The panic on board the pirate ship had reached its height. There must have been grave damage to the hull and it was clear the vessel was already going down. The shouts of the seamen getting the boats into the water were overridden by the voice of Kouloughis bellowing frantically: 'Stephanos! Stephanos!'
'Let him look on the deck under his feet,' Theodoros muttered. 'He'll soon find his precious Stephanos!'
On board the big three-decker there was also activity, but a disciplined activity. There was a rapid patter of the seamen's bare feet about the deck but, apart from a single voice speaking in a curiously accented Greek to the men on the polacca and a faint background hum of men talking quietly together, there was no noise.
An order came abruptly from the unknown quarterdeck, amplified by the speaking trumpet. The order itself meant nothing to Marianne, yet at the sound of it she started violently and almost let go her hold of her companion.
'Theodoros!' she whispered. 'This ship – she's English.'
He too was startled. It was not good news. The cordial relations which had existed recently between Britain and the Porte was enough to make her the natural enemy of the rebel Greeks. If he were known, Theodoros would be handed over to the Sultan just as readily as by Kouloughis. The only difference would be that the operation would not cost the Sultan a penny, thus effecting a considerable saving.
The entry-port for which they were making was not far off now. Theodoros paused for an instant in his climbing.
'You are French,' he whispered. 'What will happen if they find out who you are?'
'I'll be arrested, imprisoned. Already, only a few weeks ago, an English squadron attacked the vessel I was travelling in, to capture me.'
'Then they must not know. There's one person at least on board who speaks Greek – I'll say that you're my sister, deaf and dumb, and we were taken by Kouloughis in a raid and ask for asylum. In any case, we've no choice. When you're escaping out of hell, Princess, you don't stop to worry if your horse is running away with you!'
He resumed his climb and a few seconds later the two of them tumbled on to the deck of the English vessel, at the feet of an officer who was strolling along by the side of a man in an impeccable white suit, as tranquilly as though they were enjoying an agreeable cruise. Neither of them showed any undue surprise at the sudden appearance of two dirty, unkempt foreigners. Their reaction was more of faint displeasure, as if something rather improper had occurred.
'Who are you?' the officer demanded sternly. 'What are you doing here?'
Theodoros launched into a long and eloquent explanation while Marianne, suddenly oblivious of her peril, stared about her in amazement. She was conscious of an indefinable sensation, as if the England of her childhood had risen up before her all at once, and she was breathing it in with a totally unexpected delight. Everything, the two beautifully dressed men, both as neat as new pins, the spotlessly holystoned deck, the gleaming brasswork, it all seemed extraordinarily familiar. Even the face of the officer (who, judging by the amount of gold lace he wore, must be the captain), with grizzled side-whiskers half-concealed by the shadow of his great cocked hat, was oddly like a face she knew already.
The man in the white suit was now deep in conversation with Theodoros, but all this time the captain had said nothing. He was watching Marianne, standing in the light of one of the lanterns, and she felt his eyes upon her as strongly as if he had placed his hand on her shoulder.
The man who had been talking to Theodoros turned to the officer.
'The vessel that struck us belongs to one of the Kouloughis brothers, notorious renegade pirates. This fellow says that he and his sister were carried off by him from Amorgos and were on their way to Tunis to be sold as slaves. They managed to escape in the confusion and are asking for asylum. I gather the young woman is deaf and dumb. We can scarcely throw them back into the sea, can we?'
The captain made no reply. Without a word, he reached out and, taking Marianne's hand, drew her up on to the quarterdeck, where a powerful lantern was burning. There he fell to studying her face as the light fell on it.
Sticking to her part, Marianne said not a word. Then, suddenly:
'You aren't Greek, nor are you deaf and dumb, are you, my child?'
At the same time, he swept off his cocked hat and revealed a full, high-coloured face in which was set a pair of laughing eyes as blue as periwinkles, a face that surged up so unexpectedly from the depths of the past that Marianne could not help giving it a name:
'James King!' she cried. 'Captain James King! But this is incredible!'
'Not so incredible as finding you here, sailing about on a pirate ship in company with a Greek giant! All the same, I couldn't be more delighted to see you, Marianne my dear. Welcome aboard the
Whereupon Captain King put both arms round Marianne and kissed her warmly.
CHAPTER TWELVE
An Irascible Antiquary
To find oneself suddenly, halfway across the world, on board the same vessel as an old family friend who, besides being one's accidental rescuer, has all unwittingly become a wartime enemy is an experience of singular awkwardness.
Sir James King had been a part of Marianne's life as far back as she could remember. In those rare intervals when he was not away at sea, he and his family, whose home lay within easy reach of Selton, were among the few callers permitted to cross the sacred limits of Aunt Ellis's carefully guarded threshold. This fact was probably due to her finding them both estimable and restful.
To the fierce old lady, ruling her vast estates with a rod of iron and tending always to carry about with her a faint aroma of the stables, Sir James's wife Mary, with her pretty dresses and big frothy hats, and her perpetual look of having just stepped out of a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was a continual source of interest and amazement. Even life's hardest knocks seemed to roll off her, baffled by her charming smile and the exquisite good manners that were second nature to her.
Marianne, giving her all a child's whole-hearted admiration for something perfect in its kind, had seen her come through an epidemic of smallpox, to which her two youngest children had fallen victim, and wait with unfailing constancy for the return of a husband long believed lost at sea, with the serenity of her sweet face apparently quite undisturbed. Only, her eyes had lost a fraction of their delicate blue, and her smile acquired an indefinable tinge of melancholy to betray the anguish she was suffering. She was a woman who would always hold her head high and never give in to circumstances.
Marianne had always been glad to see Lady King, thinking, as she looked at her, that her own mother, of whom she possessed only a single miniature, must have been very like her.
As ill luck would have it, Lady King had been out of England at the time of her young friend's marriage, having been summoned to Jamaica to the bedside of her ailing sister, where she had been obliged to undertake the management of a large plantation. Her husband, too, had been away, at Malta, and their eldest son at sea. So Marianne had been deprived of the happiness of having those she considered her best friends among the few people present at a ceremony which she was so swiftly to consider a disaster.
Had they been at home, things would almost certainly have been very different and Marianne would not have been forced to seek asylum abroad after the tragic events of her marriage night, since the Kings would have opened their house to her unhesitatingly.
Now and then, in the difficult times which led up to the moment when she had found a haven and a kind of home in her ancestral mansion in the rue de Lille, Marianne's thoughts had gone out to the English family she would probably never see again, now that an impenetrable curtain had been drawn between herself and England. She had continued to think of them a little sadly until, as time went by, they had faded gradually into the mists of her past life, so far back that she had almost forgotten them.
And now, quite suddenly, here they were again, in the person of this elderly naval officer who in so few words had reforged the chain that had been broken.
The rediscovery was not without its problems for Marianne. She knew, of course, that Sir James must have heard of her marriage to Francis Cranmere, but what did he know of the subsequent events?
