A Most Extraordinary Pursuit Read online




  PRAISE FOR A MOST EXTRAORDINARY PURSUIT

  “A Most Extraordinary Pursuit is a most extraordinary new mystery—with a spirited heroine to root for, a disappearing duke, and a murder set on the isle of Crete. Steeped in gorgeous Edwardian detail with plot twists and turns galore, it’s a riveting read.”

  —Susan Elia MacNeal, New York Times bestselling author of the Maggie Hope series

  “Packed with unforgettable characters, exotic settings, and unexpected twists, A Most Extraordinary Pursuit is a delicious adventure from the first word to the last. This book has everything a reader could want: lyrical prose, swashbuckling action, and a heroine worth rooting for. Three cheers for Truelove!”

  —Deanna Raybourn, New York Times bestselling author of the Veronica Speedwell Mysteries

  “Juliana Gray brilliantly weaves historical detail, classical mythology, and unforgettable characters in this magnificent book. A triumph!”

  —Tasha Alexander, New York Times bestselling author of The Adventuress

  “If Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody and Deanna Raybourn’s Lady Julia had an intrepid younger sister, it would, without doubt, be the heroine of Juliana Gray’s new series, Miss Emmeline Truelove. A rollicking good adventure with just a whisper of the supernatural.”

  —Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author of the Pink Carnation series

  “I fell in love with the winsome, witty, and oh-so-clever Emmeline Truelove. Gray’s charming historical mystery flavored by a perfect romance is an utter delight. You’ll devour A Most Extraordinary Pursuit like a luscious box of chocolates, but without any guilt because it’s oh-so-smart.”

  —M. J. Rose, New York Times bestselling author of The Witch of Painted Sorrows

  RAVE REVIEWS FOR THE NOVELS OF JULIANA GRAY

  “Juliana Gray has a stupendously lyrical voice.”

  —Meredith Duran, New York Times bestselling author

  “Charming, original characters, a large dose of humor, and a plot that’s fantastic fun.”

  —Jennifer Ashley, New York Times bestselling author

  “Fresh, clever, and supremely witty. A true delight.”

  —Suzanne Enoch, New York Times bestselling author

  “Fun, engaging, sensual, and touching . . . Gray’s lyrical writing, intense emotion, and spirited characters carry the sophisticated plot to satisfying fruition.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Emotionally electric scenes between strong characters make this one a winner.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “A literary force to be reckoned with.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Exquisite characterizations, clever dialogue, and addictive prose.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Extraordinary! In turns charming, passionate, and thrilling . . . Juliana Gray is on my autobuy list.”

  —Elizabeth Hoyt, New York Times bestselling author

  BERKLEY

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2016 by Juliana Gray

  Excerpt from Along the Infinite Sea by Beatriz Williams copyright © 2015 by Beatriz Williams

  “Readers Guide” copyright © 2016 by Beatriz Williams

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN: 9780698176485

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Gray, Juliana, date.

  Title: A most extraordinary pursuit / Juliana Gray.

  Description: Berkley trade paperback edition. | New York, NY : Berkley Books, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015039206 | ISBN 9780425277072 (softcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Missing persons—Investigation—Fiction. | Man-woman

  relationships—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Romance / Historical. | FICTION / Romance / Suspense. | GSAFD: Romantic suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3607.R395 M67 2016 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015039206

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley trade paperback edition, October 2016

  Cover illustration by Michael Crampton

  Cover design by Sarah Oberrender

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  To Maestro Verdi,

  for whom great passion was never a mere subplot.

  Acknowledgments

  If you find this book unusual in certain respects, you (and certainly I) have my editor to thank: the lovely and reckless Kate Seaver at Berkley, who gave me free rein to write whatever I wanted, in whatever style I wanted, based on a disgracefully brief and deliberately vague synopsis. Those of you who have read my earlier books will recognize a few familiar characters—and I apologize for killing off the Duke of Olympia on the first page, an act of creative destruction—but everything else has gone off in a new direction, which will probably end my career as Juliana Gray. To Kate, and to all the well-meaning, talented souls at Berkley who have assisted in the development and marketing of this novel, I offer my endless gratitude and any letters of reference you may soon require, once Management realizes what we’ve done.

  Sharing the blame is that great schemer (and worthy of a novel in her own right) Alexandra Machinist at ICM, who actually got Penguin to write a contract for this novel and its successor, using her Jedi powers of persuasion. Alexandra—assisted by her capable sidekick, Hillary Jacobson—has kept the champagne flowing at Gray Grange for many a year, and if you have any impossible-to-sell manuscripts hiding among the orphaned socks under your bed, I’d recommend you just send them her way. All of them. (You’re welcome, Alexandra!)

  Speaking of champagne . . . Lauren Willig. Not only a damned fantastic storyteller, but a quaffer of anything bubbly—my kind of girl, in other words—and a Real Help when one’s driven one’s outlandish omnibus of missing dukes and Edwardian ghosts and Greek myths into a ditch. (Go figure.) By way of thanking her for her invaluable assistance over coffee and omelets at a certain Le Pain Quotidien in midtown Manhattan, I urge you to buy anything she writes. A Lauren Willig book may be just the antidote you need.

  We may safely disregard the fractious Gray offspring in any expression of gratitude—without them, which God forbid, this book would have been finished at least a month or two earlier—but Mr. Gray really can’t be ignored. Solid and attractive, he performs the duties of a writer’s husband without too much complaint, and he’s always there for a cuddle when the champagne has run dry.

  (Oh, all right. The truth is, I simply can’t do without him.)

  And finally, to my dear and faithful readers, who have waited so patiently for the next Juliana Gray book, on
ly to discover that there’s no sex inside. I’m sorry. Stay with me. I love you.

  The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

  ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Contents

  Praise for Juliana Gray

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  Readers Guide

  Author’s Note

  Excerpt from Along the Infinite Sea

  THE HAYWOOD INSTITUTE

  RYE, EAST SUSSEX

  1 June 2012

  There was no moon, but the two men stealing through the institute’s rear courtyard kept to the periphery wall anyway. They were dressed in dark clothes, and as they neared the metal skip that flanked the service door, the first one stopped and pulled a balaclava over his head. The second did the same.

  A battered halogen light illuminated the doorway from one corner, while a security camera blinked a slow red cadence at the other. The first man—medium height and extremely lean beneath his snug black clothes—pulled a pistol from the holster at his waist, fitted a silencer on the end, and motioned to his partner, who stepped to the side and laid his back against the tall brick wall. He fired twice: once at the camera, which expired in a crack of shocked plastic, and once at the light. The bulb splintered, turning the air dark and briefly alive with invisible glass slivers. The sound bounced across the courtyard, and then a tiny rain of glass reached the paving stones.

  The two men remained motionless against the wall, waiting for the shower to end. Over the past few days, the weather had turned warm and settled, and the air smelled of cut grass and night jasmine and scorched powder. The first man closed his eyes, as if he were savoring the promise of summer, and leaned his head against the bricks.

  The silence resumed, black and rich, except for a soft chorus of crickets in the grass on the other side of the wall. The first man touched the sleeve of his partner, and together they approached the door. The second man felt along the metal surface for the dead bolt. When he found it, he reached into his pocket and drew out a bump key, which he inserted gently into the keyway. A small jerk, and the key turned obediently to the right. He opened the door and allowed the first man to enter.

  Inside, the building was cavernous, laden with an Edwardian atmosphere of wood and polish and magisterial damp. The first man extracted a small torch from the belt at his waist, and the beam found the newel post of a long back staircase. He made an upward movement with the torch, and the second man fell into place behind him, climbing the stairs on silent feet.

  Either the men were already familiar with the institute, or they had studied its complex floor plan for many hours. They moved without hesitation up the staircase to the first-floor landing, and then the second, where they turned left and proceeded down a high-ceilinged corridor. The first man slid one hand against the wall, counting the doorways, while the other man followed the buoyant track of the torchlight along the worn carpet. They had nearly reached the end of the corridor when the first man stopped and pivoted to face a doorway on the right. He tested the knob: unlocked.

  For an instant, he paused, laying one hand on the smooth vertical plane of the door, while the other clenched the turned knob.

  The other man nudged his shoulder and spoke in a flat American whisper. “Go on!”

  The office inside contained the usual mixture of old and new. A flat computer monitor perched on a battered wooden desk, littered with paper and photographs stuck in cheap plastic frames; a Keurig gleamed atop an oak bookcase, flanked by a sculptural Habitat K-Cup holder, half-stocked, and a couple of white mugs. But the first man wasted no effort exploring the furniture. A cursory survey, and the beam of the torch flashed up twelve feet to the ceiling next to the long sash window.

  “There!” whispered the second man.

  “Where?”

  “Right there! You see the corner?”

  He fumbled against the desk until he found the chair, which he scraped across the rug to a position just beneath the flattened yellow oval of torchlight on the ceiling. He climbed onto the seat and stretched his hands upward, while the first man ran the beam along the plaster. “Hold it still!” he hissed, dragging his fingers back and forth, until the tip of his pinkie caught against a small metal latch.

  “Got it!”

  “Holy shit! For real?”

  “Damn, it’s stiff.”

  “Yeah it is. Eighty-five years, bro.”

  The latch moved, and a rectangular section of ceiling sagged away from the surface, in a tiny creak of old hinges.

  “And there it is,” said the first man. He directed the torch at the crack in the plaster. “Pull it down.”

  The second man inserted his fingers into the crack and pushed gently. The hinges squeaked again, louder this time, longer, more like a groan, and the rectangle swung downward, revealing a set of wooden steps folded against the inside.

  The second man jumped down from the chair and unfolded the steps. “Saddle up, bro,” he said, and mounted into the attic.

  The space was cramped and unfinished, triangular, smoky with trapped heat. The first man set the torch upright on the floor, like a lantern, and the glow illuminated only a small writing table, a bookcase, and a file cabinet wedged beneath the slanted wooden ceiling. On the table stood a green-shaded lamp, and the first man stepped forward and pulled its chain. Nothing happened.

  The desk was otherwise empty, except for a thick layer of dust. The second man pulled open a drawer in the file cabinet and whistled. “Stuffed.”

  The first man yanked off his balaclava and knelt next to the bookcase. “Take everything you can.”

  They worked in silence: pulling out the books from the bookshelf, lifting the files from the cabinet, stacking them on the writing table. The second man also removed his balaclava, and in the macabre underlight of the torch on the floor, a small gold earring flashed in the lobe of his left ear.

  When the cabinet was empty, the men placed the files in a pair of dark rubbish bin liners, and the second man straightened and asked, “Anything in the bookcase?”

  “Just old history books.” The first man stood akimbo beside the volumes stacked on the floor near the bookcase. He looked over the bags and scowled. “Are you sure it wasn’t in one of the files?”

  “Nope. I checked.”

  The first man picked up the torch from the floor and shone the beam along the walls. “Damn. It should have been here. We’ve looked everywhere else.”

  “We got a lot of good shit here, bro.”

  “Yeah, but not the book. We need the book.” He aimed the torch in the space between the bookshelf and the wall. “Come on, little fucker,” he muttered. “Where did you put it?”

  “Anso, we gotta go. It’s just a book.”

  “It’s not just a book. It’s the key to everything. Six chapters, right? Each one revealing the true story of history’s gre
atest myths. How? Because he was there, bro. He saw the shit live. He made it happen. And that book is proof.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s four o’clock. We gotta go. Sun’ll be up.”

  “Dammit!” Anso straightened and kicked the base of the empty bookcase, and a panel fell out from the back of the bottom shelf, making a sharp thud against the century-old wood.

  Both men went still. Stared at the bookcase. The slim panel lying flat, like a felled soldier, maybe two feet wide and a foot and a half tall.

  “Whoa. What was that?” whispered the second man.

  “Shut up!” Anso went down again, on his hands and knees, pointing the torch at the back of the bookcase. The second man crouched next to him.

  “See anything?”

  Anso didn’t answer. He stuck a hand at the back of the shelf, and a ferocious expression took hold of his face. “Hold the flashlight,” he said to the second man, and he braced his fingers against the side of the bookcase and maneuvered his other hand in the cavity left behind by the fallen panel.

  “Hurry, man! We gotta split!”

  “Hold on! Just—damn, damn, damn—”

  His hand came free from the back of the bookcase, clutching a sheaf of papers bound together by a double loop of plain butcher’s twine.

  The second man’s voice sagged with disappointment. “It’s not a book.”

  “Of course it’s not a book, fool. He never published it.” Anso drew the papers reverently onto his lap and brushed the dust from the overleaf. The paper was smooth, the twine tough and hardened, catching the dust. He snatched the torch from the second man’s hand.

  “Well? What does it say?”

  Anso looked up slowly. The torch twitched in his hand, causing a nervy glow to flicker along the side of his face.

  “Holy shit, man,” he said. “This is it. The Book of Time, by A. M. Haywood.”

  “Haywood?”

  “Arthur Maximilian Haywood, right? He’s our guy. The eighth Duke of Olympia. Born in London in 1874 . . .”