Free 1 The Assassins' Village by Faith Mortimer Page A

reprisal against seditious talk. How could they possibly compare Mr Leslie with those people?  He was not like that.
    She met him in the most unusual places, along a deserted track leading to an unused vineyard, or a rocky outcrop at the far end of a wooded little coppice. Best of all, Antigone loved the old stone house at the bottom of the river valley where the water ran pure and sweet along the parched banks when the autumn rains came. On a shady little grassy knoll she would sit at his feet whilst he stood and read from little hard-backed books. His words were strange and Antigone had little hope of understanding the old English in the texts. But how the sound of his voice flowed over her, enveloping her, strong, clear, beautifully modulated, it entranced a young girl who believed he was on a pedestal alongside Adonis. Sometimes he would bring paper and sketch her against a backdrop of olive trees and the towering mountains behind, capturing the whole essence of Antigone and her beautiful country.
    If Kristiakis or her rough uncles had but known Antigone was meeting a man without a chaperone, a stranger and a foreigner , she would have been in trouble. And so, she would creep out, unseen, except for a goat or two and meet Mr Leslie as if by chance in a quiet secluded spot. The young Antigone was hopelessly and deeply in love…
     

 
     
    Chapter 8. Sunday morning
     
    Nor time nor place did then adhere.              
    Macbeth. Act 1 Scene 7
     
    The contents of the mug stood cooling on the desk, the froth from the milk slowly dissolving to leave a flat, scummy white lid of a meniscus.  Diana, seated at her study desk looked lost in thought. Earlier, the sunny room had seemed to beckon her. As she’d slipped into the comfortable, familiar chair she flipped open her notebook, taken up her pencil and within minutes the story had her completely absorbed. She wrote rapidly. She sat there for more than three hours, as sheet after sheet became covered with her open-handed writing. As the words came fast, Diana found she was almost having trouble keeping up with the pace. To her, writing was like launching a child out into the wide world. The child was conceived in passion, and brought to life with the most agonising birthing pains. After weeks and months of nursing to a tentative adolescence, it was then finally moulded into maturity.
    Notwithstanding the change in genre, Diana knew this book was going to be different. For a start, Diana felt that all the characters were around her in form and colour. She could reach out and almost touch and feel them. As her pencil scratched, they marched seemingly without effort across the paper. She had the beginnings of a plot formulated in her mind, but mostly she was working on a multitude of anecdotes that she’d gathered from the villagers hereabouts. Parts of stories, scraps of gossip, and hearsay all loosely knitted together that she would eventually unravel into one cohesive yarn (sic).
    Some days she wasn’t able to write much at all. She would find herself struggling to put the tales into the right places of her unfinished novel. Other days, the golden days, she could see the story stretching like a bright shining road leading the way towards its rightful end. Diana paused in her writing to take a glance at her wristwatch. With an exasperated sound she put down her pencil and noticed the coffee. Where had the time gone? It felt like only five minutes since she’d walked into the study to jot down a few ideas. It was nearly time to get ready to go out for Sunday lunch at the local taverna. She took a sip from the coffee mug. Yuk, it was stone cold and she’d gone off coffee in this hot weather anyway. Diana could only vaguely remember Steve bringing it into her. He would be mad at her, saying she’d become too dehydrated and end up sick for not drinking enough. Not that coffee was a good hydrator, but he was right concerning fluid intake. He was also concerned