‘For it is a sprain,’ he said in relief, ‘not a fracture, and certainly not a break.’
Their eyes held. ‘It may only be a sprain, but there’s no way I can put weight on it and get myself back down to Kalamata,’ Ella said.
‘You may be able to, once I’ve put an ice-cold bandage on it and made you a crutch.’
Christos shrugged off his jacket, folded it into a makeshift cushion and put it behind her back. Then he took off his shirt and, with the knife he kept in his sash, began ripping the material into broad strips, saying as he did so, ‘Before I strap your ankle up, there are a couple of things I have to do. First, I’m going to soak the bandaging in the channel of rainwater. It will be icy enough to reduce the swelling. Then I’m going to see if there is dittany growing amongst the broom.’
‘Dittany? What’s dittany?’
‘It’s a herb that’s known for its healing powers. If I find some, I shall make a poultice of it.’
He stood up and, as bare-chested as when he took a morning wash beneath his family’s pump, smiled down at her. ‘When Georgio’s sheep injure themselves, they rub against dittany.’ He shrugged expressively. ‘And if it is good enough for a sheep . . .’
‘. . . then it must be good enough for me,’ she finished for him, laughter in her throat despite her pain.
‘I would tell you not to move while I look for it, only it is so obviously unnecessary.’ He picked up the strips of linen that had once been his shirt and thrust them through his knife-sash. Then, wearing only sash, breeches and boots, he strode out of the cave and, because of the upward angle of the rock shelf, was almost immediately lost from view.
Ella took in a deep steadying breath and looked around at what she could see of the cave. There was no discernible end to it. The roof was high, and from where she was sitting she couldn’t see any markings on the walls that would instantly stamp it as a sacred cave. There were no double axes carved into the stone; no carvings of any kind. She reminded herself that from where she was sitting she had a very restricted view, and that carvings so near the cave’s mouth would, in any case, be unlikely. There was a torch in Christos’s sakouli and with it he would, when he returned, be able to do as thorough a search of the cave as time permitted.
She regarded her swollen ankle malevolently. If she hadn’t sprained it, they would have been able to do the torchlit search together. As it was, Christos would not only have to do the search on his own, but would also have to cut it short, for there was now the extra time it was going to take getting her back to Kalamata to factor in, and that was something that couldn’t even be guessed at.
Considering everything, she knew she ought to be feeling wretched, and yet she wasn’t. She was disappointed they couldn’t use the best part of the day to search the cave together; she was sorry she was causing Christos so much trouble and anxiety; she didn’t like the wincing pain she felt whenever she tried to put weight on her foot; but she didn’t feel wretched. Instead, with her head and back resting against the wall of the cave, waiting for Christos to return to her, she felt the opposite of wretched. She felt light-headed and trouble-free, as if she’d been lifted out of normal space and time.
The Minoans had deemed such caves sacred because of their special atmosphere and the otherworldly sensations they aroused in those who entered them. Was that why she had this curious feeling of well-being? She’d once heard the Squire say that the Minoans considered sacred caves to be the connecting point between this world and the next – a place where humans could contact the normally inaccessible spirit world. It was something Ella found easy to believe. Just as she was pondering what the manner of Minoan worship might have been, there came the sound of boots on stone, and a second later Christos’s shadow fell across the entrance. In one hand he was carrying the makeshift bandages, now all dripping wet; in the other, a clump of not very inspiring-looking greenery.
‘Dittany,’ he said, going down on one knee beside her. ‘I found it growing in the same cleft of rock as the yellow broom.’
His knee was pressed close against her thigh, the throb of sexual tension between them so strong it seemed to Ella that the very air was thick with it. He was sweating from the exertion of his climb and as a bead rolled down his chest, she had an overpowering urge to lick it away. Half-senseless with desire, knowing that to give in to it would be to open floodgates that could never be closed, she dug her nails into her palms and struggled to focus on the plant he was holding.
It was very unprepossessing. There were no flowers on it, although as March was still a couple of days away, that was perhaps not surprising. Its leaves and stems were coated in tiny white-grey hairs, giving the impression that it was covered in velvety-white down.
Taking the silence of her private battle as disappointment in the plant, Christos said, ‘It’s very rare, Ella. It grows only in Crete and only in high, hard-to-reach places. As well as being famous for its healing powers, it also symbolizes love. Men have died climbing mountainsides and deep gorges in order to give it to their sweethearts as love tokens.’
Full of deep intensity, his eyes held hers, and even before he spoke again she could feel passion rising within her, in a tide so vast and violent she knew that this time it was going to be unstoppable.
‘Ella, agápi mou, I have brought dittany to you to speed the healing of your ankle, but I also bring it as a love token – and if it had been necessary for me to risk my life in order to bring it to you, then I would have risked it not once, but a score of times – a hundred times.’ His voice cracked and broke. ‘I love you, little Yorkshire girl. You are like no other girl I’ve ever known, or ever will know. You are not meant to return to England and marry. You are meant to stay here, on Crete, and marry me.’
In the pale shafts of light now spilling into the cave, Christos had never looked more Greek. Wearing only breeches and boots, his tightly curling hair falling low over his forehead, his skin a sun-bronzed mahogany, his moustache as dark and luxuriant as that of a bandit, he confounded Ella with desire; desire that overruled all common sense. He was what she wanted, and nothing else – Sam, Yorkshire, a career as an archaeologist in parts of the world other than Crete – mattered.
In that moment she abandoned the battle she had waged for so long. With her eyes holding his, she slowly and steadily slid Sam’s engagement ring off the fourth finger of her left hand and into her jacket pocket.
With a groan that seemed to come from the very centre of his being, he pulled her into his arms, saying hoarsely, ‘I love you, Ella. I will always love you. There is nothing you could ever do that would stop me from loving you.’
She could feel hot tears on her cheeks and didn’t know if they were her tears or his.
His mouth was on her temples, her eyelids and then, just as she had dreamed of for so many months, at long last on her mouth. As his hands moved to her breasts, she made no move to stop him. Between them there were now no limits, and when Christos made love to her on the hard floor of the cave, it was an experience of such deep commitment, such perfect joy that Ella knew she would remember and treasure it lifelong.
Chapter Nineteen
Daphne had written in her distinctive scrawl:
Dear Kate,
I received your letter and Ella’s letter in the same post and I’m utterly speechless. I’ve always thought myself remarkably free of snobbery, but now I’m no longer sure that’s true. If Christos was a pukka archaeologist, it would be different. But he isn’t. I know Lewis, Helmut, Kit and the Squire all think very highly of him, but he has no professional qualifications. Being foreman on a dig is as high as he can ever go, and I suspect he wouldn’t be foreman on the Kalamata dig if it wasn’t that both he and his father had worked on the Palace of Minos site and that the family was well known to the Squire. It was the Squire who recommended him to Lewis, wasn’t it? I think Ella’s making a huge mistake, but as she’s already written to Sam – and returned his ring by post – there’s no point in my telling
her so, as it can’t, now, change anything.
As for me, I’m gloriously happy and, at six month’s pregnant, I’m beginning to look like a ship in full sail. Sholto is now very enthused at the prospect of becoming a father and refers to my lump as ‘the sprog’. He’s assuming the sprog will be a boy and, if it was possible to put his name down now for Eton, he would have. As it is, if it is a boy, Sholto will be doing so the day Caspian (not my choice, but I like it) is born. I, of course, am hoping for a girl and am already thinking up lots of delicious names for her. Theodora, Persephone and, with a nod to Crete, Ariadne being top of the list.
Returning to Ella and this month’s unlikeliest wedding of the year . . . Even though I think she’s making a ghastly mistake marrying Christos, I would still have liked to have been a bridesmaid (now I’m married, ‘matron of honour’, to be more correct), but because of the sprog it simply isn’t possible. (And anyway Ella made it sound very complicated.) Can’t get my head around the fact that you can be a bridesmaid/matron of honour if you’re not Greek Orthodox, but not a koumbara – who, apparently, is the person who really matters. As the koumbara is to be Nikoleta, I’m not sure I’d appreciate playing second fiddle to her – and don’t expect you will, either!
Sholto is in a state of cold, icy anger at the way the Austrians have embraced Hitler so wholeheartedly. Austria is now just another province of Germany. Can you believe it? What life must now be like for Austria’s Jews, I can’t imagine. Sholto says the Foreign Office is inundated with immigration applications. The latest obscenity is that German and Austrian children are no longer allowed to play or speak with Jewish children. If that doesn’t make people’s blood boil, nothing will. The sooner Herr Hitler is drummed into outer darkness, the better it will be for the world; and if it takes a war to get rid of him, then so be it, although I hate the thought of a war in which the charming Helmut Becke will be the enemy. Is much said on the dig about the war clouds hanging over Europe, or are you all in your own private little bubble on Crete?
Sombrely Kate put the letter down, reflecting that, totally immersed in excavation work, they were indeed living in their own private little bubble. It was the excitement of the palace and of the now-confirmed sacred cave that took up conversation at mealtimes, not politics. Or it had been, until Christos and Ella had announced they were going to marry.
She was taking a mid-morning break, sitting beneath a tented awning with what, on the dig, passed for a cup of coffee. Not far away from her Yanni, the dig’s self-appointed cook, was tending a pot of lamb stew over a fire of pungent-smelling juniper wood. The rest of the team had already had their mid-morning breaks and were all hard at work in different sections of the site.
The progress that had been achieved since the dig had begun again was phenomenal. Thanks to the extra workforce, in a score of deep pits and trenches the entire outline of the palace was now clearly visible. Although patchy in lots of places and built on a more modest scale than the other Minoan palaces, there were now identifiable remains of a central court, west court, a royal megaron, a small tripartite shrine and what had once been a three-columned portico. Down the east side of the central court a long line of what appeared to have been storerooms were, after three and a half thousand years, emerging into twentieth-century daylight.
Dimitri, Angelos, Pericles, Nico and Adonis were excavating a series of galleries abutting the west court. Something that was a feature of other palaces, and which had not yet been found, was a broad ceremonial staircase; and the new work team, under the direction of Helmut, were a little distance away, digging trial-pits in a likely area.
Kate watched them, her thoughts not on the dig, but on the difficult atmosphere that had existed on it, since Ella and Christos had announced they were a couple.
She and Ella had always enjoyed an easy-going camaraderie with the work team, but since Ella’s engagement to Christos, the team’s behaviour towards her had become awkward and strained.
Lewis, who liked a congenial atmosphere on his digs, had solved the problem by handing Ella responsibility for the most important artefacts, which, when found, were taken to a workroom at the Villa Ariadne where they could be kept safe, studied and the notes on them written up. Ella now undertook these tasks full-time, driving herself there and back daily in one of the dig’s small trucks; and although she usually had a lunch of sandwiches in a corner of the workroom, there were many days when she joined Eleni, Kostas and sometimes Nikoleta for a lunch of soup, salad and a hunk of Eleni’s home-made cheese.
That the Kourakis family were happy about Ella and Christos marrying was a source of great relief to Kate. Nikoleta, she knew, had reasons of her own for being happy about it, for Christos and Ella were setting a precedent for her and Lewis. Eleni and Kostas’s happiness had no ulterior motive. Quite simply, because of the winter months Ella had spent living in their home and because of their affection for her, she was, in their eyes, already one of the family.
Kate rose to her feet and began walking in the direction of the partially excavated storeroom trenches, enjoying the sight of mountains as far as the eye could see, certain that May had to be the most wonderful month of the year in Crete. The sun wasn’t yet too hot for comfort, and the island was a riot of wild flowers. Even high on the upper plateau it was hard to walk without crushing sweet-smelling thyme and sage underfoot. On the edges of the site were carpets of white, pink and purple anemones and, a special joy to Kate because of their rarity value, thick clusters of wild tulips, their petals the palest lilac, their hearts the deepest indigo. Whoever the chief occupant of the palace had been – and, like Lewis, Kate’s instinct was that it had been built for a priestess-queen – the person in question had lived amidst great beauty.
What she dearly wanted to discover was some inscription on pottery or stone that would solve the mystery of the palace’s single royal suite of rooms and confirm the sex of whoever it was who had occupied them.
Yesterday, in one of the storerooms in which excavation had only just begun, the rims of three great stone jars had begun appearing and, with the help of one of the new team members, she was in the middle of exposing them fully. When that was done she would carefully remove the earth still clinging to them and it was then that inscriptions, if there were any, would be revealed.
As she bypassed what had been uncovered of the stone-paved central court, she saw Lewis striding purposefully towards her from the opposite direction. Her stomach muscles tightened as they always did when the two of them were in an unexpected one-to-one situation.
‘I’ve just been looking at the pithoi you’re unearthing,’ he said, referring to the stone jars and coming to a halt in front of her. ‘They’ll help confirm that the area was used for storing produce – in this case, probably oil and wine.’
‘Yes.’ She wondered what was going to come next. Lewis rarely commented on the obvious. She didn’t have to wonder for long.
His shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows and he was wearing the kind of blue jeans American cowboys wore.
‘I want to talk to you at length about the dig and what is concerning me.’
‘Fine.’ She waited expectantly.
‘Not here and now. It’s the kind of conversation best done over dinner. If you’ve no objections, I’ll pick you up at the cafeneion at seven. Will one of the restaurants around the harbour suit?’
‘In Heraklion? Yes. Fine.’
He gave her a nod, hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and strode off.
It took her several seconds to steady her breathing. In the almost two years they had worked together, Lewis had never made such a suggestion before. Discussions to do with the progress of the dig were either solely between him and Helmut, or were group discussions in which they all – Lewis, Helmut, Christos, Ella and Kate herself – took part. As she climbed down the earth steps of the trench, she wondered if perhaps the mysterious sponsors of the dig had run out of money; if the dig was perhaps going to be prematurely t
erminated. Was Lewis going to fire her, in one of the harbour’s candlelit restaurants?
That evening, on the drive into Heraklion, he said very little. He asked Kate about the four-foot-high jars and shared her disappointment that, now they were totally uncovered, there was no sign of inscriptions on them. ‘It was perhaps too much to hope for’ was all he said as he drove through Archanes, scattering hens right and left.
She didn’t fill the ensuing silence with chatter. If he didn’t wish to talk, then it was all right by her. She wasn’t going to allow him to make her feel uncomfortable. Neither did she want to give the impression that she thought there was a social aspect to their evening. They may have been going out for a meal together, but she hadn’t dressed as if they were out on a date. She was wearing a pleated skirt that could have passed for a work skirt, a sweater and cardigan, as it could be cool around the harbour in the evenings, and low-heeled sandals. She had put on pearl earrings, but then, deciding they made it look as if she was making too much of an effort, had taken them off again.
He parked in one of the harbour’s side streets and led the way into a restaurant she hadn’t been in before. Immediately they stepped over the threshold, she regretted not having worn the earrings. She had been expecting that they would eat somewhere casual, but the restaurant he took her into was far from casual. It oozed formality and expense.
When they were seated he said, ‘Would you like something to drink, before we order?’
‘I don’t know.’ She was thrown off-balance by the unexpectedness of the white napery and heavy silverware. ‘Perhaps a raki.’
He ordered two rakis and asked for the menu. Then he said, ‘What I’m going to say this evening must remain between the two of us, Kate. I don’t want you to talk about it to anyone, not even Ella.’
Her sense of foreboding escalated.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 21