As they talked, the three of them had completed the circuit of the garden and found themselves back on the vine-covered terrace outside the drawing room. Autumn had turned it to a wine-red canopy which glowed redder still in the light of the lamps that were now being lit all over the house. But a pervasive odor of roast meat and frying onions emanating from the kitchens robbed the moment of its poetical effect and brought it down to earth. It was dinner time, and Marianne was hungry as always.
An ancient servingman with long white hair came into the drawing room bent under the weight of a lighted candelabrum almost taller than himself. The prince bowed, touching his forehead, lips and breast in the eastern fashion.
"I'll bid you good night," he said, as though concluding an ordinary call, "and shall hope to see you very soon."
Marianne swept him a little curtsy.
"Very soon, indeed, Turhan Bey, if I have my way. Good night to you also."
The aged retainer made haste to open the door and the prince followed him quickly, but he turned in the doorway to deliver one parting counsel.
"If I may be allowed one piece of advice—On no account have any further communication with the lady in question. She is a great deal too intelligent and she has everything to gain from frightening you. Such people make perilous friends."
The following evening, enveloped in a black ferej and veil of the same color, Marianne left the Morousi palace. Behind her, like a shadow, went a tall Albanian with a dagger like a small cutlass stuck in his belt. His drooping black mustache gave him a strong resemblance to Attila the Hun and he glared around him with a fierce black eye that defied anyone to cross him. But there were plenty more Albanians like him on the waterfronts of Stamboul and his gaudy clothes were in harmony with the multicolored crowds that swarmed there from dawn to dusk. He also possessed the added advantage that he was dumb.
With him to protect her, Marianne reached the unremarkable little perama waiting among a hundred others like it at the jetty of Aykapani. In another moment she was gliding over the gray waters of the harbor under a fine, persistent rain which, although unpleasant, was almost as impenetrable as a fog, toward her new home.
Chapter 5
Arcadius Is Angry
RAIN! It had begun just after Christmas, which had been unusually mild, and since then it had not stopped, a thin, persistent drizzle soaking everything in sight. The fishing village of Kandilli, across the Bosporus on the Asian side, showed only as a vague blur with the inevitable minaret standing up like a quill pen. The bright colors of the boats and the houses, painted pink, blue, green and yellow, dissolved in the watery mist to form a kind of grisaille in which even the spires of the cypress trees merged into the general gray. The Bosporus was cheerless, a broad salt river heaving sullenly day after day with seabirds shrieking overhead.
These days were mostly spent by Marianne in the tandour, whose windows, covered with gilded grilles, overhung the gray waters. This was a small circular apartment furnished with a number of divans, their feet converging in the center on a large, tiled stove covered with a brilliantly embroidered woolen blanket, the edges of which could be lifted by the occupants of the divans to cover their feet to help ward off the cold and damp.
The palace of Humayunabad, built by Ibrahim Pasha in the previous century and now by favor of Mahmoud II the property of Turhan Bey, possessed a number of such comfortable chambers, but Marianne had chosen this one on account of its oriel windows overlooking the Bosporus from which she could watch the shipping pass back and forth each day.
The view was much livelier than looking at the dripping gardens which, for all their splendor, were enclosed by high, defensive walls that made them almost as depressing as the fortress of Rumeli Hisar, whose battlemented walls and three round towers rose out of the water guarding the narrows with their guns. So huge and lofty were its walls that they remained visible even through the chill sea mists that rolled in from the Black Sea beyond and smothered the place where two worlds met.
Except for an occasional short stroll in the gardens whenever the rain stopped for long enough to allow it, Marianne would spend hours and hours in this room, resisting all attempts on the part of Jolival and the Persian physicians whom the prince had procured for her in place of Dr. Meryon to persuade her to take more exercise. She was nearing her time now and she felt heavy and sluggish. She could hardly bear to look in the mirror and see her figure, now swollen beyond all possibility of concealment, and her sunken face, entirely dominated by a pair of great green eyes.
The sight of the sea, though, had become like a drug to her, and it was almost more than she could do to drag herself away from it. The nights, when she was forced to leave her divan to go to bed, seemed endless, in spite of the soothing drafts administered by her doctor, who was becoming alarmed at her increasing tension.
With her hands lying idle on the embroidery that she would probably never finish or on a book she did not read, she would lie there from the boom of the morning gun that marked the beginning of the day until the evening one that ended it, enclosed in her glassed-in birdcage resembling the after cabin of a ship, watching the vessels slipping past the palace and the little landing stage with the marble steps going down into the leaden water, always looking for one who never came.
The year 1811 had gone out silently and already the first month of the new year had passed away. Yet still Jason had not come. And every new day ate a little more cruelly into Marianne's hopes, until she had almost come to despair of ever seeing him again. If it had not been for the Sea Witch, she could even have believed that he had abandoned her forever and his love for her was dead. The brig, still riding at her moorings in Phanar under Turhan Bey's colors, was her one hope, and she clung to it with all her strength. He could not ignore the ship he loved even if the woman whose face she bore on her prow was nothing to him anymore.
Weak and ill, with a weight of misery in her heart, Marianne blamed herself for what she privately thought of as her cowardice. The old Marianne of Selton, who had put a sword through her husband on her wedding night to avenge her honor, would have turned her back on any man who treated her as he had. But that had been two hundred years ago and the frail, unhappy woman who lay huddled like a sick cat among her cushions had strength only for the one thought that still kept her going: the longing to see him again.
One of Turhan Bey's merchantmen, on a regular run from Monemvasia with a cargo of Molvoisie wine, had brought news that the American had left the Morea for Athens early in December, but no one seemed to know what had become of him after that. Once arrived in the ancient capital of learning, he appeared to have vanished into thin air.
A hundred times over Marianne had made Jolival repeat to her what the fishermen had told the messenger sent by Turhan Bey with instructions to bring Jason back with him if he so wished. The stranger had read the letter that had been given him, together with a sum of money, according to instructions, as soon as he was fully recovered. Then he had simply put it in his pocket and begun making inquiries about a boat for Athens. After warmly thanking those who had nursed him with such kindness, he had pressed on them half the money he had been given and, early one morning, had embarked on a small vessel trading along the coast as far as Piraeus. By the time Turhan Bey's men arrived, he had been gone for a fortnight.