A Darker God (50 page)

“Good Lord!”

“Can
you
imagine, William?
Nibbling
bits of Percy?”

“Well, no. I’ve never found coppers particularly palatable. Tell you what, though … If your imagination should prove not to be up to it, I’m perfectly prepared to offer up selected parts of me for experimentation.”

The world of the historical detective writer is an
Alice-in-Wonderland
one. Where does reality end and imagination take over? If you’ve done your job, the reader should hardly be able to spot the interface. It’s all a sleight of hand, but there are rules—largely self-imposed in these forgiving literary times—and fair play is my censor.

The background, the setting, and the political storms growling in the background are always as accurate as I can make them. They generate the story. The peripheral historical figures encountered did or said or behaved as described, in accordance with their generally accepted character. Where they interact with the heroine or hero, as one or two do in this book, we are inviting them into make-believe and must treat them with absolute respect.

Three characters from the past inspired this tale, and their historical paths may be traced by anyone who, as I do, enjoys bolting down the rabbit-holes of history to see where they will lead me.

The earliest is the constantly magnetic figure of Alexander of Macedon. His homeland, the traditional state of Macedonia to the north of Greece, became a battlefield during the early years of the twentieth century. I had always envisaged this as a mysterious land of myth, the preserve of Dionysus the Dark God, the haunt of eagles and the home of Greek-speaking warrior tribes, and here I was, at one moment in my research, having this same land laid out for me with a soldier’s eye for terrain. Brigadier Sandilands of the Northumberlan
Fusiliers describes with a jaundiced eye the deprivations of the British Salonika Army, who found themselves sequestered here in 1915 and set to fight the Bulgarians (whom they admired) and the mosquitoes (which they feared greatly). Disease-ridden, badly supplied, and with not much grasp on the overall strategy, hundreds of British engineers were busying themselves digging trenches across an archaeologically rich land. And the Tomb of Alexander, much sought after, has to this day not been located … Another rabbit-hole opens.

The two other historical characters who influenced the book are a twentieth-century couple: a prime minister of Greece and his first lady.

He is Eleutherios Venizelos, world-renowned revolutionary, politician, and hero, and there is a wealth of information on him. For the
Times of London
, he was “The Great Cretan;” for
Time
magazine (in 1928) he was “greatest of living Greeks, a nimble old man of ready wit.”

But it is his wife, the glamorous and mysterious Helena, who fascinated me. In 1921, in London, the rich and stylish Mayfair lady Helena Schilizzi, half Greek, half English, married the much older man she had been in love with for ten years. Londoners, who have always loved a good romance, gave the couple an enthusiastic send-off as they left to spend their honeymoon in California.

Back home in war-ravaged Europe with her husband taking a leading role on a dangerous political stage, Helena proved herself to be an inspiring consort. Intelligent, energetic, and fearless, she shared her husband’s public life, knowing that he was perpetually the target for an assassin’s bullet. She was the moving force behind many good works, sponsoring valuable scholarships (still in use today), endowing hospitals, and providing health care for the thousands of needy who flooded into the capital, Athens. A role model for any first lady!

She would have been much admired by Laetitia Talbot, I thought. And there it is—the descent into Wonderland. Helena, the historical character, steps—literally—onstage in my story. She appears gracious, beautiful, brave, and charismatic, as she was in life, and in borrowing her corporeal essence for a few pages, I trust I have not offended her Shade.

The attempted murder described in the book is an invention but not an outrageous imagining, as the reader may guess, judging by the following account of an actual attack which was to occur some six years after the event in the book. We have Venizelos’s own crisp words to a
Times
reporter:

The chauffeur had been shot through the arm. Helena had, in silence, been struck by four bullets. She recovered. Both Helena and her husband would die of natural causes three years later.

Three historical characters and one chilling historical theme provided the impetus for the book. The theme is a heart-breaking one. The events briefly described, which constitute a motive for a crime, actually happened. Considering their devastating impact on millions of lives and not so long ago, these events are little known outside the Balkans.

The affair is named, inoffensively enough, “The Population Exchange Between Greece and Turkey” of 1923. A treaty was ratified in Lausanne by top European politicians. What this devastating document authorised was nothing less than ethnic cleansing and the displacement of over two million people. Selection for enforced emigration was by religion. Half a million Muslims living in Greece (largely in the north and Macedonia) had to move to Turkey. One and a half million Greek Christians (in addition to the million who had already been thrown out or massacred) were expelled from Turkey.

Thousands set out in boats to cross the Aegean, leaving everything behind. Of those lucky enough to survive the diseases and privations of the sea voyage, many arrived homeless and destitute, abandoned by their political masters. For years, Greece, the much smaller state receiving vastly disproportionate numbers, was unable to cope with the huge influx, and the streets of Athens were crowded with Turkish-speaking immigrants who had to resort to begging to survive. In the rescue efforts, an international force—largely from the United States-worked valiantly to provide medical help. The accounts of an American doctor, Esther Lovejoy, are at once horrifying and inspiring. This tough lady was a survivor of the massacre of Smyrna, where she, the only foreign doctor left in the city, was caught up, taken for a Greek, and clubbed by a Turkish rifle. She records watching helplessly one day in 1923, as a refugee ship listed badly off the coast, its captain signaling:
Four thousand refugees. No water. No food. Smallpox and typhus fever aboard
. Esther and her colleagues were there on the quay-side to rescue
those who were eventually able to stagger off the ship when it docked.

I’m listing below three works that readers intrigued by this little-known period of history, which has such chilling lessons for our own age, might like to dip into.

    
Salonika, City of Ghosts
by Mark Mazower. Harper Perennial, 2004.

    
Certain Samaritans
by Doctor Esther Lovejoy. MacMillan, 1933.

    And a wonderful book on the population transfers, objective, sensitive, and meticulously researched, is:

    
Twice a Stranger
by Bruce Kent. Granta Books, 2006.

BARBARA CLEVERLY
is an award-winning writer of eleven novels, including the acclaimed Joe Sandilands series, which includes the
New York Times
notable book
The Last Kashmiri Rose
. She lives in Cambridge, England.