“He watched her for some time, and then she came onto the shore. She was naked—no bathing costume, no bathing shoes, nothing to protect her from the wind or the stones. Only in her hand she carried a very old mirror made of polished metal. He thought she must have stolen it from some ancient tomb or grave, because he knew by looking at it that it was very old, not a thing a young girl swimming alone off the coast of Rhodes would have!
“She knew he was there watching her—and when she came ashore she walked directly toward him. The water behind her like blue snow and the full moon in the sky. She was beautiful—of course she was beautiful! An hallucination, they are always lovely! Young, and very slender, and though she had long legs she was not tall. So that you inherited from Luciano. And she had wide hips and high breasts and long hair that was very dark and curled, and huge golden eyes, though how he could see the color of her eyes I do not know because it was dark. Even in the moonlight it is dark. He said she was not like any woman he had ever seen before—not because of her beauty, but because of how she was put together. Such small bones, and so delicate but very very strong.
“And so he lay with her, and in the morning she was gone. He never saw her again.”
Angelica stared at him. “But what about me! He must have seen her again, if she was—if she was really my mother!”
“Luciano says he did not.” Her uncle gave her a piercing look. “Perhaps he never saw her in the first place, eh? But some months later he was in London, staying with friends, and in the middle of the afternoon there came a knock at the door and when they opened it—pfff! There was a very nice basket from Harrods, and a blanket, and inside the blanket was a baby—and with the baby there was that—”
He pointed to the tarnished-looking mirror on the table before her: a round mirror the size of her two hands, carefully wrapped in chamois leather, and decorated with an octopus’s elegant dark coils. “A fairy story, eh? I do not believe all of it, but you are here, so—” With a heavy sigh he settled back upon the divan beside her, and raised his glass in a toast. “Cede Deo.”
“But who was she? What was her name?”
Her uncle smiled sadly. “I do not know, my darling. We none of us know. Not even your father—”
“But he must—you said—”
“Perhaps he does know. But he has never told me. He said only what I have told you already—that she was beautiful, and also that she sang, and he found her songs very interesting. They were old songs, he told me, very old songs. I am only a financier and so I do not know about these romantic things! But he said they were in a language we no longer remember.”
“But isn’t there a picture? Or a birth certificate? Somebody has to have something—”
Her uncle’s eyes widened. “My dear! You must not be so distressed—here, I will have Giuletta bring you some warm milk and biscòtti—”
Angelica looked stricken. “No—I mean, isn’t there anything else? A photo, something—”
Her uncle pursed his lips, frowning. “I can show you what your father showed me,” he said at last, and went over to the tiers of bookshelves that covered one wall. “Here—”
He pulled a heavy volume from the wall. Angelica craned her neck to read the title.
Kietisch-mykenische Siegelbilder.
Lavender-smelling dust rose when her uncle blew upon the cracked binding. “One of his books. See?”
She glimpsed a brightly colored plate of a vase, the pink clay fragments carefully repaired and painted with a wide-eyed octopus.
“Like yours, eh?” Her uncle cocked his head at the mirror on the table. “Scungilli. But this is what I want to show you—”
Beckoning Angelica closer he held up the book to display another illustrated plate. “He showed me this, afterward. Many years later. He said it reminded him of his woman from the seashore.”
It was part of a fresco showing the profile of a woman’s face. A woman in a blue-and-white-striped dress bedecked with scarlet ribbons, her long hair elaborately arranged; her huge eyes accented with kohl, bee-stung lips brightly rouged. In her hand was a sort of axe, double-bladed, the heads crescent-shaped. At the bottom of the plate were words printed in German. Beneath them Angelica recognized her father’s casually elegant script—
“She is lovely, eh?” her uncle murmured.
“Y—yes.”
The image had none of the inhuman coldness of Egyptian paintings. Angelica could easily imagine this girl laughing, eating bread, dancing; smoking too much and drinking too much wine and falling into bed and—
“Yes, she’s very lovely,” whispered Angelica—
Very lovely, and she looks just like me.
“So you have seen her,” her uncle said after a long silence. Angelica could feel him staring at her, but she refused to look up. What remained of her energy she was saving to keep tears of outrage and fear and disbelief from spilling down her cheeks. With a sigh her uncle closed the book and set it back upon the shelf. “But in your studies, Angelica, your archaeology—such a famous image, you would have seen her someday and noticed the resemblance, even without me.”
Downstairs in the main kitchen she could hear footsteps, Giulleta giving orders to one of the maids to bring mostaccioli and a glass of marsala to Signorina. Her uncle finished his aquavit. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and carefully folded the metal mirror back into its chamois. “But perhaps I should not have spoken of this now. Forgive me, Angelica—”
He kissed her cheek, his breath smelling of Sen-sen and spirits, and pressed the soft packet holding the mirror into her hands. “But you do have this, and your mother’s necklace—” He inclined his head delicately toward her throat.
“What do you mean?” One of her hands closed tightly about the mirror in its chamois wrapping; the other touched the lunula beneath her scarf.
“Your necklace.” Her uncle leaned back against the divan and closed his eyes. “Eh! This rain is exhausting.”
“My necklace?”
He opened his eyes and nodded. “Yes—the other thing she had, besides the mirror. Your father said she wore a silver necklace, like the new moon—like the labrys the priestess carries—”
He glanced at the bookshelf. “—the double axe. I am glad he gave the necklace to you; I cannot stand these family secrets. Ah! Your aunt has sent us some wine and biscòtti di cioccolata! She knows we must make you fat!”
“But he didn’t—I didn’t—” Angelica stammered, then grew silent as a maid entered the dim room. She had not told her father of the lunula. She had worn it casually here in her uncle’s house, because she had been certain no one would recognize it; but now…
“Thank you,” her uncle said to the maid. “Here, Angelica—”
And he had handed her a crisp dark crescent on a tiny silver plate, a little smiling mouth like the new moon. “Now, my darling—eat.”
Now, nearly twenty years later at Huitaca, Angelica gazed into the same mirror. When she turned her head, the metal’s blurred surface showed her the same profile she had glimpsed so many times since then: on postcards at Knossos and Iraklion; in art histories and volumes of mythology; in the publicity photographs that adorned her books. The bull-priestess, the moon-priestess, the author at home. Angelica Furiano.