Charles was fond of declaring. Perhaps he too was an echoer. He certainly has become a snake.

When my brothers returned from their university years in Padova, they began calling the British “the Occupiers.” They would call Charles, an officer and a surgeon in the British Army, something much worse.

When Old Iota wanted to know more about my father’s family, I had told her that it was as small as his heart. It was God’s will that his own father and mother were long passed by the time their three grandchildren were born. My father, their only son, inherited the house above Kapsali town, the farmland in the interior of the island, and whatever else kept food on our table and my mother and then Kanella by his side.

By and by, I understood that Kanella was a very good cook but that she was an even better broker of my father’s consent. Long before my years inside, Kanella’s household duties had been reduced to those of the kitchen. She still walked down to the marketplace every morning, but on the way back a porter was with her. The foodstuffs were not any heavier. Kanella was just no longer a beast of burden. She also had two women who came every morning to sweep, dust, launder, and assume the chores that had once been hers. These women, who only spoke Romaic and only spoke to Kanella, came to the house during the hours when my father was in the belly of Kapsali town conducting the business of owning what he referred to as the Cassimati Estate. I should have known that “estate” was a bloated term, same as “villa,” same as “nobility.” There were tracts of land, but they were shrinking with each passing year, sold to cover expenses that I dimly understood then. For instance, where was Padova; what was a university; and why had my brothers returned from these locales so changed in clothing and in manners but more like my father than ever before?

After I met Charles, or “Assistant Staff Surgeon Charles Bush Hearn,” as he had introduced himself, he answered these questions and many others for me. His knowledge of the everyday mysteries of my own family and my own island impressed me. He offered me unfamiliar words for familiar things. I had never even heard of the “United States of the Ionian Islands” before him. “Where is that?” I asked him. To his credit, he did not laugh or deride me for my ignorance. That would come later.

“Where is here, Sióreta Cassimati,” he replied, sweeping his arms around him. “You, Sióreta, are an Ionian Islander under the amical protection of the United Kingdom,” he added, bowing his head in my direction. He listed these islands for me, slowly, as though he were pausing to consider whether their names befitted them. He began with Cerigo, which he said was a far distance from the others and the farthest one south.

Corfu

Paxos

Cephalonia