Marianne and the Lords of the East

by Жюльетта Бенцони

  Marianne took a deep breath and forced herself to keep calm. She could see that he was studying her face closely. He was evidently expecting her to lose her temper, to make one of those calculated outbursts of indignation that came so easily to women in love and deceived nobody. Easily, she sidestepped the trap and leaned back in her seat, laughing gently.

  "That is not very imaginative of you, Your Excellency. Do you think there is only one reason that a woman might wish to help a man when he's in trouble?"

  "Of course not. But this Mr. Beaufort is not your brother, is he? And you have undertaken a long and dangerous voyage to come and plead for him."

  "Long and dangerous? Crossing the Black Sea? Really, my lord Duke, let us be serious." She stood up suddenly, her face growing very serious indeed, and said austerely: "I have known Jason Beaufort a very long time. The first time I met him was at my aunt's house, Selton Hall, where he was a guest, received there as he was everywhere in England. He was acquainted there with the Prince of Wales. To me, he is a very dear friend, as I said, a childhood friend."

  "A childhood friend? You swear it?"

  She heard the quiver of jealousy, bitter and desperate, in his voice and knew that if she wanted to save Jason it was necessary to convince him. With the faintest shrug of her lovely shoulders, she murmured in a tone of gentle raillery: "Why, of course I swear. But, although I hesitate to say it, my lord Duke, surely you are behaving a little like a jealous husband—rather than a friend whom I have known only a short time, but to whom I had looked for more gentleness and understanding… for more affection, even, considering the old ties between us…"

  He was staring at her intently, breathing rather hard, as though trying to read to the bottom of the green eyes, as deep and compelling as the sea. Gradually, Marianne felt something yield and relax in him.

  "Come," he said at last, taking her by the hand and hurrying her quickly inside.

  She followed him through the little yellow salon where the candles were already guttering, across a wide landing tiled in black marble and into a huge office, lit only by a nightlight on the desk. The long blue velvet curtains were tightly drawn and the room felt as close and dark as a tomb.

  Still holding her hand, the duke went straight to the writing table, which was littered with papers and a heap of green leatherbound dispatch boxes. There he released her at last. Not even pausing to sit down, he opened a drawer and took out a large sheet of paper stamped with the double-headed eagle and already covered with writing. A space had been left blank. He filled it in, added a few more words and signed with a nervous scrawl.

  Marianne had managed to read some of it over his shoulder, and her heart beat faster as she realized that it was an order for the release of Jason and his men. But then, while Richelieu was hunting for sealing wax and melting it at the candle, her eyes wandered over the remainder of the desk and paused for a moment on a partially folded document. She was not able to read more than a few words, but what she read struck her so forcibly that it was all she could do not to put out her hand and pick it up.

  Meanwhile, the duke had finished writing. He reread the order quickly and then handed it to Marianne.

  "There. You have only to give that to the commander of the citadel and your childhood friend will be instantly restored to you, along with those who were captured with him."

  Flushed with happiness, Marianne took the precious paper and slipped it into a pocket cunningly hidden in a fold of her skirt.

  "I am deeply grateful," she said, much moved. "But—may I ask if this includes the restitution of the ship?"

  Richelieu stiffened and frowned.

  "The ship? No. I am sorry but it is out of my power. By the law of the sea it belongs now to the Russian navy."

  "But surely, Your Excellency, you have no right to deprive a harmless foreigner of his sole means of livelihood? What good is a seaman without a ship?"

  "I don't know, my dear, but I have already gone as far as I dare in offering to release a man whose country is at this moment at war with our ally, England. I have given a fighting man back to America. Don't ask me to give her a ship of war as well. The brig is a fine vessel. Our navy will make good use of her."

  "Your navy? Indeed, my lord Duke, I begin to ask myself if there is anything French left in you. Your forebears must be turning in their graves if they can hear you."

  Unable to contain herself any longer, she had allowed her indignation to blaze forth, and the governor blanched at the icy contempt that showed clearly in her tone.

  "You have no right to say that!" he cried, his voice rising to the curiously shrill note it had in anger. "Russia is a true friend. She took me in when France had cast me out and now she is mustering all her forces to fight against the usurper, against this man who, to satisfy his own insane ambition, has not shrunk from putting all Europe to fire and slaughter. Russia is prepared to shed her own blood to save France from this scourge."

  "To save France—but France has never asked to be saved. And if what they say in the town is true, you, the Duc de Richelieu, are going to march tomorrow at the head of the Georgian troops—"

  "To crush Napoleon! Yes, I am! And gladly!"

  There was a moment's silence, while both sides paused for breath. Marianne, breathless and blazing-eyed, could barely contain herself, but she meant to stop this man going to fight against his own people in the ranks of the tsar if it was the last thing she did.

  "So, you are going to fight him? Very well. But have you thought that in fighting him you will also be fighting men of your own blood, your fellow countrymen, your brothers and your peers?"

  "My brothers? The scum thrown up by the revolution and dressed up in fancy titles? Really, Madame!"

  "Your peers, I said! Not Ney and Augereau, Murat or Davout, but men with names like Ségur, Colbert, Montesquiou, Castellane, Fezensac and d'Aboville—to say nothing of Poniatowski and Radziwill! Because you will be raising your sword against them, too, Monsieur de Richelieu, when you charge at the head of your half-savage Tatars!"

  "Be quiet! I am bound to aid my friends."

  "Say your new friends, rather! Very well, then, my lord Duke, but take care that you do not serve the tsar an ill turn."

  "An ill turn? What do you mean by that?"

  Marianne smiled, pleased to have struck a spark of anxiety in the duke's eyes. She had a feeling that her blows had struck home more truly than she had dared to hope. And a fiendish idea had just occurred to her, one whose destructive power she meant to put to the test.

  "Nothing. Or nothing I can be sure of. But please, never mind. Forgive me if I spoke too sharply just now. You see—I like you very much. I cannot help myself, and not for anything in the world would I have you come to regret your—your truly generous heart. You have been so kind to me and to my friends. I would do anything to keep you from falling into a trap, even if it made you accuse me of Bonapartist sympathies, although of course it is not true."

  Richelieu softened immediately.

  "My dear Princess, I know that. And I believe in your friendship. It is in the name of that friendship that I beg you to speak. If you have discovered anything that affects me, you must tell it to me."

  She gazed into his eyes and uttered a deep sigh. Then she shrugged.

  "You are right. This is no time for scruples. Listen, then. You know that I came here from Constantinople. While there, I became friendly with Princess Morousi, the widow of the former hospodar of Walachia, and it was she who gave me what I can hardly call a warning, for at the time it seemed to me no more than a piece of gossip of no great importance."

  "Tell me. She is not a woman with the reputation of an idle gossip."

  "Very well. Then I will go straight to the point. Are you quite sure of the regiments that have just landed? It was Prince Tsitsanov who sent them, was it not?"

  "Yes, but I fail to see—"

  "You will. It is less than ten years, I believe, since Georgia came under Russian control? The majority
of the people there are loyal, but not all. As for Prince Tsitsanov, according to what I was told he seems to have been finding out that Tiflis is a long way from St. Petersburg and that his governorship had something vice-regal about it. From vice-regal to regal is not so very far, my dear Duke, and by asking the prince for troops you provided him with a convenient method of getting rid of unwanted troublemakers. He is not going to miss those two regiments, you may be sure of that. As to how they will behave under fire, shoulder to shoulder with the Muscovites whom they detest… But there, as I said, I am not sure of this. What I am telling you is idle drawing room chatter, nothing more. I may very well be maligning Prince Tsitsanov—"

  "But on the other hand, what you say may easily be true."

  The duke had dropped into a chair behind the desk and was gnawing his thumb with a gloomy expression. Marianne stood for a moment, gauging the effect of her words. The man was certainly a genius when it came to organization. He was a great colonial administrator and possibly a great diplomat, but he was also a worried man, a man who lived on his nerves, and in these aspects of his character he was showing himself more vulnerable than she had dared to hope.

  She hesitated, uncertain of her next move. Richelieu, staring into space, appeared to have forgotten her entirely. And then there was the order for Jason's release burning a hole in her pocket. She was impatient now to get away from the governor's palace and hurry to the citadel. And yet something drew her to that open letter on the desk, which was stirring slightly in a faint breath of air come from nowhere in that close room, almost within her reach as though to tease her.

  The silence prolonged itself and at last Marianne gave a small cough.

  "Your Excellency," she said, "I am sorry to disturb you when you are thinking, but if I might ask you to see me home? It is very late and—"

  Before the words were out of her mouth he was on his feet and was stumbling toward her like a man half out of his mind with worry, where she stood like a ghostly vision in the dimly lighted room.

  "Don't leave me," he said brokenly. "Don't leave me alone—not now! I don't want to be alone here tonight."

  "But why ever not? What have I said to alarm you so? For you are afraid, aren't you?"

  "Yes, I am afraid. But not for myself. I am afraid of what I was about to do. But for you—but for the advice you have just given me, I might have gone to Alexander bringing disaster, betrayal, even death. And that to the man to whom I owe everything, who has been good enough to call me his friend—"

  "You mean—that you will not go?"

  "Just that. I will stay here. The Georgian troops will be sent back again tomorrow. Only the Tatars whom I have trained myself and can trust will set out for Kiev. And I shall remain behind."

  A wave of joy swept over Marianne. Even now she could hardly believe that she had won, won all along the line. Within the hour Jason would be free, and tomorrow Richelieu would remain in Odessa and two regiments of troops would never reach the battlefield. It was almost unbelievable. It was too much, and if she had only been able to recover the Sea Witch as well…

  "Is it because of what I said to you?" she asked quietly.

  "What did you say?"

  "You will not fight against your own people?"

  Marianne felt the duke's hands tremble as they gripped her shoulders.

  "I cannot fight my own brothers, however misguided, yes, there is that… But you have also made me see that by leaving new Russia I should be leaving the field open for others' ambitions. If I go, what is to stop Tsitsanov or anyone else from stepping in? The Crimea needs to be strongly defended. I must stay. Without me, God knows what might happen."

  Marianne was seized with a sudden and highly inappropriate desire to laugh. Politics was certainly a most peculiar game, and its practitioners the strangest people. You could rely on them to go one better and her spurious information had been a wild success. The duke had built on it in a way she could never have expected.

  However, she managed to choke back the laughter that was bubbling up in her and merely smiled, although the eyes that met Richelieu's were twinkling so gaily that it was a wonder they did not betray her. Happily for her, the duke mistook the real cause.

  "You are wonderful," he said softly. "Truly, I think that Providence herself must have sent you to me. Are you really a woman, or are you an angel in disguise? The loveliest of all the angels. An angel with emerald eyes, unutterably sweet and beautiful, clad in the shape of an adorable woman…"

  He was standing very close to her and all at once his hands slid down from her shoulders to encircle her waist. For a panic-stricken moment she saw the duke's tormented face near to hers, his dark gaze thickened with desire like a pool when the bottom was stirred up. She tried to push him away, startled to find him suddenly transformed into a different man.

  "Your Excellency, please, let me go! I must go—I have to go home."

  "No. You shall not go. Not tonight, at least. I can recognize fortune when she appears, for she comes all too rarely. You are my chance, my one chance of happiness. I knew it the moment I saw you, the other day, down there on the crowded quayside. You were like a fairy hovering above a reeking bog. And you were beautiful, as beautiful as light itself. You have saved me tonight—"

  "Nonsense. I have merely given you some good advice. Anyone would think to hear you that I had snatched you from the jaws of death."

  "You cannot understand. The thing you have saved me from was worse than death. It is a curse, a curse that has hung over me for years. God Himself has sent you. He has heard my prayers…"

  His hold on her tightened and Marianne felt a moment's terror as she realized that she was powerless against him. That thin, almost fragile-looking body concealed a wholly unsuspected nervous strength. His arms closed about her like a vise and he was deaf to her entreaties, as though he had become quite suddenly another person. And he was talking so strangely. What had God to do with the fierce access of desire which had made him seize her like this?

  "A curse?" she gasped, struggling to get her breath. "Whatever do you mean? I don't understand."

  He had buried his face in the soft hollow of her shoulder and was covering it with kisses, his lips traveling by degrees up the slender neck.

  "You can never understand, so do not try. Give me this night, only this one night, and I will let you go. I'll give you anything you want… Only let me love you… It is so long since I have known what it is to love. I thought I never should… never again. But you are so lovely, so desirable… You have brought me to life again…"

  Was he mad? What did he mean? He was squeezing her so tightly that she could almost hear her ribs cracking, and yet at the same time the softness of his lips upon her quivering flesh was almost unbearable. Marianne was conscious of a sudden lump in her throat and she knew, even in the midst of her anger and her shame, that she no longer had the will to fight. It was so long since she too had known the sweetness of love and of a man's touch caressing her body. Not since that unknown lover—some Greek fisherman, had he been?—had taken her in the recesses of a cave so dark that she had never even seen his face. He had been no more than a vague form in the night, a kind of phantom, yet he had given her the most exquisite pleasure.

  The soft touch of his mouth was on her cheek, had found her lips, which parted of themselves. Her heart was thudding like a hammer in her chest and when a hand crept up to her breast and imprisoned it, she felt as if her legs were giving way beneath her. It was a simple matter for the duke to lower her gently on to the velvet-covered sofa which stood close by the desk.

  He took his lips from hers as he laid her down and turned briefly to extinguish the candles. The room was plunged into darkness. Her head swimming and her limbs on fire, Marianne thought for an instant that she was back again in that glorious cave in Corfu. She was at the heart of an impenetrable darkness in which there was nothing, only a warm, tobacco-scented breath and two hands that divested her skillfully of her dress and began a pa
ssionate exploration of her body.

  He was quite silent now, and his only contact with her was through those roving hands, caressing her breasts, belly and thighs, lingering over each new revelation, before resuming their exquisitely titillating voyage of discovery, until it seemed to Marianne that she must go mad. Her whole body was on fire and crying out for the satisfaction of its primitive desires. So that it was she, at last, who drew him down to her.

  She reached up and linked her arms about the duke's neck, seeking his lips, and they fell back together on to the cushions, she giving a little gasp of pleasure as she felt his weight upon her and sensed the pent-up passion in his body. In her eagerness to satisfy a hunger which had been too long denied and was now brutally awakened, she was already offering herself, but she waited in vain.

  Silence fell, thick and frightening. The weight removed itself from her body and then, quite suddenly, out of the enveloping darkness, as thick and black as the tomb, there came the sound of a sob.

  Marianne got up quickly and felt her way to the desk. Her trembling fingers found flint and tinder, and she struck a light and first one and then another candle came to life, revealing the room with its heavy furniture, its thick curtains and its oppressively businesslike atmosphere, as far removed as it was possible to be from the delirium of love.

  The first thing to catch Marianne's eye was her dress, lying in a snowy heap of satin on the end of the sofa. She snatched at it in a kind of fury to cover her shivering nakedness, still striving to control her breathing and calm the frenzied beating of her heart. It was only then she saw the duke.

  He was sitting on the edge of a chair, his head in his hands and crying like a child whom Santa Claus had forgotten. His shoulders were shaking with sobs and he was shivering so wretchedly that all Marianne's feelings of bitter frustration were swallowed up in pity for him. At that moment, the powerful governor of new Russia looked more wretched and broken than the least of the Armenian beggars that crowded the port of Odessa.

  Hurriedly, she slipped into her dress and did what she could to tidy her hair. She could not bring herself to break the silence, preferring rather to wait for his misery to subside, for she sensed in some confused fashion that it sprang from a deep and private hurt. But when, after a little while, his sobs showed no sign of abating, she went to him and laid one hand timidly on his shoulder.