A Most Extraordinary Pursuit

by Juliana Gray

  “Very churlish.”

  “And our merry King Edward, God save him, owes his rule to the kind intervention of Olympia’s own ancestors—mine, too, come to that—dragging old Dutch William and his wife across the North Sea to replace the Stuarts.”

  “Yes, but Mary was a Stuart by blood, and so was her husband, if I recall. They were both grandchildren of Charles the First.”

  “Oh, if you like. But you can’t jolly well explain away the Hanovers.”

  I laughed. “Yes, I can. The first George’s mother descended directly from James Stuart, as you must know well enough, if you paid any attention at all to your schoolmaster. Just because it’s through the female line doesn’t make the blood any thinner, you know. It’s the women who saved the succession for Britain.”

  Silverton turned around and leaned against the window frame, bringing his hands together atop the flat stomach of his waistcoat and twiddling his thumbs. As I said, the windows were shadowed at this hour, and the blue of his eyes had faded to a lazy gray behind their glass lenses, but the austere effect of this demi-illumination seemed to suit him, not that a man of his careless beauty needed any augmentation from the surrounding atmosphere. He smiled at me and said, “At least for the Church of England. No lack of Catholic heirs of the male line, after all.”

  “That isn’t the point. The point is that a king should have some sort of blood claim to the throne, or he’s not a king. You might as well dispense with all the mystery and the ritual and have a proper republic.”

  “Call a spade a spade, in other words.”

  “Hmm.”

  He went on twiddling his thumbs, gazing at me in such a way that I was compelled to gaze back, waiting for him to speak. The sensation was unsettling, the quarters too close. There was, I realized, something intimate about his wearing of the spectacles. They had humbled him, like an admission of guilt. A faint scent of pipe tobacco drifted from his tweeds. I touched the tender side of my face and said, “What’s the matter?”

  “I was just thinking I should have hit the damned fool a little harder,” he said quietly.

  I pushed away from the window and turned to face the room. “I don’t understand this. Who would ransack Mr. Haywood’s rooms? Why? He was a scholar, an archeologist. What were they looking for?”

  “Haven’t a clue, I’m afraid. But at least we have a start. We know what they weren’t looking for.”

  “What’s that?”

  He came up to stand next to me and gestured grandly around the room. “All this.”

  After we had made a general inventory of the flat—the bare and shabby parlor in which we stood, which seemed to serve as an office and storage room, and a tiny bedroom in the back, in which a purse containing a hundred and fifteen drachmae was left untouched—we gathered up the papers scattered on the floor and attempted to restore them to order. They were not varied. There were scholarly journals and handwritten notes—Max’s handwriting, Silverton said, and indeed it resembled the script I recalled from Mr. Haywood’s correspondence with my employer—accompanied by diagrams, almost always in Latin.

  “Why Latin?” I said. “Why not Greek or English?”

  “God knows. Max was always a bit of a show-off with his languages.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t speak of him in the past tense.”

  “Ah, yes.” He picked up a leather envelope and peered inside. “I nearly forgot we’ve got a succession crisis of our own. But I don’t mean to imply the worst. I’ve a lingering fondness for the old boy, though he used to ravage me at cards.”

  “He plays at cards? He doesn’t strike me as the frivolous sort.”

  “He did it for the mental gymnastics, you see, not for the companionship or, come to that, the filthy lucre in the center of the table.” Silverton set aside the envelope. “Are you saying I’m frivolous?”

  I rose to my feet and carried the last stack to the desk, which was now piled high with neat vertical columns of papers that had held no interest to our apparent burglar. Silverton tossed the envelope on a chair and went to the door.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just casting another beady eye on this lock.”

  “Why?”

  “Only to confirm my original impression, which is that there’s no sign of its having been picked. Or broken or replaced, for that matter.”

  “The landlord might have let him in.”

  Silverton walked to the window and peered down to the street below. “Hmm. Possible, but unlikely. Climbing through the window, I mean.” He straightened and turned to me. “As for the landlord, I already asked the fellow if anyone else had been to see the flat, and he said there hadn’t.”

  “Was he telling the truth?”

  “Damned if I know for certain. But I slipped him ten drachmae, so I should jolly well hope so.” He nodded at the desk. “Nothing but scholarly rubbish, eh? No business matters?”

  “No, nothing.” I paused. “Although I’d have thought . . .”

  “What?”

  “Well, Mr. Haywood used to send his correspondence from here. From Athens, I mean, so I suppose he would have been staying in this flat. Not his personal letters—he sent those from wherever he was—but the official reports he sent back every quarter. And the boxes, of course.”

  Silverton’s eyebrows lifted high above his spectacles, like the hair of a hound when it scents a fox. “His boxes, eh? You mean the loot he sent home to Olympia?”

  “Yes, he used to send us crates every quarter, along with the reports. Olympia liked to be kept apprised of what he’d found. He was acutely interested in the progress of Mr. Haywood’s expeditions, especially when he came to Crete.”

  “Yes, I imagine so.”

  “Because of the institute, you see. The artifacts he was sending back for the institute.”

  “Exactly. The institute. But do you mean to say he sent them all from here? He would return to Athens every quarter day on the dot, box them up, write up his report, and chuck the whole lot in the post?”

  “Actually, he sent them by special courier.”

  “By special courier! I see. A singular fact that you, as His Grace’s personal secretary, would be in the best position to know.” Lord Silverton cast his gaze about the room. “I don’t suppose you’d happen to have his name? The courier, I mean?”

  “Why, no.”

  “Was he English or Greek?”

  “Greek, I believe. I never met him. He simply left the shipment with the butler in London and went on his way.”

  “There’s a chap. And this last shipment arrived at Christmas, am I correct?”

  “Yes. Just before his last letter.” I frowned. “You don’t think the intruder was looking for the artifacts, do you?”

  “I think it’s very likely.”

  “Why is that?”

  Silverton wandered to the cabinet on the opposite wall and opened one door. “Because, Truelove. Unless I’m mistaken, there’s no sign of any of his old rubbish here, nor was the intruder troubled to make off with the small fortune in the top drawer of our missing heir’s bureau. And that leaves us with two possibilities.”

  I leaned back against the desk and frowned at the patch of blue sky across the room. “Either he sent them all to England at Christmas . . .”

  “Or else the burglar was good enough to save him the trouble.”

  As a consequence of our activities at Mr. Haywood’s flat, we were eleven minutes late for our meeting with Mr. Livas at the Ministry of Antiquities, but Lord Silverton assured me the man wouldn’t take offense.

  “These Mediterranean chaps have it all right side up,” he said. “They’re not troubled about the tyrant clock the way we English are.”

  “A sign of spiritual decay.”

  “Or the opposite.” He peered out the window of the motorcar. “There’s the Par
thenon, if you’re interested.”

  “Oh!” I lurched over his lordship’s lap and pressed my nose against the dusty glass. “Oh, it’s more beautiful than I dreamt!”

  “Surely you’ve seen photographs.”

  “But it doesn’t compare. My God, the living Parthenon. Look at the endless columns. How magisterial she sits, there on the hill.”

  He picked me up and set me back in my seat. “Not actually living, you understand, at least by the standards of most of Earth’s creatures. And she could bear a spot of cleaning and repair.”

  “Don’t you dare be jaded about the Parthenon.”

  His lordship leaned back against the corner of his seat and regarded me in the beam of winter afternoon that came through the window, as we waited for the street to clear before us. (Athens, I observed, was not a model of organization as regards traffic.) The spectacles were gone now, replaced carefully in his waistcoat pocket the instant we left the privacy of Mr. Haywood’s flat. “Perish the thought. Do you know, Truelove, I can’t quite seem to make you out. You’re so frightfully brusque and practical, until one turns the corner of a Greek street, or plays a bit of Italian music, and without warning you’re a romantic fool.”

  The motor thrust forward again, while the driver stuck his entire torso out the window and hurled reckless invective at a man pushing a cart piled high with dung. I placed my handkerchief over my nose. The Parthenon sped past Silverton’s golden head and disappeared behind us.

  “There’s nothing contradictory about it. I simply appreciate beauty, Lord Silverton.”

  “You don’t appreciate my beauty,” he said.

  “Why should I? You worship it well enough without my help.”

  “Oh! Well played, Truelove. The point is yours.”

  Nicodemus released a burst of noise from the automobile’s horn and swerved to the curb, nearly oversetting a carthorse and its indignant driver. We roared to a dizzying halt outside a smart new building, and the driver blew the horn again, scattering another dozen astonished souls from the adjacent sidewalk.

  Satisfied, Nicodemus popped out of his seat, tassel swinging jauntily, and came around to open the passenger door.

  The building reeked simultaneously of newness and decay, or perhaps that was only the mildew growing in tiny dark spots in the corners of the ceiling. Hastily built structures, I am told, are subject to this complaint, especially in such climes where the summer heat reaches oppressive heights.

  “Grand but cheap,” I whispered to Silverton, as we followed a clerk down a red-carpeted corridor lined with doors.

  “What’s that?”

  I pointed to the plasterwork, which was crumbling in patches.

  His lordship nodded. “Rather like the newer London suburbs.”

  The clerk made an abrupt right turn and disappeared through a doorway. I darted through after him and found myself inside a large square white-walled office, upholstered in patriotic blue and white, where a compact man was rising from a desk and preparing to greet us. The clerk whispered in his ear and stood back.

  “Good afternoon,” I said. “I apologize for our late arrival, Mr. Livas, but—”

  The man frowned and turned to the clerk, asking a question in rapid Greek.

  “Dear me,” said his lordship. His hand touched the small of my back.

  The official turned back to us, cleared his throat, and spoke in smooth accented English. “I am afraid, sir and madam, that there has been some terrible mistake. I regret very much to say that my colleague Mr. Livas departed this mortal realm unexpectedly a fortnight ago, God rest his soul.”

  He crossed himself. I pressed my hand against my stomach.

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” said Lord Silverton.

  The Lady stared in amazement at the Hero’s bowed head before her. ‘My lady, you have been sent by the gods,’ he said, ‘for I am the son of the King of Athens, and I have taken the place of one of the tributes in order to defeat this yearly summons upon my country, which feeds the appetites of the King’s beast-made son.’

  ‘Then rise, Hero,’ she said, ‘and I will tell you what you must do to save yourself and your people. But before you agree, be warned that I ask a boon in return, which you may not wish to grant.’

  He replied, ‘Lady, before the gods, I will do whatever you ask of me, for since I saw you tonight at the banquet I have thought of nothing else but you, and when you removed your veils before me I knew that my prayers had been answered.’

  The Lady knew not whether to speak or to weep, for her tender heart had known nothing but sorrow since the night of her nuptial rites. She knelt to join the Hero on the fine rug before the brazier, and she placed her hands upon his cheeks and said, ‘I will tell you the secret of the Labyrinth and the Beast at its heart, if you will promise to carry me away with you when you leave . . .’

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

  Seven

  Itold you so,” said Her Majesty. “I told you, in clear and exact language, that this expedition would prove a grave mistake.”

  I went on brushing my hair. “On the contrary, I am convinced my presence here is of the utmost importance. Imagine if Lord Silverton were left to deal with the affair himself.”

  “I think that would be a very good idea indeed. I advise you to take the next steamship back to England, and leave this sort of grubby investigation to those best suited to soil themselves in it.”

  A sharp double knock sounded on the door to my room. “Heigh-ho,” said a cheerful and muffled voice.

  “Speak of the devil,” muttered the Queen.

  I set down the hairbrush, gathered my hair in a rapid braid at the nape of my neck, and rose from the dressing table.

  “You don’t mean to answer the door!” Her Majesty exclaimed. “In your nightgown!”

  “I’m wearing a dressing gown above all. It is hardly improper.”

  “Your hair is wantonly loose.”

  “Nonsense. I have braided it. If you’ll excuse me.”

  I marched to the door and flung it open.

  “I say,” said his lordship. “Abed already? What about dinner?”

  “I plan to take a tray in my room. Have you something important to communicate? Could you not have used the telephone?”

  “I meant to whisk you downstairs to the hotel restaurant, but I’m perfectly happy to dine here instead.”

  “Certainly not.”

  His lordship edged past me into the room. “A fine chamber you’ve got here, Truelove. Overlooking the square and whatnot. My window looks into the alleyway, which is endlessly entertaining but not precisely healthy for one’s morals.”

  “I should think your morals would hardly know the difference.”

  “Ah, Truelove. You have the most confounded notions about me. I’m as tame as a pussycat, really. Stories all false. Or at least exaggerated to a great degree.” He shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers—he was wearing immaculate dinner dress—and turned to offer me a broad and toothsome grin, of the sort a female hyena might find alluring. “Your virtue is perfectly safe with me.”

  I heard a faint harrumph, though the slipper chair was now empty.

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Be quick, your lordship. I wish to order my dinner now.”

  “I shall take that as a rejection of my very kind offer, and be accordingly offended,” said Silverton, looking not offended in the least, but rather amused.

  I said nothing.

  Silverton walked to the fireplace and removed one hand from his pocket to lay his elbow on the mantel. “Oh, very well. You’re a hard woman, Truelove, very hard. The thing is, I’ve been thinking rather thoroughly about this matter, gears grinding squeakily and all that, and I wonder if—now, don’t raise your nose at me—I wonder if you’re better off taking the Isolde back home to England, while I delve into
this Cretan matter on my own humble power.”

  Indeed! said a haughty voice, from the direction of the slipper chair. Just what I think. The first sensible thing he’s said in days.

  “I see. You think it’s too dangerous for me.”

  “I wasn’t going to say dangerous, exactly. The contrary. I expect it’s all just a jolly queer coincidence, Mr. Livas shucking off his mortal coil just now. Wintertime is notorious for . . . well . . .” He waved a hand.

  “Men having their throats cut at half past five in the afternoon, on the way home from an honest day’s labor?”

  “I was going to say incidents of a violent nature, since the hours of darkness are much increased. And Greece, I regret to report, is notable for its lawlessness, even in this modern age. Might a fellow have a drink, do you think?”

  “I haven’t got anything.”

  “Ring something up, I mean. Perhaps a spot of dinner, while you’re on the telephone.”

  “I’m not dressed for dinner.”

  “I think you look charming.” The smile flashed out once more, white enough to match his shirt. He had brushed back his hair with a touch of pomade, so that it positively burnished in the electric light. No one could deny that Lord Silverton was a glossy, well-polished animal, in the absolute prime of its health and strength, and that, as impressive as he looked in his travel tweeds, he appeared even more remarkably resplendent in dinner dress.

  “Your lordship,” I said, closing my ears to any possible comment from the slipper chair by the window, “you have come here to ask me a question, and my answer is no. Frankly, I am now convinced that Mr. Haywood may stand in real danger, and my participation in this search has become even more urgent than before.”

  “More urgent? I say, that’s humbling. You think I’ll foul things up on my own, do you? Where’s the trust, Truelove?”

  “It’s not a matter of trust. I simply believe—as does the dowager duchess, I should like to point out—that my intimate knowledge of the duchy’s affairs may prove essential to discovering the whereabouts of Mr. Haywood.”