‘There are still many people who admire your book very much.’
‘Yourself amongst them, I hope, Miss…?’ Adam left the question mark over his visitor’s name hanging in the air, but the attempt to discover her identity was unsuccessful. She simply ignored it.
‘Indeed, I admire your book so much, Mr Carver, that I have put my reputation at risk of compromise by coming here to tell you so myself.’
‘I can assure you that no one will know of your visit save myself and Quint. Now, I am the soul of discretion and Quint can keep a secret even in his cups. So your reputation is as safe as the gold in the Bank of England.’
‘I am grateful for your assurance, sir.’ The woman, sitting demurely amidst the chaos, spoke quietly and apparently seriously, but Adam could not help but notice a hint of half-hidden irony in her voice. ‘I thought long and hard before I decided to visit you. I know that perhaps I should have left my card first or come with a chaperone. Or acted in almost any way other than that in which I have acted. But I was so determined to see you.’
Adam was sensible of the suggestion of play-acting, even insincerity, in his visitor’s manner but it was not every day that a beautiful woman expressed determination to see him. He decided that he was happy enough to ignore any doubts he might have about the reasons for her arrival on his doorstep.
‘I am sure that your reasons for acting as you have done are important enough to outweigh any minor transgressions of etiquette, madam.’
‘You are right. I do have important reasons for coming. But, before I vouchsafe them to you, I must tell you something of myself.’
Not a moment before time, Adam thought to himself but he said nothing.
‘My name is Emily Maitland. I am not a native of London. Indeed, I have not spent time here since I was a small girl. My mother and I have been abroad for many years. We have made our home in a number of places. Constantinople. Athens. Rhodes. For the last three years we have lived in Salonika. A city which, of course, you know.’
‘An unusual city in which to make your home, Miss Maitland.’
Adam was surprised. He recalled the harbour at Salonika and the houses rising gradually from the water up the steep slopes to the castle on the summit. He remembered the white walls of the city and the long stone fingers of the minarets pointing heavenwards. From a distance it was a beautiful sight, but it was also an unhealthy spot with a reputation for malaria. Why would a young woman and her mother choose to live there? Salonika, he remembered, had its small English community, mainly merchants and traders, but he could not believe that it included many women living on their own.
‘There are reasons for our choice of Salonika,’ Emily said, sensing his surprise, although she made no attempt to reveal what they were. ‘We travelled to London in the spring of this year. A distant relative of my father had died and we were beneficiaries in his will. We needed to visit the lawyers to make the proper arrangements to receive our legacy.’
The young woman paused and looked up at Adam. He smiled and made a gesture that he hoped would be interpreted as an encouragement to go on.
‘However, I need not trouble you with the details of our family affairs,’ she continued. Adam found himself very nearly agreeing with his visitor but he bit his tongue. ‘I must hurry on to the point in my story when it will become clear why I have called upon you in so unconventional a fashion.’
Miss Maitland moved her hand across the front of her dress, as if brushing from it a fragment of lint she had just noticed.
‘When your expedition arrived in Salonika in the summer of sixty-seven, my mother and I had only just become residents of the city ourselves. We were staying in a hotel by the waterfront. We saw you land from the Constantinople steamer. As you disembarked we could see you were English. We decided that—’
Adam was never to know what Miss Maitland and her mother had decided. Her words were interrupted by the most terrific uproar from the direction of the dark room. The sound was as if a shell had exploded in a glass factory. As the noise ceased, Adam and his visitor looked at one another in shocked surprise. He was the first to recover composure.
‘If you will excuse me for just a moment, I will endeavour to discover what Quint is doing.’ He bowed himself out of the room, leaving the woman sitting amidst the disordered books and papers. ‘And why he is making that infernal racket as he is doing it,’ he added to himself as he left.
He was gone just long enough to learn that Quint, his amour propre injured by the remarks about dirt and dust, had been cleaning the equipment in the dark room when several of the glass plates had — of their own volition, according to Quint — crashed to the floor. Lingering only briefly to curse his servant for his clumsiness, Adam made haste to return to the sitting room and his guest. ‘I must apologise for Quint. A bull in a china…’ His words dried up as he realised he was addressing an empty room. There was no one sitting in the chair. Emily Maitland was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
The following day found Adam sitting in the Marco Polo Club, listening to Mr Moorhouse talk about whatever subjects flitted briefly through his butterfly mind. The Marco Polo, established in the early 1800s by a group of army officers who had served in India and travelled in the rest of Asia, was not the best-known of London’s gentlemen’s clubs but it was, its members felt, the most agreeable and, in its own particular way, the most prestigious. Only those who had, at some time in their lives, travelled extensively beyond the comforts of civilisation were allowed membership in the Marco Polo: a little dilettante journeying through France or Italy was insufficient qualification for admission. Adam himself had been hard pressed to convince the membership committee that his travels in the mountains of Macedonia had been dangerous and discomforting enough to allow the doors of the Marco Polo to be opened to him. Only the support of the club’s secretary, Baxendale, a man who had spent two winters in the 1850s sharing an igloo with a family of Eskimos in northern Canada and was thus able to speak authoritatively on the subjects of danger and discomfort, provided Adam with an entrée. Baxendale had enjoyed Travels in Ancient Macedon and let it be known that he believed its author would be a worthy addition to the club’s membership roll. Within days of the secretary expressing his opinion, Adam was admitted to the Marco Polo. In the thirteen months since his admission, he had grown to love the club and had spent many happy days in its Pall Mall premises.
Mr Moorhouse, Adam’s conversational partner on this particular day, was the oldest member of the club. Many decades before, when Lord Byron had set a fashion for discontented young men of fortune to journey abroad in search of experiences unavailable in England, the 25-year-old Mr Moorhouse had set sail for the Middle East. Landing at the ancient port of Sidon, he had travelled on to Damascus and then set off through the wilds of the Syrian desert, accompanied only by a supposedly faithful Arab servant named Ibrahim. Eighty miles into their journey, Ibrahim had handed Mr Moorhouse over to a Bedouin chieftain in return for two camels and a dozen goatskins filled with water. The Bedouin, delighted to gain a young and handsome Frankish servant for so low a price, had immediately set Mr Moorhouse to work on a series of humiliating, indeed disgusting, tasks about his encampment. It had cost the British consul in Damascus three weeks of negotiation and ten more camels to arrange his countryman’s release.
By the time he was free and able to sail home, Mr Moorhouse had been cured permanently of any further desire to leave his native land. Now, more than fifty years after his Levantine adventure, he rarely set foot outside London. He sat for hours in the smoking room of the Marco Polo, puffing contentedly on a succession of foul-smelling cigars and indulging in amiably inconsequential conversation with anyone prepared to join him at his table. Adam found him a curiously relaxing companion.