Then he said,
“Listen to me, my darling – I have something to say to you.”
“What is it?” she asked apprehensively.
“Nothing frightening,” he replied quickly. “I just wanted to tell you that I cannot leave you alone when we have so little time together. I shall stay with you and hold you in my arms, as I did last night. But I will not make you mine as you were meant to be.”
He drew in his breath.
“You shall go to the seraglio pure and undefiled.”
Natasha’s fingers tightened on his and then she said in a low voice,
“But I want to be – yours! I want to – belong to you with my – body as I do already with my – mind and soul.”
Lord Athelstan shook his head.
“Do you think that I could live with myself afterwards,” he asked, “if I thought you would suffer in any way because I had taken advantage of your love?”
It was easy to say such things, Natasha thought.
But at times during the night she thought that the flames that burned so furiously in both of them would sweep away Lord Athelstan’s control and he would possess her as she wanted him to do.
Once he wound the long tresses of her hair around her neck and asked hoarsely,
“Shall I strangle you, my precious, so that no man shall ever look on you again and no man should ever presume to touch you?”
Natasha knew then that he was driven almost to breaking point and, because she loved him unbearably, she answered,
“No man shall ever – touch me but you – that I swear!”
“How can I think of you dead?” he asked.
“Don’t think of it,” she begged. “Just understand that our love will last for eternity. Even if we cannot see each other, I shall always be loving you! I shall always be somewhere, waiting for you until we meet again.”
“I want you – now!” he cried fiercely.
Then he was kissing wildly and passionately her lips, her neck, her breasts until she could no longer think, she could only feel his violence sweep over her like a raging fire that threatened to consume them both.
“I want you! I want you! You are mine – mine in the eyes of God!” Lord Athelstan cried.
But the self-control he had exercised all his life forced the fire to die down and then he was gentle and tender holding Natasha closely to him until she slept against his shoulder.
Only when she awoke with a start, annoyed with herself because she had been unconscious for some of their precious time together, did she find that he was still awake.
He was looking down at her with an expression in his eyes that softened his whole face.
“I had been – dreaming of you and – you were – here all that – time!” Natasha said, a little drowsily.
“You look so beautiful when you are asleep.”
“I want to be – beautiful for you.”
“You are!” he answered. “At the same time it would not matter to me how you looked. I know there is something so spiritual, so perfect in our love that it does not depend on anything material – not even beauty!”
That was true, Natasha thought. She would love him if he was maimed or even deformed.
She would love him if he was ill or if he could no longer speak and tell her how much she meant to him.
“We are so lucky – so marvellously lucky,” she said, “to have found each other! Whether it is for a short or a long time we know that we are complete, no longer two people – but one!”
“That is true!”
He kissed her mouth slowly and lingeringly.
Then his arms tightened and it seemed to her as if he drew not only her heart but her very soul from between her lips and made them his.
“You are mine!” he cried. “Mine until there is no Heaven and no earth – mine beyond the confines of thought!”
Chapter Eight
They had two days and three nights together when they touched the stars and Natasha held the moon in her arms.
They were happy as few people are privileged to be happy and it seemed as if the wonder of their love glowed like a light inside them, transforming their faces so that they were hardly recognisable even to each other.
There were no difficulties between them, no lovers’ tiffs – no moments when they felt slighted or irritated. Only the wonder of being together and a love that increased hour by hour.
There were inevitably moments when Lord Athelstan’s decision not to possess Natasha was hard to keep.
One evening after dinner was finished they were sitting in the Saloon and he was telling her of his travels and the interesting people he had met when she asked,
“There must have been many women in those different lands whom you loved and who loved you?”
“There were many women,” he admitted, “but love, as you well know, my darling, is a very different thing!”
“Is it?” she asked.
He put his arms around her and drew her close.
Then he lifted her chin and found her lips.
He kissed her slowly and possessively before he said quietly,
“This is love! It would be impossible for me to love you more than I do at this very moment!”
“Are you sure of that?” she asked, half-teasingly.
He kissed her again, kissed her until he knew that not only her lips but her whole body responded to him and something wild and fiery gleamed in her eyes.
“Does that answer your question?” he enquired.
“Not completely,” she replied “Perhaps you have felt like this for other women and then awakened in the morning to find, as you moved on to another City, that it was only a memory, a ghost you had left behind.”
She was really only teasing because she wanted to hear him tell her again and again how much he loved her.
But he took her seriously.
“How can you ask such questions?” he demanded. “How can you believe for one moment that what we feel for each other can compare with what I have felt for other women or that I should ever forget you?”
His lips became more passionate, demanding, almost violent, so that he compelled her to echo the flame that was rising in him.
He raised his head to say,
“Tell me you love me! I want to hear you say it so that I am utterly and completely convinced that you could never feel for another man as you feel for me!”
“Why will you not let me – show you that my – love is – greater than anything else in the whole – world?” Natasha whispered. “More than – fear, more than – life!”
She paused and put her arms around his neck.
“Love me, my darling! Make me yours! Let me belong to you just once – so that we can both know that our love is perfect and – that God meant us for each other!”
Her words inflamed Lord Athelstan. He kissed her until she was conscious of nothing but the fire burning on his lips.
Then he said in a voice deep and hoarse with passion,
“I desire you and my body aches for you until it is a torture to touch you and not make you mine!”
He looked down at her eyelids heavy with the passion he had aroused in her and the softness of her lips.
“But because I love you, because my love is greater even than human need, I will leave you as you are, pure and perfect – a woman at whose feet I worship!”
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he rose to his feet and went from the Saloon and she knew that he had gone on deck to seek the coolness of the night air.
It was some time before he came back to her.
Natasha was in bed waiting for him a little apprehensively, looking fragile against the white pillows, with her dark hair falling over the sheets.
He came into the cabin and stood looking at her. Then he crossed to her side and lifted her hand to his lips.
“Forgive me, my darling!” he said, “but you try me too hard – I am only a man!”
“The mos
t wonderful man in the world!” Natasha said softly.
“You understand?” he asked,
“I respect you and adore you,” she answered. “Forgive me for being so weak. I have not your – control over my – desires.”
It seemed to her that night as they lay together talking, with the starlight shining through the uncurtained portholes, that they were closer spiritually to each other than they had ever been before.
At the same time they were both acutely conscious that Constantinople was drawing nearer and nearer.
Natasha prayed that there would be a storm that would delay their passage, but the surface of the Black Sea was smooth.
Then, in the early morning sunlight, she saw the skyline of Constantinople for the first time.
Thousands of domes and minarets gleamed golden in the sun.
There were the busy lanes of shipping, as galleys, mahoons, battleships, vessels of every type, were converging on or leaving the Port.
The Corinth tied up alongside a quay, and Natasha knew that Lord Athelstan had made his plans so that they could be together until the last possible moment.
He ordered Hawkins to set up his tent flying the Union Jack bravely at the harbourside.
It was away from the busy heavily populated part of the Port – the City rose sheer above them. To the South, Natasha could see the Royal Palace set on its promontory looking across the strait towards Asia.
It seemed immense and she knew that she looked at the roofs of not only the Palace but the barracks, the stables, the kitchens, the prison, the torture chambers, the Hall of the Circumcision, the pleasure gardens and the Mosques, all of which housed thousands of souls to wait on the Sultan.
There were cypresses, dark and somehow menacing outside the battlemented walls and to Natasha they appeared like grim sentinels.
She did not go up on deck but stood at the porthole in her cabin looking out, knowing that in a short while she would have to say goodbye to Lord Athelstan.
She wondered how she could turn away and leave him.
She was to find that he equally could not face the moment of parting when he must watch her taken from him in a palanquin.
Hawkins had discovered that there was an English Man of War just a short distance from The Corinth, not tied up at the quay but anchored out in the river, the sailors coming backwards and forwards to the shore in rowboats.
On Lord Athelstan’s order, Hawkins went aboard H.M.S. Victorious and returned to say that the Captain would be deeply honoured to carry Lord Athelstan as his passenger to England.
The only difficulty was they were already behind schedule and he would wish to sail as soon as it was possible for his Lordship to come aboard.
It was as if this message made it easier for Lord Athelstan to go ahead with the preparations for Natasha to be carried to the seraglio.
‘What is the point,’ he asked himself, ‘of prolonging the agony, knowing that we must eventually part?’
It was better to make a clean cut than to linger on, torturing themselves until the pain was unendurable.
Even at the last moment he had hoped there would be some chance of Natasha being saved because the hostages had not been exchanged.
But Hawkins had gone into the City and come back with two pieces of news.
Lord Athelstan had known by his servant’s face that it was not what he longed to hear.
“I learnt in the bazaars, my Lord,” Hawkins said, “that His Imperial Majesty, the Czar, is dead.”
“Dead?” Lord Athelstan ejaculated.
“Yes, my Lord, but the Russians, I believe, are mourning him only officially – a great number are glad that his cruelties will no longer be continued.”
Lord Athelstan waited.
He knew that Hawkins had something else to tell him.
“The hostages have been exchanged, my Lord!”
Lord Athelstan did not answer and Hawkins said quietly,
“I delivered your Lordship’s message to the seraglio.”
There was evidence of this a short while later when three horsemen from the Sultan’s special guard of Janissaries arrived at the yacht.
They informed Lord Athelstan that the Caliph of the Faithful, Sultan Abdul Aziz wished to greet the representative of Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Victoria, and thanked Lord Athelstan for his courtesy in bringing to him a present from Shamyl the Avar, Imam of Daghestan.
“A palanquin with an escort will collect the lady in question within an hour,” Lord Athelstan was told. “In the meantime we have with us the clothes she must wear before entering the seraglio.”
They handed over an exquisitely painted box with a gold lock and hinges.
When Natasha opened it in her cabin, she saw the clothing she would be adorned in as a member of the harem.
She changed her caftan for the full crimson Chalvari, or full trousers, which showed beneath a gold damask robe with wide sleeves trailing almost to the ground.
It was buttoned with topazes and belted by a huge wide girdle of precious stones, the clasp fashioned of enormous diamonds.
The robe, or entari, was cut very low and showed the transparent gauze of a chemise.
There were bracelets for her wrists set with precious stones and diamonds to wear in her hair attached to very fine gold chains.
Every time she moved the gems glittered and shimmered in the sun.
Also for her hair there was a large aigrette fastened by a brooch and fashioned to represent a bunch of flowers, made of rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls.
Over it all she wore a full muslin veil that must be fastened across her face to hide everything but her eyes – the traditional yashmak.
When she was ready, she waited in her cabin.
It seemed that all emotion had left her and she was too numb with misery to feel anything but a blank despair.
The door opened and Lord Athelstan came to her.
She turned to look at him and their eyes said all that needed to be said between them. Already they were past words.
All night they had talked as, in the darkness, they had held each other close.
Now there was nothing left to be said.
He looked away from her.
“I have made arrangements that you will be collected from the tent so that we stand on British soil. The boat from the British Battleship will be waiting for me and, as you move away, I too will leave. I cannot watch you go.”
The pain in his voice made her long to put her arms around him.
“Everything has gone aboard,” he went on, “with the exception of the tent and the carpet we shall stand on.”
“How soon – ?” Natasha asked through dry lips.
“Hawkins will tell us when the procession is sighted coming from the seraglio. Then we must leave the yacht.”
Natasha looked around her cabin.
“We have been so – happy here.”
Lord Athelstan did not answer and she said,
“You will take – care of yourself, my darling? Remember – wherever you are – you still – belong to me!”
“Do you think I could ever forget that?” he answered. “You will always be in my heart.”
“I do not – wish you to feel – tied,” Natasha said. “You must marry and have – children – an heir to inherit your – house and your – title.”
“How can you think I could take another woman to be my wife?” Lord Athelstan enquired.
“This has been a – dream,” Natasha replied, “a dream so – wonderful so – perfect that it is not – reality. You have to go on – living in this world, my darling. There is work for you to do – and you must not – fail those who look to you for – leadership.”
Lord Athelstan drew in his breath and then he answered,
“What you are asking of me is impossible! Can a man who has once entered Heaven endure for the rest of his life the agonies of Hell?”
“You have always been – brave,” Natasha said softly.
; “My darling – my love! How can I let you go!”
It was the cry of sheer unbridled pain, but before Natasha could reply there came a knock at the cabin door.
“The procession is in sight, my Lord!”
The blood seemed to be drained both from Lord Athelstan’s face and Natasha’s.
They looked at each other.
Then, drawing a deep breath and lifting her chin, she opened the door and preceded him along the passage, up the companionway and onto the deck.
She knew that the Greek sailors were looking at her with curious eyes as she appeared in Turkish costume, but she crossed the gangplank and moved over the short grass towards Lord Athelstan’s tent.
Raising her eyes she could see, as Hawkins had said, the procession coming down the hill from the seraglio.
She could see the guards who escorted the huge red and gold palanquin she must travel in.
They were led by a band playing the strange tuneless music that always heralded the Sultan on his excursions in his Capital.
There also seemed to be a great number of other personages all in colourful clothes with waving plumes in their turbans or dark faces, which made Natasha guess that they were the Black Eunuchs.
She moved into the shadow of the tent and stood on the Persian carpet, drawing her muslin veil across her face and fastening it with a little gold hook that held it in place.
Lord Athelstan joined her and she saw him for the first time wearing his gold-embroidered diplomatic uniform with glinting decorations on his chest.
He looked resplendent, very dignified and a complete contrast to the gaudy procession of Turks coming towards them down the hill.
Natasha looked at him and, although her lips moved, no sound would come through them.
She was saying ‘goodbye’ with her heart, her soul, her whole body and she knew that after all it would not be difficult to die.
She could not live without him! The little coral and turquoise-decorated dagger she had bought in Tiflis was hard against her breast.
‘I will kill myself tonight!’ she thought. ‘There will be no point in waiting.’
Perhaps if God was merciful her spirit would be somewhere near Lord Athelstan as H.M.S. Victorious moved through the sea of Marmara and into the blue of the Mediterranean.
As Eagles Fly Page 15