A Terrible Beauty

by Tasha Alexander

  “I agree, if we can settle on a mutually acceptable price.”

  “When can I visit your home? I plan to be in Constantinople next month. May I call on you?”

  “I will look forward to it with pleasure. Only tell me where you are staying, and I shall send my driver to fetch you.”

  “Very good,” I said. “How can I reach you once I am there?”

  “Go to my brother’s shop. He sells spices in the Grand Bazaar. Give him this statue”—he pulled out of his jacket a small bronze Hermes identical to the ones I had already seen—“and he will take care of everything. The messenger god will tell him you are someone I trust.”

  “And the location of the shop? I know the bazaar can prove more daunting than Minos’ labyrinth,” I said. He passed me a card with the information, including a small map, printed on it. “I am grateful. Grateful enough to lower my price for you by twenty percent.”

  “Thirty?” he asked.

  “Twenty-five. I must, after all, keep my husband in cigars.”

  He laughed. “You are a delight. Twenty-five it is. I will have to verify the authenticity of the piece, of course.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” Colin said, taking advantage of my having left Demir the chair facing the caldera, and coming upon him from behind. “We already have everything we need.”

  “It is nothing but a formality, I assure you,” Demir said. He stopped talking and rose from his seat as the men at the tables surrounding ours gathered close around.

  The tallest—and broadest—who served as a policeman of sorts on the island, gripped Demir’s hands and twisted them behind his back. “You can talk more in prison,” he said. “For now, as you have already been told, we have everything we need.”

  “I have been tricked,” Demir said. “This woman is a charlatan. I have not even taken possession of the item we were discussing.”

  “I am the mayor of this town,” said the man who had shared a table with the policeman. “We heard enough, and I can promise you my testimony will be held in high regard. No more will you steal our cultural treasures.”

  Demir made one attempt to break away, but was quickly—and thoroughly—subdued. Along with the mayor, police officials from Athens, the Keeper of the Ministry of Religion and Education, who oversaw the Acropolis and other archaeological sites in Greece, and several people from the Antiquities Department witnessed our conversation. My husband had summoned them all via telegram the night before when he had gone to Fira, believing at the time he would need them to deal with Philip, and had chartered a ship to bring them to Santorini overnight.

  “A good day’s work,” Colin said, once Demir was in custody and on the vessel that would transport him to Athens. We walked along the cliff path, hand in hand, back to the villa. “You are very persuasive, my dear, and by encouraging Demir to reveal what he did, have no doubt made a significant contribution to preserving the cultural heritage of the Greeks.”

  “Now if I could only persuade my own countrymen to return the Parthenon Marbles to their rightful owners,” I said.

  “You know full well Elgin obtained them legally,” Colin said. “He should not be held accountable for the decisions of the Turks, whom I need not remind you ruled Greece at the time.”

  “So if occupying forces take over Britain, you would not object to them selling off the contents of the National Gallery?”

  “The Elgin Marbles were not in a museum, Emily,” he said. “They were crumbling on the Acropolis. No one was looking after them, no one objected to their removal—”

  “Ah, I see. You consider it a crime only when priceless treasures are removed from museums? And you assume the Greeks, who as you already pointed out were not in charge of the country, did not value the marbles? I can assure you that is not true. First, there is continuous evidence of people—Greeks included—visiting the Acropolis—”

  “Not now, Emily,” he said, and stopped me from continuing with a kiss, taking advantage of our arrival on a stretch of the cliff path devoid of all buildings and, hence, people. “I do love your passion, and if you want Elgin’s marbles returned to the Greeks, I would gladly bring them here myself were it possible. For now, though, I fear you must content yourself with what you have already accomplished today.”

  “It is not simply a matter of what I want,” I said. “The marbles should be returned because they belong to the Greeks. We would not have even the beginnings of our civilization without them. We—”

  He kissed me again, this time with an intensity fierce enough to drive all thoughts of the marbles out of my head. I did, however, make him promise we would continue the discussion later. After a pleasant interlude, we continued, hand in hand, along the path toward Imerovigli.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew Jones wasn’t Ashton?” Colin asked.

  “I would have last night if we had been together.”

  “We were together all morning, alone, on the ride to Thera,” he said. “You even asked me if I believed him.”

  “I suppose I hated the thought of being the person who caused you, once again, to lose your friend. I overheard a certain amount of the conversation between the two of you the night you sat outside talking.”

  “A certain amount?” he asked.

  “I am not proud of my actions, but you must try to imagine what it is like, believing your two husbands are discussing you.”

  “I assure you we did nothing of the sort,” he said, “but I should have been more cautious with him.”

  “As should I. He made it awfully easy for us both to believe what we wanted to. He really did look like Philip, at least as far as I remember, broken nose notwithstanding.”

  “Can anyone remember details clearly after a decade?” Colin asked.

  “I was primed almost to expect him,” I said. “First, there was the picture of the Parthenon addressed to The Viscountess Ashton. The next day, when we came home from the zoo, I found Philip’s journal open on my desk in the library. I knew I hadn’t left it there. I suspected Margaret, but Mr. Jones confessed that over the winter he had bribed one of the housemaids to bring it to him to read—easily enough done, as we weren’t in residence—and then he studied it carefully. He paid even more for her to place it in the library, on my desk, shortly before we were to make our annual trip to Greece this spring.”

  “And the picture of the Parthenon?”

  “She mailed it for him.”

  “I should like to think our servants are above such actions,” Colin said. “We shall have to dismiss her.”

  “Do not rush to judgment,” I said. “Let me speak with her when we return to Park Lane and then we can decide.”

  “How did the maid know about the journal?”

  “Really, my dear man, you are naïve when it comes to servants. Half of our current staff came with me from Berkeley Square, and everyone there knew I had read and reread the journal. I am not the least shocked to learn the fact is still, on occasion, discussed in the servants’ hall.”

  “They ought not,” Colin said.

  “Yes, well, there is much all of us ought not. Seeing the journal put Philip into my head, especially as we were about to leave for Greece, and then when I thought I saw him on the ship—”

  “Was it Jones?”

  “Yes. The maid also alerted him to the date we planned to leave England, enabling him to put into action the final phase of his plan. Do you remember when I heard someone calling out to Philip Ashton at the zoo in London? Mr. Jones had hired an investigator to trail us while we were in town and to stage the scene whenever he felt it would be most appropriate. Jones himself traveled to Italy and followed us from there, boarding the same ship we did. And then, in Athens, I saw him at the Acropolis—no, do not interrupt: I would have told you, but hesitated to make such an outlandish and impossible claim. Would you have believed me?”

  “I would not have accused you of fabricating the story, any more than I did on the ship,” Colin said.
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br />   “Jeremy came upon me moments after it happened, and I confessed to him. He convinced me it was nothing more than me thinking about Philip because of being in Greece, and that I ought not say anything lest doing so dredge up those complex emotions with which you and I both struggled when we first fell in love.”

  “Bainbridge.” Colin frowned. “You should know better than to listen to him.”

  “He made a fair point,” I said. “The past ought to be left in the past. Then, when we reached the villa and Mrs. Katevatis told us who had arrived, I found myself all but expecting her to say Philip’s name. Mr. Jones planned extremely well. I had all but accepted him before even laying eyes on him, and when he did present himself, all of his careful preparations slid into place. How could I not have believed I recognized him?”

  “I may have received him with more initial skepticism than you, but he made neat work of convincing me when we spoke alone. He knew so many details—some of them with greater recall than I.”

  “That recall made me ever so slightly suspicious of him,” I said. “He described the night Philip fell in love with me in such detail it sounded more like a studied recitation than a cherished memory, but I could not be sure, particularly as the night in question had made very little impression on me at the time.”

  Colin squeezed my hand. “You had no reason to be impressed by it at the time.”

  “As for his knowledge of the past you and Philip shared, he confided in me before he died that he knew about Kristiana not from something Philip told him—Philip would never have betrayed such a confidence—but from the lady herself. He ran into her in Vienna, of course having no idea who she was, and she hailed him under his adopted name.”

  “Philip had met her on more than one occasion.”

  “Apparently this meeting occurred shortly before she was killed,” I said. “She spoke very openly with him about her relationship with you, only because she believed him to be your dearest friend.”

  “Whom she knew to be dead,” Colin said.

  “Evidently, she accepted his story almost without question, even telling him that in her line of work it often behooved individuals to let the world believe they were dead before—” I stopped. “Good heavens, you don’t think she might still be alive? Mr. Jones might have given her the idea to stage—”

  “No, Emily, there is absolutely no question. She is dead.”

  “Yes, but you said the same thing about Philip, and—”

  “And he, too, was dead.”

  “Right. Right. Of course.” I frowned. “Mr. Jones did make it easy to believe him, didn’t he?”

  “Indubitably,” Colin said. “Particularly as he did not act as if he wanted anything from us. The past, however, must stay in the past.”

  “Which neatly brings us back to the topic of the Parthenon Marbles—”

  “It most certainly does not,” he said.

  We argued, each with a fervor normally seen only in religious zealots, about the subject all the way back to the villa.

  25

  Our argument, refreshing and stimulating as only intellectual debate can be, came to a crashing end when we reached the house. We stood outside for a moment, our mood bleak and somber as we considered the task before us. “I feel terribly sorry for Fritz. It will hurt to learn the truth about his friend.” It could not be avoided, however, particularly as Margaret, having heard our approach, flung open the door.

  “You took long enough to get here,” she scolded. Jeremy and Fritz crowded into the doorway with her.

  “Where is Ashton?” Fritz asked. Colin took him aside, as we had both agreed that on this occasion he ought to deliver the tragic news, while I ushered Margaret and Jeremy to the roof terrace, wanting to give Fritz as much privacy as possible for the difficult conversation he faced. Once we were settled around the table, I recounted everything that had transpired.

  “Dreadful. Perfectly dreadful,” Jeremy said. “So he went back to camp in that awful storm after Bohn died and destroyed his tent, just to ensure your sympathy?”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  “Hideous that his friend lost his life in an accident that could have so easily been prevented,” Margaret said.

  “It is a terrible tragedy, from beginning to end.” I clenched my hands in my lap.

  “My dear girl, are you quite all right? You did seem a bit fond of the poor bloke—not in an inappropriate way, of course, but—”

  “I did come to enjoy his company, initially because I felt guilty at not having taken the opportunity to do so when Philip—the real Philip, that is—was alive. But I have moved past abusing myself over long-ago sins. I am sad Mr. Jones was unable to find satisfaction in his own life and chose instead to try to steal someone else’s.”

  “It is most tragic,” Margaret said. “Reiner tells me he was an excellent archaeologist.”

  “And what about the Achilles bronze?” Jeremy asked.

  “It shall go to the archaeology museum in either Athens or Constantinople,” I said. “The authorities will sort it out. Personally, I should like to see it in Constantinople, as Troy is in Turkey.”

  “Fair enough,” Margaret said, “although I would rather see it in Athens. Achilles, after all, was Greek.”

  We did not debate the point, as Colin had come up the stairs, his expression clouded. “Reiner will be here shortly. He asked to have a moment to compose himself.”

  “The poor man,” Margaret said.

  “Quite.” Colin turned to me. “One of the men from the Antiquities Department has arrived to collect the bronze. I thought you would want to be the one to give it to him.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I will go at once.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Margaret said. “I want to see it one more time before it’s put behind glass.”

  “I was glad I did not have it with me this morning,” I said as the two of us examined it in my bedroom before bringing it downstairs. “I would have had to turn it over on the spot.”

  “I know you despise Achilles, but no one could deny the magic of this bit of bronze,” Margaret said, holding it gently on her palm.

  “I console myself with the idea that it may once have been in Hector’s presence,” I said. “I wish they had not come quite so quickly to collect it, but I suppose they couldn’t hold the ship much longer. They will want to get Demir settled into a nice, comfy cell as quickly as possible.”

  Mr. Dimitriou, a short but dignified man with a spectacular pair of mustaches, greeted us with a neat bow. I remembered seeing him sitting in the taverna at the mayor’s table. “I did not get to speak with you at the taverna,” he said, “as I arrived only a bit before our quarry. It is a pleasure to meet you now.”

  I handed him the bronze. He accepted the object with his thanks on behalf of his government and, as he added, all decent people on the planet. “You have done a great service for mankind by giving this to us,” he said, wrapping the bronze in a spotless square of soft flannel before packing it in a small wooden box.

  “I am delighted to be of assistance,” I said, “and look forward to seeing it in whatever museum comes to be its home.” Margaret and I watched as he and the two burly guards who accompanied him collected Batur and his colleague, whom they were confident was recovered more or less enough to travel. They would both stand trial.

  “I wonder if we should have had Dr. Liakos look in on him one more time before letting them take him,” I said after they had gone. “He is a criminal, but that does not mean we should treat him inhumanely.”

  “This morning he was lively enough to force me to have Adelphos tie him up,” Margaret said. “You need not worry.” Adelphos, who had supervised the removal of the prisoners, seconded her position, with great enthusiasm, and told me if, in the future, I planned to hold more criminals in the house, he could construct a more reliable cell. I assured him I did not expect to do any such thing, and am certain I caught a glimpse of disappointment in his eyes.

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bsp; By the time we returned to the roof, Fritz had joined the gentlemen. I went to him at once, and offered my condolences. “I am most heartily sorry for your loss. Mr. Jones considered you a true friend and I can tell you without doubt that lying to you did not come easily to him. Guilt tormented him over it until his very last moments.”

  “Thank you,” the German murmured. “It would be best if I beg my leave now. I should see to his body and take stock of things at the excavations. Hiller von Gaertringen will arrive soon.”

  “That can wait,” I said. “Colin spoke to the men in the village and they will bring him here so you can arrange for whatever burial you think fitting. It does not appear Mr. Jones had any family to consider—his parents died long ago—and as you were his closest friend—”

  “Yes, thank you. He should be buried on the island. I suppose it is too much to ask that you attend the service.”

  “We will be there,” Colin said. “We would not leave you to stand alone.” I beamed with pride at my husband’s goodwill. To be sure, he did it out of respect for Herr Reiner, not Mr. Jones, but his motive did not diminish the gesture. That settled, we sat quietly for a while, no one certain what to say until Jeremy broached the subject of the remainder of our trip.

  “I am of the mind that I have suffered through enough distraction for a lifetime,” he said. “Can we not return home? Even the ballrooms of London would provide a respite after this trip.”

  I started to reply, but Mrs. Katevatis appeared at the top of the stairs. “There is another gentleman—a Mr. Marinos—here from the Antiquities Department, Lady Emily. Should I send him up or would you prefer to meet him downstairs?” I instructed her to bring him to us, deciding there might be merit to his seeing us all in full support of Fritz. I worried that his close association with Mr. Jones might unjustly taint him.

  Mr. Marinos crossed to me with haste after his ascent to the roof. I recognized him from the taverna; the Greek flags embroidered on the band on his hat would be hard to forget. He thanked me, most graciously, for my assistance and Colin for his. He was not as well put together as his colleague Mr. Dimitriou had been, but something in his rumpled appearance, suggesting he would be more comfortable in a museum than an island villa, appealed to me.