A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (21 page)

“I see. Most useful of you. And what sort of inquiries did Max have for you?”

“Well, to do with Minoan myth, primarily. The story of King Minos and the labyrinth, and the defeat of the Minotaur by
Theseus, familiar to every schoolboy. He was well aware of the general features of the legend, of course, but in fact there are numerous variations on the details, as one might expect, with the Athenians having it one way and the Mycenaeans having it another, and even Plutarch, in his avowedly factual history of Theseus, coming up with an odd twist or two. Mr. Haywood asked me, in the first place, to lay out, in an orderly fashion, all the different variations and their sources, which took quite some time, I can tell you.” Mr. Higganbotham shook his head.

“I can well imagine,” I said.

“And then what?” said Silverton. “You sent him this—this compilation of myths. Did he have any further questions?”

“Oh, yes. He kept me busy, I can tell you that. He then wished to know more about the known facts of Greek history, dates and so on, which are of course only approximate, particularly in the period before what we call the classical age, Socrates and Plato and the Persian wars. He found that frustrating, I'm afraid, although it's something to which a classical scholar is long accustomed.”

“No doubt.” Silverton's fingers resumed drumming.

“Indeed,” Higganbotham went on, gathering enthusiasm, “it's part of the whole work, really. Comparing history with myth, and applying a chronology to events previously deemed fantastic. We are beginning to understand from Mr. Evans's work, for example, that there existed a specific civilization that we might call Minoan, existing in Crete and indeed the Aegean as a whole in the centuries before the dominance of the Mycenaean Greeks. Mr. Haywood wished to speculate with me what the cause of this transformation might be. Whether the Mycenaean simply defeated the previous inhabitants, as so often happens, or whether some specific event
might have precipitated the transfer of power.” He lifted another sandwich from the plate. “Forgive me. I haven't eaten since a very inconsequential breakfast on the ship from the mainland.”

“No need for restraint, I assure you.”

“I set off at once, you see, after I received Mr. Evans's telegram yesterday. I have been concerned about Mr. Haywood for some time.”

“Had you? Why?” I said eagerly.

“Why, because we had arranged a meeting in December, and he never appeared.” Mr. Higganbotham filled his mouth with sandwich, chewed, and swallowed.

“He never appeared? But why didn't you say something?”

“Well, I had his note. I simply assumed—”

“His note? Where?”

The patting of pockets again, and then a nod. “I left it back in Athens. But—”

Without warning, Lord Silverton sprang from his chair and leapt for the door.

“What on earth—” began Higganbotham, astonished, but I was already out of my own chair and heading for the door, flinging it open again to find Silverton racing across the street in pursuit of something only he could see.

I raised my arm to shade my face against the bright winter sun. Silverton disappeared between the columns of the hotel portico, and after an instant's hesitation, I started after him.

“Where are you going?” exclaimed Mr. Higganbotham, from some district just over my shoulder, but I didn't pause to satisfy his curiosity. I ran across the cobbled roadway, struggling against the heaviness of my skirts, and slipped through the portico to where the hotel doors stood open to the warming air.

Once inside, I had no trouble discovering Silverton's whereabouts: he stood behind the front desk, holding the clerk's lapels by the fistful, having evidently given up his philosophy of gentle persuasion.

“He's gone up to Knossos,” Silverton said, “and taken our mule, too, the cheeky bastard.”

Mr. Higganbotham flinched at the word
bastard
and glanced at me. “Sir, there's a lady present.”

“Where? Oh, do you mean Truelove? She doesn't mind. Do you, Truelove?”

We sat in a private back room of the Hotel Alabaster, overheated by an entirely unnecessary fire; or rather, Mr. Higganbotham and I were sitting, and Lord Silverton was pacing, pacing, a glass of the local liquor in one hand and his pipe in the other. The landlord had been persuaded to give up the room in exchange for his clerk. The
tsikoudia
, I believe, cost extra.

I folded my hands in my lap and said, “I suppose I am resigned to his lordship's habits of speech. I should like to point out, however, that the mule was not ours. He belongs to the hotel, which had every right to hire him out to this man.”

“It's a piece of damned cheek, is what it is. However, I shan't complain, as the mule is presently bearing him farther away from our location at every step. Ha! I should like to see his face when he arrives at Knossos, only to find out we've got the jump on him again.”

“Still, it doesn't give us much time, does it?”

“No, that's true.” He turned to Mr. Higganbotham. “Sir. I believe you were telling us something about my friend Max.”

“Was I?” Mr. Higganbotham looked alarmed. “I thought I'd told you all I know already.”

“My attention was diverted during the last bit. Something about the Minoans and the Mycenaeans that so vexingly captured Max's attention, and you had arranged to meet him—”

“No, no. It was Mr. Haywood who asked for the meeting. He wrote me in December. He had found something terribly interesting, he said, but it was all quite sensitive and he wanted to bring it to me personally.”

“Did he say what it was?” asked Silverton.

“No. But he asked me not to discuss it with anyone; not to mention, in fact, that he had been in touch with me at all, or to disclose any of the arrangements for our meeting.”

“Once more with the hush-hush.” Silverton drained his glass and set it on the mantel. “Most immensely valuable object, one must conclude.”

“I gathered there was somebody else involved,” said Mr. Higganbotham. “Someone else, whose motives were venal rather than scholarly, from whom he was trying to conceal this object, whatever it was.”

“So you agreed to meet him.”

“Yes. I must confess, I was too intrigued to refuse. I arrived at the appointed lodging on the appointed day, but in the end there was only a note, and even that was unsigned. Something had come up, he said, and he would write again when it was safe for us to rendezvous. And I should remain silent about the entire matter until he gave me the all clear.”

“How lucky for us, then, that you've elected to break Max's edict.”

Mr. Higganbotham rose from his chair and met Silverton with a gaze that had turned decidedly steely. “When I learned yesterday that no one else had heard from Mr. Haywood since that day, I was naturally concerned. I hope my trust has not been misplaced.”

“It has not,” I said.

He looked at me. “Thank you. And now I expect you will want to track him down there, won't you? His last known abode.”

Silverton brought a fist down on the mantel. “Back to bloody Athens again. A needle in a haystack.”

“Athens?” Higganbotham looked back and forth between us. “Who said anything about Athens?”

For a moment, neither I nor Silverton made a single sound. I remember how we stared mutely at Mr. Higganbotham's well-kept moustache, waiting for his lips to move again and cure our perplexity; how—at least to my eyes—his brow seemed to take on the radiance of an oracle.

I leapt to my feet. “He didn't meet you in Athens?”

“No, of course not. He wanted to avoid Athens, above all. No, he asked me to meet him rather more remotely, on an island in the Aegean. He would sail there himself, he said, though I told him that was madness, at this time of year. But he insisted that he was an experienced sailor, and the matter could not wait until a more auspicious season.”

During the course of this speech, Silverton had removed his spectacles and wiped them with a handkerchief, and was now replacing them on his nose in precise movements. His blue eyes, I thought, were terribly bright; but then my own heart was beating so quickly, I felt almost dizzy.

“Which island?” asked Silverton, very low.

“Well! That, you see, is what I found so intriguing, as a student of classical mythology.” Mr. Higganbotham smiled, first at me and then at Silverton, as if it were Christmas Eve and he'd just presented us with an especially pleasing gift. “He asked me to meet him at Naxos.”

Now the Lady was blindfolded, she had no advantage over her husband the Prince in her knowledge of the Labyrinth, so she tore a thread loose from the hem of her tunic and unspooled it behind her as she raced through the maze of chambers in the heart of the Palace. But the Prince soon caught her, and the Hero, hearing her cries, followed the sound to the chamber where she was chained. ‘Release her,' he said to the Prince, ‘and I will submit to whatever torture you require.'

So the Prince chained the Hero, but instead of releasing the Lady he removed her blindfold and said, ‘She will first witness your suffering at my hand, for I know she has lain with you and carries your seed in her womb, and if that seed bears fruit, I will repeat this revenge on your innocent babe.'

The Hero roared and fought against his chains, but even his great strength could not wrest the iron free . . .

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

W
e must leave at once,” I said. “Mr. Higganbotham, do your duties require you to return to Athens immediately, or can you spare a few days to assist us in Naxos?”

“Truelove—” began Silverton.

“I am at your service, of course,” said Mr. Higganbotham.

I strode to the door. “Then I shall find the landlord and have him retrieve our luggage, and send word to the ship to build steam. There's not a moment to lose. Silverton, do you think—”

“Madam,” said his lordship, in a voice of such deadly certainty that I stopped my hand on the very knob and turned my head toward him. “A word.”

“Silverton, there isn't time to plan the details. That awful man will come thundering back down the road in short order, and in the meantime the
Isolde
cannot be ready to depart without at least some advance warning—”

“Truelove!”

I blinked in astonishment at the thunder in his voice. My hand, shocked into obedience, began to fall away from the knob, and then I remembered myself and straightened. “You have some concern, perhaps? Some
better
plan?”

Silverton's gaze met mine, as raw and hazardous as an electric current. I thought I felt it sizzling the atoms of my skull. In the familiarity of our frequent intercourse, I had forgotten how tall he was, and his height now returned to me: so towering that his hair nearly brushed the ceiling, and his shadow might have sheltered an army.

“Mr. Higganbotham,” he said quietly, “will you be so good as to allow me a moment or two of private conversation with Miss Truelove?”

“Of course.” Mr. Higganbotham walked toward me, and I stepped back from the threshold as he approached. “I shall be just outside, should you require my assistance,” he said, directing his words to me rather than to Silverton, and then the door closed behind him.

“I call that extremely rude,” I said.

“Rude? I call it prudent. We don't know the first thing about this Higganbotham fellow, only that he turned up conveniently beside you in a tavern while I was off tracking down a man who means to kill you.”

“Us.”

“Yes,
us
, though I'm rather more concerned about
your
welfare, Truelove, since you haven't the least bit of training and, what's more, are apparently reckless enough to invite strangers along on an expedition fraught with murderous—”

“Oh, if you're going to go throwing around words like
fraught
—”

He strode up to me and took me by the shoulders. “It
is
fraught,
damn it all. It's bloody dangerous, and I can't for the life of me imagine why the duchess sent you along in the first place. To be a millstone around my neck, I suppose. The fly in my ointment, the last damned straw to break my back!”

A knock sounded on the door behind me. “Miss Truelove. Is everything all right?”

I looked up fearlessly into Silverton's blazing face. “Quite all right, thank you, Mr. Higganbotham,” I called.

His lordship's hands dropped away. “And there you are. The proof, right on the other side of this door, of your reckless judgment. We have no reason at all to believe that Higganbotham isn't behind this himself.”

“He isn't. He's a scholar.”

“Scholars are some of the greediest devils I know. Convinced of their superiority to the rest of humanity, and then jealous of the riches that accrue to those who prefer to act instead of study—”

I began to laugh. “I've never heard anything so unreasonable.”

“Because you haven't stepped outside that Belgrave Square library long enough to know the world and the men who inhabit it.”

“Is
that
what you think? You think I'm
sheltered
?” I pointed my finger out the window. “Do you have any notion of the sorts of men I've encountered, in the course of my duties? I have performed a man's job since my father's death, Lord Silverton, enjoying scarcely a single day to myself in all those years. I have dealt with rich men and poor men, yachtsmen and merchant sailors, City bankers and country farmers, and yes, I have met many scholars. And in my experienced judgment, Mr. Higganbotham is genuinely concerned about his friend, and genuinely curious about this mystery in which Mr. Haywood was embroiled: not because he lusts after riches, but because he is a decent fellow.
And that”—I adjusted the stab of my finger, so that it pierced the center of Silverton's capacious chest—“
that
, I suppose, is what you don't recognize.
Decency
.”

In the course of this outburst, Silverton's face had lost all expression. The electricity of his gaze died away, breaking its circuit with mine, retreating to an ordinary blue behind the screen of his spectacles. His fingers, which had been gathered into fists, relaxed at his sides, and he said, quite reasonable now, “Very well. We will follow your judgment in the question of Mr. Higganbotham, since you feel so passionately on his behalf.”

“Hardly
passionate
—”

“And since he has so thoroughly gained your trust, I shall leave you under his expert protection while I nip back up to Knossos before we leave. A great relief to my mind, in fact.”

I thought, for a moment, that I hadn't heard him properly. My mind fastened on a single word and turned it over, several times, to ensure it was genuine.

“Knossos! You can't go to Knossos!”

“My dear Truelove, have you forgotten that a certain innocent young woman, who has so generously assisted our investigation, lies in the direct path of a dangerous man who will stop at nothing to gain the information he requires?”

“Do you mean Mrs. Poulakis?”

“Yes.”

“I beg your pardon. I was thrown off by the word
innocent
.”

“Another piece of wit. How clever you've become, Truelove.” He turned away to knock the remaining ash from his pipe and replace it in his pocket. “Regardless. I'm heading up now. I find myself in the grip of an irresistible urge to confront this fellow before he begins to make an actual nuisance of himself.”

“Confront him? Are you mad?”

“Not at all. I do this sort of thing all the time, or had you forgotten?” Silverton had sat down in front of the desk in the center of the room, and was now rummaging shamelessly through its drawers. He made a triumphant noise and withdrew a sheet of writing paper and a fountain pen.

I watched him with gathering alarm.
This sort of thing
. What sort of thing was that? Did he mean to kill the man? What if Silverton himself were killed? “This is impossible. We don't have time for you to—to do whatever it is you do. We've got to leave for Naxos immediately. Had you forgotten about Mr. Haywood? He stands in far greater need of your help than Mrs. Poulakis.”

“You needn't wait for me. Leave as soon as the ship is ready. Brown's on board; give him this note. He'll know what to do, if I'm not back in time.”

“But how will you get to Naxos?” I asked, bewildered. Silverton's head was bent over the paper, on which he scribbled furiously.

“I'm a dashed good sailor, Truelove. Didn't you know that? Here.” He folded the paper and held it out to me. “Don't worry. I'll be back in time, likely as not.”

His face had resumed its ordinary expression of congenial beauty, impossible to penetrate. You could not react in fury to a manner like that, any more than you could argue with the wagging tail of a Labrador retriever.

I took the note between my fingers and asked feebly, “But what if something happens to you?”

He rose from the desk and replaced the pen carefully in its holder. The smile came out, as burnished as ever, if somewhat distorted by the nearby bruise. “Why, Truelove. You know better than that. I am the favorite of the gods, am I not? And, as I'm
sure Mr. Higganbotham will happily explain, those immortal chappies never allow their protégés to come to harm.”

In his lordship's absence, I took charge of the arrangements, as swiftly and efficiently as I had learned to do, throughout more than six years of service to so exacting an employer as His Grace, the Duke of Olympia.

A note was dispatched to the
Isolde
, instructing her crew to make ready for an immediate departure, and our luggage was brought out from the windowless room in which we had stored it yesterday morning. The cart and horse already stood waiting by the door, and a man who might be described as a porter, had he not reeked so strongly of the stables, began to load our trunks inside.

“Wait a moment,” I said, bending over my traveling desk, which rested atop the single trunk that belonged to me. I pulled on the small handle of the bottom drawer, which opened without impediment, and examined the lock. “It's broken!”

“What's broken?” asked Mr. Higganbotham.

“My desk. Someone has broken the lock. Where's the landlord?”

Mr. Higganbotham jiggled the drawer. “My God, it's outrageous! Did you keep anything valuable inside? Has anything been taken?”

“Only some papers, and photographs that Mr. Haywood had sent to my employer. By good luck, I brought them with me to Knossos instead of leaving them here.” I stared at the gaping drawer, and my breath went cold in my chest. The man with the earring, perhaps? Or someone who worked at the hotel, hoping to find valuables?

The landlord, summoned by Mr. Higganbotham, threw up
his hands and insisted he had no knowledge of this, no knowledge at all, and the door had been locked throughout the entirety of our absence. By now, the cart was fully loaded and the minutes ticked by. “I suppose we've got to leave it at that,” I said reluctantly, and we climbed into the cart for the short journey to the quayside, where the
Isolde
waited for us, fires stoked, boilers heating impatiently.

“What sort of photographs?” Mr. Higganbotham asked as the cart bounced along the cobbles.

“They are of a certain fresco that was discovered in the Knossos ruins, which is what led Mr. Haywood to his investigation in the first place.”

“I say. You don't mind if I take a look, do you?”

I hesitated only an instant. “No, of course not.”

I found the photographs in my satchel and handed the first one to him. He took it eagerly and held it up at an angle, so that the image found the afternoon light. I thought perhaps I should tell him about Mr. Vasilakis's conclusion—that the painting was not native to the Minoans—but some instinct made me hold back the words. Perhaps it was the way Mr. Higganbotham held the photograph: with the possessive appetite of a scholar contemplating his particular field of study.

“Interesting,” he said. “What is that object in the first man's hand?”

“An excellent question. We are equally puzzled.” I made a motion with my fingers to take back the photograph, and he relinquished it to me.

“Perhaps you will be so good as to allow me to study the image at greater length, when time permits,” he said.

“Of course.”

He looked out the side of the cart, up the hillside toward Knossos itself. “It's curious. I have visited the excavation many times, of course, and I thought I was familiar with all of its frescoes. Most have similar themes, you see, but this one is entirely different.”

“Is it? I wish we had had time to see more.” I followed his gaze. We could not see Knossos itself, of course; the passing buildings kept obscuring the view, and the details were too far away to distinguish in any case. But it was there, weighing against the base of the mountains. What had it looked like, three thousand years ago? Who had lived there?

And what scenes were playing out between those half-crumbled buildings now?