Free Strangers in Company by Jane Aiken Hodge

unlike, what she had felt back in London, the feelingof being always watched that had sent her to Dr. Brown. But there the haunting had been particular to her; here she felt it as general, heavy in the air, the breath of the Furies?
    â€œImagination,” said the professor robustly. “Come on up, Mrs. Frenche. I want to hear what that glib young man has to say about Schliemann.”
    â€œGlib?”
    â€œWell.” Fairly. “It’s splendid stuff, for the purpose, but I wouldn’t give him an A for the course. I wonder if he’ll even mention that Homer speaks of Agamemnon as from Tiryns, not Mycenae at all.”
    They found Mike haranguing a rather silent group scattered round a circle of stones deeply planted in the earth. “Not Agamemnon, of course,” he was saying. “Much earlier. And so is what they call his tomb—the beehive one we’ll be visiting presently.” Behind Marian, the professor grunted approval.
    â€œBut what an extraordinary place.” She turned to him as the rest of the party moved on up the hill. “It’s like Stonehenge.”
    â€œOnly different.” The tension of the place seemed to have got into Stella. Once again she spoke with a brusqueness that was very nearly rude.
    â€œWhich came first?” Marian turned to ask the professor but found that he had drifted away, binoculars at the ready.
    â€œBird watching.” Stella gazed after him with contempt.
    Marian fought irritation and won. “Let’s go on up.” She made her voice a little extra cheerful. “I want to know if Mike will show us the bathroom where Clytemnestra killed her husband.”
    â€œBloodthirsty, aren’t you, Mrs. F.?” Had Stella noticed the strain in Marian’s voice? Certainly the place was doing something very strange to her. Could she really be wishing that she had, simply, killed Mark all those years ago? It would have been easy enough, looking back on it. He was always taking pills. Pills to make him sleep, and pillsto wake him up. Pills that combined well with alcohol, and pills that were poison with it. One of those times when he had been in session and had called upstairs, “Hey, Mari, throw me one of those blue torpedoes,” she could so easily have thrown him the wrong one. She would have been a wealthy widow; the twins all hers. Horrible. She looked out over the rolling plain. How had Clytemnestra and Aegisthus felt when they faced each other over the knowledge of what they had done?
    There was no fatal bathroom. The site of the palace was open to the sky, and one must imagine the great hall where Clytemnestra and her lover feasted Agamemnon and Cassandra before they killed them.
    â€œBut Orestes’ stair still exists,” Mike told them. “And the postern by which he escaped after he killed his mother. You can go down if you want to, but it’s a long way, and besides, the Furies might get you the way they did him. I’d recommend the stairs to Perseus’ spring, myself; that’s really interesting, so long as you don’t mind the dark.” He felt in his pockets, produced an electric torch and a handful of candle stumps and gave a Greek exclamation that was evidently an oath. “I’m a fool. I forgot to get new ones. But these will do if we share them. Who’s for the long stair to the secret spring that made the palace of the Atrides impregnable?”
    â€œWhat do you think?” Marian turned to Stella. “I’m not mad about the dark myself.” Passionately, she hoped that Stella would agree with her. Even the entrance to the secret stair looked sinister, black against the bright sunshine.
    But Stella was already moving forward. “Oh, come on, Mrs. F.,” she said impatiently. “You can’t come all this way and then welsh out on the horrors.”
    Something odd about her tone? No time to think about it as Marian reluctantly joined the slowly