by Juliana Gray
“What, then?”
He gestured with one hand. “There’s a great mystery here, an enigma of such breadth and power that it takes my breath away. It has been chasing me all my life. It has driven men to their deaths, out of lust for it. And I find I should like to undertake this final attempt, before I resign myself to the life that God in his wisdom has apparently ordained for me.”
He was wearing a tweed suit almost identical to the one worn by Silverton, except gray-toned rather than brown. The color suited his square dark features and pale skin. I thought he looked as if he were made of the same stone as the island around us, rugged and ascetic, and that God was perhaps mistaken: this man did not belong in England at all.
“There is another thing,” he went on, glancing down the hill, where Lord Silverton, a cane hooked over his elbow, was assisting the lady Desma over a patch of rubble. “I cannot bear to see her unhappy.”
“As you like,” I said.
The duke’s eyes narrowed as he watched the progress of his beloved. He reached into his pocket and said, in a low voice, “I am, however, more than a little concerned for her.”
“She should not attempt such a climb, in her condition.”
“It isn’t that. She’s as strong as a mountain goat, I assure you. But she gave me this last night.” He held out his hand and opened his fingers, and upon his palm rested the medallion from Knossos, the one I had returned to Desma two nights ago, flashing in the sunshine.
“But that’s hers! A protection against death. Would she not want to keep it for her own safety? Carrying a child?”
“I am afraid, Miss Truelove, most deeply afraid that she means to leave me here, and join her lover.”
“Join him? But he’s—” I looked into the duke’s grave eyes and comprehended him. “Surely not. Surely she would not end her own life, and that of her babe.”
With his thumb, he turned the medallion over, revealing the double ax etched into the metal. “I have not touched her,” he said quietly. “I have offered her nothing but friendship and respect, though my true desire is, at times, almost impossible to suppress.”
“Perhaps if she knew the nature of your devotion . . .”
“She loves him.” He shook his head and replaced the medallion in his pocket. “She loves him with a tenacity that cannot be turned, or even dented. It is ageless. She would die for him without a second thought, and such is my—my admiration for her, I would allow her to do it. Because to do otherwise is to condemn her to a lifetime of unending sorrow.” He turned and levered himself easily up the boulder, extending his good left arm to assist me in following him. “But you will keep an eye on her for me, won’t you, Miss Truelove?”
I took his hand and climbed up beside him. “I will do whatever you ask of me, sir.”
“Good. Now head up that path and ask Mr. Higganbotham how much longer we are to tramp along before reaching our destination. And I shall go back to make sure she gets up this damned path without giving birth along the way.”
“According to Plutarch,” said Mr. Higganbotham, rearranging his maps, “Lycomedes pushed Theseus directly off the cliff and into the sea. Now, my best calculation places the ancient palace somewhat to our south and east, making this headland the obvious place to take one’s unsuspecting guest for a doomed afternoon walk . . .”
I turned to Silverton and whispered, “We’re on a fool’s errand, aren’t we?”
“My dear Truelove,” he whispered back, “the truth is immaterial. We have only to convince the lady that we have reached the exact spot of the poor bloke’s demise.”
“You would deceive her?”
He tilted the glass bottle over his tin cup and allowed a stream of water to fall inside. “It’s not a deception. He might just as well have plunged off here as anywhere. Water?”
“Thank you.” I accepted the cup from his hand and shifted my eyes to the figure of the duke, who was pacing along the cliff path nearby, turning over an object in his pocket that I knew to be the medallion. I had done much the same trick, hadn’t I, as we walked along the road in Naxos.
But you will keep an eye on her for me, won’t you, Miss Truelove?
I returned my gaze to the point in which I had last noticed Desma. She was still there, sitting upon a solitary boulder, staring out to sea. Her gaze was steady and unblinking, and her hair was loose, moving in the breeze. The falling sun turned her face to gold.
“She is beautiful,” I murmured.
“Desma? Oh, yes. Quite.” Next to me, Silverton fidgeted with the bottle, spinning the glass slowly between his large hands. His injured leg stretched out stiffly before him, and his cane lay across his thighs. I sensed a turn in the subject of his thoughts, and before I could rise and walk away, he said, “You have not given me an answer, you know.”
For an instant, I considered saying, disingenuous: An answer to what?
I lifted the tin cup and drank thirstily. “I miss your pipe, at a moment like this. Did you leave it on board?”
“Yes. But I thought you disliked my pipe.”
“The human spirit can grow accustomed to anything, it seems.”
“Am I to take hope from this?”
I looked again at the duke, who had come to a stop and now stood on the dusty earth, perhaps thirty yards from where Desma sat on her boulder. His head was bowed, and his fist clutched the medallion in his pocket. The gentle afternoon light outlined his shoulders, so that he seemed even broader than before. Nearby, Mr. Higganbotham fussed with his map, stood, and sat down again. The breeze was picking up, mild and dulcet, alive with salt and greenness. My heart seemed to be straining in my chest: for what, I could not say.
“A new wife may not look kindly on her husband’s female secretary, after all,” said Silverton, when I did not reply.
I laughed and finished the water. “I doubt this particular young wife will care one way or another.”
The duke took a hesitant step, and another. He seemed to be scrutinizing the ground before him for some unknown object. He had taken off his hat, which he clutched in his left hand, while the right fist was still balled in his jacket pocket, where he kept the medallion. I found myself mesmerized by his movements, which were uncharacteristic of him: small and jerky, as if he were not quite in control of his own limbs.
“Would you care?” Silverton asked softly.
“I suppose that depends on the husband.”
“Me, for example?”
My heart beat at a ferocious pace, crashing against the wall of my chest as if to shatter my ribs. Ahead of me, the duke kept moving forward in that curious marionette way, still examining the ground, still gripping the medallion. My mouth had gone quite dry, and the warmth of the sun on my face turned suddenly oppressive.
“In that case, I should care very much indeed. But you knew that already. You know my fatal jealousy.”
He hesitated. “If you want to call it that. I was rather gratified that you gave a damn. But I assure you, in future—”
“There is no point in making assurances you cannot keep. I am jealous by nature, and you are promiscuous by nature.”
“Oh, I say—”
“So we are unsuited in the most fundamental point of marriage.”
The duke kept moving. In a moment, I realized, he would reach the edge of the cliff. The tin cup slid from my fingers, into the dust.
“Dash it all, that’s not true. For God’s sake, I don’t go to bed with women because I can’t help it. I go to bed with them because—”
I leapt to my feet. “Look to the duke!” I screamed.
Now I come to the crux of my story, on which hinges all the rest of my life.
You will possibly not believe me, when I tell you what came next. I should not have believed it myself, if I encountered the incident in a book or a play, and indeed I don’t know how to describe th
e sequence of events in a manner that properly communicates their double nature: a physical reality that is etched in minute and exquisite clarity in my memory, and an agency that can only be described as supernatural.
I shall stick to the facts.
At my cry of warning, my companions sprang into movement. Silverton, whose reflexes were naturally the sharpest, reached the duke first, in an athletic blur of his long and golden limbs that stirred the very dust from the rocks. He reached for Olympia’s shoulders, but they were no longer there: the duke was falling forward, arms outstretched, to land on his knees at the extreme edge of the cliff, his muscular frame supported by I know not what unseen force.
To my left, Desma released an inhuman shriek. Mr. Higganbotham ran toward the two men, but I was there before him, wrapping my arms around the duke’s waist while Silverton took hold of his left shoulder.
As I have said before, the Duke of Olympia was a burly, well-built man, but between my efforts and those of the exceptionally strong Lord Silverton, we ought to have dragged him from the brink at once.
We could not.
I dug my heels into the pebbly earth and strained with all my might; above me, Silverton wrapped his arm across the duke’s chest and heaved backward. But it was as if gravity itself had taken on a mighty new strength, holding His Grace at the cliff’s dizzy edge, and though I could see very little from my vantage, I felt that the duke was straining, too. That his outstretched arms contained an object of immeasurable weight, and it was this unknown mass—not the duke himself—that drew us inexorably forward, until the cool, vast emptiness of the chasm beneath us struck my forehead, and my heels skidded against the rock.
“He’s slipping!” I gasped, and I thought my arms should pop from their sockets, so great was the burden upon them. Silverton roared with effort, or perhaps the pain in his injured limbs, unable to loosen his grip in order to achieve a better point of leverage. I remember the texture of tweed against my cheek, the briny scent of the sea crashing below us, the taste of dirt in my mouth, the horrible scrape of my shoes against the rock. The stretching pain in the muscles of my upper arms and in the joints of my fingers, which I had locked together against the duke’s hard belly, so I would not lose hold of him.
A weight dropped next to mine on the rock, and for an instant I thought it was Mr. Higganbotham. But the bones were too small, and the panting that came from its lungs was shallow and high in pitch, and as she gasped out desperate words in a strange tongue, I realized the body belonged to Desma. She was reaching for something just beneath the edge of the cliff, something I couldn’t see, and I tried to tell her to go back, that she was going to crush the child in her womb, she was going to tumble from the cliff to her death, but I was too tired to speak, too exhausted of oxygen to form the words.
My fingers began to slip against the wool. Next to me, Desma was making urgent noises, repeating words in a desperate, aching cry; she maneuvered her clumsy body to the farthest possible point and grasped frantically into the air.
My God, I thought, maybe she loves him after all.
And then, without warning, the balance shifted.
For an instant, I thought that a gust of wind had drafted upward from the sea and caught the duke, forcing him from the brink. The effect was so sudden, I found myself tumbling backward, drawing His Grace with me. Silverton uttered a surprised oath as the duke fell back on his chest, and we dropped together in a heavy, panting, sweating tangle: limbs and breath and bones all crushed atop each other, while I lay stunned at the bottom, unable to move.
“Get off her!” shouted Silverton, and the weight shifted, the limbs untangled. I found fresh air and sucked it into my lungs. The final body lifted from mine and I rolled to my side, wheezing and grateful.
Desma was keening softly in her foreign tongue, repeating a single word, over and over. My eyes were closed, the lids too heavy to lift, and so I did not, in that first moment, realize the extraordinary truth.
I heard Silverton’s voice above me, saying softly, My God.
And Mr. Higganbotham, answering, incredulous: Who is he?
Befuddled, I thought that perhaps some native walker had stumbled upon our party. At the outside edge of my perception, I heard a male voice, unusually deep, utter a few guttural noises that might have been words. Desma seemed to be answering him.
Someone moved heavily on the ground next to me.
It can’t be, whispered the Duke of Olympia.
I opened my eyes.
A man lay before me, enormous in size, wearing a simple tunic made of a dirty homespun cloth. His skin had the dark, leathery cast of an ancient tannery; his hair, shorn to no more than a half inch in length, was nobly dusted with gray. His neck was so thick and muscular, ribbed with tendons, that I was reminded of the trunk of a tree.
But it was his head that drew my fullest attention: not because of his arresting features, or because his eyes were now blinking in a kind of disordered shock, but because his face was framed by Desma’s two loving hands, and she was pressing a kiss upon his lips that, in the manner of a fairy tale, brought him inevitably back to life.
Epilogue
We remained nine days on Skyros. On the morning of our departure, I woke early and walked along the cliffs, near the headland where Tadeas had first appeared, contemplating the vast froth of the sea as it encountered the rocks below.
The weather had grown warmer and steadier as each day passed, and though I wore my cardigan jacket of thick worsted wool, I left the buttons undone, and the ends flapped against my legs as I walked. The morning breeze was sweet against my cheek. Presently I found the opening of the path that we had taken up the hillside, the steepening of the track as it met the cliffs. There was the ledge on which I had sat with Lord Silverton, just before the strange miracle unfolded in my arms; there was the boulder that had borne Desma. I leaned against it and folded my arms.
“It is really most ill-advised for a young lady to walk by herself, so early in the morning, and among a foreign people,” said a voice behind me.
I did not bother to turn, nor even to soften the squarish set of my shoulders. “What a very great relief,” I said. “I’d begun to fear that you had discovered some other fortunate young lady to torment.”
“I assure you, if I had any choice in the matter, I should be comfortably home in England.”
“Any choice? You have all the choice in the world, haven’t you? You’re hardly obliged to inflict yourself on me.”
“Well, you are quite wrong there.”
She said this in a subdued voice, not her usual stately pronouncement at all, and curiosity provoked me to turn around and look at her. She was wearing a sensible walking costume of gray tweed jacket and matching skirt, and she had settled herself on the ledge, though her short legs did not quite reach the ground, giving her an almost childlike aspect. I admired her hat, made of gray wool felt and a single black feather, which tilted just an inch or two to one side and beautifully suited her soft, round face. Her cheeks were pink with exercise, and she appeared to be a trifle winded, though her bulbous Hanover eyes shone as blue and bright as the promising spring sky above us.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Don’t you? You’re a clever, impertinent sort of girl. Surely you realize that you are the one who calls me to attend you.”
I am not often struck dumb—the phenomenon seemed to have afflicted me more frequently in this single journey than in all my preceding years—but as the Queen’s words passed into the soft Aegean air, I found myself speechless. I fastened my attention on the single black feather that wavered above Her Majesty’s hat, and my hands tightened around my elbows.
“I have been thinking about your mother,” she went on.
I opened my mouth and filled my lungs. The briny air returned some measure of vigor to my limbs.
“What about my mother?”
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“How, despite sharing so many of your more disagreeable traits—her stubborn impertinence perhaps the least among them—she was at last persuaded to do the sensible thing. Marrying your father, I mean. I believe she had found some measure of peace when she died.”
“Indeed. She expired as soon as she became happy. An inspiring moral, don’t you think?”
The Queen sniffed and looked away. “Would you rather she had died unhappy?”
“No. But I think it hardly matters whether we are happy or unhappy. It’s all the same, in the end.”
“I suppose that’s true.” She heaved a little sigh and arranged her hands in her lap. She wore a pair of black kid gloves, somewhat worn. “Regardless, we have, upon reflection, reconciled ourselves to the prospect of your union with his lordship, and are prepared to offer you our most sincere wishes for your contentment in that fruitful institution to which, above all, God commends us.”
“I beg your pardon. I have not agreed to Lord Silverton’s proposal of marriage.”
“My dear girl. You can hardly refuse.”
“Can’t I?”
“In the first place, you are unlikely to receive a better one. In the second, you may be able to do him some good, which is no small consideration in the eyes of Providence—”
“Do him good? What about my own inclinations? Are those not to receive any consideration at all?”
“As to that,” she said, a little more softly, “I believe I have your own moral welfare in mind, most of all.”
“My moral welfare.”