A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (37 page)

We were almost halfway back to the village before his lordship spoke again.

“Listen, Truelove. I'm afraid something's come up, and I'll be parting ways with you in Athens.”

I examined the toes of my dusty shoes as they descended the path. “What has come up, pray?”

“A telegram from the duchess. I'm afraid I can't say more.”

“No, of course not.”

“It's just a routine little annoyance. I shall be back in England by the first of May at the latest.”

“A routine little annoyance, is it? The sort of thing that happens all the time in your chosen profession?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact.”

He swung his cane as he walked, a little flourish at each step, as if to disguise the slight limp that impeded his stride. The red-tile peaks of the village rooftops had begun to take shape over the next rise.

“I see,” I said.

Our footsteps crunched along the path, which was strewn with pebbles. The sun was now high and warm, and the smoke from the village chimneys mingled with the scent of the sea.

“Can you tell me his name?” asked his lordship.

“No, I will not.”

He released a small sigh. “Very well.”

In another half hour, we reached the door of the hostelry. Silverton opened it and waved me inside. “Aren't you coming in?” I asked.

He shrugged. “A few loose threads to tie together.”

“Then I will see you on board the ship,” I said, and turned away.

His hand found my arm. “Wait, Truelove.”

“Yes?”

He was frowning down at me, one foot lodged on the step below. “We will continue this conversation in England, when I return. Do you understand me?”

From within, I heard the scraping of a chair leg against a stone floor. A voice called my name: “Ah, Miss Truelove! There you are at last. May I have a word with you?”

“You'll excuse me, Lord Silverton,” I said, withdrawing my arm from his lordship's grasp. “The duke has need of me.”

“Are you quite all right, Miss Truelove?” asked His Grace, when we were alone in the small and rustic chamber that had been allotted to him. “You're rather pale.”

“Quite all right, I assure you.”

“Very good. I am sorry to call you into service at such a hurried moment, but I have been thinking a great deal about this institute, and about my uncle's enthusiasm for the project, and your own capability.”

“My capability?”

“Yes, Miss Truelove.” He handed me a promised cup of tea
from the tray on the table. “I should like to put a proposal before you. You needn't answer at once, of course; I am happy to wait until the conclusion of our voyage before you make your decision.”

The duke was looking much better than he had nine days ago, when we had carried him, half-dead, down the track by the seaside, and brought him to this very chamber. The next day, he had regained the better part of his senses, and the day after that, he had risen from his couch and begun, without the slightest suggestion of sentimentality, to assist Lord Silverton in making arrangements for Desma and Tadeas to live quietly together in Skyros. He had insisted on a ceremony of marriage, which the couple carried out in a kind of dazed bewilderment, and gave the bride away from his own arm. He had then immersed himself in the duchy papers, firing endless questions at me and then taking long walks of contemplation along the seaside, holding his injured limb stiffly at his side. He had avoided any turn of the conversation toward the events of that fateful day. On the morning after his night out with Silverton, he had woken at his usual hour and called me in to breakfast, and though his face was perhaps a trifle more haggard than usual, he betrayed no sign of indisposition.

No sign, indeed, that his heart had been irretrievably broken.

I stirred my tea and said, “What is your proposal, sir?”

He propped himself on the table and picked up his own teacup. “Before the extraordinary turn of events here in Skyros, I confess I had approached this notion of an institute for the study of anachronisms with a certain degree of skepticism. I suppose I offered my cooperation only to appease my uncle, who had recently developed such a passionate interest in my work.”

“Yes, I remember it well.”

“Do you happen to have any idea
why
, Miss Truelove? I only
ask because—well, because everything has taken on a different cast, now. Now that we know the truth.”

I set my teacup in its saucer. “That you are the instrument of miracles.”

He did not answer at first. He was sitting near the window, and the light struck the left half of his face in a white and almost smoky blur. Were his eyes always so grave and dark, I wondered, or had they acquired their gravity recently? But I had only known him a fortnight. The breadth and depth of him remained a mystery to me.

I heard the Queen again, as if she had returned and stood now by my side:
You have seen for yourself the continual jeopardy in which this agency places the poor fellow. The moral burden he bears, to say nothing of the lust other men harbor for the immeasurable power he controls.

“Yes,” he said. “So it would seem. It explains a great deal—why, for example, Anserrat and his companions were so determined to gain control of me, though we can only speculate how they came to learn of this power, when I—at the time—had no idea of it.”

“Have you any theory at all?”

“None that makes any logical sense. And you?”

The duke made this query without thought, as if asking my opinion were the most natural thing in the world. I fingered the handle of my teacup and said, “It seems to me—you will forgive me, sir, for I speak only from my own feeble intuition—it seems to me, as I look back on the encounter in Knossos, that these men did not . . .” I hesitated, looked at my lap, and looked up again. “They did not quite seem to belong to our own age.”

“Ah. I confess, Miss Truelove, the same idea has lately occurred to me.”

“Of course, it's impossible, unless we suppose you are not the
only man invested with this power. Or else how might they have found us, in our present century?”

The duke swung his leg and glanced out the window. “I was thinking of something Anserrat said, just before the end. How he had proof of my power, and that it wasn't something I had already done . . .”

“It was something you
would
do.”

“Yes.”

The tea was finished. I set it aside. “Is there any news of the other man? The one we left tied up in the cave?”

“No word at all. He appears to have vanished.” He turned to the papers on the table behind him and lifted a slip of paper. “And the only man among them to survive the attack on the beach has, I'm afraid, now died of his wounds.”

He handed me the telegram, and I glanced over the words. “So we have no one left to interrogate.”

“I'm afraid we must be content to live with the mystery, Miss Truelove, unless some solution presents itself in the future.” He paused to take back the telegram from my outstretched fingers. “Furthermore, I believe, for the time being, we must keep this knowledge strictly to ourselves.”

“Sir, I have never considered otherwise.”

“Of course not. I knew at once that I could trust you, thank God, which is why I have asked for your help in this matter.”

“I will do whatever I can for you.”

“No, don't say that. You must not obey me out of a sense of duty, for God's sake. You must enter into this partnership freely.”

At the word
partnership
, my heart stopped. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that I can think of no better person—no other person
at all, in fact—to run this institute on my behalf, Miss Truelove, except you.”

My heart resumed its course, except perhaps at an accelerated pace, as if to make up for lost ground. “I see. This is indeed a position of great trust.”

His Grace set his cup and saucer on his knee and turned his head to the window. “You see, Miss Truelove, I have always been of a curious cast of mind, and when I encounter a problem of any sort, my instinct is to gather as much information as I can on the subject. And this—this
problem
of mine, it seems to me, is the reason God placed me on this earth. It is the great purpose of my life, and it is my duty to discover why, exactly, he has chosen me for this particular task.”

“Of course. I quite agree.”

The duke turned his gaze back to me. “I want you to give this a great deal of thought, Miss Truelove. It is no small task I have asked of you; you must perceive that.”

I rose to my feet and carried my cup and saucer to the table, where I placed them on the tray. “There is no need for further consideration, sir. I am quite willing to devote myself to this mystery, in any capacity you require.”

“There may, of course, be some danger involved in this position,” he said.

“I am equal, I hope, to any challenge that may present itself.”

He regarded me without expression. I was close enough to see the lines about the corners of his eyes, the bruised shadows beneath them, and my chest filled with compassion.

There is always a price,
Her Majesty had said, the duke was already paying it.

“There is one other matter,” he said. “I hope I do not intrude on your privacy.”

“Not at all.”

“You see, I had some concern that you would dismiss my proposal out of hand.” The slightest suggestion of color came to the tip of his nose, and the outer edges of his thick cheekbones. “I thought there might perhaps exist some prior engagement.”

“A prior engagement?”

“Between you and my friend Silverton.”

I confess, I was surprised to hear this. I had thought this subject would have been thoroughly covered by the two of them by now; certainly after such a night of manly comradeship as had occurred the day before last. Had the question of Emmeline Truelove's affections not been raised at all?

And yet, why should it? Nothing had been settled, after all. I had not given Silverton an answer. He hadn't pressed me for one.

I turned my head to the window, which overlooked the village square. The white sun blinded me, but I could still make out the shapes of the central statue, the wandering townsfolk. Silverton among them, no doubt, swinging his jaunty cane, chewing his pipe, tying up his loose threads.

With Silverton, I supposed, there were always loose threads.

I have few clear memories of my mother; they are mostly of the dreamlike variety, bedtime kisses and the scent of her skirts and something to do with paper dolls. Even the image of her on her sickbed is lost to me. But I do have this: a visit to the village confectionary, a much-anticipated reward for some childish achievement. I remember looking at the rows of sweets in an agony of indecision. I gazed back and forth between a glossy fruit marzipan—I can still
see the luscious purple curves of the grapes, perfect in every detail—and a round chocolate bonbon, containing a brandied cherry, and I burst into tears, because to have one was to relinquish all hope of the other.

And my mother bent down next to me and put one warm arm around my shoulders, and she didn't scold. “Emmie, darling,” she said, “every day of your life you will have to make choices, and you can't waste a single precious minute mourning what you have lost. Only be grateful for what you have gained.”

I remember the comfort of her words, though at the time I did not fully understand them, and as I stood there in that simple room in the center of the Aegean, contemplating the new spring sun, I thought I could feel my mother's arm upon my shoulders once more, and smell the scent of her dress, as if she were standing again beside me.

I returned my gaze to the Duke of Olympia and smiled gravely.

“In fact,” I said, “I am quite at liberty.”

Discussion
Q
uestions

1. A Most Extraordinary
   Pursuit
   begins with the death of the Duke of Olympia, a fictional titan of the Victorian Age, and Emmeline links the duke's death to the death of the nineteenth century itself. What changes do you think took place during the turn of the twentieth century? How do you think Emmeline feels about them? How do these themes play out in the book as a whole?
   
2. What were your initial impressions of Lord Silverton? How did they change during the course of the narrative? Do you think he would make a good match for Emmeline? Why or why not?
   
3. Do you think the ghosts of Queen Victoria and Mr. Truelove are “real,” or simply figments of Emmeline's imagination? What role do they play in the story? What is the nature of the Queen's apparent bond with Emmeline, and vice versa?
   
4. Were you surprised to discover that Emmeline has a lover in her past? Why do you think she held this information back from the reader for so much of the narrative? Do you think Emmeline is a reliable narrator? Why or why not?
   
5. Emmeline is a woman holding down a man's job in 1906, executing those duties competently and holding her own against her male companions, and yet at many points in the book she expresses traditional views about social, economic, and sexual politics. Do you find this contradictory? Why do you think she feels this way? What kinds of internal conflicts might Emmeline be experiencing, other than those she tells us about?
   
6. What did you think of the “retelling” of the myth of Theseus and Ariadne? Do you believe that myths and legends originate from real historical events? What role do you think myth and storytelling play in human society?
   
7. Max Haywood, the new Duke of Olympia, doesn't appear until the last section of the book. What impression did you have of him before he finally entered the story? Were your expectations realized or confounded? How does he compare to Lord Silverton?
   
8. How would you cope if you discovered you had Max's power? Would you use that power in some way, or leave it aside? Why?
   
9. What do you think of the possibility of time travel? Would you be afraid of affecting other events
   through the domino effect? Or do you think those effects are already “written” into history?
   
10. Do you think Emmeline made the right decision at the end of the book? Do you think Lord Silverton really loves her? Which man would you choose?