As they stepped outside, under the porch with the belfry, the echoes wakened in the monastery, solemnly calling the monks to prayer. Muttering a hasty blessing, the fat monk swung the iron door to, and Marianne and her companion hurried away down the steep path to the villa.
The return journey was accompanied much more speedily than the outward one, and they passed the guard post without trouble. The fire was dying down and only two guards remained, sleeping up against their long- barrelled guns. The women's light tread was in no more danger of waking them than the faint rustle of the undergrowth. A few minutes later, Melina shut the door of the old chapel behind them and lighted the lamp.
They stood for a moment, looking at one another without speaking, as if they were really seeing one another for the first time. Then, very slowly, the Greek princess moved closer to her new friend and kissed her on the brow.
'I want to thank you,' she said simply. 'I know what it must have cost you to agree to take Theodoros with you, and I want you to know that, even if you had refused, I should not have let him kill you.'
'He may still do so when we are far away from here,' Marianne muttered, unable to repress a certain resentment against the giant.
'Of course not. First of all, he needs you – and then he has a strict sense of honour. He is rough, violent and passionate but, from the moment that you are travelling companions, he will die for you if you are in danger. That is the law of the mountain klephts.'
'Klephts?'
The mountaineers of Olympus, Pindus and Taygetos. They live by brigandage, of course, but they are really much more like your Corsican bandits than ordinary robbers. Theodoros, like his father Constantine before him, was their chieftain. There is no more valiant fighter for Greek freedom… As for you, you are one of us now. The service you are rendering gives you the right to ask aid and protection from any one of us. Go to sleep now, and peace be with you.'
Peace? In spite of all her heroic efforts, Marianne did not find it again that night. What lay before her was not conducive to peace of mind; in fact she had never found herself in a worse mess. For the first time since leaving Paris, she began to long for her quiet, comfortable house in the rue de Lille, the roses in her garden, and her cousin Adelaide's sardonic, reassuring presence: Adelaide who must be waiting there quietly, dividing her time between the gossip of the neighbourhood, the services at the church of St Thomas Aquinas, and her interminable little snacks, for the letter which would summon her to America, to join Marianne and her old friend Jolival… A letter that would never come. Unless the threads of destiny were to sort themselves out at last, which did not look like happening!
'I'll make you pay for this, Jason Beaufort!' Marianne exclaimed suddenly, anger reviving in her at the memory. 'If you are still alive, I'll find you, wherever you are, and make you pay for all I've suffered on your account, through your stupid obstinacy! And now it's all your fault I'm mixed up in this insane business, putting to sea with a boatload of dangerous rebels…'
She was within an inch of echoing Antigone's anguished cry: 'I was made for love, not for hate.' Yet it did her good to be the old Marianne again, with her hopeless rages, her miseries, quarrels and follies, just as she had derived comfort from the thought of her home and her cousin, even if it was only the comfort of regret.
So much had happened to her already, she had suffered such a variety of experiences, that her present situation was not really so much worse than it had been on other occasions in the past. Even the fact that she was pregnant by a man she loathed had ceased to matter so very much. That was now the least of her problems. A slightly philosophical note began to creep into her angry thoughts.
'All I need now,' she thought, 'is to find myself becoming a brigand chief! But with Theodoras perhaps that won't be so very far off!'
In any case, the important thing for the moment was how they were to get to Constantinople, wretched place! She had lost all her papers, passports, credentials, of course; everything had gone that could prove her identity. However, she knew herself to be equal to persuading the ambassador, at least, to recognize her, and there was a small inner voice which whispered to her, stronger than all the reason and logic in the world, that at all costs, somehow, she had to reach the Ottoman capital, if she had to travel on a fishing boat, or even swim! And Marianne had always placed great faith in her inner voices.
CHAPTER TEN
The Island Where Time Stands Still
Yorgo's boat cast off, slid over the dark water in the shadow of the cliffs and put to sea. The white figure of Melina Koriatis, standing in the entrance to the little cave that served as a discreet landing stage, receded and her waving hand was lost in shadow. Soon, even the cave mouth itself had disappeared.
Marianne sighed and huddled in the big black cloak given her by her hostess, seeking what shelter she could find from the spray in the lee of the heavy canvas that was laced across from side to side of the vessel to protect the cargo, in this case jars of wine.
The fisherman's boat was a scaphos, one of those curious and rather badly-built Greek vessels that have nothing essentially Mediterranean about them, save their gaudy sails: a jib and a big gaff mainsail rigged up to a yard of inordinate length. She rode very low in the water, amply justifying the expanse of canvas, especially at times like the present when there was a heavy sea running. It must have been blowing a gale somewhere, for the night was cold, and Marianne blessed the warm wool they had bundled her up in, over her tattered gown.
She had felt a little sad at parting from the woman called Sappho. She had liked the revolutionary princess with her strangeness and her courage, recognizing in her something akin to herself and to those other women she had known with the capacity to grasp life with both hands: women like her cousin Adelaide and her friend Fortunee Hamelin.
Their good-byes had been brief.
'We may meet again, perhaps,' Melina had said, shaking her hand with a firm grip, like a man's. 'But if our paths should not cross, then go with God.'
That was all, and then she had gone with them down the dark narrow staircase cut in the rock beneath the floor of the chapel in which Marianne had been housed.
The sight of Yorgo lifting up the heavy stone and sliding into the lightless hole with the ease of long practice had told Marianne all that she needed to know about how she had come to find a fish by her bed, but Melina had coolly furnished her with the details. It appeared that whenever Yorgo and his brother were landing contraband articles such as guns, powder, shot or similar items, they were in the habit of carrying it in their baskets, hidden under a batch of fresh fish, and bringing it up the steps under the chapel. These led down by means of a long and fairly gently sloping chimney cut in the rock to a cave, half-filled with water, where a fishing boat could tie up out of sight of anyone.
Running before a southerly wind that filled the sails and whipped up the sea, the scaphos made good speed along the east coast of Santorini, before heading straight out to sea. No one had said a word since they left the cave. The passengers sat apart from one another, as though in mutual distrust, and gave themselves up to the rhythm of the ship. Only Theodoros took his turn at the helm.
When he had turned up, earlier, with Yorgo, Marianne had scarcely recognized him. He was dressed in rags, much like those in which she herself had been decked, but his were half-concealed under a rough woollen blanket, and with his face covered by a flowing beard that joined his hair and obscured his moustache, he looked like some mad prophet. His appearance was certainly an unlikely one for the servant of a fashionable Frenchwoman, but it fitted perfectly the part of a recent castaway.
The story which had been concocted to explain Marianne's return to her ordinary life was a fairly simple one. On his way to Naxos with a cargo of wine, Yorgo was supposed to have found the Princess Sant'Anna and her servant adrift, clinging to a few spars, in the water between Santorini and Ios, the vessel in which they were travelling having been sunk by pirates – who apparently abounded in the islands and were perfectly capable of sinking any vessel which came in their way.
Once arrived in Naxos, where there was a considerable population of Venetian origin and where the Turks tolerated the existence of a number of Catholic communities, the fisherman would take the two 'castaways' to a
