unwontedly close attention to her coach.
'May I ask what you expect to find?' she snapped sharply. 'I suppose you imagine I am carrying a keg of brandy concealed under my cushions?'
'Orders are orders, madame.' The reply came from a gendarme who emerged at that moment from the guardhouse. 'All carriages entering Paris to be searched, especially those coming from a distance. Where are you from, madame?'
'From Italy,' Marianne said tartly. 'And I promise you I have no contraband goods, or conspirators in my coach. I am merely returning home.'
'Then I daresay you'll have a passport,' the gendarme said, smiling unpleasantly and revealing in the process a set of startlingly white teeth framed in the bristly thatch of his moustache. 'A passport in the name of the Duke of Otranto, perhaps?'
It did not appear that such passports would be well received and Marianne blessed the fate that had made her, henceforth, a loyal subject of the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. Proudly, she produced the passport which Count Gherardesca had presented to her three days after her marriage.
'This bears the signature of her Imperial Highness, Princess Elisa, Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Princess of Lucca and Piombino – and sister to his Majesty, the Emperor and King, as you may perhaps be aware,' she added ironically, taking a sardonic pleasure in retailing the impressive list of titles. However, the gendarme seemed impervious to irony. He was heavily engaged in spelling out the name inscribed on the official document by the light of the lantern.
'Marianne Elizabeth d'Assel… nat de Villeneuve… Princess… Sarta – no, Santa Anna…'
'Sant'Anna,' Marianne corrected sharply. 'Now may I return to my coach and continue my journey? I am extremely tired – and it is starting to rain.'
Big, round drops, heavy as coins, were beginning to fall, making small craters in the dust around the coach, but the gendarme in his cocked hat appeared not to notice it. He was eyeing Marianne suspiciously.
'You can get back in, but don't move on. I've got to check something.'
'Just what, I'd like to know?' Marianne raged, as the man vanished into the guardhouse with her passport. 'Does the oaf imagine that my papers are false?'
The answer came from an old market gardener with a cart full of cabbages who had drawn up alongside the berline.
'No use getting impatient, m'dame. It's the same for everyone, every bloody day standing in the bloody rain! They've got so ruddy nosey you wouldn't believe! I can tell you, I've been made to unload a whole cart of cabbages, just in case I might be hiding some bleeding conspirator.'
'But, what is it all about? Has there been an attempt at assassination? Has a criminal escaped? Or are they looking for robbers?'
'Nothing like that, m'dame. It's all that bloody Savary, thinks he's the only one as knows how to serve the Emperor! So he goes on searching and nosing and asking questions. Who hatched it? Who laid it? Wants to know it all, he does.'
The farmer's confidences might have continued indefinitely but for the reappearance of the hairy gendarme, preceded this time by a sub-lieutenant, a dapper, beardless youth who approached the coach and bowed perfunctorily, taking in Marianne with an eye of insolent appreciation.
'You are Madame Sant'Anna, it appears.'
Outraged at the tone the young whipper-snapper had used to her, Marianne felt herself stiffen.
'I am the Princess Sant'Anna,' she said, very distinctly. 'It is usual to address me as Serene Highness, lieutenant. Apparently they do not teach you manners in the gendarmerie?'
'It is enough that we are taught to do our duty,' the young man said, in no way discomposed by her disdainful tone. 'My duty, Serene Highness, is to conduct you forthwith to the Minister of Police – if you will be good enough to ask your maid to make room for me.'
Before the outraged Marianne could say a word, the lieutenant had opened the door and climbed into the coach. Agathe rose automatically to relinquish to him her place beside Marianne, but her mistress laid a firm hand on her arm.
'Stay where you are, Agathe. I did not tell you to move and I am not in the habit of allowing any Tom, Dick or Harry to sit beside me. As for you, sir, I believe I must have misunderstood you. Will you repeat what it was you said?'
The lieutenant, obliged to maintain an uncomfortable stooping posture in the absence of anywhere to sit down, spoke in a voice of stifled anger.
'I said that I was to conduct you forthwith to the Minister of Police. Your name has been circulated to every guard post for more than a week. These are my orders.'
'Whose orders?'
'Whose orders would you expect? The Minister of Police, his grace the Duke of Rovigo, and therefore of the Emperor.'
'That remains to be seen,' Marianne retorted. 'Very well, if that is what you want, we will go to the Duke of Rovigo. I should not object to telling him what I think of him, and of his subordinates. Until then, however, I intend to remain mistress of my own coach. Have the goodness to take a seat next to my coachman, young man. And while you are about it, you may show him the way. Under no other circumstances will you get me to budge from this spot.'
'Very well. I will go.'
With a very bad grace, the young gendarme climbed out and went to join Gracchus, who welcomed him with a sardonic grin.
'Nice of you to come and bear me company, lieutenant. You'll find it's well enough up here. A little damp, maybe, but you get more fresh air than inside. Now, where is it we're going exactly?'
'Straight on, and none of your sauce my lad, or you'll be the worse for it. Drive on.'
For answer, Gracchus touched up his horses and began to bawl out a lusty, street urchin's version of the soldiers' march from Austerlitz:
'When we break through their line
Ta rum ta ra, ta rum ta ra,
When we break through their line
Then how we'll laugh…'
Laugh? Marianne, hunched up inside the coach, felt no desire to laugh but even so the infectious rhythm of the march and the warlike gaiety of the voice suited something in her mood. She was far too angry to be afraid, even for an instant, of this Savary or of his reasons for ordering her arrest at the very gates of Paris.
When, a little later, they arrived at the Hotel de Juigne, Marianne saw that there had been changes here also. The place was clearly being redecorated. Everywhere there was scaffolding, buckets of plaster and paint pots left about by the workmen at the end of the day. In spite of this, and of the lateness of the hour (ten o'clock had not long sounded from Saint-Germain) the forecourt and antechambers were filled with footmen in glittering liveries and with visitors from every class of society. Instead of conducting Marianne upstairs to the dusty waiting- room on the first floor which led into the tiny, ill-furnished office that had belonged to the Duke of Otranto, the young lieutenant handed her over to a towering major-domo in red plush and powder. He flung open the doors into a
In the midst of all this, a lady in a gown of mauve taffetas, with a black pelisse and a rice-straw hat, was pacing up and down in an agitated manner. She was middle-aged, and her noble features and wide, thoughtful
