A Most Extraordinary Pursuit by Juliana Gray

Author:Juliana Gray
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-06T16:14:12+00:00

THE BOOK OF TIME, A. M. HAYWOOD (1921)

Fourteen

I had protested, of course. I ought to go with him; could there be any act so singularly unprofitable to our investigation as that of sitting at a table, drinking coffee?

He would not hear of it. I had no training or experience in these sorts of confrontations, nor had he any time to prepare me.

I had demanded particulars: What was his lordship planning to do? Did he mean to catch the man? Interrogate him?

What if he didn’t return in half an hour? What if something happened to him?

“My dear Truelove,” he said, tugging a few coins from his pocket and laying them on the table, “I have promised to return to you in half an hour. I do not break my word.”

And he had turned and left, as if that settled the matter.

During the course of our conversation—I will not call it an argument—the man with the earring had straightened himself away from the column and ducked into the hotel itself, so quickly that I nearly missed the maneuver. But Lord Silverton had not. He crossed the street nimbly, paused, and went around back through the narrow alley between the Hotel Alabaster and a neighboring tavern, where I lost him from view.

I checked my watch briefly—seven minutes past one o’clock—and continued for some time to stare at the columns forming the shallow portico of the Hotel Alabaster, as if I might actually conjure some vision of what was occurring within. But the exterior of the hotel remained somnolent, in the manner of a Mediterranean town in the middle hours of the day, even in winter, and after twelve minutes (having checked my watch a second time, and dropped it with exasperation back into my jacket pocket) I raised the first two fingers of my right hand and signaled the waiter for more coffee.

Six excruciating minutes later, during which the front portico of the Hotel Alabaster remained wholly complacent, a waiter arrived bearing the coffee, a welcome distraction. He removed Silverton’s empty cup and raw beefsteak with an air of decided distaste. I added two teaspoons of sugar, and had only just taken the first tentative sip when the door opened and a man walked in, wearing a gray suit and a familiar black moustache.

Very quietly, I turned my chair away.

“Beg your pardon,” the man said to the waiter, “but I don’t suppose you could spare a plate of sandwiches?”

“Sandwiches?”

“Yes. Famished. I’ve just arrived off the boat from Piraeus, and the hotel doesn’t seem to be serving yet.”

I shrank into my collar and bent my head over my coffee cup.

The waiter appeared not to understand him—he hadn’t understood us very well either, until Silverton had switched to Greek—and the Englishman tried again, this time in the local tongue. An animated discussion ensued, during which I finished my coffee and disappeared further into my clothes. I had just begun to measure the distance to the door when the man’s voice switched abruptly from incomprehensible patois to a sound, sharp, unmistakable English.

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