Marianne and the Lords of the East

by Жюльетта Бенцони

  Marianne and the Lords of the East

  Жюльетта Бенцони

  Juliette Benzoni

  Marianne and the Lords of the East

  PART I

  The Creole Sultana

  Chapter 1

  Audience by Night

  DRIVEN by the strong arms of its four and twenty rowers, the gilded caïque was literally flying over the smooth waters of the Golden Horn. Other vessels scattered like frightened chickens before it for fear of impeding the royal barge.

  Seated beneath the red silk canopy in the stern, the Princess Sant'Anna watched the dark walls of the seraglio draw nearer through the slow dusk that was beginning to fall over Constantinople. In another moment they, too, would be enveloped in the shadows which had already fallen on the narrow streets and close-packed houses of Stamboul.

  The number of other boats around them dwindled as they advanced because the crossing of the Golden Horn was forbidden after the firing of the sunset gun. But this was a law which naturally did not apply to vessels from the palace.

  Marianne was perspiring in the court dress of leaf-green satin which she had donned more or less at random with a view to the audience before her. These first days of September retained all the heat and humidity of high summer. For a week past, the city had been steeped in an atmosphere like a Turkish bath which had wreathed the monuments in a yellow fog and made the wearing of even the lightest clothing a penance, much less untold yards of heavy Lyons silk with long kid gloves reaching well above the elbow and almost touching the short, puffed sleeves of the dress.

  But in only a short while now, perhaps no more than a few minutes, she was going to find herself face to face at last with the royal lady she had come so far, and at such pains, to seek. At Napoleon's command she had crossed the whole of Europe for this meeting. What would be the outcome of her mission? The burden of it seemed to press more heavily on her shoulders with every stroke of the oars: to ensure the continuance of the war which had been dragging on for years between Russia and the Sublime Porte for the possession of the Rumanian principalities, and so to keep a large section of the Russian army engaged on the Balkan front while the emperor crossed the borders of the Tsarist Empire and marched on Moscow. Now that she was here, it seemed a frighteningly impossible task, made worse by the fact—which had become all too clear since her arrival in Constantinople—that things were going very badly indeed for the Turkish army on the Danube. It seemed to Marianne that the audience ahead, however comfortingly disguised as a mere cousinly courtesy, was going to be a singularly tricky one.

  How would the sultana react to the discovery that this distant cousin, traveling for pleasure in the Levant and so eager to make her acquaintance, was actually the bearer of credentials from the emperor and had come to talk politics? Or had she known it all along? Too many people knew about this journey, for all its intended secrecy. First and foremost the English had found out, God alone knew how, all about Napoleon's unofficial ambassadress. But no one, thank heaven, could possibly know the real object of her mission!

  For a fortnight now Marianne had waited for an audience which no one seemed in any great hurry to grant her. It was a fortnight since, escaping from the English frigate on board which she had been held pending return to the land of her childhood as a hostage of war, she had arrived at the French embassy quite unconscious, draped like a sack of flour over the shoulder of a notorious Greek rebel. That rebel, who had snatched her out of English hands and literally saved her from despair, was now her firm friend.

  Marianne had spent those two weeks incarcerated in the embassy buildings, prowling up and down like a caged beast in spite of all her friend Jolival's pleas for her to be patient. The ambassador, the Comte de Latour-Maubourg, had been reluctant to let her stir beyond that small patch of French territory, for his countrymen had become unpopular with the Ottoman since the unfortunate matter of Napoleon's divorce.

  The Sultan Mahmoud and his mother, that Creole cousin of the Empress Josephine who had been captured by Barbary pirates and carried by her beauty to the supreme height of Haseki Sultan, were now inclined to favor England, in which they were encouraged by the British envoy, the charming Mr. Stratford Canning, who would stick at nothing to further his country's interests.

  "Until you have been presented to the sultan's mother," Latour-Maubourg had insisted, "you had better avoid any unnecessary risks. Canning will do anything to forestall an audience. He has already shown that he knows how much he has to fear you. Are you not Her Highness's kinswoman?"

  "A very distant one!"

  "A kinswoman, nonetheless, and as such we hope to see you received. Take my advice and stay indoors until your audience is granted. This house is watched, I know, but Canning will not dare to try anything while you remain inside it. Whereas he is quite capable of having you abducted if you step outside."

  It was good advice, energetically supported by Jolival, who was too glad to have his adopted daughter restored to him to run the risk of losing her again almost at once, and Marianne yielded. Hour after hour she paced her bedchamber off the embassy garden, waiting for the longed for summons. The house itself was one of the oldest in Pera, having been built in the sixteenth century as a Franciscan convent, and it possessed a charming cloister which had been made into a garden. Latour-Maubourg, a diplomat of the old school with a rigorous Breton upbringing behind him, had not judged it proper to bring wife and children to that infidel land, yet even without a woman's touch the ambassador had given to his garden and to the old house itself an elegance that was wholly French. Marianne recognized it, and it lightened the burden of her enforced captivity.

  As well as Arcadius de Jolival, she found there her coachman, Gracchus-Hannibal Pioche, the onetime errand boy from the rue Montorgueil. At the sight of his mistress safe and sound when he had thought her at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, the poor fellow had burst into tears and, child of the atheistical revolution though he was, had gone down on his knees and thanked heaven as fervently as any Chouan. His subsequent celebrations, undertaken in the company of the ambassador's cook and various bottles of raki, had very nearly been the death of him.

  One person Marianne had not found. Her maid, Agathe Pinsart, was gone—but not very far away, nor was there anything at all tragic about her going. Against all expectation, the poor girl had not only survived the barbarous and inhuman treatment she had suffered at the hands of Leighton and his mutineers aboard the Sea Witch but had made a conquest of the Turkish captain who had captured the brig and released the prisoners with her caustic charms. And since Agathe, on her side, had been greatly impressed by the young reis, with his dashing presence, his silken garments and his splendid mustaches, their voyage to Constantinople had assumed all the appearance of an amorous idyll, culminating in a proposal of marriage from Achmet to his new sweetheart. Agathe, convinced that she had seen the last of Marianne and strongly tempted by the luxurious life of a Turkish lady, had offered only a token resistance designed merely to enhance the value of her consent, and not many days before her mistress's arrival she had embraced both Achmet and Islam with an equal enthusiasm. She was now officially installed in her husband's handsome house at Eyub, not far from the great mosque recently rebuilt by Mahmoud II to shelter the footprint of the Prophet.

  Marianne would have liked to visit her former abigail, partly to see her in her new status and partly to reassure the girl about her own fate, but this too was considered unwise. So she could only wait, interminably, even though the waiting became more of a torture with every day that passed. Yet the ordeal had an end at last.

  The imperial summons had reached the embassy just as the a
mbassador and his guests were finishing dinner. They were about to go into the drawing room when the royal envoys were announced. They consisted of the Aga of the Janissaries and one of the Black Eunuchs belonging to the harem. Both were magnificently dressed. Despite the heat, the officer was clad in a sable-lined dolman, laced boots and a broad belt made of linked silver plates with a whip thrust into it. His tall felt hat was swathed in a kind of bubble of silver gauze, forming an extraordinary kind of turban. The Black Eunuch's dress consisted of a long white robe lined with fox fur, and on his head was a snowy turban set with a golden clasp.

  They both bowed ceremoniously and presented a letter bearing the tughra, the imperial seal. The audience which the Frankish princess had craved was granted and would take place within the hour. She was allowed only a few minutes to change her dress and prepare to go with the sultana's messengers.

  In fact, while Marianne hastened to her room, Latour-Maubourg knew a moment's hesitation, fearing the consequences of allowing the emperor's personal friend to go, unattended and at night, into the seraglio. He feared that the flowery terms of the invitation might conceal a trap. On the other hand, since Marianne's object was to enter the harem, it was scarcely possible for the French ambassador to request the favor of accompanying her, nor did the presence of the Aga of the Janissaries leave much room for argument. In any case the command, on a second reading, was unequivocal: the Princess Sant'Anna was to go to the seraglio alone. A closed litter was already waiting at the door. With a caïque and another litter, it would carry the princess to the place of the Sultan Valideh's choice and bring her back again by the same route when the audience was concluded.

  And so, when Marianne came down again some minutes later dressed for her audience, the ambassador said merely that he trusted they would not keep her all night, since he and Jolival proposed to wait up for her, whiling the time away with a game of chess.

  "And may God go with you!" he added in a lower tone, like a good Breton.

  As the caïque rounded the seraglio point, Marianne was thinking to herself that divine inspiration was precisely what she needed most. During the days of waiting she had gone over in her mind a hundred times the things she meant to say and had tried to picture the questions she would be asked and the answers she must make. But now that the time had come her brain felt curiously empty and she could not remember any of the speeches she had prepared so carefully.

  In the end, she gave up and concentrated instead on trying to calm her nerves by filling her lungs with the sea air, cooled by the evening freshness, and her eyes with the magical vision of the fabulous city before her. With the coming of night, the voices of the muezzins had fallen silent in the minarets of the great mosques, but the evening shadows, through which there still gleamed here and there the gold of a cupola or the rich molding of a palace, were pierced little by little by a multitude of tiny lights from the oiled paper lanterns which every citizen was bound to carry with him when he went out. The effect of all these little gilded lamps was charming and gave to the Ottoman capital the fairylike appearance of a vast colony of glowworms.

  They were on the Bosporus now, and the vast bulk of the seraglio's formidable walls loomed over the glittering waters. The black points of cypress trees showed where they enclosed a world of gardens, kiosks, palaces, stables, prisons, barracks, workshops and kitchens, providing occupation for some twenty thousand people: In a moment they would be landing at the old Byzantine jetty of worn marble that led by a flight of shallow steps up to the two medieval gates in the walls between the palace gardens and the shore. This was not the main entrance, for the Princess Sant'Anna, despite the ties of kinship which lay between her and the Queen Mother, was deemed to be on a private visit and so would not enter by the Sublime Porte in the usual way of ambassadors and other important persons. This was a private visit and the lateness of the hour, like the mode of entry, stressed its unofficial nature.

  But while the Black Eunuch involved himself in a host of explanations designed to convey this to the Frankish princess without undue offense to her pride, Marianne was thinking that really it did not matter to her in the least and that in fact she infinitely preferred it so. She had never wanted to be burdened with an official diplomatic mission, the emperor himself had stressed the private character of the undertaking and she had no conceivable wish to tread on Latour-Maubourg's toes, being only too well aware of the difficulties he was up against.

  The oars were shipped and the caïque drifted up to the jetty. Marianne was ushered from her awning into a kind of flat-bottomed egg-shaped container, hung with brocaded curtains and smelling strongly of sandalwood.

  Borne on the shoulders of half a dozen black slaves, the litter passed through the guard of janissaries, armed to the teeth, outside the gates and entered the scented, humid atmosphere of the gardens. Here were roses and jasmine in abundance. The salty sea smell was lost in that of thousands of flowers, and the slap of the waters was drowned in the music of the fountains and streams that cascaded over steps of porphyry and pink marble.

  Marianne stared about her, abandoning herself to the rhythm of the bearers. Very soon a fragile building appeared at the far end of an alley. It was surmounted by a translucent dome that shone like a huge, multicolored lantern in the darkness. This was a kiosk, one of the delicate, precious little pavilions with which the sultans loved to dot their gardens, each bringing to them something of his own life and tastes. This one, standing at the highest point of the gardens, was silhouetted against the dark background of the Asian shore and seemed to tremble on the brink of the Bosporus as if it feared to lean too far and fall to meet its reflection in the water. Around it was a little secret garden planted with tall cypresses and a carpet of pale blue hyacinths which the Bostanji Bashi, the head gardener whose dominion extended over all the gardens of the empire, kept in flower all the year round because they were the Sultan-Mother's favorite flowers.

  The delightful retreat, set apart from the somewhat forbidding mass of the seraglio as a whole, had a private, festive air with the rose-colored lanterns hung about it. Fragrant shrubs that looked as if they were covered with snow crowded up against its slender columns, and the exotic, turbanned shadows of the eunuchs of the guard passed to and fro against the blue-green and violet-tinted glass of the windows.

  As the slaves set down the litter a gigantic figure surged forward from between the pillars and bowed low to the visitor. Marianne beheld a round, smiling face, as black and shiny as if it had been well polished, under a tall, snow-white headdress in which gleamed a brooch of blood-red rubies. A magnificent robe, sable lined and covered with silver embroideries, fell majestically to his feet, covering a royal stomach which did honor to the palace kitchens.

  Speaking in a soft voice, in impeccable French, this imposing person introduced himself as the Khislar Aga, chief of the Black Eunuchs, at the visitor's service. Then he informed her with another bow that he had the honor to present the "noble lady come from Frankish lands to Her Highness and Sultan Valideh, most revered mother of the Omnipotent Padishah."

  Marianne thanked him briefly and with a little kick sent the long train of the green satin dress shimmering behind her like a changeable river of crystal and pearls. Instinctively she lifted her head, suddenly conscious that she was at that moment the representative of the greatest empire in the world. Then, gripping the slender sticks of her matching fan between nervous fingers to give herself confidence, she stepped forward onto the great blue silken carpet which flowed down into the gardens.

  In another moment she had paused, holding her breath to listen to the strains of a guitar, light and melancholy as they came to her, the strains of a guitar playing:

  Nous n'irons plus aux bois,

  Les lauriers sont coupés;

  La belle que voilà

  Ira les ramasser…

  Marianne felt the tears prick her eyelids, and there was something sticking in her throat, something that might have been pity. Here, in this easter
n palace, the simple song sung by children at play in France had the plaintive sound of a lament. And she wondered suddenly what kind of woman this was who lived here guarded by an ageless ritual. What was she going to find within those translucent walls? A fat woman, stuffed with sweets and self-pity? A little dried-up old woman cut off from the world? The sultana was roughly of an age with her cousin Josephine and so must be nearing fifty, which seemed a great age to the nineteen-year-old Marianne. Or a creature of exaggeratedly girlish ways, a superannuated school girl? No one had been able to give her even the faintest picture of the Creole girl who had risen to such a fabulous position, because not one of the people who had described her had ever set eyes on her. A woman might have told her more, but no European woman, to her knowledge, had passed the threshold of the seraglio since the death of Fanny Sebastiani. And all at once Marianne was afraid of what she was going to find, dearly though she had longed for this moment.

  The delicate notes of the song floated on the air. The Khislar Aga had paused, realizing that he was not being followed, and was waiting.

  "Our mistress likes to listen to the songs of her own land," he said pleasantly, "but she does not like to be kept waiting."

  The spell was broken. Thus recalled, Marianne smiled in apology.

  "Forgive me. It was so unexpected and so charming."

  "The songs of their native land are always charming to those who journey far from it. Do not apologize."

  They went forward again and the sounds of the guitar grew stronger, together with the scent of flowers which surrounded Marianne as soon as she entered the carved cedarwood doorway set with a multitude of tiny mirrors. Then, without warning, the vast form of the Khislar Aga which had blocked her view had stepped aside and she found herself on the threshold of a blue world…