Matteo, beside himself, was on the point of hurling himself at Marianne to throttle her, but even as his hands went for her throat, Ishtar sprang between them.
'Are you mad?' she cried. 'You are the master and whatever she may say, she is yours! Why should you kill her? Have you forgotten what she means to you?'
Her words acted on Damiani like a douche of cold water. He stood for a moment, breathing heavily, striving to take hold of himself, and then, with unexpected gentleness, he put the negress aside and turned again to Marianne.
'She – she is right,' he gasped. 'Flunkey I may be, Princess, but this flunkey has got you with child, I doubt not, and when the child is born—'
'It is not born yet and you have no means of knowing whether your base treachery has borne fruit. And if it is true I am to bear your child, then you will have to kill me to keep me silent, for no power on earth shall prevent me delivering you into the Emperor's hands!'
'Then I shall kill you, lady. Why not, when you have done your part? In the meantime…'
'What in the meantime?'
For answer, Matteo set about removing his dressing-gown, which he laid over a chair, and then returned to the bed with the evident intention of getting in. But before he could so much as lay a finger on the sheets, Marianne had sprung out and, regardless of her unclothed state, had made a lightning dash for the curtains where she clung.
'If you dare to set foot in that bed, Matteo Damiani, then you will sleep in it alone. Nothing shall make me share it with such a creature as you!'
As calmly as though she had not spoken, Matteo got into bed, plumped up the pillows and settled himself against them with obvious enjoyment.
'Like it or not, my lady, we shall be bedfellows for as long as I choose. What you said just now was very true. The best-laid plans can go astray and it may be that you are not yet breeding. So we'll do our best to make it certain. Come here!'
'Never!'
Marianne tried to run, to avoid the clutching hand which groped towards her, but she found Ishtar barring her way. The tall negress seemed enormous, standing there, as though the evil genie out of eastern tales had suddenly risen up before her to cast her back into the devil's power. Without apparent effort, not even seeming to notice Marianne's instinctive struggles, Ishtar picked her up bodily, screaming and kicking, and flung her on to the bed, straight into Damiani's arms, at the same time saying something in her strange tongue. The steward answered her in Italian.
'No, no hashish. She reacted badly and the child might suffer. We have other means. Call your sisters. You shall hold her down.'
At once, three pairs of black hands clamped down on Marianne, gripping her arms and legs and holding her flat on the bed, in spite of her screams and tears of rage. A gag was put in her mouth to quiet her and this time there was no merciful unconsciousness to spare her the shame and disgust.
For what seemed like endless minutes she was forced to suffer her tormentor, lying half-stifled and utterly helpless in the grip of those vice-like hands, and dying a hundred deaths of shame and sorrow. She felt as if she had fallen into the pit of hell itself, with the man's gross, scarlet, sweating countenance thrusting close to hers and the three black figures, standing still as stones, their blank eyes contemplating the rape with as much indifference as if it had been a mating of beasts. And that was what it was: she, Marianne, was being used like an animal, a brood mare to produce the right stock.
When they let her go at last, she lay unmoving on the ravaged bed, choking with sobs and drowned in tears, exhausted by her body's futile attempts at resistance. She had no more strength even to abuse her ravisher and when Matteo rose, still panting from his exertions, and began, grumbling, to put on his dressing-gown, she could only groan.
'She's so unwilling, there's no pleasure in it! But we'll keep it up, all the same, every night until we're sure. Let her be now, Ishtar, and come with me. That cold creature would put Eros off his stroke!'
So Marianne, broken and defeated, was left in her hated room, alone except for the other two women who remained as mute but watchful guards. No one even took the trouble to cover her. She had ceased to have any hope, even in God. She knew now that she would have to endure every step of this abominable martyrdom, until the time came when Damiani had what he wanted from her.
'But he shan't win – he shan't!' she vowed silently, out of the depths of her misery. 'I'll get rid of the child somehow, or if I fail I'll take him with me…'
Vain words, the desperate ravings born of fever and the paroxysms of humiliation she had suffered, yet Marianne repeated them over and over again in the nights that followed, nights in which even horror began to acquire a kind of monotony. Even revulsion became a kind of habit.
She knew that this was the witch Lucinda taking her revenge, that it was her power reaching out through Matteo from beyond the tomb. Sometimes, in the dark, it seemed to Marianne that she could see the marble statue from the little temple come to life. She heard its laughter… and would wake then in a bath of sweat.
The days were all alike, all dreary. Marianne spent them locked in her bare room under the watchful eye of one of the women. She was fed, bathed, even clothed after a fashion in a kind of loose tunic, like those worn by the black women, and a pair of slippers. Then, when night fell, the three she-devils bound her, for greater convenience, to the bed and left her so, naked and defenceless, to the tender mercies of Matteo. He, in point of fact, seemed to find increasing difficulty in performing what he appeared to regard as some kind of duty. More often than not, Ishtar was obliged to provide him with a glass of some mysterious liquid to revive his flagging powers. From time to time the prisoner's food was drugged, making her lose all sense of time, but she had ceased to care. In the end, overwhelming disgust had finished by inducing a kind of insensitivity. She had become a thing, an inanimate object incapable of reaction or of suffering. Her very skin seemed to have atrophied and grown dull to all sensation, while her sluggish brain held room for only one single, fixed idea: to kill Damiani and then die herself.
This idea, like a persistent, nagging thirst, was the one thing that remained alive in her. Everything else was stone and dead ashes. She no longer knew even if she loved, or whom she loved. All the people in her life seemed as strange and far-off as the characters on the tapestried walls of her room. She had ceased even to think of escape: how could she, guarded as she was by night and day? The she-devils who watched over her seemed incapable of sleep, fatigue or even inattention. All she wanted now was to kill, and then to do away with herself in turn. Nothing else mattered.
They had brought her some books, but she had not even opened them. Her days were spent seated in one of the high-backed chairs, as still and silent as her black guardians, staring at the hangings or at the marks of soot on the ceiling of her room. Words seemed out of place in that room where the silence was like that of the tomb. Marianne spoke to no one and did not answer when they spoke to her. She suffered herself to be cared for, fed and watered with no more response than a statue. Only her hatred was awake amid the silence and the stillness.
At last, this mute indifference began to have its effect on Damiani. As the days passed, Marianne could see the uneasiness growing in his eyes when he came to her at night. Little by little, the time he spent with her grew less until it was only a few minutes, and then, one night, he did not come at all. He had ceased to desire the marble being whose unblinking stare had perhaps power to disconcert him. He was afraid now, and soon Marianne did not see him at all except for the few moments every day when he came to inquire of Ishtar as to his prisoner's health.