A Most Extraordinary Pursuit (36 page)

“According to Plutarch,” said Mr. Higganbotham, rearranging his maps, “Lycomedes pushed Theseus directly off the cliff and into the sea. Now, my best calculation places the ancient palace somewhat to our south and east, making this headland the obvious place to take one's unsuspecting guest for a doomed afternoon walk . . .”

I turned to Silverton and whispered, “We're on a fool's errand, aren't we?”

“My dear Truelove,” he whispered back, “the truth is immaterial. We have only to convince the lady that we have reached the exact spot of the poor bloke's demise.”

“You would deceive her?”

He tilted the glass bottle over his tin cup and allowed a stream of water to fall inside. “It's not a deception. He might just as well have plunged off here as anywhere. Water?”

“Thank you.” I accepted the cup from his hand and shifted my eyes to the figure of the duke, who was pacing along the cliff path nearby, turning over an object in his pocket that I knew to be the medallion. I had done much the same trick, hadn't I, as we walked along the road in Naxos.

But
you
will keep an eye on her for me, won't you, Miss Truelove?

I returned my gaze to the point in which I had last noticed Desma. She was still there, sitting upon a solitary boulder, staring out to sea. Her gaze was steady and unblinking, and her hair was loose, moving in the breeze. The falling sun turned her face to gold.

“She is beautiful,” I murmured.

“Desma? Oh, yes. Quite.” Next to me, Silverton fidgeted with the bottle, spinning the glass slowly between his large hands. His injured leg stretched out stiffly before him, and his cane lay across his thighs. I sensed a turn in the subject of his thoughts, and before I could rise and walk away, he said, “You have not given me an answer, you know.”

For an instant, I considered saying, disingenuous:
An answer to what?

I lifted the tin cup and drank thirstily. “I miss your pipe, at a moment like this. Did you leave it on board?”

“Yes. But I thought you disliked my pipe.”

“The human spirit can grow accustomed to anything, it seems.”

“Am I to take hope from this?”

I looked again at the duke, who had come to a stop and now stood on the dusty earth, perhaps thirty yards from where Desma sat on her boulder. His head was bowed, and his fist clutched the medallion in his pocket. The gentle afternoon light outlined his shoulders, so that he seemed even broader than before. Nearby, Mr. Higganbotham fussed with his map, stood,
and sat down again. The breeze was picking up, mild and dulcet, alive with salt and greenness. My heart seemed to be straining in my chest: for what, I could not say.

“A new wife may not look kindly on her husband's female secretary, after all,” said Silverton, when I did not reply.

I laughed and finished the water. “I doubt this particular young wife will care one way or another.”

The duke took a hesitant step, and another. He seemed to be scrutinizing the ground before him for some unknown object. He had taken off his hat, which he clutched in his left hand, while the right fist was still balled in his jacket pocket, where he kept the medallion. I found myself mesmerized by his movements, which were uncharacteristic of him: small and jerky, as if he were not quite in control of his own limbs.

“Would
you
care?” Silverton asked softly.

“I suppose that depends on the husband.”

“Me, for example?”

My heart beat at a ferocious pace, crashing against the wall of my chest as if to shatter my ribs. Ahead of me, the duke kept moving forward in that curious marionette way, still examining the ground, still gripping the medallion. My mouth had gone quite dry, and the warmth of the sun on my face turned suddenly oppressive.

“In that case, I should care very much indeed. But you knew that already. You know my fatal jealousy.”

He hesitated. “If you want to call it that. I was rather gratified that you gave a damn. But I assure you, in future—”

“There is no point in making assurances you cannot keep. I am jealous by nature, and you are promiscuous by nature.”

“Oh, I say—”

“So we are unsuited in the most fundamental point of marriage.”

The duke kept moving. In a moment, I realized, he would reach the edge of the cliff. The tin cup slid from my fingers, into the dust.

“Dash it all, that's not true. For God's sake, I don't go to bed with women because I can't help it. I go to bed with them because—”

I leapt to my feet. “Look to the duke!” I screamed.

Now I come to the crux of my story, on which hinges all the rest of my life.

You will possibly not believe me, when I tell you what came next. I should not have believed it myself, if I encountered the incident in a book or a play, and indeed I don't know how to describe the sequence of events in a manner that properly communicates their double nature: a physical reality that is etched in minute and exquisite clarity in my memory, and an agency that can only be described as supernatural.

I shall stick to the facts.

At my cry of warning, my companions sprang into movement. Silverton, whose reflexes were naturally the sharpest, reached the duke first, in an athletic blur of his long and golden limbs that stirred the very dust from the rocks. He reached for Olympia's shoulders, but they were no longer there: the duke was falling forward, arms outstretched, to land on his knees at the extreme edge of the cliff, his muscular frame supported by I know not what unseen force.

To my left, Desma released an inhuman shriek. Mr. Higganbotham ran toward the two men, but I was there before him, wrapping my arms around the duke's waist while Silverton took hold of his left shoulder.

As I have said before, the Duke of Olympia was a burly, well-built man, but between my efforts and those of the exceptionally strong Lord Silverton, we ought to have dragged him from the brink at once.

We could not.

I dug my heels into the pebbly earth and strained with all my might; above me, Silverton wrapped his arm across the duke's chest and heaved backward. But it was as if gravity itself had taken on a mighty new strength, holding His Grace at the cliff's dizzy edge, and though I could see very little from my vantage, I felt that the duke was straining, too. That his outstretched arms contained an object of immeasurable weight, and it was this unknown mass—not the duke himself—that drew us inexorably forward, until the cool, vast emptiness of the chasm beneath us struck my forehead, and my heels skidded against the rock.

“He's slipping!” I gasped, and I thought my arms should pop from their sockets, so great was the burden upon them. Silverton roared with effort, or perhaps the pain in his injured limbs, unable to loosen his grip in order to achieve a better point of leverage. I remember the texture of tweed against my cheek, the briny scent of the sea crashing below us, the taste of dirt in my mouth, the horrible scrape of my shoes against the rock. The stretching pain in the muscles of my upper arms and in the joints of my fingers, which I had locked together against the duke's hard belly, so I would not lose hold of him.

A weight dropped next to mine on the rock, and for an instant I thought it was Mr. Higganbotham. But the bones were too small, and the panting that came from its lungs was shallow and high in pitch, and as she gasped out desperate words in a strange tongue, I realized the body belonged to Desma. She was
reaching for something just beneath the edge of the cliff, something I couldn't see, and I tried to tell her to go back, that she was going to crush the child in her womb, she was going to tumble from the cliff to her death, but I was too tired to speak, too exhausted of oxygen to form the words.

My fingers began to slip against the wool. Next to me, Desma was making urgent noises, repeating words in a desperate, aching cry; she maneuvered her clumsy body to the farthest possible point and grasped frantically into the air.

My God,
I thought,
maybe she loves him after all
.

And then, without warning, the balance shifted.

For an instant, I thought that a gust of wind had drafted upward from the sea and caught the duke, forcing him from the brink. The effect was so sudden, I found myself tumbling backward, drawing His Grace with me. Silverton uttered a surprised oath as the duke fell back on his chest, and we dropped together in a heavy, panting, sweating tangle: limbs and breath and bones all crushed atop each other, while I lay stunned at the bottom, unable to move.

“Get off her!” shouted Silverton, and the weight shifted, the limbs untangled. I found fresh air and sucked it into my lungs. The final body lifted from mine and I rolled to my side, wheezing and grateful.

Desma was keening softly in her foreign tongue, repeating a single word, over and over. My eyes were closed, the lids too heavy to lift, and so I did not, in that first moment, realize the extraordinary truth.

I heard Silverton's voice above me, saying softly,
My God.

And Mr. Higganbotham, answering, incredulous:
Who is he?

Befuddled, I thought that perhaps some native walker had stumbled upon our party. At the outside edge of my perception, I
heard a male voice, unusually deep, utter a few guttural noises that might have been words. Desma seemed to be answering him.

Someone moved heavily on the ground next to me.

It can't be,
whispered the Duke of Olympia.

I opened my eyes.

A man lay before me, enormous in size, wearing a simple tunic made of a dirty homespun cloth. His skin had the dark, leathery cast of an ancient tannery; his hair, shorn to no more than a half inch in length, was nobly dusted with gray. His neck was so thick and muscular, ribbed with tendons, that I was reminded of the trunk of a tree.

But it was his head that drew my fullest attention: not because of his arresting features, or because his eyes were now blinking in a kind of disordered shock, but because his face was framed by Desma's two loving hands, and she was pressing a kiss upon his lips that, in the manner of a fairy tale, brought him inevitably back to life.

W
e remained nine days on Skyros. On the morning of our departure, I woke early and walked along the cliffs, near the headland where Tadeas had first appeared, contemplating the vast froth of the sea as it encountered the rocks below.

The weather had grown warmer and steadier as each day passed, and though I wore my cardigan jacket of thick worsted wool, I left the buttons undone, and the ends flapped against my legs as I walked. The morning breeze was sweet against my cheek. Presently I found the opening of the path that we had taken up the hillside, the steepening of the track as it met the cliffs. There was the ledge on which I had sat with Lord Silverton, just before the strange miracle unfolded in my arms; there was the boulder that had borne Desma. I leaned against it and folded my arms.

“It is really most ill-advised for a young lady to walk by
herself, so early in the morning, and among a foreign people,” said a voice behind me.

I did not bother to turn, nor even to soften the squarish set of my shoulders. “What a very great relief,” I said. “I'd begun to fear that you had discovered some other fortunate young lady to torment.”

“I assure you, if I had any choice in the matter, I should be comfortably home in England.”

“Any choice? You have all the choice in the world, haven't you? You're hardly obliged to inflict yourself on me.”

“Well, you are quite wrong there.”

She said this in a subdued voice, not her usual stately pronouncement at all, and curiosity provoked me to turn around and look at her. She was wearing a sensible walking costume of gray tweed jacket and matching skirt, and she had settled herself on the ledge, though her short legs did not quite reach the ground, giving her an almost childlike aspect. I admired her hat, made of gray wool felt and a single black feather, which tilted just an inch or two to one side and beautifully suited her soft, round face. Her cheeks were pink with exercise, and she appeared to be a trifle winded, though her bulbous Hanover eyes shone as blue and bright as the promising spring sky above us.

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Don't you? You're a clever, impertinent sort of girl. Surely you realize that
you
are the one who calls me to attend you.”

I am not often struck dumb—the phenomenon seemed to have afflicted me more frequently in this single journey than in all my preceding years—but as the Queen's words passed into the soft Aegean air, I found myself speechless. I fastened my attention on the single black feather that wavered above Her Majesty's hat, and my hands tightened around my elbows.

“I have been thinking about your mother,” she went on.

I opened my mouth and filled my lungs. The briny air returned some measure of vigor to my limbs.

“What about my mother?”

“How, despite sharing so many of your more disagreeable traits—her stubborn impertinence perhaps the least among them—she was at last persuaded to do the sensible thing. Marrying your father, I mean. I believe she had found some measure of peace when she died.”

“Indeed. She expired as soon as she became happy. An inspiring moral, don't you think?”

The Queen sniffed and looked away. “Would you rather she had died unhappy?”

“No. But I think it hardly matters whether we are happy or unhappy. It's all the same, in the end.”

“I suppose that's true.” She heaved a little sigh and arranged her hands in her lap. She wore a pair of black kid gloves, somewhat worn. “Regardless, we have, upon reflection, reconciled ourselves to the prospect of your union with his lordship, and are prepared to offer you our most sincere wishes for your contentment in that fruitful institution to which, above all, God commends us.”

“I beg your pardon. I have not agreed to Lord Silverton's proposal of marriage.”

“My dear girl. You can hardly refuse.”

“Can't I?”

“In the first place, you are unlikely to receive a better one. In the second, you may be able to do him some good, which is no small consideration in the eyes of Providence—”

“Do
him
good? What about my own inclinations? Are those not to receive any consideration at all?”

“As to that,” she said, a little more softly, “I believe I have your own moral welfare in mind, most of all.”

“My moral welfare.”

“You are, of course, fatally in love with him.”

I pushed myself away from the rock and turned to the sea. “I will admit to a certain personal inclination, but that is easily overcome.”

“How? For what purpose? What else are you to do with your life?”

“I will continue to work for the Duke of Olympia, of course, if he will have me.”

Her feet landed on the ground behind me. “Impossible!”

“Impossible? Why?”

“How can you ask such a thing? You have seen what he is. You have seen the immeasurable danger of this power he possesses.”

Her footsteps crunched over the dirt and gravel toward me. I looked down at the tossing white foam below, the perilous sharp edges of the rocky shore.

“I don't know what you mean.”

She came to stand next to me, though her image exuded no living warmth, no breath of any kind. “Of course you know what I mean. We cannot ignore what occurred here.”

“But that's the thing,” I whispered. “I don't know. I don't understand what happened at all.”

“I think you do, however.” Her voice was unexpectedly kind. “You saw for yourself that he summoned a man through an abyss of time.”

“But it's impossible! The duke cannot have been the
agent
of his appearance!”

“Miss Truelove, I doubt that Almighty God much cares
what
a single, overclever young woman believes is possible or impossible. In any case, you're better off washing your hands of the entire affair, even if such an escape requires you to unite yourself in marriage to one of the most cheerfully promiscuous reprobates in England.”

I made a sound of frustration.

“Come now,” she went on. “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. Why, you were nearly killed yourself.”

In spite of the growing warmth of the sun, I began to feel chilled in the core of my belly. I drew together the ends of my cardigan and folded my arms under my breasts. The wind, picking up strength, blew against my ears.

“And yet he has done good,” I said. “The joy that now belongs to Tadeas and Desma, it is almost beyond bearing.”

“Of course he can do great things. That's the marvelous thing about power. But there is a price, Miss Truelove; there is always a price. To the duke himself, and to anyone who shares his life.”

I bowed my head.

“Well?” said the Queen. “What is it?”

“I don't know what to do. I don't know which is worse.”

She stood by my side, without speaking. I believe she only reached so far as my shoulder, and yet her presence cast an enormous shadow over me, as if to smother me with a will that was not my own.

I don't know how long we hung there, poised over the sea. I lost count of the beating waves, the cries of the dirty seagulls, and I remember thinking,
I might be anywhere; there is nothing
here that anchors me to the century to which I belong, no sign that it is 1906 and not a thousand years past, or a thousand years in the future, so perhaps I too have passed into another time.

“Hullo there,” said Lord Silverton.

By good fortune, he had put his hand out to touch me, or I might have fallen over the brink. I leaned into his arm for an instant, regaining my balance, and straightened. The Queen had gone.

“Not as bad as all that, is it?” he said.

“What's that?”

“You looked as if you meant to jump.”

The most cheerfully promiscuous reprobate in England,
the Queen had called him, and yet he hadn't acted like a reprobate at all during the past nine days. He had held us all together, as if rescuing ancient Greek heroes from the clutches of fate was all part of his life's work. While the rest of us staggered in shock, he had sorted out every practicality, limping about with his cane and his battered face. He had taken Tadeas in hand, man-to-man, and found the two travelers a cottage of their own, and hunted down a doctor, and calmed down Mr. Higganbotham into the proper spirit of inquisitive cooperation. Once the duke had recovered from the physical enervation that had rendered him almost helpless in the immediate aftermath of the fateful event, to say nothing of the several burst stitches in his right shoulder, Silverton had taken him out for a long and apparently merry night at the taverna in Molos, in order to recover him spiritually.

I remembered hearing them arrive back at our hostelry, roaring with song, and how I lay on my bed and smiled at the ceiling.

The next morning, I had asked Silverton how he did it. How he had known exactly what to do, how he hadn't seemed surprised or wrong-footed for even an instant.
Why, training,
Truelove
, was his answer, tapping his temple.
Expect the unexpected, that's what they pound into our skulls.

Expect the unexpected
, I thought, and I smiled a little, because I could smell him now, that curious combination of pipe tobacco and soap and sunshine, as
unexpectedly
pleasurable as the scent of my bedroom at home.

I said, “I assure you, my lord, I am not the sort of person who leaps off cliffs.”

“
My lord?
Just what have I done to deserve that?”

“Nothing.” I turned to face him. His height came as a surprise after the short Queen; my gaze traveled for some time, up his chest and neck until I reached his unsmiling face. A trace of fear tingled my nerves at the sight of this unaccustomed gravity, and I asked if something were amiss.

“No, no. Have just been making my farewells to the happy couple, who seem to have accepted their miraculous lot with remarkable fortitude. Higganbotham was there, administering another lesson in Modern Greek. I don't believe they give a tinker's damn at the moment, but I daresay he will keep trying until it sinks in.”

“It's good of him to stay on and help them.”

“On the contrary, I think he would have stayed on whether they agreed or no. He's like a chap with a new bride.” Silverton paused to turn pink.

“Yes,” I said. “About that.”

“Don't say it like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you're about to tell me
no.
”

The breeze was ruffling his hair, and the sun found his cheek. By now, the bruises had largely faded. Except for a few red marks left behind by the more serious lacerations, his beauty was back
in possession of his face, thoughtlessly perfect. He wasn't wearing his spectacles, and his eyes were blue and earnest, crinkled with worry at the corners. I reached up and brushed a speck of imaginary dust from his broad right shoulder.

“I wasn't about to say no,” I said. “But—”

He caught my hand, just before it left his shoulder, and held my fingers against his chest. “But?”

At the sight of his relief, and the warmth of his breath on my face, I had forgotten the substance of my conditional clause. “But I—but before we—”

Silverton leaned closer. His hand tightened around mine. “Before we
what
, Truelove?”

“Before you—that is, I think—”

He lifted his other hand and touched his finger to my lips. “Oh, let's not have any of this thinking business, Truelove. If you think any more, I daresay you'll probably change your mind, and my last hope for earthly redemption will be shattered.”

He is going to kiss me,
I thought, and then, in wonder:
And, by God, I believe I am going to let him.

His hand moved to lie against my cheek, and such was the length of him, his fingertips rested on the crown on my head, while his wrist touched my jaw.

“If you wish to remain untouched before your wedding night, Truelove,” he said, smiling a little, “you had better speak up now.”

His head moved closer, while my ears sorted through his words. His eyelids sank, and I closed my own eyes. Just before his lips touched mine, I heard myself say, “But I am not untouched.”

Silverton paused, a millimeter away.

A second passed, and another. I opened my eyes.

“What did you say?” he asked softly.

I don't think I answered him aloud; I don't think I was able to say the words again, not while his eyes were open, and mine, too.

“Yes,” he said at last. “As I thought.”

He did not release my hand, but he straightened away from the imminent kiss. A bird screamed overhead.

“We should be getting back,” I said. “The ship leaves soon.”