The Realms of Gold

by Elizabeth Hunter

  She looked at him quickly, wondering what he meant. Would a Greek woman have given herself without love? Emily didn’t know. She bit her lip. What was the matter with her? She had been straight with him right from the beginning. He knew that she would never have married him at all if he had wanted her to be his wife in fact.

  In her confusion she somehow missed Hermione’s departure. Demis waved to the porter who had gathered up their luggage, and guided her out into the car park where his car was waiting for them.

  ‘It was good of Hermione to bring the car,’ he said. ‘With Barbara away, I thought we might have to take a taxi to my Athens house.’

  ‘Do you have a house everywhere?’ she asked with a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

  ‘I suppose you would say so,’ he answered. ‘Cheer up, you will soon grow used to us.’

  ‘But will your friends grow used to me?’ she countered. The slight stress of the word friends turned it into an insult, but she couldn’t help that. Their encounter with Hermione had shaken her more than she liked to admit.

  He shrugged. ‘Hermione need not worry you,’ was all he said.

  ‘She doesn’t!’ she retorted.

  He lifted an eyebrow, unlocking the car before opening her door for her. ‘If she doesn’t, you should be more careful of the impression you give to my friends,’ he bade her before shutting the door on her. ‘It will be all over Athens that you are less than sure of your power over me. If you had wanted Hermione to think you a secure and happy bride you could have cut her out with the greatest of ease. You had only to take the first step forward yourself and I would have followed your lead with pleasure.’ The door didn’t shut properly the first time and he opened it again, slamming it so hard that the car rocked on its axis.

  ‘She would have told all Athens something unpleasant whatever I did,’ she said as Demis got into the car beside her. ‘It was obvious that she didn’t like me.’

  ‘She didn’t have to.’

  She opened her eyes wide. ‘Why not? Don’t you want your friends to like me?’ There was the slight stress on friends again, but she cared even less than the first time.

  ‘Not the Hermiones of this world. She wouldn’t have come if she had known I had you with me. I told you, you don’t have to worry about her.’

  ‘Because she’s in love with you?’

  He put his hands on the steering-wheel. The sun shone full on them and they looked more golden than ever—and very strong. Emily’s heart beat a tattoo of sudden panic and she looked down at her own hands, noting how white and soft they were against his.

  ‘Are you jealous because she knows what my kisses are like and you do not?’ he asked.

  ‘Certainly not!’ Emily’s lips tightened into a disapproving line. ‘But she certainly wanted me to know that you had kissed her,’ she told him. ‘And that you’d enjoyed it too!’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you marry her?’ Emily demanded.

  ‘Because I didn’t have to, if you want to know.’

  ‘Not even to gain control of her father’s airline?’

  She saw the angry tilt to his face and shivered with a fear she had never known before. She would have recalled the taunt if she could, but it was too late for that.

  ‘My wife,’ he said in measured tones, ‘needs more than mere material possessions to become mine. Hermione fell short of those ideals. Does that satisfy you?’

  She nodded her head blindly. ‘You didn’t have to tell me that.’ She pulled herself together with an effort. ‘But you have to admit that your wife had to bring you a sizeable dowry all the same. You may not have married Hermione for her possessions, but you didn’t marry me for my kisses either!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  It was so quietly spoken and so—so menacing! What had she done? She was alone and at his mercy if he chose to—It was a pity she hadn’t thought of that before! She looked straight ahead of her, very close to tears. What with getting married the day before and the four-hour flight from Heathrow today, it was no wonder that she was on edge. But would he realise that? And would he make allowances for her having an attack of the jitters when she should have been at her very best, just about to meet his family for the first time?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have said that—any of it.’

  ‘Why not, if you thought it was the truth? You usually say what you think, don’t you?’

  ‘Not to you.’

  He turned his full attention back to her. ‘Now, I wonder why that is?’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Could it be that you have something to hide?’

  She was indignant. ‘Of course not! You know everything there is to know about me!’

  A muscle moved in his cheek. ‘Not yet I don’t,’ and Emily was only too conscious of his hidden meaning. ‘But I mean to know you inside and out before I’m through.’ He put up a hand and brushed the angry tears from her face. ‘Destiny calls, my love. It’s nothing to cry about.’

  ‘I’m not your love!’ she denied with a return of spirit. ‘Don’t—don’t pester me, Demis!’

  His hands grasped her by the shoulders, pulling her firmly into his arms. She struggled against him, hitting out wildly, but he was never in any danger of losing control of himself—or her.

  ‘It’s time you learned something about me, sweetheart,’ he said in her ear. ‘Nobody, but nobody, gives me orders. Certainly not a slip of a girl who doesn’t know which way she’s looking. Is that clear?’

  She nodded. ‘But—’

  His eyes glowed. ‘But? But I’ll pester you whenever I want to!’

  ‘You will not!’ she declared. ‘You promised—’

  But she never finished her sentence. His mouth came down on hers and he held her more tightly than ever against him. For a breathless moment she was very frightened. She had always known he was strong, but her own weakness in the face of that strength was a revelation to her. Her lips parted beneath his, against her will, presaging a momentary response to his ardour that shook her to the roots of her being. Humiliation welled up inside her as he finally released her, putting her back into her seat beside him.

  ‘You promised you would leave me alone,’ she said huskily. She sounded like a small, repentant child, unsure of how to make amends to a threatening adult.

  ‘All the time you wanted me to,’ he replied.

  ‘I do want you to!’ she claimed.

  ‘Then you’d better not tempt me to break my word again,’ he answered harshly. ‘You can be the only loser if I do.’

  ‘But I didn’t!’ She swallowed hard, very aware of her recent moment of weakness. ‘Did I?’ she couldn’t resist adding.

  ‘You’re a walking temptation!’ The abrupt reply was completely unexpected. ‘And I suspect you know it. How right I was when I said you’d be a thorn in my flesh. A Thorne by name and a thorn by nature!’

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that many thorned plants produced the prettiest flowers, but the unwisdom of such a remark was apparent even to her.

  ‘Thorns only prick you if you grasp them,’ she said instead. ‘You had better keep your hands to yourself.’

  ‘Some defences are only meant to be overcome,’ he told her dryly, ‘and, as I like a challenge as much as the next man, you’d better keep your prickles out of sight.’

  She pretended not to have heard him, ‘Hadn’t we better be going?’ she suggested.

  His eyes travelled over her face and down over her figure. She was sharply reminded of the way he had looked her over on the train and how much she had resented it.

  ‘Very well, koritsi. For now, you will have your own way. Lunch is waiting for us at my Athens house and, after that, we have a long drive to Nauplia where my brother and sister are waiting to meet you. It is at Nauplia that I prefer to live when my work doesn’t call me away elsewhere. It is the most beautiful of all my houses.’

  ‘I see,’ she said in a strained voice. ‘Will I live there all t
he time?’

  His eyes swept over her again. ‘That depends on you,’ he said.

  The Athens house was one of the old ones left beside the ancient Greek and Roman market places. From its windows the Acropolis dominated the scene with its constant reminder to the modern city that it owed its existence to the old-time gods who even now exacted their due from its citizens. Mighty Athena no longer had her statue in the temple that had been built for her glory, and Poseidon, the blue-haired god of the sea, no longer had to be pacified for losing the city to the goddess of wisdom, but their stories were recounted daily to the swarms of tourists who came to Athens only because of them. Their appeal was as great now as it had ever been at the height of their powers. Theirs was the voice that beckoned to all Europe to return to its beginnings by making a pilgrimage to Greece.

  Emily fell in love with the house at first sight. She loved the crumbling pantiles with their traditional decorations; the casement windows, carefully shuttered against the light; and the decaying elegance of the watered-silk hangings on the walls. Most of all, she was taken with the astonishing assortment of antique furniture that rubbed shoulders happily with the artifacts of centuries. There were several pieces of statuary, but she didn’t know enough about the art to tell if they were any good or not.

  ‘Where did they come from?’ she asked Demis. She had been conscious that he was watching her.

  ‘I bought most of them in Italy,’ he answered. ‘Whenever they came on to the market.’

  ‘Why Italy?’

  ‘They shipped our statues there by the thousands. Why shouldn’t I bring a few of them back where they belong?’

  It must have been a very long time ago, thought Emily. ‘Do you mean Imperial Rome? Julius Caesar, Nero, and so on?’ And when he nodded, she asked him, ‘But couldn’t they carve any statues of their own?’

  His glance was wry. ‘They tried,’ he said. ‘But the genius wasn’t there. Only the Greeks had that. The Roman contribution was to polish their works to give them a soapy look—like this one over here.’

  There was a difference, she saw. The older statues glowed with the life of the marble from which they were created. Beside them, the others looked insignificant, more like very good plastic copies. Poor Rome, she thought. The whole world had been at their feet, but their jealousy of the greater civilisation of Greece had been a constant irritant to them. They had ruled the whole known world, or the greater part of it, but they had initiated very little in the spheres where men have found their greatest inspiration.

  ‘Which is your favourite piece?’ she asked him.

  Demis gave her an amused, knowing look. ‘It isn’t here, but in the house at Nauplia. It’s a copy, as a matter of fact, of a piece in the National Museum. I’ll show it to you this evening.’

  Emily was impressed by the quality of the food with which they were served at lunch. She had always heard that Greek food was Turkish food not quite so well cooked, but Demis Kaladonis evidently expected high standards of cuisine in his establishments. Perhaps that was why he had married her? She could not repress a smile at the thought.

  ‘I feel better with all that food inside me,’ she told him. ‘It’s a long time since I ate a meal I haven’t cooked myself and really enjoyed it. I shall grow fat if I always eat so much.’

  ‘If you also grow contented I shall not complain. It will be good for you to have nothing to do for a while but enjoy yourself. If you do that, I shall be well pleased.’

  She eyed him covertly from beneath her lashes to see if he was serious. How little he knew himself, she thought. At the first hint of her striking out in anything that he disapproved of, he would soon destroy her enjoyment in it. That much she had already discovered about him. No, Mr. Demis Kaladonis, I don’t like you at all! she told herself, eyes lowered. And I like you least of all when you seem to think you have some kind of God-given right to rule my life.

  But this did not stop her taking pleasure in the drive to Nauplia. Even in the wintry sunshine the tawny hills were redolent with a life of their own. It was not surprising that the ancient Greeks had seen gods and other strange beings wherever they had looked. There were moments when she, too, felt that if she turned her head quickly she would catch a glimpse of something strange and not for mortal eyes.

  They went past the Monastery of Daphni, which had previously been a temple of Apollo, and past the ancient sanctuary of Elefsis, where Demeter had given corn to the world and had taught men how to sow and reap the crops in their due seasons. Demis pointed out across the water to where the sea-battle of Salamis had been fought, the turning point in the war between the Greeks and the Persians. He made it sound as though it had happened just the other day, that if he had not seen it with his own eyes, his grandfather certainly had. It gave time a longer perspective than Emily was accustomed to, and she felt her first glimmer of pride in the people she had married into more or less by accident.

  ‘Do we pass over the canal at Corinth? I’ve always wanted to see it,’ she confessed. ‘Wasn’t it cut by the same French company that did the Suez Canal?’

  ‘They planned it and began it,’ he conceded. ‘There were too many land-slips for them to finish it. It was a Greek company that did that. Before, the Corinthians used to haul the ships up manually and let them down on the other side of the isthmus. It was how they made their living. They never wanted the canal to be built for that reason. Not that that stopped many people from trying. The Roman Emperor Nero thought to immortalise his name by cutting the canal. He even dug the first few spadefuls himself, and that was his undoing. The very ground wept blood where he had put in the spade.’

  Emily remembered the story when she saw the straight, sand-yellow sides of the narrow cut that divided the northern part of the mainland of Greece from the southern part, the Peloponnese, sometimes called the Morea because its shape is somewhat reminiscent of a mulberry leaf.

  Demis stopped the car by the canal and bought her a can of fruit juice to drink. Emily would have liked to have spent longer, staring down at the clean sides of the canal, just in case a ship should pass through it while they were there, but she could feel her husband’s impatience to be gone and turned reluctantly back to the car.

  ‘There will be other times,’ he said, closing her door on her. ‘We are not very far from Nauplia now.’ But it seemed far to Emily. Darkness fell and a chilly wind sprang up, making her glad of the protective warmth of the car. She snuggled further down into her seat and allowed her head to lean against the high back, shutting her eyes for a few minutes. The next thing she knew she was being shaken awake and Demis was leaning over her, his face as stern as ever. ‘Wake up, koritsi, we’re home!’

  ‘Home?’ She managed a confused smile. ‘Oh, you mean we’re at Nauplia.’ She sat up quickly, embarrassed that he should have seen her sleeping. Her hand went up to her hair and she patted it, aware that she was not looking her best. ‘You promised to show me your favourite statue,’ she reminded him, to cover the awkwardness of the moment. ‘I’m expecting something wonderful!’

  ‘Come on then,’ he bade her. He put a hand beneath her elbow and hauled her out of the car and on to her feet. ‘You can see it on the way, through the hall, and then you can have a wash before you meet my family.’

  She nodded, wiping the sleep out of her eyes. She felt crumpled and a mess and she blinked in the sudden light that came flooding out when he opened the front door.

  There was no escaping the sculpture after all. It stood as high as she did in the centre of the enormous marble-floored hall. The nude woman representing the goddess Aphrodite was one of the most beautiful and the most detailed she had ever seen. Accosting the goddess was Pan, his intentions obvious, and round their shoulders circled a cupid-like figure whom she took to be Eros. That Pan was not going to win the goddess was made plain by the way she held one of her sandals in her hand, ready to punish him in the way that comes most naturally to women of the eastern Mediterranean, who will whip off their
shoes as the nearest and handiest weapon in any quarrel.

  ‘It’s very frank,’ Emily said at last, feeling called upon to make some comment. ‘Though she’s very lovely.’

  He was looking at her inscrutably. ‘You could have modelled for her if you had your hair done differently.’

  She gave him a quick look. ‘But she’s—’ She broke off, not liking to give him further cause for embarrassment by mentioning the beautiful proportions of the goddess’s figure. ‘You couldn’t possibly know that!’ she added with mounting indignation.

  ‘Of course I know,’ he said. ‘I have seen women before and I can imagine very well what you look like.’ He caressed the marble figure, giving her a familiar pat on the behind. ‘One day you’ll show me if I’m not right! But now you will wish to see the rest of the house and meet your new relations.’ And he added something else in Greek that she didn’t even try to translate. All she could think of was that she would have to pass that statue every time she came into or went out of the house.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The sharp knock at the door disturbed her dreams and brought her reluctantly into the present moment. She opened her eyes and was astonished to see her husband’s tough shape outlined against the french windows that led out on to the balcony. There had been no request from him to come into her room. Well, if he thought he could come and go as he pleased, he had another thought coming! She opened her mouth to tell him exactly that, when he made a compelling gesture demanding her silence.

  ‘Oriste!’

  The door opened to the sound of rattling china, and a maid appeared, carrying a heavy tray laden with coffee and rolls for two.

  ‘Kalimera, kyria, kyrie,’ the maid said, a distinct gleam in her eye. ‘You slept well, yes?’

  ‘Thank you,’ Emily murmured, wishing them both elsewhere and herself back asleep. Her husband said something in Greek to the girl, who smiled at him worshipfully and withdrew with a stifled giggle.