger stories than this of yours. You have only to tell me now what is your name, and what was your business at Constantinople?'

  The difficult moment had come, when the choice must be made that might have dire consequences. From the beginning of this conversation, Marianne had been reluctant to reveal her proper identity. She had considered giving a false name, explaining her presence on board the American vessel as the flight of a woman in love, anxious to put the greatest possible distance between her guilty joys and a husband's anger, but she had been studying her hostess's grave face while she talked and found herself increasingly disliking the idea of handing her a fabrication which, love story or not, was more than likely to disgust her. In addition, Marianne knew herself to be a bad liar, and a clumsy one, like any woman not in the habit of lying. She was not even very good at keeping her feelings to herself, as the recent catastrophic end to her love had proved all too clearly.

  She remembered, quite suddenly, something that François Vidocq had said to her as they journeyed back together from the coast of Brittany. 'Life, my dear, is a vast ocean strewn with reefs. We can expect to strike one at any moment. It is best to be prepared. In that way, there is often a chance of escape…'

  The reef was there before her, hidden behind that broad, impenetrable brow, those enigmatic features. Telling herself that she had nothing more to lose, except for a problematical revenge, Marianne decided to drive straight at it. After all, whatever happened, it did not matter very much now, and if the woman believed that she was an enemy and killed her, it would not be so very terrible. She said clearly and steadily:

  'I am called Marianne d'Asselnat de Villeneuve, Princess Sant'Anna, and I am going to Constantinople at the command of my master, the Emperor Napoleon, in order to persuade the Sultana, to whom I am related in some degree, to break off the alliance with England and resume friendly relations with France – and also to pursue the war with Russia. There, now I think you know all about me.'

  The effect of this candid statement was astonishing. The woman sprang to her feet, became very red and then, as the redness faded, was left as pale as ever. S
he stared at the castaway, open-mouthed, as though about to speak, but then shut it again without a word. After which she turned abruptly on her heel and made for the door, as though she had suddenly been faced with a heavy load of responsibility which was more than she could bring herself to deal with. She stopped dead at the sound of Marianne's voice:

  'May I remind you that, while I have told you everything you wished to know, you, on your side, have not yet answered my perfectly natural question. Where am I? And who are you?'

  The woman swung round and stared at Marianne out of the black eyes which looked larger than ever.

  'This is the island of Santorini, known to the ancients as Thera, the poorest of all Greek islands, where one is never sure of living until tomorrow, or even until nightfall, because it rests on the primeval fire. As for me, you may call me Sappho. I am known by that name.'

  Without adding another word, the strange woman hurried from the room, stopping to lock the door carefully behind her. Marianne shrugged, resigned already to this new kind of prison. Then she picked up the peplos which Sappho – since Sappho she was – had left behind and, wrapping it round herself, lay down again on the goatskins and prepared to recoup her strength properly by a really good sleep. The die was cast now. It was out of her hands.

  The early evening found her still locked in the chapel, sitting by the window, without having set eyes on a living soul. The view before her was a strange one, consisting of an expanse of ruins and ashes, in which each object seemed to partake of a peculiar silvery quality. The stumps of broken columns and fragments of walls rose from a fine dust made up of every shade of grey. All this jutted out from a wide plateau one side of which was under cultivation. The labour of the peasants had carved out great terraces which were planted with low vines, sheltered by fig trees twisted by the wind and silvered over with the ubiquitous dust. On the far side, beyond a dilapidated stone windmill with tattered sails, the plateau seemed to drop straight down into the sea.