'Precisely. For more than a month we have waited. Ever since, in fact, we heard that Prince Talleyrand had returned from Bourbon l'Archambault… and that the Princess Sant'Anna was too ill to leave her room. Don Alonso took a lodging in the rue des Ballets and kept watch. We knew that you were not in the prince's house, nor your own. You had to be somewhere, and watching the prison was the one way to find out.'

'I congratulate you,' Marianne said. 'I had not known that you were so intelligent… or so talkative. And now what do you mean to do with us? Kill us?'

Pilar's pale face was thrust close to hers. Hatred gleamed in the black eyes but Marianne stared back coolly into the beautiful features, their purity already ravaged by bitterness and despair. If ever she had seen her death written in a human face it was here, but in the strength of her newly consummated love she felt no fear. Besides, Pilar was speaking:

'That would be too easy! No, we are merely going to take you with us and take good care of you, in case you should do anything foolish. We cannot have any ill-considered action of yours interfering with the course of justice. I had thought at first to hand you over to the police, but it seems that your Napoleon has a fondness for you.'

'If I were you, I would not forget that fondness. He does not take kindly to having his friends kidnapped!'

'He will not know. After all – you are still in exile, are you not? You had better silence the lady, gentlemen, she seems to be about to scream.'

This was true. But before Marianne could do more than open her mouth to alert the people in the nearby houses, she found herself firmly gagged, then bound and bundled into the cab to join Crawfurd. One of the cloaked men jumped on to the box but Pilar and Vasquez got in with their prisoners. Seated, facing her enemy, Pilar frowned:

'Better bandage their eyes as well, my friend. I don't want them to know where they are taken.'

This the Spaniard did and Marianne, robbed of both sight and speech, could only sit and think her own thoughts, which seemed suddenly to have become rather less optimistic. Things had ceased, in fact, to be as simple as she had been inclined to think. Ever since leaving Jason she had been buoying herself up with the comforting illusion that she was going to snatch her lover from death and set him free, a freedom which she naturally intended that he should share with her. Failing this, she had been determined to die with him, or at least at the same time, so that they might embark together, hand in hand, on an eternity of love. She had even got to the point of imagining the letter she would leave for Jolival, so that he might unite both their bodies in a single grave, and, rather like a spoiled child saying 'I'll die and then they'll be sorry', she had even derived a certain satisfaction from the thought of Napoleon's grief and remorse when he should learn that by his harshness he had driven his nightingale to her death. In all of which, she found herself obliged to confess bitterly, she had quite forgotten the disagreeable fact of Pilar…

Until then, she had thought of Pilar as a fanatical barbarian, incapable of any normal train of thought, whose main aim in running to seek refuge with the unlikely Queen of Spain at her court at Mortefontaine had simply been to pull her own chestnuts out of the fire. She had believed her proud and unbalanced, and even base because to satisfy her own unworthy longing for revenge she had sided with the police against her husband. But she could never have believed that her hatred could go so wickedly far. What was it the creature had said? That no action of Marianne's must interfere with the course of justice?… In other words, she was kidnapping Marianne to prevent her from doing anything to rescue Jason!

For a moment, Marianne seemed to hear Talleyrand again. 'Pilar comes of a fierce and passionate race… an injured woman may deliver up her faithless lover to execution without flinching – and then wall herself up alive in a nunnery to expiate her crime…'

That was it! They were going to keep Marianne locked up in some dungeon from which she could not escape until Jason had been executed. Perhaps then they might do her the favour of killing her also? No doubt it would all make the path of expiation much easier for the saintly Pilar!

'If I were in her place,' Marianne thought, 'I should probably kill my rival, but not for anything in the world would I harm the man I loved.'

Her bonds were hurting her and the gag was making it hard for her to breathe. She tried to wriggle herself into a more comfortable position.

'Sit still,' came Pilar's voice coldly. We shall be changing carriages very soon.'

They had travelled only a short distance in the cab, but already it was slowing down. Several hands seized Marianne none too gently and dragged her out, but scarcely had her feet touched the ground before she was lifted up again and felt herself set down on a cushioned seat, much softer than the previous one. Her elbows touched silky velvet. But at the same time she knew for certain that the person sitting beside her was no longer Quintin Crawfurd. It was Pilar. Marianne's delicate nostrils had picked up at once the characteristically heavy scent of carnations and jasmine which she used. No one else entered the carriage and the prisoner began to feel seriously anxious on behalf of her companion, whose stifled grunts she could hear coming from some way away. Then someone spoke through the window, in Spanish:

'What shall we do with the other one?'

'I have told you,' Pilar replied. 'Drive him to the place you know of. I can promise you the police will not come looking for him there, supposing that they look for him at all.'

'They'll do that all right, Dona Pilar, you may be sure. When his wife finds he's not come home she'll raise heaven and earth.'

'Not necessarily. It would mean admitting that they had an exile hidden under their roof. The important part, in any case, is that nothing should be known before the date we have settled. We can let him go after that. We have nothing against him. Which reminds me, did you pay the driver of the cab?'

The man Vasquez's reply to this was a low, guttural laugh which made Marianne's blood run cold. Even Pilar was moved to protest:

'You should not have done that. We are not at home now.'

'Bah! Another curst Frenchman the less! Go now. Three of our men will go with you and we will meet again there. And if I may make a suggestion, she had better not be seen. Allow me.'

Marianne was seized again, bundled up in something rough and warm and smelling so strongly of the stables that it must have been a horse blanket, and dumped unceremoniously on the floor of the chaise.

'I had meant to do that before we arrived,' Pilar said.

'You are all goodness! Are you so fond of the harlot who has stolen your husband?'

'How well you understand me, Don Alonso,' Pilar purred. Her voice was so seraphic that it made Marianne immediately long to bite. 'Thank you. Thank you a thousand times. You have made the prospect of the journey very agreeable – to me at all events.'

The prisoner, lying totally helpless on the carpeted floor of the vehicle, was soon made well aware of how agreeable the journey was to be for her by feeling her enemy's feet planted firmly on her chest. Rather than add to Pilar's enjoyment, however, she refrained from any reaction of her outrage.

"You'll pay for this!' she swore inwardly. "You'll pay a hundred times over, for this and everything else. You single-minded savage! When I get my hands on you, you murderous she-devil, I'll show you what I can do…'

Thereafter, the names which Marianne in her impotent fury applied to Pilar were of a sadly descending order of refinement, being almost exclusively borrowed from the vocabulary of old Dobs, the groom at Selton who had taught Marianne to ride. Nor, indeed, was she invariably certain of the precise meaning of the terms she invoked, but she derived a good deal of comfort from the thought that nothing was too base to describe a woman who could permit the cold-blooded murder of an innocent cab driver, to say nothing of the savagery with which she was working to bring Jason to the block.

Angry, bruised and half-stifled, Marianne lay, feeling the chaise move off smartly, travelling at first over the jolting cobbled streets of Paris. Then, still muffled in her rug, she thought she heard the clash of arms and a brief word of command, as if they were passing a guard post of some kind, although the vehicle had not slowed down. She guessed that they had in fact passed out of the city limits when the driver whipped up the horses to a still faster pace over a good road in which the pot-holes were few.

She heard Pilar, above her, give vent to a sigh of relief, and then felt the blanket being moved away from her face.

'I don't wish you to suffocate,' the Señora said, with insulting solicitude. 'That would be much too quick. Besides, you may as well try and sleep, my dear, because we have a good two hours ahead of us.'

The Spaniard's feet resumed their position but Marianne had succeeded in shifting herself round so as no longer to have them immediately under her nose, though it made her slightly more uncomfortable. At least she was spared the slight of her foe's complacent expression, and thus able to devote herself to her own thoughts.

Two hours? At the rate the horses were travelling, and bearing in mind that there would have to be a change somewhere if Pilar intended to keep up this rapid pace, that would mean a distance of about twenty miles. But a knowledge of how far it might be to the place where she was to be held captive did not tell her very much about the place itself, since she had no idea by which gate they had left Paris. Never mind, she knew at least that if she did manage to escape she would have to steal a horse, or else resign herself to the prospect of walking back to Paris – not that the thought frightened her. In order to escape from her captors and fly to Jason's rescue she would gladly have walked to Paris from Marseille.