The man who had been talking to Theodoros turned to the officer.

'The vessel that struck us belongs to one of the Kouloughis brothers, notorious renegade pirates. This fellow says that he and his sister were carried off by him from Amorgos and were on their way to Tunis to be sold as slaves. They managed to escape in the confusion and are asking for asylum. I gather the young woman is deaf and dumb. We can scarcely throw them back into the sea, can we?'

The captain made no reply. Without a word, he reached out and, taking Marianne's hand, drew her up on to the quarterdeck, where a powerful lantern was burning. There he fell to studying her face as the light fell on it.

Sticking to her part, Marianne said not a word. Then, suddenly:

'You aren't Greek, nor are you deaf and dumb, are you, my child?'

At the same time, he swept off his cocked hat and revealed a full, high-coloured face in which was set a pair of laughing eyes as blue as periwinkles, a face that surged up so unexpectedly from the depths of the past that Marianne could not help giving it a name:

'James King!' she cried. 'Captain James King! But this is incredible!'

'Not so incredible as finding you here, sailing about on a pirate ship in company with a Greek giant! All the same, I couldn't be more delighted to see you, Marianne my dear. Welcome aboard the Jason, bound for Constantinople.'

Whereupon Captain King put both arms round Marianne and kissed her warmly.

CHAPTER TWELVE

An Irascible Antiquary

To find oneself suddenly, halfway across the world, on board the same vessel as an old family friend who, besides being one's accidental rescuer, has all unwittingly become a wartime enemy is an experience of singular awkwardness.

Sir James King had been a part of Marianne's life as far back as she could remember. In those rare intervals when he was not away at sea, he and his family, whose home lay within easy reach of Selton, were among the few callers permitted to cross the sacred limits of Aunt Ellis's carefully guarded threshold. This fact was probably due to her finding them both estimable and restful.

To the fierce old lady, ruling her vast estates with a rod of iron and tending always to carry about with her a faint aroma of the stables, Sir James's wife Mary, with her pretty dresses and big frothy hats, and her perpetual look of having just stepped out of a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was a continual source of interest and amazement. Even life's hardest knocks seemed to roll off her, baffled by her charming smile and the exquisite good manners that were second nature to her.

Marianne, giving her all a child's whole-hearted admiration for something perfect in its kind, had seen her come through an epidemic of smallpox, to which her two youngest children had fallen victim, and wait with unfailing constancy for the return of a husband long believed lost at sea, with the serenity of her sweet face apparently quite undisturbed. Only, her eyes had lost a fraction of their delicate blue, and her smile acquired an indefinable tinge of melancholy to betray the anguish she was suffering. She was a woman who would always hold her head high and never give in to circumstances.

Marianne had always been glad to see Lady King, thinking, as she looked at her, that her own mother, of whom she possessed only a single miniature, must have been very like her.

As ill luck would have it, Lady King had been out of England at the time of her young friend's marriage, having been summoned to Jamaica to the bedside of her ailing sister, where she had been obliged to undertake the management of a large plantation. Her husband, too, had been away, at Malta, and their eldest son at sea. So Marianne had been deprived of the happiness of having those she considered her best friends among the few people present at a ceremony which she was so swiftly to consider a disaster.

Had they been at home, things would almost certainly have been very different and Marianne would not have been forced to seek asylum abroad after the tragic events of her marriage night, since the Kings would have opened their house to her unhesitatingly.

Now and then, in the difficult times which led up to the moment when she had found a haven and a kind of home in her ancestral mansion in the rue de Lille, Marianne's thoughts had gone out to the English family she would probably never see again, now that an impenetrable curtain had been drawn between herself and England. She had continued to think of them a little sadly until, as time went by, they had faded gradually into the mists of her past life, so far back that she had almost forgotten them.

And now, quite suddenly, here they were again, in the person of this elderly naval officer who in so few words had reforged the chain that had been broken.

The rediscovery was not without its problems for Marianne. She knew, of course, that Sir James must have heard of her marriage to Francis Cranmere, but what did he know of the subsequent events?

It was clearly impossible to embark on an explanation of her present prestigious but highly dangerous persona. She knew his forthright nature, his uncompromising sense of honour and deep love for his country. How could she tell such a man that she was the Princess Sant'Anna whom a British squadron had attempted unsuccessfully to capture off Corfu, without placing him in an altogether intolerable position? That Captain King would not hesitate, she was certain. The little girl of Selton Hall would be put firmly out of mind, however much it might cost him to do so and Napoleon's most serene envoy would be instantly incarcerated in a cabin, with the prospect of quitting it only for an equally strict confinement in England.

Thus it came as something of a relief to her to hear him inquire, after the first excitement of recognition had worn off:

'But where have you been, all this time? I learned of your disastrous marriage on my return from Malta, and I know that had my wife been at home she would have advised your aunt most strongly against it. I was told that you had fled from home after gravely wounding Francis Cranmere and killing his cousin, but I could never bring myself to believe ill of you. In my own view, which is that of a good many other sensible people, they came by their just deserts. His reputation seems to have been notorious, and only someone as blind as your poor aunt would have dreamed of matching such a child as you were with a gazetted fortune-hunter.'

Marianne smiled. It amused her that she should have forgotten how talkative Sir James could be, unusually so for an Englishman. It was probably his way of compensating for the long hours of silence at sea. True, he was a good listener too. He seemed to be very well informed about her catastrophic marriage.

'How did you come to hear all this? Was it from Lady King?'

'Good God, no! My wife only came home from Kingston herself six months ago, and in poor health at that. She got a fever out there and she has to watch herself. She don't go gadding a great deal nowadays. No, I heard of your misfortunes from Lady Hester Stanhope, Chatham's niece, y'know. I took her on board last year on the voyage out to Gibraltar. She was pretty badly cut up after her uncle's death and took it into her head to travel about a bit, visit the Mediterranean and all that. Don't know where she is now, of course, though she talked a good deal about the lure of the East. But when she left England this business of your marriage was only some three or four months old and still a good deal talked of. Francis Cranmere came in for some sympathy – he was slow recovering from his wound – and so did you.

'I'd not been long at Portsmouth myself and not much time to spare for gossip while I was there. It was Lady Hester brought me up to date with all the news. She was quite on your side, by the by. Swore that Cranmere had got no more than he deserved and it was a wicked shame ever to have married you to the fellow. But there, I dare swear your poor aunt thought she was doing all for the best, remembering her own youth.'

'I made no objection,' Marianne admitted. 'I was in love with Francis Cranmere – or I thought I was.'

'It's understandable. He's a handsome shaver, by all accounts. D'ye happen to know what's become of him? There's a rumour abroad of his having been taken up for a spy in France and put in prison and heaven knows what else.'

Marianne felt the colour drain from her face as she saw again the red-painted instrument erected in the snowy ditch at Vincennes, and the chained man twitching with the fear of death in his sleep.

Once again, the terrible cold of that winter's night seemed to creep into her bones and she shivered.

'N-no,' she managed to say at last. 'No, I've no idea. If you please, Sir James, I'm dreadfully tired. We, my companion and I, that is, have been through a terrible experience.'

'Why, of course, my dear. You must forgive me. I was so happy to see you again that I've kept you standing here in all this bustle. You shall come and rest. We'll talk later. This Greek of yours, by the by – who is he?'

'My servant,' Marianne replied, without hesitation. 'And quite devoted to me. Is it possible for him to be lodged near me? He will be lost otherwise.'

The fact of the matter was that she was not entirely easy in her mind about Theodoros' possible reactions to this total change of plan, and she was anxious to confer with him as soon as possible.

She had drawn no very cheerful conclusions from the heavy frown and general air of mistrust with which he had been following, without understanding, this evidently very friendly exchange between the noble French lady and an officer of His Britannic Majesty's Navy. Foreseeing trouble, she preferred to face it quickly.