Dangerous Inheritance Read Online Free PDF Page A

inspired the title of the Most Distinguished Order of Chivalry bestowed upon so many famous British diplomats. Now, the Palace was an Archaeological Museum. It also housed an exceptional collection of no fewer than seven thousand five hundred piecesof Chinese and Japanese porcelain, lacquer, jade and precious stones.
    Truss, like a good American, had read up on Corfu before arriving there and, guidebook in hand, was full of facts and figures. He wanted to go in to see at least the star pieces of Greek art that had been excavated from the foundations of the town: a Gorgon from the pediment of the Temple of Artemis, and an archaic lioness. But such things bored Fleur, so she dissuaded him and they sauntered across to the long arcades on the west of the square beneath which there were a number of cafés. These were known as the ‘Listern’ because in times past only the privileged, whose names were on a ‘list’ submitted to the British Governor, were allowed to sit and drink at them. By then Fleur was hot and tired, so they had cassata ices and sat there for a while before returning to the villa.
    Over lunch the Duke asked them what they had seen. Then he said, ‘Unfortunately Corfu has comparatively few interesting ruins because when the island was threatened by the Turks, before the famous siege of 1537, the town was still unwalled; so the Corfiotes pulled down most of the Greek and Roman temples and used the great stones to create defences.
    â€˜Even so, there remain quite a few traces of its chequered history. In Homer’s day it was known as Phaeacia and at one time King Alcinous ruled here. It was his daughter Nausica who took pity on Ulysses when he was washed up on the shore, and after his many years of wandering sent him safely home to his own Kingdom, the neighbouring island of Ithica.
    â€˜Historically the first we know of Corfu was that it was colonized by the Corinthians about seven hundred B.C. Later the Kerkyarians, as they were then called, broke away and became independent. In due course the Romans conquered it, then it passed to the Eastern Empire of Byzantium. During the Middle Ages the Franks, Angevins, Naples and Sicily each held it for a while and Richard Cœur-de-Lion stayed here on his way to a Crusade.
    â€˜But most of the remains you’ll see are Venetian. In the hands of the Serene Republic it remained for four hundred years one of the great bastions of Christendom against the Turk. WhenVenice fell Napoleon seized it by treachery, counting it his most valuable stepping stone to the conquest of Egypt and the East; but within two years a combined Russian and Turkish fleet wrested it from him.
    â€˜By the Treaty of Paris in 1815 it was awarded to Britain as a Protectorate, and for the first time for many centuries its wretched inhabitants were no longer plagued with wars and constantly ravished by pirates. For fifty years under British rule they enjoyed peace and a certain measure of prosperity. We gave them schools and hospitals and built all the roads so that one of their few great writers said of us, “If ever a State was prosperous, free and progressive under the dominion of another, that State was Ionia under the domination of Great Britain.”
    â€˜Yet like so many other ignorant and primitive people they were led by so-called patriots, who are usually self-seeking politicians, to demand the casting off of the friendly yoke and to become re-united with Greece. Gladstone, that cheeseparing little Englander, saw a chance to save the few thousands a year the island cost to administer; so he let them have their way. As a result, from the sixties on, they sank back into poverty and still today the peasants go hungry half the year because their only means of support is their olive crop.’
    â€˜Thanks a lot, Duke,’ smiled Truss. ‘What you’ve said was most interesting; and you’ve certainly made a case for British colonisation in this