[Marianne 5] - Marianne and the Lords of the East

by Juliette Benzoni

  "No, indeed, Your Highness. I feel perfectly well now."

  Nakshidil nodded and turned to look across the arm of the sea to where the clouds were piling up over the hills of Scutari.

  "Summer is nearly over," she observed with a touch of sadness. "The weather is changing and we shall probably have rain tomorrow. It will be good for the crops because the land is parched but after that will be the winter. It can be bitterly cold here and I dread it… But we will forget all that now. Tell me about yourself."

  "Me? But there is nothing interesting about me, Your Highness, except insofar as I am the mouthpiece of Napoleon."

  The sultana put up her hand with a gesture of impatience.

  "Let's leave your emperor for the present. His turn will come, although I cannot see what is to be said about him. Whatever you may think, I find you much more interesting than the great Napoleon. And so I want to know all about you. Tell me of your life."

  "My—my life?"

  "Yes, the whole of your life! As though I were your mother."

  "But, Your Highness, it is a long story—"

  "Never mind. We have the night before us. But I want to know—everything! There are so many stories about you already and I like to get at the truth. Besides, I am your cousin and would like to be your friend. Don't you need a friend who has some power?"

  The sultana's silky little hand was laid on Marianne's, but she was already responding impulsively: "Oh, yes!" It was spoken with such feeling that her companion smiled and was confirmed in her initial conviction that this young and ravishingly lovely creature stood in desperate need of help. Accustomed by the perilous life she had been forced to lead in this palace before becoming the mistress of it, to watch the slightest change of expression in the faces of others with a closeness on which her very life might depend, Nakshidil had been struck from Marianne's first appearance by the drawn look on her lovely face and by the unconscious pathos of her great green eyes. Napoleon's envoy was very far from anything she had expected.

  The rumors which had been going around the Mediterranean in the past weeks had created a fantastic picture of a bold courtesan, a kind of boudoir Messalina, decked out by the emperor her lover in a princess's crown, hardened in every kind of trickery and cunning and ready to stop at nothing, however flagrant, to ensure the success of her mission. Face to face with the reality, it had not taken the sultana long to realize that this picture was a complete fantasy, a mere caricature concocted by the Foreign Office which had nothing to do with reality.

  It was a caricature, moreover, which had been causing her a good deal of secret annoyance. The Princess Sant'Anna was a kinswoman, if a distant one, and it was tiresome to have such unpleasant things said about a member of her own family. Consequently, a wish to form her own opinion had played no small part in her decision to grant the accused an audience. Now she wanted to hear all about this strange, beautiful young woman who seemed to bear a burden too heavy for her, yet bore it with pride.

  Marianne began, a little shyly and reticently, to give a brief, superficial sketch of her past life but yielded little by little to her companion's very evident sympathy and understanding. Strange as the events of her own life had been so far, Nakshidil's far outdid them, for it was a much longer road from a convent in Nantes to the harem of the Grand Signior and a position of absolute power than from Selton Hall to the Palazzo Sant'Anna, even by the way of Napoleon's bed.

  When she fell silent at last, she found that she had described it all down to the smallest detail and that it must be very late because the silence that lay all about the little terrace where the two women sat was much deeper than it had been. The noises of the city had died away and from the sea there came only the gentle slap of the waves and the measured tread of the guards at the seraglio gates.

  The sultana, for her part, had not moved. She sat so still in fact that Marianne had the sudden, unnerving thought that she had fallen asleep. But she was only lost in thought, for a moment later Marianne heard her sigh.

  "You've done a great many more stupid things than I ever did, for I only went where my fate directed, but I can't see that anyone could possibly blame you. When I think about it, love is to blame. It is love that has brought you both great suffering and great exaltation, set you on the strange road which has brought you to me."

  "Your Highness!" Marianne said, stammering a little. "I beg you will not judge me too harshly—"

  Nakshidil sighed again; then suddenly she laughed.

  "Judge you? My poor child! Say rather that I envy you."

  "Envy me?"

  "Why, yes! You have beauty, nobility, a famous name, you have wits and courage and you have that most precious and fragile of all gifts: youth. And more than that, you have love. I know, you are going to tell me that love has brought you little joy and that just at this moment you could well do without it, but even so it is there, driving you on and filling your life, coursing with the youth in your veins. And then you are free, you have the right to do what you will with your own life, even to destroy yourself if you like, in pursuit of this love of yours. The whole world is open to you. Yes, I envy you. You can never know how much I envy you."

  "Your Highness!" Marianne said, startled by the depth of sadness and regret in the soft voice, schooled to years of whispers.

  But Nakshidil did not hear her. The story told her by her visitor had carved a breach in the wall in which her spirit was imprisoned, and all her regrets, her aching desires, came pouring through it like the pounding seas through a broken dike.

  "Do you know what it means," she went on, more softly still, "do you know what it means to be twenty years old and to learn about love in an old man's arms? To dream of wide open spaces, of sailing the seas and galloping with the morning breeze on your face, of nights under huge, free skies, listening to the singing of the blacks and breathing in the scents of the islands—only to wake and find yourself in a cage among scheming eunuchs and an army of stupid, vindictive women with the souls of slaves? Do you know what it is to be always longing for a young man's love, for a young man's arms about you, strong and eager, as you lie on your silken cushions in the lonely room whence they take you from time to time to the bed of a man too old to make the contrast anything but bitter… And all this, year after mortal year—the years that might have been the richest and warmest of your life?"

  "Do you—do you mean that you have never known—love?" Marianne murmured, at once stricken and incredulous.

  The fair head stirred and the movement, slight as it was, drew a flash from the huge rose diamond that adorned it.

  "I have known the love of Selim. He was the son of my husband, old Abdul Hamid. He was young, certainly—and he loved me with such passion that he chose to die to save me, me and my son, when the usurper Mustapha and the janissaries swept through the palace. There was much warmth in his love and I was very fond of him, but as for the burning passion I might have known with—with another who filled my dreams when I was fifteen, the fever of love, the need to give and to take, no—those are things I have never known. So, little girl, forget your sufferings, forget all that you have endured because you still have the chance and the right to fight for your happiness. I will help you."

  "Your Highness is very good, but it is not right for me to think only of the man I love. You forget that I am to bear a child, a child who would raise an impassable barrier between us, even if I could ever find him again."

  "That is true. I was forgetting that terrible experience of yours and its consequences. We must find a remedy for those as well. You don't want to keep the child, do you? If I understood you rightly—"

  "I hate it, Your Highness, just as I hated the man who fathered it. It is like a monstrous, loathsome thing inside me, feeding on my flesh and blood."

  "I understand. But at this late stage abortion would be dangerous. Your best course would be to retire to one of my houses and live there in seclusion until the child is born. I will take charge of it after that, a
nd I promise you that you will never hear of it again. I will have it brought up by people of my own."

  But Marianne shook her head. She was not prepared to spend the next few months in waiting for an event which both frightened and disgusted her. As for the dangers the sultana had mentioned, she was well aware of them but feared them much less than the thought of living for five months cut off from all possibility of finding Jason again.

  "I will have them begin the search for this American privateer of yours first thing in the morning," Nakshidil said after a moment, reading her young kinswoman's thoughts like an open book. "It is bound to take some time in any case. Are you still set on risking your life?"

  "Yes. I'm only sorry to have waited so long, simply because I did not know of anyone who could help me. But now I must take the risk. If this child lives, even if I never see it, even if the whole world lies between us, there will still be an invisible tie, a living witness to all that I suffered at the hands of that abominable creature."

  There was a note of strain and fierce denial in the younger woman's voice and her companion recognized it. Remembering how she herself had felt on learning that the seed of the aged sultan was germinating in the mysterious depths of her own body, and the kind of revulsion which not even the triumphant prospect before her could altogether extinguish, she could guess at Marianne's frantic urge to tear out of her womb the thing that had been planted there in a fashion so horrible that she could not even bear to think of it as a child but only as a kind of monstrous growth, a cancer devouring her life and all her hopes of happiness. Once again she put out her hand and pressed Marianne's, but without speaking, and her silence added to the girl's unhappiness.

  "I—I disgust you, don't I?" she murmured.

  "Disgust me? My poor child! You don't know what you're saying. The truth is that I am afraid for you. In the passion of your love and your longing for your lover, you are prepared to embark on a perilous course—and I fear you have not properly estimated the dangers and difficulties of it. Abortion is rare here, because our country can never have too many men. Only—forgive me, but I must speak plainly—only prostitutes regularly resort to it, and I will spare you the details of how they go about it. Why can't you bring yourself to accept my offer? I should never forgive myself if any harm should come to you. And you must see that it would be foolish to lose your life over this, for then you could never be with your lover again in this world. Is that what you want?"

  "Of course not! I want to live; but if, with God's help, I were ever to meet him again, he would turn from me in disgust—indeed, he has already done so. He would not believe a word of what I tried to tell him. And so rather than endure his scorn, I would face death, yes, a thousand times over! I feel as though once I'm rid of it, I shall be somehow cleansed, as if I'll have recovered from an infectious illness. But if the child were living—anywhere in the world—I could not feel that. It must never be anything more than a disease, faceless and formless, of which I have been cured, and then I shall feel clean and whole again."

  "Or else you will be dead." The Sultan Valideh sighed. "Very well, since you are so set on it there is nothing I can do except—"

  "The thing I ask?"

  "Yes. But there is only one person here capable of carrying out this… operation with less than a fifty percent chance of killing you."

  "I'll take that chance. Fifty percent is pretty good."

  "No. It's very bad, but there's no other way. Listen. There is a woman living in the district of Kassim Pasha on the other side of the Golden Horn, between the old synagogue and the Nightingale River. She is a Jewess called Rebecca, the daughter of a skilled physician, Judah ben Nathan. She plies the trade of midwife, and with some skill by all accounts. No dockside whores or street harlots from the arsenal are admitted to her house, but I know that she has lent her services from time to time, at a price, to the adulterous wife of some man in high position, thereby saving her from certain death. She is known also to the rich Europeans of Pera and to the Phanariot Greek nobility, but her secret is well kept and Rebecca knows that silence is the key to her continued prosperity. She will not take you without a strong recommendation."

  Marianne's hopes faded once again.

  "Money?" she faltered. "Does she want very much? Everything I had was stolen from me on board Jason Beaufort's ship—"

  "Don't worry about that. If I send you to Rebecca, then it is my affair. One of my women shall come to you tomorrow after dark with a closed carriage. She will take you to the Jewess, who will already have received her payment and her instructions. My woman will remain with you there for as long as necessary and then bring you by water to a house belonging to me in the vicinity of the Eyub cemetery where you may rest for a few days. Your ambassador will know only that you have gone with me on a brief visit to my palace at Scutari, where I shall be going the day after tomorrow."

  As she spoke, the weight began to lift from Marianne's heart, to be replaced by a sense of profound gratitude. By the time the soft, lisping voice had ceased, her eyes were full of tears. She slid to her knees and, lifting the hand that still rested on her own, she raised it to her lips.

  "Your Highness," she murmured, "how can I thank you—"

  "Why, by saying nothing. You will embarrass me if you insist on thanking me so much. This is a very small thing I do for you—and it is long since I had to do with an affair of the heart. You can't think how much I am enjoying it. Now, come—" She rose and shook out her pale-colored draperies, as though in haste now to shake off the burden of her confidences.

  "It grows cold," she said, "and must be shockingly late besides. Your Monsieur de Latour-Maubourg must be wondering what has become of you. Your Breton is capable of imagining anything! He probably thinks I've had you sewn into a sack and dropped into the Bosporus with a stone tied round your neck. Or else that Mr. Canning has somehow spirited you away—" She laughed, relieved perhaps to have dealt with an awkward situation, and possibly also by the chance to unburden herself of some of the accumulated bitterness of her years. She chattered like a schoolgirl as she settled her muslin veils about her with all the care of a woman whose habit it is never to appear looking less than her best.

  Marianne rose automatically and followed her. They made their way quickly back to the kiosk, where the file of eunuchs was still gravely waiting, and Marianne, hearing her companion giving orders for her return to the embassy with a doubled escort on account of the lateness of the hour, was appalled to realize that she had spent the best part of the night at the palace and still the mission entrusted to her by Napoleon remained unfulfilled. With a graciousness that was not perhaps entirely disinterested, the sultana had encouraged her to talk about herself, turning what had begun as a diplomatic audience into a purely family occasion in which the emperor and his concerns were out of place, and putting under a strong obligation of gratitude one who ordinarily should have been thinking of nothing but the success of her mission.

  When, therefore, Nakshidil led her guest back into the pavilion and proposed a final cup of coffee while they waited for the arrival of the litter, Marianne was quick to accept, even if one more dose of that comforting beverage meant that she would not get a wink of sleep that night, or what was left of it.

  She spoke seriously, striving to banish a trace of compunction at bringing the sultana back to what was evidently unwelcome ground.

  "Your Highness has been so very kind to me tonight that you have made me forget the real reason for my coming here. I am ashamed to think that I have talked of almost nothing but myself when there are so many more important matters at stake. May I know how Your Highness is disposed to regard those things I have said in confidence and whether you will consider mentioning them to His Highness the sultan?"

  "Talk to him? Well, I might, but"—and here she sighed—"I am afraid he will not listen to me. It is true that my son's love for me is complete and unchanging, but my influence is no longer what it was and neither is his admiration for yo
ur emperor."

  "But why not? Is it the divorce?"

  "No. Rather it is because of certain clauses in the Treaty of Tilsit, of which he was informed by Mr. Canning, who had them from what source I do not know. It seems there was a letter from Napoleon to the tsar, dated February 2, 1808, in which the emperor put forward a proposal for the partition of the Ottoman Empire. Russia was to have the Balkans and Turkey in Asia; Austria, Serbia and Bosnia; France, Egypt and Syria, which would be a magnificent base for Napoleon to attack the British power in the Indies. So you see, we have small cause to love the emperor."

  Marianne felt as if the ground were shifting under her feet and mentally cursed Napoleon's epistolary indiscretions. What made him write such dangerous letters to a man he was not wholly sure of? Was he so delighted with Alexander as to forget even the most elementary rules of caution? What could she say now to rid the Turks of their very reasonable belief that the French emperor was prepared to sell them to the highest bidder? Should she deny it? There was small chance that she would be believed, and in any case it was becoming increasingly unlikely that she could persuade them to go on getting themselves killed to facilitate Napoleon's invasion of Russia.

  However, she was determined to do her duty to the end, and so she went in gallantly to attack the English position.

  "Your Highness is quite sure that the letter is genuine? The Foreign Office has never balked at forgery where its interests were concerned, nor do I see how secret clauses of the Treaty of Tilsit, how a letter addressed to the tsar in person—" She broke off, realizing that she had lost her audience. The two women had remained standing in the center of the room, but now the sultana was engaged in prowling slowly around and around her visitor. It was evident that she had quite lost interest in a political discussion to which she felt she had already given a sufficient answer, and she was subjecting Marianne's dress to the detailed scrutiny which any woman, be she empress or no, reserves for matters of such vital importance.