she’d never experienced before, as a woman of means without a man to whom she must answer. But now, now that dream was slipping away, being lost in the murk of someone else’s agenda. What had brought her to this point?
A month earlier, she had been visiting her parents, one of her typical midweek calls. She often saw her mother for luncheon, especially after Lawrence’s death, and, though Jonas kept to his rooms, occasionally their father joined them for a meal. He was to eat with them on that day, a rather dreary Thursday in April. London and her mother sat at the table in the dining room, as they did when Father planned to join them. They waited and waited, but Father’s seat remained empty. Mother refused to eat until he arrived, but she was too circumspect to send a servant after him. She had even looked longingly at the creamed lobster on toast, yet would not take the smallest bite.
Finally, famished, tired of her mother’s unnecessary self-sacrifice, London rose from the table to find her father, herself. She went straight to his study, as he was usually there. Pausing outside the closed door, she had tapped lightly. When there wasn’t an answer, she knocked, a little more loudly. Still nothing. London had tried the door, expecting to find it locked as it always was, but this time it wasn’t. Slowly, London opened the door and peered inside. It seemed empty. London felt herself drawn into the room. Despite the fact that she was a grown woman, she held her breath as she crossed the Turkish carpet, seeing the shelves of bound volumes, the large maps upon the walls. Britain. India. Africa. A fire burned in the grate. The smell of tobacco and significance. The Forbidden Kingdom.
The study was the realm of men. At hours early and late, a steady parade of sober-suited men went in and out its door. Jonas had permission to enter. London did not. Even the parlor maids were barred from entrance. Only Slyfield, the butler, had leave to clean the room at Father’s explicit order. London never knew what would happen to her if she ever went into her father’s study, only that, if she did, something terrible would happen to her. She should not be there. Yet she could not make herself leave.
The massive desk had drawn her like a lodestone. This was the place where her father conducted his business, where he made momentous decisions and shaped lives. London touched her fingers to the surface of the desk, trying to absorb some of its power. She could use more of that in her own life. As she had done this, her gaze fell to some pieces of foolscap arranged in a row. Someone had done rubbings in charcoal on the paper, taken from some stone source. Ancient writings. She frowned. Laid out as they were, they made no sense. London could not stop herself. She rearranged the papers.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
London had whirled around at the sound of her father’s outraged voice. He stormed into the study, and, for a moment, she actually feared he might use physical violence on her. He had never spoken to her or looked at her this way before, preferring, instead to treat her as if she were made of spun sugar. She didn’t care for either form of interaction.
“I’m sorry, Father,” London had blurted. She tried to back up, but the desk blocked her. “I was only trying to help.”
“Did you touch anything? Read anything?”
“Just these.” She gestured to the row of papers. “They were out of order.”
“Out of order?” her father had repeated, his eyes straying to the rubbings. Confusion flickered across his face. “You can read this?”
Not knowing whether she was damning herself further by revealing her linguistic knowledge, London decided it was better to openly admit her expertise than revert to a cowering, ignorant girl. “Yes, Father. It is a form of ancient Greek that was only known in the Cyclades Islands. Only a few scholars are even aware of its existence. And me,” she had added, trying to keep the pride from her words.
He had scowled, but his temper seemed to be cooling at this revelation. “You?”
“Yes, me.”
“Are those other scholars English?”
“One is French, another is German, and the other is Russian. I am the only person in England who knows this form of Greek.”
After a moment, he said, almost grudging, “So, what does it say?”
She fought against the fillip of happiness his acceptance brought her. “That’s what’s odd about it,” she had said, turning back to the papers. “Even properly ordered, the words make no sense. There is more, I assume?”
“Yes, much more.”
“I would have to see it all, put it in context. Then, I believe, it would become clear.”
Her father had paced away from her, then, and finally took a cigar from a rosewood humidor on his desk. Mother didn’t like him to smoke in the house, but this was his study and he could do as he pleased in here. After trimming the cigar and lighting it, he had taken a few meditative puffs whilst contemplating the maps. London stood in an agony of worry. What would he do? Disown her? Forbid her from coming back to his house?
“Do you know what I do for the British government?” he had asked, at last.
She had shaken her head numbly.
Carefully, as if he were explaining a complicated scientific principle to a child, he said, “I, and Jonas, and Lawrence and all our associates, are archaeologists. We find ancient objects around the world and bring them back to England, for the glory of England.”
That was a surprise. London never would have considered her father nor his colleagues to be men of science or academic learning. But she did not voice this, letting her father continue.
“The rubbings you see here”—he waved toward his desk—“were part of a much larger set taken from a ruin in Greece. Not a man on my team could decipher them. Not a single university professor in the whole of the country could, either. But you”—and here he turned back to her—“a woman, my daughter, were able to do what no one else had been capable of.”
“I wasn’t able to understand it, though,” London felt compelled to add. “Not fully. I would have to see the complete writings to make sense of them.”
“Yes,” Father had agreed. “It is imperative, for the good of England, that we decipher these writings. Under normal circumstances, I would seek out a British scholar with the proper expertise, but there isn’t one. There’s only you.” He ground out his cigar with a deliberate motion, and watched it smolder for a moment before looking up at her.
“And that’s why,” he continued, “for the first time in the history of my organization, I must involve a woman in our work, though it pains me greatly to do so.” He took from his waistcoat pocket a heavy gold pocketwatch inscribed with symbols London did not recognize. “Today is the twelfth of April. I expect you to have your bags packed and ready for travel by the sixteenth.”
London had blinked. “I’m sorry—what do you mean?”
“It means, my daughter, that you are coming with me to Greece.”
And so it had begun. Now she was in Greece, being led across a nighttime garden by her father. Enemies, he’d said. Enemies of England. Something else much bigger than simple archeology was happening, and London was in the middle of it, whether she wanted to be or not.
Bennett watched from the shadows of a nearby parapet as London Edgeworth Harcourt was escorted from the hotel garden by none other than the vicious,
