Жюльетта Бенцони - Marianne and the Privateer

'He can do as he likes, I shall not go! The Emperor himself cannot compel me to. Besides, I shall probably have left Paris in a little while.'

'Again?' wailed Mademoiselle d'Asselnat. 'But, Marianne, where are you going? And I thought we were going to settle down to a nice quiet life here, in this house, with all it stands for.'

Marianne smiled, a fond and very understanding smile, and held out her hand to her cousin with impulsive tenderness. That elderly spinster seemed to have changed a little as a result of her little adventure, which had surely cost her some degree of heartache. The irrepressible energy which had seen her through more than forty years of an eventful and far from easy life seemed to be dead, or at least sleeping. What she must want now above all was quiet and peace. Her expression as she looked round the elegant salon with its fine furniture and ornaments, was almost greedily possessive and acquired a hint of an appeal whenever her eye came to rest on the big portrait of the Marquis d'Asselnat over the fireplace.

'You need not come with me, Adelaide. You need rest and tranquillity, and this house needs a mistress who is here rather more permanently than I have been. I am going away again, and you know I am. Jason's prison will not be in Paris, and I want to go with him now wherever he goes.' She turned to Arcadius. 'Is it known yet where he will be taken?'

'Brest, for sure.'

'That is good news. I know the town well. I lived there for several weeks with poor Nicolas Mallerousse, in his little house at Recouvrance. If I cannot manage to arrange his escape on the way, I am sure I shall have a better chance in Brest than at Toulon or Rochefort where I have never been.'

'We shall have a better chance,' Jolival corrected her. 'I have already asked you to allow me to take charge of everything.'

'Will you leave me all alone?' wailed Adelaide, sounding like a hurt child. 'What shall I do when all these messengers start arriving from the prince, your husband? What shall I say to them?'

'Anything you please! Say I am away, that will be best. Besides, I am going to write to him myself and say that – that I have to go away – a long way away – on the Emperor's service, let us say, but that on my return I shall not fail to comply with my husband's — er — request,' Marianne said, thinking out her letter aloud as she spoke.

'That is madness! You yourself said not a moment ago that you did not wish to return to Lucca—'

'Nor shall I. You must understand, Adelaide, that I am simply trying to gain time… time to rescue Jason. Afterwards, I shall go away with him, away to his own country and live there with him, at his side, in a log cabin if needs must, in poverty, but I will never leave him, never, never again.'

Jolival was swift to intervene. His little black eyes held Marianne's huge ones steadily.

'You are deserting us, then?' he asked softly.

'No, no! The choice is yours. Stay here, in this house – I will give it to you – or come with me over there, with all the risks that involves…'

'Have you remembered that Beaufort is still married to that harpy? What do you intend doing with her?'

'Arcadius,' Marianne said, with sudden gravity, 'when that woman dared to use me as her footstool, and when, most of all, I heard her tell me coolly and implacably that she was determined to send her husband to his death, I swore that one day I would make her pay for it. If she dares to approach Jason again, I shall get rid of her without a second thought. There is nothing,' her voice shook with the intensity of her feelings, 'nothing I would not do to keep him for myself. I would not even shrink from a murder which, all told, would be no more than a just execution. I fought a duel with one man who debased me, I killed the woman who insulted me… I shall not let a wicked wife destroy the one love of my life!'

'You have turned into a terrifying woman, Marianne!' Mademoiselle d'Asselnat exclaimed, with a horror not entirely devoid of admiration.

'I am your cousin, my dear. Can you have forgotten that the night we met you were trying to set fire to this house to punish it for belonging to a creature you had decided was unworthy of it?'

The entrance of Jeremy bearing lighted candles forced them to break off the conversation. Absorbed in their discussion, not one of the three had observed that it was growing dark. Shadows had crept into the farthest corners of the room and crowded thickly about the curtains and hangings and under the lofty ceiling. The only light came from the fire blazing in the hearth.

They sat in silence while the butler disposed branches of candles about the room, clothing everything in it in a golden radiance. When he had departed, with a gloomy pronouncement that dinner would be served shortly, Adelaide, who was sitting bundled up in a vast, white woollen shawl in the armchair by the fire, stretched out her thin hands to the dancing flames and remained for a moment staring into them. Locked each in their own thoughts, Marianne and Arcadius, one seated on a cushion before the fire, the other leaning against the chimney piece, were also silent, as though waiting for the familiar sounds of the house to give them an answer to the questions which filled their hearts but which they dared not utter for fear of influencing, however little, the steps which would decide the others' futures.

At last, Adelaide looked up at Jolival and rubbed her hands together quietly.

'They say America is a wonderful country,' she said placidly and a flicker of the old fire shone for a moment in her grey eyes. 'And I have heard it said that in those southern parts it is never cold. I think that I should like never to be cold. You, Jolival?'

'I too,' the Vicomte returned gravely, 'I believe I too should like—'

The doors were flung wide open.

'Her Serene Highness is served!' Jeremy intoned from the doorway.

Marianne slipped her arms companionably through Jolival's and Adelaide's and smiled with deep gratitude upon them both.

'Indeed I am,' she said, 'I am served far, far better than anything I deserve.'

Day dawned, grey and dirty, a sodden November dawn, soaked through and through with the thin, freezing rain that had been falling on Paris for some days, penetrating everything. Looming through the yellowish fog of early morning, the old hospice of Bicêtre with its soaring roofs, lofty gateway and nicely balanced buildings, recovered some ghost of its former elegance. The mist concealed the cracks in the walls, the chipped gables and the smashed and glassless windows, the dark streaks that mottled the crumbling stonework below gutters cracked by frost and all the unsightly decay of a building which had once been royal, a work dedicated to the loftiest aims of charity, now put to the meanest uses of the law. Ever since 1796, when it had replaced La Tournelle, it had been the last stage before the galleys, the antechamber to hell, whether the road led via the Conciergerie and the scaffold or to penal servitude, which was a death no less certain but more horrible because stripped of the last rags of human dignity.

In the normal way of things, this gloomy edifice, brooding on its hillside with the waste lands all about, stood silent and alone, but on this day, despite the early hour, a swelling, noisy crowd was surging up against the rotting walls, big with a nameless joy, an unwholesome curiosity. It was the crowd which always assembled there, four times a year, to witness the departure of the 'Chain'. The same crowd of milling humanity, alerted by heaven alone knew what mysterious signs, pressed around the scaffold on execution days, no matter how quiet the thing was kept, a gathering of connoisseurs come together to watch a most choice spectacle with undisguised relish. They beat upon the closed doors of the hospice like patrons in a theatre stamping with their feet, impatient for the curtain to go up. Marianne gazed at this grisly mob with loathing.

She was standing, enveloped from head to foot in a great, black, hooded cloak, in the lee of a broken wall which had once belonged to the hovel whose crumbling remains still stood beside the road. She was up to her ankles in mud, her face was wet and her cloak already sodden with rain. Beside her was Arcadius de Jolival, grim-faced, his arms folded on his chest, also waiting, chewing the ends of his moustache.

He had wished to spare Marianne the pitiful sight in store and had tried, right up to the last minute, to dissuade her from coming, but in vain. She clung stubbornly to her pilgrimage of love, determined to follow every step of the cruel journey that lay before the man she loved, only repeating endlessly that some opportunity might occur on the way and that they must not let it slip.

'The chances of an escape while the chain is on the road,' Arcadius had explained tirelessly, 'are non-existent. They are all chained together, in batches of twenty-four at a time, and they are searched at the first halt to make sure that no one has managed to slip them any tool to sever their chains as they set out. After that they are kept under close guard and any man who is fool enough to try and escape is shot down on the spot.'

In the long days which had gone before, Arcadius had acquired minutely detailed information on everything which concerned the penal colony, the life the men led there and the conditions of the journey which took them there. He had penetrated, in ruffianly disguise, into the worst dens of the Cite and the Barrière du Combat, buying many drinks, saying little but listening a great deal, and, as he had told Marianne, his conviction had grown that any escape would need extremely careful preparation down to the minutest details. Nor had he concealed from her his fears regarding her ability to face the brutal facts about what awaited Jason. There had been a time when he had hoped to keep the greater part from her by advising that she should go to Brest and begin to make arrangements there while he followed the convict chain on its journey. But Marianne had refused to hear of any such plan. Nothing would dissuade her from following Jason step by step from the moment of his leaving Bicêtre.