'But don't you understand, he means to separate us? We are going to be parted, here and now, and they may be taking you to face a firing squad.'
The corner of his mouth lifted a little in his familiar, mocking smile. Then he shrugged.
'That is in God's hands. Think of yourself. You know quite well that you'll come through. You won't be friendless in the city for very long.'
'But I don't want to! I don't want to! I want to stay with you, to share your fate whatever it may be.'
She was striving desperately to reach him and cling to him, even at the risk of being trampled by the horses, but already the squad of mounted men had closed in on him. She uttered a piercing cry, like a wounded animaclass="underline" 'Jason! Don't leave me!'
Aksakov, too, was lifting himself into the saddle as she turned to him.
'Don't you understand that I love him?'
It was his turn to shrug and he made her a derisory little bow.
'I dare say. But we must abide by the conditions. Your Serene Highness is free – free even to follow us if you wish, although at the risk of being trampled by the crowd and lost without trace.'
With that, paying no further attention to her, the little troop formed up about the wounded man who had been hoisted as comfortably as possible on to his own horse until a conveyance could be found for him and, with the prisoner in their midst, rode off down a side street which, in due course, would bring them up with the body of the retreating army.
Marianne watched them go. In her wretchedness it was even some time before the significance of Aksakov's last words sunk in. Not until the last horse had vanished round the corner of the street did her brain grasp the fact that nothing, as the captain had said, prevented her from following, whatever the dangers involved. As he had just told her, she was free.
The thought of her friends whom she was abandoning with little hope of ever seeing them again crossed her mind briefly but she dismissed it. Her fate was bound to Jason's. She could not and would not have it otherwise. She had to follow him to the last moment, even if that last moment were very close now. After all that she had been through to find and keep him, anything else would be senseless desertion and a betrayal of herself.
She threw back her head and took a deep breath, then set off in her turn along the same way that the cossacks had taken. She had crossed the square and was just entering the street when she saw Shankala.
The gipsy was standing in the middle of the narrow thoroughfare with her arms spread wide as though to bar the way. All through the fight Marianne had not thought of her once, for the girl had an incomparable talent for vanishing into the tiniest patch of shadow and remaining there unseen and unheard. But now she had shown herself and Marianne knew by the grin of hatred and triumph that distorted her brown features that if she wanted to go after her lover it would not be without a fight. Too late, she understood that by pretending, against all probability, to be pursuing the man who had cast her off, the half-wild gipsy girl had all the time been aiming at nothing but the conquest of the master she had chosen for herself and taking him from the woman who might consider him her own rightful property.
Marianne stepped out boldly towards the other woman who, in her blood-red garments, looked like nothing so much as one of those crosses that were once drawn on the doors of houses where the plague had struck. Throwing out her arm in a commanding gesture, Marianne ordered her to let her pass.
'Begone!' she said sternly.
The other gave a shrill, high laugh and then, before Marianne could lay a hand on her to put her out of the way, she had drawn a dagger from her belt. The short blade gleamed for a moment in the sun and then she struck.
With a sound like a groan, Marianne collapsed on to the earth, already trampled by the horses' hooves. Shankala was bending over her, her weapon already lifted again to deliver one final stroke, when a sudden outcry made her look quickly back towards the farther end of the square. Instantly she abandoned her intention and instead ran swiftly after the cossacks.
CHAPTER THREE
The Player Queen
Pain bit sharply through the cocoon of thick mist which for Marianne had replaced the world of reality. It was like a persistent burning sensation and she tried to shake it off but her invisible tormentor refused to be dismissed.
A voice was speaking, a feminine voice with a lilting Italian accent.
'It's better than I feared. Madre mia, but she was lucky! I quite thought she was dead.'
'I too,' agreed a second voice, this time without an accent. 'But her assailant did not. She was just about to strike again when you shouted out and banged the shutters, Vania dear. Luckily we frightened her.'
The voices belonged definitely to the real world. Marianne opened her eyes and nearly closed them again at once at the strange picture made by the two women bending over her in the light of a candle. She who held the light was a handsome woman, no longer in her first youth, with red hair, a pale complexion and golden-brown eyes, dressed in the velvet farthingale, starched ruff and peaked head-dress of a renaissance princess, while the other, who was clad in the dark red draperies of a Roman matron, bent over the injured girl energetically sponging the wound, with such an expression of concentration on her fine, regular features below the piled-up hair and Roman diadem adorned with flame-coloured plumes that her black brows met in a frown above her dark eyes and the tip of a pointed tongue protruded from between shapely red lips.
She was dressing Marianne's wound with the aid of a bottle of brandy and a wad of lint with a thoroughness that drew a moan of protest from her patient.
'You're hurting me,' she protested.
The wearer of the plumes paused in her work and addressed a beaming smile to her companion.
'She speaks French! And without a trace of accent,' she cried, giving full range to a magnificent contralto voice. 'How strange that we do not know her!'
'I am French,' Marianne said. 'And I gather that you are also. But, please, you are hurting me.'
The other lady laughed, revealing small, pointed teeth, irregular but of a flawless whiteness.
'Be glad that you can still feel pain,' she observed. 'In any case, we cannot help it. The girl's knife may have been dirty. The wound must be cleaned.'
'Besides, it is finished,' the Roman lady said cheerfully. 'The wound is not very deep. I've probed it and by good fortune I have with me a quite miraculous ointment. I am going to bandage you up and, with a little rest, I think you will do very well.'
She was doing so as she spoke, anointing the wound with a kind of thick cream that smelled agreeably of balsam and concocting a makeshift bandage out of a pad and a long strip which the renaissance princess had ripped from the bottom of what had once been a white petticoat. This done, she reached for the brandy bottle again, poured a little into a glass and, placing two or three cushions under Marianne's head, obliged her to drink it.
Now that she was sitting up, Marianne could see that she was lying on a large sofa in a fair-sized room but the shutters, drawn tightly across the windows, made it too dark for her to make out many details. However, the candle in the princess's hand enabled her to make out strange shapes of stacked-up and dilapidated furniture.
She felt stronger after the brandy and made an effort to smile at the two women who were regarding her with some anxiety.
'Thank you,' she said. 'I think I owe you a great deal. But how did you find me?'
The Roman lady stood up, displaying a queenly yet graceful form, and moved to a window, her dark red robes swishing dramatically around her.