Carver's Quest (35 page)

‘Simpkins – the boy Jinkinson employed – assumed that he was. But I think it unlikely that he was right. Jinkinson merely suggested Ada join him in a plot to take her revenge
on her seducer.’

‘And she was eager to do so.’

‘Perhaps, perhaps not. I believe Ada was past caring about revenge. But she has a mother. Quint tells me the mother is an avaricious old soak. She probably saw an opportunity to extract
money from her daughter’s disgrace.’

‘What a quagmire you have stumbled into, Adam. Death and deception on all sides. It will be a relief for you to swap such dark scenes for the bright light of Greece. When do you
go?’

‘At the end of the month.’

‘You will be able to renew your activities on behalf of the Foreign Office. Did you not tell me that the great panjandrums there valued your opinions on matters Greek and
Turkish?’

Still curious about their conversation some weeks ago, Jardine was very obviously fishing for more information about the exact nature of the relationship between his friend and the people he had
been seen visiting in Whitehall. Adam was unwilling to satisfy his curiosity. The truth was that he had visited Sunman soon after the professor had first mooted the journey to Athens. The languid
young aristocrat had encouraged the idea that despatching his thoughts and impressions of the Greek capital back to London might be a valuable one while simultaneously suggesting that it was
entirely Adam’s decision whether or not he should do so. ‘Always glad of an extra pair of eyes in a place like Athens, old man, but no need to put yourself out too much.’ Those
had been his exact words, Adam recalled, but he felt no urge to report the conversation to Cosmo.

‘I doubt the great panjandrums will be hanging on my every word,’ he said mildly.

‘I shall have no opportunity to see you again before you go,’ his friend continued, seeming to realise that he would learn no more. ‘I would raise a glass to the success of
your expedition with Fields but there is no glass on the table at present. This will have to do as a substitute.’

Cosmo Jardine lifted his coffee cup into the air. Adam smiled and followed suit. The two young men touched the delicate porcelain cups carefully together.

A
dam awoke with the sound of one of the tunes he had last heard at the Cremorne Gardens in his ears. At first he imagined that some Athenian
hurdy-gurdy player had added the Pretty Kitty Quadrille to his repertoire, but even within a delicious state of half-sleep, he was aware that the song was only in his head. He continued to lie
beneath the sheets, enjoying the memory of Cremorne and his encounter with Emily Maitland. He remembered the warmth of her body pressed against his as they danced and the unexpected but delightful
touch of her lips to his.

Two weeks had now passed since he had left England in the company of Quint and Fields. The journey to Greece had unfolded much as the professor had predicted on the afternoon he had eaten burnt
muffins in Adam’s rooms in Doughty Street. They had travelled through France at breakneck speed in order to catch a steamer from Marseilles to Malta. A short stay there had been enlivened
only by an altercation on the Valletta waterfront between Quint and a sailor which had escalated from mutual insults in English and Maltese to a sudden and inconclusive bout of fisticuffs. The
three men had then travelled onwards to Athens. They had docked at Piraeus three days earlier and had been driven from there to the Hotel d’Angleterre in Constitution Square. Fields had
insisted, at some length, that this was the finest hotel in Athens and that its manager, Polyzoïs Pikopoulos, was a particular friend of his. They could not think of staying anywhere else. In
the three days they had been there, ‘Polly’, as every English guest appeared to call him, had been a model of respectful politeness, but there had been not the slightest indication on
his part that he knew Fields of old or that he could distinguish him from any of the many other Englishmen who passed through his hotel.

On the second day after their arrival in Athens, Adam and the professor had visited the latter’s friend at the French School. To Adam’s amusement, Professor Masson had fitted almost
exactly the caricatured image of the average Frenchman presented in the comic papers. He was small and moustachioed and exceedingly voluble. He waved his arms vigorously and very nearly
unceasingly, like a man trying to pluck a swarm of flies from the air. He spoke torrentially of his own impending excavations near Eleusis and it was only with the greatest difficulty that he could
be brought round to the question of the Euphorion manuscript. At this point his face had fallen and he had slapped his forehead as if he were close to distraction. He was wretched, he was
desolé,
so
desolé
. His friends, his
chers amis
, how could they forgive him? He had brought them to Athens on what they would call a chase of the wild duck.
There was no manuscript of Euphorion?
Au contraire
, there were
two
manuscripts of Euphorion.
Mais
,
hélas
, they were both the
wrong
Euphorion.
They were the work of Euphorion the poet not Euphorion the traveller. How could his
chers amis anglais
forgive him? Even more importantly, how could he forgive himself ? His life had
become an insupportable misery to him. It had been a full thirty minutes before Adam and the professor had been able to extricate themselves from the conversation and leave. By that time the
diminutive Frenchman had succeeded in forgiving himself and was discoursing happily on the worship of Demeter in sixth-century Athens. The two Englishmen had returned to their hotel in a dejected
mood to contemplate the chase of the wild duck on which they had come all this way across Europe.

A bell somewhere in the city was chiming eleven when Adam finally emerged from the bedclothes and stumbled towards the luridly floral washbowl and jug the hotel provided for his ablutions. It
was close to noon when he finished dressing and made his way down to the hotel restaurant. The place was almost empty. Only a handful of tables were occupied. The professor was sitting at one of
them, drinking coffee. He waved cheerfully at Adam. His recovery from the disappointments of the previous day seemed complete.

‘There you are, my boy. While you have been such a slug-abed, wasting precious morning hours in the arms of Morpheus, I have been busy. I have seen Masson again. I have spent time at the
National Library. For an institution that has been established for no more than a few decades, it is an admirable one.’ Fields, whose usual opinion of everything in Athens less than two
thousand years old seemed to be one of contempt, was in a surprisingly gracious mood.

‘As I have had occasion to remark before, sir,’ Adam said, joining the professor at the table, ‘there is more now to the city than just the ancient sites.’

‘And, as I have had occasion to reply, nothing of any significance, my boy.’ Fields was amiably dismissive. ‘The delights of the National Library notwithstanding, the modern
town is but a mushroom growth of the last forty years. Since the moment it became the capital of a newly liberated Greece. There is nothing of any consequence intermediate between us and the age of
Plato.’

‘But we have seen so much ourselves of a new Athens taking shape. And we have been here but a few days.’

‘It is true that the city is expanding. By the hour, it sometimes seems. But Greece has no modern history of such a character as to obscure its classical past.’

It was becoming a familiar argument to Adam and one that he knew he could not win. He turned briefly to survey the restaurant. There was a solitary waiter in evidence, a tall and gangling youth,
and he indicated to him that he, too, would welcome coffee.

‘Your visit to the library has proved useful, has it, sir?’

‘Enlightening, if not of any immediate use. Our French friend Masson did indeed mislead us. The manuscripts of which he wrote to me so excitedly are fine specimens of Byzantine calligraphy
from the time of the emperor John Komnenos. But, as he told us yesterday, somewhat belatedly, they consist of the work of Euphorion of Chalcis.’ Fields picked up a spoon and began to stir his
coffee vigorously. ‘Fragments from an epic poem which is shockingly poor. And lines of amatory verse which are merely shocking. I am surprised that the scribe, who was almost certainly a
cleric of some kind, could bring himself to write them down. But that is by the by. The point is that they are not by our Euphorion.’

The long-legged waiter sidled awkwardly to the table and served Adam his drink. It was a small cup of what looked like boiling mud. The young man stared at it, black and bubbling, and braced
himself to raise it to his lips.

‘I have also paid a visit to the embassy and arranged to see someone there,’ the professor went on. ‘Samways. Felix Samways. He was up at the college not so many years ago.
Perhaps you recall him?’

‘I have no memory of anyone of that name.’

‘He must have been before your time. The man’s a fool but even fools can have their uses. He is attached to the embassy.’ Fields took a napkin and dabbed at his lips.
‘With luck, he will be able to expedite any journey out of Athens we might wish to make.’

‘What journey out of Athens might we wish to make?’

‘Who can tell where we might wish to travel?’ The professor replaced the napkin on the table. He had adopted an air of mystery like a stage magician about to pull a rabbit from a
hat. ‘But this Dilessi business earlier in the year has made it exceedingly difficult for us to come and go as we please. After the kidnapping and murder of several Englishmen so close to
Athens, no one is eager to allow others to leave the safety of the city. A voice raised in our favour at the embassy might well prove invaluable.’

‘But where might we wish to go?’ Adam persisted. ‘I would think that our only journey should be back to England. After our disappointment with Masson, what is there to keep us
here?’

‘Why should we not stay a while longer? The land where Pericles ruled and Plato thought must always have a strong claim on our hearts,’ Fields said, picking his teeth as he
spoke.

‘I do believe that you have learned something more at the National Library, Professor.’ Adam swallowed a mouthful of the hot mud and found it surprisingly flavourful.

‘I have spoken with the librarian there. He is a charming man. He had a suggestion to make.’

‘And that was?’

‘That there are manuscripts still awaiting discovery and proper cataloguing in many of the Greek monasteries. That we might wish to mount an expedition in search of some to take back to
Cambridge.’

There was a silence as Adam thought about this.

‘What of these monasteries?’ he asked after a few moments. ‘Is the librarian right, do you think? Is it possible that they could contain unknown manuscripts? Lost
manuscripts?’

‘Possible, yes, but I do not know that it is likely.’ The professor seemed suddenly deflated. His earlier enthusiasm had evaporated. ‘I did look into the matter before I left
Cambridge.’

‘And what did you learn?’

‘A Swedish traveller named Bjornestahl examined some of the monastic libraries in Thessaly about fifty years ago. He found little of any interest. Musty volumes of the Greek Fathers. Some
manuscripts and codices, but none of any considerable value. Everywhere he found signs of damp and neglect.’

‘Perhaps the monks were unwilling to show an outsider what they really owned.’

‘Perhaps. But scholars have long ago lost hope that a forgotten library might hold some genuine treasure.’

‘Who knows? Maybe we will stumble upon the lost books of Livy.’

‘No, they are gone for ever.’ Fields sounded like a man regretfully acknowledging an inescapable truth. ‘As are the missing plays of Aeschylus and Aristotle’s book on
comedy. We shall find nothing so remarkable.’

‘But there might be the work of some lesser author still to be discovered.’ It was Adam whose enthusiasm was now growing as the professor’s shrank. ‘An author like
Euphorion.’

‘I cannot bring myself to believe even that.’ The professor stared into the bottom of his cup and stirred the dregs of his coffee. He appeared to discover new hope there.
‘Although, it is true that Bjornestahl did not include all the monasteries of Thessaly in his survey.’

‘So, there is a chance that there is something still out there.’

‘A chance, yes. A systematic search of the monastic libraries might reveal hitherto unknown manuscripts. Who knows? Even lost works by ancient authors.’

‘Then we must go,’ Adam said, decisively. ‘We have come too far to do no more than return to London with our tails between our legs.’

The professor shrugged, whether in agreement or disagreement Adam was not entirely certain, then got to his feet.

‘There is something,’ he announced rather too loudly, ‘that I must fetch from my room.’

Adam followed Fields’s progress through the hotel’s restaurant, which was fuller than it had been when he had first come down. Several tables were now taken by those intent upon
lunch. Adam looked across at a young English couple whose behaviour suggested they were newlyweds on their honeymoon. Further away, two middle-aged men, Americans to judge by their accents, were
talking noisily about stocks and shares. Another man entered the restaurant and, at first, Adam assumed he was planning to join the two Americans. He moved in their direction. As he did so, Adam
saw to his astonishment that the man was Lewis Garland. The MP strode confidently past the American businessmen and took a seat at a more distant table. He waved to the tall waiter who set off
towards him like a contestant embarking on a foot race. Adam took the opportunity to head for the nearest door. He had no desire to engage Garland in conversation but he could not help but wonder
what on earth could have brought the man to Athens.