CHAPTER TWO
The Ravisher
With a little scream, Marianne shrank back into the carriage, staring with eyes of horror at the peaceful, romantic scene, all bathed in the glorious sunset light which was framed in the open door. To her it might have been a prison.
Her companion got out and stood beside the man who had lowered the steps, bowing respectfully as he offered his hand.
'If your highness will descend…'
Hypnotized by the two black-clad figures who seemed to her suddenly like the ambassadors of fate, Marianne got out, moving like an automaton, knowing that it was useless to struggle. She was alone in an isolated spot with three men whose power was all the greater because they represented one whose authority she was not entitled to ignore. Her husband's rights were paramount and she now had every reason to fear the worst. If it were not so, Sant'Anna would never have dared to have her abducted like this by his servants, right in the middle of Florence and almost under the nose of the Grand Duchess herself.
Beneath the ruined arch of a ghostly cloister, which in any other circumstances would have charmed her, Marianne saw that a large travelling berlin was in fact standing ready waiting. A man was standing at the horse's heads. The berlin itself, while not new, was well-made and evidently designed to spare its occupants as much as possible the discomforts of the road.
And yet, like Dante at the gate of hell, she seemed to see written above it the words: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. She had thought to cheat the man who had trusted her, only to find she had been cheated in turn. Too late she realized that Zoe Cenami had never written that letter, that she did not need her help and must be quietly occupied at that very moment in welcoming the usual company of friends to her house. As long as Marianne could rely on the powerful protection of Napoleon, she had turned to it as to a cliff-girt isle against which the most terrifying waves must break in vain. And finally she had believed that her love for Jason made her somehow invulnerable and could only end in triumph. She had gambled and she had lost.
The unseen husband had claimed his rights. Deceived, he had a brutal way of making himself felt, and when the fugitive found herself face to face with him at last, even if what she faced were still a blank mirror, and she would stand alone, with her hands tied and her soul defenceless. There would be no Duke of Padua, with his powerful form and voice accustomed to command, to stand as a bulwark, proclaiming the inalienable rights of the Emperor.
Suddenly a faint glimmer of light penetrated Marianne's despair. Her disappearance would be noticed. Arcadius, Arrighi, even Benielli would look for her. One of them might guess the truth. Then they would go straight to Lucca to check, at least, that the Prince had no part in her abduction, and Marianne knew them well enough to be sure that they would not readily abandon hope. Jolival, for one, was perfectly capable of taking the Villa dei Cavalli apart, stone by stone, to find her.
Nothing on earth could have made her betray her fears to the servants, whom she saw as nothing more than tools, so she sat with apparent calm, concealing the raging anxiety in her heart, watching the preparations for this new departure as if it did not concern her. She watched the man who held the horses hand them over to the coachman, before setting off at a tranquil pace with the brougham, back in the direction of Florence. Then the berlin itself moved off slowly, driving back up the track between the ruins to the road. It was this road which had dragged Marianne out of her state of apathy.
Instead of heading straight for the red disc of the setting sun, now about to sink behind the city's campaniles, so as to skirt the town and come out on the Lucca road, the heavy coach was continuing eastward in the same direction as that taken by the brougham a little earlier. They were making for the Adriatic, in quite the opposite direction from Lucca. It might, of course, be a ruse intended to throw pursuers off the scent, but Marianne could not help risking an oblique question.
'If you are my husband's people,' she observed coldly, 'you must be taking me to him. Yet you are taking the wrong road.'
Without deviating from a politeness which, however necessary, Marianne was beginning to find overdone, the black man answered in the same oily voice:
'Many roads lead to the master, Excellent. One has only to know which way to choose. His highness does not always reside at the Villa dei Cavalli. We are going to another of his estates, so please your ladyship.'
Marianne was chilled by the irony in the last words. It did not please her in the slightest, but what choice had she? A cold sweat prickled unpleasantly at the roots of her hair and she felt the colour drain from her face. Her slender hope that Jolival and Arrighi would find her evaporated. She had known, of course, from Donna Lavinia, that her husband did not live at Lucca all the time but was sometimes found at his other properties. To which was she now being taken? And how could her friends discover her there when she herself did not know the first thing about these places?
By not listening to the reading of the marriage contract on her wedding night, she had lost a good opportunity of learning… but that was only one of so many opportunities already lost in the course of her short life. The best and greatest of all had been at Selton Hall when Jason had asked her to fly with him; the second in Paris when she had refused once more to go with him.
At the thought of Jason, grief threatened to overwhelm her and she became a prey to bitter depression. This time fate was against her, and nothing and nobody was going to come and put a spoke in its wheel on her behalf.
Her husband's was to be the last word. The little hope that remained to her now was all in her own charm and intelligence, in the kindness of Donna Lavinia who was always near the Prince and who at least would plead for her, and perhaps in the occurrence of some chance to escape. If such a chance did present itself, Marianne was, of course, fully determined to grasp it and to use it, to the best of her ability. It would not be the first escape she had contrived!
She recalled with some pleasure and no little pride her escape from Morvan the Wrecker, and, more recently, from the barn at Mortefontaine. Luck had been with her both times, but even so she had not managed so badly!
Her need to find Jason, a deep, visceral longing which came from the inmost parts of her being to fill her heart and brain, would act as a stimulant, supposing any were needed beyond her own passionate desire for freedom.
Besides… she might be wrong: there might be no need to torment herself about Sant'Anna's plans for her. All her fears stemmed from Eleonora Sullivan's hair-raising confidences and from the drama surrounding this abduction, but she had to admit that she had left her invisible husband little alternative. Perhaps, after all, he would be merciful, understanding…
To boost her courage, Marianne went over in her mind the moment when Corrado Sant'Anna had rescued her from Matteo Damiani, on that dreadful night in the little temple. She had almost died of fright when she saw him burst from the shadows, a dark, ghostly figure masked in pale leather and mounted on the plunging white shape of his horse, Ilderim. And yet this terrifying apparition had brought rescue and life.
Afterwards, too, he had tended her with a solicitude that might easily have suggested love. Suppose he did love her… No, better not to think of that, but make her mind a blank and so try to recover a little calm, a little peace.
Yet, in spite of herself, her thoughts would keep turning to the enigmatic figure of her unknown husband, caught between fear and a queer uncontrollable curiosity. Perhaps this time she would penetrate the secret of the white mask…
The coach was still travelling into the oncoming dark. Soon enveloping darkness lay all around, and the coach pressed on through the mountains, from stage to stage, on its journey to the end of the night.