Read Online Strangers in Company by Jane Aiken Hodge - Free Book Online Page A

quoted to them, and when their visit to the Temple of Apollo was over and they were back in the bus, Stella summed up what might well have been many people’s feelings: “It isn’t everyone who’d want to. They can keep it for all of me, Doric columns and the lot. I never did go much for architectural terms.”
    â€œNo.” Marian was happy to agree with her. “But I’m looking forward to Mycenae.”
    One last look up to the towering citadel of the Acro-Corinth, where, the professor leaned forward to tell Marian and Stella, the Turkish garrison had held out all through the Greek War of Indepedence, and the bus began to climb up out of the coastal plain.
    â€œGod, I’m hungry,” said Stella. “Thank goodness it’s lunch first and Mycenae afterwards.”
    Lunch at the Belle Hélène was stuffed vine leaves again, and delicious. Only the professor was disappointed. “They’ve changed the place a whale of a lot since I was here last. Progress, I suppose. But I liked it the way Schliemann saw it.”
    â€œSchliemann?” asked Stella.
    â€œThe man who found Mycenae and all that gold. I expect Mike will tell us about him on our way up to the site.”
    Mike did, but Marian was not listening. She was back in her own deep past, those lonely days at school, before she met Mark, when all her life was books. A day girl at an Oxford boarding school, she had somehow belonged in neither the world of school nor that of home. The school library, and later the public one, had been her refuge,secondhand bookshops her pleasure. She would never forget discovering the tattered grey translations of Aeschylus’ three plays about the doomed House of Atreus. A cold little shiver ran down her spine. Agamemnon had sacrificed his own daughter, Iphigenia, to get a fair wind for his fleet to sail against Troy. He had got it, too, and conquered Troy, after ten years, by the meanest of tricks, only to come home, bringing the unlucky prophetess Cassandra with him, to his own doom, and hers. And could you blame his wife, Clytemnestra, who had sent her daughter off, as she thought, to marry the great Achilles and then learned of her death on the sacrificial alter? No wonder if she took a lover, and if the two of them, alerted by the beacon fires that announced Agamemnon’s triumphal return, planned and carried out their deed of blood. Daughters.… What was Mark doing with Viola? Sebastian would be all right. It was his nature, all too like his father’s. But Viola.… Would Mark be taking care of her properly? Or sacrificing the two of them on the publicity altar of his career? They had been a liability eighteen years ago. Now, eighteen, similar, beautiful, they had proved, suddenly, an asset. Would he even have the sense to take care of them as such? And, if not, would they be wise enough to come home? Suppose they decided to, cabled her and got no answer, because she was here, on this mad venture, in Greece?
    Mike’s voice aroused her, and she was glad of it. This kind of aimless worry was a self-indulgence she could ill afford. They had reached the gate to the inevitable wire-mesh fence, and Mike was striking an attitude by it as Cairnthorpe handed out tickets. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are here, at the entrance to the palace of the doomed Atrides. Can you hear the Furies howling up the wind?”
    â€œGrue,” said Stella, and then, “We actually seem to have the place to ourselves.”
    It was true; theirs was the only bus below them in the car park, but now, looking back, Marian saw a small red car being deftly parked beside it. Two young menemerged and came up the hill with the long, swift strides of practised walkers. Marian wondered for a moment if they intended to hang on the edges of their party and get the benefit of Mike’s guiding, but as they passed, they were talking in what she assumed to be Greek. Quick glances at all the