Tomb of the Golden Bird, page 30
I had several private errands of my own to carry out. They had nothing to do with our holiday preparations, but I made certain they did not mar the spirit of the season by not telling anyone about them. Running back and forth to Luxor on various errands provided sufficient excuse for my occasional absences. I did not lie to Emerson about the reason for them. While in Luxor I did do errands and call on friends. I saw no reason to mention what else I did.
Unfortunately I was seen leaving the zabtiyeh, and the word duly reached Emerson. He waited until we were alone, preparing for bed, before he went on the attack.
“Can’t you stay away from corpses even at this time of year?” he demanded.
“There were no corpses in which I took an interest, Emerson.”
“I cannot believe there is a corpse in which you do not take an interest. What did you go there for?”
I decided not to lie. Emerson had just returned from the bath chamber. His hair waved about his brow and his admirable form had a slight sheen of dampness.
“I prefer not to tell you, Emerson.”
“You prefer? You prefer?” Emerson drew a deep breath. His muscles swelled. So did the veins in his neck. I waited for the burst of outrage I had every reason to expect.
Alas, my expectations were not fulfilled. Emerson let his breath out. He placed a heavy but gentle hand on my shoulder.
“Peabody, my darling girl, I came close to losing you last year. I wish you would allow me to protect and cherish you. I wish you would not do this sort of thing.”
I wished he would not do that sort of thing. When Emerson stoops to appeal he makes me feel that I have taken unfair advantage. Turning into his outstretched arms, I murmured, “I give you my word, my dear, that I did nothing that requires me to be protected.”
“Hmph,” said Emerson—and spoke no more.
FROM MANUSCRIPT H
The children were accustomed to visiting Abdullah’s tomb. Ramses’s mother had been right (as usual) when she claimed there was nothing morbid about remembering the honored dead. The twins and Sennia had heard the stories about his heroism and devotion; to them he was a distant figure of legend, like Charlemagne and King Arthur. They anticipated this particular visit with delight, since the whole family was going and they would be allowed to make a special offering.
Attired in their best, they set out for the small cemetery of which Abdullah’s tomb was the most prominent feature. It was a beautiful little structure, designed by David, with graceful columns supporting its domed roof. The servant of the tomb roused himself from his prayers and came forth to meet them. Having heard of their plans, a number of the villagers had turned up, not only to honor their local saint but to enjoy the spectacle. The Emersons could be depended upon to do things in style.
Daoud outshone all others in a new caftan and elaborately wound turban. Cyrus had brought Jumana and Nadji, and, to Ramses’s surprise, Suzanne.
Across the open entrance hung the usual offerings—trinkets and beads and bits of cloth. Ramses lifted Charla up so she could attach her gift of a little book, which she had decided Abdullah would prefer to an offering anyone might make. David had tactfully pointed out that Abdullah might not appreciate pictures of ladies in low-cut frocks, so the pages contained photographs of the family. David John was next. Strictly speaking, his portrait violated the law against representations of the human form, and it bore a strong resemblance to M. Lacau (except for the turban), but the spectators only smiled approvingly, as they did when Sennia added a particularly large, colorful ribbon. After the servant had led the proper prayers, they made their contributions to the fund for the maintenance of the tomb and its attendant, and prepared to depart.
Emerson blew out his breath in a sigh of relief. He considered religious ceremonies of all kinds to be gross superstition, but he had learned to keep his opinions to himself around the children.
“Well, now, that was fine,” said Cyrus, who had contributed largely to the fund. He replaced his hat. “I hope Abdullah was pleased.”
They had all become accustomed to speaking of him as if he were still among them. Ramses’s mother was responsible for that, of course. She had followed the proceedings with a smile, and from time to time she had nodded, her smile broadening, as if she were listening to words no one else could hear.
“Oh, yes,” she said.
“He was a great man,” said Nadji seriously. “I have heard much about him.”
“Did you know that he saved Grandmama’s life by giving his own?” David John asked. “If you have not heard the story, I will tell you.”
Nadji smiled down at the little boy. “I would like to hear it.”
Emerson edged away. To say he was jealous of his wife’s attachment to Abdullah would have been absurd, but there was something…
The excitement reached its peak on the morning of Christmas Eve. One would have supposed that after days of preparation there was nothing left to be done, but Charla had thought of several other friends who required little books and Fatima was convinced she had not prepared enough food for the party. Shrieks and curses came from the kitchen, mingled with the sobs of Maaman, for Fatima in a frenzy tried the nerves of those around her. When Kareem spilled an entire pot of coffee across the breakfast table, Emerson leaped to his feet with a roar.
“I am going to—to the Valley,” he announced, mopping at the stains on his shirt and trousers with a napkin.
“An excellent idea,” said his wife, exchanging glances with Nefret.
“Yes, go away, all you men,” said Nefret. “None of you is up to this sort of thing.”
“Does that include me, madam?” asked Gargery, who had finally been persuaded to take meals with them—but only if guests were not present.
“Yes,” Nefret said.
“No,” said Emerson.
Eventually the women got all the men out of the house, except for Gargery. Emerson had pointed out that he would have to ride a donkey. Gargery did not care for donkeys.
“That was an excellent idea, Father,” Ramses said feelingly, as they rode out of the stable.
“Don’t know why women get in such a pother about holidays,” Emerson grumbled.
“Where are we going?” Sethos asked. He had resisted coming at first, but had been shoved out with the rest of them. “Cyrus won’t be working in the West Valley today.”
“Does it matter?” David adjusted his pith helmet and buckled the strap under his chin. There was a stiff breeze that morning, and the sun was veiled by light clouds.
Emerson mumbled something, and Ramses said, “I doubt Carter will be working either.”
“I don’t give a curse what he’s doing,” said Emerson.
So it was to be the East Valley. Emerson had probably had that in mind from the first. He had stayed away for several days, and curiosity was eating at him.
They rode single file in order not to impede the traffic, which included local villagers as well as tourists. The latter were not so considerate; their hired carriages yielded the way to no one except the camels, who yielded the way to nothing. The donkey riders spread out across the road, and some of them stopped to photograph anything that moved: camels, rude carts loaded with produce, a man perched on a donkey with his wife walking alongside, women balancing heavy water jars on their heads.
When they were able to do so, Emerson went ahead with David, and Ramses drew up beside his uncle. Sethos hadn’t spoken since they left the house. He rode with his usual ease, but his mouth was set and his forehead furrowed. Tinted glasses darkened his eyes to hazel.
“You received another private communication yesterday,” Ramses said.
“Hassan was bribed to tell no one,” Sethos said.
“I bribed him to tell me.”
“Dear me,” said Sethos, with a fair show of insouciance. “Don’t you trust me?”
“Should I?”
Sethos reached into his breast pocket and took out a folded paper, which he handed to Ramses.
The message was short and to the point. “Yours received. Do nothing more.”
“English,” Ramses said.
Sethos sneezed and swabbed his nose with a handkerchief. “Brilliant.”
“Don’t be rude,” Ramses said equably. “What’s put you in such a bad humor? The response was what we expected.”
“Precisely.” Another, louder sneeze was muffled by the folds of the handkerchief.
“Have you caught cold?”
“It would appear so.”
“You could give it to Margaret,” Ramses suggested.
His uncle turned the tinted spectacles toward him, and then, unexpectedly, burst into laughter. “What a charming idea. Will you aid and abet me when I catch her in a close embrace and breathe heavily on her?”
“She’ll probably be there this morning.”
“I know.” Sethos sighed and dabbed at his nose. “You are omniscient, so you have anticipated that I’m not looking forward to encountering her. As for the message, I would have liked something more positive. Something along the lines of ‘count on us to behave ourselves.’”
“Or a simple ‘Happy Christmas’?”
His uncle’s mouth twitched. “Point taken. I’ll do my best not to shed gloom over the proceedings. After all, we’ve no reason to assume our unknown acquaintances (who do write excellent English) mean to bother us. As for Margaret, why should I give a damn about her? She doesn’t give a damn about…about anything except her bloody newspaper.”
Ramses had been mistaken about Carter. He was at work, and so were several others of his crew. His nose in the air, Emerson strode past the tomb without so much as a sidelong look, but Ramses and the others joined the spectators, of whom there were quite a number. There wasn’t much to see; most of the activity was being carried on in the tomb chamber, deep underground.
“Yes, they are drawing pictures and taking photographs,” said one of the guards, in response to a question from David. Leaning on his rifle, he yawned.
“There is nothing much to do,” Ramses said. “It is a boring job.”
“Boring?” The man scratched his beard. “There are worse tasks, Brother of Demons. As soon as the gentlemen leave we can lie down and talk and smoke and have a sleep. Tomorrow is your holiday, yes? So we will have another day of rest.”
“Possibly two days,” David said.
“It is so?”
“On the day after Christmas the English take a holiday and give presents to those who have served them well,” David explained.
“So I have been told. But there will be none for us, I think.”
“I think he’s right,” Ramses said, as he and David turned away.
“One can hardly expect Carter to reward this entire lot,” David said.
There were certainly a large number of guards. They lined the wall around the tomb, wearing a variety of uniforms and headgear. Ramses recognized the khaki of local troops and the fezzes of the men from the Ministry. Margaret and Kevin O’Connell were not in evidence. Looking around, he realized Sethos and his father were also missing.
“Where’s Father got to?” he asked.
He got an immediate answer, though not from David. Sounds of a loud altercation reached his ears. It was safe to assume that whenever voices were raised, Emerson’s would be one of them.
He and David hurried toward the spot, which turned out to be the area in front of the remote tomb of Seti II. It was some distance away, at the far end of a path that branched off to the right from the more traveled route that led to the tomb of Thutmose III.
Only his father’s voice would have carried that far, Ramses thought. Of course the echoes helped.
Emerson’s adversary was none other than Sir Malcolm Page Henley de Montague. Holding his stick like a dueling sword, he shouted back whenever Emerson paused for breath. “No right!” and “How dare you?” formed the refrain of his remarks. His rage was so enormous it overcame his fear of Emerson—and perhaps he counted on the three other people present to step in if Emerson was moved to violence. In that, Ramses thought, he deceived himself. Margaret Minton to the right and O’Connell to the left of the furious pair were busily taking notes.
Seeing Ramses and David, Montague’s servant dropped to his knees and clasped his hands. “Brother of Demons, help my master! Todros Effendi, speak to the Father of Curses!”
Emerson whirled round. “Oh, it’s you,” he said. “Do you know what this bastard is doing?”
“No,” Ramses said. “What?”
“Er…Hmph.” Emerson rubbed his chin.
“I have every right to be here,” Sir Malcolm said shrilly.
His appearance had deteriorated since Ramses had last seen him. Goatee and wig had taken on a grayish hue, and his cravat was unpressed. Evidently his latest servant, a youngish man, well-set-up and broad-shouldered, had not been trained for valet duties. His robe was shabby and his sandals patched.
“This is the tomb that will be used as a storage room and laboratory,” Emerson said. “Don’t tell me his presence here is a coincidence!”
“Of course not.” Sir Malcolm brushed dust from his sleeve. “Any more than yours is. I was curious. There is no law against that, I believe?”
In the silence that followed, Ramses heard O’Connell muttering as he continued to write. “…presence a coincidence…”
“Stop taking notes, O’Connell,” Ramses said. “There’s no news in this.”
“But readers love hearing about Professor Emerson’s little encounters,” Margaret said innocently. “Isn’t that right, O’Connell?”
“Indeed but it is. And the Times won’t have this exclusive!”
Belatedly aware of what he had done—and what his wife would say about it—Emerson attempted to redress his error. The forced smile he directed at Sir Malcolm made him look as if his jaw would crack.
“Just a friendly discussion between—er—old acquaintances,” he declared. “Isn’t that right—er—old chap?”
Montague was no more anxious than Emerson to be featured in the pages of the Daily Yell or its competitor. “Quite, quite—er—old chap. We will continue our—er—discussion another time, eh?”
He made good his escape, followed by his servant, who gave Ramses an ingratiating smile. The fellow’s face was familiar, but Ramses couldn’t remember where he had seen him.
“Sorry,” Ramses said to Margaret. “There won’t be an encounter. Or a story.”
“One can’t make a story out of a friendly argument between archaeologists,” David added. “They do it all the time.”
O’Connell uttered a fulsome Irish curse but Margaret only smiled. “What about this tomb, then?” she asked. “What’s so interesting about it?”
Since he could see no reason not to answer, Ramses explained. Margaret’s face took on its journalist’s stare. “So they will be carrying the objects along this path, all the way from Tut’s tomb?”
“They will be guarded every step of the way,” Ramses said.
“Oh, I wasn’t planning to steal them,” Margaret said. “Which reminds me—I haven’t seen my—Mr. Bissinghurst today. Didn’t he come with you?”
“He’s not feeling well,” Ramses said.
“Something lingering, with boiling oil in it, I hope.” She closed her notebook with a snap and walked away. After a doubtful look at Emerson’s darkening countenance, O’Connell followed her.
“Don’t say a word,” Emerson ordered.
“You got out of it very neatly,” Ramses said.
“Yes, I did, didn’t I?” Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin. “So there’s no need to mention this to Peabody.”
“No, sir,” said Ramses and David in chorus.
Emerson hadn’t finished with the tomb of Seti II. “Carter will need guards here too. And a locked gate.”
Ramses was a trifle surprised that Carter had selected this particular tomb for his storage area. The second Seti was one of the confusing pharaohs, as his mother called them, a series of rulers of whom little was known except for their habit of shoving one another off the throne. Seti’s mummy had been found in one of the royal caches; the tomb itself was rather nicely decorated, especially in the entrance corridor. Hauling boxes in and out wouldn’t do the reliefs much good. The tomb had been open since antiquity, and Carter had cleared it back in 1902; Ramses couldn’t help wondering how thorough a job he had done. The advantages of the site were clear, however; for one thing, there were no stairs to negotiate. The entrance was cut directly into the cliff face, and the first of the internal corridors sloped at a gentle angle instead of plunging steeply downward.
While Emerson brooded over the images of Maat on the entrance jambs, David and Ramses started walking back along the path. “It’s quite a distance,” David said somewhat wistfully. “Perhaps I’ll be able to get a look at some of the objects while they are being transported here.”
Ramses mentally damned Carter and Carnarvon. By rights he ought to have spared a few damns for his father as well; if Emerson hadn’t lost his temper they might not have been banned from the tomb. But it wasn’t fair to David, or to Cyrus, come to that, to hold them guilty by association with the Emersons. I wonder, he thought, if there is a way I could…
Turning back to the tomb, they were joined by Sethos. “I saw Margaret heading from this direction,” he said casually. “Has anything occurred?”
“Not really,” Ramses said. “Where were you?”
“Lurking.” Sethos blew his nose.
“Caught cold, have you?” Emerson inquired.
“Something lingering. But I do not anticipate boiling oil.”
So he had been close enough to overhear the quotation (from The Mikado, if Ramses remembered correctly).
“You decided not to confront Margaret?” Ramses asked. He added softly, “Coward.”
Sethos pretended not to hear him. “Anything interesting about this tomb?” he asked Emerson.
“Nothing that would interest you,” said Emerson pointedly.
“Before long this uninspiring sepulchre will contain a great deal to interest a thief,” Sethos replied, acknowledging the implication with a raised eyebrow. “Speaking as one who has had considerable experience, I’d rather try to rob this one than Tutankhamon’s. Look at that nice wide doorway and the easy slope beyond. The objects will be conveniently crated for shipping. Get a sufficient force together, snatch and run while some of your fellows hold off the guards, and hoist the crates straight up that slope to the top of the gebel. No need to cart the loot all the way back to the entrance.”
