'Little fool,' he murmured through clenched teeth. 'Do you think I'd leave you to perish? You're a good little soldier, Marianne, even when you talk nonsense, and I love my soldiers like my own children. Either we die here together, both of us, or we both come out of it alive. But we're not going to die just yet.' He saw that she was looking at him with a smile too sad for tears and added, more softly still: 'Trust me. Your life is not over yet. It is only just beginning. A long and happy life. I know you are unhappy now. I know you think I'm rambling, but the time will come when you will know that I was right. Forget about this Beaufort. He does not deserve you. Think of your child, waking to life without you. He can give you so much happiness. And think, too, of the man whose name you bear. He is worthy of you… and he loves you very much.'
'Are you a magician, Sire? Who can have told you that?'
'No one – unless it is my own knowledge of men. All that he has done, he can only have done for love. Stop trying to catch the star in the bottom of the well. There are roses close beside you. Do not let them fade. Promise me—'
He drew away, but still without taking his eyes from her. Then, with a brief glance at the city, he rejoined the rest. The flames seemed to be dying down now and the smoke was thinning. This had been no more than a warning.
The Emperor paused and turned.
'Well,' he said. 'I'm waiting!'
Marianne sank slowly into a deep curtsy.
'I will try, Sire. You have my word.'
Part II
WINTER
CHAPTER FIVE
Cassandra
The bed was as hard as a board and the blankets smelled faintly of mould. Marianne tossed and turned for a long time without finding sleep. Yet she was very tired and when the Emperor had retired early, immediately after a somewhat frugal and unconventional meal, she had been really glad to seek her own room. She had gone to ground there, as to a refuge, after first assuring herself that Jolival was comfortably installed in the room next door. The day had been an emotional one for her and it had ended so painfully that she could not help a feeling of relief at escaping from even the pale shadow of court etiquette which the Comte de Segur had managed to inaugurate in the Kremlin.
Asking nothing better than to go to sleep and put off until tomorrow the consideration of problems which were becoming warped and magnified by weariness, Marianne went to bed at once, thinking that her brain would be clearer and her reactions sharper after a good night's rest. But the discomfort of her bed and the remorseless treadmill of her thoughts had given her no rest and the blessed oblivion of slumber still eluded her.
Her mind refused to be put off but went roaming along the road to St Petersburg after the man who had so callously and selfishly abandoned her, without troubling himself to discover what had become of the woman he professed to love. Yet even then she could not find it in her heart to blame him, so great and so blind was her love. She knew the fierce obstinacy of his nature, in its rancours and desires alike, too well not to have started finding excuses for him, even if only in his determined resentment of Napoleon and the passionate urge he felt to get back to his own country now that she was at war. Both sentiments were, after all, quite comprehensible, and wholly masculine.
Moreover, Marianne could not hide from herself that, but for the promise extracted from her by Napoleon, a promise she was already beginning secretly to regret, she would have made every effort to escape from the palace in which she felt herself to some extent a prisoner. How gladly would she have followed the example of Craig O'Flaherty! For the Irishman had not remained with Jolival and Gracchus in the Kremlin. On learning what had become of Jason, through the few words that Gracchus had been able to get from Shankala, he had made his decision at once.
'Now that you are safely back with your own people,' he had said to Jolival, 'I will ask leave to resume my own journey to the sea, in other words, to St Petersburg. I can't breathe on these interminable inland roads. I need the open sea! Once I get there I'll have no trouble at all in finding Beaufort. I'll only have to ask for his friends, the Krilovs. And even if he travels on horseback while I'm obliged to go on foot, I'll catch him up because it's bound to be some days before he can sail.'
The understanding Jolival had released him very readily and so Craig had departed, begging the Vicomte to make his farewells to Marianne, having first paid his respects to the Emperor who had generously presented him with a horse, a royal gift considering the circumstances.
His departure was a perilous temptation for Marianne. The word she had given seemed a fragile thing when every demon of disingenuousness was ranged against it. And, after all, she had not actually given her promise to Napoleon. She had only promised to try. But to try what? To give up once and for all the dream of happiness that she had carried with her for years?
Of course, if one were honest, Napoleon was right. Marianne acknowledged that he had been both kind and clearsighted. She even admitted that in his place she might have said the same. More than that, she was prepared to concede that Jason's behaviour, in contrast, had been less than gentlemanly. But all the time her brain was trying to think sensibly, her heart was shouting aloud rebelliously that it had the right to beat as it listed and to follow blindly after the flight of a self-centred sea bird called Jason Beaufort.
But now the heart's stubborn cries seemed to be growing more vehement, as if, deep in Marianne's being, another voice was beginning, timidly, to make itself heard. It was the voice that had uttered its first murmur as she looked at the portrait of the little fair-haired boy. Suddenly, superimposed upon the face of the baby king, Marianne had seemed to see another, darker child, and she had felt again the weight of a small, silky head against her breast and the soft grip of a tiny hand curled briefly round her finger. Sebastiano! For the first time since the dreadful night when he had been taken from her, Marianne found herself able to say his name. Where was he now, while his mother was struggling to find herself? To what secret place had Prince Corrado spirited him away?
Marianne shook herself fiercely, as though to shake off a cloud of wasps that buzzed about her, and fell to castigating herself.
'Just you stop romanticizing, my girl,' she told herself, aloud. 'At this moment your son is not hidden away in any secret place. He is fast asleep, like a fairy princeling, in a palace in Tuscany set in the middle of a great garden, guarded by snow-white peacocks. He is very well and quite safe there. He is king of a wonderful world and very soon he will be running and playing—'
Her voice choked and was drowned in a sudden flood of tears, and then Marianne was crying into the musty pillow as if her heart would break. Carried along on the tide of events and sustained by the emotional demands of the endless journey, divided between fatiguing days and passionate nights, she had managed hitherto to keep the memory of her son at a distance. But now the Emperor's dire warning had ripped away the flimsy barriers she had so painfully erected and left her cruelly exposed to the real meaning of her voluntary renunciation. The truth was that the baby was going to begin his life without her, that she would not be there when he learned to laugh and to talk and that the word 'mother' would mean nothing to his baby ears. In a little while he would be discovering the use of his little legs but the hands that reached out tenderly to catch him would be Dona Lavinia's – or those of the man who, though he was none of his, had yet pledged himself to give him all his love, and even to love him for two.
The agony was coming to the surface now, overcoming the temptation to run away, and in her misery Marianne could not have said which torment was the greater at that moment: the thought of the lover going ever farther away from her or that of the child whose love she would never know.
She might easily have allowed herself to sink into one of the familiar troughs of despair which had so often
