A Most Extraordinary Pursuit

by Juliana Gray

  The desk had been bequeathed to me by my father, together with nearly all of his material possessions. (A naturalist cousin had received his extensive collection of insects, neatly classified and pinned at perfect intervals in a series of glass cases, of which I had a horror: not because they were insects, but because they were dead. I’m told the cousin treasures them still, however.) I believe Papa had had the article specially made for himself, upon his appointment to the post of personal secretary to the Duke of Olympia, around the time of his marriage to my mother, and I have never seen its equal for both usefulness and beauty. There are clever drawers for paper and pens and ink and everything one could wish, and the inner compartment locks in such a way that only the nimblest of lock-pickers could find his way in.

  Perhaps, at this point, I should make clear that my father—dearer to me than any living human being—was not my father in the biological sense. He married my mother when I was just past my third birthday, and lavished me from the beginning with such a comforting excess of paternal care that I have never regarded him as a stepfather, or as anything other than my true and devoted parent. When Mama died a few years later, he took me under the shelter of his arm and promised to serve me as both father and mother, and he kept his word faithfully until the moment of his death. Every summer, during the school holidays, he would take me on what he called a journey of discovery: a week in which we might explore the Peaks or the Lakes, the fields of Bosworth or the Outer Hebrides, without a soul for company except each other. As we tramped across the damp meadows and pebbled sun-warmed beaches, discussing history and politics and such books as we had mutually read, I thought how lucky I was to have him entirely and intimately to myself at last, without any other claims on his time and attention.

  But always he would bring his beautiful wooden desk and a stack of papers, and as the train clattered along an elderly branch line, or the wind howled softly outside the window of our place of lodging, he would place his spectacles on the bridge of his prominent nose, lift the desk onto his lap, and busy himself in the transcription of letters and the composition of memoranda. I remember the gentle scratch of his pen and the scent of ink and contentment as I sat beside him, immersed in a novel, and even now, as I hold that same desk in place on my own adult lap, I can smell the good British air, the greenness of eternal summer, and it seems as if my father still sits beside me.

  Sometimes, in fact, the illusion is so acute that his image actually appears there and speaks to me, interrupting me in my work.

  “What a curious coincidence,” he said, as I sat with roiling stomach on my berth in the Isolde. “I was not a particularly good sailor, either.”

  I didn’t look up. “Lord Silverton said the weather in the Bay of Biscay was particularly severe.”

  “But the sea is now calm, if a little overcast. Though I suppose it’s a common enough affliction, seasickness. I should try not to work, if I were you.”

  “I’m not working, really. Only looking over these papers the duchess has given me. What a wonder, that she could ready all these documents in so little time: passport, letters of credit, and so on.”

  “She is the Duchess of Olympia, after all.”

  “Yes.”

  I waited for him to go away, for the illusion to dissolve—sometimes it did—and when he did not, breathing quietly instead atop the chair next to the porthole, studying me in that scientific way of his, I said, lifting my magnifying glass, “She has also given me a set of photographs, which seem to have been taken in situ by Mr. Haywood last year, according to her note.”

  “Ah. The frescoes from Knossos?”

  “Are they from Knossos?”

  “So one must suppose.”

  I peered through the magnifying glass. “One of the figures appears to be holding a modern Brownie camera, manufactured no earlier than 1901 by the Eastman Kodak Company of the United States of America.”

  “But that would be impossible, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course. It must be something else.” I paused. “But the resemblance is uncanny. The box, the round hole of the lens, the leather strap for one’s fingers. Exactly like the one I purchased last year, which lies, unfortunately, in my bedroom in London.”

  “But this is only a fresco, and an ancient one at that.”

  “True. It might represent any number of objects. I am hardly an expert on the subject of ancient Greece.” I set down the glass and the photographs. “Did you ever meet Maximilian Haywood?”

  “I did. A fine man, a brilliant mind, though not particularly sociable. He has a certain quality of stubbornness, which serves him well in his studies and his archeological expeditions, and less well at other times. I daresay he’ll make an excellent duke, if he can reconcile himself to the idea.” He paused and stroked his thumb along the crease of his gray trousers. “I see you have met Lord Silverton.”

  I made a noise of exasperation. “The fool. I wonder that so clever and discerning a woman as the duchess tolerates him at all.”

  “Perhaps he isn’t such a fool as you imagine.”

  “Obviously you never had the pleasure of speaking with him.”

  My father took his time to answer, as he often did. I pinched the smooth enamel of the pen between my thumb and forefinger and listened to the distant grind of the engines. Several decks away, three men shoveled unceasing coal into the fireboxes that powered those engines, and six more men waited in shifts to relieve them. Or so the captain had told me over breakfast this morning, perhaps to distract me from the pitch of my stomach. I stared at the passport before me—name, TRUELOVE, EMMELINE ROSE; date of birth, 18 OCTOBER 1880; place of birth, ENGLAND—and imagined those three men now, sinuous and perspiring and unknown beside the inferno below. Laboring for my good speed. “You think I judge him unfairly,” I said at last.

  “I think that we often judge harshly what we fear most.”

  I snapped, “Or perhaps I’m right, and he’s only a fool, after all.”

  “A fool he may be, but remember that the duchess considers him a friend. So might you, perhaps, if you allowed yourself.”

  “I have no wish to become Lord Silverton’s friend.”

  “Why not? It’s just as easy to be his friend as not, and our life on this earth is too short and uncertain not to take friendship when it’s offered.”

  “He hasn’t offered me his friendship, not as such. I was thrust upon him, or he upon me. Either way, he’s hardly the sort of man a decent woman should want as a friend. He speaks too freely, lives too freely—”

  “My dear Emmeline. When did you become such a rigid moral character?”

  When I describe my father’s actions and expressions, I must emphasize that I never actually looked at his face, not directly. Not that I was afraid of the illusion itself, which I knew could not harm me; I think, instead, I was afraid that it might disappear if I turned to address him face-to-face, and in those days, even an illusion of my father—a hallucination, as I believe the scientists call them—was better than no father at all. My impressions of him inhabited the periphery of my vision, not quite distinct, and relied as much upon memory and instinct as sight itself. You might say that the illusion itself was an illusion.

  I said, into my papers, “You were the one who taught me to do what is right, Papa.”

  He didn’t answer, and when I stole another sidelong glance at the chair beneath the porthole, he had vanished, leaving me alone to wonder what I had done wrong.

  There were four young women and three young men on the dais in the center of the hall, and all were dazzling to the eye, richly clothed and anointed in oil, but the Hero shone out amongst them all. He stood as tall as a warhorse, bearing the shoulders of a great ox, and his fair hair was lustrous in the glow of the torches. He refused the wine that the Lady placed before him, and ate only meat and vegetables and water, and when he spoke the men around him grew quiet
, for he had the voice of a king.

  The Lady knew that concubines were sent to the tributes’ chambers in the evening for the pleasure of the male youths, so when the feast concluded she donned the veils of the slave women and knocked upon the door that belonged to the Hero . . .

  THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)

  Five

  The main saloon of the Isolde took up the entire width of the ship along a fifty-foot section of her main and upper decks, topped by a brilliant stained glass dome that was presently crackling with rain, though not loudly enough to drown out the voice of Caruso from the gramophone inhabiting a substantial cabinet on the port side.

  “What the devil’s that?” said Lord Silverton, pausing in the doorway.

  “It is Donizetti.”

  “Damned mournful bloke. Haven’t we got anything a bit more cheerful? Pirates of Penzance, now that’s a jolly farce. Or else—whatsit—that charming little jig a year or two back—Merrie England. Marvelous stuff.”

  I rose to a sitting position. “No.”

  Silverton strolled to the gramophone and propped his long body against the cabinet. “Still a bit green about the gills, are we?”

  “Touch that needle at your peril, sir.”

  He held up his hands and waited politely for the end of the aria, at which point he raised the arm of the gramophone with a single finger and set it aside, in the same manner he might dispose of a soiled napkin. “Just how the devil do you know what he’s caterwauling about? Or does it matter?”

  “Of course it matters. Nemorino has joined the army, and he’s just seen a tear roll down the cheek of the girl he has always hopelessly loved, so perhaps she cares for him, too, except now it’s too late—”

  “Oh, I see. The same sentimental rubbish as you get in the music hall, except it’s all right because it’s sung in Italian.”

  I folded my arms. “Have you come for any particular purpose, or only to malign a form of art of which you are entirely ignorant?”

  “Actually, I thought we might have a little chat about old Max.”

  “The Duke of Olympia, do you mean?”

  “Do you know, I can’t quite bring myself to call him that. The last time I saw Max, he was neck-deep in some damned filthy hole in the ground in Mesopotamia, swearing in five different languages.”

  I shrugged. “I’ve never met him at all.”

  “Never? How extraordinary. And now here you are, steaming across the Med to his rescue, in his own private yacht, eating his porridge and listening to his phonograph recordings, except he doesn’t know he owns any of it yet.” Silverton levered himself away from the cabinet and collapsed crosswise into an armchair, allowing himself a splendid vantage of the rain-dashed dome. “The captain informs me we’ll hurtle into the Aegean around daybreak, so it’s now or never, so to speak.”

  “What’s now or never?”

  “Why, sorting out how we go about this business of tracking down the needle that is Max inside the haystack that is the bloody Mediterranean Sea.”

  “I thought he was in Crete.”

  “Ha! You don’t know Max.” He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small white ball, which he flung into the air and caught with the other hand, before flinging it up again to be caught in the first hand. “If he hears some rumor about a butterfly’s wings touching a Rosetta stone in Alexandria, he’s off on the next tide, like the cat who . . . who . . .” The ball paused in his hand.

  “Ate the canary?”

  “No, no.”

  “Walked by himself?”

  “No, dash it. Something to do with yarn.” He shook his head and sent the ball back into the air. “Well, it’s gone now. But you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t believe I do. In any case, the Rosetta stone is now safe inside the sturdy walls of the British Museum, thank goodness, and— What is that?”

  “This?” He held up the ball. “It’s a cricket ball, of course.”

  “But why on earth are you flinging it about like that?”

  “For sport, Truelove.” He tapped his wide golden forehead with the ball. “I find it greases the old gears when the mechanism’s got stuck. Perhaps you ought to try it. You look as if you could use a bit of mental focus, at the moment. All pink about the cheeks and green about the gills. Rather ghastly, in a charming sort of way. Think, now. Why might upstanding Max leave his Cretan post in the middle of winter, without leaving word to his nearest and dearest?”

  “Has he really left it? We only know for certain that he’s not replied to anyone’s messages. Perhaps he’s been busy. It’s not impossible that he hasn’t even received these messages to begin with.”

  “There is the matter of the Greek official, to whom he’s delinquent in sending his regular reports.”

  “He may have his own reasons for that.”

  Smack went the cricket ball into Silverton’s left palm. “By George, if you’re not swimming in optimism this afternoon. Determined not to fear the worst, are you?”

  “I see no reason to borrow trouble. There’s usually a simple explanation for these conundrums.”

  “Conundrum.” Smack. “Now there’s a splendid word. I do like a splendid word now and again. Makes one feel as if words actually matter. So I suppose the first person we should interview is this Greek chap who’s got his fustanella up around his ears about those missing reports. He’ll be as crooked as a mountain path, of course—your petty Mediterranean officials always are—and probably expect a handsome gratuity in exchange for any useful information, unless we can contrive, between the two of us, to make him drunk enough to empty his brain for free.”

  “Certainly not,” I said indignantly.

  He tilted his head in my direction and applied his gaze first to my face, and then my bosom. The ball rolled nimbly around his right palm. “There are other ways, of course. But I daresay you’d object to those, too.”

  I swung my feet to the floor and rose from the sofa. “If you’re trying to discompose me, it won’t work.”

  “Perish the thought.”

  He watched me as I walked across the length of Persian rug to the gramophone cabinet. Lord Silverton had the kind of gaze you could feel between the blades of your shoulders, and down your spine to the back of your legs: not keen or piercing or tingling, but simply heavy. Heavy and quite, quite blue. I turned the crank briskly and lifted the needle.

  “If you’re right about the corruption, there is always the possibility that these reports from Mr. Haywood—the former Mr. Haywood—were not reports at all, but simply payments,” I said. “I imagine his explorations in Crete require a certain amount of goodwill from the Greek authorities.”

  Smack. “The thought had crossed my mind, I will admit.”

  “Naturally the official would be upset if the payments ceased.”

  “Incensed, one imagines. Though not so much that he’s willing to risk his own comfort to gambol off in search of the missing Max himself.”

  The needle scratched, the music began. I turned to face Lord Silverton, leaning my body protectively against the cabinet, hands braced against the edge. He was now twirling the cricket ball at the end of one finger. His head tilted to one side, catching an unnecessary radiance from the electric lamp nearby, and I realized that the unsteadiness in my stomach had quite disappeared.

  “Nor would he send any men from his own department to investigate,” I said, “for fear of arousing suspicion, and perhaps jealousy for his additional income.”

  A slow smile began at one corner of Lord Silverton’s mouth and spread to the other end. He enclosed the cricket ball in the middle of his hand and extended his index finger, waggle waggle. “Why, Truelove. What a deliciously devious mind you’re hiding behind that mask of oppressive piety.”

  “I am only doing my job, Lord Silverton.”

  “A job for which
you’re singularly suited, I think. Well done, the duchess. I only hope Max keeps you on, once we find him and deliver the awful news.”

  Caruso sang: O dolci baci, o languide carezze.

  “Now, there he goes again,” said Silverton. “What’s the poor fellow lamenting this time?”

  “You would neither understand nor appreciate his dilemma.”

  “Try me. I once wept at the Willow Song, though—to be fair—I had just lost a faithful old hound at the Boxing Day meet at Beaulieu the day before. Awfully broken up.”

  I pushed myself away from the cabinet and wandered to a painting on the opposite wall, depicting the cutting out of the Hermione. On the one side, the Porto Cavallo guns made furious orange-pink clouds against the harbor walls; on the other, the silver moon rode at peace in the night sky, casting a path along the agitated sea. In the middle, the frigate herself, young and triumphant.

  Sobbed Caruso: E muoio disperato . . . e muoio disperato . . .

  “He is to die by firing squad at dawn,” I said, “and he is remembering how marvelous it is to be alive.”

  No answer came from the armchair in the center of the saloon. The drum of rain intensified briefly, and then abated. Beneath my feet, the deck was steady and level but nonetheless alive with the grind of the engine, the surge of motion through the water. As if the soles of my shoes were vibrating.

  “Well, you’re wrong there, Truelove,” said Silverton. “I understand the poor fellow’s dilemma very well.”

  I turned in astonishment, but his lordship was already striding toward the door, moving his long legs with remarkable efficiency, having left behind the white cricket ball in the center of the paisley cushion.

  We put in to Piraeus at dawn the next day, under a sky that had turned a miraculous blue while we slept. Already the harbor teemed with fishing smacks and cutters and round-bellied sloops, a thousand sails pink and full in the rising sun.