Until then, she had thought of Pilar as a fanatical barbarian, incapable of any normal train of thought, whose main aim in running to seek refuge with the unlikely Queen of Spain at her court at Mortefontaine had simply been to pull her own chestnuts out of the fire. She had believed her proud and unbalanced, and even base because to satisfy her own unworthy longing for revenge she had sided with the police against her husband. But she could never have believed that her hatred could go so wickedly far. What was it the creature had said? That no action of Marianne's must interfere with the course of justice?… In other words, she was kidnapping Marianne to prevent her from doing anything to rescue Jason!
For a moment, Marianne seemed to hear Talleyrand again. 'Pilar comes of a fierce and passionate race… an injured woman may deliver up her faithless lover to execution without flinching – and then wall herself up alive in a nunnery to expiate her crime…'
That was it! They were going to keep Marianne locked up in some dungeon from which she could not escape until Jason had been executed. Perhaps then they might do her the favour of killing her also? No doubt it would all make the path of expiation much easier for the saintly Pilar!
'If I were in her place,' Marianne thought, 'I should probably kill my rival, but not for anything in the world would I harm the man I loved.'
Her bonds were hurting her and the gag was making it hard for her to breathe. She tried to wriggle herself into a more comfortable position.
'Sit still,' came Pilar's voice coldly. We shall be changing carriages very soon.'
They had travelled only a short distance in the cab, but already it was slowing down. Several hands seized Marianne none too gently and dragged her out, but scarcely had her feet touched the ground before she was lifted up again and felt herself set down on a cushioned seat, much softer than the previous one. Her elbows touched silky velvet. But at the same time she knew for certain that the person sitting beside her was no longer Quintin Crawfurd. It was Pilar. Marianne's delicate nostrils had picked up at once the characteristically heavy scent of carnations and jasmine which she used. No one else entered the carriage and the prisoner began to feel seriously anxious on behalf of her companion, whose stifled grunts she could hear coming from some way away. Then someone spoke through the window, in Spanish:
'What shall we do with the other one?'
'I have told you,' Pilar replied. 'Drive him to the place you know of. I can promise you the police will not come looking for him there, supposing that they look for him at all.'
'They'll do that all right, Dona Pilar, you may be sure. When his wife finds he's not come home she'll raise heaven and earth.'
'Not necessarily. It would mean admitting that they had an exile hidden under their roof. The important part, in any case, is that nothing should be known before the date we have settled. We can let him go after that. We have nothing against him. Which reminds me, did you pay the driver of the cab?'
The man Vasquez's reply to this was a low, guttural laugh which made Marianne's blood run cold. Even Pilar was moved to protest:
'You should not have done that. We are not at home now.'
'Bah! Another curst Frenchman the less! Go now. Three of our men will go with you and we will meet again there. And if I may make a suggestion, she had better not be seen. Allow me.'
Marianne was seized again, bundled up in something rough and warm and smelling so strongly of the stables that it must have been a horse blanket, and dumped unceremoniously on the floor of the chaise.
'I had meant to do that before we arrived,' Pilar said.
'You are all goodness! Are you so fond of the harlot who has stolen your husband?'
'How well you understand me, Don Alonso,' Pilar purred. Her voice was so seraphic that it made Marianne immediately long to bite. 'Thank you. Thank you a thousand times. You have made the prospect of the journey very agreeable – to me at all events.'
The prisoner, lying totally helpless on the carpeted floor of the vehicle, was soon made well aware of how agreeable the journey was to be for her by feeling her enemy's feet planted firmly on her chest. Rather than add to Pilar's enjoyment, however, she refrained from any reaction of her outrage.
"You'll pay for this!' she swore inwardly. "You'll pay a hundred times over, for this and everything else. You single-minded savage! When I get my hands on you, you murderous she-devil, I'll show you what I can do…'
Thereafter, the names which Marianne in her impotent fury applied to Pilar were of a sadly descending order of refinement, being almost exclusively borrowed from the vocabulary of old Dobs, the groom at Selton who had taught Marianne to ride. Nor, indeed, was she invariably certain of the precise meaning of the terms she invoked, but she derived a good deal of comfort from the thought that nothing was too base to describe a woman who could permit the cold-blooded murder of an innocent cab driver, to say nothing of the savagery with which she was working to bring Jason to the block.
Angry, bruised and half-stifled, Marianne lay, feeling the chaise move off smartly, travelling at first over the jolting cobbled streets of Paris. Then, still muffled in her rug, she thought she heard the clash of arms and a brief word of command, as if they were passing a guard post of some kind, although the vehicle had not slowed down. She guessed that they had in fact passed out of the city limits when the driver whipped up the horses to a still faster pace over a good road in which the pot-holes were few.
She heard Pilar, above her, give vent to a sigh of relief, and then felt the blanket being moved away from her face.
'I don't wish you to suffocate,' the Señora said, with insulting solicitude. 'That would be much too quick. Besides, you may as well try and sleep, my dear, because we have a good two hours ahead of us.'
The Spaniard's feet resumed their position but Marianne had succeeded in shifting herself round so as no longer to have them immediately under her nose, though it made her slightly more uncomfortable. At least she was spared the slight of her foe's complacent expression, and thus able to devote herself to her own thoughts.
Two hours? At the rate the horses were travelling, and bearing in mind that there would have to be a change somewhere if Pilar intended to keep up this rapid pace, that would mean a distance of about twenty miles. But a knowledge of how far it might be to the place where she was to be held captive did not tell her very much about the place itself, since she had no idea by which gate they had left Paris. Never mind, she knew at least that if she did manage to escape she would have to steal a horse, or else resign herself to the prospect of walking back to Paris – not that the thought frightened her. In order to escape from her captors and fly to Jason's rescue she would gladly have walked to Paris from Marseille.
Rather than waste her strength to no purpose, Marianne forced herself to relax as far as possible in her cramped position. Old Dobs's advice came back to her now, perhaps because she had been thinking of him before:
'Relax, Miss Marianne. It's one of the secrets of a good fencer – and of a good shot. It saves wear and tear on the nerves and helps to keep you cool. You have to teach your muscles to relax.'
Then the old man had taught her how, systematically, to relax her arms and legs, take deep breaths. Now, in spite of her bonds, Marianne strove to put his lessons into practice. At the same time, she did her best to make her mind a blank, shutting out even the memory of those miraculous moments in La Force because she could not think of them calmly, and in the end she succeeded so well that she fell sound asleep.
She was woken by the soft plop of the blanket landing once more on her face. Almost at once, there was the metallic creak of gates being opened and another clash of arms, as if they had come to a guard post again. Then the chaise was bowling over some soft, smooth surface which might have been the sanded driveway through a private park. They went on for some way but the rug was wrapped so closely round her head that Marianne could hear nothing. Indeed, it was as much as she could do to breathe.