Carver's Quest (38 page)

‘Good morning, sir. I trust that you are enjoying your visit to Athens.’

The MP smiled wrily as he shook the hand Adam proffered.

‘Miss Maitland said that she was sure she had noticed you among the congregation, Mr Carver. But we could not, at first, see you as we left. And – forgive me for saying this –
I had not put you down as a regular churchgoer.’

‘You are right, sir, I am not. But I was told that I could not miss the Sunday service at St Paul’s. That everybody would be here. Well, everybody English, that is.’

‘And, as you can see, your informant was correct. Everybody
is
here.’

Adam turned and raised his hat to the young woman.

‘I expected you to be taking the fresh mountain air by now, Miss Maitland. When we met last, I understood that you and your mother were soon to travel to Switzerland.’

‘Our plans were never set in stone, Mr Carver.’ Emily flushed very slightly as she replied. ‘After some consideration we decided that we should return to Salonika. But we have
chosen to visit friends here in Athens for a week before we travel further north.’

She looked at him almost defiantly, as if he might be tempted to dispute her statement.

‘I had not realised until a few minutes ago that you and Miss Maitland knew one another, Carver. She tells me that you met in London.’ Garland made his remark seem a casual one, but
there was no disguising his curiosity about the circumstances in which Adam had encountered the young lady.

‘We were introduced by friends of my mother’s, were we not, Mr Carver?’ Emily was swift to intervene. ‘In Kensington.’

‘Yes, of course, Kensington.’

‘As I was saying to my godfather’ – Emily inclined her head towards the MP – ‘it was at an afternoon tea party. In aid of charity.’

‘And what charitable organisation is it upon which you bestow your patronage, Carver?’ Garland asked. ‘I do not think that you mentioned its name, Emily.’

Adam struggled to think of some philanthropic body that he, together with Emily and her mother, might plausibly patronise.

‘The Society for the Employment of Necessitous Gentlewomen,’ he said, after a lengthy pause.

Emily stifled a giggle, transforming it into a genteel clearing of her throat. Garland raised his eyebrow and looked from the girl to the young man and back, but could scarcely express the
disbelief he clearly felt.

‘What did you make of the preacher here at St Paul’s, Carver?’ he asked, changing the subject. ‘Is he a bawler, would you say? Or more of a squeaker?’

‘I’m not sure I catch your meaning, Mr Garland.’

‘Every reverend gentleman I have ever heard is one or the other. Either they bawl so loud you need earmuffs or they squeak so you can’t hear more than one word in ten.’

Adam laughed. ‘The gentleman who has delighted us this morning is more of a squeaker, I would say,’ he suggested.

‘I agree with you. Squeak, squeak, squeak. I was unable to follow his argument. Or even to hear it. His text appeared to be from Ecclesiastes and to refer, as one might expect from that
depressing book, to the vanity of human wishes, but whatever benefit there might have been in his thoughts on it was entirely lost on me. What about you, my dear? Did you gain wisdom and insight
from the preacher’s sermon?’

‘There is always wisdom and insight to be gained from a sermon, Mr Garland, is there not?’ Emily said, looking as if this were the last thing she truly thought.

The older man smiled. ‘So we are always led to believe, my dear,’ he said, ‘but you will excuse me for a moment. We must be on our way.’

He turned to beckon his driver towards them. Adam and the young woman looked at one another but said nothing. The black landau began to approach.

‘And how is your man Quint, Mr Carver?’ Emily said hurriedly, eager to fill the sudden silence. ‘Is he here in Athens with you?’

‘He is, Miss Maitland. And, arrived in the birthplace of democracy, he has proved even more of a free spirit than he was in London. It is sometimes difficult to look at the pair of us and
decide which is the master and which the man.’

‘You have encountered Carver’s servant, Emily?’ Garland said, turning back to them and seizing on the girl’s remark. ‘Was he also devoting his time to the
assistance of necessitous gentlewomen?’

Emily said nothing. She looked at Adam.

‘He was waiting with a cab when I left the tea party,’ the young man said. ‘Miss Maitland was good enough to condescend to speak briefly to him then. He has not forgotten it.
He will be gratified that you remember him,’ Adam added, certain that Quint would be nothing of the kind.

The carriage, with its two greys, now stood close to them. One of Garland’s servants was sitting with reins in hand. Another had climbed down from the landau and opened one of its
doors.

‘I am sorry that we cannot stay longer, Carver,’ the MP said. ‘No doubt you and Emily would find further Kensington memories to share. But we have a luncheon appointment that
cannot wait. Perhaps we will see you again. You are at the Angleterre, I assume?’

Adam nodded.

‘You must tell Polly to serve you one of his best bottles of burgundy at dinner tonight and charge it to my account.’ Garland took Emily’s hand to help her into the carriage.
‘He has a habit of forc-

ing his guests to drink the most filthy wines if he is not watched carefully.’

‘Goodbye, Mr Carver,’ the young woman said, as she settled into her seat. ‘It has been a pleasure to meet you again in so unexpected a fashion.’

Adam raised his hat as Garland climbed into the landau and tapped the driver on the shoulder with his stick. The horses were eager to be on their way. The carriage moved abruptly into the road
and departed in a furry of dust. Adam caught a last view of Emily, her head turned to look at him and her hand waving farewell.

* * * * *

‘Garland? That’s the MP chappie, ain’t it? My pater knows him, I think.’ Samways, seated behind a large desk in an airless office in the embassy, was red
in the face and sweating fiercely. On the wall behind him was a portrait of the queen. The artist had caught Victoria at one of her sterner moments and she looked to be scowling down on her
perspiring representative in Athens.

‘He is in the House, yes.’ Adam turned his eyes away from the glowering queen and glanced briefly from the one window in the room. He could see the leaves of a tree fluttering in a
light breeze outside and hear the faint noise of traffic in the square below. ‘But he is in Athens at present. I saw him at St Paul’s on Sunday.’

‘Oh, I know he’s in Athens, old boy. Saw him at the service myself.’

‘And you know where he is staying in the city, do you?’ Adam had assumed that Garland was staying at the Angleterre but enquiries had shown this assumption was wrong. He was now
hoping that the man at the embassy could help to locate him.

‘Might do, old boy.’ Samways moved a bronze inkstand from one side of his desk to the other. He stared at it, as if judging the aesthetic effect of shifting its position, and,
clearly dissatisfied, moved it back again. ‘Might do. But I’m not sure I ought to let you in on the secret.’

‘It
is
a secret, is it?’

The embassy man smiled slyly. ‘Not sure I’d go so far as to call it that,’ he said, tempting Adam to remark that that was exactly what he
had
just called it.

‘Did I, old boy? Just a turn of phrase. It’s not a secret. Or at least not a secret that the embassy wants kept. But Garland himself might not want you knowing it.’

‘This is not a matter of any great consequence, Samways.’ Adam tried to make his voice as casual in its tone as he could. He sensed that, if the man from the embassy thought there
was much significance in his enquiry, he would not tell him what he wanted to know. It seemed there must be some hidden motive behind Garland’s arrival in the city, some reason for his visit
of which the embassy was aware. Why else would Samways be so circumspect? ‘I met Garland at my club in London last month. The Marco Polo. I thought I would leave my card. But it is of no
great moment. If you do not know where he is staying…’ Adam rose from his seat as if to leave the room.

‘I did not say that I didn’t.’ Samways’s desire to appear a man in the know was at war with his belief that discretion on the subject of Garland was required. He reached
an arm across the table as if to seize Adam by the hand and prevent his departure. Discretion, it seemed, had lost.

‘Look, I’m sure you’re a man who can keep his mouth shut, Carver, when it’s required.’

Adam agreed that he was.

‘Garland’s here on a delicate mission. Not many people know he’s here. Can’t tell you more than that. Probably shouldn’t have told you anything at all. But
you’re a college man, ain’t you? If I can’t trust an old college man, who can I trust?’

Adam assumed that the question was a rhetorical one and left it unanswered.

‘And if you know Garland of old, no harm in telling you he’s staying here at the embassy.’

‘At the embassy?’ Adam was surprised.

‘Thought he’d be more inconspicuous here than at the Angleterre. He’s only here for a few days. If you want to leave your card, I’ll make sure he receives it.’

Adam reached into his pocket and took out his silver card case. He opened it and handed one of the cards to Samways. The diplomat turned it over suspiciously, as if he thought it might have some
hidden message scribbled on its rear face, and then placed it in a small tray on his desk.

‘When you saw Garland at St Paul’s,’ Samways said, ‘you must have seen the girl who was with him.’

‘There was a girl with him, yes.’

‘Quite a stunner, ain’t she? She’s staying here as well. Calls herself his god-daughter.’ Samways leered unpleasantly. ‘Ain’t heard that one
before.’

Adam felt a strong temptation to lean across the desk and punch the embassy man on the nose, but he resisted it.

‘She’s very beautiful, certainly. Do you know anything more of her?’

Samways shook his head.

‘Garland has a reputation, though, don’t he? Randy old devil. He’s old enough to be her grandfather, never mind her godfather.’

T
he young Englishman drew a long breath as he reached the top of the Acropolis. He turned to his companion and forced a strained smile to his face.
Their exertions, so soon after breakfast, had tired him more than he had thought they would. Adam was a fit man. He had been one of the first men at Cambridge to box under the new Queensberry rules
for the sport and he had rowed on the river as one of the college eight. Since moving in to Doughty Street, he had been a regular patron of the German gymnasium in St Pancras where he had exercised
with dumb-bells and weights. And yet the climb from the ancient agora to the Acropolis had taken its toll in the morning heat. Behind him, the white colonnade of the Parthenon gleamed in the sun.
Adam took a handkerchief from his pocket. He removed his hat and mopped his brow. Now standing at his side, Rallis, just as elaborately attired as the Englishman, seemed not to feel the heat.

‘It is a fine sight, is it not?’ he said.

‘The finest in the world,’ Adam agreed. ‘I saw it once before, in sixty-seven, and I have never forgotten it. The memory of it has warmed many a chilly day in London in the
last few years.’

The two men continued to stand and admire the ancient temple to Athena. Adam, recovering swiftly from the rigours of the climb, was the first to move.

‘It is a great pity that it was impossible to bring my camera to Athens,’ he said, holding up his hands to frame the view he might have taken.

‘It has been difficult enough to carry our own selves up to this point,’ the Greek lawyer said, smiling. ‘I am by no means certain that we could have carried your photographic
equipment as well.’

‘We could have hired men to bring it. It has been done often enough before. I have seen photographs of the buildings here while sitting in the library of the Marco Polo Club back in Pall
Mall. A chap named Stillman showed them to me. An American who was staying in London.’

Adam began to pick his way across the rocks on the summit of the Acropolis. He gestured back towards the path where they had climbed up.

‘What is that unsightly horror? I remember it from my visit with Fields. And it was in one of Stillman’s photographs.’

Rallis looked over his shoulder at the tall stone building to which his companion was pointing.

‘The Frankish Tower. It was built by the Florentines several centuries ago. The Turks, when they occupied the city, used it to store gunpowder.’

‘It is a filthy excrescence,’ Adam exclaimed. ‘A blot on the landscape. It does its very best to spoil the approach to the sublime. Someone should use gunpowder to blow it
up.’

‘It would not be missed, would it?’ the Greek agreed. ‘But let us continue to turn our backs on it and feast our eyes on the temple to Athena. Or on the maidens of the
Erechtheum.’ He waved his hand towards the ruins of a smaller temple to their left, the columns of its porch shaped into female figures carrying the weight of the building on their heads.

‘Ah, the caryatids!’ Adam was filled with enthusiasm once more. ‘I see these regularly in London.’

Rallis looked puzzled. ‘In the photographs of Mr Stillman again?’ he asked.

Adam shook his head. ‘Copies of them stand guard over the crypt of the new church of St Pancras. In the Euston Road. But they look better here in the Greek sun than they do beneath the
English rain.’

The two men seated themselves on one of the fallen stones that littered the surface of the Acropolis. It was still early in the morning and there were few other visitors to disturb the
tranquillity.

‘It is enjoyable to act the tourist,’ the Greek said after a few moments. ‘But I have also been busy in the days since we first met.’

Adam raised an eyebrow enquiringly. The meeting at the embassy party had been a huge success. Rallis had been intrigued by their plans. Adam, and more importantly Professor Fields, had been
impressed by the Greek. It was now accepted that the lawyer would join them on any expedition out of Athens.