The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart, page 1
The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart
The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart
Timothy Miller
Published 2024 by Seventh Street Books®
The Strange Case of the Pharaoh’s Heart. Copyright © 2024 by Timothy Miller. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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For Jim and Asa, who have gone before.
“It is neither decent nor safe to take from their resting places the bodies of old kings. The Egyptians knew much more about the occult than we do today. This must have been a peculiar element of an Egyptian curse. “The ancient Egyptians were very anxious to guard the tombs of their Kings, there is reason to believe that they placed elementals on guard, and such may have caused Lord Carnarvon’s death. “An evil elemental may have caused Lord Carnarvon’s fatal illness. One does not know what elementals existed in those days, nor what the form might be. “These elementals are not spirits in the ordinary sense, in that they have no souls. “An elemental is a built-up, artificial thing, an imbued force which may be brought into being by spirit means or by nature.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, April 5, 1923
Chapter One: Dr. John Watson
The seventh of April 1923 was the day I formally repudiated Sherlock Holmes. It was like plunging a dagger into my own heart, but I had stomached all I could of his spiritualist rubbish. Even in the embarrassing case of the Cottingley fairies, in which he had actually championed the claims of two young girls to have photographed pixies at the bottom of their garden, I had stood by him, making labored excuses for him to the press and the public. But when he told the London papers, on the very day of Lord Carnarvon’s death, that it was elemental forces protecting Tutankhamun’s tomb from desecration that had laid him low, I could no longer in good conscience defend my old friend. I called upon Holmes publicly to retract his statement and make his apologies to Carnarvon’s grieving widow, the lady Almina. I waited but received no reply from Holmes, either in public or in private. He cut me dead. Thus ended a friendship of forty years’ standing. Of course, I still owed a profound debt of gratitude to Sherlock Holmes, which I am ever ready acknowledge and which can never be repaid. My entire reputation as a man of letters rests on my association with the man and my accounts of his extraordinary investigative methods. But more than this, he was the great friend of my life. Often irascible, supercilious, unsympathetic, he was the truest friend a man could have.
But the man who spat on Lord Carnarvon’s grave was not the Sherlock Holmes I had known. First the death of Professor Moriarty, and then the uncanny events of 1912, which I have chronicled elsewhere, had affected the man profoundly. Once a dyed-in-the-wool skeptic whose world was as elegantly constructed as a Euclidean theorem, he had come to embrace not only spiritualism, which had once again slithered into vogue, but all manner of supernatural hogwash.
The spiritualists, in return, embraced him with open arms, as one might imagine. Every speaker’s dais, every testimonial dinner, every lecture circuit shot an engraved invitation to the villa in Sussex where Holmes’s quiet retirement had been elbowed aside for his new obsession, punctuated by a series of notorious séances. I could only shake my head in dismay. I immersed myself in my practice and turned my back to the world. I was too old to engage in the matter—and too wounded.
Which brings me to the events of January 1924, beginning with a visit I received from a lady. On the telephone she had presented herself as a new patient seeking medical advice, though she was maddeningly vague as to her symptoms. New patients are, to say the least, a rarity in my practice in these latter days. Most of my clients have been with me since I first hung out my shingle on Queen Anne Street. The lady’s name was Eve Herbert. It embarrasses me to admit that I didn’t recognize it immediately. But I recognized her face the moment she stepped into my office.
And why not? I had seen her face blazoned in the press for months, first accompanying her father, then by the side of his coffin, and, most recently, arm in arm with her fiancé. The heart-shaped face, countenance serene as a Madonna’s, careful, weighing gaze from heavy-lidded eyes. She was a little thing in stature, and barely in her twenties, but so self-contained and straight that she threw a much longer shadow.
“Lady Evelyn!” I exclaimed.
Lady Evelyn Leonora Almina Herbert, the only daughter of the late Lord Carnarvon himself, discoverer, along with Howard Carter by his side, of the tomb of Tutankhamun, thirteenth pharaoh of the eighteenth dynasty of ancient Egypt, the archaeological find of the century. She was still dressed in mourning—the most fashionable mourning one could imagine.
“Dr. Watson. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”
“Lady Evelyn,” I stuttered, “please allow me to extend my deepest sympathies on the loss of your father. The entire kingdom mourns his passing.”
I took her coat—it was a frigid day outside, with the wind scudding along the street, searching out the keyhole in every door, every chink in every window. (I noticed a brown maple leaf caught in her hair but dared not remove it or even bring it to her attention; besides, I found it charming.) I ushered her into my consulting room, which looked decidedly shabby in contrast to her elegance. I made a mental note to have the housekeeper beat the rugs to death that very afternoon. It was at least quite warm, for I had a fire blazing on the hearth. I find as I’ve grown older that the cold wants to lodge in my bones.
“You’re very kind, Doctor,” said Lady Evelyn. “I’m sure you’ve guessed I’m not actually here seeking medical attention.”
I nodded, waving her to my best chair. “Please do sit, my lady. Would you care for some tea?” I was painfully aware that young ladies of Lady Evelyn’s crowd were more at home with martinis in the afternoon than oolong, but I could no more mix a martini than I could pilot an aeroplane to the moon.
The lady demurred. “In fact, Doctor, my father’s death is the reason I’m here today—or at least part of the reason.”
“Let me apologize, then, for the untoward remarks of my associate Mr. Holmes. My former associate, I should say. This mania for spiritualism has clouded his judgment in his latter years.”
“Yes, he told me you would say something of the sort.”
“I’m sorry, my lady, who told you?”
“Mr. Holmes. It was he who sent me to you.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”
“No, of course not. Please allow me to explain. Have you heard the story of Hugh Evelyn-White?”
I most certainly had, though I was loath to admit it, for it touched upon this selfsame “curse of the pharaoh.”
“I may have seen something in the papers about it,” I admitted reluctantly. The papers had had a field day with the sensational suicide. Once they’d discovered that he’d been a member of the Metropolitan and had been one of the first inside Tutankhamun’s tomb, they went into paroxysms, for he had written his suicide note on the wall of his study with his own blood—“I have succumbed to a curse that forced me to disappear”—and then hanged himself. If talk of a curse had died down in the last few months, this certainly threw enough fuel on the flame to make it burn merrily.
“Well, to be brief,” she began, “Evelyn-White was one of our preeminent scholars in ancient Greek, a lecturer at University of Leeds. He was also a talented Coptologist and a translator of hieroglyphics who had done some work for us on Tutankhamun’s tomb. After leaving a suicide note, he got into a taxi and requested to be taken to the house of Dr. Maxwell Telling, a well-known physician. Just before reaching the doctor’s house, however, the driver heard the report of the gun—it must have deafened him—and turned back to find Evelyn-White slumping forward. He had shot himself. The driver raced to a nearby hospital, but Evelyn-White was pronounced dead an hour later. Terrible enough on the face of it.”
This was somewhat milder than the lurid tale I had read in the press. Therefore, far more apt to be correct. But—
“The suicide note?” I probed carefully.
“You’ve hit upon the nub of it. This was the note he had left upon his desk.” She took a slip of paper from her bag, unfolded it, and handed it to me. I read:
“I knew there was a curse on me, though I have leave to take those manuscripts
Not written in blood, perhaps, but certainly problematic.
“What are the manuscripts he speaks of?”
“No one has the slightest idea. Nor who the monks are. Have you heard of Prince Ali Kamel Fahmy Bey?”
She certainly liked to jump from one subject to another. I humored her.
“Egyptian chap, wasn’t he? Created quite a stir this summer. Wife shot him, didn’t she? At the Savoy. Rum business. These Orientals often let their passions run away with them.”
“His wife—his widow—is French.”
I might have argued that the Orient begins at Dover, but I decided on discretion. She went on. “You’re familiar with the story of my uncle, Colonel Aubrey Herbert?”
I frowned. “Didn’t know you had an uncle. Not that there’s anything strange in that. Your having an uncle, I mean, not me not knowing about it. Although that’s not strange, either, come to that. Don’t really keep up with the society section.”
“He was my father’s half brother. He died in September.”
“In Egypt?”
“In London. Of blood poisoning. As did my father.”
“Bad spot of luck.” No, that wasn’t the right way to put it. I put a finger to my temple, trying to reorder my thoughts. “You mentioned Holmes sent you to me?”
Lady Evelyn smiled. “I don’t mean to be mysterious, Doctor. Colonel Herbert and Prince Ali and Mr. Evelyn-White share a very important distinction with my late father. All four, at least according to Mr. Holmes and his spiritualist associates, were victims of the pharaoh’s curse.”
“Would you care for a glass of port, my lady?” I asked, for I felt myself in desperate need of a restorative at that point, and billy-bedamned if it were improper etiquette. Lady Evelyn nodded sweetly.
“Pardon me, my lady.” I took up the thread, pouring with a shaky hand. “But we have already established that the prince was shot to death by his wife. How exactly did your uncle die?”
“He had every tooth in his head pulled out.”
“Good Lord! Was he tortured?”
“No, he was given frightfully bad medical advice by a quack doctor. He was trying to stave off advancing blindness and was told that it could alleviate his symptoms. Instead he contracted blood poisoning.”
“It sounds like criminally bad medical advice. And your father, I believe, died of an infection caused by—what was it?”
“A mosquito bite.”
“Yet the great detective Sherlock Holmes looks beyond these trivial facts to the eternal wrath of a boy king buried three thousand years ago in Egypt, and cries, ‘Aha! Here we have our culprit!’” I trumpeted, unable to keep the bitterness from my voice.
“Yes,” agreed the girl, accepting the port from me and taking a sip, “but he is the great detective, after all, is he not?”
Was he? Was he still, in spite of the séances, the table turning, the floating ectoplasmic visions, the mediums possessed by their spirit guides, was he still Sherlock Holmes?
“Yes,” I was forced to concede, “he is.”
She drank her port with relish, as if she had the reassurance she had come for. But I was wrong on that count. She had come for more.
“The truth is,” Lady Evelyn said, with just a hint of a tremor in her voice, “the deaths do have one other thing in common. You see, Prince Ali and Colonel Herbert both visited the pharaoh’s tomb within days after it was opened, just as Evelyn-White did.”
“Along with how many others? Dozens? Scores? What of Mr. Carter? Or yourself? Have you suffered any ill effects? My lady, don’t tell me you believe this nonsense about a curse?”
“My brother Henry seems convinced of it. He said my father’s dog Suzy at home began howling the moment my father died, three thousand miles away.”
“But what do you think?” I pressed her.
“I want to know, to be frank. I want to be certain. I want someone to examine all the evidence and either put the rumors to rest or confirm them. I want your help, Doctor.”
I was flattered, but not enough to lose my head. “What you want, my lady, is a detective. A proper detective, not some superannuated old army surgeon.”
“I’ve already hired a detective. Sherlock Holmes.”
I had a sudden vision of myself throttling the girl till she made some sense, but I believe I only stood there blinking. “But Holmes has already reached his verdict on these incidents!” I finally got out. It sounded like a yelp, even to me.
“Is there another detective you would recommend over Mr. Holmes in the case of a suspicious death?” she returned, unruffled.
She was going to drag it out of me. I had to admit there wasn’t. Even in his sunset years, even in the fog of his spiritualist beliefs, there was no more penetrating mind than that of my old friend, at least once he was on a case.
“Mr. Holmes presumes supernatural influence. I have challenged him to investigate. He has accepted my challenge. I will accept his findings. No one could debunk Sherlock Holmes with authority but Sherlock Holmes himself.”
I looked at her with new eyes. “You’re a gambler, my lady,” I said admiringly.
“I take after my father in that regard.”
It was well-known that Lord Carnarvon had lost a fortune gambling, especially on horse racing, a fortune that had only been recouped by his marriage to Lady Evelyn’s mother, Almina Wombwell, the illegitimate daughter (so it was bruited about) of the millionaire banker Alfred de Rothschild, the first Jew appointed director of the Bank of England.
“Well, then,” I said. “The only question is, why have you come to me?”
“Mr. Holmes was extremely reluctant to take this commission, as you might guess. He swore he had not taken a case in twenty years, though I’m well aware of his secret work for military intelligence during the war. He tried to fob off some Belgian mountebank with a waxed moustache on me. At one point he even called himself a doddering old fool. But I persisted. Finally he agreed, on one condition. He could do nothing, he insisted, he would not take step one, unless his old partner John Watson were by his side.”
There was no hiding my astonishment. It must have been incised upon my face like glyphs on the Rosetta Stone. He had asked for me. He had demanded me! Could it be that he was somehow unaware of my barrage of censures? Or had he simply brushed them aside as unimportant?
“Well, Doctor,” asked Lady Evelyn, with a smile I can only characterize as seductive, “will you help us solve the riddle of the pharaoh’s curse once and for all?”
Chapter Two: Mrs. Estelle Roberts
Ikissed my beautiful girls goodbye before they left for school that morning, hugging them so tightly to my breast that they complained they could not breathe. I tried in vain to keep the tears from flowing. I felt as if I were going to the ends of the earth, never to return. I would not be long at all, I kept telling myself, a fortnight perhaps, but it was farther than I had ever dreamed of voyaging in my life. And there was Terry, the baby, with the croup. How could I leave him? Yet I knew that I must. Sacrifices had to be made.
My husband, Arthur, and I had thrashed it out repeatedly, till we were sick of hearing each other’s voices. Of course, Arthur colored it as high adventure, which I suppose it was, in a certain light. He said they would be fine without me. Which did not comfort me one iota. Bea, the hired girl, would take perfectly good care of them. I agreed, quelling the anxiety in my voice. And of course Mrs. Slade was just next door. I admitted the soundness of it. But I didn’t have to like it, not one bit.
I had a much shorter journey ahead of me that afternoon. The Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, where I had a long-standing invitation to perform a psychic demonstration for the Spiritualist Association. Sir Sherlock had neglected to inform me of little niggling details such as where and when I should meet my escort. He always expected me to simply know. I don’t think it was because of my clairvoyance, which is anything but infallible; he always expected everyone to anticipate his needs. Little wonder he had never married.
I should have to bring my bags along with me to the demonstration. More bother. And I was feeling nervous as a cat. Arthur saw it and did his level best to calm my jitters. Dear man. He would have his hands full for two weeks, even with Bea to cook and clean and tend to the baby. He reminded me to pack for warm weather. I hadn’t noticed what I was shoving into my bag until he mentioned it, and I had to unpack all my woolens. Did some of my warm-weather clothes still smell of smoke? I sniffed. Well, it couldn’t be helped.
