Richelieu softened immediately.
"My dear Princess, I know that. And I believe in your friendship. It is in the name of that friendship that I beg you to speak. If you have discovered anything that affects me, you must tell it to me."
She gazed into his eyes and uttered a deep sigh. Then she shrugged.
"You are right. This is no time for scruples. Listen, then. You know that I came here from Constantinople. While there, I became friendly with Princess Morousi, the widow of the former hospodar of Walachia, and it was she who gave me what I can hardly call a warning, for at the time it seemed to me no more than a piece of gossip of no great importance."
"Tell me. She is not a woman with the reputation of an idle gossip."
"Very well. Then I will go straight to the point. Are you quite sure of the regiments that have just landed? It was Prince Tsitsanov who sent them, was it not?"
"Yes, but I fail to see—"
"You will. It is less than ten years, I believe, since Georgia came under Russian control? The majority of the people there are loyal, but not all. As for Prince Tsitsanov, according to what I was told he seems to have been finding out that Tiflis is a long way from St. Petersburg and that his governorship had something vice-regal about it. From vice-regal to regal is not so very far, my dear Duke, and by asking the prince for troops you provided him with a convenient method of getting rid of unwanted troublemakers. He is not going to miss those two regiments, you may be sure of that. As to how they will behave under fire, shoulder to shoulder with the Muscovites whom they detest… But there, as I said, I am not sure of this. What I am telling you is idle drawing room chatter, nothing more. I may very well be maligning Prince Tsitsanov—"
"But on the other hand, what you say may easily be true."
The duke had dropped into a chair behind the desk and was gnawing his thumb with a gloomy expression. Marianne stood for a moment, gauging the effect of her words. The man was certainly a genius when it came to organization. He was a great colonial administrator and possibly a great diplomat, but he was also a worried man, a man who lived on his nerves, and in these aspects of his character he was showing himself more vulnerable than she had dared to hope.
She hesitated, uncertain of her next move. Richelieu, staring into space, appeared to have forgotten her entirely. And then there was the order for Jason's release burning a hole in her pocket. She was impatient now to get away from the governor's palace and hurry to the citadel. And yet something drew her to that open letter on the desk, which was stirring slightly in a faint breath of air come from nowhere in that close room, almost within her reach as though to tease her.
The silence prolonged itself and at last Marianne gave a small cough.
"Your Excellency," she said, "I am sorry to disturb you when you are thinking, but if I might ask you to see me home? It is very late and—"
Before the words were out of her mouth he was on his feet and was stumbling toward her like a man half out of his mind with worry, where she stood like a ghostly vision in the dimly lighted room.
"Don't leave me," he said brokenly. "Don't leave me alone—not now! I don't want to be alone here tonight."
"But why ever not? What have I said to alarm you so? For you are afraid, aren't you?"
"Yes, I am afraid. But not for myself. I am afraid of what I was about to do. But for you—but for the advice you have just given me, I might have gone to Alexander bringing disaster, betrayal, even death. And that to the man to whom I owe everything, who has been good enough to call me his friend—"
"You mean—that you will not go?"
"Just that. I will stay here. The Georgian troops will be sent back again tomorrow. Only the Tatars whom I have trained myself and can trust will set out for Kiev. And I shall remain behind."
A wave of joy swept over Marianne. Even now she could hardly believe that she had won, won all along the line. Within the hour Jason would be free, and tomorrow Richelieu would remain in Odessa and two regiments of troops would never reach the battlefield. It was almost unbelievable. It was too much, and if she had only been able to recover the Sea Witch as well…
"Is it because of what I said to you?" she asked quietly.
"What did you say?"
"You will not fight against your own people?"
Marianne felt the duke's hands tremble as they gripped her shoulders.
"I cannot fight my own brothers, however misguided, yes, there is that… But you have also made me see that by leaving new Russia I should be leaving the field open for others' ambitions. If I go, what is to stop Tsitsanov or anyone else from stepping in? The Crimea needs to be strongly defended. I must stay. Without me, God knows what might happen."
Marianne was seized with a sudden and highly inappropriate desire to laugh. Politics was certainly a most peculiar game, and its practitioners the strangest people. You could rely on them to go one better and her spurious information had been a wild success. The duke had built on it in a way she could never have expected.
However, she managed to choke back the laughter that was bubbling up in her and merely smiled, although the eyes that met Richelieu's were twinkling so gaily that it was a wonder they did not betray her. Happily for her, the duke mistook the real cause.
"You are wonderful," he said softly. "Truly, I think that Providence herself must have sent you to me. Are you really a woman, or are you an angel in disguise? The loveliest of all the angels. An angel with emerald eyes, unutterably sweet and beautiful, clad in the shape of an adorable woman…"
He was standing very close to her and all at once his hands slid down from her shoulders to encircle her waist. For a panic-stricken moment she saw the duke's tormented face near to hers, his dark gaze thickened with desire like a pool when the bottom was stirred up. She tried to push him away, startled to find him suddenly transformed into a different man.
"Your Excellency, please, let me go! I must go—I have to go home."
"No. You shall not go. Not tonight, at least. I can recognize fortune when she appears, for she comes all too rarely. You are my chance, my one chance of happiness. I knew it the moment I saw you, the other day, down there on the crowded quayside. You were like a fairy hovering above a reeking bog. And you were beautiful, as beautiful as light itself. You have saved me tonight—"
"Nonsense. I have merely given you some good advice. Anyone would think to hear you that I had snatched you from the jaws of death."
"You cannot understand. The thing you have saved me from was worse than death. It is a curse, a curse that has hung over me for years. God Himself has sent you. He has heard my prayers…"
His hold on her tightened and Marianne felt a moment's terror as she realized that she was powerless against him. That thin, almost fragile-looking body concealed a wholly unsuspected nervous strength. His arms closed about her like a vise and he was deaf to her entreaties, as though he had become quite suddenly another person. And he was talking so strangely. What had God to do with the fierce access of desire which had made him seize her like this?
"A curse?" she gasped, struggling to get her breath. "Whatever do you mean? I don't understand."
He had buried his face in the soft hollow of her shoulder and was covering it with kisses, his lips traveling by degrees up the slender neck.
"You can never understand, so do not try. Give me this night, only this one night, and I will let you go. I'll give you anything you want… Only let me love you… It is so long since I have known what it is to love. I thought I never should… never again. But you are so lovely, so desirable… You have brought me to life again…"