Scandal's Daughter (8 page)

“Then if that was so easy,” she said waspishly, “why did you think I couldn’t make it?”

“I didn’t say ‘couldn’t,’ I said ‘wouldn’t.’“ His dark blue eyes met hers in a steady look. “I was afraid you might decide it was impossible, which tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I beg your pardon for misjudging you.” He paused, as if waiting for a similar apology from her, then sighed. “Time to go.”

Standing up, he reached down to offer his hand, but Cordelia struggled to her feet without it. She didn’t misjudge him, she assured herself. He was the one who had told her he was fleeing the law.

The ground sloped gently upward from where they stood, a mixture of bare rock and pebbles. Here and there pockets of soil supported stunted grey-green shrubs, prickly weeds, and tussocks of dry grass. A flock of twittering goldfinches with scarlet faces and flashes of yellow on their wings flitted from thistle to thistle, tearing the silvery puffs apart to eat the seeds. As Cordelia and Preston started up the slope, a small goat with long, shaggy, dark-brown hair came over the crest. It stared at them, amber-eyed, before it returned to cropping the unrewarding herbage.

“We must be near people!” Cordelia exclaimed.

From the top, they looked down on a village of whitewashed, flat-roofed houses, built around a small harbour sheltered on the far side by another rocky headland. The nearer end of the village was hidden by a slope like that they had just walked up. Less than a quarter mile ahead, the ground ended in an abrupt edge with nothing but air beyond.

“Meh-eh-eh,” said a second goat mockingly and turned its matted back.

As one, Cordelia and Preston swung round to look inland.

“It never rains but it pours,” said Preston philosophically.

Their headland was joined to the rugged, mountainous mainland by a neck of land no wider than the goat track which ran along its top. On one side, the cliff they had climbed fell sheer to the deserted cove. On the other, a low, equally precipitous cliff ended in a steep slope of scree, which petered out in terraced fields and olive groves, dotted with a dozen or so houses, outposts of the village.

The loose mass of earth, pebbles, stones, and boulders looked as if a touch would start a landslide. Half way down lay a dead goat.

Cordelia shuddered. If the sure-footed beast had fallen, what hope had they?

Chapter 8

“Shall we try that cliff over there?” Cordelia gestured hopefully. The terrors of climbing a precipice suddenly seemed insignificant compared to the prospect of walking a tightrope between two precipices.

“I cannot study it properly from above,” James Preston pointed out. “I would not want to start down a cliff without having some idea of what I’m going to find on the way, and at the bottom.”

“No.” She looked again at the knife-edge ridge. The longer she gazed, the narrower it looked. “I can do it,” she said with grim determination, “but let us go now, before I have time to think about it.”

“And before this breeze grows any stronger. If you have the slightest feeling you’re going to lose your balance, down on your knees and crawl. I shall, I promise.”

The near end of the isthmus was below them. As they descended towards it, Cordelia saw it was nearer two feet wide than the six inches she had guessed. A perfectly adequate path—were it not for the drop on either side. If only she could traverse it with her eyes shut!

Might James Preston allow her to hold onto his girdle?

“You go first, this time,” he said, as promptly as if he had read her thoughts. “I want to be able to grab you if you falter.”

That stiffened her spine. “I shan’t,” she snapped, and started across.

For some distance the track continued downward. At the bottom, it narrowed to less than twelve inches. Cordelia hesitated. Then, feeling his critical eyes on her back, she marched on, her gaze glued to the ground before her feet, trying to ignore the void on either side.

To her right, in the corner of her vision, a seagull floated by. Distracted, she saw the jumbled rocks far below, dark fangs hungrily waiting for her. Quickly looking the other way, she saw the dead goat, a horrid warning of the perils of overconfidence. A gust of wind caught at her kaftan.

In an instant she dropped to her knees.

“Thank heaven,” Preston remarked in a conversational tone. “Call it masculine vanity if you will, but I wasn’t going to go on hands and knees until you did. No, don’t look round. I assure you I’m right behind you, my nose to those charming ankles of yours.”

Bristling, she held her tongue and crawled doggedly onward.

The path widened as it began to rise. Soon Cordelia forced her weary limbs upright again. Then, miraculously, they were walking side by side.

She stopped and stared back. “I cannot believe we crossed that.”

“We did. But I’m afraid your bundle didn’t. The wind pulled at it and I had to let go. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Gazing down, she discovered it was true. The bundle had caught on some snag and ripped open. The scree slope about the goat’s pathetic carcase was strewn with clothes. Shifts and shawls, richly embroidered kaftans given her by the pasha and elegant, high-waisted gowns given her by the margrave. Another link in the chain of her past was broken. “No, it doesn’t matter.”

Turning away, she found him regarding her with surprised approval, as though he had expected her to kick up a great fuss over her lost possessions. She frowned and quickly looked away, towards the village. The sun glinted on a gold cross where the dome and belfry of a small church stuck up among the low, rectangular cottages on the slopes above the harbour. A boat approached the quay, propelled by a man waggling a single oar at the stern. Bent black figures worked in the terraced, pocket-handkerchief fields, punctuated with the dark exclamation marks of slender cypresses.

“The only thing is, what shall we say to the village people, arriving with nothing but the clothes on our backs?”

“A good question.” As he spoke, he led the way along a goat path which seemed to lead in the right direction, though it wound about a good deal between fragrant myrtle bushes. “Not that the lack of luggage makes a great difference, but I’ve been pondering what tale to tell and still haven’t come up with a good answer.”

“Then perhaps we should not try to explain our presence. They will not believe we are Greek anyway, since I don’t know the language.”

“I don’t speak well enough to be taken for a native.”

“Suppose you pretend you understand well but speak only a very little, just enough to make our wants known, and perhaps a word or two of explanation. ‘Lost,’ say, and maybe ‘ship,’ and a great deal of waving of arms. No, I have it. Tell them we were on a Turkish ship when the captain robbed us and set us ashore. I daresay they will believe any evil of a Turk!”

“And be glad to help us. Splendid! Let’s see, the
Amphitrite
sailed north, so the nearest sizable port is probably Thessaloniki, if I recall my geography correctly. I’ll tell them in shockingly fractured Greek that we were on our way to Thessaloniki. It’s just as well you don’t speak any at all. You won’t be able to contradict my story by accident if we are separated.”

“Separated! Oh no!”

“It’s not likely,” he soothed, “not for long, anyway, since we shall have to pretend to be husband and wife.”

“We what?” Scarce able to believe her ears, she stopped and glared at his back. Sometimes she almost forgot he was a rascal, but one way or another he always reminded her. She had guessed right, for all his denials he had designs on her virtue. “Never!”

He turned to face her, the patient expression she found insufferable combined—still worse!—with amusement. “My dear girl, the modern Greeks don’t keep their women segregated like the Turks, but we cannot expect them to receive with cordiality an unmarried man and woman travelling together.”

“Fiddlesticks! You must tell them we are brother and sister.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said regretfully, then brightened. “You will have to call me Iakov, then, the Greek equivalent of James. You cannot call your brother Mister.”

She frowned.

They went on. James heard the girl stumbling along behind him. She must be exhausted after the unaccustomed exertion, but he’d be damned if he would offer her his arm. She’d probably cry rape.

How determined she was to believe him a villain! That was bad enough, but what really annoyed him was her certainty of her own superiority. She even despised and resented her mother, with no attempt to understand or forgive that unfortunate lady’s fall from grace.

James did not know the full story, only what little Uncle Aaron had told him. Lady Courtenay had found herself at low ebb in Prussia, of all places, with a daughter to support. Without resources or friends to turn to, she had accepted the protection of Mehmed Pasha, in Berlin to court an alliance with King Frederick William against Russia, or Napoleon, or both.

Lady Courtenay was not the first—nor doubtless the last—beautiful widow to be forced by circumstances to veer from the straight and narrow. James felt nothing but sympathy for her. Yet her daughter, whom she had kept in comfort, held her in contempt and blamed every difficulty on her.

It was practically his duty to seduce Cordelia Courtenay, he mused. She depended on him as Lady Courtenay had depended on the pasha. Let her learn what had driven her mother to succumb to the Turk’s blandishments.

Though he’d no more force her than rob her, he would do his best to win her favours, he decided. For the present they were brother and sister, but England was still a long way off.

The goat track he was following twisted and turned downward until it ended at a gap in the stone wall of a small vineyard. Autumn-yellow vine leaves drifted to the ground under the assault of the strengthening wind, but bunches of purple grapes still hung here and there.

Cordelia plodded up behind him as he paused at the tumbledown wall. “Do you think anyone would mind if we ate a few?” she said longingly.

“I doubt it. The vines look abandoned to me, all overgrown and tangled as if they haven’t been pruned in years, and most of the grapes are wrinkled.”

“And there’s a fig tree in the corner, look, with figs on it.”

James gave her his hand to help her over the fallen stones in the gap. She was tired enough to accept his aid, and he no longer minded if she fancied he intended to seduce her. Now it was true.

He smiled at her. “Sit here against the wall in the shade, Miss Courtenay, and I’ll bring you some fruit.”

“Thank you.” She sank wearily to the ground. “It is dreadfully hot for the time of year.”

When he returned a few minutes later, his hands full of grapes and figs, she was leaning back against the wall with her eyes shut.

At the sound of his footsteps, she opened her eyes and sat up straight. “It is a little cooler in the shade, but the wind is hot. Is my nose sunburned?” she asked as he dropped to the ground beside her.

“I think not. We had our backs to the sun most of the time.” He studied her round face, pink-cheeked from heat and exercise. Her fair hair escaped in wisps from its severe braid, and small, pearly teeth, slightly uneven, bit into the rosy flesh of a juicy fig. Despite dust and dirt she was quite attractive. Making love to her would be no penance.

“My nose freckles horridly. I wish I had a bonnet.”

“We haven’t a head-covering between us. They disappeared with your bundle.”

She stared at him, dismay in her brown eyes. “I forgot.”

“Fortunately it’s only the Moslems who regard a woman’s bare head as not merely indecorous but sacrilegious.”

“So the villagers will never believe even the wickedest Turk stole the kerchief from my head!”

“Oh Lord, I daresay you’re right,” he said, and started to laugh. “So much for our story.”

After a startled moment, Cordelia smiled. “Ah well, it wasn’t much of a story anyway. You will just have to make sure your Greek is so shockingly bad they do not try to ask personal questions.”

The hot wind continued to rise as they rested, and the sky turned a leaden hue. When they went on they caught a glimpse of sullen grey waves rolling white-capped into the harbour, where a number of boats were now tied up at the quay. On the other side of the vineyard, they found a cart track which ran between stony cultivated fields and vineyards, groves of oranges and lemons, olives and figs, all deserted.

“Nap-time,” James said when Cordelia wondered at the absence of the toilers she had seen from above. “What the Spanish call siesta. Everyone and everything comes to a halt for the hottest hours of the day.”

Everything except the dogs. As they came to the outskirts of the village and started walking along a crooked street no wider than the cart track, a bony mongrel sprawled in the gutter raised its head and the alarm.

Springing to its feet, the cur let fly an ear-shattering volley of barks. Instantly a half-dozen, a dozen, a score of canine voices joined the cacophonous chorus.

Cordelia stopped dead. “It’s not going to attack, is it?” she said. “It’s just barking, not growling or snarling.”

“I see you know dogs. I—”

Above them a pair of green shutters crashed back against the wall. A man stuck his head out, his leathern face decorated with a huge black moustache, and bellowed a demand for silence. He followed his roar with a missile which crashed in shards beside the dog, sending it scampering off with its skinny tail between its legs. Then he looked down at the strangers and said mildly, “
Kalespera
.”

“Kalespera,” James responded to the greeting. He continued in deplorable Greek which would have appalled his schoolmasters, “Us lost. Ship captain Turk he rob us.”

“Filthy Turks.” The man turned his head and spat sideways into the street.

Encouraged, James continued, “Me and sister go Thessaloniki now.”

He did not need to pretend to have difficulty understanding the man’s speech. The local dialect was a far cry from anything he had ever heard, but helped by vigorous gesticulations he contrived to get the gist of it. He turned to Cordelia.