Lament for Leto (Mrs. Bradley)

by Gladys Mitchell

  “What are the odds?” asked Simon. “I will buy as many shares in Mary as I can afford. She is not of those to whom things happen. She is just an English unofficial rose and would be perfectly safe anywhere. Look at the way she gave in after making that so spirited outburst.”

  “I offer four to one on Mary,” said Hero. “I keep all my odds very simple and straightforward because I am not good at arithmetic. I do not understand all this hundred to eight thing. It is too complicated.”

  “What about long-priced outsiders?” asked Julian. “Personally, I’m always game for a gamble.”

  “Well,” said Simon, looking over Hero’s shoulder, “we’re left with Mrs. Cowie, soon—” he glanced at Dick—“to become Mrs. Owen. Also we have Mr. Owen himself.”

  “Dad ought to get some protection,” said Roger, “if only from that stepmother person I am not going to have, so, whatever the odds are, I shall try to shorten them.”

  “He is under Scorpio,” said Hero. “I will give six to one. He is a botanist, too, and if there is a rare plant he will climb up to reach it, or he will go out in the hot sun, or he will place himself in the power of some unscrupulous guide who will push him down a mountain and rob him of his wallet, perhaps.”

  “If Apollo could slay Pytho, would he burke at a mere scorpion?” asked Dame Beatrice, mildly amused by the conversation.

  “That is a thought,” agreed Hero. “Very well, I offer three to one on Mr. Owen. Leaves the future Mrs. Owen. She is under Capricorn.”

  “Then she ought to be safe,” said Dick in his mild way. “Goats could be used as sacrificial animals, for they were valuable and surely would have been acceptable if they were offered to Apollo by the herdsmen.”

  “Three to one, then,” said Hero, “because goats are also very sure-footed. Who offers to make a wager? Simon is my clerk and will take the bets and ensure that nobody is cheated.”

  “We’ll have to keep the book open for a bit. We must give the steamer party a chance to take a piece of this,” said Simon. “It would be unfair to leave anybody out. Why don’t we heave to and have a swim?”

  At Mykonos there was a slight complication.

  “We do not go to Delos,” said the two-men crew.

  “Not go to Delos? But why not?” Dick enquired. He spoke without heat, having been so long accustomed to the Irish attitudes of Greek workmen as to realise that some cock-eyed logic lay behind the refusal.

  “Because,” said Archimedes, the father, “it is understood that one goes to Delos by caique.”

  “It is the custom,” said Orestes, his son, a thin, brown youth with the hyacinthine-black hair of his race.

  “I think they have a relative who wishes us to hire a little boat,” said Hero. “I shall talk to them.” She proceeded to do so in a flood of modern Greek which even Dick found impossible to follow. The father and son replied in an equally impassioned style and with wide expressive gestures indicative of astonishment, protest, and downright incredulity. Suddenly the argument was at an end. There were smiles and handshakes all round, and the newly-appeased crew brought the yacht faultlessly to moorings.

  “I explain,” said Hero, “that you pay just the same for hire of the uncle’s boat, but that we must remain on board and that, when we have seen Mykonos, they will wait to meet the rest of our party, and take us, all of us, to Delos, the uncle’s caique being paid for just the same.”

  “But the rest of our party will land on Mykonos as soon as the steamer puts in,” said Dick, “and hire their own caique, as is the custom, for Delos. There was no real need for us to come to Mykonos at all, as I tried to explain to them earlier. We could have had an extra day on Delos under my original arrangement.”

  “I wish very much to stay on Mykonos,” said Simon. “It is gay here, and Dame Beatrice will wish to purchase souvenirs. Besides, the white houses are so pretty, and the streets are so narrow and there are so many it is like a maze. Then there are the little squares—so charming—you will all enjoy it so much. I like very much to stay here.”

  “We do like Papa Ronald says,” said Hero, giving him a warning glance.

  “Oh, I am willing to be at your disposal,” said Dick, with the indulgence he always accorded his adopted son and his ward.

  “So we please Papa Ronald,” said Hero emphatically, “and we go to Delos, as he wishes, and meet the rest of them there.”

  Delos was very much smaller than Mykonos and it appeared, unlike the gay and popular island, to be covered in ruins. It was composed of nothing more than a great chunk of granite and gneiss, eroded fantastically by the waves and the weather. Even the landing-place seemed to be among ruins, and, besides being bare and treeless, the island was without streams. Even the Sacred Lake was completely dry. Water for the island was collected in hillside cisterns when it rained.

  A modern jetty, at which the yacht tied up, separated the ancient sacred harbour, which was partly enclosed by a strangely-shaped horned peninsula of bare rock, from the modern commercial dock. Nearby was the ancient agora and north of this the reputed Shrine of the Bulls and the precinct of Apollo.

  Simonides expressed his disappointment.

  “I wish to have remained on Mykonos,” he said. “Here everything is so dead. It depresses me. I shall go back there.” He exchanged glances with Hero.

  The crew’s relative who, having been hired, had faithfully followed the yacht into harbour, and took the crew and Simon back to Mykonos in his boat. If Dick was disappointed that his adopted son had deserted the pilgrimage even for one night, he gave no sign of it. He asked what Simon would do for accommodation, but Hero assured him that there were plenty of people with rooms to let on Mykonos, and this he knew to be true, since, the moment the party had landed on the holiday island, touts of all descriptions had surrounded them, making spirited offers of rooms in the local houses.

  “I think,” he said to the remainder of the party, “that I should like to go ashore alone this evening to pay my respects to Sir Rudri’s memory. It is fitting, I think, that I should visit the birthplace of Apollo alone.” Dame Beatrice agreed, and Roger, who had his own ideas as to what was fitting, watched him go ashore and then went to her and asked whether she would mind if he went exploring on the island for an hour or so.

  Sympathising with his desire for more physical activity than the resources of the yacht could provide, she laid only two injunctions upon him. He was to avoid all contact with Dick, who must be left to his own devices, and he must return to the yacht in time for supper. She meant by this that she did not want him to explore among rocks and broken masonry after dark, but was far too tactful to say so. Roger promised that he would come back in plenty of time for the evening meal. As, in the absence of the crew, he had decided to cook this himself and was greatly looking forward to having the run of the boat’s stores and of being in sole charge of the tiny galley, she was hopeful that the promise, barring circumstances beyond his control, would be faithfully kept.

  He told her nothing about his shore-going when he returned, but went zestfully below to begin the culinary preparations. Dick returned half an hour later and joined her in the comfortable saloon. He was silent while he poured out sherry, which she preferred to anything native to the country, and he remained silent until he had recharged the glasses. Then he said:

  “Dame Beatrice, have you ever had premonitions?”

  “I have never called them that,” she replied. “You refer, no doubt, to a feeling that disastrous events may occur in the near future. I have always found, however, that the feeling is based on matters which can be foreseen and that therefore, more often than not, the dangerous situation can be averted.”

  “I refer to this ridiculous gambling game which Hero has invented.”

  “I believe the idea originated with Mary Cowie, when she asked Julian Suffolk for his date of birth.”

  “Yes, but it was Hero who took up the idea and turned it into this foolish and dangerous business.”

  “Fo
olish it may be, but why do you consider it dangerous?”

  “I hardly know. One can hardly call it impious, I suppose, to invoke the protective powers of Apollo, since nobody worships him nowadays . . .”

  “ ‘And all the train that loved the stream-bright side

  Of the poetic mount with him are gone

  Beyond the shores of Styx and Acheron.

  In unexploréd realms of night to hide,’ ” quoted Dame Beatrice in her beautiful voice.

  “Yes, exactly. All the same—”

  “And yet, you know,” Dame Beatrice went on, “she* continues by referring to ‘some nameless power of nature,’ and concludes:

  ‘The shepherds meet him where he herds the kine.

  And careless pass him by, whose is the gift divine.’ ”

  “So you do think there might be something! How heartily Sir Rudri would have agreed with you!” exclaimed Dick.

  “Suppose you tell me all about it,” suggested Dame Beatrice, putting down her glass.

  “Well, of course, I’ve been on Delos before. The French dig here, you know, and I’ve always been interested in their work. By this I mean that I know my way about the excavations. I thought I would go first to the Terrace of the Lions. It leads to the remains of the temple of Leto and towards where the sacred palm tree is supposed to have stood, and under which the god and his sister were born.

  “On the way I loitered, admiring all the remarkable and painstaking work of the French archaeologists. First I lingered in the agora, which is easily reached from this mole, and then threaded my way through to the Hypostyle Hall. From there I went to the Lion Terrace, intending to proceed to the Leto temple and, only after all that, to come back to my main objective, the temple of Apollo. I mention all this by way of introduction because I wish to make it clear that, if anyone had so wished, it would have been a simple matter to follow me and that there would be plenty of cover, actually, for anybody who had been minded to track my movements.”

  “But why should anyone wish to follow you?” Dame Beatrice asked, her mind busy with recollections of Dick’s revelations of his experiences on the Acropolis and in the Athens Museum. She found that she was beginning to have more doubts about the little man’s mental equilibrium. Could he be suffering from persecution mania, she wondered.

  “Well, that is what I ask myself,” said Dick. “Why should anyone wish to follow and annoy me? But, as you see, I am not willing to accept a supernatural explanation of my experience if a natural reason for it can be entertained.”

  “Pray continue. Your narrative promises to be most interesting.” Was this going to be another ventriloquist outbreak, she wondered. If so, it must involve either Julian or Roger.

  “Well, I got no further than the Lion Terrace. If you have not actually seen it, no doubt you have seen photographs. It consists of a number of figures made of marble from Naxos and dating from the seventh century. These lions are not all of the same size, and were probably dedicated by different Naxian families in rivalry, it seems, with one another, for Naxos at the time—somewhere between 625 and 600 B.C.—held lordship over Delos.

  “Well, as I reached the first of these majestic archaic sculptures, it spoke to me.” He paused in a manner which indicated that he was giving her a chance to ask a question, but she remained silent. This shook Dick. He gulped and then went on, “I suppose you think it was a ventriloquist again, do you? I am bound to say that what with the vast loneliness, the bare ground, the dark mountain, the stark pillars in the distance, the wide sky and the utter silence, I was, I am not ashamed to admit, extremely startled, no matter what was the explanation of the voice.”

  “What did the lion say?”

  “Oh, a lot of gibberish.”

  “In English?”

  “No, in Greek.”

  “What kind of gibberish?”

  “Oh, tags of this and that, you know—nothing which made much sense.”

  “For instance?”

  “Well, translated it went something like this: ‘He is a plotter without a sense of shame. All he wants is to make a profit for himself. We only joined this expedition to please him, and now he has tripped us up and thrown us off our balance. We are entitled to compassion. Be merciful to us, remembering your own father. At first Clytemnestra would not listen. She was a sensible woman. But now he has carried her off to his house and, owing to your cowardice, she is his willing captive.’ That was it, so far as I can remember.”

  “Dear me!” said Dame Beatrice. “It reminds me vaguely of extracts from the first book of The Iliad coupled with snippets from The Odyssey. Set your mind at rest, my dear Mr. Dick. This is a piece of schoolboy mischief like the other—nothing more.”

  The boat bringing passengers by public transport from Mykonos docked at about a quarter to ten on the following morning, and the crew of the caique, bringing Simon, were a little earlier. Reunited, the Apollo party roamed the island with other sightseers, visited the excavations, and climbed to the sacred cave on Mount Kynthos past the Roman house. They inspected the ancient cisterns, home of innumerable frogs, saw the Temple of Isis, partly reconstructed and now the most beautiful of the ruins, and from the summit of the mountain, after an easy climb, they obtained a view of the rest of the Cyclades. Gazing at the circle of green islands, the blue of the sea, and the even wider blue of the sky, Henry Owen was moved to utterance. He took possession of Chloe Cowie’s not unwilling hand and murmured amorously.

  “Blue for the hope of thee, green for the joy of thee!”

  “Her name is not Eiladh,” said Hero, who overheard him and whose reading appeared to be wide. “And I myself,” she added, sotto voce, “would not call her ‘a bonnie wee lass.’ ”

  Dick had intended the next stage of the pilgrimage to be to the giant statue of Apollo on Naxos and to the sixth-century temple on the tiny island called Palati, but when he mentioned that the statue might not be that of the god, and that of the temple nothing but a doorway twenty feet high was left standing, the others, except for Dame Beatrice, who did not care either way, put it to him that, as there were other and perhaps more rewarding sites to visit, the pilgrimage should by-pass Naxos and Amorgos, and go on to Santorin, where they wanted to visit the hill-town of Thera.

  “There’s a fortune-teller on Amorgos,” said Julian casually, “or so I read somewhere or other. I believe he does it with coffee grounds, but I suppose anybody who knows the symbolism could tell your fortune that way, if you believe in that kind of thing.”

  “You don’t mean you could?” demanded Chloe.

  “Oh, yes,” replied Julian, in an off-hand tone. “I used at one time to do it to amuse people—girls, of course. It was one of my parlour tricks when I was at College. You’d be surprised how popular it was.”

  “But I can tell you don’t believe in it,” said Mary.

  “Oh, as to that, well—no. All the same, I can recall one or two pretty odd coincidences. There’s one, in fact, that I shall never forget. One of the girls had the sign for death in her cup. Of course I didn’t tell her that. I told her she’d soon be taking a long journey. She was killed in a car crash ten days later. Mere coincidence, of course, but there it was.”

  “We will have a séance tonight in the saloon,” said Hero, “and Julian shall tell us who is going to die.”

  “My dear Hero, we are all going to die,” said Dick, in a tone of mild expostulation, “and in any case, as Julian has just told us, he very rightly does not play upon people’s feelings to any serious extent, so he certainly will not pander to your morbid curiosity.”

  “Oh, come now, Papa Ronald!” protested Hero, getting up from her deck-chair and standing behind his with her hands around his neck. “Not to be so stuffy! I spoke only in fun. But we shall have our séance, just the same, won’t we?”

  “Unless you’d prefer to have me read your hand,” said Roger. “I’m not squeamish. I’ll tell each of you just how long you have to live. This is the line to look at.” He stood w
ith his back to the rail, facing the row of deck-chairs, and held up his right hand palm outwards. With the forefinger of his left hand he traced the long vein which ran from above the thumb down to the wrist. “My own life will be a short and a merry one,” he said.

  “It’ll be short, all right, if you don’t sit down and shut up,” said his father. “Go and help steer the boat or something. We prefer your room to your company.”

  The southern islands of the Cyclades, some near, some far, slid by on either side of the yacht and nothing but the two tall masts cut the blue of the Aegean sky. Around the coasts of Naxos, Amorgos, Astipalaia, and Milos creamed the almost tideless sea, while between them and the lesser islands the waters were the colour of dark grape-hyacinths.

  “Halcyon!” murmured Chloe Cowie, before she fell asleep in her deck-chair. Mary and Hero looked at her with different reasons for hatred.

  After her first taste of the brew dished out by the Greek boatmen, Hero had undertaken to make the after-dinner coffee. Her method was simply to pour boiling water over the coffee grounds and leave the result to settle, but, on the whole, she was fairly successful. The yacht was amply supplied with crockery, and there were two sets of coffee cups, half-a-dozen in each. In one set the cups were of different colourings but of the same pattern. In the other set they also could be distinguished from one another, for they were figured with imitations of Greek vase-paintings, and at an early stage in the cruise each of the original passengers had made personal choice from these and guarded it jealously from the four who had joined the yacht at Delos.

  Roger did not care for coffee, so had not chosen a cup, but he always handed theirs to the others, a duty insisted upon by his tutor. Having a quick eye and the advantage of a youthful and unspoiled memory, he had never made a mistake in carrying out his simple task. He knew that his father had a brown cup, Chloe an orange one, Edmund a dull green, and Mary had chosen blue—to match her eyes, said the spiteful Hero. Of the original yacht party, Dick’s cup figured the Warrior Vase from Mycenae with its procession of long-nosed, spear-carrying foot-soldiers, Hero’s had a geometric pattern but with a picture of a horse and a warrior round the rim, Simon’s also carried a geometric design, but it had no picture and only an embryo key-pattern as its main feature, Julian’s showed Odysseus blinding the Cyclops Polyphemus, and Dame Beatrice’s cup had a pattern of Athenian revellers copied, so Dick informed her, from a cup by the Brygos painter which she must go to Wurzburg to see. The giver of that pictured feast had ended up with a nasty hangover, he told her, and he pointed out the drunken figure of the host.