'Bah!' Jolival said. 'I'll be surprised if she stays with us long. She'll be off at the first opportunity as soon as she's put sufficient distance between herself and her friends in the village here. You heard what Gracchus said? She's a gipsy, a born traveller.'

'Oh, let her do as she likes,' Marianne said with a sigh, nettled by the girl's contemptuous attitude. 'Gracchus is the only one of us who can talk to her. Let him try what he can do.'

She had had more than enough of the business and if she was not precisely sorry they had saved the gipsy girl from drowning, she certainly wanted to put her out of her mind as far as possible. After all, Gracchus was a grown man and old enough to be responsible.

She turned her steps towards the doorway of the inn where the familiar figure of the postmaster stood cap in hand to greet them. Jason followed her but when Gracchus took Shankala by the arm to lead her inside she twisted out of his grasp like a snake and, running after Jason, took his hand and pressed it to her lips with fierce intensity. As she released it she spoke some words in a low, guttural voice.

'What does she say?' Marianne cried with rising irritation.

Gracchus had turned scarlet to the roots of his carroty hair and his blue eyes flashed.

'She says that – that if she must have a master she will choose him for herself. The hussy! I've a good mind to call back her husband and hand her over to the women again.'

'It's too late now,' Jolival said.

Indeed, the cossacks, after a final blessing from their priest, were already beginning to cross the river. Heedless of wetting themselves, they rode into the water at a place known to them which must have been a ford because the horses, guided by their sure hands, were never more than breast deep in the stream. The leaders were already mounting the farther bank. The rest followed in their turn and before very long they were all forming up again in perfect order on the other side. Two by two, the black-clad riders vanished into the gathering darkness.

That night, in the little boarded room beneath the icon of the Virgin and Child, both of them sporting the most atrocious squints, Marianne failed to recover the perfect happiness of earlier nights. She was nervous and irritable and unable to respond wholeheartedly to her lover's caresses. Her mind still dwelled on the woman who was sleeping somewhere beneath their common roof. In vain she told herself that she was little more than a wild animal, a creature of no importance who could never affect her own life; still she could not rid herself of the notion that the gipsy was a danger, a threat that was the more formidable because she could not tell what form it would take.

Tired of clasping an unresponsive body and of kissing lips that did not take fire from his, Jason got up suddenly and, fetching the candle that burned before the icon, brought it close to Marianne's face. In the light her eyes were wide open and shining, with no hint of amorous softness in them.

'What is it?' he murmured, laying a finger softly on her lips. "You look as if you'd seen a ghost. Don't you feel like making love tonight?'

She did not move her head but her eyes, as they looked at him, were full of sadness.

'I'm frightened,' she said.

'Frightened? What of? Are you afraid those village harpies will come and sit down outside our windows to get Shankala back?'

'No. I think it is Shankala I am afraid of.'

Jason laughed. 'What an idea! She's no very friendly look about her, I'll agree, but then she doesn't know us and from what we've seen she's had no cause so far to love the human race. Those old witches would have torn her to pieces if they could. Her beauty can't have helped her there.'

Marianne was conscious of a nasty little tug somewhere in the region of her heart. She did not at all like to hear Jason speak of the woman's beauty.

'Have you forgotten she deceived her husband? She's an adulteress—'

The sudden harshness that came into her voice made her feel as if the words had been a scream. Or perhaps it was the silence that followed them. For a moment Jason studied the sharpened lines of his beloved's face. Then he blew out the candle and drew her hard against him, holding her so close that it was as if he would have crept inside her very skin. He kissed her, a long kiss that sought to warm her cold lips and instil into them something of his own passion, but in vain. His lips moved to her cheek, then nibbled at her ear before he whispered at last: 'But you, too, are an adulteress, my love. Yet no one has suggested drowning you…'

Marianne leapt as if a serpent had stung her and struggled to draw away but he held her firmly and, the better to immobilize her, imprisoned both her legs between his hard thighs, while she cried out: 'You are mad! I, an adulteress? Don't you know that I am free? That my husband is dead?'

She was panic-stricken, seized with a terror she could not control. Guessing that she was on the point of screaming aloud, Jason spoke more tenderly than ever.

'Hush! Be quiet,' he murmured against her lips. 'Don't you think it's time you told me the truth? Don't you know yet that I love you – and that you can safely trust me?'

'But – what do you want me to tell?'

'What I have a right to know. I know I may not have given you much cause to think that I will understand. I have been brutal, cruel, violent and unjust. But I have been sorry for it, Marianne! All through those days when I lay like a corpse in the sunshine at Monemvasia, waiting for the recovery that seemed to elude me, I thought only of you, of us two – and of all that I had so wantonly destroyed. If I had helped and understood you then, we would not be here now. You would have carried out your mission and at this moment we would be sailing back to my country, instead of journeying endlessly over these barbarous steppes. So let us have no more foolishness, no more lies and pretence! Let us cast off everything but ourselves, as we cast off our clothes to love one another. I want to see your naked soul, my love… Tell me the truth. It is more than time if we want to be able ever to build up a true happiness—'

The truth?'

'Yes. I will help you. Where is your child, Marianne?'

Her heart missed a beat. She had always known that, sooner or later, Jason would ask her that question but until that moment she had tried to ward off all the possible answers, perhaps from an unconscious weariness at all the lies she had been forced to tell.

She knew that he was right, that they must make an end, once and for all, of all misunderstandings, and that only then would all things become possible. Yet she still shrank, unaccountably, from uttering the words, like a little girl trembling on the brink of a deep ditch.

'My child…' she began slowly, halting over the words, 'he is…"

'With his father, is he not? Or at least with the man who would be a father to him? He is with Turhan Bey, or rather, with your permission, with the Prince Sant'Anna.'

Once again, there was silence but this time there was a different quality in the air. A sudden relief, a clear note of release rang in Marianne's voice as she asked, almost timidly: 'How did you find out? Who told you?'

'No one – and everyone. He, most of all, I think, a man who could choose slavery by going aboard my ship. He had no reason to bear what he did from me and from others unless it was to protect some other person, and that someone you. To be sure, I did not guess it all at once. But the thick web that was woven so closely about you became amazingly clear one morning at the palace of Humayunabad, when I met the Sant'Annas' faithful servant bearing the last of those princes with such triumphant joy and pride to be presented to a simple merchant, of no very certain nationality, who, in the ordinary way, could not have had so pressing an interest in the child that all else must make way for it. But you, Marianne? When did you learn the truth?'

She told him then. Eager to complete the tale he had already heard from Jolival, she told him everything, emptying her heart and her memory once and for all with an inexpressible feeling of release. She told him all about the nocturnal visit to Rebecca's house, about the Prince's demand and her stay at the Morousi palace, about the bargain she had made with her husband, the peril she had been in from the English ambassador and her installation in the palace by the Bosphorus, culminating in the Prince's sudden departure with the child, believing that its mother had rejected it, at the very moment when she had come to know her own heart. Last of all, she told him of her fears as to his own reactions when he should learn that she had been married to a black.

'We had agreed to part,' she said, 'so what was the good of telling you all this at the risk of making you angry again?'

He uttered a mirthless little laugh.

'Making me angry? So, in your eyes, I am nothing more than some kind of slave trader?' he said bitterly. 'I suppose you'll never understand that I grew up among black people, that I owe some of the best parts of my childhood to them, and that to me it seems quite natural that I should be their master and love them just the same? As for him—'

'Yes, tell me. How do you think of him?'

He thought for a moment and she heard him sigh.

'I don't really know. With liking, certainly, and respect for his courage and his selflessness. But with anger, too – and jealousy. He is altogether too great a man. Too noble, too remote from other men, from common or garden adventurers like me! And a darn sight too good-looking also! What's more, in spite of everything, he is your husband. You bear his name in the sight of God and men. And then he has your child, flesh of your flesh – something of you! So you see, there are times when I think that for all his willing sacrifice, he has the luck…'