Moved to tears by this, Marianne murmured huskily: 'Do you mean, Sire, that – that you are not going to punish me for my disobedience?'

'By no means. But the very fact that you are here, and in this condition, is the best possible proof that you have not betrayed the promise you made me, by which I mean that you did not take the road to St Petersburg, easy as that would have been for you. Because of that, I shall inflict no worse penalty on you than I have done.'

'And – that is?'

'Your house in Paris is yours no more. Just as you have long ceased to be Mademoiselle d'Asselnat de Villeneuve. Your family's mansion shall belong henceforth, as of right, to your cousin, Mademoiselle Adelaide d'Asselnat.'

There was a lump in Marianne's throat and she lowered her eyes so that he should not see the sudden pain in them.

'Does that mean – that Paris is closed to me? That I must live in exile?'

'That's a funny word for an émigrée brought up in England. But don't imagine I'm sending you back to Selton Hall. No, you are not exiled, only you may no longer make your home in Paris. You will not be forbidden to visit it, but you will live henceforth where you belong.'

'And where is that?'

'Don't play the simpleton with me. You are Princess Sant'Anna, Madame, and you will live with your husband and your son. No other home within the Empire is permitted to you.'

'Sire!'

'No argument. What I have said is no more than you have already promised. Go back to Prince Corrado. He is worthy of your love, even if – the colour of his skin is not what might be looked for in such a man.'

"The – colour of his skin? Then your Majesty knows—'

'Yes, madame, I know. In the hope of sparing you my displeasure at the news of a divorce, Prince Sant'Anna has confided his secret to me, trusting to my honour. I had his letter in Moscow. His hope in writing to me was to make me understand you better and forgive you for blindly following your heart to America. I know now what manner of man you have married.'

He moved slowly to the bed and laid his hand on her shoulder as she sat listening with bent head, overwhelmed by feelings she could not control.

'Try to love him, Marianne. No man could deserve it more. If you want me to forgive you wholly and completely, be a good wife to him – and bring him back with you to my court. A man of his quality should not live apart from the world. Tell him that. And tell him also that after the welcome he will receive from me, no one will dare to look askance at him.'

The tears were streaming down Marianne's cheeks now, but they were blessed tears of relief and gladness. Turning her head quickly, she pressed her moist lips to the pale hand that gripped her shoulder, but she could not utter a single word. They remained thus for a moment, then Napoleon gently withdrew his hand and walked to the half-open door.

'Constant!' he called. "You have it ready?'

The Emperor's valet appeared almost at once and placed a folder and some loose papers in Marianne's hands.

The Emperor explained.

'Here is a passport, a requisition order for a vehicle, a permit to obtain post horses and, finally, money. Go to sleep now. Rest here for a few days and then go on to France by easy stages. When you leave here, take a sledge if you can. It's what I'm going to do.'

'You are going now, Sire?' Marianne asked timidly.

'Yes. I must get back as soon as possible. I've had word that in my absence a crazy fool named Malet, by declaring that I was dead, has come within an ace of succeeding in a coup d'etat, thanks to the stupidity and carelessness of those I left in charge in Paris. I'm off again almost at once.' He turned to Constant, who was standing on one side, awaiting orders. 'Has it been decided yet which route we are to take? Königsberg or Warsaw?'

The Duke of Vicenza has just despatched a man to Gumbinnen to see what the road is like to Königsberg, since that is the most direct.'

'Good. Let's go. We may be able to make a detour if the going is bad. It might be better to avoid going through Prussia. Farewell, Madame. I hope that we may meet again in less tragic circumstances.'

For the first time for a long while, Marianne found herself able to smile.

'Farewell, Sire. If God answers my prayers for you, your journey will be a safe one. But before you go, Sire, tell me – about the army. Is it as terrible as I have heard?'

The Emperor's tired, handsome face tautened suddenly, as though at a blow. The hard eyes filled with a grief such as Marianne could never have suspected him of feeling.

'It is worse,' he said heavily. 'My poor children – they have slaughtered them, and the fault is mine! I should never have stayed so long in Moscow. I was deceived by that damned sunshine – and now I must leave them, leave them just when they still need me so badly.'

Marianne thought that he was going to weep but Constant came softly to his master and deferentially touched his arm.

'They have men to lead them, Sire. They will never be quite abandoned as long as they have men like Ney and Poniatowski, Oudinot, Davout and Murat to command them.'

'Constant is right, Sire,' Marianne said eagerly. 'And the Empire needs you – we all need you. Forgive me for reminding you of your grief.'

He shook his head as if to say that it was nothing and passed a shaking hand across his face. Then, with the shadow of a smile for her, he left the room and Constant closed the door softly after him. Very soon, the morning streets were echoing to the sound of departing vehicles. It was broad daylight by now and the weather was clearing.

Marianne and Barbe left Kovno three days later in a travelling coach mounted on runners, drawn by a pair of horses, and took the steep hill that led out of the town in the direction of Mariampol. While Marianne lay in bed at the inn, Barbe had gone in search of Ishak Levin and handed over to him his cousin's letter and the pearls, as well as the little horse that had brought them. She had also told him where to find the damaged kibitka. She had returned from this visit with new clothes that were not merely warm but also more in keeping with her mistress's proper station in life. Barbe could not help remarking with deep satisfaction as she took her place in the coach beside Marianne: 'I was quite right in thinking our luck would turn one day, but I'd no idea it would be so soon. Now your Highness has no more need to worry. All our adventures are at an end.'

Marianne glanced at her and behind the big muff of black fox that she was holding before her face, her lips twitched with something of their old irony.

'Do you think so? Oh, my poor Barbe, I'm very much afraid I'm one of those women who go on having adventures until the day they die. But I hope you won't have to suffer again as you did on that appalling journey.'

At Mariampol they learned that the Emperor had abandoned the idea of travelling by the direct route, by way of Königsberg and Danzig and had elected instead to go by Warsaw, so as to revive the waning enthusiasm of his Polish allies, chilled by the news of the reverses he had suffered. But Marianne had no reason to alter her own route and they pressed on towards the Baltic despite the difficulties of the road, where snowdrifts often made the going painful. More than once in the course of that long journey, Marianne blessed the encounter with Napoleon which had made it possible for her to travel in this unlooked-for luxury.

'In our kibitka, I don't think we should ever have got there,' she confided to Barbe.

'Oh, we'd have got somewhere right enough, only there's a good chance it would have been to heaven.'

Even so, with regular changes of horses and stopping at inns for no longer than they needed to snatch a bite of food, it took them nearly a week to reach Danzig. The cold was intense and as they drew nearer to the sea they ran into such a storm as wrought havoc in the countryside and sent the sea storming against the shore.

They caught their first sight of Danzig one evening through the raging wind that swept across the flat, low-lying plain whipping up flakes of frozen snow. Built on a marshy site between two rivers and the estuary of another, the Vistula, it loomed up beneath a darkening of ragged cloud like a ghost city among the massive white shapes that were the military earthworks ordered by Napoleon and discontinued when the first frosts came.

The land hereabouts was so low that it might have been Holland but for the high hills to the south-west. But beyond the dark mass of the ancient Teutonic city was the boiling whiteness of the sea, making a roar like gunfire as it bombarded the dykes.

Marianne had spoken little during the journey. She sat huddled in her furs, her face turned to the window, staring out at the snow-covered world through which their sledge was gliding smoothly now on its great wooden runners. She seemed, if not perfectly restored to health, at least a great deal better and Barbe could not understand why, as they drew nearer to Danzig, her mood seemed to grow more dark and sad.

She could not know that in this city by the sea, Marianne was to face a great decision in which no one could help her but herself. What lay before them in the drear light of that late afternoon was, for her, the crossroads, the point of no return. It was there that she must make the ultimate decision, on which all the remainder of her life would depend.

Either she would continue on the road mapped out for her by the Emperor, with a wisdom it did not even occur to her to dispute, or she must disobey him once again, for the last time, perform her final act of rebellion and burn her boats once and for all. If she did that she would go down to the harbour in Danzig and try to find a ship to carry her out through the bay, dotted with low-lying islands on which the sea broke in foam, and through the perilous Nordic straits to some Atlantic port where she could take passage at last for America. But what would she find there? That was the question she was asking herself, sitting silently in the sledge, throughout that long journey.

And the answer had been: the unknown, waiting for someone to come to her, for the end of the war, for love, yes, and happiness, perhaps. That it could be at most a partial happiness was certain. It could not be otherwise because Marianne knew herself too well now to be unaware that, even married to Jason and the mother of more children, there would always be one corner of her heart that would mourn for little Sebastiano, for the child who would grow up without her and who might one day, grown a man, meet with no feeling whatsoever, a woman who would be his mother.

Only in Danzig could that heartrending choice be made. Easy as it looked, it would be impossible to return to France and sail from Bordeaux, Nantes or Lorient. If she wanted to vanish, she must do it now, once and for all, because only then would it seem feasible. It was a long way from Danzig to Paris and the weather so bad that an accident was always possible. Her friends would believe her dead and it would not occur to Napoleon to revenge himself on her family. They would mourn her for a little while and then forget her. Yes, the thought of such an escape was tempting because it would effectively wipe out all trace of Marianne d'Asselnat de Villeneuve, Princess Sant'Anna. She would be born again and one fine day a new woman, without ties, without a past, would step out on to the quay at Charleston and start to breathe a new air…

A cough from Barbe brought her back to earth.

'Are we stopping here, my lady?' she asked. 'Or are we simply changing horses and going on?'

'We'll stop, Barbe. I'm tired out. I need a rest and so do you.'

They entered the city just as the courier bearing the mails was leaving it in a miniature whirlwind of flying snow after changing horses, clattering over a wooden bridge above the white and frozen waters of a moat. And as the sledge glided through the narrow streets of the old Hanseatic town it seemed to Marianne that she was being carried back into the Middle Ages. It was a medieval world of tall, gabled houses, timbered walls and upper storeys overhanging narrow alleys, dark as mountain chasms.

Here and there, round the corner of a street, a soaring red church would rise in gothic splendour, as though out of the mists of time, or it might be a mansion, a period gem bearing witness to the city's wealth in the fifteenth or the seventeenth century. Yet those few people they saw who were not soldiers of the mixed French, Dutch, German and Polish garrison commanded, since General Rapp's departure for Russia, by General Campredon, were plainly dressed and their cheerless looks were out of keeping with the beauty of this queen of northern cities. There was an atmosphere of constraint, of suppressed anger and an obstinate reserve.