What we have found so far this year is really quite amazing. A section of courtyard still paved in mesmerizing blue schist stone; footings of storerooms on the west side of the courtyard; and intermittent three-foot- and four-foot-high walls of what we are almost sure is a royal apartment and a sacred area on the east side of the court. What is intriguing is that there only seems to be the one royal apartment. Knossos, Phaistos and Mallia all have two megara complete with porch, vestibule, large hall and central hearth, but not so at Kalamata. Or, at least, not so far.
Daphne paused before reading more. It was so long since she had been on a dig that she could scarcely remember what being on one felt like. She was alone in the mansion flat she shared with Sandy in Kensington, and rain was beating against the multi-paned windows. She wondered if it was raining on Crete, or if, in October, the weather was still dry and mild. She had been meaning to visit Crete all summer and perhaps work alongside Kate and Ella for a week or two on the dig. Where the dig was concerned, she had quite obviously left things too late, but it wasn’t too late to make a trip out there in order to spend time with Kate and Ella – provided, of course, that Kate and Ella were staying on in Crete, as they had last year.
She returned her attention to the letter, to see if Kate had written anything about her own and Ella’s intentions:
The work on the site has been totally engrossing, so apologies if I don’t have too much other news. At one time I thought I might have, because in the summer I had several dates with Helmut. He’s very attractive in a raw-boned, blond, blue-eyed German kind of way, but much as I like him (and I like him an awful lot), there were no sparks (at least not for me), and so instead of blossoming into a red-hot romance it’s settled into good solid friendship. (As far as red-hot romances go, I sometimes wonder if I’m ever going to know what one is like).
Daphne knew what one was like.
She bit the corner of her lip, overcome by memories of her romance with Sholto and the cataclysmic way in which it had ended so abruptly. Where was Sholto now? As it was October and a weekend, he was most likely out of town and at a North Country house party, shooting pheasants. Or perhaps he was in Paris with Francine. Her stomach muscles tightened in a painful knot. If he wasn’t in Paris with Francine, perhaps Sholto was somewhere else with her. Perhaps they were even now in London together, enjoying lunch at the Ritz or the Dorchester.
It was just over a year since the nightmare scene in the Savoy’s River Room when she had so dramatically and finally broken off her relationship with him. Why was she not yet over Sholto? Why was the memory of him – prior to her finding out about his long affair with Francine – still the yardstick by which she judged all the other men who came her way? There had even, God help her, been moments when she’d wondered what would have happened if she’d never let him know that she knew about Francine. If she’d continued with their affair as if Francine didn’t exist. Would Sholto’s need of her then have become so great that Francine would now be nothing but a distant memory, both to him and to her?
Fiercely closing her mind against the thought, she returned her attention to the letter. At the start of a new paragraph, Kate had written:
Ella spent August at home in Wilsden. She came back seriously out of patience with Sam, her parents and her granddad. Apparently they all think Christmas a perfect time for a wedding, and the Christmas they have in mind is this Christmas. When Ella got engaged at Easter she was anticipating being engaged for two or three years. She says that there’s no Christmas wedding pencilled in her diary and that, despite a mammoth amount of persuasion, she’s not about to pencil one in! The engagement is still on, though. Ella says she never really spelled out to Sam that she expected to be engaged for far longer and that, as she hadn’t done so, she is partly to blame for the misunderstanding. However, there is now pressure for her to agree to a wedding date. Her mother says an Easter wedding would be the next best thing to a Christmas wedding, and Sam is saying if not Easter, then June.
Despite the melancholy she’d been plunged into by thoughts of Sholto, Daphne felt a flash of amusement. A wedding in June would fall smack in the middle of next year’s season at Kalamata, and she could no more imagine Ella taking time off from it than she could imagine Ella flying to the moon.
The dig is clearly going to be one of major archaeological importance and next year’s team needs to be far bigger than our present team. As the site is so isolated, and as Kalamata village is small and the present team are already occupying all the available lodgings there, for newcomers it’s going to be a case of tented accommodation on the upper plateau.
It’s all tremendously exciting and I do wish you were a part of it. (Don’t panic at the thought of being in tented accommodation with thirty men halfway up a mountain! Another bed can be squeezed in our room at the cafeneion). Please give it some thought, Daphne. It’s been way too long since Ella and I last saw you and if you don’t flex your archaeological muscles soon, you won’t be able to remember what a mattock is for!
In a week or two, when this year’s dig is finally over, I’ll be moving with Ella to Knossos, so that together with Lewis and Helmut – and in the facilities provided by the British School – we can study what has been found at Kalamata. I’ll be staying in the Villa Ariadne’s hostel with whatever British School students happen to be there, and Ella is going to be lodging with the Kourakis family.
Love you lots, Daph – and think about Crete for next year.
Kate
Daphne was thinking about Crete – and not for next year, but for what was left of the present year.
She sprang to her feet, seized with an overwhelming passion to see for herself what had been excavated on Kalamata’s upper plateau; to meet Lewis and Helmut and Christos; to see the cafeneion and meet Andre and Agata, and drink raki beneath the shade of the cafeneion’s shabby awning; to throw sweets to the children as, according to Kate, Lewis did; and, most of all, to visit Knossos. How could she have lived so long and yet never have visited Knossos? How could she have known Kate for so many years and yet never have met Kit?
As she shrugged herself into a chinchilla bolero and snatched up a lizard-skin clutch bag, she thought of Crete’s fabled White Mountains; of Mount Dicte, where the ancients believed the great god Zeus had been born; of snow-capped Mount Ida, where they believed he had been reared.
As Daphne went down in the lift, her head was full of lammergeiers with ten-foot wingspans – surely it was a lammergeier Ella had written of seeing? Of small plains dense with white-sailed windmills, and of elderly peasant women dressed from head to foot in black, smiling toothlessly as they rode on the backs of donkeys. It was all going to be utterly magical and, once there, she could stay for as long as she wanted.
She stepped out of the lift and ran out of the building into Kensington High Street. Maybe she could even help puzzle out the significance of a Minoan palace without sea access and with only one royal apartment. Sir Arthur Evans’s excavations at Knossos had shown that Minoan kings were also priests, and that their queens were priestesses. What it would be interesting to know was if the apartment found at Kalamata was that of a priest-king or a priest-queen. If it was that of a priest-queen, it might have been that the queen in question had fallen out of royal favour. In medieval times, discarded queens were traditionally sent to nunneries. Maybe the palace found at Kalamata was the Minoan equivalent of a nunnery?
With all kinds of possibilities racing through her head as to how she could be useful to Lewis Sinclair and his team, she ran into the first travel agency she came to.
‘I want to go to Crete!’ she announced breathlessly to the young man seated behind a desk in one of three booths, the sides of which were high enough to give privacy. ‘I want to go now, and I want to get there in the fastest time possible!’
‘Cr . . . Crete, Gr . . . Greece, Miss?’
Stammering wasn’t a habit with the young man in question, but he couldn’t help it. It was as if a combination of
Marlene Dietrich and Jean Harlow had dramatically sat down opposite him. Her silver-blonde hair was worn close to her head in shining finger-waves. Her eyes, framed by soot-black mascaraed lashes, were the most amazing colour he had ever seen, for surely no one could have amethyst-coloured eyes?
Before he could decide that they could, the goddess opposite him said crossly, ‘Well, of course Crete, Greece! What other kind of Crete is there? ‘
Seriously flustered, he began dragging heavy timetables out from under his desk.
‘Per . . . perhaps the Orient Express as far as So . . . Sofia and then . . . and then a standard train down to Thessaloniki and a boat from Thessaloniki . . .’
Daphne regarded him pityingly. ‘Sofia is in Bucharest, not Greece, and a boat to Crete from Thessaloniki would take forever.’
Aware that her astonishingly coloured eyes and hourglass figure were fast making it impossible for him to behave intelligently, he heaved another tome, this time the Thomas Cook Continental Railway Timetable, on to his desk.
As he rifled through it with unsteady fingers, there came the sound of someone entering the next booth.
Whoever it was, Daphne wished them better luck than she was having.
‘The boat train from London to Paris?’ her pimply-skinned advisor suggested. ‘And then a train from Paris to Milan, where you would need to change trains again, this time taking a train down to Brindisi, from where you can get a steamer across to—’
‘Piraeus, from where I can get a steamer to Heraklion,’ Daphne snapped, remembering the long, time-consuming journeys Kate and Ella had made. ‘I know all that and it takes forever. What I want is to get to Crete in the fastest time possible, and I want to set off now – today. Or,’ she added as he looked as if he was about to pass out, ‘at the very latest, tomorrow. And why,’ she added sternly, ‘are you not suggesting that I fly to Paris, in order to cut down the travelling time it takes to get there? There are regular air flights from Croydon Airport to Le Bourget and . . .’
‘And they are not half as much fun as flying across the Channel in a two-seater Leopard Moth,’ a dark, rich voice said from the next booth.
Daphne sucked in her breath.
Unseen, but only a couple of feet away from her, there came the sound of a chair being scraped backwards from a desk; of someone rising to their feet.
‘Fly to Paris?’ The young man who was causing her so much irritation looked bewildered. ‘But the boat train arrives at the Gare du Nord, which is where trains for your ongoing journey leave from. It is m . . . m . . . much more convenient and . . .’
Daphne was no longer listening to him.
As far as she was concerned, he no longer existed.
Dry-mouthed, she rose to her feet and very slowly, her heart feeling as if it was beating fast and light somewhere up in her throat, she turned around.
He was wearing a dove-grey three-piece suit, a trilby tilted at a rakish angle and black leather shoes that had clearly been handmade. There was a suspicion of a smile at the corner of his mouth and he looked, as always, heart-stoppingly gorgeous. She wanted him so much she could barely stand.
‘The Leopard Moth,’ Sholto said again. ‘It’s far more fun. Sadly, Crete is out of its range. However, Imperial Airways have just started a flying-boat service to Cape Town and one of the refuelling stops is Athens, so that might be a possibility. If it isn’t, then there’s a seaplane crossing from Athens to Crete, which would shorten your journey time by several hours.’
Resisting the urge to throw herself into his arms, Daphne said hoarsely, ‘What are you doing here?’
Her puzzlement was genuine. A travel agency in Kensington High Street was one of the last places anyone would have expected to find Sholto. As Daphne knew from the months they had spent together, Sholto travelled only on private transport. Private planes, private yachts and possibly – when he visited the ex-royals of Europe, several of whom were his friends – private trains.
‘You’re still wearing Shalimar,’ he said, ignoring the question.
Equally inconsequentially, she said, ‘You’ve grown a moustache.’
It was a very neat pencil moustache and it made him look very much a diplomat. No one, she thought looking at him, would suspect how much of a bohemian he really was. And then, because she couldn’t stop herself, she said, ‘Does Francine like it?’
‘I’ve no idea. She’s no longer part of my life.’
Blood began beating in Daphne’s ears. ‘She’s left you for someone else? Someone in Hitler’s hierarchy?’
‘No. Or not in the way you think. We fell out over her politics. Nazi Germany has never been a joke. Now it’s reached a pitch where no one is justified in continuing to be friends with Hitler’s henchmen.’
‘And Francine still is?’
‘Yes.’
Daphne let out a deep, long sigh.
Their eyes held.
‘You asked me what I was doing here.’ His voice had become taut and, with a stab of shock, she realized he was as nearly thrown off-course by their unexpected meeting as she was. ‘Now that Hitler and Mussolini are hunting as a pair, the workload at the Foreign Office is manic. Before I expire beneath it, I thought I’d take a short cruise to Madeira.’
‘By yourself?’ Her throat was so tight she could barely get the words past her lips.
‘That was the original plan. Now I think a double suite would make far more sense.’ The heat in his eyes left her in no doubt as to what he was suggesting.
Never before had Daphne hesitated when faced with a major decision. Her choice of what to do, no matter how reckless, had always been instant, made on nothing more than gut instinct.
Now, to her own amazement, she hesitated.
Although Francine was no longer a part of Sholto’s life, it didn’t change the fact that eighteen months ago, when faced with a choice between her and Francine, he had, without a moment’s hesitation, chosen Francine. And when he had finally ended his long affair with Francine he hadn’t taken steps to seek her, Daphne, out. His meeting with her now was entirely accidental; his invitation a purely spur-of-the-moment thing. As the blood continued thundering in her ears, she asked herself if she really wanted to rekindle an affair with a man who had treated her so cavalierly in the past and who, given the chance, would probably do so again in the future.
No answer to her question came.
In a voice that didn’t sound remotely like hers, she said, ‘What makes you think that, after the decision you made the last time we were together, I should now be interested in a double suite on a cruise to Madeira?’
The air between them was so charged with sexual tension it was palpable.
In their booths, the young men they had been dealing with held their breath.
‘This,’ Sholto said masterfully, pulling her into his arms and kissing her hard on the mouth.
It was a deep, forceful kiss. She couldn’t have pushed him away even if she had wanted to – and she didn’t want to. She could no more have stopped her arms from winding around his neck, and her mouth from opening beneath his, than she could have stopped herself from breathing.
The young man in booth one began making out a double booking form.
The young man in booth two began sliding heavy railway timetables back beneath his desk. It was obvious that his client was no longer interested in travelling to Crete; so obvious that he doubted if she even remembered it had ever been her intention.
Chapter Fourteen
Ella woke to the sound of tin buckets clanging against knee-high boots and knew that Christos was walking back towards the house after milking the Kourakises’ bad-tempered goats. She looked across the small whitewashed room and saw that Nikoleta’s bed was empty, which meant that she had overslept. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t expected in the workrooms this morning. It was a free day and, as it was also a free day for Christos and as free days didn’t come round very often, he had suggested they make full use of it by borrowing one of Villa Ari
adne’s spare trucks and driving to Kalamata to visit Dimitri and Angelos Mamalakis and their families. Unspoken had also been the possibility, if the weather conditions permitted, of not only visiting Kalamata village, but also the excavation site.
‘Just to make sure that no one has helped themselves to any ashlar blocks,’ Christos had said, only half-teasing.
‘They won’t have,’ she’d said, for Yanni Zambiakos, whose marksmanship with a rifle was legendary, had appointed himself the site’s guardian and, with typical Cretan toughness, had moved into a cave overlooking it for the winter.
Looking forward to the day ahead of her, Ella dressed swiftly in the same kind of clothes she wore when on-site, the only difference being that now it was November, her dungarees were denim, not cotton; and bearing in mind how high in the mountains Kalamata village was, she’d taken the precaution of wearing a polo-neck sweater beneath her lumberjack chequered shirt.
The room she shared with Nikoleta wasn’t far different from the room she’d shared with Kate at the cafeneion. There was a handmade rag rug on the floor, striped woven coverlets on both beds, an oil lamp on a chest of drawers and an enamel bowl and ewer on a washstand. The only major difference was the number of hooks that had been hammered into the walls in order to accommodate Nikoleta’s prized collection of citified dresses, for Nikoleta liked to dress in a way that made her stand out from other village girls and, because of her guiding work, could afford to do so.
Ella’s clothes took up hardly any room at all. Her dungarees, shorts, T-shirts and sweaters were kept neatly stacked in a cardboard box beneath her bed; her underwear and nightwear were in a second cardboard box; and two wall hooks took care of everything else.
Bearing in mind that it was now the rainy season, she took a waterproof jacket from one of the hooks and, carrying it over her arm, ran lightly down the stairs to the family living quarters.
Beneath the Cypress Tree Page 14
