by Mary Stewart
‘If it is a dog, Miss Ferris, I shall not shoot it. Now, please, you must let me – ah!’
From the shed had come a whole series of sounds, now quite unmistakable. A scrape and a clatter, a curious clucking noise, and the thud of a small, soft body landing from a height. Then from the half open door shot a vague, slim shape which slid mewing between our feet, and was gone into the shadowed lane.
Stratos stopped, and his hand dropped from his hip. He laughed. ‘A cat! This is the criminal on my sister’s property! You may calm yourself, Miss Ferris, I shall certainly not shoot that!’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said shamefacedly. ‘That was silly of me, but guns and things do panic me. Besides, you might have got hurt or something. Well, thank goodness that’s all it was! I was talking to that cat in the lane a while ago; he must have been ratting.’
‘Nothing so useful,’ said Stratos cheerfully. ‘My brother-in-law keeps a decoy quail in there. The cats can’t get at it, but they keep trying. Well, we’ll shut the door, shall we?’
He pulled it shut, and turned out of the yard. We walked back to the hotel together.
Sofia’s yard seemed darker than ever. The shed door was still shut. The cat had gone, and the nightingale was silent in the cypresses. A cracked bell from somewhere near the harbour tolled three.
The door opened with only the slightest creak. I slipped through it into the shed, and pulled it shut behind me.
‘Mark?’ It was only a breath.
No reply. I stood still, listening for his breathing, and hearing only my own. There was brushwood stacked somewhere; I could smell rosemary, and dried verbena, and all the sweet sharp scents of the bed he and I had shared last night.
‘Mark?’ I began to feel my way cautiously over to the wall that skirted the lane. A small sound behind me brought me round sharply, with eyes straining wide against the dark, but it was only the scrabbling of claws, and a small rustling movement from a corner where the quail’s cage must be. No other sound.
I groped my way over to the wall. As my hands met the stone the nightingale, outside in the grove, began to sing again. The sound filled the darkness, full and near. I felt along the wall. Stone, rough stone, cold stone. Nothing else; and no sound but the rich music from the cypress grove. I had been wrong; Mark hadn’t been here after all; the strong sense I had had of his presence had only been something evoked by the verbena scents of the piled brushwood. It had been the cat, and only the cat, that we had heard.
My hand met something that wasn’t stone, something smooth and sticky, and still faintly warm, that made the hair rise up the back of my neck, and my stomach muscles tighten sharply. I pulled the hand away and stood there, holding it stiffly before me, fingers splayed.
So instinct had been right, after all. Mark had been there, leaning against the wall within inches of Stratos and me, perhaps betrayed by exhaustion into some revealing movement, while his shoulder bled against the stone. In sudden fear I stooped to feel if he had fallen there, at the foot of the wall. Nothing. The shed was empty. There was only his blood.
Outside, the nightingale still sang in the cypresses.
I don’t remember getting back to the hotel. I know I took no care. But I met no one, and no one saw me running back across the square, with one hand closed tightly over its smeared palm.
12
. . . One clear day when brighter sea-wind blew
And louder sea-shine lightened, for the waves
Were full of god-head and the light that saves . . .
SWINBURNE: Thalassius
The water was smooth and gentle, but with an early-morning sting to it, and a small breeze blew the salt foam splashing against my lips. The headland glowed in the early sunlight, golden above the dark-blue sea that creamed against the storm beach at its feet.
Here, where I swam, the water was emerald over a shallow bar, the sunlight striking right down through it to illumine the rock below. It threw the shadow of the boat fully two fathoms down through the clear, green water.
Psyche rocked softly at her old moorings, orange and blue. I swam up to her, and threw an arm over the side. She tilted and swung, but held solid, squatly built and fat bellied, heavier than she looked. I waited a moment to get my breath, then gripped and swung myself in.
The boat rocked madly, bucked round on her rope, then accepted me. I thudded down on the bottom-boards, and sat there, dripping and panting, and rubbing the salt drops from my eyes.
I had had no reason for coming out to Stratos’ boat, except that a boat anchored in a bay is a natural challenge to an idle swimmer. I sat on the broad stern seat, resting in the sun, and reflecting that this was as good a place as any from which to watch the hotel.
If I had had any doubts about the innocence of Stratos’ fishing trip last night, one look at the boat would have dispelled them. There was no hiding place for anything larger than a puppy, and nothing to be seen except the small-boat clutter that one might expect; oars, carefully laid along the sides, a baling tin, a rope basket for fish, a kind of lobster pot – the scháros pot, I supposed – made of cane, a coil of rope, some hollow gourds for use as floats, and a folded tarpaulin. The only things strange to me were the fish-spear – a wicked double trident, with five or six barbed prongs set in a circle – and the glass. This was a sort of sea-telescope, a long metal tube with a glass the size of a dinner-plate set in the end. The fisherman lies in the bows, pushes this thing under water as far as it will go, and watches the depths.
I fingered it curiously, then lifted it, and lay down on the flat boarding behind the big brackets that hold the lights. I carefully lowered the glass into the sea, and peered down through it.
You might, in a simpler world, have said it was magic. There was the illuminated rock of the sea bed, every pebble clear, a living surface shifting with shadows as the ripples of the upper sea passed over it. Sea weeds, scarlet and green and cinnamon, moved and swayed in drowsy patterns so beautiful that they drugged the eye. A school of small fish, torpedo shaped, and barred like zebras, hung motionless, then turned as one, and flashed out of sight. Another, rose coloured, and whiskered like a cat, came nosing out of a bed of grey coralline weed. There were shells everywhere.
I lay and gazed, with the sun on my back, and the hot boards rocking gently under me. I had forgotten what I had come out for; this was all there was in the world; the sea, the sun hot on my skin, the taste of salt, and the south wind . . .
Two shadows fled across the glimmering underworld. I looked up, startled.
Only two birds, shearwaters, flying low, their wings skimming the tops of the ripples; but they had brought me back to the surface. Reluctantly, I put the glass back where it had been, and turned to look at the hotel.
People were beginning to move now. A shutter was thrown back, and presently a wisp of smoke curled from the chimney. In the village a black-clad woman carried a jar to the well, and a couple of men were making for the harbour.
I sat there for a little longer, prolonging the moment, basking in the sheer physical joy brought by the salt water and the sun. Then I slid over the boat’s side, and swam back to the hotel.
I picked up my towel from under the tamarisks, and padded up the steps to my room. Sofia’s cottage door was open, and I caught a glimpse of her moving inside. She was sweeping. Below me, in the restaurant, Tony was singing ‘Love me tender’ in a passionate counter tenor. Stratos, in his shirtsleeves, was outside in the square, talking to a couple of half-naked workmen with buckets and trowels. In the other cottages, people were moving about.
I went in to dress.
‘Not a move out of place,’ I reported to Frances. ‘Everything as innocent as the day. I’m beginning to think the whole thing was a mirage.’ I stretched, still feeling the luxurious physical pleasure of the salt water, and the mood it had inspired. ‘And, oh my goodness, how I wish it was! I wish we had nothing in the world to think about except tramping off into the hills and looking at the flowers!’
&
nbsp; ‘Well,’ said Frances, reasonably, setting down her coffee cup – she was finishing her breakfast in bed, while I sat on the edge of the table, swinging my legs – ‘what else is there? We can hardly plan anything. We’ve done all that lies ready to hand, and it does look now as if Lambis and your Mark have given the village a good going over between them.’
‘That’s at least the fourth time you’ve called him my Mark.’
‘Well, isn’t he?’
‘No.’
Frances grinned. ‘I’ll try to remember. As I was saying, all we can do now is behave as we normally would, and keep our eyes open. In other words, we go out for the day, and take the camera.’
I remember that I felt a kind of shame-faced relief. ‘Okay. Where d’you want to go?’
‘Well, since we’ve seen the shore and the village, the mountain seems the obvious choice, so we can extend our search there quite nicely. Anyway, nothing will keep me away from those irises you told me about last night.’
‘So thick on the ground that you had to tread on them,’ I said cheerfully, ‘and cyclamens, all over the rock. And wild gladioli and tulips. And three colours of anemone. A yellow oxalis as big as a penny. Rock roses the size of breakfast cups and the colour of Devonshire cream. And, of course, if you go really high, those purple orchids that I told you about—’
Frances gave a moan, and pushed her tray aside. ‘Get out of this, you little beast, and let me get up. Yes, yes, yes, we’ll go as high as you like, and I only hope my aged limbs will stand it. You’re not pulling my leg about the orchids?’
‘No, honestly. Lady’s slippers, or something, as big as fieldmice, and trailing things, like the ones in shops that you can never afford.’
‘I’ll be with you in half an hour. Get Ceddie to have some lunch put together. We may as well take the whole day.’
‘Ceddie?’
‘Little Lord Fauntleroy. I forgot, your generation never reads,’ said Frances, getting out of bed. ‘A thumping good lunch, tell him, and some wine.’
The onshore breeze had found its way well inland, and it was deliciously cool by the river bridge. We went along the river, up the path that I had taken yesterday.
Our progress was slow. Frances, as I had known she would be, was enraptured by everything she saw. The sugarcanes, standing deep along the ditches, rustling. A pair of turtle doves, flying up out of a patch of melon flowers. A jay, vivid and chattering. A nest of rock nuthatches that I found on a broken wall. And the flowers . . . Soon she stopped exclaiming, and in a short while managed to overcome the feeling that one ought not to touch – let alone pick – the pale lilac anemones with indigo hearts, the miniature marigolds, the daisies purple, yellow, and white. Between her delight, and my own delight at her pleasure (for Greece was, I liked to think, my country, and I was showing her round it), we reached the upper plateau with its fields and windmills before I even had time to remember my preoccupations of yesterday.
There were a few people at work among the fields. We saw a man and his wife working with primitive long-handled hoes, one on either side of a furrow of beans. In another field a donkey stood patiently beside the ditch, waiting for its owner. Further on, a child sat on a bank beside a patch of crude pasture where vetches and camomile grew, watching over his little flock of four goats, two pigs, and an ewe with her lamb.
We left the main track and picked our way along the narrow beaten paths between the fields, pausing frequently for Frances to use her camera. Everything made a picture – the child, the beasts, the men bent over their work; even the long views of the plateau and the upper mountain were brought alive by the whirling sails of the windmills. These were everywhere on the plateau, dozens of them, skeleton structures of iron like small pylons, ugly in themselves, but now, with their white canvas sails spread and spinning in the morning’s breeze, they looked enchantingly pretty, like enormous daisies spinning in the wind, filling the hot morning with the sigh of cool air and the sound of spilling water.
Then Frances found the irises.
These were the same as I had seen further up the hillside, tiny irises three inches high, lilac and bronze and gold, springing out of ground baked as hard and – you would have sworn – as barren as fireclay. They grew on the stony banks, on the trodden pathway, in the dry verges of the bean field, and swarmed as thick as butterflies right up to the walls of a windmill.
This, as luck would have it, was no ugly iron pylon, but a real mill, one of the two cornmills that served the plateau. It was a solidly built, conical structure, much like the windmills we know, with a thatched roof, and ten canvas sails. The sails unlike those of the watermills, were furled along their spokes, but this idle mill, with its arched doorway and dazzling whitewash, was beautiful. The irises – in places crushed and trodden – were thick around it, and just beside the doorstep stood a clump of scarlet gladioli. Behind the white mill crowded the lemon groves that edged the plateau, and beyond these rose the silver slopes of Dicte.
Muttering strange oaths, Frances reached for her camera yet again. ‘My God, I wish I’d brought five miles of film, instead of five hundred miserable feet! Why didn’t you tell me that the very dust of this country was so damned photogenic? If only there was some movement! Why aren’t the sails going?’
‘It’s a cornmill. The owners only run it when somebody hires them to grind the corn. Each settlement has two or three, to serve everyone.’
‘Oh, I see. Well, look, would you go into the picture, and – ah, that’s lucky, there’s a peasant woman . . . just what it needs, the very job . . .’
The door of the mill had been standing half open. Now it gaped wider, and a Greek woman, clothed in the inevitable black, and carrying a cheap rexine shopping bag, came out. She turned, as if to pull the door shut, then she saw us, and stopped short in the act, with her hand still out to the big old-fashioned key that jutted from the lock.
Frances’ camera whirred on, unconcernedly; but my heart had started to beat in erratic, painful thuds, and the palms of my hands were wet.
I thought: If I tell Frances that’s Sofia, that’ll be two of us acting our heads off, instead of only one. Frances, at least, must be left to behave naturally . . .
The camera stopped. Frances lowered it, and waved and smiled at Sofia, who stood like stone, staring at us, with her hand still out to the door.
‘Nicola, go and tell her it’s a movie, will you? There’s no need to pose, I want her moving. Ask her if she minds. And get in the picture yourself, please; I want that turquoise frock beside the gladioli. Just walk up to her and say something. Anything.’
Just walk up to her and say something. Dead easy, that was. ‘Have you got Colin Langley hidden in the mill, Sofia?’ The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
I swallowed. I was scrubbing my hands surreptitiously on my handkerchief. ‘I’ll ask her,’ I said, steadily enough, ‘to show me into the mill. You’ll get a good picture as we go into that dark archway.’
I walked across the irises to greet Sofia.
Frances still has the film. It is the only one, of many which she has of me, in which I walk and behave as if quite oblivious of the camera. As a rule, in front of a camera, I am stiff and shy. But on this occasion I wasn’t thinking about Frances and her film; only about the woman who stood unmoving in the bright sunlight, with that half-shut door beside her, and her hand on the big key. It is a very effective piece of film, but I have never liked watching it. This was not a day that I care, now, to remember.
I trod through the irises, and smiled.
‘Good morning, kyria. I hope you don’t mind being photographed? This is my cousin, who’s very keen, and she’d like a picture of you and the mill. This is your mill?’
‘Yes,’ said Sofia. I saw her tongue wet her lips. She bobbed her half-curtsey at Frances, who made some gesture of greeting, and called out ‘How do you do?’ I hoped that both would assume that an introduction had been made.
‘It’s a moving picture.’ My vo
ice sounded strained, and I cleared my throat. ‘She just wants us to stand and talk here for a moment . . . there, you can hear the camera going again . . . and then, perhaps, walk into the mill.’
‘Walk – into the mill?’
‘Why, yes, if you don’t mind? It makes a bit of action, you see, for the film. May we?’
For one long, heart-stopping minute I thought she was going to refuse, then she put a hand flat against the door, and pushed it wide. With an inclination of the head, and a gesture, she invited me in. It was a movement of great dignity, and I heard Frances give a little grunt of satisfaction as the camera got it.
I mounted the single step, and went into the mill.
Just inside the door a stone stairway, built against the wall, spiralled upwards. Within its curve, on the ground, stood sacks of grain, and a pile of brushwood for repairing the thatch. Against the wall was a stack of tools; a rough hoe, a spade, something that was probably a harrow, and a coil of light rope. A sieve hung from a nail.
I couldn’t hear if the camera was still going. Sofia was just behind me. I looked up the curling stairway.
‘May I go up?’ Already, while I was speaking, I had mounted two steps, and my foot was on a third before I paused to glance back at her. ‘I’ve always wanted to see inside a mill, but the only other one I’ve been to was derelict. That was on Paros . . .’
Sofia had her back to the light, and I couldn’t see her face. Again I sensed that hesitation, and again my pulses thudded, while I gripped the narrow handrail. But she could hardly, without a boorishness comparable to my own, have refused.
‘Please do.’ Her voice was colourless. She put her bag down on the floor, and followed me closely up the stairs.
The chamber on the first floor was where the flour was weighed. Here were the old-fashioned scales, a contraption of chains and bar and burnished bowls, which would be slung from a hook on the massive wooden beam. All about the floor stood the big square tins which caught the milled flour as it came down the chute from the grindstones. Some of the tins were full of a coarse, meal-coloured flour. Here, too, were sacks of grain.
