'No,' he said, with a curl of his lip, 'you cannot do my work for me. You are nothing but a foreign woman and I do not trust you enough. But you have the choice of refusal, if you wish. After all, no one knows that you are here…'
Beyond a doubt, if she refused, this brute was capable of slitting her throat on the spot, church or no church. Moreover, she had a real desire to accomplish her mission and to escape from this rat hole so that she could find the brig again, with the piratical doctor and, more than all else, Jason and her friends. If it were fated that, after the joy of rendering a signal service to Napoleon, the only happiness left to her in this world was to see John Leighton hanged, then she did not mean to let slip even the smallest chance of bringing it about; and no such chance existed on Santorini.
'Very well,' she said at last. 'I agree.'
Princess Koriatis exclaimed delightedly but Theodoros was not yet satisfied. He damped his big hairy hand round Marianne's wrist and drew her close to the iconostasis.
'You are a Christian, yes?'
'Certainly I am, but—'
'But your Church is not ours, I know that. But God is the same for all his children, in whatever fashion they pray to him. So, you will swear, here, before these holy images, to perform faithfully everything that is asked of you in order to assist me to enter Constantinople and to stay there. Swear!'
Unhesitatingly Marianne stretched out her hand toward the images, their silver mountings glinting with points of gold in the flickering lamplight.
'I swear,' she said firmly. 'I will do it to the best of my ability. But—' She let fall her hand and turned slowly to look at the woman who called herself Sappho. 'I want you to know that it is not for your sake, or because I am afraid of you. I will do it for her, because she has helped me and I should be ashamed to fail her now.'
'Your reasons do not matter. But may you be damned to all eternity if you break your word! Now, father, I think we may go.'
'Not yet. We still have something to do. Come with me.'
They followed the abbot's black robe out of the chapel and through the white stairways and passages until they emerged at last on the topmost terrace of the monastery. Under the rising moon, it looked as white as a field of new-fallen snow. At that elevation the wind blew incessantly and Marianne shivered in her thin clothes, but the prospect before her was an amazing one.
From that height it was possible to see the whole of Santorini: a long crescent-shape of accumulated lava and volcanic slag, dotted with straggling white villages. Its deep bay was almost entirely enclosed by a chain of rocky islands that marked the rim of the old crater, now sunk beneath the waves. From Palaia Kaimeni, one of the two largest of these, Marianne could see a faint drift of smoke, and the wind brought a tang of sulphur to her nostrils. At the site of the monastery itself, the ground fell away sharply in a dizzy precipice dropping straight down, two thousand feet or so, into the black waters of the sea. Not a tree was visible in the cold moonlight. It was an apocalyptic landscape, a waste of stone to which man clung only by some miracle of stubbornness, in peril of his life. Those wisps of smoke looked ominous to Marianne, and she stared at them fearfully. The greater part of her life had been spent amid the green English countryside, a far cry from this scorched land.
The volcano is breathing,' Melina said, hugging her arms across her chest as though to keep herself from shivering. 'Last night, I heard him grumble. Pray God, he does not wake.'
But the abbot Daniel was not listening. He had walked on to the far end of the roof, where there was a small pigeon house. With Theodoros' help, he took out a large pigeon, fastened something to one leg, then let it go. The bird circled for a moment above the monastery and then flew off in a north-westerly direction.
'Where is he going?' Marianne asked, her eyes still on the vanishing white speck.
Melina tucked her arm comfortably through her new friend's and drew her back to the steps.
'To find a vessel worthier of the French Emperor's ambassadress than Yorgo's fishing boat,' she said. 'Yorgo will take you no farther than Naxos. Come, now. We must go in. It is past midnight and soon the bell will ring for the first of the night offices. We must not be seen here.'
The two women bade farewell to the higoumenos and followed the fat monk back to the monastery door. Theodoros, with a brief good night, had vanished into the depths of the building where he had been living for some days past. The night was much brighter now and on the long terrace with the cistern, even the smallest details stood out with chiselled clarity in a bleached universe.
As they stepped outside, under the porch with the belfry, the echoes wakened in the monastery, solemnly calling the monks to prayer. Muttering a hasty blessing, the fat monk swung the iron door to, and Marianne and her companion hurried away down the steep path to the villa.
The return journey was accompanied much more speedily than the outward one, and they passed the guard post without trouble. The fire was dying down and only two guards remained, sleeping up against their long-barrelled guns. The women's light tread was in no more danger of waking them than the faint rustle of the undergrowth. A few minutes later, Melina shut the door of the old chapel behind them and lighted the lamp.
They stood for a moment, looking at one another without speaking, as if they were really seeing one another for the first time. Then, very slowly, the Greek princess moved closer to her new friend and kissed her on the brow.
'I want to thank you,' she said simply. 'I know what it must have cost you to agree to take Theodoros with you, and I want you to know that, even if you had refused, I should not have let him kill you.'
'He may still do so when we are far away from here,' Marianne muttered, unable to repress a certain resentment against the giant.
'Of course not. First of all, he needs you – and then he has a strict sense of honour. He is rough, violent and passionate but, from the moment that you are travelling companions, he will die for you if you are in danger. That is the law of the mountain klephts.'
'Klephts?'
The mountaineers of Olympus, Pindus and Taygetos. They live by brigandage, of course, but they are really much more like your Corsican bandits than ordinary robbers. Theodoros, like his father Constantine before him, was their chieftain. There is no more valiant fighter for Greek freedom… As for you, you are one of us now. The service you are rendering gives you the right to ask aid and protection from any one of us. Go to sleep now, and peace be with you.'
Peace? In spite of all her heroic efforts, Marianne did not find it again that night. What lay before her was not conducive to peace of mind; in fact she had never found herself in a worse mess. For the first time since leaving Paris, she began to long for her quiet, comfortable house in the rue de Lille, the roses in her garden, and her cousin Adelaide's sardonic, reassuring presence: Adelaide who must be waiting there quietly, dividing her time between the gossip of the neighbourhood, the services at the church of St Thomas Aquinas, and her interminable little snacks, for the letter which would summon her to America, to join Marianne and her old friend Jolival… A letter that would never come. Unless the threads of destiny were to sort themselves out at last, which did not look like happening!
'I'll make you pay for this, Jason Beaufort!' Marianne exclaimed suddenly, anger reviving in her at the memory. 'If you are still alive, I'll find you, wherever you are, and make you pay for all I've suffered on your account, through your stupid obstinacy! And now it's all your fault I'm mixed up in this insane business, putting to sea with a boatload of dangerous rebels…'
She was within an inch of echoing Antigone's anguished cry: 'I was made for love, not for hate.' Yet it did her good to be the old Marianne again, with her hopeless rages, her miseries, quarrels and follies, just as she had derived comfort from the thought of her home and her cousin, even if it was only the comfort of regret.