A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (3 page)

The sight of the sails filled the Lady with sorrow, for she knew they had arrived in respect of a yearly tribute her kingdom exacted on the conquered people of Athens, which required that unfortunate city to sacrifice seven of its fairest young people in slavery to the triumphant Minoans. The annual entry of the tribute ships into the harbour below the palace would be celebrated by seven days of feasting and gamesmanship in the great halls of the port itself, followed by a ceremonial parade of the new slaves from the port into the Palace of Labrys in the hills above. Here they would be taken blindfolded into special chambers, and the outside world would never hear of them again.

But the Lady knew what occurred in those chambers, and the ends to which the innocent Athenian youths were subject. As she watched the tiny ships bob in the distant harbour, her eyes welled with tears at the knowledge of their occupants' fates . . .

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

Y
ou might wonder why a man so distinguished as the Duke of Olympia chose to employ a humble female, not related to him by blood, as his personal secretary. I can only say that His Grace was a man of great loyalty, and his affection for my father must have guided his choice. In any case, from the moment he offered me the position, two days after my poor father's funeral, I wrung my last nerve in an effort to prove—to the duke and to the world—that I was not a charitable endeavor.

The Duke of Olympia hadn't wanted a grand state funeral. He had told me this five years ago, on the occasion of Queen Victoria's mortal dissolution, while we waited in the black-draped gloom of his London study to depart for the official solemnities at St. George's Chapel in Windsor: a pageant in which England's dukes and duchesses must necessarily play their role. I remember well how the two of them stood in the glorious ermine-trimmed
robes due to their rank, dwarfing even the great scale of the room—His Grace reached nearly six and a half feet tall, and his wife, though more than a foot shorter, carried herself like a giant—and how the duke then asked for a glass of port. I poured one for each of them, and as the duke accepted the libation from my fingers, he said, “It's a damned business. I suppose these rituals are good for the public, but I'm damned glad I shall be dead for the occasion of mine.”

The duchess had put her hand on his arm and said, in a voice of great emotion, “Not for many years.”

To which he had patted her affectionate fingers. “I trust, when the fateful hour arrives, you and Miss Truelove will ensure that as little fuss as possible is taken with my mortal remains. If I had wanted a cortege through the streets of London, I should have elected to become prime minister.”

So when His Grace expired without warning in the middle of his favorite trout stream—about a mile from the door of the stately pile that had served as the seat of the Dukes of Olympia since the Glorious Revolution first raised the family to the prominence it enjoys today—there was no magnificently solemn procession through the streets of Whitehall, attended by heads of state. The duke's remains arrived at the nearby church of St. Crispin on a caisson pulled by a single horse, and were borne to the humble altar by his grieved grandsons, the Duke of Wallingford and Lord Roland Penhallow; his natural son, Sir Phineas Burke; and three nephews by marriage, His Highness the Prince of Holstein-Schweinwald-Huhnhof and the Dukes of Southam and Ashland. The county gentry were invited, of course—who could possibly deny them the pleasure?—along with a handpicked selection of friends and relations who might reasonably be expected to conduct themselves with the necessary gravity.

But while the church was filled, it was also small, and when we proceeded to the interment in the family plot, I observed that every last face among us hung with an oppressive weight of grief for this man—this colossus—we had known and admired and occasionally loved. Her Grace the dowager duchess stood veiled on the edge of the newly turned earth, supported by the Duke of Wallingford, the step-grandson to whom she had become especially close, and though her back remained straight, her shoulders curved slightly inward, as if they had begun to warp under the burden of her loss. They had married only twelve years ago, when the duke was already a widower of many decades, and while the marriage had come late in life, and occasioned much sniffing among the more narrow-minded of the duke's contemporaries, it proved as intimate and loving a union as any I had ever witnessed. I shall never forget the sight of the duchess's face when the unhappy news was brought to her at last, at the end of a frantic afternoon's search for her missing husband: the slow way in which her mouth parted and her expression crumpled, as disbelief gave way to despair.

I remember thinking, at the time, that no one would ever mourn me so utterly.

The minister, an elderly man whose own father had first baptized an infant Olympia into the Church of England, wasted few words on the interment itself. It was February, and the wind was bitter with the promise of snow. The air smelled of loam and rot and annihilation, the extinction of a century that had begun with the bloody triumph of Waterloo and was now concluding with the burials of Victoria and Maestro Verdi and, in his turn, the grand old Duke of Olympia.

I watched the polished wood descend into the rough and barbaric earth, and a kind of panic swept over me: not of grief, exactly,
but the sense that a candle was sputtering out, which could never be lit again.

By contrast, the reception afterward was almost jovial. I thought this was exactly as His Grace would have wanted it, and after all, only a natural reaction of the human spirit when it comes in from the cold to a brightly lit room, furnished amply with refreshment.

I flatter myself that we did the old lion proud. He had always appreciated the civilizing effect of good drink and fine food, and the dowager duchess and I, in consultation with Norton the butler and Mrs. Greenly the cook, had chosen the funeral meats with loving care. By the time the guests arrived in carriages and motorcars from the churchyard, the servants had laid everything out on an enormous trestle table along one side of the great hall, while the footmen circulated to ensure that nobody's glass remained empty for long. Had everyone not worn an uncongenial black, it might have been a Christmas ball.

“Not quite the thing for a funeral, however,” said my companion, as he surveyed the assembly. “I believe that's Lady Roland by the punch bowl, squinting her disapproval.”

“We did not design the menu with Lady Roland's opinions in mind,” I said.

“We?” His eyebrows lifted.

“I am—I
was
—the duke's personal secretary.”

“Oh! My dear. What a dismal sort of job. I suppose you're glad
that's
over.”

“I quite liked my position, as a matter of fact. The duke was a generous employer, if exacting.”

“Exacting!” He laughed. “Yes, I daresay that's the charitable way to put it. I'm Freddie, by the way.”

“Freddie?”

He leaned over my wine. “Frederick, if we must be proper about it. Have you really organized all of this?”

“With a great deal of advice, of course.”

“Oh, of course. We mustn't allow anyone to know how capable we are. This wine is excellent, by the way. I applaud your taste. The last of His Grace's seventy Lafite, is it?”

“Yes. You're familiar with it?”

“I don't know much,” he said, tapping his temple with one forefinger, “but I do know wine. One's got to be an expert about something, and it might as well be something that gives one pleasure. I say, were you really Olympia's secretary? You don't look like a secretary.”

“How does a secretary look?”

“Certainly not like a charmingly constructed young female. Isn't paid employment supposed to be improper and that sort of thing? Have you got to work one of those nasty typing machines?”

“On occasion, when His Grace's personal business demanded it.”

Freddie—Frederick—I could hardly call him by either name, so I called him by none—looked at me keenly over the top of his wineglass, which had now fallen dangerously empty.

“I say, you
do
look dashed familiar, though. Have we perhaps met?”

“I don't recall. Did you ever have personal business with the duke?”

“Personal business? Haven't the foggiest. Probably not.”

“Then I imagine we haven't met before.”

In truth, I would have remembered if we had. I shall not go to such lengths as to call this Freddie an Adonis—the term, I feel, is tossed about too carelessly these days—but in those early days of the century, he possessed the lucky beauty of youth in spades, beginning with a helmet of sleek gold hair and ending in a well-polished shoe, with all manner of blue eyes and straight noses and lantern jaws arranged at regular intervals in between. His shoulders extended sturdily from a somewhat disordered collar. He had a quick, lean way of moving himself about, which he disguised by his lazy expression. If anything, he stood a bit too tall for convenience, but perhaps I quibble; I sometimes suspect I am overparticular when presented with specimens like this self-professed Freddie. At any rate, as I regarded the radiant totality of him in the great hall of the Duke of Olympia's country seat, I expected he was probably very good at the tennis, had left Oxford with a dismal Third in History, went down to Scotland every August to kill grouse in a Norfolk jacket and leather gaiters, was engaged to marry an earl's daughter, and had a mistress waiting for him in a flat in Kensington, to which he motored back and forth in a two-seater automobile.

How this brainless, glamorous creature had come to rest in my proximity, I couldn't imagine.

“And yet,” he said, “I can't quite shake the feeling.”

“What feeling, sir?”

“That we've met before.” A footman passed; Freddie, still frowning, stretched out his glass for servicing. “Do you go to London?”

“Only when His Grace is—was—in town.”

“Belong to any clubs?”

“Not your sort of clubs.”

“House parties?”

“I have generally preferred to remain at home when Their Graces are called away on social visits.”

“I say. How amazingly dull. Well, chin up. You're free now, eh?” He nudged my upper arm with his wineglass, which was already half-empty again.

“Free? I'm in mourning.”

“Well, but after a decent interval, I mean. Surely the old chap's left you a nice little remembrance, so you can run off and see the world and all that sort of thing. Smoke cigarettes and gad about on ocean liners, quaffing champagne by the bucketful.”

“I haven't begun to think about it.”

“Oh, come now. Admit it, it's been in the back of your mind all this time. Why else do we put up with the old duffers, eh? The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.” He leaned close again and winked, and in the copious candlelight—the duke had not yet begun the project of electrifying Aldermere Castle before he died, and perhaps five hundred fine beeswax candles illuminated the great hall this February night—his eyes looked a little too bright.

“Yes,” I said. “Exactly so. And if you'll excuse me, sir, I'm afraid I must speak with the butler about the wine.”

“The wine? What's wrong with the wine?”

“I suspect there's too much of it.”

He laughed at me, and I was about to turn away, when his expression changed to one of recognition. He snapped his fingers. “Now I remember!”

“Remember meeting me?”

“No, alas. Remember that I was supposed to summon you to the library for a desperately important meeting.”

“A meeting? With whom?”

“With whom? Why, herself, of course. The dowager duchess.
Wants a word with you, on the chivvy.” He shut one blue eye and stared through his wineglass at the ceiling, as if admiring the optical effect. “Better you than me, if you're asking. But then, nobody ever does.”