The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl

by Theodora Goss

  But no, when Gitla opened the door at the end of a passageway on the ground floor, she saw only Mrs. Raymond and Miss Trelawny. They were sitting in a small, pleasant room that looked quite different from the rest of the house. Its walls were papered in a floral pattern. It had a desk in one corner, a sofa, and a comfortable reading chair in front of the fireplace. In front of the window was a round table set for breakfast, and seated at the table were the two women, quite alone, thank goodness.

  “Good morning, Lydia,” said Miss Trelawny. “We’re about to have breakfast. We hoped you would join us. Did you sleep well?”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Alice. Now was the time to implement her plan. Could she do it? She steeled herself for the most difficult thing she had done in her life. She walked up to Mrs. Raymond, leaned forward, said, “Good morning, Mother,” and kissed her on the cheek.

  Mrs. Raymond turned as though startled and looked at her with astonishment.

  “I’ve been thinking since yesterday, just alone in my room,” Alice continued. “And… well, I’ve decided to help you, Miss Trelawny. With mesmerism, you know. Like Professor Moriarty and my… mother wanted.”

  “Oh?” said Miss Trelawny. “Were you persuaded by Moriarty’s diatribe—that is, argument—yesterday?”

  She was smiling, but there was something in her expression… and the energic waves around her head were darker than usual. What should Alice say? That she had been convinced by Moriarty, even though his idea of an England for Englishmen was the stupidest and most frightening thing she had ever heard? After all, Mr. Byles, the butcher, was English right enough, but what about Mr. Patel, the grocer, who always saved the best vegetables for Mrs. Poole, so she would go nowhere else, or Mrs. Jablonski, who made the best bread in Marylebone? Or Mr. Nolan, who was a groundskeeper in Regent’s Park and always greeted her so kindly when she walked through the park on errands? He was Irish. Did that count as part of the professor’s England? Alice rather thought not. And what Moriarty had said about the Queen—well, that was blasphemy! What in the world would Mrs. Poole do if she heard such a thing? She would hit Professor Moriarty with a rolling pin, and he would deserve it. Could she convincingly tell Miss Trelawny that she thought his ridiculous plan was a splendid idea?

  “No, that’s all rot,” she said. “But I want to spend more time with my mother. After all, we haven’t seen each other since I was a baby. She may have abandoned me in an orphanage”—here she looked at Mrs. Raymond accusingly—“but she’s still my mother. Or so she tells me.”

  “You don’t understand,” said Mrs. Raymond, frowning—but not as though she were angry, simply as though she were displeased at having to remember what had happened so long ago. “I had been accused of murdering my husband—your father. Although I was acquitted for lack of evidence, the police would not give up—there was a young sergeant who was convinced I was guilty. I had to get away from London. How could I do that with a child—an infant? You were only three months old. And I would have been putting you in danger as well. Besides, I was not fit to be a mother, not then—perhaps not even now. Some women are born to be mothers; some are not. I am the latter sort.”

  “Fit or not, you are a mother—my mother,” said Alice. “So I’d like to get to know you better. Also, I’m hungry.”

  Miss Trelawny laughed. “Come sit down, Lydia.” She patted the chair next to her. “Mrs. Mandelbaum may not speak English, but she can certainly make an English breakfast! Toast and marmalade, eggs, sausage—” She was heaping these on a plate as she spoke. “Milk and sugar in your tea? You look like the milk and sugar type. And please do call me Margaret. We’re friends, are we not? There’s no need to be formal among ourselves.”

  The breakfast was indeed excellent, and Alice had been right—she was hungry. She had not realized how very hungry until there were sausages and eggs and toast on her plate, under her nose. Then, despite her best effort to remain ladylike—as ladylike as Mary would have been under the circumstances—she began to eat with a sort of restrained ravenousness.

  “Are all the items for the ritual properly situated?” asked Mrs. Raymond, turning to Miss Trelawny—or rather Margaret—and continuing whatever conversation they had been having before Alice entered.

  “I believe so,” said Margaret. “That’s where I was yesterday morning, or I would have come sooner. I measured between the altar and sarcophagus myself.”

  “As she directed?” asked Mrs. Raymond, whom we may as well, at this point, call Helen. After all, she was not quite the woman Mary had met at the Magdalen Society anymore. She was younger, less harsh in her manner—and she was Alice’s mother. “They have to be placed correctly for the energic waves to flow through them.”

  “Of course.” Margaret put her hand up to the ruby beetle at her throat. “I assure you, I’ve followed directions precisely. I’m going back again this afternoon. I want to check the Hathor lamps one more time. When we get to that part of the ritual—”

  “Little pitchers have big ears,” said Helen, warningly.

  “What—oh, you mean Lydia? I don’t think she’s even listening. Lydia?”

  Alice looked up from a deliciously runny egg she had been trying to get onto a piece of toast. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “There’s no need to ma’am me. Do you agree with Helen?”

  Alice tried to look startled and innocent. “Um, yes, of course.”

  “About the fact that Professor Moriarty resembles a fish?”

  “Oh yes.” Alice sighed with what she hoped was obvious relief. “He does, a little. A flounder, I should say. Not that I’ve been acquainted with many flounders, except the ones at the fishmonger’s.” Listen and observe. And don’t let them know you’re doing it. She had received valuable training in that at the orphanage.

  “There, you see? Lydia agrees with you,” said Margaret. “Would you like another cup of tea, Lydia? Eat up, there’s a good girl. I need to be back at the British Museum at noon. The exhibit opens next week, and there are still boxes to unpack, artifacts to arrange. We want the tomb of Queen Tera to be set up just right, so visitors can see exactly what we saw when we opened the tomb.”

  “Were you with your father in Egypt?” asked Alice, astonished. She knew, of course, that Egypt was a real country—after all, it was mentioned in the Bible. But actually going there seemed only slightly less fantastical to her than going to the moon.

  “Of course!” Margaret smiled. “I was my father’s unofficial assistant—his amanuensis. I did his research for him, wrote down all his findings—indeed, I often wrote the first drafts of his papers. He would revise them, of course, adding all sorts of technical phraseology I did not know. I had raised the possibility of going to university myself—Girton would have been my first choice—but he did not believe a university education was suitable for women. ‘You will get married and have children,’ he said. ‘And then it will all have been a waste of your time and my money.’ But when we entered the tomb of Queen Tera, it was I who deciphered the hieroglyphs on the walls. The inscriptions were in both the hieroglyphic writing of ancient Egypt and the Greek used in Alexandria during the Ptolemaic Dynasty. Do you know anything about the Ptolemaic Dynasty, Lydia? I don’t know how much you were taught—”

  Alice just shook her head. Beatrice had taught her the natural sciences, and a little Latin and Greek. Mary had taught her history and geography. Justine had taught her philosophy, which she did not particularly understand. Catherine had taught her literature, and Mrs. Poole had taught her arithmetics. But no one had taught her anything about ancient Egyptian dynasties.

  “Well,” said Margaret, with evident pleasure—she seemed to enjoy explaining to someone who knew nothing about the subject, “there were many Ptolemies, so we distinguish them by epithets. Tera was a queen before she was a priestess of Isis, the second wife of Ptolemy Auletes. His first wife, who was also his sister, bore him a daughter, Berenice, but was too sickly afterward to bear another child, so he set her aside and
married Tera, the daughter of the High Priest of Ptah at Memphis. For generations, the Ptolemies had not married outside their own family. Brother married sister, uncle married niece, with terrible results—deformity and madness in the family line. Tera was a popular choice—the Egyptians were rebelling against Macedonian rule, and she was a native Egyptian. She bore Ptolemy three healthy children—Cleopatra, Arsinoë, and his son Ptolemy, called Philopator. She ruled Egypt for several years while her husband was exiled in Rome, then ceded the throne again on his return. When he died, his son Philopator and daughter Cleopatra ascended the throne. Cleopatra said the Goddess Isis had come to her in a dream and told her that Tera should become the High Priestess of Isis at Philae. It was, of course, to get her out of Alexandria so she would not try to assume the throne again herself. She would certainly have made a better ruler than her daughter!”

  Miss Trelawny sounded like a university professor. Mrs. Poole had once taken Alice to hear a professor of literature speak about Wordsworth: Our English Bard in a lecture at the Working Women’s Institute, and he had sounded exactly the same way. Would Margaret have liked to be a professor? If women could become professors—Alice was unsure on that point.

  “You know the rest from Shakespeare,” Margaret continued. “Cleopatra lost Rome to the armies of Augustus. After conquering Alexandria, Augustus sent a contingent of his soldiers to Philae, to the temple of Isis. He was hoping to capture the High Priestess, because he feared that she might once again claim the throne and lead a rebellion against Roman rule. The priestesses resisted his soldiers, and many of them were killed, including Tera. A tomb had already been prepared among the rocky hills that flanked that portion of the Nile, for Egyptians planned carefully for the afterlife. The remaining priestesses interred her in that tomb, sealing the entrance and covering it with desert sand. There it remained undisturbed until my father discovered it a year ago.”

  “Your father! As though he had anything to do with the discovery.” Helen snorted. “You’re the one who discovered that tomb—and did he give you credit? Of course not.”

  “Well, you could say that I stumbled upon it,” said Margaret. “You see, I had gone out to see the sunrise over the Nile—I had been awakened early by the call to prayer, which was chanted by the leader of our Arab bearers five times a day. As I climbed a sandy cliff, my foot slipped on the sand, and I felt something hard beneath it. For no reason other than idle curiosity, I leaned down and started to dig with my bare hands. When I realized it was a door set into the underlying rock, I went to get my father and Eugene Corbeck, a weaselly little man my father employed to find him genuine artifacts in the markets of Cairo, where they were often sold by grave robbers. The three of us were the first to open that door—and then Corbeck went to fetch our bearers, to help us clear the rest of the sand from the tomb. It was carved directly into the cliff. Once we had cleared the entrance, I followed my father down a long passageway illuminated only by the light of our lanterns. We were excited, of course—it seemed to be a new tomb that had never been found by robbers. Any Egyptologist would be excited by such a discovery. But we did not expect what we would find at the end of that passage.” Here she paused for a moment, her hand on the beetle at her throat, as though remembering.

  “And what was that?” asked Alice. She could almost see it—the desert sand, the bright light of the Egyptian sun, and then the darkness of the passageway, illuminated only by lanterns. For the first time in her life, she wondered what it would be like to travel to faraway lands, to see such sights. Yes, she was just Alice the kitchen maid. Nevertheless, she would not mind seeing Egypt, or Greece, or the lands of the Bible. Perhaps someday…

  Helen smiled and raised her left hand. She waved it like a conductor gesturing for the orchestra to begin. Suddenly, stone walls rose around them, covered in pictures unlike any Alice had ever seen—scenes of what life must have been like in ancient Egypt, as well as rows of hieroglyphs, which looked like small pictures themselves. The room was growing dimmer. The three of them were standing beside—what was it? A large, oblong box made of stone, with a stone slab to cover it, carved and painted. Around them, set into the walls, burned seven lamps. By the walls stood furniture of various sorts: a narrow bed with a platform of woven reeds, several folding chairs and small tables, a cabinet with drawers, and what looked like a game board, all beautifully carved and painted. Along one wall was a narrow table on which was placed a series of intricately decorated boxes. Next to them was a mummified cat, with almond-shaped eyes and a whiskered smile painted on its wrappings.

  “Have I gotten it right?” asked Helen, looking at Margaret. “This is how you described it when we first planned… you know.”

  “Close,” said Margaret, looking around at the tomb of Queen Tera with pleasure, as though glad to be back there. “It was darker, of course. The lamps were not lit, not then, and we could not see as clearly by the light of our torches. The paint was worn, and some of the plaster had fallen. But you must show Lydia what we saw when we opened the sarcophagus itself.”

  Helen waved her hand. Suddenly, the top of the oblong box was gone. Inside the box was another, without a top, and inside that lay a woman. She was old—her face was covered with a web of wrinkles—but she must have been very beautiful in life. She had light brown skin, high cheekbones, and delicate features. White hair flowed past her shoulders, as fine as thistledown.

  She was wrapped in white linen, with only her left arm outside the linen wrappings, placed over her chest, her hand where her heart would be. In it she held an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. Alice saw, with a start, that she had seven fingers! On her neck was a gold necklace with a ruby pendant in the shape of a beetle, just like Margaret’s.

  “Very beautiful,” said Margaret. “But that was not how we found her.”

  Suddenly, the woman’s wrappings turned brown. Her fine features shriveled up, until she looked positively ancient. The white hair fell out until there were only a few tangled strands. Her seven-fingered hand curled into a claw clutching the ankh. Only the necklace with the beetle on it stayed the same, glowing on her breast.

  “That’s more accurate,” said Margaret. “It’s a good re-creation. I wish I could show it to the visitors who will be flocking to the museum to see the exhibition. Instead, they will have to imagine it, based on the artifacts themselves.”

  “Is that the necklace you wear?” asked Alice, looking down at the one on the wrinkled brown neck of the mummified queen.

  “It is,” said Margaret. “Temporarily, of course, since Queen Tera may wish it back some day!” She smiled, as though making a joke. “It’s a scarab—a beetle sacred to the Egyptians. The scarab beetle rolls its dung up into a ball, like Ra rolling the sun across the sky each day, from dawn to sunset—therefore, it was seen as a symbol of resurrection. The equivalence may seem strange to us—we are not accustomed to thinking of the sun as a dung ball! But the Egyptians did not scorn such humble things as beetles, or even their dung. The dung of the scarab beetle fertilized the fields of Egypt.” She looked down at her wristwatch “Goodness, look at the time! I think we’ve been talking long enough. Now I had better go check on Queen Tera herself! If you will excuse me, Helen—”

  The illusion swirled around them, like paints in a jar of turpentine, then melted into the floor. They were back in the pleasant room in the considerably less pleasant headquarters of the Order of the Golden Dawn, with the remains of breakfast in front of them.

  “Go on, Lydia,” said Margaret. “You can find your way back to your own room, can’t you? Now that you have joined our cause, I don’t think there’s any need to keep you confined.”

  “Are you quite certain?” asked Helen, sounding surprised. “Of course, I could tell if Lydia tried to leave the environs of this house—I can sense her energic waves, as I can sense yours. And she would not make it past Moriarty’s sentries. But I think it would be best if her room were kept locked.”

  So that was how her mother s
till thought of her—as a prisoner who might escape. What does she mean that she can sense my energic waves? Alice wondered. How far could this ability extend? Throughout the entire house? Beyond it? Well, it did not matter, because she was not planning to escape, not anymore. Now there was something more important than her personal safety involved. First, she needed to help Mr. Holmes, to get him out of this place. And after that, she needed to stop Moriarty, somehow. She had never imagined that it might be up to her, Alice the kitchen maid, to save the Queen, but there was no one else, was there? So she would have to do. If her mother could sense her energic waves—Could I sense hers, if I tried? She could see the waves, swirling around her mother’s head. Would she be able to sense them at a distance?

  “Yes, I’m certain,” said Margaret. “You can’t keep your own daughter locked up. Even you should know that! Lydia said she was on our side. I trust her—don’t you?”

  “It’s for her own safety,” said Helen, frowning. “Lydia, pay attention! You look as though you’re a million miles away. Harker is a harmless idiot. Godalming and Seward are unlikely to concern themselves with you. But I don’t trust Moriarty out of my sight. Moran does whatever Moriarty tells him, and as for my own father—well, he’s far too interested in resuming his old experiments. Moriarty was delighted when one of the mesmerists we located told us about you. He suspected at once who you must be. I was skeptical—until I saw you myself. Then, of course, I knew. One cannot mistake the resemblance in our powers, or our energic signatures. I only wish I had noticed that night at the Magdalen Society—we could have become acquainted sooner. But I was not paying attention to you. My mind was entirely on Hyde, whose requests I was fulfilling as a representative of Moriarty. He is, among other things, in the business of supplying young women—he does not ask for what purposes. And while I’m glad to have found you again”—she did not look particularly glad, but perhaps it was the only way she could look glad?—“I’m concerned they might have plans for you that they haven’t shared with me. Moriarty does not tell me everything—he is secretive, and a very dangerous, man. I will be glad when this ritual has been successfully completed.”