Carver's Quest (57 page)

It was nearly two months since his struggle with Fields on the edge of the pit in Macedonia. Together with Emily and Garland and Quint, he had left the camp near Koutles and ridden back towards
Salonika. On the way, they had overtaken Rallis and the two men deputed to look after him. Perhaps it was as well for his own comfort that the Greek lawyer had remained more or less unconscious for
most of their journey. Once in Salonika, in the care of Roman Catholic nuns there, he had made a surprisingly swift recovery from his wounds. When it came to the time to make their farewells,
Rallis was once again on his feet.

‘Goodbye, Alexander,’ Adam said as he stood by the dock, awaiting the moment to step on board Garland’s private yacht. ‘If you ever visit London again, I shall insist
that you see the sights in my company.’

‘I shall accompany you to the British Museum, my friend,’ Rallis replied with a smile, holding out his hand. And I shall point out all the treasures there that one day will be
returned to Greece.’

Adam laughed and took the lawyer’s hand. ‘I might even help you to smuggle some of them out of the museum,’ he said.

The journey back from Salonika to Athens had proved uneventful. After a few restorative days enjoying Polly’s hospitality at the Angleterre, Adam and Quint had taken ship for Malta. From
there, another steamer had transported them to Marseille. The French railways had taken them to the Channel coast and the end of October had seen the pair settled once again in Doughty Street.

To Adam’s misery, Athens had been the scene of a parting from Emily and her husband-to-be. Looking, in Quint’s words, ‘as sad as a sick monkey’, the young man had been a
poor companion on the journey back to London. Once back in his rooms, he had been unable to find the enthusiasm to return to any of his former pursuits. His photographic equipment had remained
untouched. His friends had seen nothing of him. He had spent his days locked away in the sitting room in Doughty Street, idly reading novels and brooding over the events of the summer. There had
been times when he had thought that he would never be able to reconcile himself either to Fields’s treachery or to Emily’s preference for Garland. Quint, his spirits oppressed by the
atmosphere in the rooms, had spent long periods away from them. On many occasions, Adam had called for his manservant only to find that he was alone in the flat. He had been too melancholy to
complain when Quint, often smelling strongly of brown ale, had returned to Doughty Street long after night had fallen.

One afternoon, more than a fortnight after they had arrived back in England, Quint had strode into the sitting room from his own reeking little den at the rear of the flat. Adam had looked up
from his copy of Wilkie Collins’s
Man and Wife
, the latest book to fail to hold his attention. His manservant had thrown down a newspaper on the table.

‘Thought you might want to cast your peepers on that,’ he had said.

‘What is it, Quint?’ Adam had asked irritably. ‘I am busy.’

‘
Reynolds’s News
from last Sunday.’

‘Since when did you become a follower of the press?’

‘I likes to keep myself informed,’ Quint had said indignantly. ‘Anyways, there’s word in it of someone we know.’ He had opened the newspaper and pressed a grubby
finger on the centre of one of its pages. ‘Here.’

Curious, Adam had stood and walked across to the table. He had looked to where Quint had been pointing. It had been an item in what seemed to be a kind of gossip column.

‘Word has reached your correspondent,’ it had read, ‘of the return of a distinguished parliamentarian from a long sojourn abroad…’

Adam had read it through and read it through again. He had looked at Quint, who was visibly smirking.

‘But this is splendid news,’ the young man had said.

‘Reckoned you might see it that way.’

‘Emily is free.’

‘’Alfway across bleedin’ Europe, of course.’

‘But she is free. She is no longer engaged to that man.’

‘’Ard to bill and coo between ’ere and Salonika, mind.’

‘This calls for a celebration.’ Adam had ignored his servant’s remarks. ‘I shall go to the Marco Polo. I have not been there since we returned home.’

And so Adam now found himself in the smoking room of his club, puffing cheerfully on a cigar from Philip Morris’s shop in New Bond Street and gazing companionably at Mr Moorhouse.

‘Bit of a fog out there, I gather,’ the old man said.

‘A London pea-souper, Mr Moorhouse. The strangest atmospheric compound known to science.’

‘Quite like the fog myself. Damned inconvenient, of course, if you’re a man of business. But the city always looks rather beautiful in it, I think. Shapes looming out of the dark and
all that.’

The two men fell silent. The smoke from their cigars drifted towards the ceiling.

‘I do like a play with a good murder in it, don’t you?’ Mr Moor-house said suddenly. He had a faraway look in his eye, as if he was recalling happy theatrical experiences from
his youth. ‘Blood and gore.
Murder in the Red Barn
. That kind of thing.’

‘With the murderer brought to book at the end, of course,’ Adam suggested. Did Mr Moorhouse, he wondered, know something of the dramatic events that had overtaken Adam while he had
been abroad? Perhaps the old man was not quite the innocent he usually appeared. He looked across at his companion but Mr Moorhouse’s face revealed nothing more than bland contentment.

‘Absolutely,’ the old man agreed. ‘All topped off with repentance in the condemned cell. And a speech warning younger members of the audience not to follow his example.
Educational
and
moral. Not enough plays like that any more.’

Silence descended again on the room. All that Adam could hear were the distant sounds of voices in another part of the building. Probably the Marco Polo’s servants, he thought, preparing
for the influx of members in the evening.

‘Haven’t seen you around for a while, Carver,’ Mr Moorhouse said. ‘Been up to anything interesting?’

Adam thought for a moment or two, then decided there could be no harm in satisfying Mr Moorhouse’s curiosity, regardless of how much, or how little, the old clubman already knew. His
decision was vindicated, since Mr Moorhouse proved a good listener as Adam related the salient points of his adventures in European Turkey. He said little himself but he made the right noises of
encouragement at the right points in the narrative. When all was told, he sank back in his chair and stared upwards at the stucco decoration on the ceiling.

‘So this Euphorion chap was wrong, then, was he?’ he said, after thinking the matter over for a while. ‘No gold to be found?’

‘On the contrary, Mr Moorhouse. Euphorion was entirely correct, I think. We were the ones who went astray. We failed to find the right place in which to dig. Garland arranged further
excavations but nothing was found. As a consequence, all we have are a few beautiful objects like this.’

Adam held up the gold ring to the gas lamp and, for a minute, both he and Moorhouse admired its twinkling in the light. Then the young man folded his hand round it and slipped it back into his
pocket.

‘But the tomb of Philip is out there somewhere in those hills,’ he said. ‘Someday it will be found. And when it is, the treasures it holds will make that poor ring look like a
trifle indeed.’

The young man drew deeply on his cigar and allowed himself a brief reverie of future triumphs. One day, he would return to the Macedonian hills himself. He would follow the trail to
Philip’s tomb and he would unearth its hidden riches. It would, as Fields had predicted, be the archaeological sensation of the era. He would be a famous man. And – who knew? –
perhaps Emily would be there to share his success. Despite what Quint said, Salonika was not so distant.

Adam Carver blew out the smoke of his cigar and watched it spiral and disperse into the already fuggy air of the room. It was now early evening and other members of the Marco Polo were
conversing in the corridor outside. He felt himself called back to the present and so turned to speak once more to Mr Moorhouse. But there was little point. The old clubman had fallen fast
asleep.

Although, as Professor Fields rightly points out, there are several Ancient Greek writers with the name of Euphorion, there is no record of any Euphorion of Thrace, nor is
there any trace of a work similar to Pausanias’s
Ellados Periegesis
that could have contained clues to the whereabouts of Macedonian gold. However, Creech and Fields were right to
suspect that the hills in central Macedonia did contain a treasure worth discovering. In 1977, the Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos undertook an excavation near the small town of Vergina and
unearthed what he claimed was the tomb of Philip II, father of Alexander the Great. The exact identity of the tomb’s inhabitant is still the subject of scholarly debate but there is no doubt
about the significance of the objects that Andronikos found there, and in other tombs, in what was clearly an important burial site for the ancient Macedonians. Many of the objects, including
delicate golden crowns and a beautiful golden
larnax
, the box used to contain human remains, can be seen in the museum at Vergina.

The monasteries at Meteora, now a UNESCO World Heritage site, provide one of the most extraordinary tourist attractions in Greece, but there is not and, to the best of my knowledge, there never
has been one called Agios Andreas. They were visited on a number of occasions in the nineteenth century by English travellers who left accounts of the hair-raising methods employed by the monks to
haul their guests up to their lofty retreats. The water-colour painter and writer of nonsense verse Edward Lear visited Meteora and painted some memorable views of the rock formations, although, unlike the characters in my story, he chose not to be winched to the monasteries on their pinnacles.

The Marco Polo Club does not exist outside the pages of my novel but I have imagined it to be somewhere close to the other gentlemen’s clubs in Pall Mall and to share some of the
characteristics of the Travellers’ Club. Poulter’s Court, home to Jinkinson, is an imaginary London address. So, too, are the lane near Holy-well Street containing the brothel in which
Adam and Quint find Ada and the Wapping backstreet in which the Cat and Salutation is open for business. With the exception of a few individuals (Sir Richard Burton, W.S. Gilbert, Effie Millais and
others) who flit peripherally across its pages, all the characters in
Carver’s Quest
are my own invention. Any historical errors in the novel are similarly my responsibility.

My first thanks must go to Angus MacKinnon and Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books who originally suggested that I might be able to write fiction and were extremely patient when, for
some time, it seemed only too likely that they were mistaken. Angus has been an inspirational editor and his thoughts and advice have made
Carver’s Quest
a much better novel than it
would otherwise have been. Thanks also to Sara O’Keeffe, Maddie West and Lauren Finger at Atlantic. Melissa Marshall copy-edited the book with great skill and insight and I am grateful for
her help and suggestions. Friends, including Susan Osborne, Hugh Pemberton, Gordon Kerr, Andrew Holgate, Travis Elborough, Kevin Chappell and Dave Lawrence have lent a sympathetic ear and/or given
practical support over the years. My family proved a great source of love and encouragement throughout its long gestation. Particular thanks go to my wife Eve and to my sister Cindy Rennison, who
read earlier drafts and provided invaluable feedback.