The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto Read Free Book Online

dainty legs, their high piping calls mingling with the voices of Claudine and Piero as they ran after the birds, which took to the air in great curved arabesques.
    Piero was five that summer and it was the first time the three of us had the house to ourselves for the whole holiday. Claudine’s mother had passed away the year before. I’d never met her father, who died when she was a teenager. In my mind’s eye I pictured the beach that year, a summer of perfect sun. How brown Claudine had become. And she’d let Piero’s hair grow, so that his black curls and his tanned skin had given him the appearance of a little faun. Like that boy I’d seen.
    Now, just as I was about to slide down the slope to the beach, I stopped. I heard a voice calling. But when I looked up and down the sand, in both directions, there was no one. I was alone. It must have been the wind, or the sandpipers. I walked on.
    The village appeared as I rounded one of the curves in the shoreline: a handful of cottages facing the harbour, which was tiny, just two stone piers like the arms of a crab sheltering a narrow entrance. A couple of boats were anchored in the harbour with ropes attached to the piers. Heaps of netting and lobster pots lined the quay and the fecund smells of the seaweed and mud were rich in my nostrils as I followed a lane up from the shore between the houses. An unseen dog barked nearby. I recalled the woman I’d met near the cliff yesterday. Did she live here?
    The village seemed to be deserted, most of the cottages fastened shut. Disappointed, I continued along the path, which cut inland now. Soon I was beneath the dappled shade of widely spaced oaks. In a hollow where the ground underfoot was thick with brown acorns, I came upon the black pellets of goat droppings. At the same instant, I heard a flat clinking, like the rattle of pebbles in a tin can, and in a gully to my left, among the rocks and grass, I saw the goats. I positioned myself next to the trunk of an oak, keeping very still, my eyes scanning the surrounding area.
    Was the boy with them?
    The goats hadn’t noticed me. They cropped at the grass and shrubs, clambering among the rocks that edged the gully, the bells at their throats clanking. There was no sign of the big ram that had confronted me on the cliff. Just then, from beyond thetrees, three long low notes resonated over the landscape—the tolling of a church bell. The goats lifted their heads to stare across the gully at me, as if the sound were of my making.
    I waited, half expecting some answering sound. The bells pealed again, three deep notes that echoed into one another. As the sounds died away, the goats scampered out of sight. Once again, I was disappointed. I had expected something. But what? After waiting a couple of minutes longer, I walked on, soon coming to the sea again.
    Below me, just off shore, stood a small stone church, unusually situated on its own little islet of rock, separated from the main island by about fifty metres of sand. The building wasn’t really substantial enough to be called a church—chapel was more appropriate—but it was sturdily built of the local granite, with a black slate roof. In the tower, silhouetted against the sea and sky, sunlight gleamed on the bronze of the bell that I had heard minutes earlier.
    I made my way down to the beach and across the damp, spongy sand to the islet of rock. The chapel doors were substantial slabs of oak with black iron hinges and a knocker in the shape of a braid of rope. One door was partially open.
    I hesitated. A tremor shivered through me. Ever since that day in Cyprus, at the chapel of Agios Lazaros, I’d avoided every sort of religious building. I associated them with darkness, with death. Was that other chapel still standing? Had it been repaired, or was it just a bombed-out ruin? As for who was responsible—Turks, or Greeks, or both—that had never been established. Another small war in another small place.
    The shepherds who