hoarse shout. The black woman heard it and, shuddering, left her accustomed place on the steps of the bed and went out of the room, not forgetting to close the door carefully behind her.
It was the first time for many days that Marianne had been left alone but she hardly noticed it. In a moment the woman would be back with the others, for it was near the time usually allotted for her bath. Without interest, she went and lay down on the bed and closed her eyes. The long imprisonment, with its enforced inactivity, was telling on her system. She often felt sleepy during the day and had got into the habit of following her own inclinations as meekly as the will of those outside herself.
She might have slept like that all night but for some instinct which woke her. She knew at once that something unusual had happened.
She opened her eyes and stared about her. It was pitch dark outside and the candles burned as usual in the great candelabra, but the room was as silent and empty as before. No one had come back and the hour for her bath was long past.
Marianne got up slowly and walked a little way across the room. A sudden draught, flattening the candle flames, made her turn her head towards the door and as she did so something stirred in her brain. The door was open.
The heavy oaken panel studded with iron swung back against the wall leaving a black hole between the tapestries. Hardly able to believe her eyes, Marianne moved forward to touch it, to convince herself that this was not simply another of the dreams which haunted her nights, in which, time and again, she had seen the door stand open on to limitless blue distances.
No, surely this time the door was truly open. Marianne could feel the faint draught it created. Even so, to make sure she was not dreaming, she went back to the candles and held one finger up to the flame. At once she gave a little cry of pain. The flame had burned her. Then, as she sucked her smarting finger, her eyes fell on the chest and she cried out again in surprise. There, neatly laid out on the lid, were the clothes in which she had arrived: the olive-green dress with the black velvet trimming, even her shoes and petticoat. Only the hooded cloak edged with Chantilly lace was missing. It was like a memory of another world.
Marianne put out her hand almost fearfully and touched the fabric, stroked it gently and then clutched at it like a drowning man at a straw. Something inside her seemed to snap and come away. She was suddenly alive again, capable of thought and action. It was as if she had been imprisoned in a block of ice and now the ice was broken and pieces were being chipped off and coming back to warmth and life.
With a surge of childlike joy, she tore off the hateful tunic they had put on her and fell on her own clothes as on something infinitely precious. She put them on, revelling in a sensation like feeling herself in her own skin after being flayed. She was so carried away that for the moment she did not even pause to wonder what it meant. It was simply wonderful, even if the heat made the garments uncomfortably hot to wear. She was herself again, from top to toe, and that was all that really mattered.
As soon as she was dressed, she marched determinedly to the door. Whoever had brought the clothes and opened the door must be a friend. She was being given a chance and she must take it.
Outside, everywhere was in total darkness and Marianne went back to fetch a candle to light her way. She saw that she was at the end of a long corridor with no other opening but another door facing her. It seemed to be shut.
Marianne's hand tightened on the candle and her heart missed a beat. Were they merely torturing her with false hopes? Was all this designed simply to bring her, helpless and more desperate than ever, face to face with yet another locked door?
But when she reached it, she saw that it was merely closed, not locked. It yielded to her hand and she found herself in an open gallery like a kind of long veranda, looking down on to a small courtyard. Overhead was a roof of broad, painted wooden beams supported on slender arched columns.
For all her haste to get away from the house, she paused for a moment in the gallery, drawing deep breaths of the warm night air.
It carried with it a disagreeable smell of mud and decaying refuse, but she had not been out of doors for so long and able to see the sky. It made no difference that the sky in question was heavy with cloud with not a star in sight: it was still the sky and therefore the ultimate symbol of freedom.
Resuming her cautious advance, Marianne came to a second door at the far end of the gallery. It opened to her hand and she found herself in China.
All round the walls of the delightful little salon, slant-eyed princesses danced a mad fandango with a joyous troop of grinning monkeys, in and out among black lacquered screens and gilt whatnots bearing quantities of rose and yellow porcelain, over which a Murano lustre cast a shimmering rainbow brightness. It was, in truth, a very pretty room but so much festive illumination made an uneasy contrast with the stillness that reigned there.
This time, Marianne passed on without a pause. Beyond, all was again in darkness, but she was in a broad gallery from which a staircase led, apparently, down to ground level.
Marianne's feet, shod in thin leather, made no sound on the polished marble mosaic as she glided, ghostlike, past the bronze columns that emerged from the walls on either side like ships looming out of the fog, and past the blind stone warriors. Everywhere, on the long inlaid chests, miniature caravels spread their sails to a non-existent wind, and gilded galleys dipped their long oars in invisible seas. On all sides, too, were banners of curious shape bearing the often-repeated crescent of Islam. Lastly, at either end of the gallery, reflected in tall, tarnished mirrors, a great terrestrial globe stood still and useless, dreaming of the tanned hands which had once set it turning in its bronze rings.
Impressed, in spite of herself, by this kind of mausoleum to the warlike, seafaring Venice of other days, Marianne found her feet dragging unconsciously. She had almost reached the staircase when she came to a sudden halt, her heart thudding, and listened intently. Someone was walking about downstairs, carrying a light which was moving slowly along the wall of the gallery.
She stood, rooted to the spot, scarcely daring to breathe. Who was it moving down there? Matteo? Or one of her three sinister keepers? Marianne cast about her for a refuge in case the bearer of the light should come upstairs and catch her unawares. Selecting the statue of an admiral whose armour was partly covered by a cloak with ample folds of stone drapery, she slipped softly behind it and waited.
The light stood still. Whoever it was must have put it down somewhere, because the footsteps went on, growing fainter.
She was just beginning to breathe again when her blood froze. A groan had come from below. There was a muffled cry, as though of terror and surprise, and then, almost at once, the sound of two sets of feet, one running from the other. A crash like the clap of doom told of the collapse of some piece of furniture, evidently laden with bric-a-brac. A door slammed, and the noise of the pursuit dwindled rapidly. Marianne heard a second and much fainter cry followed by the faint but horrible sound of a death-rattle. Somewhere, in the house or garden, a person was dying… After that, nothing. Only an overpowering silence.
Striving to still the thudding of her heart which seemed to echo through the silence like a cathedral bell, Marianne left her hiding place and tiptoed nervously towards the stairs, since there appeared to be no other way out. She reached them, but the sight which met her eyes froze her where she stood.
The stairs ran down to a noble hall sombrely furnished and hung with long tapestries and paintings in the style of Tiepolo, but to Marianne the room looked like a battlefield. A tall candlestick stood on a long stone table and nearby lay the bodies of the two black servants whose living voices she had never even heard. One was on the floor beside an overturned chair, the other lay across the table. Both had died in the same way, stuck through the heart with merciless precision.
But there was a third body, lying right across the lowest steps. Matteo Damiani sprawled with eyes wide open on an eternity of horror and the blood from his severed throat spreading in slowly widening pools over the dripping steps.
'He is dead!' Marianne said aloud, half-unconsciously, and the sound of her own voice seemed to come from an immense distance. 'Someone has killed him – but who?'
The horror of it was mingled in her with a savage joy that was almost painful in its intensity, the instinctive joy of the torture victim who finds the dead body of the torturer stretched suddenly at her feet. Some unknown hand had simultaneously avenged both the murdered Prince Sant'Anna and the sufferings of Marianne herself.
Abruptly, the instinct of self-preservation reasserted itself. There would be time to rejoice later, when she was safely out of this nightmare, supposing she ever got out of it, for there were only three bodies in the room.
