Carver's Quest (37 page)

‘I shall not accompany you back to the Angleterre, my boy. I shall visit my friends at the National Library again.’

‘I do not believe the waiter plans to venture outside again for the rest of the day.’ Adam stood. ‘I shall beard him in his den.’

He brushed aside the curtain that hung across the café door and entered. Almost blinded by the change from light to darkness, he squinted into the interior. There were several rickety
tables inside but only one was occupied. Two middle-aged men in shabby suits, wreathed in the smoke from their cigarettes, stared expressionlessly at Adam. As his eyes adjusted to the shadows, an
older man emerged from the innermost depths of the building, smiling and nodding. Adam paid him for the drinks and turned to leave. He glanced through the window. The professor was standing with
his back to the street. He was patting the pockets of his jacket as if he suspected that the beggar-woman who had importuned them might also have been a pickpocket and he was in danger of having
lost his wallet.

‘
Antio sas
.’ Adam tipped his hat in farewell at the two shabbily dressed men at their table. They made no reply but continued to draw impassively on their cigarettes. He
pushed aside the flimsy drape that separated the darkness of the café interior from the morning sunshine. As he did so, he heard a rumbling like distant thunder. It was so like thunder, he
later remembered, that he was about to look up to the heavens in search of the clouds that must have materialised so suddenly. Instead, he could only stare in horror at what was racing towards
them. Fields was still lost in his own world, his back to the street. Behind him, and approaching at tremendous speed, were the chestnut horse and its wooden cart. In the short time Adam had spent
paying the café owner, something must have disturbed the beast and sent it careering across the junction of the two roads. Realising that it was charging towards a collision, the horse
suddenly veered leftwards but, as it did so, the barrow it was pulling spun round in the direction of the café front. There were yells of warning from passers-by but the professor, still
oblivious to the uproar behind him, made no movement.

Adam acted without thought or hesitation. Instinct replaced reasoning and he hurled himself towards Fields, like a swimmer diving full-length into a river. His outstretched arms struck the
professor in his midriff. Both of them were propelled sideways just as the cart crashed into the table where they had been sitting. Momentum drove it on and clean through the window of the
café with a terrific noise of shattering glass and splintering wood until finally the vehicle came to a halt. Adam, now sprawled across the professor’s body, felt a waterfall of tiny
shards of glass shower down upon them both. He continued to lie there, aware now of the frantic whinnying of the chestnut horse and a hubbub of voices in the background. To his relief, he could
sense Fields breathing heavily beneath his weight. He moved his arms and legs gingerly. Miraculously, there seemed to be no great damage. The café owner had emerged from the wreckage of his
business together with his two customers, apparently unhurt and shocked, not into silence, but into voluble complaint and indignation. All three men roared and yelled. Picking himself up, Adam
could hear loud demands that the owner of the horse and cart should make himself known to them. They were also threatening such retribution that he doubted anyone would step forward from the crowd
that had gathered. Indeed, the driver of the cart had vanished. His vehicle was scarcely worth claiming. It had all but disintegrated in the impact. The chestnut horse had bolted up the street.

Amidst the continuing clamour, Fields pulled himself groggily to his feet.

‘Are you hurt, Professor?’

‘I think not.’ The old scholar raised his hand to his brow. He looked curiously at a red smear on it. ‘There is blood here but no serious injury. What happened? One moment I
was thinking of the library manuscripts and the next, like Icarus, I was plummeting earthwards.’

‘A runaway horse.’ Adam kicked aside fragments of wood and glass and picked up his hat from where it had fallen. ‘An accident.’

‘Possibly.’

‘What else could it be?’

For once, Professor Fields was silent.

* * * * *

The large room on the embassy’s ground floor was already crowded when Adam and the professor arrived in the Square of the Mint. Most of the men in attendance were dressed
in black tie and jacket. A few of the Greeks, wishing perhaps to advertise their patriotism, wore what had come to be seen since the War of Independence as national dress: richly embroidered velvet
jackets, two or three inside one another, accompanied white
fustanelles
, bound round the waist by leather belts. One fierce-eyed individual even had a silver dagger and scabbard hanging by
his side, as if to suggest that he was a warrior chieftain only recently descended from his mountain hideout. Samways, appearing briefly to point out the more interesting guests to them before
pushing his way back into the throng, identified him as a journalist on one of the city’s more radical newspapers.

‘They’re like the damn Scotch,’ Fields said with disgust as he watched Samways’s back disappear into the crowd. ‘Marching around in their ridiculous kilts,
pretending to be great heroes.’

The embassy man was not gone for long. Within a couple of minutes he had returned, forcing his way through the crush of people in the company of the man Adam and the professor had come to meet.
Rallis was one of the majority that had chosen western dress. Indeed, his immaculately tailored suit would not have looked out of place in Piccadilly or Bond Street. He was of medium height and
olive complexion. Samways had told them that the lawyer was not yet out of his twenties, but his jet black hair was already receding and his high forehead gave him the look of an older man. He
bowed deeply on introduction but made no attempt at first to shake hands with them. Adam had the feeling that, just as they had attended the reception to judge him, Rallis was there to assess them.
He might meet with their approval but there was no guarantee that they would meet with his.

‘I am delighted to meet you, gentlemen. Mr Samways has told me much about you.’ Rallis now reached out his hand to Adam. ‘I trust that you are enjoying your visit to
Athens.’

‘It is a city that every lover of truth and beauty must enjoy,’ Adam said. ‘But we are finding the heat near intolerable. We are not used to such temperatures as
yet.’

‘Ah, the heat, yes. It is fierce, is it not? Enough to drive a man as mad as the March hare.’

‘You have a fine grasp of a good old English simile, Mr Rallis,’ the professor said, shaking the Greek’s hand in his turn, and was rewarded with the briefest of smiles.

‘Oh, Alexander speaks English better than I do,’ Samways said. ‘He lived in London in the early sixties.’

‘I was there as a very young man.’ The Greek spoke as if he was now full of years and looking back on his distant past. ‘I was a student but I was also busy with the task of
persuading your fellow countrymen to support the rightful claims of my people.’

Adam raised an eyebrow enquiringly.

‘Our claims to land that should be Greece but which is ruled by the Turk,’ Rallis continued. ‘It is what we Greeks call the
Megale
Idea
, the Great Idea. We
long for a time when the nation will encompass all Greeks.’

‘Dreaming that Greece might still be free and all that?’ Samways said, clearly bored, his eyes idly roaming around the room.

‘A part of Greece is already free, Mr Samways. But the kingdom of Greece is not the whole of Greece. The Greek is not only he who inhabits the kingdom. The Greeks of Ioannina, of Salonika,
even the Greeks of Constantinople, do they not deserve their freedom? What kind of a Greece is it that does not include Mount Olympus? Where the ancient gods look down on a land ruled by
Turks?’

Rallis was growing warm in his enthusiasm. His voice was raised above the ordinary level of social conversation, so much so that several people in his vicinity turned their heads to look at
him.

‘All sounds a bit too political for me, old boy,’ Samways commented. ‘We embassy chaps should always steer well clear of politics.’

‘I see it is the same with the English as with the French or with the Germans. I discovered that it was so when I was in London,’ Rallis said. He had noticed that he was attracting
attention and had lowered his voice. He was now smiling to take any sting from his words. ‘You are always kind enough to allow us a glorious past, but it is seldom you concern yourselves with
our future.’

‘The future’s no business of ours, Alexander old chap. Difficult enough keeping up with what’s going on in the present.’ Samways had seen someone he wished to flatter on
the other side of the room and was eager to extricate himself from the conversation. ‘I shall leave you with these two gentlemen. Although I suspect that they will prove to be like the rest
of us. More interested in the past than the future.’

Rallis watched the English diplomat push his way through the crowd and then turned to Adam and the professor.

‘I think that Mr Samways, perhaps, does not always concern himself even with my country’s present. But he is a good man.’

Fields snorted. ‘Felix Samways is what he always was. A man with more money than he has brains. But he recommends you, Mr Rallis.’

The Greek bowed his head as if to suggest that this recommendation merely proved the diplomat’s essential goodness.

‘He is very kind. However, for what is he recommending me? Not for legal work, he tells me. He speaks instead of ancient manuscripts. I must confess myself puzzled. But I am also
intrigued. What manuscripts do these English gentlemen seek? I wonder to myself.’

‘The story is a long one, sir. But it is one that you should hear. It begins in London at a dinner in my club. A gentleman named Samuel Creech introduced himself to me.’ Adam took
Rallis gently by the arm and, with the professor on his other side, guided the Greek lawyer towards a less crowded corner of the room.

S
itting towards the back of the little Anglican church of St Paul’s, listening as best he could to the preacher’s quiet drone, Adam was
able to survey the English community in Athens at worship. It was not, he decided, an altogether prepossessing sight. He could see Samways, stifling a yawn, in one of the pews further forward.
Looking beyond the young diplomat, he could see more men he assumed were attached to the embassy. Some he recognised from the night of the reception. Others in the congregation, well-fed and
well-dressed men and women with a look of indestructible self-satisfaction in their eyes, he took to be businessmen and their wives. One white-bearded old man, sitting stiffly to attention near the
front, might have been one of the generation of English Philhellenes who had fought on the Greek side in the War of Independence. Bored by the service, Adam indulged himself in idle speculations
about the life the elderly gentleman might have led. He might have witnessed the kind of adventures in the 1820s of which the young man had dreamed as a boy. He might have been one of Byron’s
comrades at Missolonghi or a man who had sailed with the British fleet at the Battle of Navarino. These thoughts were enough to distract Adam slightly from the tedium of the service. He had not
wished to attend St Paul’s this Sunday morning but the professor had insisted. Fields, it seemed, was too busy to go to church himself, but it was imperative that Adam should go.

‘There are few more revealing sights than our fellow countrymen at prayer,’ he had said. ‘You will lean more about the English Athenians in one hour at St Paul’s than in
a week spent observing them elsewhere.’

Adam was unsure that he wished to know much more about the English in Athens than he knew already. He was very certain that the professor was wrong in his assumption that they would best display
their true characters while worshipping their god. However, he had chosen not to argue with Fields and had dutifully made his way to the Anglican church for the morning service. Now, here he was,
crammed uncomfortably into a wooden pew, wondering anew why he had come. His eyes moved on from the ageing Philhellene and further towards the front of the congregation. He almost exclaimed aloud
in surprise at what he saw. Sitting in a pew immediately beneath the pulpit was Emily Maitland. She was leaning forward, her lips slightly parted, listening to the sermon with more apparent
attention than it deserved. Seated next to her, his face set in a faintly mocking smile, as if he could scarcely credit what the preacher was saying, was Lewis Garland.

Adam was astonished to see them together. The MP’s presence in Athens was, of course, no great surprise. Adam had seen him in the restaurant of the Angleterre earlier in the week. At the
time, the young man had made every effort to avoid Garland’s notice, slipping out of the room before the MP had spotted him. An encounter just at that time, Adam had thought, would have
proved too complicated to negotiate. He had told Quint of his sighting, but not Fields. Yet what was Emily doing in the city? This was Athens, not Switzerland or Salonika. And why was Garland in
the company of the enigmatic young woman who had visited Adam in London? How did an English businessman and member of the House of Commons know her? Was she another of his conquests? It was not a
pleasant notion. As the clergyman continued to mumble relentlessly about the wages of sin, Adam found he could not begin to bring his thoughts into order or to find adequate answers to all the
questions that filled his mind.

When the service finally stumbled its way to its conclusion, he was the first on his feet and the first to make his way into the bright sunshine of the Sunday morning. His initial thought was to
avoid coming face to face with Garland and Emily. If they had not seen him, what purpose was there in renewing acquaintance with them? If Emily was indeed one of the ageing Don Juan’s
paramours, why torment himself with meeting them together? He began to walk away from St Paul’s, but he had gone no more than a hundred yards when curiosity and the overwhelming desire to
speak to the young woman got the better of him. He turned and retraced his steps. The English expatriates were still trooping out of their church. The street was filled with their carriages. Ahead
of him, Adam could see Lewis Garland escorting Emily towards a black landau. He hastened to intercept them.