Read Online This Rough Magic by Mary Stewart - Free Book Online

course – and now there’s no bus for an hour! Of course she must go home!’
    I found myself staring, not at his easy assumption of responsibility for the girl, or even at the near-perfect English he spoke, but simply because of his looks.
    In a country where beauty among the young is a common-place, he was still striking. He had the fine Byzantine features, with the clear skin and huge, long-lashed eyes that one sees staring down from the walls of every church in Greece; the type which El Greco himself immortalised, and which still, recognisably, walks the streets. Not that this young man conformed in anything but the brilliant eyes and the hauntingly perfect structure of the face: there was nothing to be seen here of the melancholy and weakness which (understandably) tends to afflict the saintly persons who spend their days gazing down from the plaster on the church walls – the small-lipped mouths, the meekly slanted heads, the air of resignation and surprise with which the Byzantine saint properly faces the sinful world. This youth had, indeed, the air of one who had faced the sinful world for some years now, but had obviously liked it enormously, and had cheerfully sampled a good deal of what it had to offer. No church-plaster saint, this one. And not, I judged, a day over nineteen.
    The beautiful eyes were taking me in with the frank appraisal of the Greek. ‘You must be Miss Waring?’
    ‘Why, yes,’ I said, in surprise; then suddenly saw who, inevitably, this must be. ‘And you’re – Adonis?’
    I couldn’t for the life of me help bringing out thename with the kind of embarrassment one would feel in labelling one’s own compatriot ‘Venus’ or ‘Cupid’. That in Greece one could meet any day a Pericles, an Aspasia, an Electra, or even an Alcibiades, didn’t help at all. It was the looks that did it.
    He grinned. He had very white teeth, and eyelashes at least an inch long. ‘It’s a bit much, isn’t it? In Greek we say “Adoni”.’ (He pronounced it A-thoni.) ‘Perhaps you’d find that easier to say? Not quite so cissy?’
    ‘You know too much by half!’ I said, involuntarily, and quite naturally, and he laughed, then sobered abruptly.
    ‘Where is your car, Miss Waring?’
    ‘It’s down near the harbour.’ I looked dubiously at the crowded street, then at the girl’s bent head. ‘It’s not far, but there’s a dreadful crowd.’
    ‘We can go by a back way.’ He indicated a narrow opening at the corner of the square, where steps led up into the shadow between two tall houses.
    I glanced again at the silent girl, who waited passively. ‘She will come,’ said Adoni, and spoke to her in Greek, briefly, then turned to me, and began to usher me across the square and up the steps. Miranda followed, keeping a pace or so behind us.
    He said in my ear: ‘It was a mistake for her to come, but she is very religious. She should have waited. It is barely a week since he died.’
    ‘You knew him well, didn’t you?’
    ‘He was my friend.’ His face shut, as if everything had been said. As, I suppose, it had.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
    We walked for a while in silence. The alleys were deserted, save for the thin cats, and the singing-birds in cages on the walls. Here and there, where a gap in the houses laid a blazing wedge of sunlight across the stones, dusty kittens baked themselves in patches of marigolds, or very old women peered from the black doorways. The smell of charcoal-cooking hung in the warm air. Our steps echoed up the walls, while from the main streets the sound of talk and laughter surged back to us, muted like the roar of a river in a distant gorge. Eventually our way opened into a broader lane, and a long flight of shallow steps, which dropped down past a church wall straight to the harbour square where I had left Phyl’s little Fiat.
    There were crowds here, too, but these were broken knots of people, moving purposefully in search of transport home, or the midday meal.