A Terrible Beauty

by Tasha Alexander

  “I might agree with you if I hadn’t thought I saw him on the boat as well.”

  “Hardly surprising on a trip to Greece. Philip was so obsessed with the place I’m surprised his ghost didn’t wear a toga.”

  “Romans wore togas, Jeremy, not the Greeks.”

  “Romans, Greeks, who could be bothered to tell the difference? Forget about it all, Em. What we need now is the champagne I’ve been lugging in this wretched basket. Come, let’s go find your tedious living spouse and that dreadful American. We don’t need a ghost.”

  “You’re a beast,” I said.

  “Thank you ever so much for noticing,” he said, leaning in close. “And, Em, I wouldn’t mention your ghostly visitor to Hargreaves.”

  “Why ever not?”

  “You know he and I don’t get on—I never could tolerate a Cambridge man—but I have done my best to stop actively disliking him over the past few years, strictly for your sake. Ashton was his best friend. Dragging up memories will only cause him pain.”

  “I never thought I would see you so concerned about Colin. The two of you have been getting on so well of late I’m almost afraid you will transfer all of your affections from me to him. Life would hardly be worth living.”

  “Ah, Em, if only you took me more seriously.” He pulled my arm through his. “You break my heart.”

  “You are a dreadful tease,” I said.

  Champagne by moonlight at the Acropolis cures nearly any ill, and by the time we had spread a blanket in the center of the Parthenon and opened the first bottle, I had all but forgot Philip. There were several other small parties visiting the site that evening, and we struck up conversation with the local guide, Alcibiades, one of them had hired. He regaled us with tales from mythology, and joined in when, regretting that I had not brought a copy of something to read aloud from, I began to recite a passage from Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus.

  “Last and grandest praise I sing / To Athens, nurse of men, / For her great pride and for the splendor / Destiny has conferred on her. / Land from which fine horses spring!”

  Alcibiades finished for me. “Land of the sea and the sea-farer! / Upon whose lovely littoral / The god of the sea moves, the son of Time.”

  “Enough! Enough!” Jeremy made a show of covering his ears with his hands. “No poetry! I much preferred your stories, sir. You must not allow her to force more poetry on me.”

  “Are you traveling to any of the islands?” Alcibiades asked.

  “Just Santorini,” Jeremy said.

  “Well, then, be sure to answer to the Gorgona correctly if she questions you while you’re on the boat.”

  “The Gorgona?” Jeremy asked. “Is she the one with snakes in her hair?”

  “That’s Medusa, a gorgon,” I said. “The Gorgona is Alexander the Great’s sister.”

  “Yes,” Alcibiades continued. “One day, Alexander, after a quest of great difficulty, came to possess a flask of water that, if drunk, would bestow immortality. When he reached home, exhausted, he gave it to his sister to look after while he slept.”

  “I am quite onto the way these myths work,” Jeremy said, pouring himself more champagne. “First mistake is not drinking the bloody water the moment you get it.”

  “A valid point,” Alcibiades said. “While her brother was sleeping, she was carrying the flask to a place she thought it would be safe, but she tripped and spilled it. When Alexander awoke and learned what had transpired, he cursed her, condemning her to live for eternity as a mermaid.”

  “If he could give her eternal life, why couldn’t he give it to himself?” Jeremy asked, refilling everyone’s champagne.

  “It doesn’t work that way, old chap,” Colin said. “There are many technical difficulties in these myths that require the modern gentleman to ignore common sense in order to fully appreciate them.”

  “I find it charming,” I said. “Even the greatest heroes make mistakes. It reminds us of our humanity.”

  “The Gorgona, neither fish nor human—trapped in a state that kept her separate from both the creatures of the sea and those of the earth—was struck by a guilt so deep and so overwhelming that to this day she still stops ships in the Aegean to inquire after her brother.” Alcibiades graced me with a sage smile.

  Margaret interrupted. “Presumably one must be very careful to give the correct answer to her question.”

  “But of course, madam,” he said. “She will ask, Is Alexander the king alive? You must reply, He lives and reigns and conquers the world!”

  “If you tell her Alexander is dead,” I said, “she will start keening and chanting songs of mourning that churn up the sea until the waves have destroyed your ship and everyone on board drowns. But if you know what to say—”

  Jeremy leapt to his feet. “He lives and reigns and conquers the world!”

  Alcibiades nodded. “Then she watches over your journey and teaches you the beautiful songs of the sea.”

  “Bit inane, don’t you think?” Jeremy asked. “Even I know Alexander is long dead. This sister sounds rather daft.”

  “Don’t say so out loud,” I said, laughing. “You must tell her what she wants to hear. ‘He lives and reigns and conquers the world!’”

  Soon we were raising our glasses and toasting the great Alexander, chanting the phrase again and again—He lives and reigns and conquers the world!—until we had all collapsed in mirth.

  Our spirits damped temporarily when the sour gentleman who had hired our new friend as his guide urged him back to his group. We thanked Alcibiades for entertaining us and waved as he sullenly followed his employer toward the Propylaea.

  “Perhaps those words are all Alexander needs to live forever,” Margaret said, lying on her back and looking up at the stars glistening in the sky. “Say it often enough and they become true. Maybe that is how one defeats death, by never being forgotten.”

  “Dead is dead,” Colin said. “He may be remembered, but that is not the same as being alive.”

  “I don’t know that I agree, Hargreaves,” Jeremy said. “It might be preferable to slogging through the rest of eternity. On the other hand, if dead is dead, then I need not worry about offending your spirit when I marry Em the day after you depart this world.”

  Colin shifted uncomfortably and looked away. “Might want to wait a decent interval.”

  Jeremy glanced at me and shrugged. “If it will make you feel better, of course. But if dead is dead…”

  “You couldn’t convince her to marry you if you had a thousand years at your disposal, Bainbridge.” Colin stretched out on the blanket. “That said, I almost wish I did believe in ghosts, so that I could watch the farce that would be your unwelcome courtship.”

  “I would help our darling duke,” Margaret said, “by composing Latin odes to Emily’s beauty and grace.”

  “Don’t encourage him,” I said, swatting her arm.

  “Margaret, you want me to accept your offer only so you can then poke fun at me for not realizing Latin odes would put her off me altogether the instant she heard they were not in Greek,” Jeremy said. “I am not so ignorant as you like to think.”

  “Well, then I shall compose Greek poetry for you to recite to her, but you will have to learn the ancient language better than you did at school to ensure you are saying what you actually mean.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, laughing. “Please do that, but don’t let him learn Greek. It would be much more diverting to hear him reciting words whose meaning he can’t understand. You will prove a malicious Cyrano.”

  “The prospect of courting you, Em, grows less and less appealing,” Jeremy said. “Another good thing ruined. At any rate, I owe your husband a debt. It was he, after all, who pointed out that Amity left me with a bulletproof excuse for avoiding marriage for the foreseeable future. The least I can do for him is promise to leave you to your lonely widowhood. Spent, I imagine, reciting dreadful Greek poetry.”

  Now we were all laughing again, although I must own to bein
g not altogether amused by the direction the conversation had taken. I could see from Colin’s expression that the guilt he had felt at having married his best friend’s widow, even after a decent interval, had resurfaced. Not that he regretted our marriage, just that he wished, as did I, that our love had not been born from loss. I decided to follow Jeremy’s advice and did not mention to my husband that I thought I had seen Philip. Why cause the dear man any unnecessary pain?

  * * *

  We passed several more pleasant days in Athens before setting off for Delphi. We took the train to Corinth and then a steamer to Itéa, where we hired a dragoman and horses, the means of transit upon which one must rely when traveling in the interior of the country. As we were all excellent horsemen—and -women—this proved no obstacle. We did not require the dragoman’s services as a translator, but welcomed his guidance as to route and would rely on him to find us suitable accommodations in the nearby village when we reached Delphi.

  The site was fewer than nine miles from Itéa, and our chosen route took us away from the carriage road and onto a narrower path that had been traveled since antiquity. At least I chose to believe it had; I cannot be entirely confident in the accuracy of my claim, and apologize to the reader for the enthusiasm that consumes me when traveling in Greece. While there, I like to believe I am always following in the footsteps of the ancients and imagine that the path under my boots might previously have been trod by Agamemnon or Pericles or one of the great ancient playwrights. Sometimes one must give in to romanticism.

  As the path grew steeper, our pace slowed. Eventually we approached the ruins of the ancient Temple of Apollo, from whence the Delphic Oracle had made her prophecies. Craggy Mount Parnassus rose up behind it, its rough surface and dramatic angles giving it the appearance of only just having been thrust from the fiery core of the earth. Leaving the horses with our dragoman, we walked along the road taken by ancient supplicants, passing the ruins of various city treasuries, and winding up the side of the mountain to the temple, where a scant six of its original fifteen Doric columns remained. Only one still reached its original height.

  We paced the floor of the structure, wondering where, exactly, the inner sanctum of the oracle had been—only she, the Pythia, was allowed into the adyton, where she would enter into a trance before speaking Apollo’s words. After thorough exploration of the area—I remain convinced the adyton was beneath the main level of the temple—we continued on to visit the theatre and the stadion, both used during the Pythian Games, held every four years to honor Apollo, who, when four days old, had gone to Delphi and slayed Python, the beast who had wreaked havoc on the surrounding environs for years and tormented Apollo’s mother, Leto. While Colin and Margaret ran the length of the stadion’s track, he graciously letting her cross the ancient marble finish line first, Jeremy and I stood in the stands on the side nearer to the edge of the mountain, looking at the expansive view before us.

  “You can see why the ancients believed this was the center of the world, can’t you?” I asked. In the valley below, olive groves shimmered silver all the way to the sea visible in the far-off distance. Violet-blue mountains rose, rolling above them, not nearly so jagged as Mount Parnassus. “Standing here, it feels impossible to believe there is anywhere more important.”

  “It is stunning,” Jeremy said. “But I must say, Em, I’m awfully glad you weren’t in charge of planning my ill-fated engagement party. You’d have brought us here and it would have been the simplest thing ever for Amity to fling me to my death. She wouldn’t have had to try to shoot me.”

  “You don’t think Apollo would have protected you?”

  He shrugged and lit a cigarette. “Hard to say. Difficult to rely on the old gods.”

  “Are you all right?” I asked. He looked tired and drawn and lacked all of his usual spark.

  “I despise her—obviously—but I miss her, too. We did have good times, you know.”

  I scowled. “You had good times when she wasn’t trying to murder you. I know you have many shortcomings, Jeremy, but not so many that you deserve such a fate. Someday, you will meet your match, and she will erase forever any warm memories you have of Amity Wells.”

  “I assure you I never look back on the time with fondness, only with shame. I wonder that I could have been such a fool.”

  “Love can keep us from seeing even obvious truths,” I said. “And Amity had a knack for keeping her true nature hidden.”

  “I am well cured of her now.” Smoke curled from his lips. “And what about you? Here we are, in the most sacred of ancient spaces, and you have not seen your dead husband even once, have you?”

  I laughed. “No, I have not.”

  “Sounds to me like he’s a rather lazy ghost, put off by the notion of climbing mountains. I’d say you’re well rid of him, Em.”

  Philip

  Munich, 1891

  The telegram to Hargreaves, which Ashton had sent requesting an immediate response, did not garner the reply he had wished. His friend’s butler wired to say that his master, currently working abroad, would not receive the message until he returned to England. The butler had no way of reaching him.

  “The time has come to stop being a coward,” Ashton said, accepting the strong beer Reiner pushed across the table to him. Ashton adored the city’s beer gardens, with their heavy steins and hearty food; the Augustiner-Keller in Arnulfstrasse had become their second home in Munich. “We must go to London. I cannot bear to be away from Kallista a moment longer. You will adore her the moment you see her. She is a vision of loveliness and feminine perfection.”

  “Her father must be a scholar to have chosen such a name,” Reiner said.

  “‘Emily’ is her given name. I alone call her Kallista, as I find it a far more appropriate moniker.”

  “‘Kallista.’ Most beautiful. She sounds more like a dream than reality,” Reiner said, a grin on his face. “Are you sure she is not a creation of your fever?”

  “If so, I would never want to be well again.”

  The next day, they boarded a train for Paris, where they tarried for a fortnight, Ashton’s anxiety at seeing his wife growing as he came closer to England. Eventually, he could delay no longer. He comforted himself with the knowledge that even if she had lost her love for him, she was still legally his wife. He was confident he could win back her affections once they were living together again. Before setting foot on the train that would speed them to Calais, he combed jewelry stores until he found the perfect gift for his bride: a brooch depicting a single rose, exquisitely carved from ivory. For their wedding, he had given her a similar piece, an elaborate profusion of flowers rather than a solitary stem. This second gift would mark the new beginning of their life together.

  No part of Ashton’s journey had been easy, but he determined to be undaunted by this final leg. The channel tossed the ferry with such vehemence that hardly a passenger on board was not sick the entire trip to Dover, but Ashton stood on the deck, despite the warnings from crew members that he would be safer inside. Had he not already proved himself a survivor? He clenched the rail and strained his eyes, desperate for that first glance of the White Cliffs. When at last he stepped onto English soil, he collapsed on the ground and wept. He was home.

  4

  Delphi proved as mesmerizing as ever, worth far more than the half day Baedeker’s suggests devoting to it. I could have spent weeks exploring every inch of the ruins—and had done so in years past—but recognized Jeremy would not enjoy the activity so much as I. So we returned to Athens, made leisurely visits to the museums, dined with other travelers in the Grand Bretagne, and shopped. Jeremy, we discovered, loved to haggle with local traders. He acquired three pairs of tsarouhi shoes—complete with woolen pom-poms—despite the insistence even of the seller that no one outside remote rural areas wore them anymore.

  “They shall prove remarkably useful for fancy dress,” Jeremy said, pleased with his purchase. “You ought to throw a ball for me, Em. A masquerade.
The theme can be folk costumes.”

  He became rather attached to the idea. Colin told me in no uncertain terms that he would not allow it, and if I insisted, he would come dressed as a Red Indian, wearing only a breechcloth and a feather headdress. If anything, this encouraged me rather than putting me off the notion, and as a result, he refused to discuss the topic any further.

  The time had come to leave the mainland and make our way to my island villa. We left the port of Piraeus on a day bright with sunshine. Colin, as was his custom, had hired a sailing yacht and its crew to bring us to Santorini. The trip would take longer than if we booked tickets on a steamer, but we had no reason to rush, and there are few activities more pleasant and relaxing than cruising on the Aegean. Each evening, we dined beneath the stars on the deck and afterward would sit out for hours over whisky (for Margaret and the gentlemen) and port (for me). Whenever we approached anything that could be considered rocky—be it island, islet, or an actual rock jutting up from the sea—Margaret and I would leap up and start to sing the Sirens’ song:

  Come here, thou, worthy of a world of praise,

  That dost so high the Grecian glory raise.

  Ulysses! Stay thy ship, and that song heare

  That none past ever but it bent his eare,

  But left him ravishd and instructed more

  By us than any ever heard before.

  This display generally led Colin to threaten flinging us off the boat. I credit this not to our lack of singing ability, but to the loss of the song’s original melody over the many centuries since Odysseus returned from Troy. I am certain had he heard the original version, my husband would have been charmed. Margaret returned his threat with one of her own, swearing she would tie him to a mast if he did not show better appreciation for our endeavors.

  Despite our best efforts, Jeremy and I had started to burn in the hot sun, and Margaret, in addition to turning quite pink, had a sprinkle of freckles across her nose that would have horrified my mother. Colin, whose skin never burned, but rather turned a deep golden shade, looked more and more like the inspiration for a Praxiteles sculpture with each passing day. His dark curls, permanently tousled by the ocean breeze, tumbled over his forehead, and when he stood on the prow of the ship, pointing to identify the islands in the distance, the sunset coloring the sky around him, I was so moved by his beauty I was forced to push dinner back three-quarters of an hour and to request his immediate assistance in our cabin.