This Rough Magic

by Mary Stewart

Genres: Literary Fiction; General Fiction; Mystery

Synopsis

The most beloved of Mary Stewart's romantic mystery novels, This Rough Magic is a tale of adventure, glamour and romance set against a stunning Mediterranean backdrop.

The pioneer of romantic suspense, Mary Stewart leads her readers on a thrilling journey to a Mediterranean island paradise in this tale of mystery, murder and intrigue, perfect for fans of Agatha Christie and Barbara Pym.

Lucy Waring, a young, out-of-work actress from London, leaps at the chance to visit her sister for a summer on the island paradise of Corfu, and what's more, a famous but reclusive actor is staying in a villa nearby. But Lucy's hopes for rest and romance are shattered when a body washes up on the beach and she finds herself swept up in a chilling chain of events.

I shuddered, and drank my coffee, leaning back in my chair to gaze out across pine tops furry with gold towards the sparkling sea, and surrendering myself to the dreamlike feeling that marks the start of a holiday . . .

(P)2018 Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

Release date: May 26, 2011

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 416

Sample

… A relation for a breakfast.

The Tempest. Act v. Scene 1.

‘AND if it’s a boy,’ said Phyllida cheerfully, ‘we’ll call him Prospero.’

I laughed. ‘Poor little chap, why on earth? Oh, of course … Has someone been telling you that Corfu was Shakespeare’s magic island for The Tempest?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes, the other day, but for goodness’ sake don’t ask me about it now. Whatever you may be used to, I draw the line at Shakespeare for breakfast.’ My sister yawned, stretched out a foot into the sunshine at the edge of the terrace, and admired the expensive beach sandal on it. ‘I didn’t mean that, anyway, I only meant that we’ve already got a Miranda here, and a Spiro, which may not be short for Prospero, but sounds very like it.’

‘Oh? It sounds highly romantic. Who are they?’

‘A local boy and girl: they’re twins.’

‘Good heavens. Papa must be a literary gent?’

Phyllida smiled. ‘You could say so.’

Something in her expression roused my curiosity, just as something else told me she had meant to; so I – who can be every bit as provoking as Phyllida when I try – said merely: ‘Well, in that case hadn’t you better have a change? How about Caliban for your unborn young? It fits like a glove.’

‘Why?’ she demanded indignantly.

‘“This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child,”’ I quoted. ‘Is there some more coffee?’

‘Of course. Here. Oh, my goodness, it’s nice to have you here, Lucy! I suppose I oughtn’t to call it luck that you were free to come just now, but I’m awfully glad you could. This is heaven after Rome.’

‘And paradise after London. I feel different already. When I think where I was this time yesterday … and when I think about the rain …’

I shuddered, and drank my coffee, leaning back in my chair to gaze out across pine tops furry with gold towards the sparkling sea, and surrendering myself to the dreamlike feeling that marks the start of a holiday in a place like this when one is tired, and has been transported overnight from the April chill of England to the sunlight of a magic island in the Ionian Sea.

Perhaps I should explain (for those who are not so lucky as I) that Corfu is an island off the west coast of Greece. It is long and sickle-shaped, and lies along the curve of the coast; at its nearest, in the north, it is barely two miles off the Albanian mainland, but from the town of Corfu, which is about half-way down the curve of the sickle, the coast of Greece is about seven or eight miles distant. At its northern end the island is broad and mountainous, trailing off through rich valleys and ever-decreasing hills into the long, flat scorpion’s tail of the south from which some think that Corfu, or Kerkyra, gets its name.

My sister’s house lies some twelve miles north of Corfu town, where the coast begins its curve towards the mainland, and where the foothills of Mount Pantokrator provide shelter for the rich little pocket of land which has been part of her husband’s family property for a good many years.

My sister Phyllida is three years older than I, and when she was twenty she married a Roman banker, Leonardo Forli. His family had settled in Corfu during the Venetian occupation of that island, and had managed somehow to survive the various subsequent ‘occupations’ with their small estate more or less intact, and had even, like the Vicar of Bray, contrived to prosper. It was under the British Protectorate that Leo’s great-grandfather had built the pretentious and romantic Castello dei Fiori in the woods above the little bay where the estate ran down to the sea. He had planted vineyards, and orange orchards, including a small plantation (if that is the word) of the Japanese miniature oranges called koùm koyàt for which the Forli estate later became famous. He even cleared space in the woods for a garden, and built – beyond the southern arm of the bay and just out of sight of the Castello – a jetty and a vast boat-house which (according to Phyllida) would almost have housed the Sixth Fleet, and had indeed housed the complicated flock of vessels in which his guests used to visit him. In his day, I gathered, the Castello had been the scene of one large and continuous house-party: in summer they sailed and fished, and in the fall there were hunting-parties, when thirty or so guests would invade the Greek and Albanian mainlands to harry the birds and ibexes.

But those days had vanished with the first war, and the family moved to Rome, though without selling the Castello, which remained, through the twenties and thirties, their summer home. The shifting fortunes of the Second World War almost destroyed the estate, but the Forlis emerged in post-war Rome with the family fortunes mysteriously repaired, and the then Forli Senior – Leo’s father – turned his attention once more to the Corfu property. He had done something to restore the place, but after his death three years ago his son had decided that the Castello’s rubbed and faded splendours were no longer for him, and had built a pair of smallish modern villas – in reality twin bungalows – on the two headlands enclosing the bay of which the Castello overlooked the centre. He and Phyllida themselves used the Villa Forli, as they called the house on the northern headland; its twin, the Villa Rotha, stood to the south of the bay above the creek where the boat-house was. The Villa Rotha had been rented by an Englishman, a Mr. Manning, who had been there since the previous autumn working on a book. (‘You know the kind,’ said my sister, ‘all photographs, with a thin trickle of text in large type, but they’re good.’) The three houses were connected with the road by the main drive to the Castello, and with each other by various paths through the woods and down into the bay.

This year the hot spring in Rome, with worse promised, had driven the Forlis early to Corfu. Phyllida, who was pregnant, had been feeling the heat badly, so had been persuaded to leave the two older children (whose school term was still running) with their grandmother, and Leo had brought her over a few days before I arrived, but had had to go back to his business in Rome, with the promise to fly over when he could at weekends, and to bring the children for Easter. So Phyllida, hearing that I was currently at a loose end, had written begging me to join her in Corfu and keep her company.

The invitation couldn’t have been better timed. The play I was in had just folded after the merest face-saver of a run, and I was out of a job. That the job had been my first in London – my ‘big chance’ – accounted partly for my present depression. There was nothing more on the cards: the agencies were polite, but evasive: and besides, we had had a dreadful winter and I was tired, dispirited, and seriously wondering, at twenty-five, if I had made a fool of myself in insisting against all advice on the stage as a career. But – as everyone knows who has anything to do with it – the stage is not a profession, but a virus, and I had it. So I had worked and scraped my way through the usual beginnings until last year, when I had finally decided, after three years of juvenile leads in provincial rep., that it was time to try my luck in London. And luck had seemed at last to be with me. After ten months or so of television walk-ons and the odd commercial, I had landed a promising part, only to have the play fold under me like a dying camel, after a two-months run.

But at least I could count myself luckier than the other few thousand still fighting their way towards the bottom rung of the ladder: while they were sitting in the agents’ stuffy offices here was I on the terrace of the Villa Forli, with as many weeks in front of me as I cared to take in the dazzling sunshine of Corfu.

The terrace was a wide, tiled platform perched at the end of the promontory where wooded cliffs fell steeply to the sea. Below the balustrade hung cloud on cloud of pines, already smelling warm and spicy in the morning sun. Behind the house and to either side sloped the cool woods where small birds flashed and twittered. The bay itself was hidden by trees, but the view ahead was glorious – a stretch of the calm, shimmering Gulf that lies in the curved arm of Corfu. Away northward, across the dark blue strait, loomed, insubstantial as mist, the ghostly snows of Albania.

It was a scene of the most profound and enchanted peace. No sound but the birds; nothing in sight but trees and sky and sun-reflecting sea.

I sighed. ‘Well, if it isn’t Prospero’s magic island it ought to be … Who are these romantic twins of yours, anyway?’

‘Spiro and Miranda? Oh, they belong to the woman who works for us here, Maria. She has that cottage at the main Castello gate – you’d see it last night on your way in from the airport.’

‘I remember a light there … A tiny place, wasn’t it? So they’re Corfu people – what’s the word? Corfusians?’

She laughed. ‘Idiot. Corfiotes. Yes, they’re Corfiote peasants. The brother works for Godfrey Manning over at the Villa Rotha. Miranda helps her mother here.’

‘Peasants?’ Mildly intrigued, I gave her the lead I thought she wanted. ‘It does seem a bit odd to find those names here. Who was this well-read father of theirs, then? Leo?’

‘Leo,’ said his loving wife, ‘has to my certain knowledge read nothing but the Roman Financial Times for the last eight years. He’d think “Prospero and Miranda” was the name of an Investment Trust. No, it’s even odder than you think, my love …’ She gave her small cat-and-canary smile, the one I recognised as preceding the more far-fetched flights of gossip that she calls ‘interesting facts that I feel you ought to know’ … ‘Actually, Spiro’s officially called after the island saint – every second boy’s called Spiridion in Corfu – but since our distinguished tenant at the Castello was responsible for the christening – and for the twins as well, one gathers – I’ll bet he’s down as Prospero in the parish register, or whatever they have here.’

‘Your “distinguished tenant”?’ This was obviously the bonne bouche she had been saving for me, but I looked at her in some surprise, remembering the vivid description she had once given me of the Castello dei Fiori: ‘tatty beyond words, sort of Wagnerian Gothic, like a set for a musical version of Dracula’. I wondered who could have been persuaded to pay for these operatic splendours. ‘Someone’s rented Valhalla, then? Aren’t you lucky. Who?’

‘Julian Gale.’

‘Julian Gale?’ I sat up abruptly, staring at her. ‘You can’t mean – do you mean Julian Gale? The actor?’

‘As ever was.’ My sister looked pleased with the effect she had produced. I was wide awake now, as I had certainly not been during the long recital of our family affairs earlier. Sir Julian Gale was not only ‘an actor’, he had been one of the more brilliant lights of the English theatre for more years than I could well remember. And, more recently, one of its mysteries.

‘Well!’ I said. ‘So this is where he went.’

‘I thought you’d be interested,’ said Phyl, rather smugly.

‘I’ll say I am! Everyone’s still wondering, on and off, why he packed it in like that two years ago. Of course I knew he’d been ill after that ghastly accident, but to give it up and then just quietly vanish … You should have heard the rumours.’

‘I can imagine. We’ve our own brand here. But don’t go all shiny-eyed and imagine you’ll get anywhere near him, my child. He’s here for privacy, and I mean for privacy. He doesn’t go out at all – socially, that is – except to the houses of a couple of friends, and they’ve got Trespassers Will Be Shot plastered at intervals of one yard all over the grounds, and the gardener throws all callers over the cliff into the sea.’

‘I shan’t worry him. I think too darned much of him for that. I suppose you must have met him. How is he?’

‘Oh, I – he seems all right. Just doesn’t get around, that’s all. I’ve only met him a couple of times. Actually it was he who told me that Corfu was supposed to be the setting of The Tempest.’ She glanced at me sideways. ‘I – er – I suppose you’d allow him to be “a literary gent”?’

But this time I ignored the lead. ‘The Tempest was his swan-song,’ I said. ‘I saw it at Stratford, the last performance, and cried my eyes out over the “this rough magic I here abjure” bit. Is that what made him choose Corfu to retire to?’

She laughed. ‘I doubt it. Didn’t you know he was practically a native? He was here during the war, and apparently stayed on for a bit after it was over, and then I’m told he used to bring his family back almost every year for holidays, when the children were young. They had a house near Ipsos, and kept it on till quite recently, but it was sold after his wife and daughter were killed. However, I suppose he still had … connections … here, so when he thought of retiring he remembered the Castello. We hadn’t meant to let the place, it wasn’t really fit, but he was so anxious to find somewhere quite isolated and quiet, and it really did seem a godsend that the Castello was empty, with Maria and her family just next door; so Leo let it go. Maria and the twins turned to and fixed up a few of the rooms, and there’s a couple who live at the far side of the orange orchards; they look after the place, and their grandson does the Castello garden and helps around, so for anyone who really only wants peace and privacy I suppose it’s a pretty fair bargain … Well, that’s our little colony. I won’t say it’s just another St Trop. in the height of the season, but there’s plenty of what you want, if it’s only peace and sunshine and bathing.’

‘Suits me,’ I said dreamily. ‘Oh, how it suits me.’

‘D’you want to go down this morning?’

‘I’d love to. Where?’

‘Well, the bay, of course. It’s down that way.’ She pointed vaguely through the trees.

‘I thought you said there were notices warning trespassers off?’

‘Oh, goodness, not literally, and not from the beach, anyway, only the grounds. We’d never let anyone else have the bay, that’s what we come here for! Actually it’s quite nice straight down from here on the north side of the headland where our own little jetty is, but there’s sand in the bay, and it’s heaven for lying about, and quite private … Well, you do as you like. I might go down later, but if you want to swim this morning, I’ll get Miranda to show you the way.’

‘She’s here now?’

‘Darling,’ said my sister, ‘You’re in the lap of vulgar luxury now, remember? Did you think I made the coffee myself?’

‘Get you, Contessa,’ I said, crudely. ‘I can remember the day—’

I broke off as a girl came out on to the terrace with a tray, to clear away the breakfast things. She eyed me curiously, with that unabashed stare of the Greeks which one learns to get used to, as it is virtually impossible to stare it down in return, and smiled at me, the smile broadening into a grin as I tried a ‘Good morning’ in Greek – a phrase which was, as yet, my whole vocabulary. She was short and stockily built, with a thick neck and round face, and heavy brows almost meeting over her nose. Her bright dark eyes and warm skin were attractive with the simple, animal attraction of youth and health. The dress of faded red suited her, giving her a sort of dark, gentle glow that was very different from the electric sparkle of the urban expatriate Greeks I had met. She looked about seventeen.

My attempt to greet her undammed a flood of delighted Greek which my sister, laughing, managed at length to stem.

‘She doesn’t understand, Miranda, she only knows two words. Speak English. Will you show her the way down to the beach when you’ve cleared away, please?’

‘Of course! I shall be pleased!’

She looked more than pleased, she looked so delighted that I smiled to myself, presuming cynically that it was probably only pleasure at having an outing in the middle of a working morning. As it happened, I was wrong. Coming so recently from the grey depressions of London and the backstage bad tempers of failure, I wasn’t able as yet to grasp the Greek’s simple delight in doing anyone a service.

She began to pile the breakfast dishes on her tray with clattering vigour. ‘I shall not be long. A minute, only a minute …’

‘And that means half an hour,’ said my sister placidly, as the girl bustled out. ‘Anyway, what’s the hurry? You’ve all the time in the world.’

‘So I have,’ I said, in deep contentment.

The way to the beach was a shady path quilted with pine needles. It twisted through the trees, to lead out suddenly into a small clearing where a stream, trickling down to the sea, was trapped in a sunny pool under a bank of honeysuckle.

Here the path forked, one track going uphill, deeper into the woods, the other turning down steeply through pines and golden oaks towards the sea.

Miranda paused and pointed downhill. ‘That is the way you go. The other is to the Castello, and it is private. Nobody goes that way, it is only to the house, you understand.’

‘Whereabouts is the other villa, Mr Manning’s?’

‘On the other side of the bay, at the top of the cliff. You cannot see it from the beach because the trees are in the way, but there is a path going like this’ – she sketched a steep zigzag – ‘from the boat-house up the cliff. My brother works there, my brother Spiro. It is a fine house, very beautiful, like the Signora’s, though of course not so wonderful as the Castello. That is like a palace.’

‘So I believe. Does your father work on the estate, too?’

The query was no more than idle; I had completely forgotten Phyllida’s nonsense, and hadn’t believed it anyway, but to my intense embarrassment the girl hesitated, and I wondered for one horrified second if Phyllida had been right. I did not know, then, that the Greek takes the most intensely personal questions serenely for granted, just as he asks them himself, and I had begun to stammer something, but Miranda was already answering:

‘Many years ago my father left us. He went over there.’

‘Over there’ was at the moment a wall of trees laced with shrubs of myrtle, but I knew what lay beyond them; the grim, shut land of Communist Albania.

‘You mean as a prisoner?’ I asked, horrified.

She shook her head. ‘No. He was a Communist. We lived then in Argyrathes, in the south of Corfu, and in that part of the island there are many such.’ She hesitated. ‘I do not know why this is. It is different in the north, where my mother comes from.’ She spoke as if the island were four hundred miles long instead of forty, but I believed her. Where two Greeks are gathered together, there will be at least three political parties represented, and possibly more.

‘You’ve never heard from him?’

‘Never. In the old days my mother still hoped, but now, of course, the frontiers are shut to all, and no one can pass in or out. If he is still alive, he must stay there. But we do not know this either.’

‘D’you mean that no one can travel to Albania?’

‘No one.’ The black eyes suddenly glittered to life, as if something had sparked behind their placid orbs. ‘Except those who break the law.’

‘Not a law I’d care to break myself.’ Those alien snows had looked high and cold and cruel. I said awkwardly: ‘I’m sorry, Miranda. It must be an unhappy business for your mother.’

She shrugged. ‘It is a long time ago. Fourteen years. I do not even know if I remember him. And we have Spiro to look after us.’ The sparkle again. ‘He works for Mr Manning, I told you this – with the boat, and with the car, a wonderful car, very expensive – and also with the photographs that Mr Manning is taking for a book. He has said that when the book is finished – a real book that is sold in the shops – he will put Spiro’s name in it, in print. Imagine! Oh, there is nothing that Spiro cannot do! He is my twin, you understand.’

‘Is he like you?’

She looked surprised. ‘Like me? Why, no, he is a man, and have I not just told you that he is clever? Me, I am not clever, but then I am a woman, and there is no need. With men it is different. Yes?’

‘So the men say.’ I laughed. ‘Well, thanks very much for showing me the way. Will you tell my sister that I’ll be back in good time for lunch?’

I turned down the steep path under the pines. As I reached the first bend something made me glance back towards the clearing.

Miranda had gone. But I thought I saw a whisk of faded scarlet, not from the direction of the Villa Forli, but higher up in the woods, on the forbidden path to the Castello.

Sir, I am vex’d.

IV. 1.

THE bay was small and sheltered, a sickle of pure white sand holding back the aquamarine sea, and held in its turn by the towering backdrop of cliff and pine and golden-green trees. My path led me steeply down past a knot of young oaks, straight on to the sand. I changed quickly in a sheltered corner, and walked out into the white blaze of the sun.

The bay was deserted and very quiet. To either side of it the wooded promontories thrust out into the calm, glittering water. Beyond them the sea deepened through peacock shades to a rich, dark blue, where the mountains of Epirus floated in the clear distance, less substantial than a bank of mist. The far snows of Albania seemed to drift like cloud.

After the heat of the sand, the water felt cool and silky. I let myself down into the milky calm, and began to swim idly along parallel to the shore, towards the southern arm of the bay. There was the faintest breeze blowing off the land, its heady mixture of orange-blossom and pine, sweet and sharp, coming in warm puffs through the salt smell of the sea. Soon I was nearing the promontory, where white rocks came down to the water, and a grove of pines hung out, shadowing a deep, green pool. I stayed in the sun, turning lazily on my back to float, eyes shut against the brilliance of the sky.

The pines breathed and whispered; the tranquil water made no sound at all …

A ripple rocked me, nearly turning me over. As I floundered, trying to right myself, another came, a wash like that of a small boat passing, rolling me in its wake. But I had heard neither oars nor engine; could hear nothing now except the slap of the exhausted ripples against the rock.

Treading water, I looked around me, puzzled and a little alarmed. Nothing. The sea shimmered, empty and calm, to the turquoise and blue of its horizon. I felt downwards with my feet, to find that I had drifted a little further out from shore, and could barely touch bottom with the tips of my toes. I turned back towards the shallows.

This time the wash lifted me clear off my feet, and as I plunged clumsily forward another followed it, tumbling me over, so that I struggled helplessly for a minute, swallowing water, before striking out, thoroughly alarmed now, for shore.

Beside me, suddenly, the water swirled and hissed. Something touched me – a cold, momentary graze along the thigh – as a body drove past me under water …

I gave a gasp of sheer fright, and the only reason I didn’t scream was because I gasped myself full of water, and went under. Fighting back, terrified, to the surface, I shook the salt out of my eyes, and looked wildly round – to see the bay as empty as before, but with its surface marked now by the arrowing ripples of whatever sea-creature had brushed by me. The arrow’s point was moving fast away, its wake as clear as a vapour-trail across the flat water of the bay. It tore on its way, straight for the open sea … then curved in a long arc, heading back …

I didn’t wait to see what it was. My ignorant mind, panic-stricken, screamed ‘Sharks!’ and I struck out madly for the rocks of the promontory.

It was coming fast. Thirty yards off, the surface of the water bulged, swelled, and broke to the curved thrust of a huge, silver-black back. The water parted, and poured off its sides like liquid glass. There was a gasping puff of breath; I caught the glimpse of a dark bright eye, and a dorsal fin cusped like a crescent moon, then the creature submerged again, its wash lifting me a couple of yards forward towards my rock. I found a handhold, clung, and scrambled out, gasping, and thoroughly scared.

It surely wasn’t a shark. Hundreds of adventure stories had told me that one knew a shark by the great triangular fin, and I had seen pictures of the terrible jaws and tiny, brutal eye. This creature had breathed air, and the eye had been big and dark, like a dog’s – like a seal’s, perhaps? But there were no seals in these warm waters, and besides, seals didn’t have dorsal fins. A porpoise, then? Too big …

Then I had the answer, and with it a rush of relief and delight. This was the darling of the Aegean, ‘the lad who lives before the wind’, Apollo’s beloved, ‘desire of the sea’, the dolphin … the lovely names went rippling by with him, as I drew himself up on to the warm rock in the shade of the pines, clasped my knees, and settled down to watch.

Here he came again, in a great curve, smooth and glistening, dark-backed and light-bellied, and as graceful as a racing yacht. This time he came right out, to lie on the surface watching me.

He was large, as dolphins go, something over eight feet long. He lay rocking gently, with the powerful shoulders waiting curved for the plunge below, and the tail – crescent-shaped, and quite unlike a fish’s upright rudder – hugging the water flatly, holding the big body level. The dark-ringed eye watched me steadily, with what I could have sworn was a friendly and interested light. The smooth muzzle was curved into the perpetual dolphin-smile.

Excitement and pleasure made me light-headed. ‘Oh, you darling!’ I said foolishly, and put out a hand, rather as one puts it out to the pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

The dolphin, naturally, ignored it, but lay there placidly smiling, rocking a little closer, and watching me, entirely unafraid.

So they were true, those stories … I knew of the legends, of course – ancient literature was studded with stories of dolphins who had befriended man; and while one couldn’t quite accept all the miraculous dolphins of legend, there were also many more recent tales, sworn to with every kind of modern proof. There was the dolphin called Pelorus Jack, fifty years ago in New Zealand, who saw the ships through Cook Straight for twenty years; the Opononi dolphin of the fifties, who entertained the holiday-makers in the bay; the one more recently in Italy, who played with the children near the shore, attracting such large crowds that eventually a little group of business-men from a nearby resort, whose custom was being drawn away, lay in wait for the dolphin, and shot her dead as she came in to play. These, and others, gave the old legends rather more than the benefit of the doubt.

And here, indeed, was the living proof. Here was I, Lucy Waring, being asked into the water for a game. The dolphin couldn’t have made it clearer if he’d been carrying a placard on that lovely moon’s-horn fin of his. He rocked himself, watching me, then half-turned, rolled, and came up again, nearer still …

A stray breeze moved the pines, and I heard a bee go past my cheek, travelling like a bullet. The dolphin arched suddenly away in a deep dive. The sea sucked, swirled, and settled, rocking, back to emptiness.

So that was that. With a disappointment so sharp that it felt like a bereavement, I turned my head to watch for him moving out to sea, when suddenly, not far from my rock, the sea burst apart as if it had been shelled, and the dolphin shot upwards on a steep slant that took him out of the water in a yard-high leap, and down again with a smack of the tail as loud as a cannon-shot. He tore by like a torpedo, to fetch up all standing twenty yards out from my rock, and fix me once again with that bright, humorous eye.

It was an enchanting piece of show-off, and it did the trick. . . .