Ella hadn’t been able to get her head around it, either, but then aristocratic titles had never been her forte.
Now she slid the icing-sugared cake onto a pretty dish and looked across to where a photograph of Christos hung on the wall, where she could always see it. She had taken the photograph when they had been together on the Little Palace dig. He was leaning on a spade, wearing his habitual black shirt, breeches, waistcoat and cummerbund, his thick black curls falling chaotically low over his forehead.
From the photograph, his dark eyes, full of mischievous high spirits, met hers and love welled up inside her in an overwhelming torrent. Over the last few years Adonis had asked her several times if she would marry him, and every time he had asked, Ella’s answer had been the same: that she wasn’t ready to marry again; that although she was a widow, she felt herself to be a married widow.
‘Then I will wait,’ he had said each time. ‘In the Bible, Jacob had to wait seven years before he could marry Rachel. Maybe, agápi mou, when you have been seven years a widow, you will no longer feel a married one and will be ready to marry me?’
The house, which would so soon be full of the friends and family who would walk with her to the church for the memorial service, was very still and quiet. Not moving, Ella thought about the quietness that had permeated the site of the Little Palace all through the years since work on it had ended. Soon it would be a hive of activity again, for under Lewis’s direction work on the site was to begin within days – and when it did, they would no longer be referring to the site as the Little Palace, but as the Dower House.
‘For that is what it is,’ she had said to Lewis within hours of his arrival. ‘Where else would a priestess-queen go, when widowed?”
His mouth had tugged into a smile. ‘It’s a nice theory, Ella,’ he’d said gently, ‘but nothing we know about the Minoans indicates a society sophisticated enough to be housing a widowed priestess-queen in the equivalent of a medieval dower house.’
It had been the response she had expected and she had set her jaw stubbornly and said, ‘We know so little about Minoan society, Lewis, that anything is possible. And once the idea had occurred to me, I set about trying to find something amongst the artefacts we’ve found at the site and the Sacred Cave, to back it up.’
He’d quirked an eyebrow. ‘And did you?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she’d said, like a cat with the cream. ‘The museum authorities gave me full access to all the finds from the Kalamata dig and, amongst those common to all sacred caves, there was a type of offering I’ve been unable to trace amongst any other collection.’
‘And?’ he’d said.
‘And we didn’t take any notice of it, probably because we thought it all of a piece with other small clay figurines, purposely missing a body part to indicate where the person making the offering was injured, and where he, or she, needed supernatural help in order to be healed.’
Lewis had frowned and she’d known he was thinking back to the Sacred Cave dig. It hadn’t been carried out under his direction, for he had been far too involved with the Little Palace dig. Helmut had overseen the Sacred Cave site, but before any finds from it had been packed and taken into storage for later, more detailed study, he – Lewis – had examined them carefully. Or at least he’d thought he had.
He’d said slowly, ‘Votive clay figures missing body parts are so commonplace a find in a sacred cave that I might well have not examined all of them with the care I should have and, for the same reason, Helmut may well have thought my doing so unnecessary. So tell me what it is, among our Sacred Cave artefacts, that you’ve been unable to trace in other collections of cave findings.’
‘This,’ she’d said, laying a photograph in front of him.
It was a photograph of a clay figurine, but whereas all the other clay figurines had been no more than asexual stick-figures with a hand, foot, leg or arm intentionally missing, the figurine in the photograph was quite clearly of a woman. The outline of an open-bodiced, ankle-length gown had been etched into the clay. Her arms were raised in an act of supplication, her breasts were bare, and directly beneath the fullness of her left breast her body was pierced by a long, vicious-looking metal pin.
‘The figurine is of a widowed priestess-queen,’ Ella had said, with quiet confidence. ‘The pin through her heart is an arrow indicating the way grief has pierced and broken it. I know, because I know how grief feels.’
He hadn’t argued with her. Instead, with barely controlled excitement in his voice, he’d said, ‘You could be right, Ella, and if you are . . .’
He hadn’t finished his sentence, because he’d had no need to. If she was right, it would open up fresh thought as to the way Minoan society had functioned, but for that to happen there had to be other finds to back up her theory. As their eyes held, both had known what the other was thinking. It was that when they again began excavating on the Little Palace and Sacred Cave sites, their sense of hope and expectation would be ratcheted to almost unbearable levels.
Her house door was open and the sound of people turning into her cobbled street brought Ella back to the present.
Ever since Christos’s death there had been a void in her heart: an aching emptiness she had been certain nothing would ever fill. Now, suddenly and wonderingly, she knew she was on the brink of change; that although she had never intended for Christos’s memorial service to bring closure, it was about to do so. Unlike the priestess-queen, the rest of her life was not going to be defined by her grievous loss. Nothing would ever remove Christos from the memory of her heart, but she was ready to love again.
With an aged Tinker at her heels, she went to the doorway in order to greet the friends and family who were about to accompany her to church.
As it was traditional for women to wear black at Greek Orthodox memorial services, Daphne was wearing a black sheath-dress topped by a tiny fitted black jacket. A wide-brimmed black hat covered her hair, and her black court shoes were, as always, perilously high-heeled. It was a look that wouldn’t have attracted a second glance in Bond Street or the Champs-Elysées, but it looked positively bizarre in a small Cretan hilltop town, especially as she was walking arm-in-arm with Eleni, who was a foot shorter than she was and whose black dress and shawl were so shapeless it was hard to know where one left off and the other began.
Kostas said, ‘I have taken the koliva to the church, Ella. Eleni was up all night making it, and her tears have watered it. Every spoonful have her tears watered.’
Koliva was a dish with great ritual significance and it was obligatory at Greek Orthodox funeral and memorial services. Made from boiled wheat, flour, raisins, cinnamon, sugar, walnuts, almonds and pomegranate seeds, it was a dish Eleni had insisted on making and, as she was doing so for the memorial service of her son, Ella could well believe that Eleni had shed some tears while making it. That her tears had watered every spoonful was, she hoped, typical Cretan male exaggeration.
‘Remind me later that, in a letter I’ve just received from Nathaniel, there was a separate note addressed to you,’ Lewis said to Ella as, knowing the drill when it came to following a widow to church, he made no attempt to enter the house.
‘If you’re going to change into your best black, Ella, it’s time you did so,’ Kate said. ‘I know Cretans aren’t sticklers for time-keeping, but even so, we should by now be en route to the church.’
Ella hesitated, watching as Pericles and Apollonia turned into the street accompanied by Adonis. The three of them were Alice Ariadne’s favourite people and she squeezed past Ella’s legs, hurtling down over the cobbles to greet them.
‘I’m serious about the time, Ella.’ Kate glanced anxiously at her watch.
Ella ignored her, waiting for the moment she knew would come; the moment when Adonis would lift a squealing Alice Ariadne up onto his shoulders and, with her hands clutching at his hair, would begin carrying her the rest of the way to the house.
When he’d done so, she turned and, smiling, went insid
e to change her dress and pin her waist-length braid of hair into a heavy circlet on top of her head. Then, covering her hair with a black lace scarf, she blew a kiss to Christos’s photograph and stepped into the street where, together with Kostas, Eleni and Georgio, she led Kate, Lewis, Daphne, Dimitri and Aminta and their children, Angelos and Rhea and their children, Pericles, Apollonia, Yanni, Nico, Adonis, Andre and Agata to the little white-walled church in the town square.
The service was very different from Kate and Daphne’s experience of memorial services in England. During it, everyone held white flickering candles as, amid clouds of heavy incense, psalms, litanies and prayers were said and hymns sung. The koliva Eleni had made was in full view on a table that also held a crucifix and candelabra.
‘Afterwards,’ Pericles whispered to Kate, ‘it will be taken to the refectory and we will all be given a small pot of it. The wheat in it symbolizes the circle of death and rebirth.’
It was two hours before Ella, Kostas, Eleni and Georgio led everyone back to the little house with a cypress tree in its courtyard for a traditional glendi.
By late afternoon the glendi was as noisy and as riotous as a wedding-party glendi. ‘Which is,’ Ella said to Kate as, led by Lewis and Georgio, the entire team began a foot-stamping maleviziotis, ‘just as Christos would have wanted it. However, I’m ready for a little reflective peace and quiet. I’d like for you, me and Daphne to have a little time on our own. And I’d like us to have it in the Palace of Minos.’
Whenever the three of them had been together, it had always been Kate who had driven the Sally and she drove it now, bowling down the hill, across the valley floor and up the narrow road that led to Knossos.
The light was smoking to dusk as they arrived and, apart from rabbits enjoying the last light of the day, the three-thousand year-old ruins of what had once been the mightiest palace in the western hemisphere were deserted.
They walked past the bust of Sir Arthur and the line of jacaranda trees that led across the paved west entrance court, instinctively making their way to the South Propylaeum, where the gigantic gypsum Horns of Consecration rose spectacularly against the flushed early-evening sky.
The plinth that fronted the horns was the same plinth Ella had once sat on with Sam, when they had so unexpectedly met up while the battle for the island had been raging; and it was where, on a very special afternoon before the war, Helmut had once take a photograph of Daphne.
She said now, sitting down on the plinth and hugging her knees, ‘This palace has played such a large part in all our lives, hasn’t it? Without it, and without Kit being an archaeologist on the nearby tomb site, you would never have come to Crete, Kate. You would never have met Lewis and become a member of his team and, if you hadn’t done so, Ella would never have come out to Crete to join you on the Kalamata Little Palace dig and would never have met and fallen in love with Christos – and it would never have become so much a part of my life, because although Sholto was posted here as a vice-consul, I wouldn’t have come out here and joined him, if it hadn’t been that you were both already here.’
‘And now that we are all here again together, the way we once saw our future is finally about to happen.’ The satisfaction in Ella’s voice was immense.
Kate quirked a mystified eyebrow and Ella said, ‘When the Little Palace dig starts again, Daphne is going to be a member of the team. It’s what we always dreamed of, isn’t it? The three of us working together – although, when we dreamed of it, we could never have imagined we would be working on a dig of such great importance.’
The sky had now spangled into dusk, and from somewhere close by an owl hooted.
Kate said, ‘I think it’s time you read the note Nathaniel sent to you, care of Lewis, Ella. That is, if you’ve got it on you.’
‘Yes, I have. I didn’t want to read it amid all the noise of the glendi.’ She took it out of her jacket pocket. ‘It won’t be bad news, because if it had been, Lewis would have forewarned me.’
‘No,’ Kate said, betraying that she already knew what the news was. ‘It isn’t bad news.’
Daphne looked across at her with raised eyebrows.
Kate shot her a wide grin and waited for Ella’s stunned reaction.
It came barely a heartbeat later.
‘Oh!’ she gasped, ‘Oh, how wonderful! How absolutely unbelievable!’ The note dropped to her lap as she pressed both hands against her cheeks in stunned disbelief. ‘Nathaniel has had correspondence with the director of the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, and the director has agreed that from now on there will be a card on the cabinet of the necklace that Christos found, naming Christos as the finder and the year in which he found it. Oh, isn’t that amazing of Nathaniel – and isn’t it incredible that I should get the news today, of all days?’
Tears of gratitude and joy streamed down her cheeks.
‘We should have brought champagne,’ Daphne said, ‘because news that deserves champagne doesn’t end with yours, Ella.’
She was seated between Kate and Ella and, as they both swivelled to look at her, she said, her face radiant, ‘I received a letter the week before I left London. Someone wants to see me. It means my being away for a week or two, but when I return I’ll not only be in the throes of a scorching grand passion, I’ll also be bringing a highly qualified team member back with me.’
Kate’s eyes widened.
Ella’s jaw dropped.
Kate said, hardly able to believe it, ‘You’re going to Switzerland?’
Ella said, ‘And bringing Helmut back with you?’
‘Yes,’ Daphne said, ‘and if that news doesn’t deserve champagne, then I don’t know what does!’
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks are due to my wonderful publisher, Wayne Brookes, and to my always supportive editor, Catherine Richards. Thanks are also due to the rest of the formidable Pan Macmillan team, especially to copy editor Mandy Greenfield, editorial manager Kate Tolley and proofreader Eugenie Woodhouse. At Curtis Brown I owe thanks to my agent, Sheila Crowley, who has always been there when needed, and to Abbie Greaves. Other people I am indebted to are Janet Kidd, Polly Pemberton, Philippa Stamatakis and Jeffrey Vernes. Last, but by no means least, I could have had no better companion when trekking the remoter parts of Crete’s mountainous hinterland than my husband, Mike.
Select Bibliography
Antony Beevor, Crete: The Battle and the Resistance
Alan Clark, The Fall of Crete
Artemis Cooper, Cairo in the War: 1939–45
Murray Elliott, Vasili: The Lion of Crete
Joan Evans, Time and Chance
Xan Fielding, Hide & Seek
Richard G. Geldard, The Traveller’s Key to Ancient Greece
J. W. Graham, The Palaces of Crete
Anna Michailidou, Knossos: A Complete Guide to the Palace of Minos
Dilys Powell, An Affair of the Heart
Dilys Powell, The Villa Ariadne
George Psychoundakis, The Cretan Runner
Beneath the Cypress Tree
Margaret Pemberton is the bestselling author of over thirty novels in many different genres, some of which are contemporary in setting and some historical.
She has served as Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and has three times served as a committee member of the Crime Writers’ Association. Born in Bradford, she is married to a Londoner, has five children and two dogs, and lives in Whitstable, Kent. Apart from writing, her passions are tango, travel, English history and the English countryside.
Also by Margaret Pemberton
Rendezvous with Danger The Mystery of Saligo Bay
Vengeance in the Sun The Guilty Secret
Tapestry of Fear
African Enchantment Flight to Verechenko
A Many-Splendoured Thing Moonflower Madness
Forget-Me-Not Bride Party in Peking
Devil’s Palace Lion of Languedoc
The Far Morning Forever
Yorkshire
Rose The Flower Garden
Silver Shadows, Golden Dreams Never Leave Me
A Multitude of Sins White Christmas in Saigon
An Embarrassment of Riches Zadruga
The Four of Us The Londoners
Magnolia Square Coronation Summer
A Season of Secrets
Writing as Rebecca Dean
Enemies of the Heart Palace Circle
The Golden Prince Wallis
First published 2017 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2017 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-1-4472-4869-9
Copyright © Margaret Pemberton 2017
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