Free 1 The Assassins' Village by Faith Mortimer

perhaps dangerous to think that. She did enjoy her own company, but nothing escaped the sharp eyes of this somewhat fey creature. Antigone knew and saw all that happened in Agios Mamas. Her thoughts shifted from her brother to another male that had played a part in her life. Mr Leslie.
    Of course she knew Mr Leslie. He had lived here in the village for at least eight years, together with his somewhat shrewish wife. She knew Sonja was shrewish because she often followed them unnoticed when they took their dogs out walking and she had heard raised voices coming from an open window of their house. She knew Sonja’s strident accent against the modulated tones of Mr Leslie’s. Antigone had listened to Sonja bemoaning about Leslie’s two grown up children and the amounts of alimony he paid to his first wife by monthly arrangement. Alimony . What a strange word that had no meaning to the Cypriot way of life. If a couples’ marriage ended in failure, the husband would simply move out of his wife’s house and go back home to live with his parents.
    Other snippets of family and village conversation came to her as she spied on them and others, angry snatches about other women, annoying neighbours, or unruly children up from Limassol for the weekend. No, Antigone knew almost everything that happened in the village. Mr Leslie. Her expression changed as she remembered.
    What most people did not know or recall, was that she had known him before. During the so-called bad times, when he was known as Captain Leslie of the British Army and she just a young girl, barely sixteen years of age. Then, Antigone had been raven-haired and startlingly pretty. Slim wrists and ankles, an impossible tiny waist and perfect smooth olive skin enhancing her tallish willowy figure.
    Back in those days she possessed a beguiling air of naivety. Interested in everything around her with a refreshing openness and a mind like quicksilver, Antigone was always asking questions and absorbing the answers. Any strangers in her village opened her eyes to the wonders of another world. Here was another land whose customs were foreign and alien to her narrow way of life. Intrigued, she watched and listened, her grasp of the English tongue growing rapidly as she learnt about this new world. It was perhaps no surprise that the most instructive of teachers was Mr Leslie himself.
    Conceivably, Antigone saw him as a fantasy figure, this tall, slim but muscular, good-looking Army officer who strode magnificently around the comparatively humble village of her birth. She shyly listened to him giving orders to his underlings in a cultured voice, and of a timbre so unlike anything she was used to; villagers being naturally loud and raucous in their everyday talk. Antigone was startled by his good looks; impressed by his smartly pressed uniform, leather boots that shone from soft polishing cloths and intrigued by his gleaming scarab gold ring brought all the way here from Egypt. To the impressionable Antigone he seemed like - almost a God. It was as if one of the old Greek legends found impressed in the ancient mosaics had come to life, and its hero had stepped out to fill her world with his presence. To Antigone he was suave and debonair, so dashing . She refused to listen to what her brother Kristiakis and their uncles said about the damned British. How the British refused to see things the Greek Cypriot way, and were only here because it suited them to carry on taking what they wanted, plundering the country and ignoring the wishes of the rightful owners. The British were no better nor different than any one of the other countless peoples who had conquered Cyprus to use for their own aims. She remembered the old stories about the rounding up of the men of the villages. How the houses and outbuildings were searched for guns, bombs and outlaws to the Colonial rule. The men had been imprisoned for refusing to hand over the ‘terrorists’ and the village school had been closed as a