A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (12 page)

‘Dear Lady,' said the Hero, ‘this is not a boon you ask of me, but the wish of my own heart, and I will obey you in this and in all things. But if I am destined to carry away the wife of another man, and to take her for my own, I must know whether she is determined in our course, and whether the crimes of her husband are equal to the sin of abandoning him.'

Said the Lady, ‘You would not ask me this, if you knew what he is. The Prince himself is the author of this cruel custom we have inflicted on your country, and it is
he
, and not my poor brother, who feeds his perverse lusts with the flesh of your Athens youth. He is not a husband to me, but a jailer; he has not honored the majesty of my blood, but rather used it for his own gratification. He has deceived and corrupted my father and defamed my beloved brother, and his time is spent chiefly in drink and in carnal heat, wherein his only pleasure flows from the agony of others.' She unfastened her tunic and bared her limbs to the Hero's gaze, and said, ‘These are the scars I have earned on our nuptial couch . . .'

T
HE
B
OOK
OF
T
IME
,
A. M. H
AYWOOD
(1921)

I
n the same spirit of recklessness, I allowed myself a tumbler of brandy from the squat bottle that arrived in the company of a cold supper and a scandalized waiter. Lord Silverton assured me it was a fine old cognac from a reputable cave in the north of France. I forget the name. In any case, it didn't matter. I was not drinking the brandy for the pleasure of it.

“There's not much to tell, really,” said his lordship, settling his long shanks into an armchair that could only just accommodate them. He held his pipe in one hand and his own glass in another; the remains of the supper littered the round white-clothed table between us. (He had refused to speak business on an empty stomach: an elegant piece of bribery.) “I was cursed at birth with a bit of a head for numbers, and Olympia caught wind of it from my father, who
would
boast about these things whenever you gave him a bottle of wine and a good cigar. So they brought me a snatch of
code to decipher, really a most elementary thing, and I suppose they must have been hard up for help at the time, because the next thing I knew, I was on the boat train for Paris and thence to Leipzig, the most confounded balls-up. Lucky to escape with my hide intact, but there you have it. Caught. Once you start, it's fantastically hard to stop.” He stuck his pipe in his mouth and sucked thoughtfully.

“Why?”

“The excitement, Truelove. The ecstasy of danger.”

I was drinking my brandy in careful sips from the comfort of the slipper chair by the window. I had half expected to hear an outraged gasp as I settled myself into the cushion, but Her Majesty was either mute or gone entirely. My father had fed me my first taste of liquor when I was eighteen, and a heavy fall of snow had caught us unawares during the journey from Petersfield station to Aldermere one winter, the last winter of his life. The cart was stuck fast, the driver drunk and cursing, the horse unable to go on. We had taken shelter in a gamekeeper's cottage a mile or so away, and Father had found a few bottles in the larder, covered in dust. He poured me a glassful while the driver attempted to start a fire in the dirty grate.
Never mind the bite, my dear
, he said.
It will warm you from the inside out.
And he was right. Then the old coals had taken hold at last, and my outsides had warmed, too, and before long we were a jolly threesome, right through that winter night, waiting out the storm in the gamekeeper's cottage with our brandy and our sizzling dirty fire. When the sun rose the next morning, my head ached like the devil, but I thought it had been worth it, to laugh like that with my father and the cart driver, whose name I cannot now recall.

As I swallowed my first drink from the tumbler Lord
Silverton had poured me, I thought I could hear my father's voice:
Never mind the bite, my dear.
The brandy burned down my throat and settled, fuming, in my stomach.

“Have you ever killed anybody?” I asked.

Silverton blew out a shapely cloud of smoke. “Only when the bloke deserved it.”

Another sip.

“I suppose it doesn't matter, your history. What matters is what we're doing now. Who put you up to this, and why? What does Mr. Haywood's disappearance have to do with—well, with whatever it is you do?”

“I haven't a clue, actually.”

“Don't play the idiot, your lordship.”

He laughed. “I'm not
playing
the idiot, my dear Truelove. I'm quite in the dark. Her Grace told me the bare facts of the matter—Max missing, Olympia dead—and asked if I would—”

“Wait a moment.” I shook my head, because the pungency of the brandy was already blunting the edges of my intellect. “
Olympia?
Do you mean to say that His Grace—that his death—” I couldn't say the word.

“Well, it
is
suspicious, isn't it? Coming to a bad end like that, in a half-frozen trout stream in February. What was he doing there? How had he gotten in? Her Grace didn't like the look of it, not a bit, and when it emerged that Max was missing, and up to his ears with Olympia in this dashed institute of theirs, why, she called me in at once. That was the day before the funeral.” His brandy was gone. He reached for the bottle. I stared at his wrist as he poured, at the band of golden skin stretching out below his cuff, and the fine hairs springing out from his pores in amazing detail. I thought I could count each one.

“The institute,” I repeated.

“Yes, the institute. Olympia's final passion.” Silverton lifted his glass to the light and shut one eye. “Not even the duchess could tell me exactly what it was about. Perhaps you can enlighten me.”

“Not really. I understand—
understood
—that it's meant to be a special research laboratory, for the study of certain objects that Mr. Haywood had encountered in the course of his many expeditions. But the duke never explained what they were, exactly. The objects. They would arrive in those quarterly parcels, and he would open them all himself.”

“And you never asked?”

“It was not my place.”

“Your
place
, Truelove? Now there's a good question. The crux of the matter, the mystery that is Truelove. What exactly
is
your place?”

I didn't answer. My insides were now quite warm and cozy, and my glass was empty. His lordship glanced at it and rose, carrying the brandy bottle with him. I covered the glass with my hand.

“Only one, Truelove? Tsk, tsk. That's no way to get properly tight.”

“I don't wish to become inebriated.” I looked up at his looming face, which had taken on a hint of flush, not unbecoming. There was something loose about him now, some tiny screw that had become unbolted, and yet he seemed to conduct himself under perfect control. His pupils were steady, his words precise.

“Why not?” he asked.

The answer to this question was perfectly obvious, and yet when I opened my mouth, I found there was no argument inside. “Because,” I said feebly.

His face came closer. I smelled the brandy on his breath, the weedy note of his tobacco. The pipe nestled in his other hand, brewing quietly. “Because why?”

“Because it isn't seemly.”

His lordship straightened and smiled, slipping the very tip of the pipe into the corner of his mouth. “Ah, well. You've got me there, right enough. It's not seemly at all, getting tight. But it's jolly good fun, from time to time, especially when one happens to like one's companions in debauchery. And I like you, Truelove.” He removed the pipe and pointed the stem in my direction. “I like you. I really do.”

The brandy's warmth had spread outward to my skin, making it singe, making each hair stand erect in its follicle. I imagined I must be quite pink. I looked upward at Lord Silverton's face, which was not so close now as at its unnerving apogee, but still hovered within the reach of my arm. I could, if I wished, stretch out my hand and touch the small, smooth cleft at the end of his chin.

“About the institute, your lordship.”

“Yes. About that. Damned curious. I mean, what sort of objects?” He returned to his chair, swinging the brandy bottle at his side, chewing on his pipe, and fell back into his seat as the toppling of a black-and-white tree. “I've known Olympia for years. Never a more practical fellow on the face of the earth. So what's old Max been digging up that interests a man who, I dare guess, never glimpsed an archeological treatise in his life?”

“Don't you know?”

He shook his head. “Do you?”

“But the photographs. Didn't the duchess show you?”

“What photographs?”

His lordship wore his blank face: the expression that I could
not yet determine was genuine or feigned. It was a neat trick, I realized, a genius ploy. You always took away more information than you gave.

“Do you always answer a question with another question?” I said.

A smile stretched slowly from the corner of his mouth, the opposite of the one that held the pipe. He leaned forward, balancing the tumbler of brandy between his forefingers, and said, “I really don't know about the photographs. What are they?”

I rose and placed my empty tumbler on the table, next to the plate that had once held my supper. A cold Greek supper: pickled fish and olives, rice stuffed in tangy grape leaves. I had expected to endure it, and found instead that I was reaching for more. I presumed I must have been hungrier than I realized.

The photographs still lay in the bottom drawer of my traveling desk. I took the key from my satchel and unlocked the drawer. As I did so, I considered the note that I had found among the papers, written in the duchess's exquisite hand:
To be kept strictly confidential
. Surely she had not meant
kept from Lord Silverton
? She would not have sent him with me if he weren't to be trusted.

On the other hand, the duchess hadn't seen fit to share these photographs with Silverton
before
our departure, had she?

Well, it was too late for doubts. I drew the photographs from their drawer and returned to Lord Silverton, who had risen politely and now stood next to the table, draining the last of his brandy. The pipe lay propped against his plate. He set down the glass and held out his hand.

“These are from Knossos. Is that right?” he said, holding the first photograph up for inspection, squinting ever so slightly.

“I presume so, yes.”

“I don't quite understand. It's a painting, obviously. Three
figures. Very lovely, fine rendering and all that, somewhat the worse for wear. Did they find this on a wall somewhere? Is it an original, or have they restored it?”

“I don't know. What I
do
know is that the object in the first man's right hand did not exist three thousand years ago.”

Silverton brought the photograph another inch closer to his face and turned it to the light. For a moment, his expression remained puzzled: the squint deepened, the lines of his forehead compressed in concentration.

And then the doubt fell away.

“I'll be damned,” he said, and as the word
damned
left his mouth, a pair of sharp knocks sounded on the door.

“Room service!” sang out a cheerful voice.

Silverton met my gaze above the edge of the photograph, glanced at the littered table, and then returned to me. A small kink had developed in his left eyebrow. “Peculiar,” he said. “I'd swear that didn't sound like a Greek.”

When I began my employment with the Duke of Olympia, he and the duchess had, perhaps, already passed the absolute zenith of life, but they nonetheless maintained a wide and active circle of friends, who arrived in their dozens for parties in town and Friday-to-Mondays in the country.

In the course of my duties, I often accompanied Their Graces into Hampshire (during the winter season) and the hunting lodge near Dundee (during the grouse season) and such was their generosity—or perhaps it was the duchess's American egalitarianism—I was always given a room on the splendor of the second floor, among the guests, though at the quietest end of
a minor corridor. As a matter of habit, I retired to this room directly after dinner, read for an hour or two, and then turned off the lamp no later than eleven o'clock and went to sleep, glorying in my independence and my self-discipline.

As you might guess, however, mine was not the general habit of the rest of the house party, particularly in those long-ago days of furtive hedonism, when one changed clothes five times a day and lovers nearly as often. The midnight hour was then famous for assignation, which was why the duchess always kindly situated me so far away from the well-trafficked corridors, in a small and beautifully furnished room with a private attached bathroom. I can picture that room still, and the rose-colored drapes on the magnificent windows, which overlooked the yew maze. The bed was new and quite wide, so that I could stretch my limbs almost into infinity without reaching the edge of the mattress.

But never mind that. I had always felt secure and hidden in my tucked-away room, listening to the faint creaks of the busy floorboards as I drifted to sleep, until one evening, perhaps a quarter hour after I had turned down the lamp, a knock came softly on my door, and the rattle of a doorknob.