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

by Juliette Benzoni

  Nakshidil extended a cautious finger and stroked one of the full green satin sleeves with its frosting of crystal beads. She sighed.

  "That dress is truly ravishing. I have never liked these long sheaths that Rose has made so fashionable. I preferred the hoops and frills of my youth. But this is enchanting. I wonder what I should look like in such a dress…"

  Marianne was aware of a moment's hesitation while she adjusted herself to the ease with which the sultana passed from matters of state to feminine frivolities. Should she lend herself to the game? Was it simply an attempt to evade the subject, or had this woman who had risen to such dizzy heights still kept something of her incurable Creole frivolity? It did not take her long to decide. Smiling as if no word of politics had ever passed her lips, she said: "I hardly dare to ask if Your Highness would care to try it on—"

  Nakshidil's face was transformed instantly.

  "Really? Would you let me?"

  Even before Marianne could answer, a brief command had summoned the women whose duty it was to help their mistress to undress, another brought forth a tall, gold-framed mirror in which it was possible to see oneself from head to foot, and a third sealed the entrance to the pavilion.

  A moment later Marianne found herself standing in her under-petticoat of fine lawn watching as Nakshidil stripped off sky-blue muslins faster than her women could assist her without snagging them. But the discarded veils were cast aside as contemptuously as if they had been a heap of old rags while one of the women proffered the dress which she had been helping Marianne to remove.

  Divested of her clothes, the fair Creole stood up for a moment as naked as a fish and as coolly unconcerned about it as any woman long accustomed to the communal bathing and beauty care of the harem. And her young cousin saw to her amazement that her body was as smooth and faultless as that of a woman of thirty. There was no trace of slackness or of sagging flesh, not a discolored vein to be seen, and Marianne was reminded sadly of the lament she had heard so short a time before.

  That form, with its voluptuous curves, recalled to her another daughter of those distant islands, Fortunée Hamelin. It was so obviously made for love, a perfect instrument designed to bend and vibrate to the fierce tempest of sensual passion which it had never truly known. Nor had the single pregnancy left the slightest trace. This beauty had the pointless, lonely splendor of a museum piece.

  A feeling of profound pity swept over Marianne as Nakshidil emerged, as excited as a small girl, from the shimmering folds of the sea-green dress and let its heavy folds drape themselves about her. The dress was too long, its rightful owner being somewhat the taller of the two, but apart from that it fitted perfectly, so perfectly indeed that the sultana clapped her hands delightedly.

  "Oh," she cried, "how I should love to own this dress!"

  Marianne had a mental vision of herself returning to the embassy in her petticoat, since there was really nothing she could do but make a present of the dress. But, equal to anything that might help to save her mission and install her firmly in the sultana's good graces, she did not hesitate, but spoke up cheerfully: "If Your Highness will lend me a cloak or something so that I may not shock people when I go back to the embassy, I shall be happy to present you with the dress since you like it so much."

  The blue eyes sparkled and gazed eagerly at Marianne.

  "You would give me your dress?" Nakshidil said. "Even though we do not resume our former relations with Napoleon?"

  Marianne controlled herself sufficiently to give no sign. Her smile lost none of its warmth or sweetness and she managed to sustain a dignity and unconcern which came none too easily when dressed only in one's petticoat.

  "Friendship is one thing," she said quietly, "and politics are quite another, very different as it seems to me. This is a gift from the heart—and I am only conscious of how unworthy it is. I wish I had something more precious to offer to Your Highness in token of my gratitude—"

  The sultana's laugh held real amusement.

  "I begin to think your emperor would be well advised to put you in Latour-Maubourg's place! You're a much better diplomat than he is—"

  Then, picking up the skirts that were too long for her, she went to her visitor and hugged her with true Creole warmth.

  Still with her arms around her, she went on with sudden seriousness: "I can do nothing for your emperor, my child. Believe me, it is not from ill will. I don't even bear him any grudge over Rose's divorce or that notorious letter. There are such things as political necessities, I know that, and, as you say, these have nothing to do with human feelings. Those who serve them must forget that they have hearts—and sometimes consciences also. But things are going very badly for us on the Danube. My son, the sultan, yearns for a well-trained, modern army, but he has to meet the Russians with an undisciplined horde which, though gallant, is eaten with corruption. Its fighting methods are medieval and it is dominated by the janissaries, with their outdated ideas and vendettas. No wonder it suffers heavy losses. Our grand vizier is shut up in Rustchuk asking for assistance and calling for an armistice—"

  "You would consider—making peace?" Marianne gasped with a sudden pang.

  "Short of a miracle—and I don't believe in miracles when dealing with an empire that would gladly rob us of the Dardanelles—we shall have to make peace before the winter is out. Khaled, the grand vizier, makes no secret of his desire to treat with Kutuzov because he is under continual attack by Ataman Platov's cossacks and running short of men."

  "But you must hold out, Your Highness!" Marianne implored her. "The emperor does not ask for your continued resistance without reason. Very soon now—"

  "Nearly a year—"

  "Sooner, perhaps. I can tell you that Marshal Davoust and your cousin, Prince Eugene, are gathering an immense army in Germany. If you can only hold out, the tsar will soon be forced to relieve you of Kutuzov. Your war is lost now, but Napoleon can turn the tables for you and give you victory—and the Danube principalities."

  Nakshidil, who had continued to hold Marianne within the warm circle of her arms, let her go and shrugged. The sadness of her smile was tinged with irony.

  "Don't try to make me believe, Princess, that Napoleon is about to attack Alexander purely for the sake of helping us. I've told you, we ceased to have any illusions regarding his intentions toward us a long time ago. If he wants us to go on holding out there is one thing he can do—send us troops, a few regiments out of that immense army of his. Then perhaps the grand vizier might hold out, with more than the fifteen thousand men he has at present! Otherwise, it's impossible."

  "Will Mr. Canning bring you any better help?"

  "Not in a military sense, no. But diplomatically, yes. When it comes to negotiating the peace, he is pledged to help us and to obtain the best possible terms from the tsar."

  "Oh, Your Highness," Marianne said reproachfully, "has the sultan so far forgotten his mother's country? Have you yourself forgotten it?"

  "I have forgotten nothing," Nakshidil said with a sigh. "Unfortunately, my son has been taught to look on his mother's country with some distrust. Do you think Mahmoud can forget that one of his greatest enemies is French?"

  "French? Who is that?"

  "The governor of Odessa. For years now, that man has been building up a powerful city on the shores of the Black Sea, and, more important, a harbor for the ships that come out to attack us at the very mouth of the Bosporus. I am speaking of the Duc de Richelieu, the tsar's friend and more Russian than the Russians. Napoleon had better reckon with that irreconcilable émigré because he has the Tatar hordes at his beck."

  "But as Your Highness says, he is an émigré, one of the emperor's own enemies!"

  "A Frenchman nonetheless. And that, in my son's eyes, is all that matters. You cannot ask him to let his people die to help a selfish ruler who never thinks of us unless he needs us."

  There was a silence in which Marianne saw the success of her mission slowly foundering. She had too much honesty
not to understand the sultan's reasons and those of his mother, for they were sound and respectable. Moreover, she had learned long ago to her cost to measure the depths of Napoleon's egoism. As Nakshidil had said, short of a miracle the Turks would soon be seeking an armistice, and this was something that Paris must know as soon as possible.

  Aware that it would be clumsy, even ill mannered to persist after the kindness already shown her, Marianne abandoned the argument, for that night at least. She would have to report to the accredited ambassador but just now she felt very tired.

  "If I might ask Your Highness's permission to retire," she murmured.

  "But of course! But not like that!"

  All the sultana's gaiety had returned and she was issuing a fresh stream of orders. In another moment Marianne found herself transformed into an Ottoman princess—by virtue of a gorgeous yellow robe, thickly embroidered with gold, to which the sultana, with princely generosity, had added a girdle, necklace and earrings set with rubies and pearls—and was sinking, not without difficulty, into her farewell curtsy, watched by the Kizlar Aga and the court ladies who had miraculously reappeared.

  "We shall meet again very soon," Nakshidil assured her with an encouraging smile as she offered Marianne her hand to kiss. "And don't forget, you will be expected tomorrow night at the place I told you of. For the rest—trust me. I do not think you will be disappointed."

  Without elaborating further on these last words, which Marianne could not help feeling were a trifle enigmatic, the Sultan Valideh vanished into the recesses of the pavilion with her ladies following in a cloud of blue, leaving her visitor to be escorted slowly back to her litter by the tall Black Eunuch.

  As she was borne back through the gardens toward the seashore at the easy, swinging pace of her bearers, Marianne tried to sort out her ideas and sum up the evening's events. She did not find it easy, for her mind was torn between such contradictory feelings as gratitude, disappointment and uneasiness. On the political plane she had failed, undoubtedly, and failed so completely that she hardly dared to ask herself how Napoleon would take the news. But she experienced no sense of guilt or regret, knowing that she had done her duty to the utmost and that as things stood no one could have done any more. At the same time, she agreed with the Valideh that Napoleon might have given a thought to Turkey before her army was at its last gasp. The promise of an expeditionary force would undoubtedly have carried far more weight than the urgings of a mere inexperienced young woman.

  She turned her thoughts resolutely away from the political situation and began to consider her own immediate prospects. In spite of the very real danger she would have to face during the coming night, Marianne was beginning to glimpse light at the end of the tunnel through which she had been struggling for so many weeks, and she could not help seeing it as a happy omen for the future. Once this nightmare was over…

  She became aware that thinking was growing more and more difficult as the swaying motion of the litter combined with the emotional exhaustion brought on by her sleepless night.

  Away to the east, beyond the Scutari hills, the sky was growing lighter, turning from black to gray. Day was not far off. Marianne shivered in the cool, damp air that rose from the gardens. It had been so hot when she came, but now she was really quite cold and was thankful for the silken veils in which they had swathed her. Hugging them tightly around her, she snuggled down among the cushions and abandoned the struggle. Her eyes closed.

  When she opened them, the litter was already passing through the gothic gateway of the embassy and she realized that she had slept the whole way home. But her brief nap had only made her long for more. As her escort of janissaries wended its way downhill again to the Galata landing, she turned to enter the house under the disapproving eye of a butler who was visibly more shocked than impressed by the magnificence of her Turkish costume.

  He informed her, somewhat distantly, that His Excellency and Monsieur the Vicomte had passed the night in the salon awaiting Her Highness's return and were there still.

  Marianne, longing for her bed, was tempted to leave them there and postpone what she foresaw would be a lengthy interview, but she told herself that, after all, they had been sitting up on her account. Not to go to them would be ungrateful. And so she sighed and made her way to the salon.

  But the sight that met her eyes as she opened the door made her smile. Jolival and the ambassador were seated in deep, cushioned armchairs on either side of a small table on which was set out a magnificent set of cut crystal chessmen. Both were blissfully asleep—the ambassador sunk deep in his chair with his chin buried in the folds of his cravat and his spectacles on the end of his nose, Jolival with his cheek resting on his hand and the ends of his mustache lifting gently with his breathing—and both of them were snoring lustily, albeit in different keys. They seemed so dedicatedly asleep that Marianne had not the heart to disturb them.

  She closed the door very gently and, with a word to the butler to let the gentlemen sleep on, she went away on tiptoe to her own room, promising herself a long rest before she had to face the ordeal of the coming night.

  Yet before that she would have to repeat to the ambassador every single thing that the sultana had said so that he could send a detailed report of it to Paris. If Napoleon was really set on winning Ottoman support, he might even decide to send the military aid which alone could combat the English influence. But Marianne had no faith in that and she was quite sure that Latour-Maubourg was under no more illusions than she.

  Well, we shall see, she told herself by way of consolation.

  Chapter 2

  The Nightingale River

  THE vehicle which entered the French embassy courtyard as darkness fell was a small, brightly painted araba curtained in green velvet such as might have been owned by the wife of any wealthy Galata merchant. It was drawn by a sturdy mule with gay red pompons on its harness and the driver was a crinkly-haired black boy whose dark face gleamed softly in the light of the lamp that was fastened to the front of the carriage.

  The apparition that descended from this equipage looked more like a ghost than a woman. She was wrapped from head to foot in a long ferej of dark green cloth and her face was covered by the thick veil without which no Turkish lady would have dared to stir abroad.

  Marianne was waiting in the hall dressed in the same fashion, except that her ferej was of a deep violet blue and she was not wearing the veil. With Jolival beside her, she walked down to the carriage where the other woman stood waiting for her. When she saw that there was a man, and a European, with the one she had come to seek, the woman did not speak but only bowed and held out a scroll of paper, tied and sealed with blue. Then she straightened and stood quietly waiting for the contents to be read.

  "What's this?" the vicomte said crossly, taking a lantern from the hands of an attendant. "Does it need all these papers for what you are about to do?"

  Jolival had been in the worst of tempers all day long. He loathed everything about this expedition of Marianne's but most of all it made him horribly afraid for her. The thought that the young friend who was almost a daughter to him was about to put her health and perhaps even her life in the hands of probably incompetent foreigners horrified him. He had made no attempt to hide his dislike of the project or the alarm it caused him.

  "What you are doing is madness," he protested. "I was ready to help you in Corfu, when this damned pregnancy was barely started, but now I'm wholly against it. Not as a matter of principle, which is beside the point, but simply because it is dangerous!"

  Nothing could budge him from this position and Marianne had wasted her time and her persuasions. Arcadius was almost ready to go to any lengths to stop her going to Rebecca. It had even crossed his mind to tell Latour-Maubourg everything and have the embassy put into something like a state of siege, or else to lock Marianne up in her bedchamber with guards below the windows. But the ambassador would probably have thought that he was mad, and in any case it would be cruel to upset the
unfortunate diplomat yet again.

  Certainly the ambassador had not been particularly overjoyed to learn that the Porte was considering an armistice, but the news had not really surprised him. He had, on the other hand, been sure that the spontaneous friendship which had sprung up between the Sultan Valideh and the Princess Sant'Anna augured most favorably for his own future relations with the court, especially since this friendship had shown itself in an invitation to spend several days with the sultana at her villa at Scutari.

  Compelled to abandon his violent projects, the poor vicomte had next endeavored to persuade Marianne to let him go with her, and here again she had found it extremely difficult to convince him that it would not do. She had to tell him over and over again that one of the Valideh's most trusted confidantes was to accompany her and guard against any possible accident, while the presence of another European might lead Rebecca to refuse her services altogether and so ruin all. What was more, she said, the house of a midwife was no place for a man.

  Defeated but not convinced, Jolival had muttered irritably all day, his temper growing noticeably worse with the approach of evening.

  Marianne, meanwhile, had been scanning the thick parchment scroll. It was an official document, inscribed in Arabic characters and sealed with the imperial tughra, which she naturally did not understand. But attached to it was a smaller letter, written on silky vellum in a delicate, flowing hand which spoke of the long hours spent at a convent desk acquiring it. The faint scent of hyacinths that came from it recalled to the reader the blue pavilion of the previous night.

  Writing in a charmingly old-world style reminiscent of Versailles and powdered heads, Nakshidil disclosed to her "dearly beloved cousin" the contents of the larger document, which was nothing more nor less than the title of ownership to the Sea Witch.

  The Valideh had purchased the American brig from the reis Achmet, and she was now the sole property of the Princess Sant'Anna. More than that, she was to be transferred to the naval dockyard of Kassim Pasha, where she would be thoroughly overhauled under the personal supervision of the Ottoman admiral, the Kapodan Pasha, before being handed over to her new owner.