A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (34 page)

“Laughter cures all, I always say.”

“How true.” I turned to address the lady herself, taking care to speak slowly. “Desma, my dear. The duke presents his compliments, and asks if you will do him the honor of attending him in his stateroom.”

The smile faded, and Desma gave me rather a blank look.

Silverton cleared his throat. “Allow me.”

He explained the situation in careful Greek, illustrating with his hands and his pipe, and Desma nodded and rose from the sofa. She sent me a regal nod and a rather odd pair of words that, after a few seconds' consideration, I recognized as
thank you.

“Of course, madam,” I replied, and then, as she made her way to the door, I exclaimed, “Oh! Wait a moment.”

She turned, and I put my hand in my pocket and hurried toward her. “Here,” I said, drawing out the medallion we had discovered under the bed in Knossos. “I believe this belongs to you.”

Her dark eyes grew huge. She looked into my face, and then returned to the object in my hands.

“I'm terribly sorry I haven't returned it already. In all the fuss, I had quite forgotten its existence. I discovered it in the pocket of my jacket this morning.” I pressed the disc into her stunned hand. “I believe it's meant to protect the owner against death, in which case it seems to have performed its work admirably.”

She did not understand me, of course. She stared down at the medallion for some time, and when she lifted her gaze at last, her eyes were wet, and her nod of thanks was no longer regal but heartfelt.

“Well done, Truelove,” Silverton said, when I sat down on the armchair next to him.

“How are you?”

“Absolutely tip-top. That dear fellow the doctor dispensed me a most marvelous bottle of pills for my sins. Hardly feel a thing.”

He gazed at me, all blue sky and sunshine, despite the assortment of bruises and half-healed abrasions adorning his face. He
wasn't wearing his spectacles, and as he continued to toss the cricket ball into the air and catch it unerringly, I wondered whether he possessed some sort of extra sense.

“I'm glad to hear it,” I said.

Silverton caught the ball and set it down on the table between us, beneath the glow of the lamp, though his fingers remained to trap the object in place. “And you, Truelove? Rather a bad show, back there on Naxos. The worst show I think I ever saw, though there was a wretched balls-up in Seville once that I shouldn't care to repeat.”

His voice was tender, and the corners of my eyes responded like a child's, filling with wetness.

“I am quite recovered,” I said.

“Oh, Truelove.” He lifted his hand, allowing the cricket ball to roll off the table and onto the rug, and leaned forward to grasp my fingers. “What a damned stoic you are. Do you know something? I don't think there's anyone I'd rather have at my back in a tight spot like that.”

“A tight
spot
?”

He stuck his pipe in his mouth, reached into his pocket with his other hand, and gave me a handkerchief. I dabbed at my eyes while he smoked in that observational way of his. He went on, “I am quite in earnest. You've the spine of a Cossack. You're colossal. There you stood, a gun to your head, cool as you please, telling the poor bloke just what you thought of him. I said to myself, Silverton, old boy, if by some miracle you make it out of here alive, you have got to marry that woman.”

I blew my nose. “You needn't joke.”

“I am not joking, Truelove.”

I looked up in surprise, into a pair of serious blue eyes.

“I am not joking,” he said again. “I want you to marry me.”

I set the handkerchief on the table, where the cricket ball had rested in the moment before it rolled off.

Silverton released my hand and continued, in a quick voice that was not his own. “I'm afraid I'm quite incapable of going down on one knee at the moment, though I'm willing to try if you require that sort of thing. Bended knees. Flowers, rings, kisses. I'm damned good at all of that, you'll find, especially the latter.” He paused. “What I'm saying, I suppose, is that I should do my uttermost to make you happy.”

I couldn't speak. The ship steamed along, the sunlight darkened for an instant and then reappeared, and I couldn't say a word.

“The thing is, Truelove, I have been lying around these past few days, according to the doctor's orders, and I have been thinking that you will go off this ship when we're back in England and become somebody else's very efficient and capable personal secretary, the duke or some other immensely fortunate fellow, and I am not at all certain I can survive that. I am not at all certain, I mean, that I
want
to survive that.”

I looked up helplessly at the ceiling and thought of Mrs. Poulakis.

“Dash it, Truelove.
Say
something.”

I thought of Silverton poised against the sunset at the top of the fortress in the Heraklion harbor, arms outstretched like a human cross, ready to jump. The ceiling seemed to be rotating around its central glass dome: first clockwise, and then counterclockwise, as if it could not quite make up its mind which hemisphere it belonged to.

“You'll be a duchess one day, if that's any consolation.”

I leaned forward and put my face in my hands. “I'm afraid I'm going to be sick.”

My father's fatal illness was of short duration, a matter of a few months. I understand from the doctors that it had something to do with his heart; he began to weaken, and to suffer pains in his chest. He could no longer walk without stopping for breath, and one day, to his great annoyance, he could not rise from his bed.

He called for his lap desk, which I brought to him, and then he asked me to sit by the bed while he worked. I poured him tea and arranged his pillows. At half past twelve I went to see about a tray for lunch, and when I returned, he was dead. He had suffered a final attack, the doctors said, shaking their heads—and the Duke of Olympia had paid for the best medical men in London, he had spared no expense whatever for his loyal secretary—and there was nothing anybody could have done for him.

And perhaps that's true, but I still cannot forgive myself for allowing my father to die alone. During those nights when sleep comes reluctantly, I lie in my own bed and imagine how helpless he must have felt, in the grip of that painful attack, and how seized with despair that this moment was his last, and he had not even said good-bye.

E muoio disperato . . . E non ho amato mai tanto la vita . . .

And I die in despair, and I have never loved life so much.

Over my own objections, Lord Silverton had carried the phonograph to my cabin and installed it there—
Nobody else appreciates the racket the way you do, Truelove
—and I was too listless to change the record for another. Eventually the last song
ended, and I stared at the ceiling while the needle scratched uselessly at the edge, and then gave up at last to leave me in silence.

But not alone.

I became aware, as the turntable slowed and stopped, and the scratch of the needle faded into quiet, of a presence in the room, like the placing of a warm hand atop my heart. I whispered, to the ceiling, “Would it be so dreadful a mistake, do you think?”

“My dear, do you love him?”

“I don't know.” I pressed my fingers together over my stomach. “Yes. He enchants me. But is that enough?”

“Marriages have been made with less.”

“I have been enchanted before, and it was a terrible mistake.”

“But this is a different man.”

“But alike in one respect: he cannot remain faithful.”

My father paused, and my stomach turned, as it always did when he did not answer immediately, because I was afraid the illusion had dissolved back into the ether.

“Are you certain of this?” he said at last.

“No doubt he'll make a tremendous effort. But it cannot last, can it? If I am with child, or away in the country, or some woman of great allure casts herself in his path. He cannot resist that. He admits it himself.”

“Would this be so terrible? A straying husband is hardly uncommon, particularly in his lordship's class of society.”

Again I considering lying to him, but to what end? I said the truth: “I would die.”

He must have heard the pain in my voice, for he made a noise of almost soothing pity. “You have always had the most tender heart, my dear. You are so easily wounded. “

“That's not true. I am
quite
self-sufficient.”

“Because of your tenderness. You are self-sufficient because you're afraid of betrayal.”

I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

Again there was a long and stomach-churning pause. I listened to the bass pitch of the engines and thought,
I will never board a ship again. This sickness, it's not worth the beauty of travel.

My father spoke. “You would, of course, have a particular consolation. You would have the comfort of knowing that, of all these women, he has chosen to marry you.”

“But not because he loves me.”

“My very dear Emmeline,” he said, full of pity, and I believe he meant to say more, for I felt a strange warmth encompass my hand and travel up my arm, but at that instant a knock sounded on the door, and the sensation retreated.

“Hello?” I gasped.

The knock repeated itself, and I swung my legs from the bed and made my way to the door. Opened, it revealed the figure of Desma, straight-backed and smooth-haired. She held a book under her arm, and her expression was wrinkled and thoughtful.

I stepped back. “Please come in.”

I didn't quite know how to address her. I supposed
Desma
would have to do. In a series of gestures and words, I offered to ring for tea. She declined and set her book on the table. An illustrated history of Greek mythology, obtained no doubt from the ship's library.

Oh dear
, I thought.

She did not waste time in small talk. After all, she had none. She opened the book and flipped through the pages with her long and sturdy fingers, and I observed that her pregnancy became her.
The size and shape did not overwhelm her; she did not draw to her belly any unnecessary attention, and yet its perfect round curve contained the sensual fascination of a bosom, so freely and unselfconsciously fecund, beneath the sober green wool of the dress she had found in Naxos.

She began to slow and to study each page before she turned it, as if searching for something particular. I stepped closer and craned my neck to gaze over her arm at the bright illustrations, the neat paragraphs of text, flashing into view and disappearing beneath her nimble fingers. For a moment I felt the return of that vertigo that had assailed me earlier in the saloon, and in my mind I caught the scent of Silverton's pipe.

I gripped the back of the armchair, wanting to sit. But how could you occupy a chair, while a woman stood nearby who was heavy with child?

Desma did not notice my dilemma. Her concentration fixed ferociously on the book before her, until at last she came to a stop and rested one spread palm atop the left-hand page, while the forefinger of her right hand tracked across the spine and landed in the center of an illustration. I leaned near, and saw that it was a man of enormous size and muscular breadth, clinging to the edge of a cliff, naked except for a white cloth swathed precariously across his chest and around his middle.

The caption was partly obscured beneath Desma's wrist, but I hardly needed to read it.

“Yes,” I said. “That's how he met his end, according to myth. Pushed off a cliff by a rival king.”

Of course, she did not understand me; at least, she couldn't translate my literal words. But the expression on her face, as she turned to
me, contained all the agony of genuine grief, and her finger stabbed at the white cloth that protected the modesty of Theseus.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “On the other hand, it
is
only myth. We have no proof that he died like this.”

She must have understood my sympathy at least, for she nodded. But the nod was an impatient one, and she pressed her finger again into the page, as if she meant to rub a hole in the illustration, to demolish the fact of her lover's death.

And I was sorry for her, and I did understand her agony, for had I not myself bled for the loss of love? But mixed in my pity, I found a trace of anger. I took the corner of the book in my own hand and slid its heavy weight a few inches to the east. I flipped back a page or two, until another illustration lay exposed, which I had noticed earlier: Theseus and the Amazon queen Hippolyta.

And another: Theseus and Phaedra, the sister of Ariadne. Phaedra knelt before her towering husband, and her robes flowed richly around her, and her arms opened upward in supplication. The artist had rendered her in lifelike and loving detail. Her breasts curved forth from her gown, and her shoulders were bare and white. I did not need the caption here, either. Phaedra knelt in the very act of accusation, telling her husband Theseus that his son Hippolytus—his son by the Amazon queen—had raped and dishonored her, and though her tale was a false one, Theseus would then go forth from his nuptial chamber to kill the unhappy Hippolytus, whose only crime was to worship the chaste Artemis instead of vengeful Aphrodite.