This rather cryptic observation was explained a short time later, when we reached the top of the stairs. Markos knocked on the brightly painted blue door, which was opened by an elderly woman in a long and rather shapeless black dress. Upon recognizing her visitor, she launched into a flood of impassioned Greek. I would have thought she was angry with him, had it not been for the fact that her wiry arms circled his neck with the strength of a vise, and she interrupted herself several times to plant a loud, smacking kiss on his tan cheek.
He finally extricated himself, saying in English, “But you must not ignore your other guest, YiaYia. I have brought someone to meet you. This is Despoinis Robin Fletcher. Robin, Kyria Odessa Rondo—my grandmother.”
Did they shake hands in Greece? I wasn’t sure, but I decided it was better to make the gesture rather than insulting her through ignorance. “How do you do?”
She took my hand in her own gnarled one, and regarded me with black shoe-button eyes. “You are English?”
She was not nearly as fluent as her grandson, but her English probably compared favorably to my own schoolgirl French, to say nothing of my nonexistent Greek. “I’m an American.”
She gave a little grunt that might have indicated anything from grudging acceptance to outright scorn, but at least she didn’t shut the door in my face. “Come, sit!” she urged, flapping her hands in the direction of the small, dimly lit parlor.
I followed Markos’s example, and sat down beside him on a worn sofa. “Robin is a passenger on the cruise ship Oceanus,” he explained.
“She is not traveling alone!” The elderly woman clearly had no opinion of the sort of female who would undertake such a journey on her own, so I was glad to be able to reassure her on this point.
“No, I’m accompanying my aunt. She is a widow,” I added by way of explanation.
She bent her sharp black gaze upon me once again, and nodded in approval. “This is good. You are a good niece.”
“Thank you. I hope I am a good niece, for she is a very good aunt.”
This comment delighted her, and her laughter was far out of proportion to what the remark warranted; apparently my lack of Greekness was forgiven. “You did well to bring her to me, Markias. It is past time you find a good girl and settle down to a life of—a life of—” Her broken English failed her.
“Safety,” I said demurely.
“I think ‘domesticity’ is the word you want, YiaYia,” Markos said, flushing. “But it isn’t like that. I am merely showing Robin the sights of Mykonos. She already has a boyfriend.”
My face flushed. Markos had made no mention of the fact that I was no longer wearing my ring, other than suggesting I leave it with the purser for safekeeping. And yet, he’d said I had a boyfriend, not a fiancé. Did he think I’d broken my engagement? Should I correct that assump-tion? In any case, Kyria Rondo gave me little time to ponder the question.
“Boyfriend!” She gave a snort of derision. “A girl may have a hundred boyfriends, but these are nothing to one husband.” She bent that sharp black gaze upon me again. “So, you are seeing the sights? You have seen the windmills, yes?”
“Oh yes,” I said, welcoming the change of subject. Alas, Kyria Rondo wasn’t finished with us yet.
“When I was a girl, I would take the barley from my father’s farm to be ground. My father, he would send me to the mill because I could get a good price. I was very beautiful in those days, and the men at the mill liked to look at me.”
I could readily believe it. Her face might be lined with wrinkles, but she possessed the kind of bone structure that, combined with those dark eyes, must have made her a stunning beauty in her youth.
“Markias, now, he is the one to show you all the sights. He has always liked the, what do you call it, the old things?”
“Antiquities?” I suggested.
“Yes, the antiquities.” She gave me an approving look. “It is good to know that he can appreciate young things, too.”
Markos leaped up from the sofa, looking more flustered than I’d ever seen him. If I hadn’t liked his grandmother already, that fact alone would have won me over. “I think we’d better be going, YiaYia,” he said. “We have other things to see before Robin must return to the ship.”
I said goodbye to Kyria Rondo, politely deflecting her invitation to come see her again, but all the while my brain was spinning. Markos had said I must return to the ship, but he’d made no mention of the fact that he worked on board the Oceanus. Clearly, his grandmother didn’t know—and he didn’t mean for her to know. Why not? Granted, “my grandson, the ship’s photographer” didn’t have quite the same cachet as “my grandson, the doctor” or “my grandson, the lawyer,” but surely it was nothing to be ashamed of.
“Are you hungry?” Markos asked, once we had descended the stairs into the street. “I know a little place where we can get a good lunch without having to fight the tourists for a table.”
I agreed to this, and after we were served platters of moussaka and a green salad with Kalamata olives and feta cheese, I remarked on the puzzle. “Your grandmother doesn’t know you’re working on the Oceanus.”
“No. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my job onboard the ship,” he added hastily, “but YiaYia would not understand.”
“Why not? She seemed pretty sharp to me.”
He grinned at that. “Oh, she is—sometimes terrifyingly so. But I studied something else, and she wouldn’t under-stand why I’m not doing that.”
“The ‘old things,’ ” I said, hazarding a guess.
He surprised me by admitting to it. “Yes. When I was about ten years old, a well was being dug on my family’s farm—”
“Would this be the same farm where the barley was grown that your beautiful young grandmother once took to be milled?”
“The very same,” he said, smiling. “They turned up archaeological remains from the period of Roman occupation—nothing of great value in itself, but taken all together, of sufficient importance for the state to take an interest. In Greece, you see, antiquities discovered on private property belong to the nation, as they are part of our shared history.”
“Bad luck for you and your family,” I remarked, not without sympathy.
“Oh, but those who own the land on which they were found are compensated by the state. Whether that compen-sation truly represents what the discovery might be worth—at auction, for instance, or on the black market—is a matter of debate, of course, but in my family’s case it was enough to fund my education in a manner my parents could not have provided on their own.”
“I should think a ten-year-old boy would be over the moon,” I said. “Like discovering buried treasure practically in his own back yard.”
“Exactly! I am told I made a nuisance of myself while the dig was in progress, but I also found my calling. When I went off to university—”
“ ‘Off’ where?” I interrupted.
His eyes slid away from mine. “I went to study in England. So many of the finest Greek antiquities have ended up in the British Museum that it seemed only natural—”
“In England,” I echoed, my eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Did you by any chance attend Oxford?”
“Oxford is not the only university in England,” he pointed out.
I was not so easily put off. “Oxford. Yes or no?”
“Well—yes.”
“Do you mean to tell me you have a degree in archaeology from Oxford,” I demanded, “and yet you spend your days taking photos of tourists on a cruise ship?”
“Not all my days,” he pointed out defensively. “Today I’m showing you about Mykonos.”
“No wonder you don’t want your grandmother to know how you’re making a living. It would break her heart, seeing that expensive education going to waste.”
“Jobs in archaeology are hard to come by,” he protested feebly.
“Still, you could try. Maybe you should start with the British Museum. If they have as many Greek artifacts as y
ou say, they might be able to use a native—”
“So I should go to work for the country who stole my own country’s heritage?” he scoffed. “I think not.”
“Well, it’s good to know you’re not bitter.”
He was silent for a long moment before answering. “It is true that Greece did not always recognize the value of her own cultural heritage,” he said at last. “I suppose we must be grateful, in a way, that the British have preserved what might otherwise have been destroyed. But now that Greece—indeed, the whole world—knows the importance of pre-serving one’s cultural heritage, I think the artifacts should be returned to their rightful place, and their rightful owners.”
“And you’ll never bring that change about by spending your days snapping photos of happy people in Hawaiian shirts,” I said bluntly.
“Shall we reach an agreement, Miss Fletcher?” he suggested, stretching his hand across the table toward me. “If you’ll refrain from telling me how to live my life, I’ll resist the temptation to tell you how to live yours.”
I thought of my engagement ring lying in my stateroom all but forgotten, and decided I wasn’t the best person to be giving anyone else advice. “I suppose I’d better accept, if I’m to avoid becoming ‘Miss Fletcher’ again,” I conceded, and took his proffered hand.
We shook on the matter, and left the restaurant in a state of rather cautious détente.
The rest of the afternoon passed in a pleasant blur of sightseeing. We toured the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, where I was no longer surprised at the depth of Markos’s knowledge, and he no longer felt the need to conceal it. We strolled along the waterfront, eventually taking off our shoes and wading along the pebble-strewn beach. Somehow it seemed only natural that sunset should find us at Little Venice, where we leaned against the railing of one of the balconies overhanging the water and watched the sun turning the whitewashed buildings to gold as it slipped below the horizon.
“There is an old tradition here on Mykonos,” he remarked. “They say it is good luck to kiss just as the sun disappears into the waves.”
I was suddenly breathless, and my heart pounded in a way that had nothing to do with the fact that I’d been hiking all over a hilly island. “I would be a fool to turn down any good luck on offer,” I said, my voice hardly above a whisper.
“Very wise,” murmured Markos, lowering his head to mine. “I believe one should not ignore whatever opportunities Fate offers.”
I would have agreed with this very admirable sentiment, but then his lips met mine, and I ceased to think at all.
At last we drew apart, and I looked up at him, trying to read his expression in the rapidly darkening dusk. “That’s not really an ‘old tradition,’ is it?”
“No. Do you mind?”
“No,” I said, and we kissed again.
Chapter 11
Cock a doodle doo!
My dame has lost her shoe;
My master’s lost his fiddle stick
And knows not what to do.
ANONYMOUS, Cock a Doodle Doo
It’s a funny thing about kissing. Some girls hear bells ring; others recall choirs of angels singing. I gradually became aware of a long, low blast like the distant sound of—
“The ship’s horn!” Markos tore his lips from mine. “They’re sounding the ‘all aboard’!”
He grabbed my hand and we ran out of the restaurant, dodging tables and lovestruck couples, then sprinted up the road that led along the waterfront, darting in and out between tourists, fishermen, and small Greek children.
All to no avail. By the time we reached the berth where the ship had docked, the gangway had been withdrawn, and a stout little tugboat was pushing our own much larger vessel out to sea.
“What do we do now?” I puffed, out of breath from our futile race.
He grinned at me. “Are you up for an adventure?”
“That all depends,” I said, but he had already turned away, calling in Greek to a man working aboard a small motorboat, and motioning toward the departing Oceanus.
“Kalá!” Markos pronounced at the end of their brief exchange. “Climb aboard, Robin.”
He took my elbow to help me down into the boat, but I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to go. “Surely we’re not following the ship all the way to Istanbul in that!”
“Of course not!”
“Then what—?”
“Will you please get in? We haven’t time to waste.”
I did as I was told, but no sooner had I settled myself on a cracked vinyl seat covered with a ratty-looking towel than I returned to my questioning. “What, exactly, are we going to do?”
“We’re going to catch the ship.”
“Oh, and I suppose the captain will be delighted to stop for us.”
“No. We’ll have to climb up the side.”
“What?” I spun toward him so fast I almost fell off my seat.
“They won’t stop, but they’ll throw down a ladder for us.”
“Markos, I—I can’t!”
“Of course you can,” he said bracingly. “Only think what a tale you’ll have to tell when you get back home.”
Strangely enough, it was the prospect of recounting the adventure to Gene that gave me courage. Granted, Gene wasn’t at home waiting to hear about my adventures; no, he was somewhere underwater on a submarine, maybe even—jarring thought!—beneath this same sea, where I’d just been gazing out over the water and kissing another man. In its own way, climbing up the side of a moving ship was less daunting than the prospect of explaining my lapse, either to Gene or to myself.
The tugboat had finished its task by this time and was returning to port, but the Oceanus had not yet reached her top speed. As we approached, Markos stood up in the boat, cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed at the top of his voice, “Ahoy! Ahoy there, Oceanus!”
Apparently someone on the bridge heard, or saw, for within minutes two uniformed officers appeared at the deck railing, one of them motioning for us to draw carefully up alongside. The captain of our own little craft did as he was bid, slowing his speed to match that of the ship and maneuvering into position alongside her. A moment later a collapsible ladder was fastened to the deck railing and released, rattling down the side of the ship as it descended.
“Ready for that adventure, Robin?” Markos asked, holding out his hand to me. “I’ll be right behind you.”
For the first time it occurred to me that I was wearing a dress, and that Markos, or the sailor whose boat he had commandeered, would be able to see straight up my skirts. I supposed there was nothing I could do about the man in the boat, but Markos was another matter.
“No, you go first,” I said. “My dress—”
He grinned at me. “If your only concern is modesty, I am convinced you will do very well. I will be watching my step on the ladder, while as for our friend here—” He gestured toward the man at the wheel of the boat, and said something to him in Greek. “He will close his eyes.”
I thought that rather unlikely, as he would have to maintain the boat’s position alongside the ship. Still, I would have to trust that the task would keep him too busy to steal glimpses up my skirt. Markos, however—
“After you,” I insisted.
He agreed to this (with a certain reluctance, I thought), then grasped the ladder and began to climb. I would have followed him, but our Good Samaritan stopped me with a few unintelligible Greek words and a restraining hand on my arm, giving me to understand that I was to wait until Markos had reached the top before beginning my own climb. As soon as Markos was beyond hailing distance I began, perversely, to wish I’d let him follow me up the ladder after all. Without him behind me, there would be no one to steady me if I lost my grip, no one to catch me if I fell—nothing at all between me and the cold embrace of the sea.
At a word from the man at the wheel and a waving motion from the officers at the railing above, I took a deep breath and wiped my clammy hands on my damp skirt, then gra
sped the rung at about the level of my head and stepped over the side of the boat. The ladder lurched crazily beneath my feet, and the wind yanked the hat from my head and flung it into the sea. “Better it than me,” I muttered, and started to climb. I was determined not to look down, so I fixed my gaze instead on Markos, standing at the deck railing beside the two officers. By this time everyone on board knew what was going on, and passengers lined the railing, many calling down encouraging words that were snatched away by the wind long before they ever reached me.
With each step I left the safety of the motorboat farther behind, and at some point I began to think of Sylvia Duprée. Had she still been conscious at this distance from the water? Had she known what was happening to her? After what seemed an eternity, I finally reached the top, and a pair of hands stretched out to help me over the railing. I knew a moment’s panic as the memory of last night’s dream came back to me, a memory of strong bronzed hands pushing me over the deck railing and into the thrashing sea below. But these hands belonged to Markos, and although there were many things I didn’t understand about him, I knew I would be safe with him. I released my white-knuckled grip on the ladder and fell into his waiting arms.
* * *
“You scared us all to death!” Aunt Maggie chided some time later. I had showered the salt spray from my skin and hair, and was now sitting on Maggie’s bed with my feet curled up under me. Maggie, following doctor’s orders, was propped up against the headboard with her injured foot elevated. “I hope your day on Mykonos was worth it.”
I thought of that balcony in Little Venice, where Markos and I had kissed as the sun sank into the sea. Oh yes, it was worth it. “Maggie,” I said thoughtfully, inspecting a fingernail I’d snagged at some point during my climb, “did you ever regret marrying Uncle Herman? Marrying so young, I mean?”
She regarded me keenly. “Does this question have anything to do with the fact that you’re no longer wearing your engagement ring?”
I should have known my sharp-eyed aunt wouldn’t miss a detail like that. “Maybe,” I said, shrugging my shoulders in an attempt at nonchalance that probably didn’t fool her any more than my ringless finger had.
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