The Summer of Secrets, page 1
Praise for
‘Full of raw emotion’
SUNDAY POST
‘I was engrossed and hanging on each and every word. This book will leave a lasting impression . . . [and is] one that I will find myself recommending to everyone I meet’
REA BOOK REVIEWS
‘We race to the end with our hearts thumping . . . Terrific stuff ’
LOVE READING
‘A beautiful, heartbreaking story of sacrifice and love in the face of evil’
FOR THE LOVE OF BOOKS
‘Full of raw emotions, family vendettas, hidden secrets and three very strong women’
THAT THING SHE READS
‘The perfect blend of fiction with historical fact’
SHAZ’S BOOK BLOG
‘Day by day the story unfolds . . . secrets are revealed, feuds revisited and three generations of women reunited’
PEOPLE’S FRIEND
‘Beautiful and evocative’
IT TAKES A WOMAN
‘I loved it’
ECHOES IN AN EMPTY ROOM
‘I absolutely LOVED, LOVED, LOVED this book . . . I can’t wait to read more from this hugely talented author’
GINGER BOOK GEEK
‘A very dramatic novel, one you cannot put down’
SOUTH WALES ARGUS
‘Thoroughly researched and very well written’
THAT THING SHE READS
‘The author writes in such an evocative and emotional style that the reader cannot help but get totally lost in the book’
KIM THE BOOKWORM
‘Attention to detail is second to none . . . I cannot praise this book enough and just hope that the author writes another book soon’
BOON’S BOOKCASE
For my darling husband, Berty.
Go back to Castellorizo,
gaze at the iridescent sea,
and find your soul.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Acknowledgments
Historical Notes
About the Author
Copyright
The Scent of Summer
Honeysuckle, jasmine and sweet frangipani,
Rose petals, lemon blossom and pine.
I’ll mix you a perfume, a scent to entrap him,
Bewitching, yes, simply divine.
Wear it when you pass the man of your dreams,
He who sets your heart on fire.
With a dab of my scent, in every right place
His attention will turn to desire.
But beware, fair maiden, once that spell is cast,
Understand, only you he’ll adore.
Once he’s tasted your scent, he will never relent
No matter how much you implore.
He’ll come to your bed, in the darkest of hours,
You’ll think him a dream of the night.
With his hand on your breast, he’ll submit to your nest,
You’ll become his divine Aphrodite.
So, Goddess, consider the risks that you face
If you capture the man you hold dear.
Be ready to lose all the others you love,
For the sake of that one Buccaneer.
Patricia Wilson
PROLOGUE
BABA
Castellorizo, Greece, 1948
‘OUT! OUT!’ THE MIDWIFE YELLED, slapping the young soldier around the head.
He staggered outside, passing Mamá and María on the way. Babá rolled up with a backgammon board and the neighbours provided a small table and two chairs.
‘It’s time you learned to play tavli, young man,’ Babá said sitting in the same spot as he had twenty-two years earlier, on the day of the earthquake. He glanced at the sky, then the ground, then at the soldier. Remembering his brother, the flamboyant Uncle Kuríllos, Babá looked towards heaven once more and crossed himself.
‘Are you all right?’ the soldier asked. ‘You look a little peculiar.’
Babá blinked. ‘What do they call it, déjà vu? I was sitting right here on this spot, playing tavli with my brother, while Mamá lay inside there giving birth.’ He nodded at the door. ‘That was the exact moment when our lives were changed forever.’
The soldier glanced around, then stared at the ground apprehensively. ‘What happened?’
‘María’s the best one to answer that question, I was preoccupied the events indoors. Couldn’t even keep my mind on the game. Me and my brother had been up all night, waiting, playing tavli.’ He shook his head and sighed. ‘If only I’d known what lay ahead . . .’
CHAPTER 1
MARIA
Castellorizo, Greece, 1926
THE VILLAGE WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET that morning, holding its breath, waiting. With a length of old clothesline, eleven-year-old María skipped towards the plateía, the village square and home. After a night with her two old grandmothers in the next bay, she could not wait to see if she had a baby brother or sister.
People passing through the plateía glanced at the neat, Venetian-style house where two men sat at a small, round, table outside the door. Everyone waited for the father’s yell of delight when his wife gave him a son.
From the back of the village, Mimi appeared in her long sooty clothes, black headscarf and spotless white apron. She led the blacksmith’s mule loaded with olive wood for the furnace. The beast’s hooves clattered on the cobbles. Mimi peered at the house, then threw an enquiring glance at a neighbour who swept outside her own home. The woman shook her head. Mimi studied the two tired souls then called María as she skipped by.
‘Ela! María, I’ve a cheese and spinach pie and a bottle of water for the men. Come to the smithy and collect them.’
‘Yes, Kyría Mimi.’ María headed over to her father and uncle and interrupted their game of tavli with news of breakfast. They looked up from the backgammon board and smiled wearily.
*
A slight breeze fanned the Greek village of Megisti, the only village on the island of Castellorizo. Fingers of golden sunlight shimmered into back alleys and through open doorways. The iridescent turquoise water was flat as glass, vividly reflecting the brightly painted fishing boats.
‘Kaliméra, Kyría Ioánna.’ Good morning, Mrs Joanna, María cried as she passed the old woman at the end of the row of houses. At dawn each morning, Kyría Ioánna tugged on a lanyard to raise the Greek flag. The octogenarian stood with her chin jutting defiantly and feet glued to her own precious plot of earth. This act of blatant defiance was punishable by a term in prison, enforced by the occupying Italians.
‘This is forbidden, take it down,’ a soldier, new to the island, ordered.
She cupped her hand around her ear and squeaked at him, ‘Aye? What’s that? Speak up, young man! Can’t you speak Greek? Where are you from?’
‘Where’s your husband? He must take that flag down!’
‘Eh? My husband, you say? My husband has gone to God. He was shot by the Italians in the Great War!’ Overcome by loud and hysterical crying, she beat her chest, pointing at the soldier and directing her voice at the sky. ‘You hear that, Adoni? He asks me where you are. I told him, Heaven. Where his sort put you all those years ago, leaving me a widow with six children and eighteen grandchildren!’ Then, throwing herself against the soldier’s chest, she continued to screech and dribble against the front of his uniform. ‘Oh my dear God, tell me – what will I do in my old age without my Adoni?’
After the Italian had removed the Greek flag himself, Kyría Ioánna stared after him with narrow eyes. She would simply hoist another the next morning and repeat the performance. Eventually, much to everyone’s glee, the new soldier would ignore her and the flag. She would be left in peace until a new recruit arrived on the island and the whole pantomime would start again.
María passed a small boy who shouldered his home-made wooden gun and marched boldly back and forth outside his family’s charming, balconied house.
‘Good morning, Sergeant Niko,’ María called. The child stopped, stood to attention and saluted María. She returned the courtesy, then chuckled as she continued.
All t
‘Castellorizo is ours!’ adults cried at special occasions, raising their wine glasses and staring out over the sparkling sea. ‘Our people may travel the globe and settle at the other end of the earth, but their souls remain here awaiting their return.’
*
‘If you win another game, I might have to kill you myself,’ said Bartholomeus Konstantinidis, Babá for short. Uncle Kuríllos threw the dice. Double six; he was destined to win.
‘Don’t worry, at least you’re lucky in love,’ Kuríllos muttered. The men’s eyes met, Babá’s full of sympathy while his brother’s displayed an unspeakable sadness. The tavli session had started when Babá’s wife went into labour at midnight. Apart from the mayor, Babá had the largest belly on the island, proving the wealth of the Konstantinidis family. He wore a short black beard that was so neat it appeared to be painted on and a black, tasselled kerchief casually wrapped around his polished pate like a napkin around a boiled egg. His black shirt and beige jodhpurs were the traditional clothes of fierce warriors that lived in the Cretan mountain villages of Anogia and Zoniana – where his grandfather came from.
Keeping Babá company was his younger brother, long-haired Uncle Kuríllos wearing his signature tan-leather gilet with a deep money pocket on the inside. Under his waistcoat, this skinny, big-hearted rebel wore colourful embroidered braces from Switzerland and a fine woollen vest from Albania. His striped, baggy breeches came from Turkey and his soft black leather boots were a gift from Babá, made for him by an expert cobbler in the high, snow-capped mountains of Crete. Seldom seen without a smile on his tanned face, Uncle Kuríllos smoked his customary cigarillo. Slung on the back of his sea-grass and olive-wood chair was his baglama, a three-stringed, spoon-like lute. Famed for his expertise with this traditional Turkish-Greek instrument, he only played when he was too drunk to walk, or too sad to speak. Nobody ever asked about the source of his sadness for fear of seeing tears on his face.
*
María, Babá’s only child, returned from the blacksmith’s with the cheese and spinach pie and set it on the table next to the tavli board. She loved her uncle fiercely and could listen to his tales for hours.
‘Will you tell me how you lost your eye, Uncle?’ she asked, standing close to his chair and running her finger over his redundant eyelid.
Kuríllos, a colourful character with one eye, had the other stitched closed in a permanent wink that suited his mischievous persona. His smile widened and displayed even, tobacco-stained teeth. He patted his thigh and she scrambled onto his lap and flung her arms around his neck. He laughed. ‘How many times have I told you, María, one hundred . . . two hundred?’
‘I know, lots of times, Uncle, but it’s such a good story. I’m afraid if you stop telling me, you’ll forget how it goes.’
He looked across at Babá and laughed again. ‘All right then . . . I lost my eye while fishing – dynamiting for grouper near the blue grotto cave.’ He nodded and squinted through his good eye. ‘Unfortunately, due to some very delicious whisky that I drank with your father at Manoli’s christening the night before, I had a painful head. Because of this, I misjudged the distance. The boat lurched at precisely the wrong moment and boom! The stick of explosive bounced off the cliff face as it detonated. A flying shard of flint, spinning like fury, headed straight for my face and though I ducked, it whipped my eye out and hurled it into the sea.’
As he cried, ‘Boom!’ he suddenly jigged his knee, throwing her off balance so she almost fell. She squealed and clung to him and he and Babá forgot their tiredness and laughed.
‘Go on, go on!’ María cried, knowing the story so well. ‘About the grouper . . .’
‘Well, yes. I hope that grouper ate my eye!’ Kuríllos yelled in mock anger, shaking his fist towards the sea. ‘Because if I ever catch the maláka poutána I’ll eat both of his!’
María’s eyes popped, thrilled to hear such bad language every time he repeated the story. Uncle Kuríllos also had a limp, which no one was to ever mention.
Kuríllos threw his dice across the tavli board. ‘It had better be a boy after waiting all this time,’ he muttered at his brother. ‘And after all those silver tamatas we hung under the icon of the Blessed Virgin.’
‘Of course it’ll be a boy. Even the Mother of God knows how important that is. Imagine if she’d had a girl, what then? Anyway, the Blessed Virgin couldn’t ignore the weight of so much silver.’
Babá and Uncle Kuríllos had made each effigy larger and more detailed than the last. Both men were clearly convinced they could bribe the Mother of God with precious metal and a prayer.
A loud groan came from indoors. Inside, midwife Dorothéa attended to Mamá who lay on a beautiful multicoloured quilt on the low table in the centre of the room.
The men turned to stare at the doorway, then at each other. María scrambled off her uncle’s knee and took her father’s hand. ‘Oh, I hope it’s a girl, Babá,’ she said.
‘No, no, I have a beautiful girl already, don’t I? The baby has to be a boy, María.’
‘What will you call him?’ Kuríllos asked.
‘Yeorgo.’ George. He smiled. ‘After our father, of course.’
‘I wish Mamá would hurry up,’ María said. ‘It’s not much fun waiting, is it?’
‘Why don’t you go and sit with your grandmothers?’ Babá suggested. ‘Then we can finish our game of tavli.’
*
María skipped across the square, a few metres from the island’s magnificent harbour. Under a broad-leafed rubber tree, she saw the two ancient grandmothers sitting shoulder to shoulder on a low wall. Mikró Yiayá and Megáli Yiayá, Little Grandmother and Big Grandmother.
‘Hello, my María,’ they cried together.
María grinned, climbed onto the wall beside them and kicked her heels against the hewn grey stones. Glancing sideways at her grandmothers, one wizened and bent as a dried twig, the other, round and pillowing as risen dough. Identically dressed in their widow’s weeds they crocheted and prayed, only pausing to admire the broad shoulders of Simonos the fisherman, as he pulled his cart into the square.
Simonos, fond of the two old dears, doffed his cap and called, ‘Good morning, ladies,’ in a gesture of respect. ‘You’re both looking beautiful today!’
They laughed, remembering his grandfather and wishing they were sixteen again, but soon calmed down and returned to their crocheting and supplications.
‘Blessed Virgin, have mercy,’ Mikró Yiayá whispered. ‘We are martyrs to our granddaughter’s dowry chest.’
María laughed, delighted to see the fine lace that would one day belong to her.
Megáli Yiayá added, ‘Give us a grandson today, so we can toss these blistering crochet hooks and abandon the bridal fabrics, once we’ve finished María’s wedding linens.’
‘Lord, hear our prayers,’ they said together. María copied them when they crossed themselves three times. The old women turned their attention back to the role of white silk lace that would trim María’s marital bed linen and table runners in five years’ time.
*
A peal of bells rang out from the church, marking nine o’clock. ‘Almost there,’ midwife Dorothéa muttered. ‘Two big pushes and your baby will be born, Mamá.’ Everyone called María’s mother Mamá, though her full name was Mamáríta.
The baby knew nothing but the safety of Mamá’s watery womb. Although that abode had become cramped of late, the infant was reluctant to leave. Elbows and knees dug in. Tiny fists hung on with determination that would stay with the child into its adult life and beyond. However, nature was a powerful mother and no force for an unborn baby to deal with.
*
María scrambled back onto her uncle’s knee as another powerful groan resonated from indoors. The men paused the boardgame to listen for an infant’s cry. Babá’s fist clasped the dice and hovered over the tavli board. He met his brother’s gaze, offering yet another silent prayer for a boy.
CHAPTER 2
MARIA
Castellorizo, Greece, 1926
THE DAY OF MAMA’S CONFINEMENT was also the eve of Orthodox, All Saints Sunday.
