Marianne and the Rebels

'And now, Arcadius,' she begged, 'tell me everything that has happened since – since our parting.'

'You mean since that villain overpowered us and took possession of the ship, after as good as throwing you into the sea? Seriously, Marianne, I can still hardly believe my eyes. Here you are alive, thoroughly alive, when for weeks now we have hardly dared to think that you could have survived. Can't you see I'm dying to know—'

'And so am I, Jolival! And dying of apprehension, too, because I know you. If you had anything but bad news to tell, you would have been half-way through it by now. Is it – so very dreadful?'

Jolival shrugged and began pacing up and down the room, his hands tucked under his coat tails.

'I don't know. Weird, more than anything. Everything that has happened since the moment I last saw you seems to have been totally irrational. But listen and you'll see.'

Marianne sat curled up in an armchair, listening with all her ears, and as Jolival proceeded, she soon ceased to see or hear anything but the story he had to tell, which was certainly a very strange one.

After criminally abandoning Marianne, the Sea Witch had turned aside from her original course and set sail for Africa. On the following night she was at a point midway between the Morea and the island of Crete when, just as darkness was falling, she was sighted by the corsair xebecs of Veli Pasha, the formidable son of the Pasha Ali of Yannina.

The Epirote's flotilla had easily overcome a vessel in no better or more experienced hands than those of a megalomaniac doctor and a handful of ruffians. At least, so far as the prisoners lying in irons below decks had been able to deduce from the short duration of the fight. One thing, too, they were now certain of, and that was that Jason Beaufort was no longer in command.

'Then how can you think he may be still alive?' Marianne burst out. 'Leighton must have killed him to gain possession of the Witch!'

'Killed him? No. But deprived him of his senses, drugged him to the eyeballs. And I don't think that we need look much farther for an explanation of a great deal in his behaviour which seemed to all of us who knew Beaufort well to be utterly unlike him. Not everything can be explained by jealous rage, and I know now that our captain had been in the man Leighton's power ever since Corfu. We were not sufficiently wary of that man.

'O'Flaherty told me in the end that Leighton had long been engaged in the slave-trade and had learned various secrets from the witch-doctors of Benin and Ourdah. After his betrayal of you, he encouraged Beaufort to drink heavily, but what he drank was not honest spirits.'

'Then, if he was not killed, what did Leighton do with him?'

'He escaped with him, in the launch, during the fight. It was pitch dark and everything was in total confusion. A boy who was behind one of the guns saw them go. He recognized the captain who, he said, was like a man walking in his sleep. It was Leighton who took the oars. He also took your jewels, I may add, as a kind of insurance, because we couldn't find them with your things, although we looked.'

'Jason desert his ship when it was in danger! Jason run from a fight!' Marianne said incredulously. 'It's just not likely, Arcadius! He would never get calmly into a boat while his men were being killed.'

'Of course not, but I thought I told you he was not himself. My dear child, if you stick at every piece of unlikelihood in our tale you are going to have a hard time of it. Well, down there in the orlop, we were convinced nothing but death awaited us at the hands of the pasha's devils, that or slavery at best. Nothing of the kind. On the contrary, Ahmet Rais, who was what you might call the commodore of the fleet, treated us with perfect courtesy.'

'Surely that's only natural? You and Gracchus are French, and the Pasha of Yannina daren't quarrel outright with the Emperor. His son must be of the same mind.'

Arcadius gave a lopsided grin.

'If there'd been nothing but the fact of being Frenchmen to save us, I'd not be here today to tell you about it. It was touch and go whether we'd lose our heads when a whole pack of ruffians came bursting into the orlop, foaming at the mouth and waving their scimitars about in a highly dangerous fashion. But – and this is the most extraordinary part of it – Kaleb only had to say a few words to them in their own language to stop them in their tracks. They even bowed to us most politely.'

Marianne was staring at him as if he was delirious.

'Kaleb?'

'You can't have forgotten the bronzed young god you defended so magnificently when Leighton was trying to have him flogged to death? Well, I have to confess that it was he who saved us,' Jolival declared, blandly helping himself to the glass of champagne offered by a servant who wore a curious garb of white flannel below his ordinary French-style coat.

The ambassador had returned a moment or two before and was now sunk in a chair, missing nothing of what Jolival had been saying, or of the impromptu but delicious cold supper which his household staff had been called out of their beds to prepare and serve.

Marianne herself had drained the contents of her glass at a single gulp, as though the better to assure herself that this was all quite real.

'He saved you?' she cried to Jolival now. 'But Arcadius, that's absurd. He was an escaped Turkish slave himself!'

'It looks absurd at first sight,' Jolival agreed. 'But to tell you the truth I've been thinking a good deal about our runaway. According to Beaufort, who I must say seems to have been more credulous than one would have expected, this Kaleb was escaping from his Turkish masters on the waterfront at Chioggia, in other words at a respectable distance from Ottoman territory. To further his escape, he then joins the crew of a vessel belonging to a nation notorious for the practice of slavery, and later doesn't turn a hair when he hears that the ship is on its way to Constantinople, of all places. After which, we find out that he possesses a certain influence over the Turks and their associates. It makes you think.'

'You're right. It is very strange. What do you make of it?'

'Either that the man's mad, which I can't believe, or that he is serving the Ottomans in his own way. Don't forget there are plenty of negroes and those of allied races holding important posts around the throne. Even if only in the harem.'

Marianne had a vision of the Ethiopian's lithe figure and his rich, deep voice. She lifted her brows.

'A eunuch? That one? Really!'

'I did not suggest he was. It's only a theory. At all events, he certainly got us out of Veli Pasha's clutches. We barely touched the coast of the Morea, and were not obliged to leave the brig, but allowed to resume our original quarters. Then the xebec escorted us to the Bosphorus, with a prize crew belonging to Ahmet Rais on board.'

'But what became of the remainder of the crew?'

'The mutineers are dead, and the pasha's methods must have made them long for hanging. The rest have no doubt been sold as slaves. O'Flaherty, of course, shared the same clemency as ourselves and we brought him here with us.'

'And – Kaleb?'

Jolival spread his hands in a gesture of ignorance.

'From the moment we dropped anchor at Monevasia in the Morea, we have not set eyes on him, and no one would tell us where he was. The last time we saw him, he said good-bye very politely and then simply vanished, like a genie out of a bottle. Nor would he consent to answer any of our questions.'

'This gets stranger than ever.'

Marianne's thoughts dwelled for a moment on the Ethiopian slave. Had he even been born in the country of the Lion of Judah? Was he ever a slave? He did not look like one. No, Arcadius was probably right and the man was some secret emissary of the Grand Signior's, an agent of some kind, perhaps. But he had been friendly, and she was glad, even if he had been keeping some secret from them, that he was free and safe, and out of Leighton's clutches. Very soon she turned from brooding on Kaleb, with his dark skin and light eyes and his perfect physique, and fell again to pondering the one subject which preoccupied her most passionately: Jason.

Her feelings, she discovered, were queer and complex. The thought of him deep in the power of that evil man was horrifying and revolting, and yet at the same time it brought with it a kind of paradoxical happiness. Now that she knew with what diabolic cunning the doctor had gained possession of his mind, she could forgive him his rages, his injustice and all that he had done to her, because she knew now that he had not been responsible for his actions.