She was in such a state that Jolival saw it was impossible to reason with her. Her eyes were burning with fever and exhaustion and there was a shrill note in her voice that revealed nerves strained almost to breaking point, ready to snap at any moment.
'I promise, my dear, and now, for heaven's sake, calm yourself. You need rest and sleep… to help you recover. You are quite safe with me. No one can harm you and I'll do all I can to help you to forget this time as quickly as possible. Gracchus and Agathe are here with me, you know. And now I'll call your maid and she shall put you to bed and take care of you and no one, I promise you, is going to ask you any more questions…'
Jolival's voice flowed on in a gentle, reassuring murmur, soft and soothing as velvet, and it acted like oil on troubled waters.
Little by little, Marianne relaxed, and when, a minute later, Agathe and Gracchus burst into the room with cries of joy, they found her weeping softly in Jolival's arms.
But these, too, were healing tears.
CHAPTER FIVE
Dreams to Reality
Late on the following afternoon, Marianne lay on a sofa pulled up to the open window and watched two ships come sailing through the Lido Channel. The first and larger of the two was flying the American colours from her peak but it did not need the stars on her flag to tell the watcher it was Jason's ship.
She had known from the confused and contradictory state of her own feelings, even when the tall, square-rigged brig was no more than a white dot against the sky.
The sun which all day long had blazed down on Venice was sinking in a welter of molten gold behind the church of the Redeemer. A breath of cooler air drifted through the window, bringing with it the sound of seabirds crying, and Marianne sniffed appreciatively, enjoying the fragile peace of these last moments of solitude, and wondering a little that she should be doing so when the thing she was waiting for was the arrival of the man she loved.
In a few minutes, he would come. She pictured his entrance, his first look, his first words and trembled with mingled joy and apprehension: apprehension that she might not be able to sustain the role she had decreed for herself, that she might not be sufficiently natural.
Waking that morning, after practically sleeping the clock round twice, she had felt much better, her mind easier and her body relaxed by her sleep which, thanks to Jolival, had been surrounded by more luxury than might have been expected.
Instead of putting up at one of the inns, Jolival had taken rooms in a private house on his arrival in Venice. In Florence he had been recommended to the house of a Signor Giuseppe Dal Niel, a polite, good-natured and cheerfully-disposed individual who, at the fall of the Republic, had rented the upper floors of the splendid old palace built for the doge Giovanni Dandolq, the man who had given Venice her coinage and had been responsible for striking the first golden ducats.
Dal Niel was a widely-travelled man and consequently deplored the poverty of contemporary inns and hostelries. He had the notion of taking in paying guests and surrounding them with a degree of comfort, even luxury, hitherto quite unknown. It was his dream to get possession of the whole of the mansion and turn it into the greatest hotel of all time, but in order to do so he needed the ground floor, and this, so far, he had failed to acquire, since the present owner, the old Countess Mocenigo, was violently set against any such commercial undertaking.[1]
He made up for it by taking in only hand-picked visitors in whom he took as much interest as if they had been his personal guests. Twice a day he would attend them in person, or send his daughter Alfonsina to make sure that they had everything they required. Naturally he could not do enough for the Princess Sant'Anna, in spite of her somewhat unconventional arrival, clad in a soaking wet gown, in the arms of an officer of dragoons, and he had given strict orders to his staff that no noise be allowed to disturb her rest.
As a result of his care, Marianne had succeeded, in a single day, in erasing the marks of her imprisonment, and she now presented a fresh and blooming countenance to the sun. If it had not been for the evil memories which still persisted, she would have felt gloriously well.
As soon as the Witch's lines became clear beyond a doubt, Jolival had gone down to the harbour to tell Jason of Marianne's arrival and explain what had happened to her, or that version of it which had been concocted between them. Agreeing that the simplest was always the best, this was what they had decided upon together: Marianne had been carried off by her husband's orders and kept prisoner under strong guard in a house whose whereabouts she did not know, where she remained in total ignorance of the fate in store for her, a fate which her injured husband seemed in no hurry to reveal. All she knew was that she was to be put on board ship for some unknown destination. One night, however, when her guards were unusually lax, she had succeeded in escaping and making her way to Venice where Jolival had found her.
It was Jolival, of course, who had applied himself to fabricating a sufficiently circumstantial account of her actual escape, and Marianne had spent much of the day going over her lesson until she was sure of being word perfect. Even so, she could not help feeling uncomfortable at telling a lie against which all her natural honesty and truthful instincts rebelled.
The story was a necessary one, certainly, because, as Jolival himself said, 'the truth cannot always be told', especially to a lover, but Marianne found it all the more distasteful because it involved the name of one who was not only innocent of any wrong but was actually the chief victim of the affair. It went against all her instincts to portray as a ruthless abductor the man whose name she bore and for whose death she was, indirectly, responsible.
She had always known that everything, in this imperfect world, had to be paid for, and happiness above all, but the thought that her own would be built upon a lie brought with it a superstitious dread lest fate should exact its penalty for the deception.
All the same, she knew that she was capable of enduring anything for Jason, even the hell of these past days… even to live a lie.
A large mirror ornamented with glass flowers, hanging on the wall near her sofa, showed her her reflection looking charmingly graceful in a dress of white muslin, with her hair beautifully dressed by Agathe, but neither rest nor any amount of beautifying had been able to dispel the worried look in her eyes.
She forced herself to smile but the smile did not reach her eyes.
'Is there anything wrong, your highness?' asked Agathe, who had observed this manoeuvre from the corner where she was sitting quietly with her needlework.
'No, nothing at all, Agathe. Why should you think so?'
'Only that you did not look very happy, my lady. You should go out on to the balcony. At this time of day the whole city is out there on the quayside. And you will be able to see Monsieur Beaufort when he comes.'
Marianne told herself she was a fool. What did it look like for her to be sitting here, skulking on a sofa, when she ought ordinarily to have been bursting with impatience to see him? The previous day's exhaustion made it natural for her to let Jolival go alone to the harbour, but not to be lurking here indoors instead of looking out for him like any woman in love. She could hardly explain to her maid that she was afraid of being recognized by a sergeant in the National Guard or by a nice small boy who had helped her.
At the thought of Zani, she was aware of a twinge of remorse. The child must have watched in utter bewilderment as she was knocked out and carried off by Benielli. He must be wondering now what kind of a dangerous person he had been consorting with and Marianne felt some regrets for a promising friendship which had been broken off.
1
He had to wait until 1822 before he was at last able to found the Royal Danieli hotel, still the most exclusive in Venice.