Жюльетта Бенцони - Marianne and the Privateer

'Hush, carissima mia … do not try to move. You will be all right… do not be afraid. I am with you…'

He groped for her damp fingers and squeezed them gently. She looked up at him gratefully. So he still loved her a little, after all. She was not altogether alone in the world with her broken heart and her pain-racked body. It was good to feel that warm, strong hand holding hers reassuringly. Marianne forgot that she had wanted to die and clung to it, as a frightened child dings to its father. Yet would that handsome officer in the gilded frame have soothed his daughter in her wretchedness with such patient tenderness?

Sunk in another tide of pain, she was yet conscious of being lifted carefully and carried with all possible speed through the ravaged gardens where ashes, still warm, drifted on the night wind. In the intervals of pain she looked eagerly for Jason and not finding him whispered his name. The Emperor's hand tightened on hers. He bent over her:

'I sent him back to his wife. You do not need him now that I am here… He is only a friend…'

A friend… It was the word she would have used herself the day before, and meant it, yet now it tortured her. A friend… only a friend, not even that, perhaps, if this Pilar forbade it! A moment ago, she had believed he had come back to her. But no, it was all over. Jason had gone back to his wife and she had nothing left to hope for, except perhaps death which, a moment ago, had rejected her. She was still losing blood, not fast but enough, perhaps, to drain away her life…

With a little, quivering sigh, she gave herself up to pain.

Baron Corvisart rolled down his shirtsleeves, fastened his pleated linen wristbands with care and inserted himself into the coat of blue superfine cloth which Fortunée Hamelin was holding ready for him. Then, after a cursory glance at the glass to assure himself that not a hair of his white head was out of place, he returned unhurriedly to the bed and stood for a moment in silent contemplation of the thin, pale face on the pillow, before transferring his gaze to Marianne's hands, like objects carved out of delicate ivory against the whiteness of the sheets.

'Well, you're out of danger now, young lady,' he said at last. 'All you have to do now is get your strength back. Try to eat a little and get up for a bit. You'll live, not a doubt of it, but I don't like the look of you, all the same. We'll have to do something about that.'

Marianne summoned up a smile and answered him in a weak voice:

'Indeed, I'm truly sorry, doctor. I wish I could please you. You have looked after me so patiently. But I don't want anything… food least of all. I feel so tired…'

'And if you don't eat, you'll feel a little more tired every day,' the Emperor's doctor scolded her. 'You have lost a great deal of blood, and you have to make it up again. Good gracious, you are a young woman, and a strong one, for all your dainty looks! One does not die at your age from a miscarriage and a few burns. What do you think the Emperor will have to say to me when I tell him you won't do as I tell you?'

'It isn't your fault.'

'Oh ho! If you think His Majesty will believe that! He expects his orders to be obeyed, and we have both had our orders: me to make you better, and you to get better as fast as possible. We've neither of us a particle of choice. I attend the Emperor every morning and he always asks after you, let me tell you.'

Marianne turned her head on the pillow so that he should not see the tears in her eyes.

'The Emperor is very kind…' she said in a tight little voice.

'He is to those he cares for,' Corvisart agreed. 'Tomorrow, at all events, I mean to tell him that you are better. So don't you let me down, Princess.'

'I'll try not to, Doctor. I'll try.'

The physician smiled and bent forward on an impulse to pat his patient's cheek affectionately:

'That's better, my child. That's more what I like to hear. Until tomorrow, then. I'll have a word with your people here and I trust I'll find you've been a good girl and done as you're bid. Your servant, Madame Hamelin.'

With a bow to the exquisite Creole, Corvisart trod across the room and the door closed softly behind him. At once, Fortunée rose quietly and came to sit on the edge of her friend's bed, enveloping her in a strong scent of roses. Her dress of simple cotton lawn embroidered with tiny coloured flowers was perfect for the warm, summer day, and made her look like a young girl. A huge sun-bonnet of natural straw swung from one white-mittened hand. Looking at her, Marianne felt strangely old and tired, and the expression on her face was so bleak that Fortunée frowned quickly.

'I don't understand you, Marianne,' she said at last. 'You have been lying here for a week now and you are behaving just exactly as if wanting to be done with your life for good. It's not like you…'

'It was not like me once. But now, it's true. I do not want to live. What is the use?'

'Was it so important… the child?'

Once again, Marianne's eyes filled with tears and this time she made no attempt to restrain them, but let them flow freely.

'Of course it was important,' she said. 'It was the only thing that mattered in my whole life, my whole reason for living. I could have lived for him, through him. All my hopes were in him, and not only mine…'

Ever since she had recovered consciousness on that terrible night and learned that she had lost the child, Marianne had been blaming herself bitterly, and most of all for forgetting, all through those dreadful hours, that she was soon to be a mother. From the moment she had set eyes on Jason, everything else that had mattered to her before suddenly ceased to exist before the blinding discovery of the love which she had carried with her unwittingly for months. The garden, illumined by the blaze of fireworks, had been her road to Damascus and she had emerged from it, like Saul, blind, blind to everything around her, blind to the whole world, to her own life, to everything except this love, so deep that she could not contemplate it without a feeling of vertigo. And by risking her own life, by seeking to make an end of it, she had wantonly imperilled that of the child! Not for an instant had she thought of it, or of the man, far away in the villa in Tuscany, who would wait now in vain for news of the birth of that child on whom he had pinned every hope of his hermitic existence.

Corrado Sant'Anna had married her for the sake of a child of the imperial blood to inherit his name. And now, through her own fault, she, Marianne, had lost all hope of fulfilling her part of the bargain. The prince had been cheated.

'You are thinking of your mysterious husband, are you?' Fortunée said quietly.

'Yes. I am ashamed, ashamed, do you understand? Because I feel now as if I had stolen the name I bear.'

'Stolen it? But why?'

'I have already told you,' Marianne said wearily. 'Prince Sant' Anna married me only for the sake of the child, because it was the Emperor's and so he was not ashamed to acknowledge it…'

'So, having lost it, you think yourself unfit to live and, if I understand you correctly, your present plan is simply to go into a decline and die?'

'More or less. But don't imagine I am trying to punish myself. I told you: I just do not wish to live.'

Fortunée got up and walked nervously over to the window, threw it open and then returned to her place by the bed:

'If your will to live depends purely on the existence of a child of Napoleon's, then I should think the answer was obvious. Napoleon will give you another and all will be well.'

'Fortunée!'

Gasping, Marianne turned a shocked face to her friend, but the Creole only grinned: