by Juliana Gray
I went on, a little more loudly, and enunciated my words with care. “We have not heard from Mr. Haywood in some time, and have come to Knossos to ascertain his whereabouts. Moreover, I am afraid we stand in some need of lodging and refreshment, as well as the use of your telegraph equipment.” I paused. “My name is Miss Truelove, and this gentleman is his lordship, the Marquess of Silverton.”
There was an astonished silence from the direction of the servant.
“Well. I suppose that about sums everything up,” said Silverton.
The woman looked past my shoulder, and her expression of hostile befuddlement melted at once into the kind of look one sees on the face of a dog who has just caught sight of a rasher of bacon, left unattended.
“A very dear old friend, our Max,” said his lordship. (I can only suppose his smile exuded its usual glamour.) “We’d be most abjectly grateful for any assistance you might be kind enough to offer.”
The door opened wide. The servant stepped back.
“You are most welcome, of course,” she said, in excellent English.
The Lady returned to the Palace, where she occupied herself in the preparations for the reception of the Athenian tribute. On the first night, a banquet would be served in the Hall of the Labrys, and on the second night, the Lady of the Labyrinth was to wash the feet of the Athenian youths in water taken from the sacred spring under the last full moon.
On the third night, according to ritual, the hunt would begin.
Though the Lady kept busy, still the hours came and went like the passage of a snail across a garden, and each minute apart from her love was an agony to her. She gave instructions to the servants to fill her husband’s cup with wine at every draining, for she feared above all that the Prince would call her to his bed, while the seed of the Hero was still newly planted in her womb . . .”
THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)
Eleven
My mother was not a great beauty, but she was a coquette of tremendous charm. (You will conclude, I suppose, that my character must therefore resemble that of the man who fathered me, an assertion to which I would willingly subscribe, had I any idea who he was, or what he was like.) I know this fact not from my own personal recollection, but because her reputation has lived on so long after her corpse was laid in the damp earth of my early childhood.
Naturally, this interesting information did not reach my ears for some time after I came to live with my father—Mr. Truelove, I mean—at the Duke of Olympia’s London town house. If it had, I don’t suppose I should have properly understood the allusion. I do remember the first time someone spoke to me candidly on the subject. He was drunk, of course, which explains the candor. We were standing together on the outskirts of a party, a private musical evening hosted by Their Graces, to which they had kindly invited me, knowing my love of such things. The great soprano Tetrazzini had performed a series of splendid coloratura arias, and my whole being was so suffused with that euphoria which follows the experience of great art, I accepted a glass of champagne from a passing footman and drank it quickly and quietly, heedless of consequence.
The action did not go unnoticed, and I was immediately approached by a man of perhaps forty or forty-five years, who offered me a second glass of champagne and told me I reminded him of someone, a woman he had once much admired. Her name, he said, was Araminta, and she had married a man named Truelove.
“Then you must mean my mother,” I said eagerly. (The champagne, you perceive, had gone straight to my head.)
His face transformed into an expression I now know well, but of which I was then entirely ignorant. “Ah, the great Araminta was your mother!” he exclaimed.
“Did you know her well?”
“I am happy to say I knew her very well indeed. The most charming, the most lovely woman. You have much the look of her.” He winked.
“Do you think so? But surely not. I have seen her portrait, and while I suppose we share a certain superficial resemblance—”
“On the contrary, my dear, you’re her mirror image.” He stepped closer, and his voice dropped to a confidential murmur. “It makes one wonder what else you share with her.”
“I’m afraid I cannot enlighten you, sir, as I hardly knew her. She died when I was only five years old.”
“Only five years old! Then you must be . . . nineteen, perhaps?”
“Yes, sir. Nineteen next month.”
“Charming.” He glanced at my neck. “Perhaps, if you care to step outside for a breath of air, I will tell you all you wish to know about your dear mother.”
“I’m afraid it’s terribly cold.”
“True. But your mother was just the sort of adventurous woman to disregard such little inconveniences, in the right sort of company.”
At which point in this conversation I began to realize his meaning, I cannot say. I am ashamed to suspect that it was quite far along, because my father had sheltered me so absolutely from such men, and I was unused to the effects of champagne. I remember looking up at his face, which was of the sort that had once been handsome and now lay in incipient ruin, and feeling a kind of trepidation at the intensity of his expression. Then his arm appeared around my elbow, and the feeling became a flutter, and the flutter became a roil of dread.
But where were we? Oh, yes. My adventurous mother.
“I am afraid I am not quite so adventurous, by nature,” I said. “I prefer a warm and well-lit room.”
“Do you, now? Then perhaps the library will prove more to your taste. Your mother liked a quiet library very much.”
I set down the second glass of champagne on a nearby table. “The library is closed to guests, sir, and I believe I must retire. I find I am—I am—” For a terrible instant, I couldn’t remember the word, and for some reason this failure struck me as monumental. “Discomposed,” I said at last, and I fled through the crowd, sick and small, terrified that he would follow me: not because I was afraid of him physically, but because I did not want to hear more. I could not remember my mother’s face in life, but I did recall her gentle arms and her singsong laugh, and I didn’t want to think that this horrible, ruined man had known them, too. I didn’t want to think that he sought to know the daughter as he had known the mother, that Araminta’s sins must inevitably become my own.
I didn’t tell my father about this man. For one thing, he had already begun that decline in his health which would soon prove fatal, and for another, we scarcely ever spoke to each other on the subject of my mother. An odd, careful, unspoken agreement existed between us. She remained a mystery, a white void we never sought to fill, and I could not say whether our neglect arose because she was too sacred to us, or too profane.
But as I watched Lord Silverton beg the favor of a meal from Mr. Evans’s pretty housekeeper—her name was Mrs. Poulakis, as his lordship readily discovered, though the title of Mrs. seemed only a dignity of her profession—and secure not only a pair of well-furnished rooms for our use, but the services of Mr. Evans’s private telegraph machine as well, I began to understand a little of what the gentleman in that long-ago party meant by charming. After all, it’s one matter to experience Silverton’s powers of persuasion for oneself; to observe a third party, as she falls under his spell, is another perspective entirely.
“Is something the matter, Truelove?” asked his angelic lordship, spreading a soft English roll with butter. Mrs. Poulakis had just left to bring up another bottle of wine.
“Nothing is the matter, sir.”
“Because you have that particular look of distaste on your face, which usually signals some kind of misbehavior on my part. Do you consider a proper meal a waste of time?”
“No. One’s body requires nourishment, even in times of urgency.”
“Wine not to your liking?”
“The wine is perfectly good, as one would expect, although perhaps not an ideal accompani
ment to the concentration required of an investigation such as ours. I’m only thinking about how best to accomplish our objectives this afternoon, when the hours of daylight are in such limited supply.”
“You sound like a general planning a military campaign.”
“Is there anything wrong with that?”
“No, not at all.” He gazed at the ceiling and rolled the wine in his glass, preparing to drink. “Are you suggesting we divide and conquer?”
“Why not? We might accomplish twice as much.”
“I see. And which task would you have me undertake? The frescoes, or the villa?”
Like all Silverton’s queries, this one was delivered as blandly as if the answer were of no significance at all. As if he were only making conversation. His Adam’s apple slid up and down as he swallowed his wine, and when he put down the glass, he revealed an expectant smile.
“Which one would you prefer?” I said.
The door opened, and Mrs. Poulakis walked in, bearing a platter of sliced meat and ripe bosom, the latter of which balanced invitingly on the rim of the tray, flowing over from an inadequate bodice that had, in the course of her kitchen labors, unaccountably lost a pair of buttons.
“Dear me.” I set down my wine. “Mrs. Poulakis appears to have misplaced her pinafore.”
“A great shame.” Silverton followed the parabola of her progress around the opposite end of the table, drawing away, away, and then coming near, nearer, until she reached the edge of his lordship’s wineglass and leaned over to place her offering at his right hand.
“Some meat, sir?”
“Yes, please,” said Silverton. “The breast, if I might.”
“Among polite society,” I said, as Mrs. Poulakis used a silver fork to lay the viand, slice by slice, on his lordship’s plate, “we use the term white meat.”
“Dash it all. I’m always forgetting these niceties. Thank you extremely, Mrs. Poulakis. Delicious, I’m sure.”
Mrs. Poulakis simpered—as well she might—and made her way back around the table in my direction. “Not that I mind, particularly, Mrs. Poulakis,” I said, “but in England it is customary to serve the ladies first and the gentlemen last.”
“Oh! Sorry, madam.”
“This is because, in civilized society, one naturally defers the choicest portions of each dish to the gentler sex. For example, Lord Silverton, in expressing a fondness just now for white meat over dark, was only being polite.”
The fork wavered uncertainly over the platter. “Some meat, madam?”
“The dark, please. I shall not, of course, mention so slight an error to Mr. Evans, though I hope you will take my hint in good spirit. Something amuses you, Silverton?”
“Not at all, not at all. I am only laboring, so far as I am able, to decide whether my paltry talents are better employed in tramping about the ancient ruins where Max worked, or in conducting a thorough search of the villa in which he slept.”
“Only you can determine that, your lordship.”
His gaze slipped past my shoulder to Mrs. Poulakis’s departing figure. “Hmm. Yes. And you have no preference?”
“After such a substantial and recuperative meal, I find myself equally prepared to do either.”
‘Then the choice is wholly mine, is it?”
“Wholly yours. You have only your own conscience to consult.”
“Ah. My conscience.”
“Your conscience, sir. If you have one.”
Lord Silverton laid down his knife and fork and leaned forward. The table was large, and we sat exactly across from each other, parted by a wide snowfall of linen and a pair of brass candelabra, in need of polish. Against the backdrop of a new white plaster wall, his lordship’s eyes shone an especially pungent shade of blue.
He steepled his fingers thoughtfully before his mouth.
“In that case, I fancy I’ll ask that lovely Mrs. Poulakis to show me which bedchamber belonged to Max.”
One hears often that anger is an unwholesome emotion: a moral failing, which it is one’s Christian duty to overcome. I find I cannot quite agree. Properly channeled, anger is not merely useful but sublime.
As I tramped back up the Royal Road to the Knossos ruins, map secured between the gloved fingers of my right hand, the fury poured like melted steel through my limbs and rendered them invincible. Or perhaps it was the wine, of which I had, I confess, taken another glass. In any case, I marched along the old uneven paving stones so swiftly, I might have been born on a mountainside; I skirted the central area of restoration and approached Max’s site like a slight female juggernaut.
Nobody stopped me. Perhaps nobody dared. Perhaps that liquid steel actually flashed and clanged fearsomely through my dress, so potent was its source material. A few crumbling steps appeared in my way; I climbed over them without hesitation.
My breath huffed from my lungs, damp and indignant and smelling of wine, and as I went on, I became aware of another set of lungs, huffing alongside mine with even more vigor, and I redoubled my effort.
“Slow down, you silly girl! Do you wish to kill me?”
“Impossible. You are already dead.”
“There is no need whatever for this unsuitable display. I did, after all, warn you of his lordship’s propensities. I warned you away from this ill-favored expedition altogether.”
“I could hardly refuse, however.”
“Yes, you could, if you had a little more nerve. A little more sense of what is suitable to a young lady’s dignity.” She spoke in self-righteous little puffs of air—a . . . young lady’s . . . dignity!—and dragged her feet in metallic scrapes against the stone.
“There is nothing undignified about my behavior,” I said.
“You’re a fool. Did you really expect him to conduct himself differently? Did you expect him to alter his habits for your sake?”
I placed my hands on the top of a low stone wall and vaulted over, skirts and all. “Of course not. I have always viewed his lordship as a cross to be borne on this voyage. A voyage, I might add, that is of the utmost importance and urgency to a most prestigious, a most honored, a most essential peerage of Great Britain. A pillar of that empire you so ardently built and championed during your reign.”
“He is a danger to your moral serenity.” The word serenity ended in a grunt, as Her Majesty heaved herself after me. I had not troubled myself to glance in her direction, so I knew not what she wore, or how she handled herself over the obstacles in our path. I imagined her plump face must be flushed with effort, and her hair perhaps loose from a practical wool hat.
“He is no danger at all. I know what he is. I know what I am.”
“You will end up like your mother, and then where will we be? In disgrace. Disgrace, Miss Truelove: profound and irrecoverable.”
“I will not end up like my mother!” I shouted, and my left foot slipped right out from under me, causing me to slide down a pile of rubble and into the well of a stone doorway, shaded from the winter daylight.
“Excuse me,” said a polite masculine voice above me. “May I perhaps be of some assistance to you, Miss Truelove?”
I looked up to see a familiar tanned hand stretched out toward me, connected to a wool-covered arm that belonged to the foreman, Mr. Vasilakis.
“Thank you.” I took his hand and found myself instantly lifted to my feet, as effortlessly as I myself might lift a small child. “I’m sorry to trouble you. I am looking for this”—I held up the map, which bore a small black circle in the relevant quadrant—“the place where Mr. Haywood conducted his investigations.”
“Ah! Where we found the frescoes, do you mean?”
“Yes.”
Mr. Vasilakis nodded at the doorway. “The site is right through there, near a room we call the queen’s library.”
“Right through there?” I turned my head, looked
down at the map, and lifted my gaze to the dark rectangle before me, leading into the ground.
“Yes. Perhaps you will allow me to escort you? The chambers and corridors, as one might expect, are difficult to navigate.” He smiled, and his teeth were quite white and even, as if he visited a dentist regularly. How and where, I could not imagine.
“Of course. The labyrinth.”
“The entire palace is a labyrinth, Miss Truelove. It is endlessly fascinating. I have been working here since the beginning, five years now, and I sometimes feel I have not learned a tenth part of what is hidden here.” He raised his other hand, which contained the same paraffin lantern that had rested on the table in his tent. “Would you like to see inside?”
I hesitated, and then imagined Lord Silverton at his ease in the Villa Ariadne, glowing with wine and food and the eager attention of Mrs. Poulakis.
I looked over my shoulder. Her Majesty had disappeared.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
The lantern was already lit, and I followed its round glow down a number of stone corridors and rooms that led into one another. The walls contained decorations of all kinds, crumbling and faded but still visible, and the floors were stacked with artifacts: some in boxes, and others simply arranged in groups. From time to time, an open shaft appeared, channeling the meager light from the world outdoors. I paused before a kind of seat, built into the wall of one especially large room. “Is that a throne?”
“So we presume. It is of alabaster. You see the griffins painted on the wall behind?”
I squinted. “How beautiful! Have you restored them?”
“In fact, these required hardly any work at all. Mr. Evans discovered this room nearly intact, very soon after the excavation began, only a few inches below the surface. A miracle. We have since enclosed the chamber and many others, so that the rains and so on do not destroy in one season what three thousand years could not.”