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Authors: Anne Fortier

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BOOK: The Lost Sisterhood
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“My ancestor. The first Lord Moselane.” Astonishingly enough, James looked as if he had completely forgotten our previous encounter. In fact, his smile suggested I was precisely the sort of woman he had hoped to meet that evening. “Died peacefully in his sleep at ninety-two. At least we like to think so.” He shook my hand and was in no hurry to let it go. “Delighted.”

“Actually”—I reluctantly withdrew my hand—”we met last year. In front of Blackwell’s.” Before the words were even out of my mouth, I winced at my own treacherous honesty. It took only a few seconds for the cogwheels to click into place in James’s head, and it was not a pretty process to behold.

“Right,” he said, slowly. “Right, right, right …”

But the word written in his hazel eyes was quite the opposite.

Indeed, in the months to come, whenever we would dutifully meet for coffee—always prompted by Katherine Kent—James’s opening question, “How is your mother?” would set the tone for our conversation and remind me why our coffees never turned into lunch. He was attentive, certainly, and would occasionally give me a look that sent hope fluttering through my body. But by and large he kept treating me with unfaltering chivalry, as if I were an untouchable maiden he was sworn to protect.

Perhaps it was all because of my mother. Or perhaps it was partly due to James’s being born—as my father had once so very aptly phrased it—with a silver spoon up his arse. Keeping the blue blood pure and all that. In which case I could groom my plume as much as I liked; it would never occur to Lord Moselane’s son that we were the same species.

I was stirred from my High Table reverie by a hand taking away the plate with my untouched starter. Next to me, James sat with his head bent as if in prayer, checking his phone underneath the starched dinner
napkin. Reaching discreetly into my handbag, I pulled out Mr. Ludwig’s photograph and held it toward him. “What do you make of this?”

James leaned over to look. “Approximate dating?”

“I’d say about ten days,” I joked, “judging from the bent corner and frayed edges. As for the inscription … your guess is as good as mine.”

He squinted, clearly intrigued. “Who gave you this?”

“A mysterious man,” I said, with deliberate drama, “who told me this picture is proof the Amazons
did
exist—”

“What is that?” Katherine Kent reached over to pluck the photograph from my fingers and study it in the light of a candle. “Where was this taken?”

“No idea.” Happily surprised at their interest, I quickly drew up the high points of my bizarre encounter that afternoon. When I circled back to Mr. Ludwig’s claim about the undeciphered Amazon alphabet, however, James sat back in his chair and groaned.

“How vexing!” Katherine gave me back the photo with a puzzled frown. “This could be anywhere. If only we knew the name of his foundation …”

I shrank under her glare. Clearly, she was blaming me for not extracting more information from Mr. Ludwig, and she had a point. “I think they have an office in Amsterdam,” I said. “Because that’s where he wanted me to go.”

“Does it really matter?” James cut in. “Obviously, you’re not going—”

“Actually,” I countered, unable to resist the temptation to bait him a bit, “I came rather close to saying yes. It’s not every day some stranger in the street offers me five thousand dollars—”

“Precisely.” James gave me a look of censure. “Some stranger in the street. And what does that make you?”

I smiled, flattered that he took it all so seriously. “Curious.”

James shook his head and would likely have thrown in another derisory comment, had not Katherine—exercising the privilege of genius—held up a hand to silence us both. “And he said he would meet you at the airport?”

Perplexed by her gravity, I cleared my throat. “I believe so.”

James could remain silent no longer. “Surely,” he intervened, squeezing his napkin into a ball, “you’re not encouraging Morg to actually take off with this … Mr. Ludwig? God knows what he’s up to—”

Katherine sat back with a jerk. “Of course not! Don’t be absurd. I’m merely trying to figure out what’s afoot … who these people are.”

Anxious to restore our amicable tone, I laughed and said, “I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if it’s one of my lazy students—”

James looked at me sternly. “I don’t see the humor in this. You’ve been targeted, and I don’t mean by some sort of student prank. Make sure to lock your door tonight.”

CHAPTER THREE

In the face of a true friend a man sees, as it were, a second self.

—C
ICERO,
De Amicitia

I
T WAS STILL RAINING BY THE TIME JAMES WALKED ME BACK TO MY
rooms across the quad, carefully steering us both around the inky puddles on the cobblestone pavement. He had never escorted me home before; if nothing else, at least I could thank Mr. Ludwig for this pleasing development.

“Now, Morg”—James held up an arm to shield me from the rain as I stopped to take out my keys—” I don’t think you should leave college for a few days. At least not on your own. You never know—”

I stared at him, hardly able to believe his sincerity. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“If you want to go out,” he continued, rain dripping from his hair and winding its way down his noble face, “call me and I’ll come with you.”

Not just the words, but the deep tone of his voice crept right into my ear of ears and reverberated through the caverns of my hibernating hopes. Hungry for more I looked into his eyes … but rain and darkness blurred the moment. After an awkward pause I finally managed a stiff “That’s very kind of you,” to which James merely replied, in a voice as breezy as ever, “Rubbish. We’ve got to take care of you, don’t we?”

And then he walked away, hands in his pockets, whistling a perky tune, while I retreated into my rooms at last. Or rather, the grand, tastefully furnished office apartment was not technically mine; it belonged
to the esteemed Professor Larkin, who had conveniently been invited to spend the year at Yale. I had not been the only candidate vying for the one-year lectureship created to replace him, but I was a woman, and the college faculty had long been short on that particular variety of man. At least, that had been Katherine Kent’s argument in favor of them hiring me.

I was not paid a full salary, but taking over Professor Larkin’s office had afforded me a chance to quit my dank apartment and live in college. The only snag to the lectureship was the workload. My days were so jam-packed with tutorials I had almost no time left over for my own research. And without a selection of fresh, head-turning publications to my name there would most certainly be no college fellowship awaiting me at the end of the year; I would be back in my basement on creepy Cowley Road, writing uninspired job applications and flicking mice off my crumpets.

As I filled up the kettle for a cup of bedtime tea, my mind wandered through the events of the day and ended up—not surprisingly—at Mr. Ludwig. In a matter of minutes this strange man had presented me with a dazzling cornucopia of temptation: academic glory, adventure, and enough money to buy me half a year’s freedom, devoted to my own research. Maybe I could even squeeze in a trip to Istanbul, to look up Grigor Reznik in person and talk him into showing me the
Historia Amazonum
—the only original document on the Amazons I hadn’t read. My mind bubbled with possibilities.

In return, however, Mr. Ludwig had asked for a week of my precious time, and even if I had been reckless enough to consider his proposition, there was no way I could justify that sort of absence hardly a month into my new lectureship. It would have been one thing if he had shown me some official document, stamped and signed, outlining precisely what his foundation was asking me to do and how marvelous it would look on my curriculum vitae … but as it was, the whole thing was just too vague, too risky. Indeed, as both Katherine Kent and James had made amply clear over dinner, one would have to be absolutely insane to fly off like that, into the unknown.

If only Mr. Ludwig had not said the magic word.

Amazons.

He obviously knew of my scholarly obsession with the subject, or he wouldn’t have approached me in the first place. But what was I to make of his assumption that I was pining for proof the Amazons had really existed? Surely, there was no way he could know just how right he was.

How could he possibly?

According to most academics, the Amazons had never lived anywhere except in Greek mythology, and those who claimed otherwise were, at best, moonstruck romantics. Yes, indeed, it was entirely conceivable the prehistoric world had been populated in part by women warriors, but the myths about Amazons laying siege to Athens or taking part in the Trojan War were obviously the product of storytellers looking to mesmerize their listeners with ever more fantastic tales.

The Amazons of classical literature, I would always explain to my students, should be seen as the predecessors of the vampires and zombies populating our bookshelves today; they were creatures of the imagination, terrible and unnatural with their habits of training their daughters in the arts of war and mating with random males once a year. Yet at the same time these wild women possessed—at least in the eyes of ancient vase painters and sculptors—enough appealing human characteristics to arouse our secret passions.

I was always careful not to disclose my own feelings in the matter; to be interested in Amazon lore was bad enough, to come out of the closet as an “Amazon believer” would be nothing but an act of academic self-annihilation.

As soon as my tea was ready, I sat down to study Mr. Ludwig’s photograph with the aid of a magnifying glass. I fully expected to be able to identify the script on the wall right away as one of the more common ancient alphabets; when that did not happen, I allowed myself to feel a tiny tickle of excitement. And after another few minutes of hunched scrutiny and increased confusion, the possibilities began scooting up and down my spine with the urgency of battlefield messengers.

What intrigued me the most was the universal quality of the symbols,
which made it almost impossible to link them to a particular place or time. They might have been drawn on the cracked plaster wall immediately before the picture was taken, as part of some elaborate swindle, or they might be several thousand years old. And yet … the more I looked at them, the more I became aware of an eerie sense of familiarity. It was as if somewhere, in a remote corner of my subconscious, a dormant beast was stirring. Had I encountered these symbols before? If so, frustratingly, the context completely escaped me.

As it happened, my childhood friend Rebecca had been working at an archaeological site in Crete for the past three years, and I was fairly certain she knew precisely which organizations were digging where, and for what. Surely, if someone had come across this kind of inscription anywhere in the Mediterranean region, and had somehow linked it to the Amazons, Dr. Rebecca M. Wharton would have been the first to know.

“Sorry to interrupt your midnight orgy,” I said, when she finally answered her cellphone. We had not spoken for over a month, and it occurred to me how much I had missed her when I heard her snorting delightedly at the other end. It was a laugh I would have recognized anywhere; it sounded like a whisky hangover but, in Rebecca’s case, was really the rather prosaic consequence of having her inquisitive head buried in a dusty hole all day.

“I was just thinking of you!” she exclaimed. “I have a chorus of gorgeous Greek boys feeding me grapes and rubbing me with olive oil.”

I laughed at the image. The odds of lovely Rebecca getting intimate with anything other than ancient pottery shards were, sadly, ten to none. There she was, playing the rebel with her sun cap and cutoff denim shorts, crawling around on her hands and knees in an anthill of fascinating male archaeologists … but with eyes for nothing but the past. Although she always talked big, I knew there was still a vicar’s daughter right beneath the freckles. “Is that why you haven’t had time to call and tell me the big news?”

There was a brief rustle, suggesting Rebecca was trying to hold the phone between her ear and shoulder. “What big news?”

“You tell me. Who’s digging up Amazons in your backyard?”

She let out one of her ear-piercing jungle-bird shrieks.
“What?”

“Take a look.” I leaned forward to check the picture on my computer screen. “I just emailed you a photo.”

While we waited for Rebecca’s laptop to catch up, I gave her a quick overview of the situation, complete with James Moselane’s suspicion that I had become the victim of a hoax and might even be in danger. “Obviously, I’m not going,” I said, “but I’m dying to know where this picture was taken. As you can see, it looks like the inscription is part of a larger wall, with the text presented in vertical columns. As for the writing itself”—I leaned closer still, trying to position the desk lamp better—”I have this odd feeling … but I can’t for the life of me—”

A crunching sound suggested Rebecca was chewing on a handful of nuts—a sure sign she was getting intrigued. “What do you want
me
to do?” she asked. “I can guarantee you this photo wasn’t taken on my island. If someone had come across a wall like that on Crete, trust me, I’d know about it.”

“Here is what I want you to do,” I said. “Take a good look at that inscription and tell me where I’ve seen those symbols before.”

I knew it was a long shot, but I had to try. Rebecca had always had a knack for seeing right through the obvious. She was the one who had discovered my father’s secret stash of chocolate bars in an old tackle box in the garage when we were children. Even then, despite her sweet tooth, she had not proposed we share one; the mere triumph of the discovery—and of being able to teach me something about my father that I didn’t know—was excitement enough.

“I am going to give you another minute—” I said.

“How about,” countered Rebecca, “you give me a few days to ask around? I’ll forward the photo to Mr. Telemakhos—”

“Wait!” I said. “Don’t show this photo to
anyone.

“Why not?”

I hesitated, aware I was being irrational. “Because there is something about this writing that is deeply familiar to me … in an uncanny sort of way. It’s as if I can see it in blue writing—”

The truth hit us both at once.

“Your grandmother’s notebook!” gasped Rebecca, rustling frantically at the other end. “The one you gave her for Christmas—”

I felt a shudder of alarm. “No, it’s impossible. Insane.”

“Why?” Rebecca was too agitated to tread gently on what she knew was my emotional Achilles’ heel. “She always said she would leave you instructions, right? And that you would get them when you least expected it. Well, maybe this is it. Granny’s big summons. Who knows—” Rebecca’s voice rose in a defiant pitch as she likely realized the outrageousness of her proposition. “Maybe she is waiting for you in Amsterdam.”

BOOK: The Lost Sisterhood
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