She was still hesitating there when a soft voice reached her.
"Princess, where are you? I hope you are not still feeling ill?"
Marianne breathed again.
"No, Your Highness. I am here."
Stepping out of the shadow of the trees, she found Nakshidil standing in the doorway of the little kiosk. She must have sent everyone else away, for she was quite alone, and Marianne, feeling very much in the wrong and also something of a fool, was grateful to her.
After this unlikely start to a delicate negotiation she felt that some apology was called for, and the Princess Sant'Anna was just sinking into her best curtsy when she was promptly interrupted.
"No, please! Are you sure you are quite better? Take my arm and let us go inside—unless you'd rather stroll a little in the gardens? It is cooler now and we might go as far as the terrace there, overlooking the Bosporus. It is a favorite place of mine."
"With pleasure, but I do not like to ask Your Highness to put yourself out for me."
"Who, me? My dear girl, I like nothing better than to take exercise, whether walking or riding on horseback. Unfortunately it can be a little awkward here. In our palaces in Asia it is easier. Are you coming?"
Arm in arm, they made their way slowly toward the selected spot. Marianne was surprised to find that the sultana was as tall as she was and her slim figure was quite faultless. For that to be so at her age it was clear that the fair-skinned Creole could not have resigned herself to the lazy, cloistered existence of most women in the harem. She could only have kept that lithe, girlish figure by an addiction to the athletic sports so dear to the English. Nakshidil's interest, on the other hand, was all for her companion and while they walked she was asking with a deceptive casualness: "Do you suffer often from these turns ? Yet you look to be in high bloom ?"
"No, Your Highness. Not very often. I believe the blame for this must go to the cook at the embassy. There is a certain heaviness about his dishes—"
"And what I offered you was not of the lightest, either! Oddly enough, though, your sickness put me strongly in mind of what I suffered myself when I was expecting my son. I used to drink pots and pots of coffee and I couldn't stand halva or baklava—much less gulrecheli, the rose jam. The name and the color are very poetic, to be sure, but I could never abide it."
Marianne felt her cheeks grow hot and blessed the darkness which hid her untimely blushes. Even so, she could not control the slight stiffening of her arm which told her companion all she needed to know. Nakshidil understood at once that she had touched on the truth and also that it was a point on which her guest was peculiarly sensitive.
When the two of them reached the little terrace built of white marble, she indicated a curving bench plentifully furnished with cushions and evidently a much favored spot.
"Shall we sit here for a little?" she said. "We can talk much more comfortably than in my apartments because there is no one to overhear us. Inside the palace, there are listening ears behind every door and every curtain. Here, we need fear nothing of the kind. See—where we are is like a kind of balcony overhanging the battlements and the lower gardens." She glanced at Marianne's bare shoulders. "But you are quite sure you won't be cold?"
"No, indeed, Your Highness. I feel perfectly well now."
Nakshidil nodded and turned to look across the arm of the sea to where the clouds were piling up over the hills of Scutari.
"Summer is nearly over," she observed with a touch of sadness. "The weather is changing and we shall probably have rain tomorrow. It will be good for the crops because the land is parched but after that will be the winter. It can be bitterly cold here and I dread it… But we will forget all that now. Tell me about yourself."
"Me? But there is nothing interesting about me, Your Highness, except insofar as I am the mouthpiece of Napoleon."
The sultana put up her hand with a gesture of impatience.
"Let's leave your emperor for the present. His turn will come, although I cannot see what is to be said about him. Whatever you may think, I find you much more interesting than the great Napoleon. And so I want to know all about you. Tell me of your life."
"My—my life?"
"Yes, the whole of your life! As though I were your mother."
"But, Your Highness, it is a long story—"
"Never mind. We have the night before us. But I want to know—everything! There are so many stories about you already and I like to get at the truth. Besides, I am your cousin and would like to be your friend. Don't you need a friend who has some power?"
The sultana's silky little hand was laid on Marianne's, but she was already responding impulsively: "Oh, yes!" It was spoken with such feeling that her companion smiled and was confirmed in her initial conviction that this young and ravishingly lovely creature stood in desperate need of help. Accustomed by the perilous life she had been forced to lead in this palace before becoming the mistress of it, to watch the slightest change of expression in the faces of others with a closeness on which her very life might depend, Nakshidil had been struck from Marianne's first appearance by the drawn look on her lovely face and by the unconscious pathos of her great green eyes. Napoleon's envoy was very far from anything she had expected.
The rumors which had been going around the Mediterranean in the past weeks had created a fantastic picture of a bold courtesan, a kind of boudoir Messalina, decked out by the emperor her lover in a princess's crown, hardened in every kind of trickery and cunning and ready to stop at nothing, however flagrant, to ensure the success of her mission. Face to face with the reality, it had not taken the sultana long to realize that this picture was a complete fantasy, a mere caricature concocted by the Foreign Office which had nothing to do with reality.
It was a caricature, moreover, which had been causing her a good deal of secret annoyance. The Princess Sant'Anna was a kinswoman, if a distant one, and it was tiresome to have such unpleasant things said about a member of her own family. Consequently, a wish to form her own opinion had played no small part in her decision to grant the accused an audience. Now she wanted to hear all about this strange, beautiful young woman who seemed to bear a burden too heavy for her, yet bore it with pride.
Marianne began, a little shyly and reticently, to give a brief, superficial sketch of her past life but yielded little by little to her companion's very evident sympathy and understanding. Strange as the events of her own life had been so far, Nakshidil's far outdid them, for it was a much longer road from a convent in Nantes to the harem of the Grand Signior and a position of absolute power than from Selton Hall to the Palazzo Sant'Anna, even by the way of Napoleon's bed.
When she fell silent at last, she found that she had described it all down to the smallest detail and that it must be very late because the silence that lay all about the little terrace where the two women sat was much deeper than it had been. The noises of the city had died away and from the sea there came only the gentle slap of the waves and the measured tread of the guards at the seraglio gates.
The sultana, for her part, had not moved. She sat so still in fact that Marianne had the sudden, unnerving thought that she had fallen asleep. But she was only lost in thought, for a moment later Marianne heard her sigh.
"You've done a great many more stupid things than I ever did, for I only went where my fate directed, but I can't see that anyone could possibly blame you. When I think about it, love is to blame. It is love that has brought you both great suffering and great exaltation, set you on the strange road which has brought you to me."