Amidst the continuing clamour, Fields pulled himself groggily to his feet.
‘Are you hurt, Professor?’
‘I think not.’ The old scholar raised his hand to his brow. He looked curiously at a red smear on it. ‘There is blood here but no serious injury. What happened? One moment I was thinking of the library manuscripts and the next, like Icarus, I was plummeting earthwards.’
‘A runaway horse.’ Adam kicked aside fragments of wood and glass and picked up his hat from where it had fallen. ‘An accident.’
‘Possibly.’
‘What else could it be?’
For once, Professor Fields was silent.
The large room on the embassy’s ground floor was already crowded when Adam and the professor arrived in the Square of the Mint. Most of the men in attendance were dressed in black tie and jacket. A few of the Greeks, wishing perhaps to advertise their patriotism, wore what had come to be seen since the War of Independence as national dress: richly embroidered velvet jackets, two or three inside one another, accompanied white fustanelles, bound round the waist by leather belts. One fierce-eyed individual even had a silver dagger and scabbard hanging by his side, as if to suggest that he was a warrior chieftain only recently descended from his mountain hideout. Samways, appearing briefly to point out the more interesting guests to them before pushing his way back into the throng, identified him as a journalist on one of the city’s more radical newspapers.
‘They’re like the damn Scotch,’ Fields said with disgust as he watched Samways’s back disappear into the crowd. ‘Marching around in their ridiculous kilts, pretending to be great heroes.’
The embassy man was not gone for long. Within a couple of minutes he had returned, forcing his way through the crush of people in the company of the man Adam and the professor had come to meet. Rallis was one of the majority that had chosen western dress. Indeed, his immaculately tailored suit would not have looked out of place in Piccadilly or Bond Street. He was of medium height and olive complexion. Samways had told them that the lawyer was not yet out of his twenties, but his jet black hair was already receding and his high forehead gave him the look of an older man. He bowed deeply on introduction but made no attempt at first to shake hands with them. Adam had the feeling that, just as they had attended the reception to judge him, Rallis was there to assess them. He might meet with their approval but there was no guarantee that they would meet with his.
‘I am delighted to meet you, gentlemen. Mr Samways has told me much about you.’ Rallis now reached out his hand to Adam. ‘I trust that you are enjoying your visit to Athens.’
‘It is a city that every lover of truth and beauty must enjoy,’ Adam said. ‘But we are finding the heat near intolerable. We are not used to such temperatures as yet.’
‘Ah, the heat, yes. It is fierce, is it not? Enough to drive a man as mad as the March hare.’
‘You have a fine grasp of a good old English simile, Mr Rallis,’ the professor said, shaking the Greek’s hand in his turn, and was rewarded with the briefest of smiles.
‘Oh, Alexander speaks English better than I do,’ Samways said. ‘He lived in London in the early sixties.’
‘I was there as a very young man.’ The Greek spoke as if he was now full of years and looking back on his distant past. ‘I was a student but I was also busy with the task of persuading your fellow countrymen to support the rightful claims of my people.’
Adam raised an eyebrow enquiringly.
‘Our claims to land that should be Greece but which is ruled by the Turk,’ Rallis continued. ‘It is what we Greeks call the Megale Idea, the Great Idea. We long for a time when the nation will encompass all Greeks.’
‘Dreaming that Greece might still be free and all that?’ Samways said, clearly bored, his eyes idly roaming around the room.
‘A part of Greece is already free, Mr Samways. But the kingdom of Greece is not the whole of Greece. The Greek is not only he who inhabits the kingdom. The Greeks of Ioannina, of Salonika, even the Greeks of Constantinople, do they not deserve their freedom? What kind of a Greece is it that does not include Mount Olympus? Where the ancient gods look down on a land ruled by Turks?’
Rallis was growing warm in his enthusiasm. His voice was raised above the ordinary level of social conversation, so much so that several people in his vicinity turned their heads to look at him.
‘All sounds a bit too political for me, old boy,’ Samways commented. ‘We embassy chaps should always steer well clear of politics.’
‘I see it is the same with the English as with the French or with the Germans. I discovered that it was so when I was in London,’ Rallis said. He had noticed that he was attracting attention and had lowered his voice. He was now smiling to take any sting from his words. ‘You are always kind enough to allow us a glorious past, but it is seldom you concern yourselves with our future.’
‘The future’s no business of ours, Alexander old chap. Difficult enough keeping up with what’s going on in the present.’ Samways had seen someone he wished to flatter on the other side of the room and was eager to extricate himself from the conversation. ‘I shall leave you with these two gentlemen. Although I suspect that they will prove to be like the rest of us. More interested in the past than the future.’
Rallis watched the English diplomat push his way through the crowd and then turned to Adam and the professor.
‘I think that Mr Samways, perhaps, does not always concern himself even with my country’s present. But he is a good man.’
Fields snorted. ‘Felix Samways is what he always was. A man with more money than he has brains. But he recommends you, Mr Rallis.’
The Greek bowed his head as if to suggest that this recommendation merely proved the diplomat’s essential goodness.
‘He is very kind. However, for what is he recommending me? Not for legal work, he tells me. He speaks instead of ancient manuscripts. I must confess myself puzzled. But I am also intrigued. What manuscripts do these English gentlemen seek? I wonder to myself.’
‘The story is a long one, sir. But it is one that you should hear. It begins in London at a dinner in my club. A gentleman named Samuel Creech introduced himself to me.’ Adam took Rallis gently by the arm and, with the professor on his other side, guided the Greek lawyer towards a less crowded corner of the room.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Sitting towards the back of the little Anglican church of St Paul’s, listening as best he could to the preacher’s quiet drone, Adam was able to survey the English community in Athens at worship. It was not, he decided, an altogether prepossessing sight. He could see Samways, stifling a yawn, in one of the pews further forward. Looking beyond the young diplomat, he could see more men he assumed were attached to the embassy. Some he recognised from the night of the reception. Others in the congregation, well-fed and well-dressed men and women with a look of indestructible self-satisfaction in their eyes, he took to be businessmen and their wives. One white-bearded old man, sitting stiffly to attention near the front, might have been one of the generation of English Philhellenes who had fought on the Greek side in the War of Independence. Bored by the service, Adam indulged himself in idle speculations about the life the elderly gentleman might have led. He might have witnessed the kind of adventures in the 1820s of which the young man had dreamed as a boy. He might have been one of Byron’s comrades at Missolonghi or a man who had sailed with the British fleet at the Battle of Navarino. These thoughts were enough to distract Adam slightly from the tedium of the service. He had not wished to attend St Paul’s this Sunday morning but the professor had insisted. Fields, it seemed, was too busy to go to church himself, but it was imperative that Adam should go.