Mary looked at Elgin, who did not see her, but was shading his eyes from the sun with his hand as he stared at the corner of the building. Mary looked up, following his gaze. Blocks of concrete stuck out like jagged teeth in the empty space where the cornice had been ripped from its anchor.
THE JOURNEY TO ATHENS had not been a pleasant one. Why was it that she had twice agreed to travel on tumultuous seas in miserable ships when she was in the early stages of pregnancy? Had she not learned her lesson the first time around on the trip to Constantinople? This time was none the more pleasant for having had the experience before. But it could not be helped. As bad as her condition was, she was nowhere near as sickly as Elgin. A month ago, on the day of their third anniversary, Dr. Scott had had to amputate a good portion of Elgin’s nose. It sickened Mary to see her beautiful husband so disfigured, but after months of blistering and wounds about the throat and nose that drained incessantly, she agreed with the doctor that there was no alternative.
Elgin had gotten sicker as the months in Constantinople wore on. He blamed the dampness and the coal fires that were everywhere in the city, and allowed that he required a warmer climate in which to heal. Mary could not deny that her husband was terribly ill, but she also knew that when he lobbied to be in a warmer climate, he meant that he wanted to go to Greece to supervise the crucial and final stages of his Athenian project.
She sensed that it was all that he thought he had left. She’d had no idea of how diplomatic service used up the diplomat for the purposes at hand and then discarded him. It had been a delicate and serious mission from the start, and a less experienced and skilled man could easily have destroyed the nascent relations between England and the Ottomans. Elgin’s great diplomatic dexterity, combined with Mary’s ability to charm the most powerful Turks in the empire, had saved the alliance more than once. But after the French were expelled from Egypt, the Sultan saw no more reason to remain alienated from his former allies, and the English saw no reason to placate their ambassador.
The British didn’t seem to want to reward Elgin. He requested that the enormous sums of money that he and Mary had contributed to the war effort in Egypt be reimbursed and, astonishingly, was turned down. When that plea failed, he requested a peerage, thinking that this was the very least that the British government could do for him. If granted, he would automatically become a member of the House of Lords and could circumvent the elections. In this too he was turned down. It seemed that neither Parliament nor king bore under any responsibility to their ambassador.
In December of the previous year, after the truce with France, a young French officer, Horace François Bastien Sébastiani, arrived in the city, announcing himself as Bonaparte’s cousin and his representative in the Levant. Mary and Elgin received him graciously. Though it was difficult to stop thinking of the French as enemies, Mary was easily taken with his rakish handsomeness and urbane manners. He always wore tight breeches, a colorful waistcoat, heelless shoes, and a cravat tied several times around his neck. His hair was long. “Unkempt!” Elgin declared, but Mary informed him that the style had come into vogue with the Revolution. Sébastiani and Mary were the same age, and the young Frenchman seemed intent upon impressing her.
Besides blatant fascination with Mary, Sébastiani began to put ideas into the heads of both Lord and Lady Elgin. The young marshal, soon to be on his way back to France, tantalized Mary with the idea of how glamorous it would be for her if Elgin—now that there was peace—were to be appointed the next ambassador to France. She had never been to Paris, and he was whetting her appetite for culture and luxury with exotic tales of that city. With Elgin, Sébastiani painted grand scenarios of the rewards that would be due the ambassador that the British government would now require in order to do business with Napoleon.
Elgin was intrigued with the idea of going to Paris. One evening at a ball, however, he was so distraught at Sébastiani’s attentions to Mary that he marched right up to him and said, “My dear sir, may I remind you that the lady’s husband is in the room!”
Sébastiani had laughed, answering that it was Elgin’s presence that allowed him to pay such tribute to Mary. “It is the truly wicked man who attends to the ladies behind the husbands’ backs.”
Then, much to Elgin’s dismay, Sébastiani began to visit Mary at times when he knew that Elgin would not be present. Mary was annoyed at her own fascination with the officer’s charms at a time when her husband, ill and disfigured, needed her more than ever, but she could not resist Sébastiani’s sophisticated company. His racy stories and jokes, and the way that he bothered to kiss her hand whenever possible, charmed her. One night, after avoiding Elgin in the bedroom for weeks and weeks, she felt so guilty for her attraction to Sébastiani, and for her repulsion for the bleeding, oozing wound that sat in the middle of Elgin’s once-handsome face, that she made wild love to her husband. That little mistake had landed her here, in the middle of the sea, pregnant once again and wishing for death as the ship rocked in the waves.
But before they’d set sail, her flirtation with Sébastiani had culminated in an exchange that left her feeling at once sordid, frightened, and titillated. The bold young Frenchman had gone so far as to suggest that once Elgin’s appointment was accomplished, he and Mary could begin an affair.
“It is destiny,” he said, his brown eyes dancing as he ran them up and down her body. He had a way of flipping his long, dark hair that one would have thought would have made him seem effeminate, but only made him more desirable.
She was about to pour him another glass of wine, but she demurred. “I think you’ve had enough,” she said, trying to sound reprimanding. She withdrew the bottle. He grabbed her arm and rose to his feet, kicking the chair behind him, toppling it backwards. Mary felt a thrill rush up her spine.
“Why should you deny yourself a lover?” She could feel the heat of his breath as he whispered into her ear. “Your husband has had women.”
“How can you say that?’ she said, pulling away.
He sighed. “The evidence is on his face. The nose, the sores. It is syphilis, n’est-ce pas?”
“No, it is rheumatism, aggravated by a strange virus he contracted in Turkey,” she said, conscious that the shrill tone in her voice made her sound more defensive than convincing.
“Mais oui,” he said, sneering. “In France, we call that virus ‘la syphilis.’”
He was laughing at her. He must have thought that she was naïve.
“I have heard these ugly rumors, monsieur. My husband’s enemies put them about all the time. I did not think that you were among their number. I assure you that I have addressed this with both my husband and his doctor. Lord Elgin is being treated for his ailments with mercury, which agrees with him, but which can also eat away at the flesh.”
“Ah, mercury. The same medication given for syphilis.” He would not let it rest. “Come, Lady Elgin—Mary, Marie—I never argue on the opposite side of beauty. Let us be frank with one another. English men do as they please. Why not the women? When you come to Paris, you will not be able to resist me. I am even more charmant on my home terrain.” He kissed her hand, and she was too flustered to stop him.
“Sir, you must go now,” she said, not looking at him.
He smiled, giving her the famous French shrug, so dismissive, yet so attractive at the same time. She turned away from him and marched upstairs, where she took a strong dose of laudanum, to make sure that his insinuations did not bring on a choking attack, and went directly to bed.
The next day she demanded a private conference with Dr. Scott. She told him what Sébastiani had said, and she insisted that he be frank with her. “After all, my own health is at risk.”
“Mercury is used for many ailments, Lady Elgin,” he said, taking her hand and patting it in his reassuring manner. “It may exacerbate some of Lord Elgin’s symptoms, but it is giving him relief as well. You must ignore these prurient suggestions. Why must the French insinuate their loose morals upon the rest of us?”
/> Sébastiani left Mary grateful that she had thwarted his advances—she would never take a lover!—but admittedly, with a growing desire to see Elgin made ambassador to France.
“If we’ve been able to make a strong impression in Constantinople, imagine what we could accomplish in Paris,” she said to Elgin. “The British government owes you, my darling. If you press just a little for the appointment, I am sure it will be ours.”
Elgin liked the idea. He thought that he was just the man to help sustain the delicate peace between Napoleon and the English. That is, if Bonaparte did not resent him for interfering with France’s acquisition of certain antiquities.
“If the little Corsican is any sort of gentleman—which I doubt—he won’t hold it against me that I sent my man to confiscate that fantastic inscription,” Elgin said.
As soon as the French were defeated in Egypt, Elgin had sent his secretary William Hamilton to enter negotiations with General Jacques-François de Menou for the antiquities that Napoleon’s team of archeologists had accumulated. Elgin knew that many pieces had yet to be transported back to France, and there was one that he desperately wanted to claim for the United Kingdom.
Hamilton was instructed to keep an eye out for an invaluable inscription, which Napoleon’s scholars in Egypt had called the Rosetta Stone. The expert linguists and archeologists declared that this dedication, written in three languages, could be used to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Elgin had been miffed since Napoleon announced his acquisition some three years prior.
“It serves him right. He could not resist making his grandiose claims when the stone was discovered. Good boy, that Hamilton. He discovered that General Menou was hiding the precious item, covered with blankets, in a warehouse, trying to pass it off as his private property,” Elgin said, every bit the proud mentor.
Mary remembered when she had to promise Hamilton that he would not starve in their service. The young secretary had come a long way in the past two years.
“Hamilton promptly informed Colonel Turner, who seized the stone and is bringing it to England as we speak,” Elgin continued. “When it’s presented to King George, I shall be certain to let him know that it was my secretary, acting in my service, who rescued it for England.”
Given His Majesty’s latest dismissals of Elgin’s requests, Mary doubted that King George would care, but she let Elgin have his moment of fantasy. It occurred to her for the first time that her husband considered himself in a private race with Napoleon in these matters. She was happy to let him participate, but the price for his ambitions was escalating.
To transport his collections from Athens, Mary had bought Elgin a ship, the Mentor. The vessel had already sailed from the port of Athens with ten boxes of molds taken from the Parthenon, several extremely heavy marble torsos found from the excavations under the western pediment of the building, and a portion of the frieze. The loaded ship was on its way to pick up William Hamilton from Alexandria, and could not be used to transport the Elgin family to Athens. Despite the expense of travel, once the house had caught fire, Elgin would not be deterred from visiting Athens, no matter how Mary protested on account of her condition. She easily acquiesced, knowing that in the face of the insults from the Crown, which he had served so well, Elgin needed more than ever for his legacy—as the man who enriched the English empire with ancient treasures and monuments and elevated all aspects of its arts—to be preserved.
ON MARCH 28, AFTER leaving directions with the staff who would oversee the repairs on the embassy, the Elgins set sail in the direction of Athens. Traveling with Lord Bruce, who was barely two, and little Mary, almost six months old, they were accompanied by Masterman; the servant Andrew, whom Mary had just disciplined for giving her toddler son wine for breakfast; and Calitza, the fat nurse who now tended to little Mary. Elgin was in a favorable mood, looking forward to seeing the progress in Athens and desperate for dry warmth, but Mary’s old battle with seasickness, coupled with the familiar morning sickness, began immediately. The horrid voyage brought the old fears into Mary’s mind again. Being stuck in the rank cabin of another vessel, vomiting into a bowl while Masterman held back her hair, bathing her face in vinegar, and taking thrice-daily doses of laudanum reminded Mary not only of that horrible initial voyage to Constantinople, but of her near-death experience in labor. Did that time on the ship contribute to the difficulty she had in delivery? She asked Dr. Scott, who said that it was possible, but not probable. Yet he could not explain why her second child, conceived and carried on dry land, had come into the world with much more ease.
“Second babies are often easier to deliver,” Dr. Scott said.
“What about third babies?” she asked. She felt as if these questions were an admission of timidity, a thing she prided herself on not possessing. But once she was pregnant and on the open seas, memories of the delivery of beautiful little Lord Bruce began to haunt her once more.
This was not a topic she could share with Elgin.
“At least pregnancy is a normal condition, and a temporary one,” he said once, touching the small mask that he had to wear all the time now to cover what remained of his nose.
Henceforth, she realized, there would be no complaining about her own health. Still, she had to be adamant about certain things. Dr. Scott traveled with them to Athens, as Mary would not trust the safety of her unborn child, nor of her living ones, to foreign doctors. Further, though Napoleon’s navy, for the time being, had been drastically diminished by Lord Nelson, the seas were rife with pirates, so the journey to Athens was made with a small convoy of vessels. Near Patmos, they were caught up in storms, which swept two crew members overboard and flooded the ship’s quarters. For two weeks Mary and the others tolerated the damp, smelly conditions. When the dank cabins and the ship’s motion became unendurable, she insisted they camp for a night, though she would have to travel by donkey—so unpleasant when one was expecting—to arrive at a campsite. They spent one blissful evening away from the vessel, but hearing stories of pirates in the vicinity carrying off women, they rushed back to the ship fearing for the safety of the children.
Another night, they traveled six hours over land to arrive at a village, where Mary was elated that they would finally sleep comfortably, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by fleas, which had infested her bed as well as the children’s. The next morning, she was informed that they were still a nine-hour ride from Athens. Back on the asses they went, with the children carried in baskets, firmly attached. Luckily, the little ones slept almost the entire way, probably from exhaustion. The night before, they had been unable to sleep, what with fleas dancing in their hair.
Mary was delighted to finally reach Athens on April 3, having no idea of the sorry conditions, the turmoil, and the potential danger that would greet them on the mainland. Riding into the city, they passed two lone columns, remnants of the aqueduct built by Hadrian.
“Shall we have a look around?” Mary asked.
“Thieves are hiding everywhere, waiting to rob unsuspecting travelers,” said one of their guides. “Everyone must stay close.”
She could not have imagined the state of degradation in Athens. She had realized, of course, that the Athens of the Golden Age that she had studied in the ancient sources was long diminished, both by age and by its many invaders and occupiers. But nothing prepared her for that once-mighty city’s condition of utter ruin.
The city’s population had dwindled to barely one thousand inhabitants, half being Greeks, half Turks, with a few Albanians. The streets were narrow, crooked, and unpaved. There were no hotels or inns, so that the Greek who served as the English consul in Athens had to vacate his home to accommodate the Elgins. Mary had inquired about accommodations and taverns for her staff, but was told that none existed.
Sparse dwellings dotted the landscape until the streets narrowed and the buildings became more densely set. A Doric portico stood over the unpaved street. Houses looked uninhabited. Except for the storks
flying lazily overhead, the streets were desolate. A lone seagull, the neighborhood’s sole citizen, nested on a severely tarnished bust of some Caesar or other—one of Greece’s many conquerors—in the nook of an old building.
Upon arrival at the home of the Greek who was acting as the English consul, along with refreshments they were served the information that the country was ripe for a revolt against its longtime occupiers.
“We are sick to death of their oppression,” the man said. “Our language is no longer the official language of our country. They make our children learn the foreign tongue. Our daughters are sent at early ages to the harems. We are not free, in most cases, to practice our religion openly.”
“If the French can throw over their long-standing monarchy, surely we can eject these foreigners from Greek soil,” said another man.
Reverend Hunt, who had been on a tour of the Peloponnese with the twofold mission of seeking antiquities that might be removed and taking the political temperature of the country for Elgin, chimed in. “Secret societies are being formed everywhere. The leaders are in league with the Russians, who, as you know, would love to topple the Ottomans once and for all.”
The next morning they set out for the Acropolis. “First-rate weather,” Elgin said. It was warmer and drier out than the climes they’d encountered on their travels, and Elgin was in a cheery disposition, turning his face up to the warm sun, and gazing up at the monuments on the hill he had dreamed about for so long. That mighty and ever-present rock that had presided over the city since time out of mind still lorded over the terrain. The bones of the Parthenon and the other ruins stood against the morning light, columns rising majestically from the center of the hill.
“One must look upon it with awe,” Mary said as they approached, and Elgin smiled and patted her hand. At last they had arrived at the place he had dreamt of for so long.
But as soon as he saw the condition of the citadel, his mood began to shift.