by Anna Elliott
“Early supper and bed-time tonight,” Mrs. Orles said.
As usual, the younger woman’s voice made Zoe think of a beaker of cloyingly sweet poison.
She turned from their stateroom window, where she’d been watching the palm-fringed banks of the Nile slide past as their boat sailed upriver against the current.
Beyond the palm groves, tracts of young corn showed green on the flat banks and the occasional small whitewashed minaret reached its spire up towards a sky that was turning dusky purple with the approach of evening.
“Why?” Zoe asked.
Most of the day had been spent undergoing the arduous process of portaging, which meant that their boat had been dragged up the cataract portions of the river by brawny Nubians, using dozens of stout ropes and their own strong arms and legs to move the vessel.
Zoe had been confined to her stateroom—as she had been every day of their voyage—but the dahabeeyah was small enough that she had overheard the reis, or captain, of the boat tell Sonnebourne that in the rainy season these laborious services would not have been required, due to the increased depth of water in the river channel.
Fortunately, Reis Hassan had said, as they passed the small river city of Aswan, there was still enough water in the channel to support the vessel the entire two miles of alternating cataract slopes and level pools that they were about to traverse.
A short while later, Reis Hassan had pointed to a bustling construction site along the river, proudly proclaiming it to be the new dam that the British were constructing. The dam would be of huge economic import to the region, and indeed to the entire nation of Egypt itself.
Now they were approaching an island—she had overheard the crew refer to it as Philae—in the middle of the great river. The ancient stone temple structures on the crown of the island loomed above it, cast into silhouette by the twilight rays of the sun, now well below the horizon.
Mrs. Orles shook her head in answer to Zoe’s question, waving her index finger as she would have done to correct a naught child. “Now, now, that’s for me to know, and for you to find out. Or rather”—she gave a high-pitched and equally venomous little laugh—“not to find out.”
Zoe was spared the temptation to murder Mrs. Orles by the entrance of the serving boy, who put a tray of food—stew and thick, round flats of bread—down on the table in front of Mrs. Orles.
“Shukraan,” Zoe murmured.
The boy—a skinny Egyptian child of eleven or twelve with a head of curly dark hair—gave her a quick, frightened glance from under his long lashes.
There was a fresh bruise on his cheek, Zoe saw, the mark of someone’s fist. She didn’t have to wonder about to whom the fist had belonged. Their boat—or dayabeeyah, as the Egyptian sailing vessels were called—had separate cabins for herself and Safiya, Mrs. Orles, and each of the men. But their quarters were closely confined enough that she could hear Mr. Morgan shouting and cursing at the boat’s crew for failing to polish his shoes correctly, or bring him his preferred type of cigarettes or after-dinner whiskey, or a hundred other offenses he had found to complain of on their journey. Mr. Morgan hated everything about Egypt. He disliked the food and the native Egyptian people intensely, and had the lowest possible opinion of the sanitary measures available.
Zoe doubted he’d dared to actually strike any of the other crew members, who were full-grown men, wiry and tough-looking from manning sailboats.
This boy was the only one of them whom Morgan could hit without fearing that he would hit back.
Now the child ducked his head and hurried out, shutting the door behind him.
“You should not speak to the servants,” Mrs. Orles snapped.
She still had neither forgiven nor forgotten Zoe’s attempt to send a message through the serving girl in Brindisi.
Had Valentina found the message Zoe had hidden under the bed? And if she had, would she have actually sent it on, or was her telegram to Sherlock now lying crumpled up at the bottom of some rubbish heap?
Zoe had absolutely no way of knowing. She had felt often these past several days that if she could only know—even if the answer was that Sherlock had received no message from her at all—it would be better than the suspense of uncertainty.
She still wasn’t even letting herself consider the possibility that Sherlock was dead and would never come to her aid. But she was also forcing herself to confront the fact that she wasn’t the princess in a fairy tale, and Sherlock, even assuming that he was alive, had always been an extremely unlikely prince. As things now stood, she was on her own—and if she was going to escape, it would have to be by her own wits and ingenuity.
The trouble was that her mind kept coming up empty of any practical ideas of getting away. They had been on the river for two days, now—and for most of that time, her mind had been spinning, examining and ultimately discarding each and every plan that occurred to her as impossible.
She could—theoretically—jump off of the boat sometime in the middle of the night, when Mrs. Orles was asleep. But even if she was willing to risk Sonnebourne retaliating by harming Safiya, where would she go? She might swim to shore. She knew how to swim; that was one small point in her favor. But that would only bring her to an unfamiliar riverbank in a foreign land, where she knew no one, didn’t speak the language, and where her European clothing and pale skin would stand out like a lone untuned instrument in a string quartet.
“I was only trying to be polite,” she told Mrs. Orles meekly. She picked up one of the rounds of bread and took a bite, ignoring Mrs. Orles’s hard stare as the housekeeper evidently tried to decide whether or not she was up to something.
Even she—or Lord Sonneborne, for that matter—would be hard pressed to see the serving boy as a likely co-conspirator. So far, Zoe hadn’t managed to get him to speak a single word to her. And in any case, shukraan—thank you—was the sum total of Zoe’s Arabic.
Finally, Mrs. Orles turned to Safiya, who was pale-faced and silent, swaying a little in her chair.
“Eat.” She pushed a bowl of the unidentifiable stew towards the Egyptian girl.
Safiya looked at the bowl blankly and made no move to do as she was told. Her eyes looked both dazed and yet over-bright, and there were bright spots of color on her cheeks that made Zoe think she might be running a fever.
With an exclamation of annoyance, Mrs. Orles picked up the soup bowl and held it up to Safiya’s lips. The girl made a weak motion with one hand as though trying to push it away, and turned her head.
“Drink!”
A little of the liquid slopped over the edge of the bowl and ran down Safiya’s chin, but the girl didn’t swallow.
“Drink it, you little fool!” Mrs. Orles’s hand flashed out, delivering a ringing slap to Safiya’s cheek.
Zoe clenched her fists, fighting the urge to snatch the bowl straight out of Mrs. Orles’s hands and upend it over the housekeeper’s head. Safiya, though, only blinked.
“Would you like me to try feeding her?” Zoe asked. She kept her tone level, silently blessing a career that had been spent dealing with temperamental orchestra conductors and sopranos who gave new meaning to the term prima donna. She had a good deal of practice at sounding calm while inwardly seething with rage.
Mrs. Orles’s eyes narrowed, clearly trying to decide whether there was any chance of Zoe’s somehow turning this to her advantage. During the long pause that followed, Zoe held the housekeeper’s gaze, keeping her expression polite but indifferent.
After what seemed an eternity, Mrs. Orles huffed out a breath. “Very well. You may see what you can do.”
She rose to her feet and went out. Zoe knew from experience that Mrs. Orles would be fetching the small brown bottle of laudanum from her own room, the one that she used for dosing Safiya each morning and night.
She would be gone for a few precious seconds.
Zoe reached out quickly, picking up the dish of clarified butter that had been provided for dipping the bread. Her pulse was beat
ing from her eardrums all the way out to the tips of her fingers, but what she intended didn’t take long.
By the time Mrs. Orles came back to the table, laudanum in hand, Zoe was innocently holding a spoon up to Safiya’s lips and trying to coax her to sip a little of the broth.
Mrs. Orles still gave her a hard stare as she sat down again with a thump, reaching for Safiya’s teacup so that she could pour in the measured dose of laudanum.
The cup slipped from her fingers, fell to the floor, and smashed.
Zoe had just greased the outside of it with the clarified butter.
Mrs. Orles uttered an exclamation of irritation, setting the laudanum bottle down on the table and going to the door.
“Daoud!” Her voice echoed in the narrow confines of the passageway outside their stateroom, and Zoe heard the tap of her heels retreating towards the back of the ship. “Daoud!”
Zoe snatched up the laudanum bottle. It was about half full.
She uncorked it, poured a generous amount of the murky brown fluid into the cup of coffee that sat beside Mrs. Orles’s place at the table. Then she flew to the side of their stateroom, and dumped the rest of the laudanum out of the porthole into the waters of the Nile below.
In the bare handful of seconds it took, she noted that their boat appeared to have dropped anchor, and that they were within only a few yards of their destination, the temple island of Philae.
Well, that might come in useful, too.
Zoe had just time enough to refill the laudanum bottle from her own cup of tea and set it back on the table before Mrs. Orles returned, carrying a replacement teacup and muttering under her breath about the impossible nature of native servants and the revolting standards of cleanliness in this dreadful country.
She seemed to entirely share Mr. Morgan’s opinion of Egypt.
The boy—Daoud—trailed behind her, looking even more frightened than usual. Zoe felt a prick of conscience for letting him in for a scolding over his carelessness in serving a dirty teacup. But her primary feeling was one of overwhelming relief.
Mrs. Orles didn’t seem to suspect anything amiss.
The boy knelt to sweep up the fragments of the broken cup. Mrs. Orles, her face still flushed with irritation, tipped a measure from the laudanum bottle into the new teacup she’d brought and held it to Safiya’s lips.
“Drink it!”
This time, Safiya drank obediently, downing several swallows before she turned her head away.
Daoud finished his sweeping and went out, and Mrs. Orles picked up her own cup.
Zoe held her breath while the housekeeper drank, but she finished the cup without comment. The bitterness of the coffee was apparently enough to cover the laudanum’s taste.
Now all Zoe could do was wait.
CHAPTER 16: FLYNN
Flynn woke to the sensation of being jabbed in the ribcage. He opened his eyes to find Becky leaning over him, just about to poke him again.
“Are you awake?” she asked.
“I am now.” Flynn sat up.
He’d gone to sleep on the downstairs sofa, while Selim took the spare bed upstairs. Now it was almost morning, to judge by the faint grey light filtering in through the windows.
“Something wrong?”
Becky was already fully dressed and wearing her outdoor coat and gloves.
“I want to go and consult Mr. Holmes’s files,” she said.
Flynn rubbed his eyes. “At Baker Street? What about?”
“The name you overheard Farooq use. Urabi. I think Selim was lying when he said it didn’t mean anything to him.”
“You’ve got that right.” Flynn had been tempted to tell Selim that anyone who couldn’t make up lies better than he did should give up trying. But Selim had been in bad enough shape that he hadn’t had the heart to badger him.
Now Flynn swung his legs down from the sofa and reached for his coat. He’d already got his boots on, since he’d slept in them.
“Should we tell Constable what’s-his-name we’re going?”
So far as he knew, the copper was still standing guard outside the door.
“Polk,” Becky said. “And that’s just it, I don’t want to tell him. He’ll say that it’s too risky to go to Baker Street and we ought to wait until Jack gets back—unless he comes with us, and in that case, he wouldn’t be guarding Selim. And what if this is something important, something that Mr. Holmes and Lucy need to know?”
Flynn wasn’t going to argue about that, either. He’d stayed awake for a long time last night, with two thoughts jabbing him, sharp as a couple of tie pins between the shoulder blades:
First, that Farooq wasn’t just collecting all those weapons and the nitroglycerin so that he could put them up on some mantle shelf. He and the Sons of Ra were going to use them. People would die.
The second thought that had kept him awake, skin crawling, was the fact that Mr. Holmes could get himself killed all the way out in foreign parts.
“Let’s go,” he told Becky. “We can get out the back window where Constable Polk won’t see.”
CHAPTER 17: ZOE
Lying in her narrow stateroom bunk, Zoe strained to hear in the dark. The boat was moored for the night by the side of the river, and the only sound was the steady lap of the river waters against the hull, and the occasional snore from the crew members who slept out on the deck.
Mrs. Orles, yawning widely, had retired to her own stateroom about two hours ago by Zoe’s estimation. She had been sluggish and stupefied enough that she hadn’t even bothered to lock the cabin door when she went out as she usually did.
Zoe devoutly hoped that small piece of luck hadn’t used up all of her allotted good fortune for the night.
The question now was whether Mrs. Orles was deeply asleep enough not to wake at the sound of movements from the room next door to her own.
Slowly, Zoe eased the thin cotton sheets back and sat up, wincing as the bed creaked. A shaft of moonlight coming through the portal window cast a pale, silvery glow over the stateroom.
What would Sherlock say about this scheme? She could imagine him commenting sardonically that it was deplorably spur-of-the-moment and ill planned. But then she could also picture him pointing out that it would be the height of illogic for her to let this opportunity slip by. Both responses would be in character.
She dressed quickly in the white shirtwaist and black skirt she’d worn to Mr. Morgan’s home all those weeks ago in London. She hadn’t any other clothes. The best she’d been able to manage was rinsing her things out in the washbasin and hanging them up to dry while she slept in her shift. Now they felt unpleasantly damp against her skin, but she pulled them on, put on her stockings, and laced up her boots.
Zoe crept to the window and looked out. Everything was still and quiet, the river sparkling in the moonlight.
At least, she argued with imaginary-Sherlock, luck appeared to be on her side. She’d seized the chance opportunity for drugging Mrs. Orles. But half an hour ago, she had heard Sonnebourne informing Reis Hassan that he and Mr. Morgan wished to visit the Philae temple by moonlight, and that he was to bring them ashore.
The Reis was a big, phlegmatic man who apparently had absorbed the British philosophy of ours not to question why. Zoe had watched from their stateroom window as he maneuvered round the upstream tip of the island and then let the vessel drift back, with the current, to the shallower landing area.
She had caught just a quick glimpse of Reis Hassan lowering a small reed skiff into the water about half an hour ago, so that he could row the other two men to shore. That was when she’d lain down in her bed and pretended to sleep. In case Sonnebourne or Morgan looked back at the dahabeeyah, she didn’t want to be caught spying through the window.
Now, as Zoe peered out to survey the glittering moonlit waters, she could make out steps cut into the rock of Philae island, leading upwards into the shadows.
A small, single-masted vessel barely larger than a rowboat lay at anchor about ten
yards away.
Presumably, it belonged to whoever Lord Sonnebourne and Mr. Morgan had gone to meet. She didn’t believe they actually wanted to see the ruined temple in the moonlight, any more than she would have believed the earth was flat.
Zoe went to the side of Safiya’s bed and crouched down.
“Safiya?” she whispered. She took hold of the girl’s shoulder and shook her gently, praying that the girl didn’t cry out or scream at being woken. And that she could be roused at all.
Safiya’s eyes opened and she blinked, her gaze bleary and confused as she struggled to focus on Zoe’s face. She murmured something in Arabic, and Zoe’s heart contracted at the thought of yet another way this plan could go horribly wrong: she still didn’t even know whether or not Safiya spoke any English. If she didn’t, Zoe would be no more able to communicate with her than she would with the maid.
“Shhh.” Zoe put her fingertips lightly against the girl’s mouth, trying not to startle or frighten her. “Do you understand English?”
The wave of relief she felt when Safiya nodded was almost sickening.
“My name is Zoe—” she began, then stopped, wondering how on earth she was going to explain who she was and everything that had happened. The entire time they had been travelling together, Safiya had been either unconscious or too befuddled with the laudanum to take in her surroundings or who was with her. And, looking at their position objectively, she hadn’t any more reason to trust Zoe than she did Mrs. Orles.
Safiya interrupted, though, struggling to sit up. “I know who you are.”
“You do?”
Safiya nodded again, pushing the loosened tangle of her long dark hair back and giving Zoe a small smile. “I am not always so stupid with the … what is the word? The medicine—drugs—they give me. Most of the time I am. But other times, I pretend. I hope that they will give me less if they think I am weak and helpless. That maybe I will have the chance to get away.”
“That was clever.” A tiny spark of hope was flickering inside Zoe’s chest. Their odds of success might not be quite so grim as she had thought after all.