"We shall meet again very soon," Nakshidil assured her with an encouraging smile as she offered Marianne her hand to kiss. "And don't forget, you will be expected tomorrow night at the place I told you of. For the rest—trust me. I do not think you will be disappointed."
Without elaborating further on these last words, which Marianne could not help feeling were a trifle enigmatic, the Sultan Valideh vanished into the recesses of the pavilion with her ladies following in a cloud of blue, leaving her visitor to be escorted slowly back to her litter by the tall Black Eunuch.
As she was borne back through the gardens toward the seashore at the easy, swinging pace of her bearers, Marianne tried to sort out her ideas and sum up the evening's events. She did not find it easy, for her mind was torn between such contradictory feelings as gratitude, disappointment and uneasiness. On the political plane she had failed, undoubtedly, and failed so completely that she hardly dared to ask herself how Napoleon would take the news. But she experienced no sense of guilt or regret, knowing that she had done her duty to the utmost and that as things stood no one could have done any more. At the same time, she agreed with the Valideh that Napoleon might have given a thought to Turkey before her army was at its last gasp. The promise of an expeditionary force would undoubtedly have carried far more weight than the urgings of a mere inexperienced young woman.
She turned her thoughts resolutely away from the political situation and began to consider her own immediate prospects. In spite of the very real danger she would have to face during the coming night, Marianne was beginning to glimpse light at the end of the tunnel through which she had been struggling for so many weeks, and she could not help seeing it as a happy omen for the future. Once this nightmare was over…
She became aware that thinking was growing more and more difficult as the swaying motion of the litter combined with the emotional exhaustion brought on by her sleepless night.
Away to the east, beyond the Scutari hills, the sky was growing lighter, turning from black to gray. Day was not far off. Marianne shivered in the cool, damp air that rose from the gardens. It had been so hot when she came, but now she was really quite cold and was thankful for the silken veils in which they had swathed her. Hugging them tightly around her, she snuggled down among the cushions and abandoned the struggle. Her eyes closed.
When she opened them, the litter was already passing through the gothic gateway of the embassy and she realized that she had slept the whole way home. But her brief nap had only made her long for more. As her escort of janissaries wended its way downhill again to the Galata landing, she turned to enter the house under the disapproving eye of a butler who was visibly more shocked than impressed by the magnificence of her Turkish costume.
He informed her, somewhat distantly, that His Excellency and Monsieur the Vicomte had passed the night in the salon awaiting Her Highness's return and were there still.
Marianne, longing for her bed, was tempted to leave them there and postpone what she foresaw would be a lengthy interview, but she told herself that, after all, they had been sitting up on her account. Not to go to them would be ungrateful. And so she sighed and made her way to the salon.
But the sight that met her eyes as she opened the door made her smile. Jolival and the ambassador were seated in deep, cushioned armchairs on either side of a small table on which was set out a magnificent set of cut crystal chessmen. Both were blissfully asleep—the ambassador sunk deep in his chair with his chin buried in the folds of his cravat and his spectacles on the end of his nose, Jolival with his cheek resting on his hand and the ends of his mustache lifting gently with his breathing—and both of them were snoring lustily, albeit in different keys. They seemed so dedicatedly asleep that Marianne had not the heart to disturb them.
She closed the door very gently and, with a word to the butler to let the gentlemen sleep on, she went away on tiptoe to her own room, promising herself a long rest before she had to face the ordeal of the coming night.
Yet before that she would have to repeat to the ambassador every single thing that the sultana had said so that he could send a detailed report of it to Paris. If Napoleon was really set on winning Ottoman support, he might even decide to send the military aid which alone could combat the English influence. But Marianne had no faith in that and she was quite sure that Latour-Maubourg was under no more illusions than she.
Well, we shall see, she told herself by way of consolation.
Chapter 2
The Nightingale River
THE vehicle which entered the French embassy courtyard as darkness fell was a small, brightly painted araba curtained in green velvet such as might have been owned by the wife of any wealthy Galata merchant. It was drawn by a sturdy mule with gay red pompons on its harness and the driver was a crinkly-haired black boy whose dark face gleamed softly in the light of the lamp that was fastened to the front of the carriage.
The apparition that descended from this equipage looked more like a ghost than a woman. She was wrapped from head to foot in a long ferej of dark green cloth and her face was covered by the thick veil without which no Turkish lady would have dared to stir abroad.
Marianne was waiting in the hall dressed in the same fashion, except that her ferej was of a deep violet blue and she was not wearing the veil. With Jolival beside her, she walked down to the carriage where the other woman stood waiting for her. When she saw that there was a man, and a European, with the one she had come to seek, the woman did not speak but only bowed and held out a scroll of paper, tied and sealed with blue. Then she straightened and stood quietly waiting for the contents to be read.
"What's this?" the vicomte said crossly, taking a lantern from the hands of an attendant. "Does it need all these papers for what you are about to do?"
Jolival had been in the worst of tempers all day long. He loathed everything about this expedition of Marianne's but most of all it made him horribly afraid for her. The thought that the young friend who was almost a daughter to him was about to put her health and perhaps even her life in the hands of probably incompetent foreigners horrified him. He had made no attempt to hide his dislike of the project or the alarm it caused him.
"What you are doing is madness," he protested. "I was ready to help you in Corfu, when this damned pregnancy was barely started, but now I'm wholly against it. Not as a matter of principle, which is beside the point, but simply because it is dangerous!"
Nothing could budge him from this position and Marianne had wasted her time and her persuasions. Arcadius was almost ready to go to any lengths to stop her going to Rebecca. It had even crossed his mind to tell Latour-Maubourg everything and have the embassy put into something like a state of siege, or else to lock Marianne up in her bedchamber with guards below the windows. But the ambassador would probably have thought that he was mad, and in any case it would be cruel to upset the unfortunate diplomat yet again.
Certainly the ambassador had not been particularly overjoyed to learn that the Porte was considering an armistice, but the news had not really surprised him. He had, on the other hand, been sure that the spontaneous friendship which had sprung up between the Sultan Valideh and the Princess Sant'Anna augured most favorably for his own future relations with the court, especially since this friendship had shown itself in an invitation to spend several days with the sultana at her villa at Scutari.
Compelled to abandon his violent projects, the poor vicomte had next endeavored to persuade Marianne to let him go with her, and here again she had found it extremely difficult to convince him that it would not do. She had to tell him over and over again that one of the Valideh's most trusted confidantes was to accompany her and guard against any possible accident, while the presence of another European might lead Rebecca to refuse her services altogether and so ruin all. What was more, she said, the house of a midwife was no place for a man.