A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (6 page)

In fact, I had only had anything at all to do with Mr. Haywood's affairs since last winter, when he and the duke first conceived the notion of an institute for the study of ancient objects. I had never known His Grace to be especially interested in such things before, but his passion for the subject ignited at once. Perhaps it had something to do with the nature of these objects, which I understood were of an unusual sort. Mr. Haywood, in the course of his archeological investigations in Crete, had discovered a number of artifacts that—or so he insisted—possessed properties that could not be explained by ordinary science. At the time, I had not inquired what, exactly, those properties were. It was not my business.

The Duke of Olympia, however, had been intrigued by his grandnephew's claims, whatever they were, and had spent the past year enthusiastically putting them in the way of further study. Tens of thousands of pounds had already been invested in the institute in Rye, and Mr. Haywood had forwarded regular parcels containing objects for its initial collection. Now, of course, the duke was dead, and Mr. Haywood could not be found. And here I was, roiling atop the sea in my prison of steel, charged with his urgent discovery.

How the devil was I going to do that?

I have every confidence in you
, the dowager duchess had said, as we poised on the driveway to make our farewells. She had given me the packet of papers necessary for my voyage and kissed me on both cheeks. The sky had been very black, and her face almost purple in the light from the house. What had she said?
You have a particular talent for detail, my dear, and I know you will not disappoint me.

An odd way to put things, I thought now, and I forced my torpid limbs to unpick themselves from the cushions and slump to the small writing desk a yard or so away, on which I had placed the packet of papers Her Grace had given me.

A mistake. The documents swam before me: passports, letters of credit, introductions to people I did not recognize. It was beyond my strength even to assemble the words into meaning. I would study everything later, I thought, and I cast about for my traveling desk, which went with me everywhere, and which I could use, if necessary, while sitting up in bed. Should I ever again commit so foolhardy a maneuver as to raise my head, of course.

The stewards had stowed my desk on the floor next to the bed, and I had just unlocked the bottom drawer and placed the papers inside, when the deck began to tilt in the slow, magisterial, vertical manner I recognized too well. An especially murderous series of waves followed, one after another, while the metal groaned from within and the wind raged at the portholes. I closed my eyes and anchored myself to the floor. When I opened them again, I saw that a few of the papers had come loose and scattered across the rug.

For a moment, I simply stared at them. I dislike disorder—my room, wherever it happens to be, remains always in immaculate organization—but I could not summon either the will or the strength to recover these errant sheets. The few feet of carpet
seemed an impossible distance, and the ship would go on rolling to one side and then another.

Go on, then, Truelove
, I told myself.
You cannot leave the duchess's papers lying on the floor like this. A disgrace.

I placed both palms on the rug and crawled carefully to where the papers lay, and one by one I gathered them together in a tidy stack. As I did so, I realized they were not documents at all, but photographs, each enlarged to the size of a sheaf of ordinary notepaper.

I turned to lean my back against the wall of the groaning ship, and I held the first photograph up to the faint light from the porthole.

If I hoped to find some clue to the new duke's whereabouts, I was disappointed. The first photograph was of a stucco wall, covered by a series of peeling and disjointed frescoes. I held the photograph closer, but I could not quite make out the images in the paintings. I would require the magnifying glass in my traveling desk to see them clearly.

I turned to the next photograph, which depicted a similar scene, and then the third.

This one had been taken at a closer distance, and I could actually make out the furry gray figures in the frescoes. There was a woman, and an immense man next to her wearing a helmet of some kind, the top of which had been eroded away. Ahead of them stood a man, muscular and warlike though not quite so large as the first, holding a sword in one hand and an object in another, with which he appeared to be beckoning his companions.

I held the photograph higher, and a bar of light from the porthole crossed the image, in such a way that I imagined, for a confused instant, that the object in this ancient man's frescoed hand
was a No. 1 Brownie camera, of the type manufactured and sold the world over by the Eastman Kodak Company.

But of course I was mistaken—my God, naturally I
must
be mistaken!—and as the ship pitched back downward, shutting off the meager light, the bile rose up in my throat, and I threw down all three photographs and crawled to my private bathroom, the most miserable creature atop the seven
seas.

The Lady did as her brother suggested, enlisting the help of her most trusted handmaid to secure the disguise of a humble peasant, and leaving word for her father and her husband that she had gone into her monthly seclusion. The handmaid borrowed a donkey from her brother, who worked on a small farm near the palace, and together the two women and the donkey walked down the long road from Labrys to the port.

When they arrived, the Athenian youths had already been taken from their ships and housed in great splendour. They were bathed and anointed with oil, and robed in rich silks and velvets. The Lady and her handmaid took up dishes from the kitchens to serve in the banquet hall, and it was there that the Lady beheld the sacrificial youths for the first time, and the man whose fate was already written alongside hers for eternity . . .

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

T
hat, my dear, is Gibraltar,” said Lord Silverton, propping his elbows on the topmost rail of the promenade deck some three days later. “Do you mind if I smoke?”

“I do, but I would not deprive you of the pleasure.”

He reached deep into a waistcoat pocket and produced a pipe. “As a cure for seasickness, tobacco cannot be recommended highly enough.”

“I doubt any substance so noxious could be called a cure for anything.”

“Still cross, I see. Not that I blame you, mind. What a beastly old Biscay she was, this go-around. At her absolute worst.” He seemed to be having difficulty with his match, turning this way and that in an attempt to shelter from the draft that rushed along the sides of the ship. “Not that the bay is ever anything less than tempestuous. Ah, there we are.” He straightened and dropped
the match into the navy water below. “This is more the thing, isn't it? Clear skies, calm seas. Your face is looking decidedly less gray already.”

The scent of pipe tobacco filled the breeze. I tried to hold my breath, but you can't avoid the draft of a modern steamship traveling through the February weather at sixteen or seventeen knots; it plows directly into your nose, whether you like it or not. I held my fist to my mouth and said, “So that is Gibraltar. I thought it would be larger.”

“Ha! Yes, these things are never so great as we imagine them, eh? But it's a fine old rock all the same. I climbed to the top once, when I was a reckless young lad of seventeen. We had put in for coal, I believe.” He paused, sucking gently on his pipe, and patted the rail. “It was my parents' honeymoon trip, in this very ship.”

“Your
parents
' honeymoon? And you were there?”

“Well, my father and my stepmother, to be precise. Olympia lent us his ship for an entire year, almost. My half brother was born off the coast of Argentina, in the middle of a hundred-year gale.” He laughed. “I don't believe I've ever seen my father so frightened. At one point, my stepmother ordered him off the ship in a lifeboat. Luckily he ignored her and carried on, with the help of a bottle of Scotland's finest, procured for him from the ship's stores by yours truly. One doesn't much listen to women in the throes of childbirth, you see. Anyway, she had another the following year, so I suppose it wasn't as bad as it sounded.”

“You shouldn't speak of such things.”

“What, childbirth?” He tilted his head to one side. “I never could make that out, actually. What's improper and what's not. Nothing more natural than having a baby, and yet we're not allowed to speak about it. Why is that, do you think?”

“Because it's—because—well, a woman's delicate sensibility demands—”

“Oh, rot. If you had seen my stepmother laboring forth in the middle of a hurricane, you'd have no more regard than I do for this so-called female delicacy.” He knocked the ash from his pipe. “It's because babies are the natural consequence of human concourse, I suppose.”

I choked into my fist. “Sir!”

“Yes, exactly. And there's nothing dirtier, is there, than a man and woman coming together in mutual— Now, don't flounce off, Truelove. You're a sensible, emancipated woman. If a chap can't have a sensible, emancipated conversation with a sensible, emancipated woman, what's the point of civilization?”

“This is not a sensible conversation, and I don't have the slightest idea what you mean by emancipated.”

He made a fluttering motion with his hands, as of wings. “Free. Independent. Able to think and act and decide for oneself.”

“I hope you're not accusing me of being a
suffragette
, Lord Silverton.”

“Well, are you?”

“Of course not!”

His hands dropped to the rail. “But don't you want the vote?”

“Certainly not. Why should I? It's a nasty business, politics, and we women are well clear of it, in my opinion.”

“Oh, nothing more beastly than politics, I quite agree. Pigs in the sty and all that. But it's rather essential, you know, if one wants to get one's way in life.”

I looked down and smiled in the general direction of my hands, which were gloved in kidskin and folded, one above the other, on the rail before me. “I don't mean to shock you, Lord Silverton, but
women have been . . .
getting their way
, as you put it, for millennia, without recourse to voting for it.”

“Are you quite sure of that, Truelove? I can think of a few instances—”

“Such as?”

He pulled at the wisp of golden curl that escaped onto his forehead from beneath the shelter of his woolen cap. “The suttee, for example.”

“Yes, a horrifying practice, quite repugnant to our British sensibilities. But do the widows themselves object? Do their families? Very rarely. So it is not the legality of the matter that must change—the politics, if you will—but the moral constitution of the people themselves, of which women are guardians. Once the women decide they want something else, I can assure you, they will shortly have it.”

“You dazzle me, Truelove. I'm dashed if there isn't a fatal hole in your logic somewhere, but for the moment you have me at an absolute loss. Drawn, quartered, flopping in the wind.” He chewed on his pipe. “Though—and I don't mean to be cheeky—doesn't that make you emancipated?”

“Sir, I gather your notion of emancipation has mostly to do with the freedom to engage in improper conversation, by which definition—”

“I object. I only engage in improper conversation twice a day, at the outmost.”

“—by which definition, I insist that I am not emancipated at all.”

“Now, where's the logic in that? Just because your rigid old society has decided that certain subjects—sexual relations, for example—are dirty things that must not be discussed.”

I said quietly, “You couldn't be more mistaken, your lordship.
We do not restrain ourselves from discussing human love because it is
dirty
.”

“What, then?”

“Because it is sacred.”

Silverton wrapped his hand around the bowl of his pipe and leaned forward on his elbows, contemplating the coast of Europe. A fishing smack caught the early sun, and its sail turned to gold.

“Now that,” he said, “is the kind of logic I can't possibly answer. Have you stomach for breakfast, do you think?”

As it turned out, I did not have the stomach for breakfast, and found myself a short while later back in my berth, attempting to examine the stack of papers in the drawer of my traveling desk without losing what little porridge remained to me.

The desk had been bequeathed to me by my father, together with nearly all of his material possessions. (A naturalist cousin had received his extensive collection of insects, neatly classified and pinned at perfect intervals in a series of glass cases, of which I had a horror: not because they were insects, but because they were dead. I'm told the cousin treasures them still, however.) I believe Papa had had the article specially made for himself, upon his appointment to the post of personal secretary to the Duke of Olympia, around the time of his marriage to my mother, and I have never seen its equal for both usefulness and beauty. There are clever drawers for paper and pens and ink and everything one could wish, and the inner compartment locks in such a way that only the nimblest of lock-pickers could find his way in.

Perhaps, at this point, I should make clear that my father—dearer to me than any living human being—was not my father
in the biological sense. He married my mother when I was just past my third birthday, and lavished me from the beginning with such a comforting excess of paternal care that I have never regarded him as a stepfather, or as anything other than my true and devoted parent. When Mama died a few years later, he took me under the shelter of his arm and promised to serve me as both father and mother, and he kept his word faithfully until the moment of his death. Every summer, during the school holidays, he would take me on what he called a journey of discovery: a week in which we might explore the Peaks or the Lakes, the fields of Bosworth or the Outer Hebrides, without a soul for company except each other. As we tramped across the damp meadows and pebbled sun-warmed beaches, discussing history and politics and such books as we had mutually read, I thought how lucky I was to have him entirely and intimately to myself at last, without any other claims on his time and attention.

But always he would bring his beautiful wooden desk and a stack of papers, and as the train clattered along an elderly branch line, or the wind howled softly outside the window of our place of lodging, he would place his spectacles on the bridge of his prominent nose, lift the desk onto his lap, and busy himself in the transcription of letters and the composition of memoranda. I remember the gentle scratch of his pen and the scent of ink and contentment as I sat beside him, immersed in a novel, and even now, as I hold that same desk in place on my own adult lap, I can smell the good British air, the greenness of eternal summer, and it seems as if my father still sits beside me.

Sometimes, in fact, the illusion is so acute that his image actually appears there and speaks to me, interrupting me in my work.

“What a curious coincidence,” he said, as I sat with roiling
stomach on my berth in the
Isolde
. “I was not a particularly good sailor, either.”

I didn't look up. “Lord Silverton said the weather in the Bay of Biscay was particularly severe.”

“But the sea is now calm, if a little overcast. Though I suppose it's a common enough affliction, seasickness. I should try
not
to work, if I were you.”

“I'm not working, really. Only looking over these papers the duchess has given me. What a wonder, that she could ready all these documents in so little time: passport, letters of credit, and so on.”

“She is the Duchess of Olympia, after all.”

“Yes.”

I waited for him to go away, for the illusion to dissolve—sometimes it did—and when he did not, breathing quietly instead atop the chair next to the porthole, studying me in that scientific way of his, I said, lifting my magnifying glass, “She has also given me a set of photographs, which seem to have been taken in situ by Mr. Haywood last year, according to her note.”

“Ah. The frescoes from Knossos?”

“
Are
they from Knossos?”

“So one must suppose.”

I peered through the magnifying glass. “One of the figures appears to be holding a modern Brownie camera, manufactured no earlier than 1901 by the Eastman Kodak Company of the United States of America.”

“But that would be impossible, wouldn't it?”

“Yes, of course. It must be something else.” I paused. “But the resemblance is uncanny. The box, the round hole of the lens, the leather strap for one's fingers. Exactly like the one I purchased last year, which lies, unfortunately, in my bedroom in London.”

“But this is only a fresco, and an ancient one at that.”

“True. It might represent any number of objects. I am hardly an expert on the subject of ancient Greece.” I set down the glass and the photographs. “Did you ever meet Maximilian Haywood?”

“I did. A fine man, a brilliant mind, though not particularly sociable. He has a certain quality of stubbornness, which serves him well in his studies and his archeological expeditions, and less well at other times. I daresay he'll make an excellent duke, if he can reconcile himself to the idea.” He paused and stroked his thumb along the crease of his gray trousers. “I see you have met Lord Silverton.”

I made a noise of exasperation. “The fool. I wonder that so clever and discerning a woman as the duchess tolerates him at all.”

“Perhaps he isn't such a fool as you imagine.”

“Obviously you never had the pleasure of speaking with him.”

My father took his time to answer, as he often did. I pinched the smooth enamel of the pen between my thumb and forefinger and listened to the distant grind of the engines. Several decks away, three men shoveled unceasing coal into the fireboxes that powered those engines, and six more men waited in shifts to relieve them. Or so the captain had told me over breakfast this morning, perhaps to distract me from the pitch of my stomach. I stared at the passport before me—
name,
TRUELOVE
,
EMMELINE
ROSE;
date of birth,
18 OCTOB
ER 1880;
place of birth
,
ENGLAND
—and imagined those three men now, sinuous and perspiring and unknown beside the inferno below. Laboring for my good speed. “You think I judge him unfairly,” I said at last.