Philip felt surprise at finding his work selling antiquities so fulfilling, although it did on occasion pain him to no longer be able to afford for himself the sort of prize pieces he had acquired as the Viscount Ashton with no regard for their cost. He had thought, when he first began the work, he would like to open a gallery of his own, but as winter slipped into spring and he traveled back to Asia Minor, where he and his friend Reiner were excavating with Carl Humann at the newly discovered Magnesia on the Maeander, he realized his passion lay in archaeology.
Kallista had married Hargreaves. He had read the announcement in The Times. He could no longer pretend she would ever again be his, and had, instead, to find something else on which to focus. Excavation proved a worthy successor, stimulating him physically and mentally, and bringing him endless satisfaction.
The dig filled him with exhilaration like nothing before. No thrill could compare to brushing away centuries of dirt to expose a perfectly carved statue, fixing together the fragments of a beautifully painted vase so it looked all but new, or restoring to their original glory the columns of a temple to Zeus. Collecting became almost an afterthought to him now, and he decided not to return to the shop in Vienna when the season ended. He would focus solely on this excavation, on its treasures and on the ancient people whose sandaled feet trod upon the pavement he helped to uncover. Scholarship brought more satisfaction than commerce.
He buckled his pith helmet under his chin and waved to Professor Humann as he set off in the direction of the Temple of Artemis. Every step he took on Turkish soil—land once called Ionia, part of the Greek empire, and the place that held the ancient city of Troy, a site more important to Philip than any other in the world—brought him closer to the heroes of his childhood.
Even as a small boy, he had felt a deep connection to classical mythology, but nothing had affected him more profoundly than reading The Iliad. If only he had discovered his archaeological fervor before Heinrich Schliemann, the German archaeologist who shared his obsession with Homer’s stories, had died, he might have had the good fortune to excavate with him at Troy. He had heard rumors that one of Schliemann’s team, Wilhelm Dörpfeld, might mount an expedition of his own, and if those plans came to fruition, Philip was determined to be part of the crew. He might have lost Kallista, but he could accept the city of Homer’s epic as worthy consolation.