A Thousand and One English Nights (Book Three of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Fifty Seven: The Inevitable

Mari Lloyd's appearance was pleasing, and Ellini wondered if it was supposed to be. Her face was like a sunrise – round and rosy, with rays of red-gold hair that sprouted out in all directions without regard for gravity or convention. It looked as though the hair's owner had long-since given up trying to tame it. There was a pencil and a stick of chalk lodged behind her ears.

It was difficult to say whether she expected violence from Ellini and Robin. She didn't flinch when she met them at the gates, although there was a certain amount of chilliness – and definitely no handshake – for Robin. Her Welsh accent made her seem friendly and homely. But if you could use knowledge to threaten, then the very first words out of her lips were aggressive:

"Ah, Helen of Troy and the Kraken," she said, without a cloud on her sunshine face. "What a cheerful, incongruous mix of mythologies! Mind you, I'm sure Odysseus met something like the Kraken on his way back from Troy, so perhaps Helen too passed within a whisker of it on her way to Sparta with Menelaus."

She held her hand out to Ellini, and added, "I'm very pleased to meet you, my dear. I've heard so much about you, both from our mutual friend, and from my own researches."

Ellini couldn't help wincing. "The Helen of Camden book?" she said.

Mari Lloyd gave a dismissive wave of her hand. "Rather sensationalized, I daresay, but I'm afraid it's impossible for someone of my interests to walk past a book entitled Helen of anything without reading it."

She showed them around the school first, and there was no escaping its quiet gentility. Ellini saw well-scrubbed desks and well-dressed school mistresses – all wearing those elegant new dresses with bustle skirts and bodices as tight as corsets.

And then there were the beautiful grounds – as seductive to Ellini as Pemberley to Elizabeth Bennett! There was an oriental garden, a garden of the senses, and a more prosaic kitchen garden, in which carrots, peas, and marrows were grown. Mari Lloyd said she encouraged her girls to be in the gardens as much as possible. She said it was good for them to nurture something – in place, presumably, of the children they would never have now. And they read a different novel every week, from Jane Austen to George Eliot to Mrs Gaskell, and met up in the evenings to discuss it.

The whole experience was surreal. Ellini felt as though she was meeting the kind of person she had always admired, touring the kind of establishment she had always approved of, and she had to keep reminding herself that this was a woman who parted young lovers and ruined lives.

When they finally reached Mari Lloyd's office, she showed Ellini a long glass case in which fragments of a scroll had been painstakingly reassembled. It was covered in lovely, blocky ancient Greek script. Ellini recognized some of the names from The Iliad.

"This is the earliest known copy of Homer's epic," said Mari Lloyd. She leaned over Ellini's shoulder and placed her finger on the glass just above a certain word. "You may be interested in this name here." It was Helen's. "That's my area of expertise, actually. I translate ancient Greek poetry."

"Sappho?" asked Robin with a smirk.

Mari Lloyd ignored him. "Let me tell you a story about Helen of Troy that isn't widely known," she said, moving soundlessly to stand beside Ellini at the glass case. "I daresay you know it, my dear, but your 'husband' may not." 

You could hear the inverted commas every time she referred to Robin as Ellini's husband. It wasn't just to suggest that she knew the truth of the matter, Ellini thought. It was to put a disdainful, ironic stress on the whole concept of husbandhood.

"In Helen's youth, Theseus, the great hero of the Cretan labyrinth, saw Helen playing with her friends by the river Eurotas, and desired her. The ancients tell us that, even with all his many blessings – for he was a great king of Athens by that point – he felt his life wasn't worth living if he couldn't enjoy her. It sounds romantic, doesn't it? Until you come to understand that Helen was a girl, and Theseus a man of seventy. Ancient sources disagree on her precise age. Hellanicus of Lesbos says seven years old, and Diodorus ten. Either way, you get the picture. He abducted and raped her. Repeatedly. She was only returned when her twin brothers, Castor and Pollux, came to Athens to rescue her. That's how she began her career of romantic fascination. Being raped by a seventy-year-old."