Stealing Athena

by Karen Essex

  And this last bit, she could not resist:

  I am now satisfied of what I always thought—which is how much more women can do if they set about it than men. I will lay any bet that had you been here, you would not have got half as much on board as I have.

  Her parents were in Paris, and she had arranged for them to meet with Sébastiani. How she would have loved to see her mother’s face when having tea with such a French gallant. Mary wanted her parents’ approval, or at least their good opinion, on a stint in Paris at the embassy for Elgin. England had sent word that Elgin would not be recalled from Constantinople, so that he was free to remain or to leave, an extraordinary position of freedom for a young ambassador to have.

  When Mary took stock of her life, she was pleased. She was not yet twenty-five years old. She had a happy marriage and two beautiful, healthy babies, with another, God willing, on the way. She was young, energetic, and eager for more—more life, more experience, more adventure, more happiness. The smallpox vaccine, a cause so dear to her heart, had taken hold in Constantinople, and, according to all reports, Turkish children were now being inoculated. Elgin had performed brilliantly as ambassador, and at only thirty-four years old was undoubtedly at the very start of a long and important career. She was anxious to get this leg of the journey of their lives wrapped up along with the statues and things from the Acropolis and get on with the next epoch of what she was sure would be their wonderful life.

  Greece, June 15–29, 1802

  THE HEAT WAS INTERMINABLE, even at night, and even by day at sea as the Elgins sailed aboard the Narcissus toward Marathon. Though she was sick to death of ruins, after all that she had studied about the historic battle that took place on the Marathon plain and the victory that had inspired the monuments on the Acropolis, Mary was excited to view the locale. She hoped that after so many centuries, something interesting remained.

  She was not disappointed. As they sailed toward the site, the great tumulus under which the dead lay was plainly visible. Something about the mound of earth, covered now in grass, weeds, and scrub, sent a shudder up Mary’s spine. She had been conversing with Captain Donnelly about the battle that had taken place on the fields there; once the party went ashore, he had his crew pitch a tent for her, surrounded with pillars that they had found scattered around the grounds. She felt like an ancient Athenian lady as she disembarked and walked toward the site.

  William Hamilton, arriving on the Mentor from Alexandria, had arranged to meet up with the Elgins at the site. The Mentor had docked at Athens, where the vessel was loaded with as much of Elgin’s collection as would fit in the hold, but the captain would not enlarge the hatchways to accommodate the bigger crates. This infuriated Elgin.

  “We have accomplished so much,” Mary said, patting his hand. He’d been so happy lately. She did not like that he was sent back into misery with this news. “We shall find a way. The captain has packed all but four large cases. Surely we can find transport for that!”

  It was morning. The day was not yet miserably hot, and Mary wanted to enjoy being in the open fields. Mountains surrounded the empty plain. Trees—olive, cypress, and other evergreens—grew in sparse groups, huddled together as if against the sun.

  Hamilton and Reverend Hunt were walking the battlefield, trying to mark the positions of the armies.

  “The Athenians were outnumbered two to one,” Hamilton said. “The Spartans had promised to send reinforcements, but they sent a messenger asking the Athenians to wait several days because, according to their gods, they could only wage war on a new moon, or some such nonsense.”

  “The Persians numbered twenty thousand,” Hunt said. “The Greeks could have retreated, but instead chose to advance on the enemy. Imagine what guts it took.”

  “The Persians thought the advance by the Greeks was suicidal madness,” Mary said. The men looked up. “That is what Herodotus wrote.”

  “Excellent recall, Lady Elgin,” Hunt said, as if congratulating a child on its lessons.

  “I imagine that these warriors were mere boys,” she said as they looked at the mound of the dead. “Snatched from their homes, their tribes, their mothers’ breasts.”

  “By my calculations, the Persians would have been buried over there, under those grassy mounds,” Hunt said, pointing. “Their own commanders would have left them to be exposed to the vultures. That is what Darius did with the corpses of the warriors who disappointed him!”

  “The Greeks were nobler than that,” Hamilton said.

  “Rather like English gentlemen,” Elgin said.

  “Wouldn’t the burial mounds of the Persians be much larger, if so many had died?” Mary asked.

  “An excellent question. The Persian bodies would have been burned to ashes and buried without a marker.”

  “They buried the Persians as a courtesy, Mary,” Elgin said. “Obviously they intended the tumulus of the Athenian heroes to stand out and to last the ages, which it has.”

  They walked to the middle of the plain and began to circle the tumulus.

  “About six hundred feet in diameter, I’ll wager,” Hunt said. “And forty feet in height, though we must allow that the centuries have eroded it. It must have been much higher two thousand years ago.”

  The men examined some big holes, which exposed dry, claylike soil and some scattered shards of pottery.

  “The local people say that every night you can hear the sound of horses neighing and men fighting. They say it is not good luck to be here.”

  “Well, gentlemen,” Elgin said, ignoring the comment and looking around, “shall we have a dig?”

  “Why not?” Hunt said. “Someone’s already had a go at the burial mound.”

  “I’ll bet it was that French devil Fauvel,” Elgin said. “He’s preceded me everywhere. But I shall have the last word.”

  Out came the shovels.

  “Is it wise to dig near a burial mound?” Mary asked. Mary had begun to feel sick at the idea of walking over the dead, much less excavating the area where they had rested since 490 BCE. But she did not want the men to make sport of her womanly superstitions, so she remained, watching them sink their shovels into the earth and turn it over.

  After not too long, the men turned up some pottery shards, too small to allow them to speculate on the originals, and a mass of silver that had been rudely welded together. “Difficult to say what this might have been,” Hunt said.

  The small pieces of things were encouraging enough to make them dig deeper. Soon they began to uncover bones. Whether they were the bones of the warriors, they could not say.

  “What else could they be?” Mary said.

  She had to turn away. These were the bones of the noble heroes, without whom there might be no democracy in the world. If the Persians had won, conquering Greece, there would have been no Parthenon, no frieze, no pediment depicting the birth of Athena, no Erechtheion—none of the monuments that civilization had admired these thousands of years; none of the things that Elgin had been so passionately trying to preserve. There might have been no Greece at all, no Golden Age of Pericles, no grand western civilization. The entire world might have been different. Greece might have been ruled by Persia, as today it was ruled by the Ottomans.

  All that these men, including her husband, had considered good and noble in the world was a result of the sacrifice of the men who lay buried under the mound. And here they were, digging away at the grave, tossing aside the very bones of the heroes.

  The men soon tired of the excavation efforts, gave the shovels back to the servants to be packed away, and asked that lunch be served.

  In the afternoon they rode to nearby Rhamnous, where Elgin wished to explore the ruins of the Temple of Nemesis.

  “According to Pausanias, the Persians, confident of victory over the Athenians, arrived in Greece with a great column of marble from Paros, which they intended to use to make a trophy of their conquest,” said Hunt. “After the battle, the Athenians seized it and brought it to At
hens, where Pheidias sculpted a colossal statue of Nemesis. The Greeks built the temple to the goddess of vengeance near the battle site and placed the statue inside.”

  “A bit of well-earned gloating,” Elgin said.

  “According to Herodotus, the arrogant man commits follies because of his nature,” Mary said. “And the gods punish him for his hubris by unleashing Nemesis. She is Divine Retribution.”

  The temple was situated to overlook the gulf of Évvoia, sparkling in the late afternoon sunlight. It was a glorious setting, Mary thought, conducive for the Athenians to revel in their revenge. Not much was left of the original compound but the remnants of its many-sided walls, the marble floors, a few bases of what had been the interior columns, and fragments that outlined the rooms. Weeds grew everywhere and the scrub covering the area was rampant, making it difficult to walk. But on a sunny day, it was not hard to imagine the sanctuary’s former majesty.

  “The colossal statue would have sat here, in the middle of the cella,” Hunt explained. “Another great work by Pheidias lost!”

  The men were digging in the dirt in the areas where the marble blocks had been removed, hoping to find fragments or small statues that might have escaped the temple robbers. It was the time in the late afternoon when Mary often experienced fatigue; it had been so with the first two pregnancies, and this one was no exception. She sat on the remnants of a column near the center of the room. A little pile of dirt partially covered the marble floor tiles, which looked as if they might have an image on them. She brushed the dirt aside with her feet, exposing the image of an animal with a large beak and huge paws like those of a lion. The beast was fastened to something, its body held taut by reins. There was something familiar about the creature. Mary slid off the column and got down on her knees, but felt a little dizzy. She put her back against the column for balance, and then tore at the dirt with her hands. Wiping it away, she thought she might be tearing her hands on the jagged relief of the tile, but she didn’t care. She brushed all of the soil aside, using her nails to claw away the dirt lodged in the grooves of the relief.

  A female figure, nude, with a slackened belly and a great expanse of wings, stood on a chariot drawn by two of the strange creatures. Held high above her head was a globe, presumably the earth. Beneath the wheels of her chariot was a man’s head, his eyes wide with agony, his long tongue protruding from his mouth.

  “Ah, there she is, Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance,” said Reverend Hunt, looking over Mary’s shoulder. “She is in her griffin-drawn chariot, taking revenge on some pathetic creature who insulted Athena. That is the wheel of fortune in her hand, Lady Elgin. She controls Destiny and punishes acts of hubris as well as insults to Athena.”

  Mary brushed more dirt aside, hoping to expose something that would change Hunt’s analysis of the scene.

  “Should you be on your knees, milady?” he asked.

  But Mary did not answer him. She did not want to move, and she could not look up. The winged female and her two pitiless familiars were the same creatures that had attacked Elgin in her dream.

  WHY DID A LOVING God condemn a full half of his flock to suffer so?

  Mary knew that it was blasphemous to ask these questions, but as she lay on her bed trying to coax another child out of her exhausted body, she could not help but challenge God’s wisdom. Why did she have to endure the torments of hell to bring these beautiful children into the world?

  “Many ladies suffer,” said the attending midwife. Mary had not seen this woman before, but she was English and had come highly recommended by the Russian ambassadress. “Only lucky ones give birth to living children, such as you have.”

  It was not what she wanted to hear at this moment when the searing pain overtook her again and she bit hard on the rag between her teeth so that she would not bite off her tongue. The midwife had probably put it into her mouth to shut her up. Mary wouldn’t doubt it. She’d been screaming the entire day since hours before dawn when she awoke to use the chamber pot and the waters came rushing out of her. Now it was getting dark, and the attendants were lighting the lamps and shutting the curtains, blocking out the last of September’s lazy rays of sunlight. Little Mary had come into the world much more easily than this, and Mary had hoped that each new baby would be easier still. But this agony recalled the birth of Bruce, during which she had prayed to die, just to put an end to the intolerable pain. Dr. Scott was on hand as usual, dosing her with laudanum and kind and encouraging words, but neither palliated the suffering.

  She tried to think of all the lovely things that had happened on the journey back from Greece—the unsurpassed whiteness of the marble of a temple on the very tip of Cape Sunium as the light passed through the ruins; the nine daughters of the consul of Zea dancing the minuet to make Mary smile; the sweet water of the stream that ran next to the Cave of Pan and the fragrance of the oleanders and myrtles in bloom that grew wild; and the fountains and cascades in the orange groves at Paros. But the terrifying aspects of the voyage kept rushing in too, washing away the lovely memories—the storms at sea that sent her below, sickened; the violent attack upon their ship by pirates and the three hundred thundering rounds of cannon fire that Captain Donnelly sent flying over the sea, making the villains leap from their ship into the raging waves as the vessel sank. Mary had hugged her little ones in the cabin below as the captain took the pirates on board, tying them to one another and interrogating them as they protested their innocence.

  What more could happen? she had wondered at that moment. She soon found out.

  They docked at Smyrna, where the sailors claimed that the heat was worse than in India, and where a gloom hung over the city because mothers and fathers were losing all their little ones to the whooping cough. Mary watched the tiny corpses, covered in flowers, carried off to their premature graves while desperate parents called upon whatever God—Christian or Mohammedan—to help their young. The body count of the little ones continued to climb, which sickened her at heart if not in body, and she could take it no more. It seemed that the dank, narrow streets of Smyrna were specifically designed to contain the pestilence that was killing the children within it.

  Elgin, on the other hand, was begging her to stay. “I must meet with General Stewart and Lord Blantyre and I am very unnerved by it,” he said.

  “But what if I go into labor here in this diseased place?”

  “It is early yet, Mary,” he answered calmly, and she knew that he was about to lay out one of his incontrovertible arguments.

  “The doctor says the baby will come within weeks, Elgin. Babies are not necessarily on our schedules! It could be any day.”

  “Then better not to risk travel,” he countered.

  “Better to risk travel than to risk delivering a baby in the center of a whooping cough plague,” she said.

  That was the end of it. She made up her mind to leave Smyrna, but all the warships in the area including the Narcissus were being recalled to Alexandria immediately.

  “Oh please, please can you not take us to the Dardanelles?” she begged Captain Donnelly. “We can make our way by land from there.”

  “Lady Elgin, you are the single person in the world for whom I would entertain disobeying a direct order of the British navy. But I find that though my affection and admiration for you run deep, I cannot risk the court-martial.”

  Desperate, she set off to travel back to Constantinople by land—without Elgin, who still had diplomatic business in the area—but with Reverend Hunt, Masterman, the children, and their entourage of secretaries, maids, and other embassy staff, to make the five-day journey in the dead heat of the summer. She had to rise at four in the morning every day to make arrangements for the party of fifty, causing Reverend Hunt to declare her “the best general was ever seen.” They rode over rugged terrain until midday, when they had to pitch tents and wait out the heat. If she didn’t lose the baby on that journey in the eighth month of her pregnancy through the miasma of roasting temperatures, humidit
y, and disease-ridden air, she would not lose it now.

  “YOU HAVE TO PUSH now, Lady Elgin,” said the midwife, holding Mary’s knees apart.

  “No!” Mary cried. “Pushing brings on the blood!” How vividly she remembered the sight of ladies carrying off blood-soaked rags while she, choking, pushed with all her might to deliver Bruce. She did not want that to happen again.

  “No, Lady Elgin, pushing brings on the baby. Now be a good girl and listen to me.”

  She wished she’d hidden Elgin’s knife, the one that the Capitan Pasha had just given him that he’d taken from Napoleon. It was set with diamonds and rubies and pearls and who knows what other treasures, but its blade was sharp. She would not hurt herself with it, nor her soon-to-be-born baby, but right now she’d like to stab the midwife who was coaxing her knees apart against her will and barking orders.

  The pains were coming every two minutes. She was shaking and shivering, though it was very warm in the room. She could feel the pressure—unbearable, really—pushing at her from deep inside her bowels. She knew that it was time to push the baby out. But she could only think of the pain with Bruce, and all of her fears that she would die, leaving him a motherless child.

  “Really, Lady Elgin, you are fighting your own body. When the contracting pain subsides, you must push the baby out. Just a few times should do.”

  “Come now, Lady Elgin. Mustn’t disappoint the earl.” If Dr. Scott thought that those were the correct words to say, he was mistaken. She wanted to hiss something horrible at him. It was the earl who was responsible for getting her into this dreadful condition. But even lost in this well of pain, she knew that that would be unseemly.

  Oh, if only her mother were here. She missed her mother so much. She’d written her a forty-page letter, spotted with sweat, while she was on her miserable journey back to Constantinople. It was indecent that a girl should have to suffer these indignities of womanhood without a mother’s wisdom and experience to guide her through. Mary would always be on hand to help her daughters through these trials, she was certain. Girls needed their mothers!