Жюльетта Бенцони - Marianne and the Lords of the East

DRIVEN by the strong arms of its four and twenty rowers, the gilded caïque was literally flying over the smooth waters of the Golden Horn. Other vessels scattered like frightened chickens before it for fear of impeding the royal barge.

Seated beneath the red silk canopy in the stern, the Princess Sant'Anna watched the dark walls of the seraglio draw nearer through the slow dusk that was beginning to fall over Constantinople. In another moment they, too, would be enveloped in the shadows which had already fallen on the narrow streets and close-packed houses of Stamboul.

The number of other boats around them dwindled as they advanced because the crossing of the Golden Horn was forbidden after the firing of the sunset gun. But this was a law which naturally did not apply to vessels from the palace.

Marianne was perspiring in the court dress of leaf-green satin which she had donned more or less at random with a view to the audience before her. These first days of September retained all the heat and humidity of high summer. For a week past, the city had been steeped in an atmosphere like a Turkish bath which had wreathed the monuments in a yellow fog and made the wearing of even the lightest clothing a penance, much less untold yards of heavy Lyons silk with long kid gloves reaching well above the elbow and almost touching the short, puffed sleeves of the dress.

But in only a short while now, perhaps no more than a few minutes, she was going to find herself face to face at last with the royal lady she had come so far, and at such pains, to seek. At Napoleon's command she had crossed the whole of Europe for this meeting. What would be the outcome of her mission? The burden of it seemed to press more heavily on her shoulders with every stroke of the oars: to ensure the continuance of the war which had been dragging on for years between Russia and the Sublime Porte for the possession of the Rumanian principalities, and so to keep a large section of the Russian army engaged on the Balkan front while the emperor crossed the borders of the Tsarist Empire and marched on Moscow. Now that she was here, it seemed a frighteningly impossible task, made worse by the fact—which had become all too clear since her arrival in Constantinople—that things were going very badly indeed for the Turkish army on the Danube. It seemed to Marianne that the audience ahead, however comfortingly disguised as a mere cousinly courtesy, was going to be a singularly tricky one.

How would the sultana react to the discovery that this distant cousin, traveling for pleasure in the Levant and so eager to make her acquaintance, was actually the bearer of credentials from the emperor and had come to talk politics? Or had she known it all along? Too many people knew about this journey, for all its intended secrecy. First and foremost the English had found out, God alone knew how, all about Napoleon's unofficial ambassadress. But no one, thank heaven, could possibly know the real object of her mission!

For a fortnight now Marianne had waited for an audience which no one seemed in any great hurry to grant her. It was a fortnight since, escaping from the English frigate on board which she had been held pending return to the land of her childhood as a hostage of war, she had arrived at the French embassy quite unconscious, draped like a sack of flour over the shoulder of a notorious Greek rebel. That rebel, who had snatched her out of English hands and literally saved her from despair, was now her firm friend.

Marianne had spent those two weeks incarcerated in the embassy buildings, prowling up and down like a caged beast in spite of all her friend Jolival's pleas for her to be patient. The ambassador, the Comte de Latour-Maubourg, had been reluctant to let her stir beyond that small patch of French territory, for his countrymen had become unpopular with the Ottoman since the unfortunate matter of Napoleon's divorce.

The Sultan Mahmoud and his mother, that Creole cousin of the Empress Josephine who had been captured by Barbary pirates and carried by her beauty to the supreme height of Haseki Sultan, were now inclined to favor England, in which they were encouraged by the British envoy, the charming Mr. Stratford Canning, who would stick at nothing to further his country's interests.

"Until you have been presented to the sultan's mother," Latour-Maubourg had insisted, "you had better avoid any unnecessary risks. Canning will do anything to forestall an audience. He has already shown that he knows how much he has to fear you. Are you not Her Highness's kinswoman?"

"A very distant one!"

"A kinswoman, nonetheless, and as such we hope to see you received. Take my advice and stay indoors until your audience is granted. This house is watched, I know, but Canning will not dare to try anything while you remain inside it. Whereas he is quite capable of having you abducted if you step outside."

It was good advice, energetically supported by Jolival, who was too glad to have his adopted daughter restored to him to run the risk of losing her again almost at once, and Marianne yielded. Hour after hour she paced her bedchamber off the embassy garden, waiting for the longed for summons. The house itself was one of the oldest in Pera, having been built in the sixteenth century as a Franciscan convent, and it possessed a charming cloister which had been made into a garden. Latour-Maubourg, a diplomat of the old school with a rigorous Breton upbringing behind him, had not judged it proper to bring wife and children to that infidel land, yet even without a woman's touch the ambassador had given to his garden and to the old house itself an elegance that was wholly French. Marianne recognized it, and it lightened the burden of her enforced captivity.

As well as Arcadius de Jolival, she found there her coachman, Gracchus-Hannibal Pioche, the onetime errand boy from the rue Montorgueil. At the sight of his mistress safe and sound when he had thought her at the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, the poor fellow had burst into tears and, child of the atheistical revolution though he was, had gone down on his knees and thanked heaven as fervently as any Chouan. His subsequent celebrations, undertaken in the company of the ambassador's cook and various bottles of raki, had very nearly been the death of him.

One person Marianne had not found. Her maid, Agathe Pinsart, was gone—but not very far away, nor was there anything at all tragic about her going. Against all expectation, the poor girl had not only survived the barbarous and inhuman treatment she had suffered at the hands of Leighton and his mutineers aboard the Sea Witch but had made a conquest of the Turkish captain who had captured the brig and released the prisoners with her caustic charms. And since Agathe, on her side, had been greatly impressed by the young reis, with his dashing presence, his silken garments and his splendid mustaches, their voyage to Constantinople had assumed all the appearance of an amorous idyll, culminating in a proposal of marriage from Achmet to his new sweetheart. Agathe, convinced that she had seen the last of Marianne and strongly tempted by the luxurious life of a Turkish lady, had offered only a token resistance designed merely to enhance the value of her consent, and not many days before her mistress's arrival she had embraced both Achmet and Islam with an equal enthusiasm. She was now officially installed in her husband's handsome house at Eyub, not far from the great mosque recently rebuilt by Mahmoud II to shelter the footprint of the Prophet.

Marianne would have liked to visit her former abigail, partly to see her in her new status and partly to reassure the girl about her own fate, but this too was considered unwise. So she could only wait, interminably, even though the waiting became more of a torture with every day that passed. Yet the ordeal had an end at last.

The imperial summons had reached the embassy just as the ambassador and his guests were finishing dinner. They were about to go into the drawing room when the royal envoys were announced. They consisted of the Aga of the Janissaries and one of the Black Eunuchs belonging to the harem. Both were magnificently dressed. Despite the heat, the officer was clad in a sable-lined dolman, laced boots and a broad belt made of linked silver plates with a whip thrust into it. His tall felt hat was swathed in a kind of bubble of silver gauze, forming an extraordinary kind of turban. The Black Eunuch's dress consisted of a long white robe lined with fox fur, and on his head was a snowy turban set with a golden clasp.

They both bowed ceremoniously and presented a letter bearing the tughra, the imperial seal. The audience which the Frankish princess had craved was granted and would take place within the hour. She was allowed only a few minutes to change her dress and prepare to go with the sultana's messengers.

In fact, while Marianne hastened to her room, Latour-Maubourg knew a moment's hesitation, fearing the consequences of allowing the emperor's personal friend to go, unattended and at night, into the seraglio. He feared that the flowery terms of the invitation might conceal a trap. On the other hand, since Marianne's object was to enter the harem, it was scarcely possible for the French ambassador to request the favor of accompanying her, nor did the presence of the Aga of the Janissaries leave much room for argument. In any case the command, on a second reading, was unequivocal: the Princess Sant'Anna was to go to the seraglio alone. A closed litter was already waiting at the door. With a caïque and another litter, it would carry the princess to the place of the Sultan Valideh's choice and bring her back again by the same route when the audience was concluded.