The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [32]
“How long will it be?” she asked.
Madame Yeventlov shrugged. Nobody knew. A journey that took four hours in normal times might now take four days, or even more. She told her they must disguise themselves well. The soldiers would be sure to be on the lookout for traitors like herself.
Missie stared at the bowl of soup, wondering how she, the daughter of an eminent Oxford professor, had come to be regarded as a traitor to a country that was not even her own.
It had all started out so gaily a little more than a year ago, just she and her father setting out on another of his jaunts around the world, this time to inspect the latest archaeological excavations in Turkey.
Professor Marcus Octavius Byron had been over fifty years old when he had married lovely young long-legged Alice Lee James, and he was astonished when, three years later, she had presented him with a baby girl they named Verity, but somehow, she had always been called just “Missie.” Alice Lee had died tragically of a chill that turned into pneumonia when Missie was only eight, and after that she and her father had become very close. There were no other living relatives. He was all the family she had left, and he adored her. He took her everywhere with him. By the time she was fourteen she had been on archaeological digs in Greece, inspected excavations in India, and helped uncover ancient tombs in Egypt. But home had always been the tall, shabby house on the quiet tree-lined street just around the corner from Trinity College in Oxford.
Her father always told her she was pretty, but she thought he was biased because she looked like her mother. She had Alice Lee’s deep violet-blue eyes, pale creamy skin, and sleek seal-brown hair, but Missie had always thought herself unfashionably skinny. Her cheekbones stuck out, her nose, though straight, was positive, and her mouth too generous. Besides, her long legs made her taller than most of the boys she knew.
In the Yeventlovs’ hut the soup lay untouched on the table as she closed her eyes, conjuring up her father’s familiar, comforting image. He was a tall, thin man, stooped from too many years hunched over the fine print of old history books. He had a gray beard and faded blue eyes, and he wore a tweed jacket, turning green with age, that when she snuggled close to him gave off a faint aroma of good cigars and fine old port.
Missie fought back the tears as she remembered how she would tap on his study door, listening for his usual grunted Latin “Intra. “He always smiled and put down his book to give her his full attention, but sometimes she would come bounding in from school to find him lost in the past and he would stare at her with such astonishment that she could swear he had forgotten all about her.
But the professor didn’t forget her schooling. After telling her she would be as well educated as any boy, he sent her off to a famous Oxford prep school where she was the only girl. It was only because of her father’s eminence as a scholar that she had been accepted, but she was used to a masculine environment and fitted in as easily as if she really were “one of the boys.” When she arrived home one day and announced that she intended to play rugger, even the professor had realized that perhaps it was time to send her to a school for young ladies. But he liked the fact that the boys’ school had given her “spirit.” She was afraid of nothing.
She sighed, opening her eyes and staring bewilderedly at the tiny shuttered room and the Russian woman baking bread. Suddenly childhood and Oxford seemed so very far away.
The professor had been planning their summer trip to Turkey for a whole year; there were important excavations taking place north of Ephesus with exciting new discoveries dating back to the fifth millennium. Despite her protests that in summer it would be searingly hot, that the mosquitoes would be swarming, that water would be scarce and their rations, so far from