The Tomb of Zeus (6 page)

“More eavesdropping, William? You can hardly expect the man to make you privy to his bank accounts! He does pay you, I suppose? Well, then…Wait a moment,” said Letty, collecting her thoughts together through her fatigue. “Phoebe said something about…spending pots of Theo's money in Paris. Yes, she did. Rather dragged it into the conversation, I thought. Establishing that her husband isn't without a bob or two.”

“That would be like Phoebe. She makes it her business to provide a respectable cover for the man…whatever his enterprise. She has a good deal of money of her own. She wouldn't need to spend his. But I'm not so sure about Theo. And I have this from his son, no less. Information openly confided! George is very…unworldly. He's not mesmerised by money as the rest of the world seems to be. He's aware of its uses and he spends whatever he can lay hands on, but it's not a god for him and it's not something to discuss in an undertone in corners as the rest of us do. He'll not try to disguise the cost of that dear little motorcar—”

“He hasn't! I was shocked at his revelation!”

“In any event, George confided in me—discussing the Great Work his father's about to launch—that Theo is funding the publishing of the book entirely out of his own pocket. He's been covering the costs of his archaeological work for years and you and I both know archaeology's an expensive business for an amateur. In this world, you have to make a splash if you're to get anywhere…and Theo has much to make up for. At least he'd see it that way.”

“What do you mean? The man doesn't give the impression of inferiority of any sort.”

“Perhaps not. But Theo is acutely conscious that his background lacks polish—he could have done with a better grounding in the classics had he only known that, relatively late in life, he was going to be bitten by the bug of excavation. Evans—the man he clearly sees as his rival—was fluent in ancient Greek and Persian from a very early age
and
inherited a fortune from both sides of the family. If you're perceived to be well off in this little world, public funds are simply not available to you, however deserving and important your project. Poor old Sir Arthur discovered this. Evans had to sell his collection of coins and seal stones last year to make ends meet, having spent the family fortune on Knossos over the years. He doesn't even own the site any longer—or the Villa Ariadne, did you know?”

Letty nodded. “It was in the
Times
last year. With typical generosity, he made them both over to the British School in Athens. A grand gesture by a grand old man.”

“Mmm…” said Gunning thoughtfully, “and the news burst on a grateful world one day before his court case came up before the judge at the Old Bailey!”

“All a silly mistake, I'm sure,” retorted Letty briskly. “And it's grudging of you to bring it up.”

“Come on! Evans was caught fair and square, hand in hand with a boy hawker in Hyde Park! The lad was seventeen and it wasn't apples he was hawking! Now—each to his own entertainment—but the timing of Evans's gift was interesting! But I make the point that excavation devours money. It demands tribute with the regular appetite of a Minotaur. Expenses have to be met—digging teams paid, officials bribed, artisans engaged…Have you any idea what Theo's paying
me
!”

“More than your qualifications would justify, even if it's tuppence ha'penny,” she said bitterly, and instantly regretted her pettiness. “So—you're saying that this life Theo supports on the island may be due to the generosity of his wife?”

“It could be. She inherited a fortune from her maternal grandmother before her marriage to Theo and another one from a doting old uncle last year.”

“How do you know all this, William? Oh, don't tell me!” she added quickly. “You put on your confessional face and make sympathetic noises.”

He grinned. “I can fool anyone but you, Letty. But I don't feel in the least bit guilty—Phoebe really needs someone to listen to her. Someone to be frivolous with. Someone to confide in. Though she's stubbornly loyal and I can only guess at her thoughts through her silences sometimes. I have the highest regard for her, Letty. She's a lovely girl. She could have chosen anyone. Theo can be charming, though he grows less so over time, I suspect. But five years ago, Phoebe married him and that, for me, silences all criticism. He was her choice and she's by no means a silly woman.”

“The most intelligent of my sex are occasionally capable of making a disastrous error of judgement,” observed Letty lightly.

He ignored her. “So—one has to conclude that she loves the old blighter and not only provides the wherewithal for his hobby but presents to the world the flummery that he is the one with the moneybags.”

“Well, it seems to me that if what you say is true, all concerned are getting exactly what they want out of the situation,” said Letty. “I think you can come off watch, William, put your knitting away and stop worrying.”

Gunning exclaimed with exasperation, “You silly girl! You walk headfirst into a hornets' nest and say: ‘What a pretty buzzing!’ There's something alive and growing here, something malicious, and I don't want
you
to be involved with it. You know what you're like, Letty! ‘Nasty, forward minx!’ You meddle. Tragedy follows you around, and you won't need to whistle to find it snapping at your heels in this house. I'm anxious for you, can't you understand that?”

He held out his hands to her in some kind of appeal and, responding to words he had left unspoken, she moved forward to take them in hers.

“William, I haven't forgotten your concerns for me last year. I'll always be grateful. Truly. But,” she squeezed his hands encouragingly and released them, “you're off duty now. Free of me. No need to worry.”

“Listen, Letty.
No—really
listen! I want you to promise me to take up at once and with no argument the offer Theo will make you very shortly. Whatever it is and wherever it is—just go off and get on with it. He's got several excavations on the go all over the island, and if I read him right he'll pick out one of little importance for you—a site that you can't possibly make a mess of—and send you off to it with a map clutched in your hand. Just pack your trowel and go. Distance yourself.”

Letty peered at him, searching his face in the glimmering candlelight. Why was he here, stirring up emotions she thought she had buried? This intrusion into her evening was trumped-up…unnecessary. And then the reason for his anxiety struck her. “Ah! What you're really trying to say is, ‘Stay out of
my
hair,’ isn't it? ‘Distance yourself from
me
.’ Well, that presents no difficulty, as far as I'm concerned, but there's something else, I'm guessing…Are you going to tell me what's troubling you, William?”

“Not yet. No. I'm not about to voice suspicions that I can't back up with evidence. I'll just say, for the moment, that I'm uneasy, and the source of my unease is the volatile nature of the relationships between the characters in this house. There's a sort of tense balance at the moment—a balance that could be broken by someone stepping in with a clumsy insouciance.”

“Ah. Do I recognise myself entering, stage left?”

“Sorry! You're actually a breath of fresh, familiar air and I welcome it. But I'm not sure the troubled souls that flit about this place can take the glare of your sunny common sense.”

A banging door and the sound of laughter below alerted him. “The party's breaking up. I'll creep down the back stairs and make myself scarce.”

He got to his feet and they stared at each other, unable to embark on further or deeper matters.

“Remember the mouse if you get caught,” she whispered unnecessarily. “I'm quite certain I really did hear one earlier…scratching about somewhere…” She found she was not quite ready, at the last, to let him go.

He opened the door, looking up and down the corridor, then turned to her, smiling. “I offer you a couple of lines I came across in
Medea
the other day:
‘A man and a woman working in harmony, together make an invincible stronghold.’
Good night, Letty.”

“Good night, William. I'll see you on the battlements.”

A
ll the church bells of Herakleion were ringing out an imperious call to service on Sunday morning, as Letty guiltily stayed in Iher seat at the breakfast table and accepted a second cup of coffee. “Ignore them,” Phoebe had told her. “I'll take you to Evensong instead.”

The second summons was not so easily ignored. Theodore required the students to attend him in the library immediately after breakfast. All three leapt up and set off at once, Letty following the boys along to a spacious room on the ground floor at the rear of the house. The doors were standing open on a large courtyard, green with citrus trees and roses, and dotted with classical statuary. It was to this scene, unexpected in the centre of the city, that Letty's gaze was drawn. She was quite certain that the marble figure she caught a glimpse of was Artemis the Virgin Huntress, almost life-sized and playfully half hidden behind foliage. She was entertained to see that the goddess's extended, booted left foot and, likewise, her arrow, were pointing directly across the garden at the smooth bosom of an Aphrodite. The target, all gleaming, over-abundant curves, was standing in a clear patch of sunlight, admiring herself in a looking glass, oblivious to the threat from her sister lurking behind the laurel. Between the two, mocking their grace, stood a squat, rough-carved stone image of Dionysos. The God of Wine, drunken mouth open and carelessly about to shout out a secret, leered madly, his wild hair tangled about a crown of vine leaves.

In spite of the obvious care someone had taken to set out the garden, Letty found she had no instinctive urge to step into it and enjoy it.

Hesitating in the doorway, she looked about her at the library, admiring the coolly purposeful room, its walls lined with book-shelves, the centre occupied by a generous number of tables and chairs. A communal room if ever she saw one, and she calculated that Theodore Russell most probably had his own private retreat elsewhere in the large house. The lectern in pride of place, bearing an open copy of the first of Arthur Evans's volumes on his discoveries at Knossos, was sending out a sly message, she thought, and she smiled.

“There you are! Don't stand about—come in! Good breakfast? Phoebe look after you all right, did she? Good. Good. William and I have been hard at it since five o'clock,” Theodore announced. Looking at the self-satisfied pair, each with shirtsleeves rolled up, discovered bending amicably over the largest of the tables, Letty could well believe it. The two men appeared to be examining a map extended over the table and held down at the corners with potsherds.

“Now—who've we got?” Russell made a quick roll call: “Stewart, Dickie, and Laetitia. Step forward, Laetitia, and look at this! It's your itinerary we're planning, miss. Crete not well served by map-makers, I'm afraid. Captain Spratt had a go in…when was it, William? 1865? And made a remarkably good fist of it—for his time. But not adequate for this day and age. What you see before you…” They crowded round to inspect the paper patchwork in front of them. “…is the culmination of my own attempts to pin down this mysterious island and reduce its four majestic dimensions to a simple—two.”

He waved a hand over the map, portions of which seemed to be printed, others hand-drawn and coloured, yet others blank. “Underpinning all this are old Admiralty charts from before the War. Out of date when I made off with them, but I've personally sailed around and hiked across the island and made many corrections and additions.”

“Mr. Russell, I can identify two dimensions,” said Letty, trying for an alert student's voice, eagerness just in control. “Length—one hundred and fifty miles, width—thirty miles on average. But the other two…?”

“Height, of course, nitwit!” burst from him and, for a moment, Laetitia felt herself accepted. Russell recollected himself and went on in a more moderate tone, “Even from your first view from the harbour”—he pointed to Herakleion—“you can't have failed to notice the mountains. They run the length of the island, sticking up like the backbone of a donkey, and human life here has always had to seek out its niches in the interstices. River valleys, plateaux wherever Nature has created them, coastline, of course, but it's not a country that opens its arms to settlers.”

“And yet they came and continue to come,” remarked Gunning. “It's a stepping-stone between three continents. Down here to the south you've got Egypt and Libya, to the north and west is Europe, and to the north and east is Asia Minor. And here, at the hub, caught between these widely different and vibrant cultures, is Crete. We don't know where the first inhabitants came from—George is in pursuit with his measuring sticks—but we do know that the very earliest remains of Stone Age Man are to be found using the shelter of the thousands of caves scattered all over the island—”

“Which brings us to the fourth dimension,” Russell interrupted. “Time! And again—this goes deep and is difficult to measure. You are about to embark on the most stimulating and worthwhile study available to an archaeologist: no less than revealing to the world one of its earliest and most attractive civilizations. It was here, Laetitia,” he tapped a hairy knuckle over a red spot on the map which she had already identified as Knossos, “in the Palace of King Minos that mankind learned to dance and sing and feast, to worship the Mother Goddess and Nature herself in peace and plenty; where he learned to respond to the beauty around him by recording his brilliant culture in the most glorious works of art of the ancient world…or of any world.”

Enjoying the rapt attention of his audience, he strolled to a glass-fronted cupboard and took out an object which he brought back to the table cradled in his large hands. He set it down in front of Laetitia and waited to hear her murmurs of awe and appreciation. Into her silence he said encouragingly, “Four thousand years ago, a Minoan artist carved in ivory the image of his Goddess. And here she is.”

The nine-inch-high figurine was carved from elephant tusk, making skilful use of the natural curvature of the material to convey the proud, stiff, slightly backwards-leaning stance of the Mother Goddess—or was this her priestess? She wore a high castellated crown and her long hair fell to her shoulders. Her skirt was flounced, the tiers edged with gold, and around her narrow waist could just about be made out a ceremonial apron. Her upper body was naked apart from thick golden bracelets on her upper arms. Downwards from her elbows wound more strips of gold which, on reaching her forward thrusting hands, reared up suddenly as snakes' heads, tongues flicking out aggressively. The Lady's expression was un-dimmed by aeons under the earth, still speaking to her worshippers.

Worshippers amongst whom she could clearly count Dick and Stewart. Their eyes never left the delicate figure, held firmly in Theodore's hands.

“I say…may I?” Letty breathed.

“Of course.”

As she made to gather up the figure, Letty caught a nervous movement from Gunning; his lips tightened and he looked hastily away. To other onlookers, this was the nervous reaction of a man steeling himself to watch a woman he does not trust about to handle a precious object, but Letty knew the man and thought otherwise. Consciously or not—she could not be certain—he was sending her a warning.

With due reverence she lifted the ivory piece and looked at it closely, holding it firmly by its wide base and steadying it with one gentle finger atop its head as she'd been taught.

All four men waited for her response.

Her inspection complete, she turned the statuette upside down and peered at the base. She sighed.

“Ah. Yes. There it is:
Made in Athens.
I feared so. It's quite lovely, Mr. Russell, but I hope you didn't pay more than ten guineas for it?”

She turned with a bright smile to the students. “Not the work, sadly, of a Minoan Michelangelo but an Athenian craftsman—one of the Constantidis brothers, perhaps? There's a workshop just off Syntagma Square, where you can pick up wonderfully convincing…um…replicas.” Her voice trailed away encountering their shocked disapproval.

Dick broke the frozen silence. “But it
doesn't
say…Oh, I see! She's joking! Laetitia—you m…m…mistake this!” He went on earnestly, crippled with embarrassment for her gaffe: “I assure you—it is indeed a genuine antique. Excavated at a palace site fifty miles from here. If you would care to take a second look, you'll see that the ivory is worn away exactly as you'd expect in an object thousands of years old. Let me pass you a magnifying glass.”

“And the whole posture,” Stewart attacked from the left, “is so typically Minoan…so familiar from wall paintings…the details of the dress so well observed…can we be surprised that the leading authorities on the island have all authenticated this particular figure? But perhaps we should now discount the expertise of the Germans, the Italians, the French, and the Americans, for here is Miss Talbot, freshly arrived, to set us all straight. Oh, dear! Gentlemen, I fear we've all been paying tribute to a.
false
goddess!”

Letty felt her cheeks reddening. She looked about her for support or understanding but saw only male antagonism, dislike, scorn. Sympathy was the best Gunning could offer before he looked away. She felt herself surrounded and alone.
Only one thing to do, Letty!
Her brother's voice came back to her as he'd tried to explain to his little sister the tactics he used in aerial combat over Flanders. Three-dimensional pieces of choreography—however complicated, his manoeuvres always seemed to end with the same war cry:
À l'at-taque!
John, she was certain, would have been yelling just that when his solitary De Havilland had run into a squadron of Fokkers. In late September 1915, with the war in the air still in its early stage of chivalrous combat, the German authorities had graciously returned his remains, and the leader of the enemy squadron had sent a letter saying that the lone Englishman had managed to shoot down four of his fighters in his suicidal attack before succumbing to a hail of machine-gun bullets.

À l'attaque!
it was, then, since the enemy was massing and there was no safe way back to base. Laetitia's chin went up, her eyes narrowed, and she smiled a smile involving everyone in the room, assessing the strengths of her targets. Her brother would have picked off the weakest first.

“I'll answer your objection first, Dick, since it's the one most easily refuted by scientific—indeed, forensic—evidence.” Her fore-finger trailed gently over the pitted surface of the ivory. “Yes, I agree it looks as though it's been buried for centuries, but this process of decay can be simulated, speeded up, you know. Immersion in a jar of acid of the correct dilution will do the trick. A quick treatment, but somewhat crude and easily detectable. I understand the really professional way to do this, for those prepared to invest more of their time in the operation, is to bury the carving in the back garden and have the male members of the family urinate over the spot. It takes about a year. I think we have an example of such dedicated professionalism before us.”

“Oh, I say!” Dick could not find words to express his distress at her unladylike language.

“And Stewart's objection…” She placed the goddess on the table and, lining herself up with the figure, struck the same ceremonial pose: shoulders down, chest out, hands extended as if in protest. “A fair copy, though any man with a working knowledge of a woman's anatomy will see at once the difference between the truly ancient version and this twentieth-century artist's view. The
breasts,
gentlemen!”

In confusion, four pairs of eyes shot to the safer target of the bosom carved in ivory.

“Minoan bosoms are high and rounded and virginal—think of apples—and they are well corseted. In the genuine museum pieces I've seen in Athens and Oxford and here in Herakleion yesterday, the lady is wearing a tight-fitting laced bodice with set-in sleeves. In the statuette before us you can see that the model used is rather…um…mature. And the artist, apparently uninspired by—or perhaps uninformed as to—the fashions in bodices has chosen to omit the garment completely. The unrestrained flesh produces the effect I observe you are now judging afresh. Pears rather than apples, are you thinking?”

Throats were cleared, feet were shuffled. Someone—Theo— snorted in disgust.

“And where is her pinafore?” If she was being tested, she'd give them both barrels in reply. “It forms an indispensable part of the Minoan priestess's wardrobe, but here is merely suggested in a sketchy way. Could that be because a modern eye sees a pinny as a degrading, housewifely garment? Better left out of the design. And three tiers to the skirt? Wouldn't we have looked for seven?”

Her audience peered with renewed interest at the figurine.

“And the face?” she continued. “The lady is quite lovely! An angel from a Gothic cathedral perhaps? A Byzantine Madonna? Next month's cover girl on
Vogue
magazine? Any of those. What these features are saying to me
—a.
woman—is: This is no snake goddess. The faces of the genuine ones always strike me with awe and—yes-horror. You wouldn't want to have one on your bedside table! They are recognisably human and female but they convey no emotion I can understand. They are wide-eyed yet inward-looking, brutal, unapproachable. From another age. But this face is one I feel I know. The English mistress I had a crush on? That's it! It's Miss Carstairs saying: ‘Oh, come now, Letty! Do stop chattering!’”