The voice was amused but Marianne's quick ear had detected a faint but disturbing shade of disdain. God alone knew what tales the English had put about to damage her reputation. However, she decided to go carefully.
'You Highness seems to be remarkably well informed in such small matters.'
'News travels fast in the Mediterranean. Nor do these matters seem to me so small. English ships are not generally sent out of their way for persons of no importance—such as a lady traveling for pleasure. But the thing becomes much less astonishing if the lady in question should be also… an envoy of the Emperor Napoleon?'
Instantly, with the mere mention of that name, the cozy intimacy of the blue salon was blown away like a whiff of perfume on the wind. It was as though the Corsican himself had swept into the room in his usual tempestuous fashion, with booted feet and flashing eyes and all the commanding strength of his powerful personality. Marianne felt that he was there, watching her and waiting…
Slowly she drew from the pocket fashioned in the long skirts of her dress the letter given her by Sebastiani and presented it, bowing gracefully. Nakshidil eyed her questioningly.
'Is this a letter from the emperor?'
'No, Your Highness. It is from an old friend, General Horace Sebastiani, who begs to be remembered to you. The English were quite wrong to put themselves out over my journey, for I have no official mission.'
'Yet if you carry no word from Napoleon, you know his mind, do you not?'
Marianne merely bowed without answering, and then, while the sultana was swiftly perusing the letter, she calmly finished her cup of coffee, cold by this time, and forced herself to swallow the last morsel of baklava in order not to offend her hostess, who had recommended it. It did not go down easily.
'I see that you are much valued in high places, my dear. Sebastiani tells me you are a personal friend of the emperor's and that you are also held in real affection by the former empress, that unhappy Josephine who will always be Rose to me. Very well, tell me what it is that the French emperor wants of us.'
There was a brief silence while Marianne chose her words carefully. She was beginning to feel slightly sick and it was necessary to concentrate.
She began: 'I must beg Your Highness to listen carefully to what I am about to say because it is very important and involves the revelation of the emperor's most secret and cherished plans.'
'Let us hear them.'
Slowly and quietly, making herself as clear as she could, Marianne told her companion of the imminent invasion of Russia by the Grande Armee and of Napoleon's desire to defeat Alexander, whom he accused of the direst duplicity, on his own ground. She pointed out how helpful it would be to the invader if the military operations taking place on the Danube could be prolonged until at least the following summer, the date fixed for the French invasion of Russia, so as to keep General Kamenski and his troops and the Cossack regiments engaged well away from the Vistula and from the vicinity of Moscow. She hinted further that Napoleon could be relied upon to show his gratitude for this undeclared assistance as soon as the Russians had been beaten by granting to the Sublime Porte all the territory being lost, and more besides.
'If Your Highness's forces could hold out until next July or August,' she concluded, 'it would be enough.'
'But that is almost a year!' the sultana exclaimed. 'It is a great deal for an exhausted army whose strength is melting like butter in the sun. And I don't think—' She broke off as she caught sight of the change in her visitor's face, which had turned as green as her dress.
'Are you unwell, Princess?' she asked. 'You look very pale all of a sudden—'
Marianne hardly dared to move. The sweetmeats had been very good in themselves, no doubt, but, added to the hearty dinner she had already eaten at the embassy, their sugary sweetness in her overloaded stomach was making her feel very ill indeed and giving her a somewhat brutal reminder that she was, after all, nearly four months pregnant. At that moment the wretched unofficial ambassadress would gladly have sunk through the cushioned throne.
When she made no answer, the sultana, startled by her sudden pallor, asked again: 'Is there something wrong? Please do not feel obliged to conceal it if you feel unwell—'
Marianne cast her a helpless glance and tried to smile.
'Your Highness is right—I don't feel very—oooh—!' In one bound, Marianne was off the throne and through the salon like a flash of green lightning. She brushed past the eunuchs at the door and, making for the convenient shadow of the nearest cypress, which was luckily quite close at hand, set about restoring the unwanted contents of her stomach to the earth which had yielded them. The time this took was brief enough but it seemed to her endless, and while it was going on she was far too preoccupied to consider the shock that her precipitate departure must have caused. When at last she straightened, holding tight to the friendly tree for support, she was still in a cold sweat, but the nausea was passing. She managed to gulp down a deep breath of the scented night air, cooled by the fountains, and felt better. Her strength was beginning to come back.
Not until then did it dawn on her what she had done. She had turned her back on an empress and dashed from the room like a thief in the middle of a diplomatic talk. The scandal it would cause! Enough to make poor Latour-Maubourg faint with horror! She stood for a moment under the cypress tree, unable to move, considering the probable consequences of her sickness, convinced that when she went back to the kiosk she would find a whole troop of eunuchs with drawn swords waiting to arrest her.
She was still hesitating there when a soft voice reached her.
'Princess, where are you? I hope you are not still feeling ill?'
Marianne breathed again.
'No, Your Highness. I am here.'
Stepping out of the shadow of the trees, she found Nakshidil standing in the doorway of the little kiosk. She must have sent everyone else away, for she was quite alone, and Marianne, feeling very much in the wrong and also something of a fool, was grateful to her.
After this unlikely start to a delicate negotiation she felt that some apology was called for, and the Princess Sant'Anna was just sinking into her best curtsy when she was promptly interrupted.
'No, please! Are you sure you are quite better? Take my arm and let us go inside—unless you'd rather stroll a little in the gardens? It is cooler now and we might go as far as the terrace there, overlooking the Bosporus. It is a favorite place of mine.'
'With pleasure, but I do not like to ask Your Highness to put yourself out for me.'
'Who, me? My dear girl, I like nothing better than to take exercise, whether walking or riding on horseback. Unfortunately it can be a little awkward here. In our palaces in Asia it is easier. Are you coming?'
Arm in arm, they made their way slowly toward the selected spot. Marianne was surprised to find that the sultana was as tall as she was and her slim figure was quite faultless. For that to be so at her age it was clear that the fair-skinned Creole could not have resigned herself to the lazy, cloistered existence of most women in the harem. She could only have kept that lithe, girlish figure by an addiction to the athletic sports so dear to the English. Nakshidil's interest, on the other hand, was all for her companion and while they walked she was asking with a deceptive casualness: 'Do you suffer often from these turns ? Yet you look to be in high bloom ?'
'No, Your Highness. Not very often. I believe the blame for this must go to the cook at the embassy. There is a certain heaviness about his dishes—'
'And what I offered you was not of the lightest, either! Oddly enough, though, your sickness put me strongly in mind of what I suffered myself when I was expecting my son. I used to drink pots and pots of coffee and I couldn't stand halva or baklava—much less gulrecheli, the rose jam. The name and the color are very poetic, to be sure, but I could never abide it.'
Marianne felt her cheeks grow hot and blessed the darkness which hid her untimely blushes. Even so, she could not control the slight stiffening of her arm which told her companion all she needed to know. Nakshidil understood at once that she had touched on the truth and also that it was a point on which her guest was peculiarly sensitive.
When the two of them reached the little terrace built of white marble, she indicated a curving bench plentifully furnished with cushions and evidently a much favored spot.
'Shall we sit here for a little?' she said. 'We can talk much more comfortably than in my apartments because there is no one to overhear us. Inside the palace, there are listening ears behind every door and every curtain. Here, we need fear nothing of the kind. See—where we are is like a kind of balcony overhanging the battlements and the lower gardens.' She glanced at Marianne's bare shoulders. 'But you are quite sure you won't be cold?'
