Carver's Quest

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Adam awoke with the sound of one of the tunes he had last heard at the Cremorne Gardens in his ears. At first he imagined that some Athenian hurdy-gurdy player had added the Pretty Kitty Quadrille to his repertoire, but even within a delicious state of half-sleep, he was aware that the song was only in his head. He continued to lie beneath the sheets, enjoying the memory of Cremorne and his encounter with Emily Maitland. He remembered the warmth of her body pressed against his as they danced and the unexpected but delightful touch of her lips to his.

Two weeks had now passed since he had left England in the company of Quint and Fields. The journey to Greece had unfolded much as the professor had predicted on the afternoon he had eaten burnt muffins in Adam’s rooms in Doughty Street. They had travelled through France at breakneck speed in order to catch a steamer from Marseilles to Malta. A short stay there had been enlivened only by an altercation on the Valletta waterfront between Quint and a sailor which had escalated from mutual insults in English and Maltese to a sudden and inconclusive bout of fisticuffs. The three men had then travelled onwards to Athens. They had docked at Piraeus three days earlier and had been driven from there to the Hotel d’Angleterre in Constitution Square. Fields had insisted, at some length, that this was the finest hotel in Athens and that its manager, Polyzoïs Pikopoulos, was a particular friend of his. They could not think of staying anywhere else. In the three days they had been there, ‘Polly’, as every English guest appeared to call him, had been a model of respectful politeness, but there had been not the slightest indication on his part that he knew Fields of old or that he could distinguish him from any of the many other Englishmen who passed through his hotel.

On the second day after their arrival in Athens, Adam and the professor had visited the latter’s friend at the French School. To Adam’s amusement, Professor Masson had fitted almost exactly the caricatured image of the average Frenchman presented in the comic papers. He was small and moustachioed and exceedingly voluble. He waved his arms vigorously and very nearly unceasingly, like a man trying to pluck a swarm of flies from the air. He spoke torrentially of his own impending excavations near Eleusis and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he could be brought round to the question of the Euphorion manuscript. At this point his face had fallen and he had slapped his forehead as if he were close to distraction. He was wretched, he was desolé, so desolé. His friends, his chers amis, how could they forgive him? He had brought them to Athens on what they would call a chase of the wild duck. There was no manuscript of Euphorion? Au contraire, there were two manuscripts of Euphorion. Mais, hélas, they were both the wrong Euphorion. They were the work of Euphorion the poet not Euphorion the traveller. How could his chers amis anglais forgive him? Even more importantly, how could he forgive himself? His life had become an insupportable misery to him. It had been a full thirty minutes before Adam and the professor had been able to extricate themselves from the conversation and leave. By that time the diminutive Frenchman had succeeded in forgiving himself and was discoursing happily on the worship of Demeter in sixth-century Athens. The two Englishmen had returned to their hotel in a dejected mood to contemplate the chase of the wild duck on which they had come all this way across Europe.

A bell somewhere in the city was chiming eleven when Adam finally emerged from the bedclothes and stumbled towards the luridly floral washbowl and jug the hotel provided for his ablutions. It was close to noon when he finished dressing and made his way down to the hotel restaurant. The place was almost empty. Only a handful of tables were occupied. The professor was sitting at one of them, drinking coffee. He waved cheerfully at Adam. His recovery from the disappointments of the previous day seemed complete.

‘There you are, my boy. While you have been such a slug-abed, wasting precious morning hours in the arms of Morpheus, I have been busy. I have seen Masson again. I have spent time at the National Library. For an institution that has been established for no more than a few decades, it is an admirable one.’ Fields, whose usual opinion of everything in Athens less than two thousand years old seemed to be one of contempt, was in a surprisingly gracious mood.

‘As I have had occasion to remark before, sir,’ Adam said, joining the professor at the table, ‘there is more now to the city than just the ancient sites.’

‘And, as I have had occasion to reply, nothing of any significance, my boy.’ Fields was amiably dismissive. ‘The delights of the National Library notwithstanding, the modern town is but a mushroom growth of the last forty years. Since the moment it became the capital of a newly liberated Greece. There is nothing of any consequence intermediate between us and the age of Plato.’

‘But we have seen so much ourselves of a new Athens taking shape. And we have been here but a few days.’

‘It is true that the city is expanding. By the hour, it sometimes seems. But Greece has no modern history of such a character as to obscure its classical past.’

It was becoming a familiar argument to Adam and one that he knew he could not win. He turned briefly to survey the restaurant. There was a solitary waiter in evidence, a tall and gangling youth, and he indicated to him that he, too, would welcome coffee.

‘Your visit to the library has proved useful, has it, sir?’

‘Enlightening, if not of any immediate use. Our French friend Masson did indeed mislead us. The manuscripts of which he wrote to me so excitedly are fine specimens of Byzantine calligraphy from the time of the emperor John Komnenos. But, as he told us yesterday, somewhat belatedly, they consist of the work of Euphorion of Chalcis.’ Fields picked up a spoon and began to stir his coffee vigorously. ‘Fragments from an epic poem which is shockingly poor. And lines of amatory verse which are merely shocking. I am surprised that the scribe, who was almost certainly a cleric of some kind, could bring himself to write them down. But that is by the by. The point is that they are not by our Euphorion.’

The long-legged waiter sidled awkwardly to the table and served Adam his drink. It was a small cup of what looked like boiling mud. The young man stared at it, black and bubbling, and braced himself to raise it to his lips.

‘I have also paid a visit to the embassy and arranged to see someone there,’ the professor went on. ‘Samways. Felix Samways. He was up at the college not so many years ago. Perhaps you recall him?’

‘I have no memory of anyone of that name.’

‘He must have been before your time. The man’s a fool but even fools can have their uses. He is attached to the embassy.’ Fields took a napkin and dabbed at his lips. ‘With luck, he will be able to expedite any journey out of Athens we might wish to make.’

‘What journey out of Athens might we wish to make?’

‘Who can tell where we might wish to travel?’ The professor replaced the napkin on the table. He had adopted an air of mystery like a stage magician about to pull a rabbit from a hat. ‘But this Dilessi business earlier in the year has made it exceedingly difficult for us to come and go as we please. After the kidnapping and murder of several Englishmen so close to Athens, no one is eager to allow others to leave the safety of the city. A voice raised in our favour at the embassy might well prove invaluable.’

‘But where might we wish to go?’ Adam persisted. ‘I would think that our only journey should be back to England. After our disappointment with Masson, what is there to keep us here?’

‘Why should we not stay a while longer? The land where Pericles ruled and Plato thought must always have a strong claim on our hearts,’ Fields said, picking his teeth as he spoke.

‘I do believe that you have learned something more at the National Library, Professor.’ Adam swallowed a mouthful of the hot mud and found it surprisingly flavourful.

‘I have spoken with the librarian there. He is a charming man. He had a suggestion to make.’

‘And that was?’

‘That there are manuscripts still awaiting discovery and proper cataloguing in many of the Greek monasteries. That we might wish to mount an expedition in search of some to take back to Cambridge.’

There was a silence as Adam thought about this.

‘What of these monasteries?’ he asked after a few moments. ‘Is the librarian right, do you think? Is it possible that they could contain unknown manuscripts? Lost manuscripts?’

‘Possible, yes, but I do not know that it is likely.’ The professor seemed suddenly deflated. His earlier enthusiasm had evaporated. ‘I did look into the matter before I left Cambridge.’

‘And what did you learn?’

‘A Swedish traveller named Bjornestahl examined some of the monastic libraries in Thessaly about fifty years ago. He found little of any interest. Musty volumes of the Greek Fathers. Some manuscripts and codices, but none of any considerable value. Everywhere he found signs of damp and neglect.’

‘Perhaps the monks were unwilling to show an outsider what they really owned.’

‘Perhaps. But scholars have long ago lost hope that a forgotten library might hold some genuine treasure.’

‘Who knows? Maybe we will stumble upon the lost books of Livy.’

‘No, they are gone for ever.’ Fields sounded like a man regretfully acknowledging an inescapable truth. ‘As are the missing plays of Aeschylus and Aristotle’s book on comedy. We shall find nothing so remarkable.’

‘But there might be the work of some lesser author still to be discovered.’ It was Adam whose enthusiasm was now growing as the professor’s shrank. ‘An author like Euphorion.’

‘I cannot bring myself to believe even that.’ The professor stared into the bottom of his cup and stirred the dregs of his coffee. He appeared to discover new hope there. ‘Although, it is true that Bjornestahl did not include all the monasteries of Thessaly in his survey.’

‘So, there is a chance that there is something still out there.’

‘A chance, yes. A systematic search of the monastic libraries might reveal hitherto unknown manuscripts. Who knows? Even lost works by ancient authors.’

‘Then we must go,’ Adam said, decisively. ‘We have come too far to do no more than return to London with our tails between our legs.’

The professor shrugged, whether in agreement or disagreement Adam was not entirely certain, then got to his feet.

‘There is something,’ he announced rather too loudly, ‘that I must fetch from my room.’

Adam followed Fields’s progress through the hotel’s restaurant, which was fuller than it had been when he had first come down. Several tables were now taken by those intent upon lunch. Adam looked across at a young English couple whose behaviour suggested they were newlyweds on their honeymoon. Further away, two middle-aged men, Americans to judge by their accents, were talking noisily about stocks and shares. Another man entered the restaurant and, at first, Adam assumed he was planning to join the two Americans. He moved in their direction. As he did so, Adam saw to his astonishment that the man was Lewis Garland. The MP strode confidently past the American businessmen and took a seat at a more distant table. He waved to the tall waiter who set off towards him like a contestant embarking on a foot race. Adam took the opportunity to head for the nearest door. He had no desire to engage Garland in conversation but he could not help but wonder what on earth could have brought the man to Athens.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The man hailed Adam and the professor as soon as they entered the house in the Square of the Mint that served as the British embassy. He was wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons and a pair of white duck trousers and was about to leave the building. He looked more like a sailor recently come ashore after years at sea than a member of the British diplomatic service.

‘Apologies for the outfit, gentlemen,’ he said, looking anything but apologetic. He seemed to have forgotten, possibly deliberately, that he had an appointment to see them. ‘Not really on duty at present. Taking a boat to Aegina this afternoon, but I thought I’d exchange pleasantries before I went.’

He shook hands with Fields and then held out his hand to Adam.

‘You must be Carver. Don’t think we met in Cambridge.’ He paused. ‘Or did we? I’m constantly coming across chaps who claim to have known me at college and I haven’t the faintest recollection of them.’

‘No, we were up at different times, I think. I went down in the summer of sixty-five.’

‘Oh, different epochs altogether, then. I was a year into the dreariest of postings in Copenhagen in the summer of sixty-five. Ever been to Copenhagen?’

Adam indicated that he hadn’t had that pleasure.

‘Wretched weather. So damned cold most of the time,’ said Sam-ways, taking a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbing at one of the buttons on the cuffs of his jacket. ‘Can’t recommend it.’

‘I have no plans to visit Copenhagen at present, but if I do ever go, I shall remember your warning about the temperature.’

The young man from the embassy ignored Adam’s remark. He continued to polish the brass on his sleeves.

‘Not that Athens is much better,’ he said. ‘Choking in dust in summer, drowning in mud in winter.’

‘But surely proximity to the glory that was Greece is worth a bit of discomfort, Samways, is it not?’ Fields said, drily.

‘Not too sure about that, Professor.’ Samways tucked his handkerchief back into the top pocket of his blazer. ‘You may keep the glory that was Greece, in my humble opinion. Smacks too much of the classroom. Your natural habitat, of course. Myself, I can’t wait to get a posting to somewhere with a climate that agrees with me more.’

He smiled at Adam and the professor with a look of immense self-satisfaction on his face, as if he was expecting them to rush to agree with him that the glories of Greece were much overrated.

‘And where would you prefer to be posted, Mr Samways?’ Adam asked.

‘Ah, there you have me, old boy.’ Samways was still inspecting the gleaming brass buttons on his sleeves, moving his arms to admire the light flashing off them. ‘Paris is obviously out. Still surrounded by Bismarck’s bully-boys. No doubt the French will be at each other’s throats before long. Murdering one another in their beds and that kind of thing. As is their wont. I’m none too fond of any variety of jabbering foreigner, if truth be told, but Johnny Crapaud quite takes the biscuit, don’t he?’

Satisfied that his buttons were shining with sufficient brightness, the diplomat hauled another white cambric handkerchief from his trouser pocket and began to wipe beads of sweat from his brow. His thoughts were still running on his next posting. ‘Vienna? Berlin? Germany seems to be quite the coming place, don’t it? Wouldn’t mind going anywhere I shan’t have to deal with all these tourist pilgrims mooching about with a volume of Homer in one pocket and Byron’s verse in the other.’

‘I would have thought that tourists would be in short supply after the Dilessi affair,’ the professor said, doing little to disguise his low opinion of Samways. ‘Few things do so much to deter the average traveller as kidnap, murder and brigandage.’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Being captured by brigands isn’t all bad, you know,’ the diplomat said cheerfully, as if he was planning on being abducted himself in the near future if only he could find the time in his busy calendar. ‘Bags of fresh air to breathe and fresh game to eat. Set of picturesque rogues for company. Then, when family and friends get the money together for a ransom and aforementioned picturesque rogues release you, you’ve got a story to dine out on for years to come.’

‘The poor devils who were murdered at Dilessi would probably disagree with you,’ Fields said pointedly.

‘Oh, no doubt, no doubt.’ Samways waved a languid hand in the air. ‘Always exceptions to any rule. Poor Herbert and Vyner just had the most terrible bad luck. Problems with the ransom money and all that.’

‘And yet the countryside will still be dangerous for travellers.’

‘Safe enough for Englishmen, if you want my humble opinion. Despite all this Dilessi business. It’s not often a Greek’s going to take a potshot at you. For one thing, he’s aware of the fact that nine times out of ten either he’s going to miss or his gun won’t go off. Whereas, if you take a potshot back at him, the likelihood is the gun will go off and you won’t miss.’ Much to the irritation of both Adam and the professor, Samways continued to be fascinated by the buttons on his blue jacket and was still moving his arm back and forth as if to find the point at which they glinted most attractively in the sun. Fields glared at him like a schoolmaster about to rap a naughty pupil’s knuckles smartly with a wooden ruler. ‘Not to mention all the infernal fuss caused if an Englishman does get himself killed. Herbert and Vyner are shot and look what happens. People galloping like mad hither and yon. Arrests and beatings by the dozen. The game’s not worth the candle. As I say, those chaps were just damned unlucky.’

Fields, whose face had been turning a peculiar shade of red as he listened to Samways, looked likely to roar at the embassy man in reply. Adam, noticing the professor’s poorly suppressed rage, hastened to intervene.

‘Dilessi has undoubtedly been the scene of a tragedy,’ he said smoothly, ‘and yet it is not the subject we came here to discuss. If I understand the professor correctly, you are the one man in Athens who may be able to help us. In our quest for manuscripts. We need the help of someone like yourself who knows the town inside out.’

Adam’s flattery worked. Samways’s delight in being considered the one man in Athens capable of offering assistance was obvious. His self-regard, already enormous, visibly increased. He drew himself up to his full height and looked around the lobby of the embassy as if inviting the admiring glances of anyone who might be passing through it.

‘If I say so myself, I have become something of an authority on the place. I may not like the town but I’m here now. Representing queen and country and all that. So I reckon it’s my duty to learn all I can about it.’

Fields made a strange snorting noise. Adam was once more swift to speak.

‘Your knowledge of Athens and its inhabitants will doubtless prove invaluable to us. We are looking for someone to advise us on the sale of ancient manuscripts. A Greek, if possible. Perhaps someone from your large acquaintance in the city springs to mind?’

‘Been thinking about that since the prof first spoke to me the other day.’ Samways beamed at his two visitors. ‘It seems to me that the man you need is Alexander Rallis.’

Fields made a heroic attempt to control his temper. ‘And who is this Rallis?’ he demanded.

‘He’s a decent sort,’ Samways said. ‘About as close to a gentleman as you’re likely to get in Athens.’

‘We have certainly met very few gentlemen since we arrived in the city,’ Fields said, pointedly. ‘Either Greek or English.’

‘What more can you tell us about him?’ Adam asked, hurriedly.

‘Not a lot, old boy.’ Samways had entirely missed any hint of irritation or innuendo in the professor’s comment. ‘His father was a government minister back in the days of Good King Otto. Left politics after Otto was forced to abdicate and head back to Bavaria. Rallis senior retired to his estates outside Athens.’

‘And what of Rallis junior?’

‘He’s a lawyer. Greek lawyers usually cause nothing but trouble, but he don’t. Quite the reverse. He’s even helped us with some tricky business.’

‘Why should we have need of a Greek lawyer?’ Fields asked, the little patience he had been able to muster for their conversation with Samways ebbing away. ‘We have no intention of falling foul of the law while we are in Greece. We are here to investigate the country’s antiquities. As I told you, Samways, we are looking for manuscripts.’

‘Absolutely. That’s why Rallis is your man.’

‘We don’t want legal manuscripts.’ Fields raised his voice in his annoyance.

‘No need to get in a bait, Professor.’ Samways seemed to notice the older man’s simmering temper for the first time. ‘Alexander’s not just a lawyer. That’s the point. Did I not say? He’s a bit of a scholar as well. Has some connection with the university, although I’m never quite certain what it is exactly. If anyone knows where to find musty old parchments with Greek poetry and whatnot on them — and I understand that’s what you’re looking for — then Rallis does.’

Adam glanced at Fields. The professor’s intense irritation with the embassy man seemed to have rendered him unexpectedly speechless. His eyes spoke volumes but his lips were clamped shut. It was, Adam thought, best that they should remain so.

‘How shall we make ourselves known to the gentleman?’ he asked Samways. ‘Perhaps you might be able to arrange a letter of introduction?’

‘No need for that, old man. There’s a reception in the embassy the day after tomorrow. For some rich merchant we want to butter up. Rallis will be there. Why don’t you both come along and I’ll introduce you to him there.’

‘That would be most kind of you, Samways.’

‘Don’t mention it, old chap. Always glad to give people like yourselves the benefit of my knowledge. Anyway, must dash now. Don’t want to miss that boat to Aegina.’

Waving his arm in farewell, the diplomat almost ran from the building. Adam and the professor followed him into the sunshine.

‘We will meet this fellow Rallis,’ Fields said, as they watched Samways climb into a carriage standing outside. ‘If even that insufferable little pup recommends him, he must be a man of some consequence.’

Fields paused and stared gloomily about the square.

‘Unless, of course, he turns out to be as big a damned fool as the man who’s recommending him,’ he said.

‘That would be difficult, would it not?’

‘It would be very nearly an impossibility that one city the size of Athens should include two men of such idiocy,’ the professor acknowledged. ‘But I doubt that Samways has come to an opinion about Rallis alone. Others at the embassy must think highly of him.’

‘And, as a rule, they think little of most Greeks,’ Adam remarked. ‘If there is one subject on which all the foreign residents of Athens agree, it is the rascality of the natives. French, Italians, English, Germans, Americans — they seem to argue about everything else, but there they speak with one voice.’

‘That is true. It is rare to find a Greek they admire. So we shall come to this reception on Friday and we shall talk to Mr Rallis.’

‘The parliament building was begun more than ten years ago.’

Adam and Fields were sitting outside a café at the junction of two roads. One led back towards the Angleterre. The other, which they faced, provided them with a view of the Acropolis and the Parthenon silhouetted against the horizon. The professor had embarked upon one of his favourite topics of conversation — the decadence of the modern Greek when compared with his ancient ancestors.

‘They talk of its opening next year but will it do so?’ he continued, picking up his cup and looking at its contents dubiously. ‘This is Athens. The home of idleness and procrastination. Who knows?’

Fields sipped at his coffee. Adam, who knew better than to engage his companion in debate on this particular subject, stretched back in his seat and clasped his hands behind his head. He gazed at the distant temple to Athena on its hill and thought idly of the history it had witnessed over the centuries. The sound of the professor lecturing became no more than a background buzz requiring only the occasional, random interjection in reply. The dust rose and the Athenian traffic, its carts and carriages and pedestrians and animals, continued to thunder past them but Adam felt himself tempted towards sleep. He closed his eyes.

‘Be off with you!’

Adam opened his eyes again in surprise. An ugly dark-haired woman and a child were standing by the table, hands outstretched. The professor was waving them away with a theatrical gesture, like a father in a Drury Lane melodrama dismissing his erring daughter from his sight. Carver offered a ten-lepta coin to the girl who was barefoot, filthy and dressed in torn clothing. She snatched it and the two grubby figures moved on.

‘You should not encourage them, my boy. They will batten upon your weakness and you will never see the back of them.’

‘I can see the back of them now, sir,’ Adam remarked mildly, watching as the beggar-woman and her daughter walked away.

‘Ah, you may be flippant but, mark my words, they will return. Or others will do so. Give but once to these Athenian mendicants and you will be pestered throughout the rest of our time here.’

The young man doubted Fields was correct. He had given freely to the city’s destitute since they had arrived and he had never seen the same beggar twice. He gazed down the narrow street ahead of them. A sad procession of emaciated horses, a dozen or more of them, was being led down it. Their destination, he thought, was almost certainly the knacker’s yard. The horses, with the man lead-

ing them, turned to the left. The traffic, which earlier had been so busy, had almost disappeared. The road ahead was clear for the best part of a hundred yards. The only vehicle that could be seen was a wooden cart, drawn by a sturdy-looking chestnut horse, which was trundling steadily towards them. Adam turned in his seat and peered through the window behind them into the gloom of the café.

‘I suppose we should pay mine host and return to the hotel.’

‘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.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Sitting 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.

‘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 forcing 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.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The 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.

‘I have asked questions of many people I know. Of scholars who know much about the ancient manuscripts that are still to be found in Greece. Not one of them knows anything of Euphorion.’

Adam looked crestfallen. ‘It seems we are on a wild goose chase,’ he said.

‘Not necessarily, my friend.’ The Greek was smiling to himself. ‘I have spoken also to a fellow countryman who spends his days drinking coffee at the Oraia Ellas.’

‘The café in town?’ Adam knew the Oraia Ellas as a haunt of visitors to Athens. He had been there himself on two occasions. The tables had been filled with Frenchmen and Germans, Americans and English. Any Greek who spent long hours there, he thought to himself, was probably a government agent employed to eavesdrop on the conversation of foreigners.

‘You know it, of course. My fellow countryman remembers an Englishman who came there several times. About a year ago.’

‘Every Englishman who arrives in Athens visits the Oraia Ellas at least once, Rallis. What is the significance of one visitor out of hundreds? Thousands?’

‘This Englishman was tall. And he had a scar near his right eye.’ The lawyer waggled his finger above his own brow. ‘Like a crescent moon, my fellow countryman said.’

‘Creech. That must have been Creech.’

‘Precisely, my friend, the man you described to me two days ago. And he was asking a lot of questions. Some of them were very peculiar questions. He wanted to travel out of the city. But not to the usual places Englishmen want to travel. Not to Marathon or to Missolonghi. This Englishman wanted to head north, out of the kingdom and into Turkey in Europe. He wanted to go to the monasteries at Meteora.’

‘Meteora?’

‘You do not know Meteora, Mr Carver?’

Adam again shook his head. ‘Although Fields spoke the other day of Greek monasteries,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he meant these ones at Meteora.’

‘They are on the plains of Thessaly. They are among the most surprising buildings that we Greeks have constructed.’ Rallis smiled to himself at the thought of how surprising the monasteries were. ‘This English gentleman with the strange scar, he wanted to go to one in particular. Agios Andreas.’

‘And Agios Andreas is known to you? It is one of the monasteries?’

‘Its fame is not as great as that of the Great Meteoron or the Holy Monastery of Varlaam. But, yes, I know of it. It has its own small renown.’ The Greek continued to smile, as if at a private joke he might possibly be willing to share if the moment was right.

‘What kind of small renown, Rallis? You must not keep me in suspense in this malicious way.’

‘According to what I have been told, its library is said to contain many ancient manuscripts.’

‘Endless works by the dullest of the church fathers, no doubt.’

‘No, my informant believed that Agios Andreas held more than just religious works. It has manuscripts of the ancient pagans. Of Aristotle and Homer.’

‘Aha! And of Euphorion, perhaps.’

The Greek lawyer inclined his head, as if to suggest that this was indeed possible.

‘Did this man with the crescent moon scar who was so eager to visit Agios Andreas find the answers to the questions he was asking?’

‘Alas, my fellow countryman does not know. The Englishman, he says, did not come again to Oraia Ellas after the summer months. But whether or not he succeeded in travelling to Meteora…’ Rallis shrugged. ‘Who can tell?’

Two days passed and Rallis invited Fields and Adam, accompanied by a grumbling Quint, to join him at his house overlooking Constitution Square. As noon approached on another hot and cloud-free day in the city, the professor climbed the three steps to the main entrance and stared at the large brass knocker on the door. It was fashioned into the face of an old man with flowing hair and untamed beard.

‘It is intended to represent Poseidon, I believe,’ he remarked, peering at the door knocker as if uncertain what purpose it might serve. ‘It seems a curious choice of decoration. I cannot see what connection there can be between the god of the sea and admittance to a man’s house.’

‘Perhaps Hestia, as goddess of the hearth, might be more appropriate,’ Adam said, ‘but we are not here to debate Rallis’s choice of household decoration, Professor. Do make use of Poseidon’s head.’

‘For gawdsake, knock on the bleedin’ door, will you?’ Quint muttered, although not loudly enough for the professor to hear him. ‘It’s ’ot enough to fry eggs on the pavement out ’ere.’

Fields lifted the hinged image of the god. He rapped it firmly against the door. The sound of brass on wood echoed and reverberated through the house and was then followed by silence. The professor was about to raise Poseidon once more when Adam rested a hand on his arm.

‘There is no call to do so, sir. I can hear footsteps inside.’

It was Rallis himself who opened the door.

‘I have allowed the servants to take the day off,’ he said, spreading his arms in a gesture of welcome. ‘All save one. We shall have the house to ourselves as we make our plans. No eyes or ears upon us. Come this way, gentlemen.’

The lawyer directed them towards the staircase across the hallway, its perimeter lined with statues of nymphs in loose drapery. With Quint loitering a moment to examine the marble maidens more closely, the three men followed their host up the stairs.

‘My library,’ Rallis said, throwing open a door on the first floor with a flourish. He stood to one side and allowed his guests to enter before him. There was another man already in the room. He was standing in the shadows by the window drapes. It was difficult to see anything of his face but it was impossible to miss his size. Quint whistled as he saw him.

‘Jesus Christ,’ he said under his breath. ‘ ’E’s the size of St Bride’s steeple.’

‘Andros has spent much of the morning watching the traffic passing,’ Rallis said. ‘He is not accustomed to the city. It is only the second time he has been in Athens.’

The man, Adam thought, was like one of the Gigantes, giants of Greek legend. He towered over the other men in the room. Adam was more than six feet tall himself but Andros was at least a head higher.

‘He was born on one of the farm estates my family owns in Attica,’ the lawyer continued. ‘He has lived and worked there, all his life.’

‘Are they all ’is size in Attica?’ Quint asked.

‘No, Mr Quint. Andros is an exceptional man there as he would be everywhere else.’

The huge Greek moved out of the shadow but he continued to stand impassively at the window, looking down at the streets below. Adam could tell that he was aware the others were talking of him. The giant turned and spoke briefly to his master.

‘He is curious about the carriages in the street. He had forgotten how many there were.’ Rallis made a swift remark to his servant in Greek and then turned back to his guests. ‘But let us go through to my study.’

The lawyer opened an oak door between the bookshelves and indicated that they should all walk into the next room. As they did so, Andros, bringing up the rear, was obliged to stoop in order to avoid knocking his head on the lintel of the door. Rallis’s reference to his study had suggested some cramped retreat from the world, but the room they entered was almost as large as the library. Light streamed into it from a pair of long windows at its far end and fell onto a baize-covered writing desk beneath them. Another escritoire, pens and paper spilling from its numerous drawers and compartments, was placed against the opposite wall. By its side was a large globe on an iron pedestal. Fields walked across to it and, reaching out his hand, set it spinning. More bookshelves ran along the walls at either side.

In the centre of the room stood a mahogany table and three chairs. They looked out of place, as if they belonged elsewhere in the house and had only recently been brought here for this conference. The Greek lawyer gestured towards them and Adam and the professor seated themselves at the table. Like two mismatched sentries guarding the entrance to a temple, Quint and the giant Greek took up positions standing either side of the door through which they had all just come.

Rallis walked to the bookshelves behind Adam. He reached up and took down something from one of them. He came to the table and placed it in front of the two Englishmen. It was a map. The lawyer carefully unrolled it.

‘Please hold the ends of the chart, gentlemen,’ he said. He crossed to the desk beneath the window and picked up first a glass paperweight and then a silver inkstand with a small figure of Hercules, club in hand, standing on it. Returning to the mahogany table, he positioned both on the map.

‘Those will suffice, I think,’ he said. ‘And now we can look down, like eagles, on the land where we propose to travel.’

‘Which road shall we be taking?’ Adam asked, his eyes quickly scanning the chart.

‘There are few roads in my country that are worthy of the name. I am embarrassed to admit it, but once we have travelled from Athens to Piraeus, there is no road to take. Certainly no road to match your English roads.’

‘So we must find another means of transport.’

‘Exactly. From Piraeus, we will sail up the coast as far as here.’ Rallis pointed his finger. ‘It is a good harbour and I can arrange for horses and mules to be awaiting us there.’

There was a noisy snort from behind them.

‘Mules!’ Quint said, putting as much disgust into one short word as Adam had ever heard. ‘I ’ate mules.’

‘Ah, but they love you, Quint. They see you as a kindred spirit.’

‘I ’ate mules,’ Quint repeated. ‘Cussed beasts. No respect.’

‘These will be mules of a most respectful nature, Mr Quint,’ said Rallis, turning to smile soothingly at the manservant.

‘Mules of a saintly disposition, I’m sure,’ Adam said over his shoulder. ‘You’ll grow to love them, Quint, and they will grow to love you.’

Quint snorted again, as if to express his doubts and suspicions of all mules of whatever disposition.

‘Them as I’ve come across are so cussed they won’t even stand for saddling.’

‘Then you will have to ride them bareback like Menken in Mazeppa.’ Adam was gazing intently again at the map on the table. ‘I doubt that your legs will show to the same advantage as those of the lovely Adah but you will be able to ride across Thessaly on one of the beasts, I am sure, saddle or no saddle. Do stop grousing and let us look where the mules and the horses will take us.’

Quint subsided into grumpy silence.

‘From the harbour we will make our way inland,’ Rallis continued, deciding that concerns about the mules could now be ignored. ‘We will soon cross into European Turkey. We will keep away from villages and towns. We will also avoid the wayside khans and sleep instead under the stars.’

‘That will be difficult, surely? To keep away from people?’ Adam suggested. ‘We will be passing through well-populated territory. We will not be in remote highlands or uninhabited wilderness.’

The professor had been hunched over the map and had said nothing during the discussion about the mules. Now he looked up.

‘The papers I have obtained from the Ottoman consul here in Athens will allow us unhindered passage. We need not worry about that. But it will be easier to travel swiftly if we keep to ourselves as much as we can. We will also avoid the endless demands for baksheesh.’

‘We will not be able to avoid people altogether.’

‘No, that is true. But the journey will take little more than two days,’ the professor said. ‘The whole of Thessaly is little bigger than the county of Lincoln.’

‘The journey may take us more days than two,’ the lawyer said. ‘We may have to go out of our path to avoid meeting thieves and robbers. There are many dangerous men in that country.’

‘Brigands? We know the risks of brigands.’ Fields waved his hand in irritated dismissal of these risks. ‘We are not idle excursionists on a day’s jaunt to Marathon. We have travelled extensively in the country before.’

‘I am sure the professor is a man of wisdom and discretion.’ Rallis was offended by the abruptness with which Fields habitually spoke. He now addressed his words to Adam alone. He spoke as if the professor was already in some far-flung corner of the country rather than sitting at the table beside him. ‘I am certain that his knowledge of our country is such that it would put to shame that of one such as myself who has rarely ventured far beyond the boundaries of Attica. Nevertheless, I feel obliged to warn him of the dangers of the journey we are proposing.’

Fields, infuriated in his turn by the Greek’s sudden indifference to his presence, was puffing out his chest in preparation for a lengthy riposte, but Rallis ignored him and continued to speak to Adam.

‘The English gentlemen who lost their lives at Dilessi recently? Mr Vyner and Mr Herbert? They were idle excursionists on their way back from Marathon. They were less than a day’s journey from Athens. Yet they were taken. And eventually they were killed. A party of travellers, however experienced, heading to the north would expose themselves to considerable risk.’

Fields could clearly contain himself no longer and now spoke loudly.

‘I will not have our plans affected by worrying about a pack of damned rogues who ought to be rounded up and fogged.’

‘It is a complicated question, this question, Professor.’ The Greek lawyer made a determined effort to recover his good temper. He turned now to speak directly to Fields. ‘You English are famously virtuous. You have won a great empire through your virtue. And so you look at our bandits and you see only thieves and vagabonds and murderers. But we Greeks are not so thoroughly virtuous. We look at the klephts from the mountains and we remember how they fought in our War of Independence. And so we see a little of the hero in the brigand chieftain as well as a little of the villain.’

For a moment it seemed as if the professor might continue the argument, but he was mollified by the conciliatory note in Rallis’s voice. He examined the unfurled map on the table.

‘I can only repeat, Rallis, that we know the risks.’ He pushed back the inkstand slightly to reveal a little more of the map. ‘We will not allow them to interfere with our plans but we will acknowledge that they exist and we will act accordingly. We must not travel in a large group. Only the five of us in this room will go. I assume that you are intending to bring along the giant who stands behind me?’

‘Andros will be worth, as you say, a weight in gold.’

‘Five will be enough. There will be safety in numbers but, paradoxically, the safety will lie in small numbers.’

‘And what shall we carry with us?’ Adam asked, relieved that the discussion had returned to practical matters.

‘Our baggage must be light. Each of us must have no more than can be strapped to the back of a horse or mule.’

‘The professor is right,’ Rallis said. ‘We must not overload ourselves.’

‘We will have our bags in which to sleep. We will carry what food we can. Cheeses and bread. Smoked meats. We will need little else. A book or two, perhaps.’

‘Bottles of wine?’ Adam suggested.

‘We can live a few days without the pleasures of the grape. It will be more important to have medicines. Quinine, for example. We must have quinine or we run the risk of being racked with fever.’

‘I ain’t spent a week without a drink since I was a nipper.’ Quint, still standing guard next to the door, was again moved to contribute to the discussion. ‘It ain’t natural. Or healthy.’

‘Many things that are wholesome in one country, my dear Quintus, are deleterious in another.’ The professor had entirely recovered his good humour.

‘Not liquor,’ Quint said, disbelievingly.

‘You will recall from our days in Salonika that the spirits to be found there were not always beneficial to your constitution.’

‘If you mean, they give me some stinkin’ ’angovers, I ain’t goin’ to argue. But a week without a drink is more than a man can stand.’

‘You will have to learn the arts of abstinence, Quint,’ Adam said. ‘It will not be beyond the capacity of a resourceful man.’

The manservant retired once more into sulky silence.

‘We need someone to gather together the equipment we shall be taking,’ his master continued.

‘I think we can leave that to the man who knows the city better than we do.’ Fields waved a hand amiably at Rallis, who bowed in response. He had now, it seemed, become the very man on whom the proposed expedition could depend.

‘And what of a guide to the land beyond the border?’ Adam asked. ‘Shall we not require a dragoman?’

‘Rallis can be our dragoman,’ Fields said. ‘We shall need no other.’

‘I shall be honoured to undertake the tasks you have entrusted to me.’ The lawyer bowed again. ‘Let us all meet again tomorrow and I will let you know what success I have had. Let us join together again at the Oraia Ellas. “Beautiful Greece”. What better name for a café in which to drink a toast to the success of our expedition?’

Constitution Square was, as it seemed to be both night and day, a hive of activity. As he emerged from the hotel, Adam was immediately thrust into crowds of Greeks hurrying about their business. Crossing the square in the direction of the embassy building, he was accosted four times in the space of two dozen yards by beggars with hands outstretched for alms. It was one of the perils of looking so obviously English, he thought, as he waved them apologetically away. He made his way across town to the British embassy. He found a café, one that provided a clear view of the embassy entrance, and took a seat outside it.

He did not have to wait too long for what he had hoped to see. For an hour, a steady stream of visitors passed in and out of the embassy doors. At one point, he saw Samways walk up the stone steps to the main entrance, in animated conversation with another gentleman Adam recognised from the pews of St Paul’s. Sitting on the uncomfortable chair the café provided and drinking two cups of its foul coffee, he watched as other men approached the embassy, on foot or by carriage, and entered its portals. He began to amuse himself by trying to guess the nationality of each visitor. The English, he decided, were easily distinguished, as were two men with identical imperial beards and expressive hands who were clearly French. Others were less readily identified. Adam was puzzling over a swarthy individual in European dress and red fez, who had marched confidently into the building, when he saw two women emerge into the square. One was dumpy and dressed in black; the other was Emily.

Looking carefully from right to left and back again, they made their way through the traffic and headed towards a tree-lined garden close to the square. Adam threw a silver half-drachma on the café table and hurried after them.

He caught up with the two women as, parasols raised to protect them from the morning sun, they approached a fountain amidst the trees and shrubbery. He raised his hat and bowed slightly to them.

‘We meet again, Miss Maitland, I am delighted to say.’

The young woman did not look equally delighted by the encounter. She half turned away from Adam, as if searching for a means of escape from him. Finding none, she turned back and forced a smile to her face.

‘You chance upon us taking the air, Mr Carver.’ She waved her hand towards the sky. ‘It is impossible to stay indoors on a day such as this, do you not think?’

‘Some ladies I know would never venture out into the sun for fear of spoiling their complexions.’

‘Oh, I have no anxiety on that count. I have my parasol.’

His hat in his hand, Adam could feel the sun beating down upon the top of his head.

‘I am particularly delighted that we should meet in this way, Miss Maitland. I am eager to continue the discussions we have had in the past. Perhaps I could walk with you a while and we could speak. In private.’ He glanced meaningfully at Emily’s short, middle-aged companion. Was this perhaps her mother? The young woman had said that her mother was with her in Athens just as she had been in London, but Adam had never met her or seen her. This lady in black did not, however, look very motherly.

‘Leave us, Jane,’ the young woman said, after a moment’s hesitation. ‘I shall meet you by the statue over yonder in ten minutes’ time.’

Jane gave Adam a hard stare. She made no attempt to move.

‘Go, I tell you,’ Emily said, more sharply. ‘I shall be safe under this gentleman’s protection.’

The woman in black turned, with a distinct flounce, and walked away from the fountain.

‘Jane is my maid,’ Emily explained. ‘She has a peculiar care for my welfare.’

‘Her diligence in her duties is to be admired.’ Adam offered his arm. ‘Shall we stroll beneath the trees?’

‘There is a seat by the fountain. I would rather sit.’

Not waiting for any response, the young woman walked to the stone bench and sat primly on its edge. Adam followed and took a seat beside her. He had been rehearsing what he might say to her for much of the hour he had spent sitting outside the café, but now that the moment had come, all his fine words had left him.

‘Well, sir,’ Emily said, after the silence had grown awkward, ‘what is it you wish to say to me?’

Her manner, so different to the warmth with which she had greeted him at St Paul’s, was brusque. Could this be the same woman who had kissed him at Cremorne Gardens? Adam almost began to wonder if he had imagined the more intimate moments of their previous meetings. He felt himself even more at a loss for the right words.

‘I am simply curious, Miss Maitland.’

‘Curious, sir? Curious about what, pray?’

‘I have never learned why you came to visit me that first day in Doughty Street. Why you wished to see me again at Cremorne Gardens. Why you left me so abruptly there. And now here you are in Athens. You are a woman of mysteries, Emily. May I call you Emily? And I long very much to solve some of those mysteries.’

The young woman said nothing. Her eyes gazed into the distance as if seeking out the mountains that surrounded the city on all sides.

‘Will you not throw a little light on my darkness? Will you not tell me what you are doing here? Staying with Garland in the British Embassy?’

Emily remained silent for a moment. Then her head dropped into her hands and she began to cry.

‘Oh, Adam,’ she murmured through her tears, so quietly that the young man could scarcely make out what she said. ‘You must not ask all these questions. I cannot answer them.’

‘But do I not have a right to answers to them?’

‘Perhaps you do, but I cannot give them.’

‘Why, Emily? Why can you not give them?’

Her face still covered by her hands, the young woman shook her head. ‘I cannot,’ she said again. ‘I cannot.’

‘Your questions are upsetting the lady, Mr Carver.’

Adam looked up in surprise. Garland was standing over them. To his right, lurking several paces behind him, was the maid Jane. She had clearly seen fit, Adam realised, to go back to the embassy and summon Garland.

‘I think your conversation with Miss Maitland is now at an end,’ the MP continued. ‘She must return immediately to her lodgings.’

‘It is surely Miss Maitland’s decision, sir, as to whether or not our conversation is over.’ Adam stood and faced the older man. He was suddenly filled with what felt like righteous anger at his interruption. He clenched and unclenched his hands like a boxer awaiting the fitting of his gloves.

Garland smiled grimly. ‘I am the young lady’s godfather and thus, in some sense, in loco parentis. I believe I am well within my rights to insist on an end to this questioning of her. But we will ask Emily herself.’

He looked down at his god-daughter, who was still sitting on the bench. She had pulled a white cambric handkerchief from her pocket and was dabbing at her eyes.

‘Emily, my dear, do you wish to bring your conversation with Mr Carver to a conclusion?’

Without looking up at either Adam or her godfather, the young woman nodded. Garland held out his arm for her to take and she rose from the stone bench. The maid moved forward and picked up her parasol which had fallen to the ground. The three turned from the fountain and began to walk towards the embassy. Adam could do nothing but watch them go. At one point, Emily looked back at him, but at a distance of thirty yards, it was impossible to tell whether her expression was one of apology or outrage.

Adam returned to the Angleterre via the telegraph office. Since arriving in the Greek capital, he had found time to send two lengthy telegrams back to London. With the Dilessi murders still so recent, he felt certain that, although Sunman and his colleagues would have plenty of informants at work in Athens, one more might be welcome. This was confirmed by a telegram back from Whitehall encouraging him to stay in touch. So a third message, conveying what news and impressions he had gleaned from conversations with Rallis and others, was soon sent. When he returned to the hotel, it was to find it, or at least the floor on which he and his party were staying, in an uproar. Members of the staff were hurrying along the corridor, bumping into one another and shouting excitedly at no one in particular. Polly, the usually unflappable manager, was giving a good impression of a man tearing out his hair. In the centre of the hubbub was Professor Fields, standing outside the door to his room. He was stabbing his finger in the air and bellowing with anger.

‘It’s an outrage,’ he yelled at the unfortunate Polly. ‘I leave my room for no more than an hour. And it is invaded by thieves.’

Adam hurried to the professor’s side.

‘What has happened, sir? You must calm yourself.’

‘Calm myself? Calm myself?’ Fields was red with rage. ‘I cannot calm myself when my sanctum has been defiled in this scandalous manner.’

‘Defiled?’ Adam was bewildered. ‘What has been defiled?’

The professor, now rendered speechless by his fury, could only gesture towards his room. Adam pushed at the half-open door and went inside. The room had been ransacked. The bedding had been torn from the bed and thrown to the floor. The door to the vast mahogany wardrobe was open and the professor’s clothing was strewn on the carpet in front of it. His leather travelling cases had been turned upside down. A writing desk by the window had been emptied of its drawers. So too had those of a bureau and a mirrored dressing table. The whole room looked as if a small tornado had recently swept through it, uprooting everything within and hurling it to the floor.

Polly had followed Adam through the door. The manager had recovered some of his customary sangfroid.

‘It is terrible,’ he said mournfully. ‘In all my years here, we have not had such a terrible thing.’

‘Has anything been stolen, Professor?’

Fields had now entered his room again. He marched over to the wardrobe and stooped to pick up one of his shirts from the floor. He threw it onto the dishevelled bed and grabbed at another.

‘Has anything been stolen?’ Adam repeated his question.

The professor waved the shirt in his hand like a flag of distress. His rage had dissipated. He now looked more forlorn than angry.

‘I cannot be certain, Adam,’ he said, ‘but I think not.’

‘They have taken no money? No papers?’

‘There was little in the room worth the thieving.’

‘The professor placed some items in the hotel safe,’ Polly explained. ‘It is, perhaps, a blessing that they were not here.’

‘They are of little value,’ Fields said, still awkwardly holding his shirt as if he could think of nowhere to put it. ‘They would have been of no interest to anyone other than a fellow scholar.’ He threw the second shirt to the bed and seemed to feel another burst of rage.

‘It is not the loss of any object that is so infuriating,’ he said. ‘It is the thought of some wretch invading my privacy. I thought better of your establishment, Pikopoulos. Can any rascal off the streets of Athens simply march into the Angleterre and rifle through the possessions of your guests?’

Polly launched himself into a further round of abject apologies. Adam picked up one of the drawers from the writing desk, which had been left lying on the carpet, and slotted it back into place. He looked around in search of the other drawer.

‘We could contact the gendarmerie, if you wish, Professor,’ he said.

‘A bootless exercise.’ Fields waved the idea aside, much to the hotel manager’s relief, Adam noticed. ‘The Chorophylaki may be of use in chasing bandits through the Attic hills but they will prove of no value in a business like this.’

‘I regret to say that the professor is right. They will show little interest in the matter.’ Polly’s anxiety at the thought of gendarmes trampling through his hotel and disturbing his guests was obvious. ‘If nothing has been taken…’ The hotel manager shrugged and left his sentence unfinished. Meanwhile, Adam had found the other drawer from the writing desk, hurled into a far corner of the room, and was now putting it back into position.

The professor was making short circuits of the room, occasionally picking up one of his scattered belongings and throwing it towards the bed. Some landed there, some fell back to the floor.

‘I will send two of the maids to put your room once more into good order,’ Polly said, making towards the door.

‘There is no need,’ Fields called after him. The manager stopped and turned towards the two Englishmen; he looked uncertain what he should do next to placate them. ‘I prefer to do it myself.’

‘As you wish, Professor.’

Polly bowed first to Fields and then to Adam before leaving the room.

Clouds of tobacco smoke and the sound of half a dozen languages greeted Adam as he pushed open the door to the Oraia Ellas. Quint and the professor followed him into the café. At a table to their left, a group of Italians shouted cheerfully, one to another. Further into the room, three young Frenchmen, students perhaps at the École Française d’Athènes, were engaged in heated political debate. As Adam passed, he heard one of them loudly expressing his disgust with the conduct of Napoleon III and his undying support for Gambetta. He looked about the large, rectangular room that was one of the great gathering places for visitors to the city. As always, the place was noisy and full. Slightly to his surprise, he could see none of his fellow countrymen amongst the crowd of the Oraia Ellas’s customers. Equally surprising was the presence of so many Greeks. Usually, native Athenians left the café to the foreigners, but there was no mistaking the nationality of several knots of young men scattered about the room. A number of them were even dressed in the traditional embroidered jackets and white fustanelles that advertised old-fashioned Greek patriotism. Rather incongruously, two of the men so dressed were bent over a billiards table. Adam smiled to himself as he saw how clumsily the clothing forced them to play. He gestured to one of the waiters behind the wooden counter and led the way towards the only unoccupied table in the place. Even in the short time it took for the Englishmen to make their way to it, Adam was aware of the unexpected hostility hanging in the air of the Oraia Ellas. The café was usually a haven for English visitors but the atmosphere today was significantly less welcoming than usual. He glanced towards his companions but neither Quint nor the professor seemed to have noticed anything different. A plump and extravagantly moustachioed waiter came over to their table, looking acutely uncomfortable, and then scuttled away with their order as quickly as he could. There was no doubt that something was amiss. One of the players at the billiards table had straightened up and was staring insolently at Adam, holding his cue as if it was a hoplite’s spear. Across the noise and smoke, the young man stared back. Eventually, the Greek’s eyes dropped and he returned to his game.

The door opened again and Rallis entered, accompanied by Andros, attracting the sort of half-admiring, half-astonished attention he got wherever he went. The professor waved and the lawyer, returning the greeting, began to push his way through the crowd.

‘The Oraia Ellas is in its usual pandemonium, I see,’ he said, as he took his seat. His giant servant, head almost brushing the ceiling, stood behind the chair.

‘A better name for it would be Babel,’ Fields said amiably. ‘Because the language of all the earth is certainly here confounded. Everywhere I turn I hear a different tongue.’

‘Not quite all languages today, however,’ Adam commented. ‘Do you notice we are the only English present?’

Rallis glanced around the room. Adam could see that the lawyer was also surprised by the absence of English faces.

‘It is certainly unusual,’ the Greek said thoughtfully. ‘But it is not just your countrymen who are missing from the happy throng.’ He nodded in the direction of the young Frenchmen. ‘It is perhaps also lucky that the café has no German visitor today.’

‘Ah, yes, the Gaul and the Prussian are currently at each other’s throats, are they not?’ The professor sounded delighted by the fact. ‘The French, as I understand it from the newspapers at the Angleterre, have shown once again that, when it comes to martial affairs, their bark is worse than their bite.’

‘The emperor has gone, I understand,’ Adam said.

‘He is no great loss to the stage of European affairs,’ Fields said, seizing hold of the lapels of his jacket as if about to launch upon a lengthy disquisition on international politics.

‘We’ve got company,’ Quint said shortly, interrupting before the professor could begin.

The other three men looked up to find that one of the billiards players, the one who had glared so markedly at Adam, had left the game and was standing over them.

‘I spit upon you English,’ he said in English and then very nearly did so. Little yellow blobs of phlegm spattered across the wooden floor close to Adam’s foot. The young man began to rise in outrage from his seat but Rallis stretched out his arm to hold him back.

‘Do not rise to his bait, Adam. The man is drunk, I think.’

Certainly a strong smell of spirits had accompanied the Greek to the table. Rallis began to speak to him in his own language, very rapidly and very angrily.

The man responded with equal vehemence. Adam, still held back in his chair, could make out snatches of what he said. The names of Herbert and Vyner could be heard amidst the Greek. After a short burst of invective, the man turned on his heel and marched to the counter where the waiters tended the coffee urns. Only then did Rallis release his grip on Adam.

‘I should have thrashed the impudent wretch, Rallis,’ the young man said. He was enraged by the insult that had been offered him. Only in the distant days of his childhood, during an argument with the eight-year-old son of his father’s housekeeper, had anyone ever spat at him before. ‘Did you see what he did? Why did you hold me back?’

‘I saw how he insulted you. But the Oraia Ellas is no place to fight.’

‘Rallis is correct, Adam,’ the professor said. ‘We cannot indulge in brawling in public, no matter what the provocation.’

‘Why was the man so exercised?’ Adam turned and looked towards the counter where the Greek was laughing with two of his compatriots. Adam was tempted still to stride over to them and knock their wretched heads together. ‘Did I hear something about this Dilessi business?’

The lawyer nodded. ‘Since the killing of Mr Herbert and Mr Vyner, there has been much anger against the English.’

‘Why the devil should that be?’ The young man turned back to Rallis. He had mastered his anger and was now more curious than enraged. ‘It was the English who suffered. Herbert and Vyner were English. They were the ones who were kidnapped by bandits on a perfectly innocent journey to Marathon and then murdered by their captors.’

‘Ah, but it is not as simple a story as you think, Adam. There is much resentment in Greece.’

‘Resentment? Why should there be resentment?’

‘The patriotic Greeks wish that their government should be strong and independent. They do not wish it to be — what do you say? — a puppet of other nations. And yet, as a consequence of the murders, the English say, “Jump!” and our government says, “Yes, sir,” and jumps. The young firebrands — they do not like this.’

‘We want only justice,’ Fields said. ‘Someone must pay for the deaths of Herbert and Vyner.’

‘Yet, in pursuit of this justice, hundreds of Greeks are now harried or imprisoned in the countryside north towards Dilessi and here in Athens. Very nearly all of them are innocent. This man who insulted us, perhaps his father or his brother is one of those imprisoned.’

‘I still cannot see that the English are anything other than victims in the whole sorry story’ — Adam raised his hands in mock surrender — ‘but I am prepared to drop the argument. Quint, go and find out what has happened to the coffee we ordered. The waiter has been gone long enough to prepare a banquet.’

Quint stood and made his way to the wooden bar where the waiters stood when they were not scurrying between tables with drinks. When Adam glanced over his shoulder a minute later, he saw that his servant had buttonholed the plump waiter who was gesticulating in either excuse or apology.

‘The agitation will soon die away, Rallis,’ he said. ‘The men who actually killed poor Herbert and Vyner are under lock and key, are they not? All but they will be released, if they have not been so already, and the country will return to its usual state.’

‘Perhaps.’ The lawyer looked unconvinced. He seemed about to say more but there were sudden sounds of commotion from across the room. All over the café, faces turned towards their source. Quint was standing by the wooden counter, his fists raised. At his feet a figure in embroidered jacket and white fustanelle was doubled up and writhing on the ground. Fists still high, Quint backed slowly away from the coffee urns and towards the table where his friends were sitting. He kicked out at a chair in his path and it fell to the floor with a clatter. The sound was lost amidst the café’s continuing uproar of voices. Most people had turned back to their drinks. Quint had now stepped backwards as far as the others. He lowered his fists.

‘I had to knee him in the gooseberries,’ he explained.

‘So we gathered.’

‘It was the same cove as gobbed at us. He’d been outside to relieve hisself. When he come back, he started on at me. He give me a shove in the chest, and he spoke ’arsh words about my mother.’

‘You never knew your mother, Quint.’

‘No,’ the servant conceded, ‘but as the monkey said when he pissed across the carpet, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere. So I give him something to bellyache about.’

‘I’m not certain it’s his belly of which he will be complaining,’ Adam remarked. ‘But I think perhaps we should forget our coffee.’

‘I agree, my boy,’ the professor said. ‘I believe the time has come to beat a strategic retreat.’

The young Greek patriot, still clutching his groin, was being helped to his feet by his friends. From the four corners of the Oraia Ellas, other Greeks, slowly realising what had happened, began to converge on the injured man. Voices were raised in unmistakeable indignation. A dozen men started in the direction of the English party. Chairs were scattered as they moved purposefully forward. The first man to come within striking distance aimed a clumsy punch which Adam easily ducked. He returned the blow and had the satisfaction of seeing his opponent drop to the floor, holding the side of his face. But others were upon them. Adam glimpsed Quint, a stranger to the boxing code so recently introduced to England by the Marquess of Queensberry, kicking out at two assailants. Rallis and the professor were backing away from another half dozen, holding out their arms in placatory gestures. The lawyer was calling out to them in Greek. Some of the patriots had pulled apart two of the café chairs and were beating broken lengths of wood menacingly on the tables. One man swung a section wrenched from a backrest towards Adam’s thigh, but he was able to dodge it and aim a swift jab at the man’s nose. Another Greek leapt upon his back and began to pull at his ears and hair. Tugging furiously at the man’s arms, Adam was able to roll him sideways and force himself free. He aimed a series of short blows at the man as he fell. He could hear Rallis, abandoning any attempt at peace-making, shouting to his towering servant to enter the fray. Adam was seized from behind and his arms held. Another Greek approached him from the front, grinning evilly. Bidding a reluctant farewell to fair fighting, Adam followed his manservant’s example and kicked out. The man fell to the floor, clutching his knee. Adam pulled one arm free and elbowed the man behind in his stomach. With a whistling intake of breath, his assailant released Adam’s other arm.

The young man heard the professor’s voice calling out a warning and turned swiftly to his right but he was just too late. He was struck a glancing blow with half the broken leg of a chair and fell to the ground, momentarily stunned. Consciousness deserted him for the briefest of periods. For the span of little more than a minute he was adrift in a dream world of bright colours and enchanting music before a soothing voice, speaking accented but near-perfect English, brought him back to reality.

‘There is a side entrance, sir.’ It was the plump waiter, leaning over him. He smiled ingratiatingly. ‘If you will follow me.’

‘What of my friends?’ Adam asked, pulling himself to his feet.

‘They are already outside.’

The young man looked over towards the table where they had been sitting. Only Andros was there, standing amidst a chaos of broken furniture. He was in the act of throwing one of the few Greeks still upright in the direction of the Frenchmen. Most of the other patriots were lying on the floor. None showed any inclination to rise again in the near future.

‘Just the tall one remains,’ the waiter said.

‘He does not appear to require my assistance.’ Adam wiped his hand, bloodied from one of the punches he had delivered, across his brow. He staggered after the waiter, who made his way to a low green door hidden behind a curtain in the corner of the Oraia Ellas. It opened onto the busy street outside where his three friends gathered breath after the fray. None seemed harmed save Quint, whose knuckles were bleeding.

‘Ah, you have been able to join us, Adam,’ the professor said, running his hand through what little remained of his hair. ‘We were just beginning to feel a little anxiety for your welfare.’

‘Andros will have dealt with our attackers, I assume,’ Rallis said, with perfect confidence in the ability of his servant to have done so.

‘Achilles killing the Paionians by the Scamander River could not have presented a more terrifying spectacle than your giant, Rallis.’

‘He is a gentle man for the most part but he is a dangerous one to annoy.’

As the lawyer spoke, there were sounds behind him. Crouching to use a door that seemed designed for men half his size, Andros emerged onto the street. He smiled and nodded his great head at his master.

‘Shall we make our way to the Angleterre,’ Rallis asked, ‘now that our little party is complete again? I have yet to partake of my mid-morning coffee and I doubt that any of us will be welcome again in the Oraia Ellas in the near future.’