by Juliana Gray
“It is not so bad as that, sir,” I said quietly. “You will have an immense and talented staff to assist you, and the duchess, I am sure, will be a great comfort.”
“The duchess?”
“I mean the lady below, sir, who will become your duchess in a matter of days.”
“Yes, of course.”
I sifted through the papers in my desk. “I have here the telegraphed reply from Reverend Armitage in Athens, who will be honored to perform the marriage service at our convenience.” I looked up. “The sooner the better, I should think. When is the—er, the happy event expected?”
“June, I believe.”
“Very good. She’s in deep mourning, of course, so I’ll make the arrangements as simple as possible, but I believe a small wedding breakfast is in order, don’t you think, to mark the occasion? She will be the Duchess of Olympia, after all.”
“Very small, Miss Truelove, and very simple. I should like to stay aboard the ship, in fact, and to set off for England immediately afterward. Silverton can give her away,” he added, as an afterthought.
I made a note on the paper before me. “Of course.”
“And I suppose you will have to be bridesmaid.”
“It will be my honor to do so. I have already made inquiries for a dressmaker. She will have a number of suitable articles ready upon our arrival, which will require, I hope, only a minimum of alteration.”
“You are a miracle, Miss Truelove.” He rose from the sofa, wincing very slightly, and walked across the room to the coffee service on the side table. I started to rise, but he waved me down and asked if I would like coffee.
We were only twelve hours out to sea, and my stomach was not quite at peace. “No, thank you,” I said.
He lifted the silver pot—a little awkwardly, for he was forced to use his left arm—and apologized that there was no tea. He would order it tomorrow, if I preferred.
I thanked him.
He set down the pot and reached for the sugar. “You have not troubled me with a great many questions.”
“It is not my place, sir.”
“Isn’t it? You risked your life, after all.”
“I have only done my duty.”
“You have done far more than that.” He added a few drops of cream and stirred briskly. “I have the impression that you don’t fully credit Desma’s tale.”
I hesitated. “I have the greatest regard for the lady. She has a noble heart, and she will do you honor as your duchess.”
“But you don’t believe she is whom she claims to be.”
“Do you?”
He walked—or rather stalked, for his limbs moved at an animal-like rhythm in spite of his injuries—to one of the portholes, which overlooked an eastern sea turned gold by the new-risen sun. “The story itself is impossible either to prove or disprove. I will say this. When I first met her in Knossos, she was reluctant in the extreme to tell me anything at all. And I have never in my life encountered a dialect so strange as hers. It was scarcely even recognizable as Greek. I had to transcribe every word in the beginning, until I could understand her at the most basic level. Even then, I don’t believe I properly gained her trust for many weeks. We were in Naxos before she revealed anything of import.”
“But you didn’t arrive in Naxos until December,” I said.
“Yes, the end of December.”
“But—” I wet my lips and looked down at the smooth wooden desk before me. “You will excuse my indelicacy, but your child will be born in June.”
“Miss Truelove, the child is not mine.”
“Oh!”
“Good Lord, did you really think—?”
“I—well, I merely presumed, since you—your obvious devotion—”
“My devotion to her is absolute,” he said softly, “but her heart was never mine to win.”
The sea was calm, and the sun was warm, and the ship made not a wobble as we slid across the water. The engines ground comfortably beneath our feet. The ducal suite sprawled across the width of the upper deck, separated from the wheelhouse by the same corridor in which I had taken shelter with Lord Silverton on the morning before our tempestuous landing at Naxos a fortnight ago, and the view stretched from east to west almost without interruption, if one happened to be standing near the portholes, as the duke did, sipping his coffee. His attention was fixed on some point outside, and the sun struck his skin like a whitewash.
“I am sorry, sir,” I whispered.
“She has done me the honor of agreeing to become my wife, however, and the child will never know that he is not mine by blood as well as affection. I can do no less for the man who fathered him.”
I could think of no answer to this.
The duke turned to me. “Well, Miss Truelove? Are you not curious?”
“It is not—”
“Your place to ask,” he finished for me. “And in any case, it’s too much to believe, I suppose.”
I stared at my hand, which still held the pen, poised and ready for service. My hands were my mother’s, smooth-skinned and long-fingered. A valuable inheritance indeed, for which I was vain enough to be grateful. “Does it matter, though? Whoever he is, he’s lost to her now.”
“So it seems. We spent weeks waiting at the caves, looking for some sign of his appearance, and hoping that the men who had tracked us down in Knossos would not discover our trail to Naxos. By then I had discovered that it was my own personal secretary who had painted those frescoes in order to lure me to Crete, who had searched my belongings and betrayed me to his friends—that was why we left the villa so precipitately, you see, while I told Anserrat we were bound for Athens instead of Naxos, in order to buy us at least a little more time. But I still cannot understand his purpose, and the ferocity of his pursuit. What can they possibly have had to gain? Even if Desma is the lady of myth, what use is that? There is no tangible treasure, except perhaps to display her like a circus curiosity, and that was not what they wanted.”
I thought of the hundred and fifty drachmae left behind in the flat in Athens. “No, it was not. But how did they know who Desma really was? What she might be, I mean?”
“I have no idea whatsoever, except that they believed most profoundly that she was the true Ariadne, to use the mythical name.”
Was Ariadne, I thought. And the child in her belly sired by an ancient Theseus.
But the notion was too absurd. A fevered fantasy, the most impossible thing in the world. People did not close their eyes and wake up three thousand years in the future. Science and religion both rose up and forbade the very idea; such a brazen act had no place in a logical universe.
On the other hand, there were many things that ought not to exist in a logical universe.
When I was perhaps eleven or twelve, my father took me on a visit to the Tower of London. It was late autumn, and the trees were bare, and the air smelled of soot and damp earth. I remember examining the Crown Jewels and the messages inscribed by prisoners into the stone walls of the Beauchamp Tower, and the warmth of my father’s hand as we climbed the endless winding staircases, each step worn down at the middle by the passage of infinite feet.
At last we arrived on the Tower Green, and my father led me to the exact spot where, according to tradition, the infamous scaffold had once stood: the one on which Anne Boleyn had been beheaded. The sky was cold and blue, and I thought that this was the very same sky under which that unfortunate lady had met her end. That my eyes, running over the gray walls and the turrets and the million blades of grass, viewed much the same scene as had pressed a final earthly image upon the eyes of the queen. That she had existed in this precise spot, had stood and breathed, had spoken a few words and had bared her brave neck and had died.
That the only thing separating us was time. The long, unstoppable beat of centuries: a thing, a mystery you could not hold in yo
ur hand and examine, a power that existed inside the memory of inanimate objects.
These stone walls knew Anne. And as I stood where she had stood, I knew her, too. I would have sworn that she was there.
According to legend, it’s where Theseus landed with Ariadne, when bad weather forced them into Naxos. Then Dionysus happened along, fell in love with her, and brought her up to heaven to marry her.
I lifted my head. “What does Mr. Higganbotham say?”
The duke turned away from the porthole and walked back to the side table to pour himself another awkward cup of coffee. “I am afraid Mr. Higganbotham is ready to believe any word that falls from her mouth.”
“And Lord Silverton?”
His Grace’s eyebrows rose above the rim of his cup. He set the vessel back in its saucer, shook his head, and said, “Miss Truelove, I have the impression that, upon this earth, there lives only a single person who has the power to discover his lordship’s true thoughts on any subject.”
“And who is that?”
“You.”
I found Lord Silverton in the main saloon, quite in opposition to the strict instructions of the Naxos doctor who had, in the manner of Humpty-Dumpty, put him back together again.
He sat in his favored armchair, leg propped on a cushioned footstool, and tossed a cricket ball in the air with one hand while he smoked his pipe with the other. The air of the saloon was fragrant with warm tobacco. Across from him, the next Duchess of Olympia perched on the edge of the sofa, and I am sorry to report—for I fear it does neither of them any credit—that the lady was actually smiling.
“I beg your pardon. Am I interrupting?”
Silverton craned his head to the doorway. “Why, Truelove! There you are. Secretarial duties all finished?”
“For the moment. Is that Caruso?”
“Indeed it is. I was just attempting to explain to Desma what he’s going on about in this little ditty, and I’m afraid the essential bits may have been lost in translation.”
I flinched at the words little ditty. “So it seems. How lovely, nonetheless, that you were able to amuse the poor lady, so early in her bereavement.”
“Laughter cures all, I always say.”
“How true.” I turned to address the lady herself, taking care to speak slowly. “Desma, my dear. The duke presents his compliments, and asks if you will do him the honor of attending him in his stateroom.”
The smile faded, and Desma gave me rather a blank look.
Silverton cleared his throat. “Allow me.”
He explained the situation in careful Greek, illustrating with his hands and his pipe, and Desma nodded and rose from the sofa. She sent me a regal nod and a rather odd pair of words that, after a few seconds’ consideration, I recognized as thank you.
“Of course, madam,” I replied, and then, as she made her way to the door, I exclaimed, “Oh! Wait a moment.”
She turned, and I put my hand in my pocket and hurried toward her. “Here,” I said, drawing out the medallion we had discovered under the bed in Knossos. “I believe this belongs to you.”
Her dark eyes grew huge. She looked into my face, and then returned to the object in my hands.
“I’m terribly sorry I haven’t returned it already. In all the fuss, I had quite forgotten its existence. I discovered it in the pocket of my jacket this morning.” I pressed the disc into her stunned hand. “I believe it’s meant to protect the owner against death, in which case it seems to have performed its work admirably.”
She did not understand me, of course. She stared down at the medallion for some time, and when she lifted her gaze at last, her eyes were wet, and her nod of thanks was no longer regal but heartfelt.
“Well done, Truelove,” Silverton said, when I sat down on the armchair next to him.
“How are you?”
“Absolutely tip-top. That dear fellow the doctor dispensed me a most marvelous bottle of pills for my sins. Hardly feel a thing.”
He gazed at me, all blue sky and sunshine, despite the assortment of bruises and half-healed abrasions adorning his face. He wasn’t wearing his spectacles, and as he continued to toss the cricket ball into the air and catch it unerringly, I wondered whether he possessed some sort of extra sense.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.
Silverton caught the ball and set it down on the table between us, beneath the glow of the lamp, though his fingers remained to trap the object in place. “And you, Truelove? Rather a bad show, back there on Naxos. The worst show I think I ever saw, though there was a wretched balls-up in Seville once that I shouldn’t care to repeat.”
His voice was tender, and the corners of my eyes responded like a child’s, filling with wetness.
“I am quite recovered,” I said.
“Oh, Truelove.” He lifted his hand, allowing the cricket ball to roll off the table and onto the rug, and leaned forward to grasp my fingers. “What a damned stoic you are. Do you know something? I don’t think there’s anyone I’d rather have at my back in a tight spot like that.”
“A tight spot?”
He stuck his pipe in his mouth, reached into his pocket with his other hand, and gave me a handkerchief. I dabbed at my eyes while he smoked in that observational way of his. He went on, “I am quite in earnest. You’ve the spine of a Cossack. You’re colossal. There you stood, a gun to your head, cool as you please, telling the poor bloke just what you thought of him. I said to myself, Silverton, old boy, if by some miracle you make it out of here alive, you have got to marry that woman.”
I blew my nose. “You needn’t joke.”
“I am not joking, Truelove.”
I looked up in surprise, into a pair of serious blue eyes.
“I am not joking,” he said again. “I want you to marry me.”
I set the handkerchief on the table, where the cricket ball had rested in the moment before it rolled off.
Silverton released my hand and continued, in a quick voice that was not his own. “I’m afraid I’m quite incapable of going down on one knee at the moment, though I’m willing to try if you require that sort of thing. Bended knees. Flowers, rings, kisses. I’m damned good at all of that, you’ll find, especially the latter.” He paused. “What I’m saying, I suppose, is that I should do my uttermost to make you happy.”
I couldn’t speak. The ship steamed along, the sunlight darkened for an instant and then reappeared, and I couldn’t say a word.
“The thing is, Truelove, I have been lying around these past few days, according to the doctor’s orders, and I have been thinking that you will go off this ship when we’re back in England and become somebody else’s very efficient and capable personal secretary, the duke or some other immensely fortunate fellow, and I am not at all certain I can survive that. I am not at all certain, I mean, that I want to survive that.”
I looked up helplessly at the ceiling and thought of Mrs. Poulakis.
“Dash it, Truelove. Say something.”
I thought of Silverton poised against the sunset at the top of the fortress in the Heraklion harbor, arms outstretched like a human cross, ready to jump. The ceiling seemed to be rotating around its central glass dome: first clockwise, and then counterclockwise, as if it could not quite make up its mind which hemisphere it belonged to.
“You’ll be a duchess one day, if that’s any consolation.”
I leaned forward and put my face in my hands. “I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.”
My father’s fatal illness was of short duration, a matter of a few months. I understand from the doctors that it had something to do with his heart; he began to weaken, and to suffer pains in his chest. He could no longer walk without stopping for breath, and one day, to his great annoyance, he could not rise from his bed.
He called for his lap desk, which I brought to him, and then he asked me to sit by
the bed while he worked. I poured him tea and arranged his pillows. At half past twelve I went to see about a tray for lunch, and when I returned, he was dead. He had suffered a final attack, the doctors said, shaking their heads—and the Duke of Olympia had paid for the best medical men in London, he had spared no expense whatever for his loyal secretary—and there was nothing anybody could have done for him.
And perhaps that’s true, but I still cannot forgive myself for allowing my father to die alone. During those nights when sleep comes reluctantly, I lie in my own bed and imagine how helpless he must have felt, in the grip of that painful attack, and how seized with despair that this moment was his last, and he had not even said good-bye.
E muoio disperato . . . E non ho amato mai tanto la vita . . .
And I die in despair, and I have never loved life so much.
Over my own objections, Lord Silverton had carried the phonograph to my cabin and installed it there—Nobody else appreciates the racket the way you do, Truelove—and I was too listless to change the record for another. Eventually the last song ended, and I stared at the ceiling while the needle scratched uselessly at the edge, and then gave up at last to leave me in silence.
But not alone.
I became aware, as the turntable slowed and stopped, and the scratch of the needle faded into quiet, of a presence in the room, like the placing of a warm hand atop my heart. I whispered, to the ceiling, “Would it be so dreadful a mistake, do you think?”