Marianne and the Lords of the East

The voice was low and toneless and infinitely sad, yet even through the mists that enveloped her Marianne seemed to remember, through some tenacious thread of memory in her brain, another voice, very like it, heard once from behind a tarnished mirror, the voice of a man without a face, a shadow like this. Could it be the same? Could the ghost of the husband who had died in his tragic loneliness have followed her here, to the very edge of Asia?

Then the power of thought, like that of movement, deserted her. Marianne's eyes closed and she sank into a curious, almost trancelike sleep that left her not wholly unconscious of her surroundings. Voices were speaking hurriedly nearby in some foreign tongue and she thought she recognized Bulut Hanum's high-pitched tones, sounding very much alarmed, and the Jewess's lower ones, alternating with the deep voice of the phantom. Then she felt arms around her, lifting her strongly and surely without even a jolt. There was a pleasant smell in her nostrils of the Turkish tobacco called latakia mingled unexpectedly with the fresher smell of lavender, and her cheek was pressed against some fine, soft, woolen material. Half-consciously, Marianne understood that she was being carried away…

Once again there was the fragrance of the garden, the cool night about her, and then a slight dipping motion as the arms which held her set her down on some kind of mattress. By the sort of violent effort of will that a sleeper will make in an unconscious effort to escape from the grip of a nightmare, she managed to open the dragging curtain of her eyelids and saw a man holding a long pole that could have been an oar silhouetted against a starry sky. But then the dark mouth of a tunnel loomed up ahead, with the points of a raised grille hanging down like monstrous teeth, and the smell of the willow trees gave way to a stench of mud and refuse. A bird trilled briefly from a tree nearby but the faint, mocking sound was lost at once, smothered by the sheer weight of the walls that imprisoned the Nightingale River, on whose bosom Marianne was now being borne away, a captive like itself. The stream was no longer free to run beneath the open sky since men had decreed it so, the stream…

In the thick blackness enveloping her on all sides, Marianne gave up the struggle at last and let herself slide down into the abyss of sleep.

She awoke from it as suddenly as a cork popping out of a bottle to find herself in a strange room filled with sunshine. It was a magnificent bedchamber decorated with flowered silks in tones of blue and mauve, and but for the flood of sunlight, which took away any suggestion of the mysterious, might easily have been mistaken for a chapel, from the collection of gold and silver icons covering the whole of one wall.

Candles, a petrified forest of them, were burning before the holy images, their flames swamped by the brightness of the room, and standing in their midst, engaged in replacing the burned-out stumps with fresh ones, was a figure dressed in black.

Marianne took it for a priest at first, but then she saw by the long hair coiled beautifully under a lace veil that the figure was that of a woman, and a remarkably impressive one.

This was due less to her height, although she was tall and slim and very upright despite the years that showed in her gray hair and lined face, than to the erectness of her carriage and the strong, autocratic features which, for all the determined set of the chin, were entirely Hellenic in form.

When the last candle had been renewed and the old stumps put away in a leather bag, the unknown woman took up the gold-headed cane which had been propped against one of the candlesticks, crossed herself rapidly in the orthodox fashion from left to right, and then, turning her back on the shining icons, came toward the bed, her gait making light of what was evidently a pronounced limp. A yard or two away from it she stopped and, leaning both hands on her cane, studied Marianne gravely.

'In what language would you like to converse?' she asked in a lilting but otherwise faultless Italian.

'This one will suit me very well,' Marianne replied in her best Tuscan, 'that is, unless you would prefer to speak in French, English, German or Spanish?'

If she had been hoping to impress the other woman with her accomplishments she was quickly disappointed. The stranger only chuckled.

'Not bad,' she conceded, in French this time. 'I speak all those, and six or seven others besides, including Russian, Walachian, Serbo-Croat, Chinese and Turanian.'

'I congratulate you,' Marianne retorted. Not for anything in the world would she have shown that she was impressed. 'But now that that is settled, would you think me very stupid, Madame, if I asked you who you are and where I am?'

The old lady came closer so that Marianne could smell the scents of incense and ambergris and gave another of her sardonic chuckles.

'You are in my house,' she said. 'In my house in Phanar.[2] And I am Princess Morousi, widow of the late hospodar [3] of Walachia. I am happy to welcome you as my guest.'

'Thank you. It is very kind of you to make me welcome, Princess, but I should like to know how I come to be here at all. Last night, I went with a Turkish lady, a friend of the Sultan Valideh, to—'

'I know,' the princess interrupted her. 'But I also know that there are places to which no woman has the right to go without her husband's permission. You are here, therefore, because he brought you here.'

'My husband? But there must be some mistake! My husband is dead. I am a widow!'

The old princess gave a compassionate sigh and struck the ground with her stick to give emphasis to her words.

'I think, my dear, that the mistake is yours. Unless you are not the Princess Sant'Anna, wife of Prince Corrado?'

'That is who I am, but—'

'Then we are not at cross purposes and I tell you again that it was Corrado Sant'Anna himself brought you here, to this house, last night.'

'But that's impossible!' Marianne cried out, on the verge of tears. 'Unless—'

A dreadful thought had crossed her mind, but so fantastically improbable had been the whole course of her life since the burning down of Selton Hall that not even this could surprise her very much. If she had really come to this strange place in her dead husband's company, then it must be that she herself had died and both this unaccustomed room and this woman with her ability to speak every known language must exist in the next world. The Jewess, Rebecca, had simply poisoned her, and she had gone to sleep on earth never to wake again except in this rather luxurious kind of purgatory, watched over by a distinctly unconventional angel. But then how could anyone possibly know what the life after death was going to be like?

In her bewilderment she was half expecting the door to open and admit a patriarch or some other long-dead person, or perhaps even her own father or mother, when her companion went over to the icons and fetched a candle which she brought to Marianne.

'Feel the flame,' she told her. 'When it burns you, you will know that you are just as much alive as I am. Nor, unless I'm much mistaken, are you in the least ill. I trust that you slept well?'

'Yes, thank you,' Marianne acknowledged, putting her finger unhesitatingly into the flame and withdrawing it at once. 'Indeed, I feel better than I have for a long time. But I still can't understand what you mean by saying my husband is alive—and here, in this house. Does that mean that you know him—that you have seen him?'

'When he has never permitted you to do so?' the princess agreed tranquilly. 'That is quite true.' She drew a chair, a curious, X-shaped thing with a goatskin seat, up to the bed and continued: 'My child—my age allows me to call you so, for you are not really very old, you know—it is natural for you to be full of questions regarding your peculiar situation. I think I may be able to answer some of them, but not all. I have known the Sant'Anna family for a long time, you see. Don Sebastiano, your husband's grandfather, was a frequent guest of my parents when I was a child. He was a great friend of ours and that friendship has been passed on to his descendants. After the tragedy that struck his family, young Corrado spent much time away from Italy, where he could not live a normal life, and naturally found his way back to us, sure of finding a welcome and understanding in his dreadful plight.'

Curiosity, abruptly reawakened, drove out every other feeling in Marianne, including all the fears she had experienced since waking. Surely this woman held the key to the mystery surrounding her invisible husband, and at the least she wanted to possess that key herself. Unable to control herself any longer, Marianne broke in on her hostess.

'So you know?'

'What do I know?'