by Juliana Gray
“I believe he knows something,” I said.
“Knows something? Knows what?”
I said to the landlord, “She’s not your barmaid, is she?”
She had arrived at the inn on a windswept day in early November, when the weather had just begun to cool, the landlord told us reluctantly: illiterate and incomprehensible, dressed in pale summer clothing. In exchange for the beautiful gold bracelet she wore on her left arm, he had given her warm clothes and shelter. Her confusion and her modest demeanor had soon enlisted his chivalry—such as it was—and he returned the bracelet. Eventually he had ascertained that she came from Crete, and helped her book passage to Heraklion, where he thought she might rejoin her friends.
At this point in the narrative, the landlord stopped, turned to us, and tapped his temple with his forefinger. She was not in her right mind, he had thought at the time. He could understand a few of her words, but as if they were passed through a meat grinder first: all jumbled and misshapen. She was perhaps struck on the head.
“Ah! Very interesting! Can you perhaps describe the nature of her particular dialect?” said Mr. Higganbotham, leaping across a gleaming puddle to land at the man’s side. For the past half hour, we had walked swiftly along the road that paralleled the northern coast, leaving the town and the barmaid’s cottage well behind us. I still did not quite understand where the landlord was taking us, and could only hope that the tale he spun now—strange, full of odd and gaping holes—might somehow make the point of our journey more clear. My gaze kept shifting to the left, toward the sea, and the muscles of my abdomen clenched with urgency.
“Hang her dialect,” I said. “Where has she gone? And what has she to do with Mr. Haywood?”
The landlord spun about and launched himself determinedly forward. “I have already said. She is his sister.”
“But he’s English!”
“That is what she say. Brother, she say.”
“Miss Truelove,” said Mr. Higganbotham, sotto voce. He brought a tactful fist to his mouth and coughed into it. “Surely it does not need further explanation.”
I looked sideways at Mr. Higganbotham, who had found some point of interest on the distant hills, and then at the back of the landlord’s rigid head. My cheeks grew warm. “Of course. I mean, how did they—? That is, to what extent is he—?” I cleared my throat. “How did he come to Naxos with her?”
The landlord shook his head. “She leave here alone, in December, and then I send her to Crete, where she from. She return a week later, with her brother, except they have some fear. They say to me, We must hide, you must find us a shelter outside of the town, you must say nothing to any person who ask.” He glanced toward me at last, and his face bore the same stony-browed glare as before. “And now this English lord come and take her away.”
“He has not taken her away,” I said. “He’s a good, sensible, reliable fellow, and only wants to help. I should say it’s the other way around, and she has taken him off somewhere, for whatever purposes of her own.”
The landlord grunted his doubt. His stride lengthened, eating up the ground with remarkable efficiency for so stocky a man.
“In any case, Mr. Haywood has left with them, and we know already that he is attached to her, and has gone to great effort to keep her from harm.”
Another grunt. “He has not left with them.”
“What’s that?” I said, panting a little.
“She come to the inn, last night, in the storm. She say that her brother has gone to the caves, that he has not return. She ask for help. So I say to her, we will go in the morning, she must stay the night at the inn, she cannot stay at her house alone.”
“Very sensible,” said Mr. Higganbotham.
“What caves?” I demanded.
The landlord raised a fist in the air. “And then she go off with the English lord! Into the night!”
Mr. Higganbotham said cheerfully, “Now, now. It isn’t all that bad. He’s an honorable fellow, I assure you.”
“Yes, but what caves?” I halted in the middle of the road and crossed my arms across my chest. “I won’t go another step until somebody explains what’s going on. Who is this woman, and where did she come from, and where are these caves to which you’re leading us?”
The landlord stopped and turned, making a broad gesture with his right arm, corresponding roughly to the sweep of the sea down the cliffs. He said, in the kind of gruff, impatient voice that suggested I was an imbecile, or at the very least inattentive: “The caves of the myth! The caves where the Lady of the Labyrinth rise to heaven with her husband.”
I don’t know at what age I first realized that my parents were not in love. (Love, I mean, as the poets and the composers had it; love such as Antony felt for Cleopatra, or Tristan for Isolde, or Des Grieux for Manon. The unselfish agony such as Radamès feels for Aida, when he realizes she inhabits the tomb with him, and all the might of his strong arms cannot force the stone away to free her.)
I had never seen any sign, for example, of a passionate courtship. When I was still quite small, but yet old enough to remember such things, my mother announced that she was to be married, and shortly afterward the deed was done: a visit to a church in London, a brief wedding breakfast at a magnificent marble house I now know to be that of the Duke of Olympia, and then a rattling train journey the next morning back to East Sussex. “Now we will be perfectly provided for,” my mother said—I recall this very well, for there was something terribly momentous about the way she said it, all glossy and radiant in a rose-colored traveling dress, while her new ring sparkled on her finger—and she was right. I never wanted for a single thing, so far as my memory serves. My father came down from London to stay with us every weekend, and repaired to a bedroom he shared with my mother, who remained a breathtaking beauty—so I am told, for I can’t quite picture her face, only the shape of her hair around it—even in her pastoral seclusion from the worldliness of London. One day, in fact, when I was nearly six, Mama and my father sat down with me and told me with great delight that I was going to have a little baby brother or sister.
So we were very much a family, and yet while I observed many instances and gestures of affection between them, there was not that magnetic power I later understood from books and from stage. My father treated Mama with tender respect, and I believe he would have died for her: but he would have laid down that life because of duty, not because of passion.
I don’t know why that should have made any difference to me, but I believe it must have. For when I was fifteen, and my father took me to Covent Garden for the first time to watch a performance of Siegfried, I knew a kind of despaired young yearning as Brünnhilde awoke to the embrace of her hero: as if I had just discovered the gaping existence of a hole in my breast that could never, in this modern world made of steel rails and monstrous engines, be filled.
“But surely he doesn’t mean the actual cave,” I whispered to Mr. Higganbotham, as we trudged along the road behind the landlord.
“I beg your pardon?” Mr. Higganbotham appeared to be lost in some sort of scholarly firmament high above, for his face was turned up to the watery sun, and his eyes had filmed softly over.
“The caves, sir. The caves to which this man is leading us. He can’t actually believe these are the caves of Ariadne, that she really existed here. That these mythical events”—I gestured to the sea, much as the landlord himself had done a short while ago—“truly took place, three thousand years ago, on this soil.”
“Oh, I expect he does. That’s the splendid power of myth, you know. It’s marvelously flexible, allowing anybody to interpret events as he pleases.” He paused to negotiate a small rockslide obscuring the roadway. “Did you ever play that game as a child, in which you whispered a statement of fact into somebody’s ear, and that friend passed it on to another, and so on?”
“Yes, and the friend at the end of
the line announced what had been uttered in her ear—”
“And it was entirely different from the statement at the beginning, eh? Well, that’s myth for you. Handed along from mouth to ear for millennia, until somebody wrote it down at last and made it fact. But what really happened? We haven’t a clue.” He nodded to the road ahead. “Something interesting may very well have happened at these caves. Obviously our friends think so.”
“You mean the landlord?”
“I mean Mr. Haywood and his female companion.”
“But what could it be? What could possibly be so important that it’s worth risking one’s life for?”
Mr. Higganbotham considered. “Treasure, perhaps? A very great deal of treasure often tempts men into extraordinary deeds.”
I fell silent, because this was not the answer I craved, and I could not speak this yearning aloud. Above us, the sky had turned a brilliant morning blue, and the air was almost springlike, smelling of damp stone and new grass and sunshine. I removed my jacket and slung it over my shoulder. My shoes were beginning to pinch.
“How much farther?” I asked Mr. Higganbotham.
He called obediently to the landlord, who turned his head and shouted something back.
“Ah, I see,” said Mr. Higganbotham.
“What did he say?”
“Six or seven miles.” He cleared his throat. “Or perhaps eight.”
“Eight miles!”
But it was no use protesting. There was too much distance already behind us to turn back, and so we marched on, pausing only briefly to eat the bread and the hard sheep’s cheese that the landlord had taken from the cupboard in the cottage. The terrain became rockier, the cliffs more sheer. The sun reached its zenith and began to fall slowly to earth, and a series of clouds scudded into view from the southwest, before a strengthening wind.
Mr. Higganbotham examined the sky. “I do hope it’s not a scirocco.”
“A scirocco?”
“It arises from the Sahara at this time of year. Nasty sort of wind, carrying dust along, stirring up trouble. There is a whole category of study devoted to its effects.” He tapped his forehead. “It’s been known to do things to one’s mind.”
The heel of my shoe slipped into the crack of a rock, and I nearly fell to the ground. Mr. Higganbotham’s arm reached out to steady me, which for some reason I rather resented. I drew away and, to cover over the ingratitude, said, “To think I once imagined the Mediterranean climate as a dry, sunny, salubrious sort of thing.”
“Oh, no,” he replied cheerfully. “You have been grossly misinformed, I’m afraid.”
Contrary to Mr. Higganbotham’s stated hopes, the wind picked up briskly, and a haze of ominous dust filled in the gaps between the clouds. The landlord muttered to himself and increased his pace, though the light was starting to fail. In the distance, a headland was taking shape, and I could not see whether the road went around its face, next to the sea, or crossed the steep and rocky neck.
The landlord marched on, as if he were quite sure of his route. As if he had made this voyage several times before.
I leaned toward Mr. Higganbotham. “Something’s wrong. I cannot believe that Silverton and the woman traveled this road last night, in the dark, during the storm.”
“It seems improbable.”
“We should have stopped him. We should have refused to go, or at least sent some message back to the Isolde. Nobody knows where we are.”
He didn’t reply.
I thought, But we had no choice. We have no choice but to follow him.
The headland grew in detail, rocky and forbidding. I could not tear my gaze away. Something about the shape of it, which seemed to resemble that of a man’s head, bearing an enormous bony nose and a chin that disappeared into the cliffs below, encoded some deeper meaning that transfixed me.
Without quite realizing that I did so, I eased my hand into the pocket of my jacket and ran my fingers around the slim, ridged rim of the Knossos medallion. An image arose in my head—Lord Silverton, leaning against a rocky wall, smiling very slightly at one corner of his mouth, while his blue eyes remained narrowed and serious—accompanied by a rush of longing so intense, I buckled beneath it.
“Why, what’s wrong?” asked Mr. Higganbotham, starting toward me.
I braced one hand against the boulder on which I had sunk, while the other hand remained in my pocket, clutching the medallion. “I don’t know,” I gasped.
Mr. Higganbotham turned to the landlord and whistled.
“No, it’s all right.” I lifted my eyes to the headland, and again the wave struck, except that this time I was expecting it, and did not flinch. “Let’s press on.”
“We can’t. You’re not well.”
“But Silverton—”
“Hang him.” He turned to address the landlord, who had come up grudgingly, wearing an expression of thunderous impatience. They exchanged a few phrases in rapid Greek, while I fought down the emotion clawing at my ribs and examined the headland, and its strange formation of rock, with the dispassion of a scientist.
“Are the caves inside there?” I asked the landlord, interrupting the exchange. I lifted my hand and pointed toward the rocks.
He glanced over his shoulder. “Yes! We cannot stop now.”
“But night will be falling soon, and we have been walking all day,” said Mr. Higganbotham.
I rose from the boulder. “Our friend is right, Mr. Higganbotham. It would be foolish to stop so close to our goal. I am more than equal to finishing the journey.”
“Nonsense. You’re done in.”
“My present vigor, whether small or large, is quite irrelevant. I am deeply concerned for the safety of Lord Silverton, to say nothing of Mr. Haywood, and both men have every right to expect our most strenuous efforts to discover them.” I turned back to the landlord, who stood akimbo, gazing fiercely at us both, and said firmly, “Lead on, sir, if you will.”
Less than half an hour later, the main road began an inland curve to the right, declining the harsh edge of the headland. The wind now blew steadily, warm and just slightly damp, as if, like a thirsty cloth, it had soaked up a fine layer of seawater along its journey from the African deserts. A bit of dust caught in my throat, and as I coughed, I thought in wonder, This is the dust of the Sahara.
The landlord shouted impatiently and waved his hand.
“He has left the road,” I said to Mr. Higganbotham.
“So he has.”
The man was about fifty yards ahead, and as we drew closer, I saw that he had taken a faint path, almost invisible in the stony landscape, that forked away from the main road, toward the sea.
Mr. Higganbotham and I had both slowed our steps. The wind blew against my back. “Do we follow?” he asked, in a low voice.
I gazed at the landlord, silhouetted against the monstrous gray spine of the headland. His black hair twisted angrily in the wind beneath the edges of his woolen cap, and his eyes had narrowed into slivers against the African dust, giving him a wild and exotic bearing. Behind him grew the cliffs, silent and impervious to so temporary a condition as a common Mediterranean scirocco, showing no sign of recent human activity. The longing swelled again in my chest, holding down my breath.
He is hiding something, I thought, and then I said aloud, with great effort, “You may certainly turn back if you like, Mr. Higganbotham. You are under no obligation whatever, and have put yourself in enough danger already. But I’m afraid I must go on.”
He sighed heavily, because of course he had to go with me; no man of any character could allow a lady to proceed into peril and forbear to accompany her. But he didn’t like it, didn’t like it at all; and furthermore, neither did I.
Yet the scirocco was at my back, and propelled me forward to this strange and massive formation of rock. A prickly pear stood by the fork in the road,
where the new path beat through the stones toward the cliffs, and at the exact instant that we turned down the narrow track, a gust of wind struck the tree, making it shiver and bend and whistle.
The landlord, seeing that we had obeyed his summons, turned and resumed his march, and I struggled into a half run, in order to catch up with him. My mouth filled with dust.
“I say!” exclaimed Mr. Higganbotham, hurrying up behind, but the energy had returned to me, and I kept on striding, while the heels of my low boots slid on the stones and my right hand, still in the jacket pocket, clutched the medallion.
We had almost reached the first craggy face of the rising rock before I saw it: a small lean-to, built of stone and nestled into a fold of the escarpment.
The landlord, still several yards ahead, plunged inside without hesitation. I heard Mr. Higganbotham calling behind me, but I was now wholly gripped by that same urgency that had lured me onward from my first sight of the stern profile overlooking the sea. I ducked under the lintel, half expecting to be crushed on the head by a primitive club, but instead saw only the landlord, turning about in the murky darkness.
“They are not here,” he said, sounding bewildered.
Outside, Mr. Higganbotham was shouting something. I narrowed my eyes and peered into the shadowed corners of the shelter, but the room was quite small, and I could easily perceive that it contained only a straw pallet, a few blankets, a small hearth for a nonexistent fire, and a locked wooden chest. The air smelled of stale smoke and damp stone, of the scat of curious animals.
“No one has lived here for some days, at least,” I said.
“How do you know this?”
I considered how to reply to this reasonable question, but before I could open my mouth, a loud bang shattered the air outside.
“Mr. Higganbotham!” I exclaimed, turning for the door.
But the way was already blocked by a man’s broad shoulders, and by the persuasive heft of the large pistol he gripped in one hand.