A Calculated Risk by Katherine Neville (best time to read books .txt) 📗

trickling streams. These fed the vegetation, which sprang everywhere: wild iris, periwinkle, blue, purple, and yellow, scattered through the dark green foliage. Good thing none of this was revealed on the auction gallery’s photo, or Omphalos wouldn’t have gone for the measly $13 million that was Lelia’s winning bid.

Atop the cliff, at the brink of the volcano—at twelve hundred feet or more—we could see down the entire sharp face of black rock to the clear glassy water below, so transparent it seemed to be cut of aquamarine. Even at this distance I could make out schools of colorful fish moving among the shallow shoals. And at the edge of the farther point, there lay the castle.

Lelia wasn’t exaggerating when she called it that. Made of ocher stone, it was encircled by crenellated walls enclosing the interior courtyard. Lelia said it was built by Venetians in the 1500s to defend the channel between the Turkish mainland and the more populous Greek isles. Though its past life was now a mystery, buried in the dust of centuries, she believed that Grimani—the powerful doge of Venice—might have spent his earlier years of exile in a place like this.

When at last we embarked at the sea, I saw the sturdy base of the castle nearly submerged in water, and the tower looming above, its one narrow window facing out to sea.

The moment we’d unloaded my things, I saw our horse swerve sharply away and trot off up the embankment.

“Our transportation is getting away!” I cried, starting to hoof it after him.

“Oh, he will come back,” Lelia told me with a laugh. “He go to the quai for the tourists when he is done—he is trained like a pigeon that always is going home.”

Home? I suddenly felt alone—abandoned—as if I were at the very brink of the earth, about to step off.

Lelia glowed with pleasure as she set the large platters of lamb and pilaf on the massive stone table. Pearl was helping her while Georgian sat on the parapet wall, her back to us, photographing the sea at sunset.

Lelia had filled the stone urns with flowers and stuffed wax candles into every crack of the crumbling stone walls. Though the castle had no electricity, thanks to her efforts the parapet glittered extravagantly.

Before us lay the sea, shaded from hot pink to dark vermilion in the waning light. The bloodred sun dropped below the cone of Omphalos, and the sea darkened to purple. A light dampness rose along the coast, but the candles contained us in their circle of warmth. I wrapped myself in the heavy uncombed-wool sweater Lelia gave me, and went to the wall where Georgian sat.

“It’s so lovely,” I told her. “I feel I’d like to stay here forever and leave everything far behind.”

“You’ll get over that,” Pearl said from behind me, “when you try to take your first bath with no plumbing.”

“Or your first shit,” agreed Georgian. “After a while, you get tired of hanging your ass out over the seawall.…”

“Please!” cried Lelia. “This is not the discussion romantique! Enough, Madame la Photographe. We must eat these dinners I am making here, no?”

Georgian clambered down from the wall in her heavy mirror-embroidered caftan—Lelia was wearing one in peacock blue, and Pearl was splendid in, of course, emerald green—and we all drew together around the stone slab that served as our table as Lelia poured the wine into hobnailed glasses. I spooned some vegetables over my lamb as Pearl spoke.

“Tomorrow I’ll take you to see what we’ve set up,” she said. “Tor should be back by then—we expected him today. But he phoned the office—the only switchboard on the island, I believe—and said there had been a slight glitch he needed to take care of.”

“In Paris?” I asked.

I was more than a little resentful that I’d come eight thousand miles at a snap of his fingers—just as I’d always suspected he expected of me—and he couldn’t be bothered to be here, too. But Pearl misunderstood my tone.

“I’m sure there’s nothing serious detaining him,” she said. “He’s very thorough, as I’ve learned while working with him all these months. In fact, I must thank you for sending me on this boondoggle. It’s the best experience I’ve ever had—all packed into a few short months. It’s changed my life. When we go back, I’ll be able to do whatever I like. Not many people get that sort of chance.”

“So you plan to go back, then?” I said a bit sarcastically. “I thought it might be so idyllic here, you’d all want to stay forever!”

“Not quite,” said Pearl, exchanging mischievous looks with Lelia. “We may all have to confront reality a bit sooner than we wish.”

Georgian woke me at dawn—her favorite hour—so I could watch the sunrise. Not among my favorite sights.

She was jostling me in the straw mattress that served as my bed on the floor of the tower. She threw a long, flowing caftan over my head and dragged me downstairs before my eyes were open.

“Coffee,” I mumbled incoherently, groping for the railing.

“You won’t need it,” she assured me, dragging me into the aching light of day. “Look at this magnificent day! Doesn’t it make your heart beat quicker to see nature in all its splendor like this? Doesn’t it thrill you just to be alive?”

“Coffee would make me happy,” I managed to stammer. “My eyes hurt. I don’t think people were meant to see all this magnificence before breakfast.”

“I’m taking you somewhere, and you’re not wriggling out of it,” she told me bossily. “After Tor returns from the mainland, we’ll all have lots of work to do. I may not get you to myself for some time.”

She took me by the arm and led me along a footpath that traversed the slope and then dropped toward the sea. At the base, a hot spring gurgled from the rock into a small dark pool in the lava rock—an oval basin suspended between sea and sky—then overflowed and tumbled in a waterfall