"No. Your meeting was one of those accidents that come about God alone knows how. The cardinal only arrived here two days before yourself. He came from St. Petersburg with important news for me."

"From St. Petersburg? News from the tsar, then? Is it true what they say of him?"

"What do they say?"

"That he is as handsome as a Greek god! Altogether charming and attractive."

"Quite true," said the duke, with a note in his voice that set Marianne's teeth on edge. "He is the most remarkable man I have ever met. Men ought to kiss the ground he walks on. He is the crowned archangel who will save us all from Bonaparte…"

He had turned his head away and was gazing up to heaven as though expecting this Muscovite archangel of his to descend with flapping wings. At the same time he embarked on a panegyric of Alexander I, who was clearly his great hero, which Marianne found tedious in the extreme. She was beginning to think it must be growing very late and she had found out very little. Jason's fate, in particular, had not even been mentioned.

She let him run on for a little longer and then, when he paused for breath, she murmured quickly: "A remarkable man, indeed! But I begin to fear I am trespassing on Your Excellency's time. Surely it must be very late?"

"Late? Not in the least—besides, we've the whole night ahead of us. No, no, I'll not hear of it! Very soon now, tomorrow probably, I shall be leaving myself to take the tsar some reinforcements in the shape of the regiments I've mustered here. This is the last evening of peace I shall have for a long time to come. Don't shorten it for me!"

"Very well. But aren't you forgetting, Your Excellency, that I came here with a favor to ask you?"

He was so close that she could feel him stiffen and draw away. She guessed that she had brought him back to earth a little too abruptly for his liking. But she decided that if he had a mind to forget his promise she would bring him to the point once and for all, even at the risk of putting him in an ill humor.

"A favor?" he said irritably. "What then? Ah, yes—that American privateer. Almost certainly a spy, a spy in the pay of Bonaparte. Can't think what he could be doing here otherwise."

"You don't often find spies going about with a brig of that size, Your Excellency. It would be a rather obvious way of entering a country, surely? Up to now, Mr. Beaufort's business has been chiefly in the wine trade. As to being in the service of Bonaparte"—Lord, this was going badly!—"I can assure you he is nothing of the sort. It is not long since he saw the inside of a Paris prison—and the convict barracks at Brest as well!"

Richelieu said nothing. He had got to his feet and was pacing agitatedly up and down the little terrace, his arms folded across his chest and his fingers plucking at the folds of lace about his throat. Marianne watched him anxiously, thinking what a strange character he was. His reactions were wholly unpredictable and the least thing seemed to catch his nerves on the raw.

As abruptly as Napoleon himself could have done, he came to a sudden halt in front of her and shot out: "This man? What is he to you? Your lover?"

Marianne took a deep breath and forced herself to keep calm. She could see that he was studying her face closely. He was evidently expecting her to lose her temper, to make one of those calculated outbursts of indignation that came so easily to women in love and deceived nobody. Easily, she sidestepped the trap and leaned back in her seat, laughing gently.

"That is not very imaginative of you, Your Excellency. Do you think there is only one reason that a woman might wish to help a man when he's in trouble?"

"Of course not. But this Mr. Beaufort is not your brother, is he? And you have undertaken a long and dangerous voyage to come and plead for him."

"Long and dangerous? Crossing the Black Sea? Really, my lord Duke, let us be serious." She stood up suddenly, her face growing very serious indeed, and said austerely: "I have known Jason Beaufort a very long time. The first time I met him was at my aunt's house, Selton Hall, where he was a guest, received there as he was everywhere in England. He was acquainted there with the Prince of Wales. To me, he is a very dear friend, as I said, a childhood friend."

"A childhood friend? You swear it?"

She heard the quiver of jealousy, bitter and desperate, in his voice and knew that if she wanted to save Jason it was necessary to convince him. With the faintest shrug of her lovely shoulders, she murmured in a tone of gentle raillery: "Why, of course I swear. But, although I hesitate to say it, my lord Duke, surely you are behaving a little like a jealous husband—rather than a friend whom I have known only a short time, but to whom I had looked for more gentleness and understanding… for more affection, even, considering the old ties between us…"

He was staring at her intently, breathing rather hard, as though trying to read to the bottom of the green eyes, as deep and compelling as the sea. Gradually, Marianne felt something yield and relax in him.

"Come," he said at last, taking her by the hand and hurrying her quickly inside.

She followed him through the little yellow salon where the candles were already guttering, across a wide landing tiled in black marble and into a huge office, lit only by a nightlight on the desk. The long blue velvet curtains were tightly drawn and the room felt as close and dark as a tomb.

Still holding her hand, the duke went straight to the writing table, which was littered with papers and a heap of green leatherbound dispatch boxes. There he released her at last. Not even pausing to sit down, he opened a drawer and took out a large sheet of paper stamped with the double-headed eagle and already covered with writing. A space had been left blank. He filled it in, added a few more words and signed with a nervous scrawl.

Marianne had managed to read some of it over his shoulder, and her heart beat faster as she realized that it was an order for the release of Jason and his men. But then, while Richelieu was hunting for sealing wax and melting it at the candle, her eyes wandered over the remainder of the desk and paused for a moment on a partially folded document. She was not able to read more than a few words, but what she read struck her so forcibly that it was all she could do not to put out her hand and pick it up.

Meanwhile, the duke had finished writing. He reread the order quickly and then handed it to Marianne.

"There. You have only to give that to the commander of the citadel and your childhood friend will be instantly restored to you, along with those who were captured with him."

Flushed with happiness, Marianne took the precious paper and slipped it into a pocket cunningly hidden in a fold of her skirt.

"I am deeply grateful," she said, much moved. "But—may I ask if this includes the restitution of the ship?"

Richelieu stiffened and frowned.

"The ship? No. I am sorry but it is out of my power. By the law of the sea it belongs now to the Russian navy."

"But surely, Your Excellency, you have no right to deprive a harmless foreigner of his sole means of livelihood? What good is a seaman without a ship?"

"I don't know, my dear, but I have already gone as far as I dare in offering to release a man whose country is at this moment at war with our ally, England. I have given a fighting man back to America. Don't ask me to give her a ship of war as well. The brig is a fine vessel. Our navy will make good use of her."

"Your navy? Indeed, my lord Duke, I begin to ask myself if there is anything French left in you. Your forebears must be turning in their graves if they can hear you."

Unable to contain herself any longer, she had allowed her indignation to blaze forth, and the governor blanched at the icy contempt that showed clearly in her tone.

"You have no right to say that!" he cried, his voice rising to the curiously shrill note it had in anger. "Russia is a true friend. She took me in when France had cast me out and now she is mustering all her forces to fight against the usurper, against this man who, to satisfy his own insane ambition, has not shrunk from putting all Europe to fire and slaughter. Russia is prepared to shed her own blood to save France from this scourge."

"To save France—but France has never asked to be saved. And if what they say in the town is true, you, the Duc de Richelieu, are going to march tomorrow at the head of the Georgian troops—"

"To crush Napoleon! Yes, I am! And gladly!"

There was a moment's silence, while both sides paused for breath. Marianne, breathless and blazing-eyed, could barely contain herself, but she meant to stop this man going to fight against his own people in the ranks of the tsar if it was the last thing she did.

"So, you are going to fight him? Very well. But have you thought that in fighting him you will also be fighting men of your own blood, your fellow countrymen, your brothers and your peers?"

"My brothers? The scum thrown up by the revolution and dressed up in fancy titles? Really, Madame!"

"Your peers, I said! Not Ney and Augereau, Murat or Davout, but men with names like Ségur, Colbert, Montesquiou, Castellane, Fezensac and d'Aboville—to say nothing of Poniatowski and Radziwill! Because you will be raising your sword against them, too, Monsieur de Richelieu, when you charge at the head of your half-savage Tatars!"

"Be quiet! I am bound to aid my friends."

"Say your new friends, rather! Very well, then, my lord Duke, but take care that you do not serve the tsar an ill turn."

"An ill turn? What do you mean by that?"

Marianne smiled, pleased to have struck a spark of anxiety in the duke's eyes. She had a feeling that her blows had struck home more truly than she had dared to hope. And a fiendish idea had just occurred to her, one whose destructive power she meant to put to the test.

"Nothing. Or nothing I can be sure of. But please, never mind. Forgive me if I spoke too sharply just now. You see—I like you very much. I cannot help myself, and not for anything in the world would I have you come to regret your—your truly generous heart. You have been so kind to me and to my friends. I would do anything to keep you from falling into a trap, even if it made you accuse me of Bonapartist sympathies, although of course it is not true."

Richelieu softened immediately.

"My dear Princess, I know that. And I believe in your friendship. It is in the name of that friendship that I beg you to speak. If you have discovered anything that affects me, you must tell it to me."

She gazed into his eyes and uttered a deep sigh. Then she shrugged.

"You are right. This is no time for scruples. Listen, then. You know that I came here from Constantinople. While there, I became friendly with Princess Morousi, the widow of the former hospodar of Walachia, and it was she who gave me what I can hardly call a warning, for at the time it seemed to me no more than a piece of gossip of no great importance."

"Tell me. She is not a woman with the reputation of an idle gossip."

"Very well. Then I will go straight to the point. Are you quite sure of the regiments that have just landed? It was Prince Tsitsanov who sent them, was it not?"

"Yes, but I fail to see—"

"You will. It is less than ten years, I believe, since Georgia came under Russian control? The majority of the people there are loyal, but not all. As for Prince Tsitsanov, according to what I was told he seems to have been finding out that Tiflis is a long way from St. Petersburg and that his governorship had something vice-regal about it. From vice-regal to regal is not so very far, my dear Duke, and by asking the prince for troops you provided him with a convenient method of getting rid of unwanted troublemakers. He is not going to miss those two regiments, you may be sure of that. As to how they will behave under fire, shoulder to shoulder with the Muscovites whom they detest… But there, as I said, I am not sure of this. What I am telling you is idle drawing room chatter, nothing more. I may very well be maligning Prince Tsitsanov—"

"But on the other hand, what you say may easily be true."

The duke had dropped into a chair behind the desk and was gnawing his thumb with a gloomy expression. Marianne stood for a moment, gauging the effect of her words. The man was certainly a genius when it came to organization. He was a great colonial administrator and possibly a great diplomat, but he was also a worried man, a man who lived on his nerves, and in these aspects of his character he was showing himself more vulnerable than she had dared to hope.