‘Was this enquiry agent tupping the girl himself, do you suppose?’ Jardine asked.
‘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.
PART TWO
ATHENS
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Adam 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.