Kiss the Moonlight

  Barbara Cartland

  Kiss the Moonlight

  Dedicated to the ex-Ambassador to the Court of St. James, His Excellency General Nicholas Broumas and his lovely wife, Clary, whose warmth, generosity and affection to my son and me was everything that we had hoped to find in Greece.

  Author's Note

  In 1899 the French archaeologists moved the village of Delphi and discovered underneath it the wonders of the bronze Charioteer, the altar of Athena and many statues and friezes of great beauty.

  1 visited Delphi in 1976 and found that the Shrine to Apollo had a strange, ecstatic serenity which is indescribable. The Shining Cliffs, rising protectively behind the broken columns, look over the loveliest view in Greece.

  The Temple of Athena, surrounded by olive trees, has a mystic charm which is different from any other Temple I have visited.

  In 1837 an historian wrote that the whole of Greece was infested with brigands whom the Bavarian Government were unable to hold in check. This was one of the causes of the revolution of 1862 which drove King Otho from his throne.

  Chapter One

  1852

  Athena came out of her bed-room onto the balcony to stand looking at the vista in front of her.

  Every time she saw a view in Greece she thought it more beautiful than it had been a moment before, and yet it seemed impossible that anything could be lovelier than the blue sea of the Gulf of Corinth.

  The setting sun turned the coast-line to gold until in the distance it became purple merging to misty grey where it met the sky.

  Athena knew that behind the Palace the sun would be throwing fantastic shadows on the mountains against which the Summer Palace of the Princes of Parnassus gleamed like a pearl.

  Everything, she felt, had a mystery and a wonder about it that she had never envisaged, even though she had been sure that Greece would in fact be even more breathtaking than her wildest dreams.

  All her life she had longed to come to Greece.

  Ever since she had been a small child her grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness, had regaled her with stories of the Greek gods and goddesses; of Pan who blew his pipes under the olive trees, and of Zeus who sat in all his majesty on the summit of Mount Olympus.

  While other children had read the story of Cinderella, of Hansel and Gretel, Athena had read of the adoration in which her namesake was held.

  Not that in England anyone thought of her as Athena.

  To her family she was Mary Emmeline, and to the outside world she was Lady Mary Emmeline Athena Wade, daughter of the 4th Marquess of Wadebridge, and as such an important social figure.

  The sun sank a little lower and now the whole sea was suddenly shimmering with glittering gold and the light from it combined with the translucence of the sky seemed almost blinding.

  She could remember her grandmother saying: "The Greeks were never tired of describing the appearance of light. They loved the glitter of moist things, of stones and sand washed by the sea, of fish churning in the nets, and their Temples glowed like pillars of light."

  "It is what I feel," Athena thought.

  She compared the sunset with this morning when she had risen very early to see "the rosy fingered dawn" and imagined that the whole body of Apollo was pouring across the sky, flashing with a million points of light, healing everything he touched and defying the powers of darkness.

  Apollo was very real to her for, as her grandmother had explained, he was not only the sun but the moon, the planets, the Milky Way, and the faintest stars.

  "He is the sparkle on the waves," the Dowager Marchioness had said, "the gleam in one's eyes, the strange glimmer of fields on darkest nights."

  Athena had remembered the lines from Homer, "Make the sky clear and grant us to see with our eyes."

  She had read all she could find of the Greek poets who wrote of the light. She found herself often murmuring the lines from Pindar's ode—■

  "We are all shadows, but when the shining comes

  from the hands of the gods,

  Then the heavenly light falls on men."

  Would the heavenly light ever fall on her, she wondered; and if it did, what would she feel?

  The setting sun carried a prayer from her heart, but Athena was aware that time was passing and she would be expected downstairs for dinner.

  She turned from the balcony, crossed her bed-room floor and stepped onto the landing at the top of the stairs.

  Again there was beauty to make her draw in her breath—the curve of the stone staircase, the mosaics against the white walls, the golden light coming through the long windows through which she could see the brilliant flowers which filled the green garden.

  She paused instinctively because it was so beautiful, and as she did so she heard a man's voice below say in Greek:

  "Do you mean to tell me that you have brought me no news of His Highness ? "

  Athena knew who was speaking. It was the deep, rather hoarse voice of the Prince's Comptroller, Colonel Stefanatis.

  "No, Sir," a younger voice replied. "I have been to all the places you instructed me, but there was no sign of His Highness."

  There was a pause before the Colonel said:

  "You called at Madame Helena's Villa?"

  "Yes, Sir. She left a week ago and the servants have no idea where she has gone."

  There was another pause which Athena felt was somehow pregnant with meaning. Then the Colonel said as if he spoke to himself: "It is an impossible situation—impossible!" Suddenly he said sharply:

  "You had better rest, Captain. I shall require you to start out again tomorrow morning." "Very good, Sir."

  Athena heard the young officer's heels click as he drew himself to attention and he walked away, his spurs jingling as he moved across the marble floor.

  With difficulty she forced herself to descend the stairs slowly and in an unconcerned manner, as if she had not overheard what had been said.

  But if the Colonel thought the situation was impossible, to her it was incredible.

  She had come to Greece from England because it had been arranged by her grandmother that she should marry Prince Yiorgos of Parnassus.

  It was the result of negotiations with which the Dowager Marchioness had been concerned for nearly two years.

  Although Xenia Parnassus was only a distant relative of the Prince, the ties of family and the blood of her ancestors pulsated in her veins and never let her rest.

  Extremely beautiful she had taken English Society by storm from the moment the 3rd Marquess of Wadebridge searching for Grecian antiquities had brought back with him not only a collection of vases, statues and urns, but also a wife.

  The Greeks were extremely profligate with their treasures and, as Athena had learnt in Athens, not particularly interested in what they called "Ruins".

  From the time that Lord Elgin had committed what Lord Byron had raged over as "vandalism" in shipping the Acropolis Marbles to England, dozens of aristocrats with a yearning for culture had journeyed to Greece to see what they too could pillage from the past.

  "Dull is the eye that will not weep to see

  Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed,"

  Lord Byron had thundered, but no-one listened.

  Country houses in England and museums all over Europe were packed with the spoils from Greece.

  Xenia Parnassus, once she had become the Marchioness of Wadebridge, had never returned to her own country.

  She had however presented her adoring husband with six extremely good-looking children, although none of them had measured up to her idealised standard of beauty until her grandchild, Athena had arrived.

  The Marchioness had known when she first saw the baby that it was what she had always wanted; a
child who resembled the goddess who meant more to her than all the saints in the Church calendar.

  "I insist that she is given the name of Athena," she said firmly.

  The family protested: the Wades had never gone in for fancy names and the Marquess's first daughter must be christened Mary, as was traditional, then Emmeline after a famous ancestor whose portraits hung on the walls at Wadebridge Castle.

  It had taken a great deal of persistence for the Marchioness to get her way but finally her granddaughter had been christened Mary Emmeline Athena. The third name however was never used except by the Dowager Marchioness and her granddaughter herself.

  "Of course I want to be called Athena, Grandmama," she had said when she was nine years old. "It is a pretty name, and I think the name Mary is dull and Emmeline is ugly."

  She wrinkled her small nose, which even when she was a baby had the straightness of the statues which the Dowager Marchioness took her to see in the British Museum.

  From then on the goddess Athena was as real to her as a member of her own family.

  The Dowager Marchioness told her of Athena the Warrior shaking her spear; of Athena the companion, almost the lover; of Athena of the household presiding over the young weavers—the goddess of all things fair who gazed down on her charges with maternal solicitude.

  Most important of all there was Athena, the Virgin, immaculate and all powerful, resolved to protect the chastity of her city, who was also Athena, goddess of love.

  "It was she to whom the women prayed when they wished for children," the Dowager Marchioness explained.

  "And she brought them love ? " Athena asked.

  "Because they loved and were loved they had beautiful children— beautiful, both in body and in soul," the Dowager Marchioness replied.

  The rest of the family found the Dowager Marchioness as she grew older somewhat of a bore with her predilection for Greece and her endless stories of the ancient gods.

  But to Athena they were always absorbing, always exciting.

  It therefore seemed quite natural when as she reached eighteen her grandmother told her that her marriage had been arranged with the Prince of Parnassus and she would journey to Greece to meet him.

  Vaguely she had thought from the various things her grandmother had said that this had been intended for some time and was why the Dowager Marchioness continually extolled the virtues and the charms of a young man she had never seen.

  "He is strong and handsome; a good Ruler and a man whom his people trust," the Dowager Marchioness said positively.

  Because he was Greek, Athena was perfectly prepared to believe that he was all these things.

  But here she was in the Prince's Palace having been sent out to meet him and knowing that inevitably the story would end with wedding-bells—but there was no Prince.

  It was perhaps, Athena thought, her Aunt's fault that he had not been waiting as they had expected on the Quay when the ship which had carried them from the Port of Germeno had docked in the small harbour of Mikis.

  He had written a charming letter to her Aunt, Lady Beatrice Wade, saying he was unfortunatelyunable to meet them in Athens but would be waiting to greet them at his Summer Palace as soon as they wished to join him.

  It had been at first planned that they should stay in Athens after their arrival from England for at least three weeks.

  There were many members of the family for them to meet and King Otho asked that the future bride of the Ruler of one of the States should be presented to the Court.

  Greece after winning her independence had later become a Kingdom in 1844 and King Otho, although he was a Bavarian, had shown himself a little more interested in the people over whom he ruled but he was extremely unpopular.

  But even King Otho, Athena thought, could not at this moment con jure up a Prince who had mysteriously disappeared at the moment he should be meeting his future bride.

  Lady Beatrice had quite a lot to say on the subject when they were alone.

  "I cannot understand it, Mary," she said sharply. "And I cannot believe that your father would consider it anything less than an insult that the Prince should not be here to greet you."

  "He obviously expected us to stay longer in Athens," Athena answered.

  "I sent a messenger ahead of us," Lady Beatrice replied, "and quite frankly I do not believe a word of the story that he is visiting some obscure part of his territory where they cannot get into communication with him."

  "Then where else can he be?" Athena asked a little helplessly.

  If it was not an insult, it was hardly an encouraging welcome for a bride who had come all the way from England to meet her bridegroom.

  As she spoke, however, she looked out to sea.

  She had learnt on arrival in Athens that the Prince wore a beard, and when she seemed surprised she had been told it was because he had served in the Greek Navy and like most Greeks was more at home on the sea than he was on the land.

  Perhaps he had sailed to the opposite shores, Athena told herself, or even through the narrow Straits forming the western exit of the Gulf into the Ionian Sea.

  There he could have visited some of the many islands and perhaps forgotten who would be waiting for him on his return to the Palace.

  Yet however much one explained it away it was still a depressing thought, and now three days had passed since she and her Aunt had arrived and there was still no sign of the Prince.

  The conversation she had heard from the landing offered an explanation she had not suspected previously.

  Who was Madame Helena ?

  Athena had been brought up in the country and was very ignorant of the intrigues and loose behaviour of the social world; but she could not have read Greek mythology without realising that love had preoccupied the gods and they had been continually enraptured by beautiful women.

  For the first time since Athena had set out from England she questioned whether her marriage was likely to be a happy one.

  She had been so swept away by all her grandmother had told her, by the stories which had coloured her youth and by her own instinctive yearnings for romance, that until now she had not really considered the Prince as a man.

  He had been a mythical figure as attractive, and in a way as awe-inspiring, as one of the gods themselves.

  But she had not envisaged him as a human being, a man to whom she would belong, a man with the desires and emotions of other men.

  Now suddenly, as if she awoke from a dream, Athena realised that the Prince was flesh and blood, and never having seen her how could he be interested in her as she had been interested in him primarily because he was Greek?

  To him there was nothing particularly romantic and certainly nothing mysterious or ethereal about her being English.

  He would not have invested her with the mystery which to her surrounded the gods, and indeed he might dislike the very thought of her as his wife.

  It was almost as if Athena had been drenched with cold water when she least expected it.

  There had been a dream-like quality about the whole arrangement, the voyage from England, her arrival in Athens and most of all her first sight of the Palace.

  Never had she believed anything could look so exquisite or that the mountains behind it could be so impressive.

  She knew they were part of the Parnassus Range which extended northwest from the borders of Attica rising between the Boeotian plain and the sparsely inhabited northern shores of the Gulf of Corinth, the whole region rich in mythology and history.

  Further to the east lay the rugged slopes of Mount Kitheron which was associated with the haunts of Pan and his goat-like satyrs and the sacred Mount Helicon where the nine Muses dwelt.

  Far to the north in the centre of Greece stretched the mountain range which held as its highest peak the sacred Mount Olympus from where the gods themselves had once ruled.

  Lady Beatrice was not concerned with mountains.

  "As I have already told you, Mary, " she said insistently, "
this is the Summer Palace of the Princes of Parnassus. I believe their main Palace which is near Lividia is far more impressive, although sadly In need of repair."

  There was a note in her Aunt's voice which told Athena all too clearly why she was accentuating the fact at this particular moment.

  The whole reason that the marriage had been arranged, and her grandmother had not deceived her on this score, was that the Prince of Parnassus was in need of money.

  The centuries of oppression under Turkish rule and the protracted struggle for freedom had left the country poverty-stricken and had taken its toll of what had once been a rich and proud family.

  The obvious course for the Prince was to marry a rich wife, and that was where the Dowager Marchioness had played her trump card in the shape of Athena.

  "When I was young," she said to her granddaughter, "it would have been deemed impossible for the head of our family to marry anyone who was not a Royal; but times have changed and the Wadebridges are one of the oldest and most important families in England."

  "Yes, Grandmama," Athena had agreed dutifully.

  "What is more," the Dowager Marchioness continued, "you are singularly fortunate in that you were left so much money by your godmother."

  She had smiled in a way which was almost mischievous. "I must take the credit for that, Athena, because your father and mother were very much against giving you an American godmother!" Athena had laughed.

  "So it was you who chose such a good fairy for me?"

  "She indeed proved to be that," the Dowager Marchioness replied, "but who would have imagined that even though she had no children she would have made you her sole heiress?"

  "Who indeed!"

  "Money carries with it a great deal of responsibility, as I have always told you," the Dowager Marchioness went on, "and that is why, Athena, I can imagine nowhere where your fortune could be better spent than in Greece."

  Athena had agreed with her, and it had seemed, until this moment, almost as if she was marrying a country rather than a man.

  When she reached the hall the Colonel had moved into the Salon.