Marianne was seized with a sudden and highly inappropriate desire to laugh. Politics was certainly a most peculiar game, and its practitioners the strangest people. You could rely on them to go one better and her spurious information had been a wild success. The duke had built on it in a way she could never have expected.
However, she managed to choke back the laughter that was bubbling up in her and merely smiled, although the eyes that met Richelieu's were twinkling so gaily that it was a wonder they did not betray her. Happily for her, the duke mistook the real cause.
'You are wonderful,' he said softly. 'Truly, I think that Providence herself must have sent you to me. Are you really a woman, or are you an angel in disguise? The loveliest of all the angels. An angel with emerald eyes, unutterably sweet and beautiful, clad in the shape of an adorable woman…'
He was standing very close to her and all at once his hands slid down from her shoulders to encircle her waist. For a panic-stricken moment she saw the duke's tormented face near to hers, his dark gaze thickened with desire like a pool when the bottom was stirred up. She tried to push him away, startled to find him suddenly transformed into a different man.
'Your Excellency, please, let me go! I must go—I have to go home.'
'No. You shall not go. Not tonight, at least. I can recognize fortune when she appears, for she comes all too rarely. You are my chance, my one chance of happiness. I knew it the moment I saw you, the other day, down there on the crowded quayside. You were like a fairy hovering above a reeking bog. And you were beautiful, as beautiful as light itself. You have saved me tonight—'
'Nonsense. I have merely given you some good advice. Anyone would think to hear you that I had snatched you from the jaws of death.'
'You cannot understand. The thing you have saved me from was worse than death. It is a curse, a curse that has hung over me for years. God Himself has sent you. He has heard my prayers…'
His hold on her tightened and Marianne felt a moment's terror as she realized that she was powerless against him. That thin, almost fragile-looking body concealed a wholly unsuspected nervous strength. His arms closed about her like a vise and he was deaf to her entreaties, as though he had become quite suddenly another person. And he was talking so strangely. What had God to do with the fierce access of desire which had made him seize her like this?
'A curse?' she gasped, struggling to get her breath. 'Whatever do you mean? I don't understand.'
He had buried his face in the soft hollow of her shoulder and was covering it with kisses, his lips traveling by degrees up the slender neck.
'You can never understand, so do not try. Give me this night, only this one night, and I will let you go. I'll give you anything you want… Only let me love you… It is so long since I have known what it is to love. I thought I never should… never again. But you are so lovely, so desirable… You have brought me to life again…'
Was he mad? What did he mean? He was squeezing her so tightly that she could almost hear her ribs cracking, and yet at the same time the softness of his lips upon her quivering flesh was almost unbearable. Marianne was conscious of a sudden lump in her throat and she knew, even in the midst of her anger and her shame, that she no longer had the will to fight. It was so long since she too had known the sweetness of love and of a man's touch caressing her body. Not since that unknown lover—some Greek fisherman, had he been?—had taken her in the recesses of a cave so dark that she had never even seen his face. He had been no more than a vague form in the night, a kind of phantom, yet he had given her the most exquisite pleasure.
The soft touch of his mouth was on her cheek, had found her lips, which parted of themselves. Her heart was thudding like a hammer in her chest and when a hand crept up to her breast and imprisoned it, she felt as if her legs were giving way beneath her. It was a simple matter for the duke to lower her gently on to the velvet- covered sofa which stood close by the desk.
He took his lips from hers as he laid her down and turned briefly to extinguish the candles. The room was plunged into darkness. Her head swimming and her limbs on fire, Marianne thought for an instant that she was back again in that glorious cave in Corfu. She was at the heart of an impenetrable darkness in which there was nothing, only a warm, tobacco-scented breath and two hands that divested her skillfully of her dress and began a passionate exploration of her body.
He was quite silent now, and his only contact with her was through those roving hands, caressing her breasts, belly and thighs, lingering over each new revelation, before resuming their exquisitely titillating voyage of discovery, until it seemed to Marianne that she must go mad. Her whole body was on fire and crying out for the satisfaction of its primitive desires. So that it was she, at last, who drew him down to her.
She reached up and linked her arms about the duke's neck, seeking his lips, and they fell back together on to the cushions, she giving a little gasp of pleasure as she felt his weight upon her and sensed the pent-up passion in his body. In her eagerness to satisfy a hunger which had been too long denied and was now brutally awakened, she was already offering herself, but she waited in vain.
Silence fell, thick and frightening. The weight removed itself from her body and then, quite suddenly, out of the enveloping darkness, as thick and black as the tomb, there came the sound of a sob.
Marianne got up quickly and felt her way to the desk. Her trembling fingers found flint and tinder, and she struck a light and first one and then another candle came to life, revealing the room with its heavy furniture, its thick curtains and its oppressively businesslike atmosphere, as far removed as it was possible to be from the delirium of love.
The first thing to catch Marianne's eye was her dress, lying in a snowy heap of satin on the end of the sofa. She snatched at it in a kind of fury to cover her shivering nakedness, still striving to control her breathing and calm the frenzied beating of her heart. It was only then she saw the duke.
He was sitting on the edge of a chair, his head in his hands and crying like a child whom Santa Claus had forgotten. His shoulders were shaking with sobs and he was shivering so wretchedly that all Marianne's feelings of bitter frustration were swallowed up in pity for him. At that moment, the powerful governor of new Russia looked more wretched and broken than the least of the Armenian beggars that crowded the port of Odessa.
Hurriedly, she slipped into her dress and did what she could to tidy her hair. She could not bring herself to break the silence, preferring rather to wait for his misery to subside, for she sensed in some confused fashion that it sprang from a deep and private hurt. But when, after a little while, his sobs showed no sign of abating, she went to him and laid one hand timidly on his shoulder.
'Please,' she said gently, 'don't cry. It is not worth it. You—you were unlucky. It happens sometimes. You must not upset yourself like this over such a little thing.'
He lifted his head abruptly from his hands, revealing a face so ravaged with tears that Marianne's heart was touched.
'Not simply unlucky,' he said miserably. 'It is the curse I spoke of—earlier. I thought—oh, how I thought that you had banished it. That it was lifted from me at last! But it was not to be. I have it still. I shall always have it. It will be with me all my life and because of it my family will die with me.'
He had risen and was pacing the room agitatedly. To her horror, Marianne saw him pick up the heavy bronze inkstand from his desk and hurl it with the full force of his arm against one of the bookcases, the front of which shattered in a crash of broken glass.
'Cursed! I am cursed!' he raged. 'You can't know what it is to be unable to love, to love as other men love. I had forgotten it, but just now, when I touched you, I felt—oh, the wonder, the miracle of it—I felt that my power of feeling was not dead, that I could still desire a woman, that perhaps my life could begin again. But no, it could not! Ever since that dreadful day, it is all over—all over! Forever!'
He was shaken by a fresh bout of sobbing so violent that Marianne was afraid. The poor man seemed so close to the depths of despair that she cast about in her mind for some way to help him. On a small table by a window she saw a silver tray with a jug of water, some glasses and a decanter filled with a dark-colored liquid that was evidently some kind of wine. Going quickly to the table, she filled a glass with water and then, just as she was about to take it to Richelieu, who had slumped down again on the end of the sofa, an idea came to her. She felt in the pocket of her dress and brought out a small sachet containing a grayish powder.
Earlier that evening, setting out to keep this dinner engagement which had filled her with such apprehensions, she had brought the sachet with her from her room. In it was a preparation with a base of opium which Turhan Bey's Persian physician had made up for her during the last weeks of her pregnancy, when she was finding it difficult to sleep. It had the power of inducing a swift and pleasant slumber and it had occurred to Marianne that it might prove a useful weapon if Richelieu's attentions should become too pressing.
