A Time to Seek, page 3
I turned a slow circle in the center of the celestial vault, shaky hand holding the lantern high above my head to reveal the vibrant blue of the faraway ceiling, spattered with bright gold constellations. The sarcophagus resided in a London museum, but the chamber still held the hush of death.
Howard poked a finger toward the top of the wall. “The goddess Ma’at.”
Her outstretched blue and green wings spread truth and justice over the lower registers of paneled paintings.
I reached a tentative hand to touch the Esna shale wall. At its cool solidity, a chill swept over me, electric with connection. I kept my fingertips on the rock, half-listening to Howard talk of the damage done by Champollion a century ago, when he removed a wall panel.
I didn’t want a lecture. I’d heard years of lectures. I wanted to experience. I wanted to see and feel, to taste and smell and hear the past. To let it run through me like a current.
Something caught my eye in the sand. Had it been here when this place was new? With my hand still braced on the wall, I bent to retrieve it. Oh, how I wished I could have been here then, to get one last glimpse of Seti I’s gloriously-wrapped mummy, before it was hidden for three millennia.
As I bent, Howard was saying “This blasted war is going to ruin our efforts.”
My fingers closed around the tiny object. But then it blurred and surged, warped and twisted, like waves rising off hot sand. My stomach surged with it. My vision blanked for a fraction and then cleared. I righted myself quickly, carefully. Praying I wouldn’t be sick here in an empty ancient tomb, in front of Howard, on my first day.
But Howard was gone. And the tomb was not empty.
Around me, a crowd of women, dressed in tightly-fitting white linen dresses, keened and wailed around an open granite sarcophagus. Their kohl-painted eye makeup ran down olive cheeks.
I looked down to the object in my hand, but it was only a smooth, black stone. Dark against the unfamiliar white linen of my own tight dress. Dress? My head swam and stomach surged again. My breath was a shallow pant, my ears rang with the sound of the wailing. Nostrils filled with the sharp spice of burning incense and the tang of fresh blood.
What is this? What…?
A deep-throated recitation began behind me. I spun to the looming presence of a horrible black jackal.
No, not a jackal. A priest with jackal-headed mask, incanting from the Book of the Dead.
The incense lay thick on my tongue and stung my eyes. I swallowed and blinked. It all remained. A dream, but I could not wake. My chest constricted around my breath, trembled like a palm frond in a sandstorm.
I needed to get out. Outside, where I could breathe and think.
My feet were rooted to the sand. Fear and confusion rendered me immobile.
Until the crowd surged, and thrust me against the open sarcophagus.
My elbow scraped stone. I clutched at the pain and felt a sticky wetness.
The women swayed. The wailing and singing crescendoed and the mob pushed inward.
I would be crushed.
The urge to flee swept me like a cold wave, and the jostling unmoored me from my position.
I pushed outward, wove through the crowd, along the corridors, retracing the multiple sets of stairs. Finally, out into the night air.
Beyond a cluster of crying women, the tomb opened to the silk-purple sky, strewn with a sprinkling of silver stars. Another crowd of mourners gathered, some singing and others bending to sweep up dirt with their fingers and fling it over their heads.
A pair of oxen loitered with a wooden sledge harnessed behind them, presumably the way the massive sarcophagus had been moved into the tomb.
I backed away, kept retreating, until I brushed against the lip of the tomb entrance.
This was no better. I had to understand. Needed answers.
Needed to make all of this stop.
I shoved back against the clot of women behind me, fueled by irrational anger. Or maybe rational. I was in no position to judge.
Back down, down to the vaulted burial chamber, searching for logic.
The crowd yielded against the pressure and a way opened for me to reach the wall where it began. I lurched for it, spun, and pressed my back against the painted stone. Braced both hands against it, head bent downward. Closed my eyes. Repeated a single word like a chant. Stop.
The sharp-pitched wails, the creepy recitation, the hum of a mob, it all ceased, like a knob on the wireless clicked off, leaving a hollow silence. Light flashed against my closed eyes, illuminating snatches of muddled scenes, like someone else’s memories. The skirt of a red dress. My mother’s. Her hand crushing mine. The spinning vertigo returned, along with the nausea.
I tightened my own hands into fists. Breathed the first vague prayer I’d said since childhood. Opened my eyes.
Something caught my eye in the sand.
“This blasted war is going to ruin our efforts.”
I blinked. Ignored the small black stone. There was no way I was going to pick that thing up again.
But why had Howard said it — those words about the war — twice?
Had he repeated himself?
What seemed more true was that the bizarre, perhaps psychotic, episode had cranked the film of my life backward a frame or two.
I reached for my injured elbow.
The skin was unbroken. There was no pain.
None of it had been real. It was not real.
Some kind of… waking dream… brought on by the excitement of my first official day on a dig.
“Miss Aldridge? What’s wrong? You’d best not be overcome by the work expected of you.”
I licked dry lips, shook my head, and turned to Howard with a smile. “Nothing. Just happy to be here. A little — overwhelmed — I suppose.”
Howard grunted, his usual mixture of acknowledgment and disapproval.
It was not real.
I was in Egypt, yes. But not ancient Egypt. Not at the burial of Seti I, Nineteenth Century pharaoh. That was madness, and I was not mad.
I refused to let my love for this place be my undoing.
And yet, the fear… the fear remained.
February 9, 1922
As it turned out, the blasted war did ruin our efforts in Egypt.
Only a week after arriving, fresh-faced and confident I’d be useful, then terrified by the “incident,” in Seti’s tomb, I was bustled back to England. Japan was attacking China and the Germans were calculating the use of poison gas. Demonstration marches in London demanded rights for women to serve in war industries. But my dream was put on hold for almost four long years, years spent in part at Highclere-turned-hospital, nursing wounded soldiers.
Now, in our fourth season digging since the war, Carter had found almost nothing, Porchy’s funding was running out, and I had convinced myself the episode in the tomb eight years earlier was the product of an over-eager young scholar beginning her life’s work at last.
The foolish girl had receded into memory.
The moments in this tomb that October day had not. Nor my suspicion that more than simple imagination was involved.
Today, alone in Seti’s tomb, with Chefren waiting far above, I tried to recreate everything my memory held. Stood in the same position, flattened a palm against the shale wall, bent to pluck something from the sand. Focused my mind on my desire to see Seti’s mummy before it was lost for centuries.
But there was nothing.
I pulled myself to standing.
Tried again.
Foolish girl. Did I really think coming here was going to… what? Take me back in time?
I’d read a shiny paperback copy of H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine when I was a kid, a few years after it was published. My father gave it to me as a Christmas gift. The idea captured my imagination, along with the imagination of everyone who read it. What if we truly could climb into a machine and travel through time?
Now, standing in this silent tomb with chilled fingers, thinking of my dead parents and the Egyptian mummy who’d lain here, it seemed all the silliness of a wishful girl who grew up to be a wishful woman.
Ridiculous.
CHAPTER FIVE
Summer, 1922
Highclere Castle, Hampshire, England
And so I put aside my mother’s journal page, and my preposterous conjecture, and went back to work, striving for the excellence necessary to make a name for myself.
The Carnarvon family returned to England.
Howard and I dug in the sand for another six weeks. Found nothing. Again.
The dig season drew to a close in April as the sun grew hot, and I was back at Highclere for the summer, taking advantage yet again of the generous hospitality of Lord Carnarvon and Lady Almina. And once more putting my dream to carve out a place of value in the world on hold.
During one of my first free afternoons, I slipped away to one of the rarely-used bedrooms on the third floor and knelt in front of a locked trunk.
When my parents abandoned me here at age fifteen, to take their trip to Venice in ’05, they promised to be back in three months. They took clothing and personal items, but left the rest behind at Highclere Castle, in the rooms where Lord Carnarvon and the Countess had welcomed them, and me, for so many years.
They never returned.
Eventually Lady Almina and I donated their clothing to some of the poor tenants on the estate. The rest of it had been locked away in a trunk and stashed in this room.
This afternoon, I slotted the key into its narrow hole, lifted the lid, and then piece by piece, gently removed and set aside each fragment of my parents’ lives, as I had done many times over the seventeen years since they’d died.
My mother’s hairbrush, which she had loved and must have been sad to discover missing from her luggage after they left. A pretty glass bottle of her favorite perfume. I pulled the stopper and dabbed a tiny bit on my wrist, as I always did when looking through this trunk, and inhaled the scent of her. I set the perfume aside and pulled out a few well-loved books—Gulliver’s Travels, a few by Rudyard Kipling. The tarnished metal tag worn by my father’s favorite dog, with the engraved “Tarzan” still readable. A picture of my mother, looking so young, her name written in elegant script below the image.
And a tiny black-covered notebook, filled with tiny scribbles in two different hands, one young and one older. I paged through it, throat tight with emotion, scanning the special coded drawings no one but my father and I could decipher.
Holding the notebook, I relived that day years ago begging my parents not to leave me, to take me with them to Venice. My father’s cold refusal, my mother’s silence. The car rolling away, across the gravel curve of Highclere Castle.
I shook off the memory and set the book aside. It was the twine-tied bundle of letters that brought me to the trunk today.
Some of the correspondence was between one of my parents and colleagues in London or New York. These I set aside, at least for now, and pulled out a smaller packet of letters bound with a pink ribbon I had never felt free to untie.
Letters between the two of them, written during the infrequent separations when my father was teaching summer term at Oxford and my mother remained in the cool confines of Highclere. I rubbed at the back of my neck and shifted position. What would it do to my heart, to read the affection between them? To read, perhaps, some mention of me. Or more painfully, no mention of me.
With my back braced against the wall beneath a stately window, and the afternoon sunlight warming my legs, I read them all within an hour or two, an occasional twinge of guilt interrupting my reading. But the letters were all I had left of their hearts.
When the reading was done, there was only one line, in one letter, that held any clue.
“I am missing you fiercely,” my father wrote, “and our adventures. When I return, perhaps we can make our once-in-a-lifetime visit to Hatshepsut. I know it has always been your fondest wish, despite the dangers to mind and body.”
Slight evidence, but enough to set the letter aside, and upon re-reading to feel the flutter of excitement in my chest.
He had not said “a visit to Hatshepsut’s Mortuary Temple,” as one would expect. Besides, by 1905 they had both worked with the archaeologist Édouard Naville, near the famous female pharaoh’s temple at Deir el Bahri for three seasons. No, my father had said it would be a visit to Hatshepsut.
The phrase, including the idea the proposed visit would happen only once for them, cast a new light on my episode in Seti’s tomb eight years ago, as well as the single page Eve had brought me in February.
Could this be the reason I was not able to recreate the experience in Seti’s tomb? Was it possible to slip back past the centuries, but also true that time was like a river with many docks, and one could only visit a certain dock once in a lifetime?
Was I truly making this leap of logic? That my parents could travel through time? Or—even more unbelievable—that it was possible for me, as well?
And yet, somehow, I had always known. That moment in Seti’s tomb. It was simply too real.
I knelt before the trunk again and ran my fingers over the metal latches, cool to the touch. I blinked away tears, silly after all this time.
“What secrets did you have, Mother? Father?”
And why did you take your secrets, but not your daughter, to Venice?
Questions with no answers. And unanswered questions never failed to aggravate me beyond reason.
But there was one question I could answer, as soon as I returned to Egypt.
If it were true that one could travel to the past, would it be possible for me to travel through the millennia again, if my chosen destination were different than the last time? If I chose a new “dock” at which to land?
I swiped away the useless emotion and placed the meager remnants of my parents’ lives back into the trunk. Next season’s digging, if we began in January as usual, was months away. What was I to do until then?
I had the wedding of Eve’s brother, called “Porchy” like his father, to distract me in July. It was a splendid affair at Seamore Place in London, the house Almina’s father, banking tycoon Alfred de Rothschild, had left her in his will a few years ago. Over a thousand people were invited to the bash.
But although the younger Porchy’s new wife Catherine was an American like Lady Almina, the similarity ended there. Almina had brought the Rothschild money to her marriage. Catherine had no money. And it was that sad fact that led to the afternoon which was the first time I ever heard Howard Carter and the Earl yell at each other.
We were all at Newbury Races, watching horses with names like Weathervane and Poisoned Arrow, through a summer drizzle that left everyone’s nerves frayed. For some reason, Lord Carnarvon had picked today to tell Howard he was giving up. Giving up Egypt and their shared dream of finding the illusive, and perhaps illusionary, pharaoh called Tut-ankh-amun.
I sat with Eve and her mother, just behind the two men, and could see Howard’s ears grow pink with anger.
“So, that’s it, then? You’re just calling it quits?”
Porchy dropped his chin to his chest. “I simply can’t afford it, old man. I’ve spent a fortune—” at this, he barely glanced backward at Lady Almina, whose father’s money it mostly was—“more than fifty thousand pounds at this point. It’s been fifteen years. When are we going to face the truth—”
“Tommyrot!” Howard’s favorite expression erupted from between clenched teeth. “He’s out there!” He pounded a fist into his palm, his racing form crumpled between tight fingers. “I know it. We have to give it more—”
“More! I’ve sold three houses, man. Egypt’s a sovereign state now the war’s over, and all the excavation concessions are going to the museums and the government. What more can we give?”
But Howard was shaking his head. “There is still more to dig. Under KV9. The workmen’s huts. You know there is. All those embalming goods Davis found years ago.”
“And perhaps Davis is right. He’s already found our pharaoh, plundered in KV54.”
“KV54’s not a tomb! It’s a pit! And how do you explain the faience cup ten years ago, with Tut-ankh-amun’s name, near KV9—“
“Fine. Let’s say he’s still there, under KV9. How are we going to dig it? Ramesses VI is covered in tourists for the entire season.”
“We’ll start early. Autumn, even. Beat the tourist crowd.”
The Earl sighed. “I am sorry, Howard. You know it’s been my dream as much as yours. But I must think of my family.”
“Then I’ll fund it myself. One last season.”
I had watched this exchange with bated breath. My own future hung on the outcome, though I had nothing to contribute. Too bad I didn’t come from wealthy American money. My parents had been scholars and had left me nothing but books, journals, and a bottle of perfume. My whole education and training were tied up in archaeology. But more than that, now that I had found my father’s letter and my mother’s journal page, I suspected my entire life might hinge on my making my own discovery in Egypt that could give my life meaning. I simply had to get back there, to test the theory that had been developing since I’d read my parents’ letters.
“I’ll take the girl.” Howard’s thumb jabbed back toward me. “She’s smart, and she’ll work for free.”
The Earl was watching the horses, but his thoughts were clearly in the desert sands. “I can’t let you do that, old boy. Fund it yourself.” He huffed out a rueful laugh. “You’d go bankrupt.” He smoothed his mustache with a thumb and forefinger. “All right. You have your one more season.”
Howard’s shoulders visibly dropped.
I felt my own relief, loosening the muscles that had gone tight in my neck.
One more season.
CHAPTER SIX
November 4, 1922
Valley of the Kings, Egypt
