The Strange Case of the Pharaoh's Heart, page 22
“And?” Holmes by now had probably anticipated all my moves. But I continued for the benefit of Mrs. Roberts.
“I went up to the left luggage desk. I told them I was from the front office and that I had a valise that belonged to the Princess that had got waylaid. She was fit to be tied and I’d promised her a personal apology. So I was able to winkle her address out of him. A place in the Rue Georges-Ville, a little elbow street on the Right Bank. I thought about ending my quest there, save that I had passed a camera shop along the way. Well, it brought to mind your dodge with the Times.”
Sherlock Holmes was smiling broadly. “You didn’t.”
“I did. I wired her. Said I was from Antiques Quarterly and I’d love to get some pictures of her Egyptian collection. She fell for it like the vain little thing she is.”
“You weren’t worried she’d recognize you from our encounter in Cairo?” Mrs. Roberts asked.
“I think all her attention was on Holmes and, begging your pardon, yourself. Besides, I had my reading glasses on that morning, which I’m told make me look quite different.”
“They make you look like a sleepy old owl,” volunteered Holmes.
“I don’t believe there is an Antiques Quarterly,” said Mrs. Roberts.
“Be that as it may, I purchased a new camera—I have the receipt here for Lady Evelyn—and I presented myself at her door. I had to make it through a formidable secretary and the princess’s sister, Yvonne, but I was finally ushered into her orgulous presence. She did have quite a collection of Oriental whatnots, and I took pictures from every angle except standing on my head. One of the new single-lens reflex cameras—they’re a dream. She seemed to cotton to me, though I’m old enough to be her pater. So I started dropping a few pertinent questions into the mix:
“‘I heard you toured King Tutankhamun’s tomb. That must have been thrilling.’
“‘Mais oui. We had the private exhibition, of course.’
“‘Which of all those treasures would you own if you could have your pick? One of the couches perhaps?’
“‘You both remember that couch we saw at the museum. Body of a lion, head of a hippo, tail of a monkey or whatever.’
“‘Indeed? I would have guessed something more intimate would be to your taste. Perhaps the heart scarab.’
“‘There was no heart scarab found upon the body.’”
I slammed my fist down the table, so the tea things jumped in unison. Holmes and the lady seemed to jump as well.
“That’s when I knew I had her; for she had visited the tomb long before the sarcophagus was opened, and there had been nothing in the papers about it. Then I turned up the heat on her.”
“‘You know what I can’t figure out? Where do you suppose your husband got to the night he died? The newspapers said he was gone for hours in the pouring rain.’”
“Well, her nostrils flared at that one, but I tried my best to look harmless to pacify her.”
“An effect which he does quite well, considering. You know he received a V.C. for his derring-do in Afghanistan? You won’t find that in any of his narratives. Harmless he is anything but,” Holmes interposed.
I tried not to blush at that one. “Well, she stammered a bit, and cleared her throat, so I poured it on:
“‘I suppose he was with some boy. Orientals like those little boys, don’t they?’
“‘He wasn’t with a boy. He was with a woman, and if I told you which woman, a woman fully five years older than myself—’
“But there she clamped her mouth shut.”
“‘Oh, please. I’ve got to know. Strictly off the record. My hand before God. You’ll never hear a peep out of me, Princess.’
“It was plain that she was dying to tell me.”
“‘Natacha Rambova.’
“She said it as if she was pulling the veil off a magic trick. Well, I gasped, to go along with the mise-en-scène, though I have no idea who Natacha Rambova is. But she must be at least somewhat famous from the way she said it, and—”
“I know who she is. I’ve met her. And she’s more than five years younger than Princess Marguerite, not five years older,” said Mrs. Roberts.
I must have been staring cross-eyed at her. Even Sherlock Holmes had his mouth open.
“She’s the bride of the Hollywood actor Rudolph Valentino,” she added.
“The Sheik?” Holmes asked.
“He’s a sheik?” I asked, confused.
“He starred in the film The Sheik,” Mrs. Roberts corrected.
I don’t see many films. As in, any. “And how do you come to know a film star?” I asked, rather piqued that she had stolen my thunder.
“Oh, she’s devoted to spiritism. They both are. Their last time in London they wanted to meet Sherlock Holmes’s medium. So I made their acquaintance.”
I have never seen Holmes laugh so hard. I thought he would choke on his tea.
“Well, could you write Mrs. Valentino and ask what her business was with Ali Fahmy on the night of his death?” I asked squarely.
“Oh, no, that wouldn’t do at all, especially if she were guilty of an indiscretion. Some questions are better asked tête-à-tête, over tea and biscuits,” said Mrs. Roberts firmly.
“Well, would you care to fly out to Hollywood and chat her up?”
“Don’t be so flippant, Doctor. It doesn’t become you. Besides, there’s no need for such drastic measures. They’re preparing another film. All about El Cid, I think. That means she’ll be back here shortly, trawling the shops for costumes and props. Then it will be perfectly natural of me to ask her to tea.”
“Then we shall await the advent of Mrs. Valentino. We may finally discover what was the thing of beauty and what the thing of power,” said Holmes, “provided she knows.”
“I thought we had determined the first one was this heart scarab,” Mrs. Roberts sallied.
“We as yet have no proof that there is a heart scarab,” Holmes reminded her.
An idea hit me: “Mightn’t what’s his name, Burton, have gotten a picture of it while it was still on the body?”
“Even if he did, Carter would likely have destroyed any such photo by now.”
“So, Carter did steal the scarab?” Mrs. Roberts asked, trying to nail Holmes down.
“I’m not convinced of that, either. But he must be aware of the theft, if theft there was. He would hardly be willing to admit such an abstraction took place under his watchful eye.”
“Then how on earth can we prove it?” she asked.
“We must follow the trail of the thing of beauty. We do have one advantage, if it is indeed the heart scarab.”
“And what might that be?” I asked.
“The scarab itself. It cannot be that it wanders idly from hand to hand. It must have a specific gravity.”
Mrs. Roberts and I exchanged sidelong looks of perplexity. Then her dark eyes lit up. “Of course!” she said. “It’s an elemental, after all. It has its own desires. It seeks its center.”
Now I was more baffled than ever, and said so.
“The same principle guides the elemental as for a magnet that seeks true north, a moving object comes to rest, or water seeks its own level. The elemental must have a resting point,” said Holmes.
This was a bridge too far for me. Even if I were to accept all their wild ideas up to this point, this mishmash of physics and the metaphysical I refused to follow. But once again, I held my peace. I could hardly walk out on them now. They would need a rational mind on their side.
“But then the scarab may kill while attempting to return to Tutankhamun,” said Mrs. Roberts, dismayed.
“It may kill and kill again,” said Holmes in a doom-laden voice.
I saw an opening. “But didn’t you say it was the aspergillus whatever that killed them?”
“The fungus was merely the means to hand. The scarab was the force majeure,” he replied.
“But we still don’t know that it was the scarab that was stolen,” I said. “There were thousands of items in that tomb, and most of them had Tutankhamun’s name etched on them somewhere. Carter said as much.”
“We can wipe a few thousand from our rolls. The item must perforce be both small and extremely valuable,” Holmes pointed out.
“And it should be something dear to the pharaoh, which the elemental would logically attach itself to,” chimed in Mrs. Roberts.
“I’ll grant you that, but don’t you see what I’m driving at? If it’s so valuable, perhaps there’s no spirit involved at all. Men have lusted for gold since Midas. What great gem does not have its story of a trail of death left behind it? There was enough gold in that tomb to sink a Spanish galleon,” I rejoined.
Mrs. Roberts’s eyes rolled in her head, but Holmes gave my argument the consideration it was due. I thought for a moment he would be forced to stand and pace the floor. I even considered offering him my pipe. But I could feel something rumbling within him, something about to erupt.
“I’ve been a fool! I’ve been approaching this problem the wrong way round. The item wasn’t stolen, but appropriated!” he said triumphantly.
I was frankly hoping for something with more teeth. “I really don’t see the difference.”
“It could only be appropriated by someone who thought they had a rightful claim to it.”
“You mean one of the Egyptian officials?” Mrs. Roberts asked.
“I mean Lord Carnarvon. Remember that he went into the affair with the understanding that he would get an equal division of the spoils. The Egyptians reneged. It wouldn’t be a question of the value of the thing. It would be a matter of retribution, of justice, as he saw it.”
“But he was a man of sterling reputation. I’m sure he wouldn’t dream of taking some trophy just to display,” I said.
“Indeed not—the one thing he could never do is display it in any way. But remember he was an avid collector. Such wealthy men as he hold their secret treasures as dear as the picture of Dorian Grey.”
He was still pondering, his fingers drumming the tabletop louder than the trooping of the colors.
“If we give Watson’s theory its due—” he began.
“What theory was that?” asked Mrs. R., now thoroughly muddled.
“That it’s simply a question of avarice. We must look for opposites that attract,” he announced.
“I don’t follow you at all,” I confessed.
“What did Gould and Fahmy have in common?”
“They were both rich as Croesus.”
“Besides the obvious, Watson.”
I got rather huffy at that remark. “I don’t know! What did they have in common?”
“Absolutely nothing. What brought them together?”
“The scarab,” said Mrs. Roberts, still championing her scarab theory.
“The scarab. Either its desire to change hands, or their desire for plunder, brought them together. We must look for other unlooked-for associations. There shall we find the scarab,” Holmes said with finality.
“Then we just wait?” That did not suit me at all. “What if your spirits strike again?”
“We must hope that they don’t strike at one of us.”
There was cold comfort indeed.
“Have patience, my friend. The pieces are falling together,” he said.
My patience was exhausted. “May I have another scone, please?” I begged.
Chapter Eighteen: Mrs. Estelle Roberts
I prepared dinner—or rather, I burned dinner—in a hurry that night. Though we had by tacit agreement avoided the subject entirely in our discussion, I was still deeply shaken by my bruising encounter with Moriarty. One thing I was sure of: I had no wish to ever come near the Reichenbach Falls.
Sir Sherlock had said that all the pieces of the mystery were falling together, but they seemed more jumbled than ever to me. If there were a heart scarab, who had stolen it from the tomb? Lord Carnarvon had died, so it must have been he. Next had come Mr. Gould, who had somehow stolen the scarab from Lord Carnarvon, from his cold, dead hands, even as the elemental passed to him? And then had Aubrey Herbert killed him to avenge his half brother, coming into possession of scarab and elemental both? And then Ali Bey must have killed him for it. I could imagine him in a fit of madness, pulling the teeth from the blind Colonel Herbert’s open mouth, one by one, all the while making soft clucking noises to throw him off guard. And then the elemental must have passed to the princess upon his death. But that was not the order the spirits had hinted at.
Ouch! I’d burned my finger.
Well, what then? Had the princess stolen it from the lord and the prince stolen it from the princess and the colonel—oh, it was maddening! Where had the spirit fled to? What was its purpose? To be reunited with the pharaoh? Or to poison whoever came into possession of it? If they came too near, could it possess Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson? Was that what Madame Louise had been warning us about all along—that her son might add another death to the scarab’s score? Was I safe from possession? Surely Red Cloud would protect me. If he could. He hadn’t been able to defend me from Moriarty’s onslaught.
Salt. It needed more salt.
If we were to return the scarab to the tomb, would Mr. Carter even take it back? He had already denied its existence. And what if he took it back, returned it to the pharaoh? Wasn’t it his intention to remove the mummy from the tomb? Would the elementals strike him down if he attempted it? It might serve him right. Oh, I wished that they had never found the tomb, no matter how fabulous the treasure. What is gold to the lives of innocents?
The family crowded into the kitchen, but they seemed far removed, as if I viewed them through a spyglass. My beloved Hugh, and my three daughters, Ivy, Evaline, and Iris, all at the small deal table, smiling up at me, but with that guarded look that meant they knew I was in another world. No, not Hugh—Arthur, my second husband. Hugh was gone, but I often saw him sitting there at the table, watching over his girls. Of course, I never told Arthur.
Yes, I had burned the bottom of the stew. No matter. The girls were used to it. They probably thought it was supposed to be that way. Arthur was patient. Where was baby Terry? My heart stopped. Oh— Bea was with Terry. He was asleep. He was safe. I wish that I could sleep so soundly. Ever since the spirits had begun visiting me at the tender age of three, my sleep had been invaded by the dreams of others.
None of the girls had yet manifested my gift. Would Terry be the one to inherit it? I hoped not. But what was it like, to be alone in one’s mind? It seemed lonesome. Was it only emptiness, with one solitary soul rattling around in there? I could not remember a time before the voices. They were part of me. I would be lost without them. I would be incomplete. I remember when my brother Lionel, who had died before I was born, first appeared to me. I was only five. He was a child then, too, but I watched him grow to maturity along with me. He still comes to visit me in the quiet hours, bringing soft words of encouragement.
“Look for the unlooked-for,” Sir Sherlock had said. There was something—
I dished out the stew. Iris, my picky eater, took a tiny spoonful into her mouth. “Stew’s burnt,” she said, with a look of disgust. The other two girls nodded in unison. They hadn’t even tasted it yet.
“It’s not. It’s fine,” said Arthur. Bless him for lying so valiantly.
“There’s bread and butter,” I said.
“What about bread and chocolate?” Iris begged.
Bread and chocolate? Where did she ever get an idea to mix—?
Princess Marguerite and Sir Archibald!
Chapter Nineteen: Dr. John Watson
That night, I met one of Holmes’s elementals. Or, not precisely met, and not precisely an elemental. But he was unquestionably a creature of ill omen. Let me explain. Holmes had disappeared on some secret fact-finding mission, and I was feeling fidgety. I went down to the pub for a pint and some chips. It was a bit more crowded and a bit louder than I liked, so I decided on having only one. I was taking my first sip when a sudden slap on my back knocked my teeth against the glass and sent bitter flying in all directions. I swung around to find myself facing—what was his name?—Shaw—no, Lawrence. The plucky pilot who had flown us to Cairo. That was how I placed him at first. It was hard, even with what I now knew, to picture him in flowing white robes. How could he even ride a camel, short as he was? Not exactly the hail-fellow-well-met kind, I would have thought. He wanted something.
“Well, what are you doing here?” he cried, which is exactly what I had intended to say to him.
“I live just round the corner,” I said defensively and immediately wished I had not volunteered that information. Still, I could not help but think of Holmes’s directive to look out for the unlooked-for. This meeting definitely qualified. Silly, perhaps. But was this meeting a coincidence? Doubtful.
“Well, imagine that. By the by, did you ever find what you were seeking in Tutankhamun’s tomb?” he asked. I noticed he didn’t have a drink in his hand.
“Looking for?” I remembered all too well Holmes warning me about the man. Although he could hardly be causing the Egyptians much trouble in a pub off the Marylebone Road.
“That’s what your companion said. He was looking for some explanation for all those unnatural deaths connected to the unsealing of the tomb. Or was he just having me on? All that blather about a curse.”
“He makes such a pother. You don’t believe in supernatural curses, do you?” I said, trying to put him on his back foot.
“I don’t know. One sees a great number of outré things in the Orient. Especially poisons. I’ve seen men die the most excruciating deaths because someone shook a drop or two of something wicked in their waterhole.”
“That doesn’t exactly fall under the definition of the supernatural, though, does it?”
“Quite natural. But nothing says those ancient Egyptians couldn’t have devised a poison that would activate when someone opened their tomb three thousand years later. They were far more sophisticated than we give them credit for.”
