by Anna Elliott
“Maybe.” Safiya swayed a little as if she were dizzy with the effort of sitting and pressed her hands against her temples. “So far, it has not helped, though. I feel sick all the time, and my head goes around and around when I try to stand, and I am so tired I cannot think … but I know that you are Zoe Rosario, and that you are a prisoner, like I am.” She looked around their moonlit stateroom, still blinking. “Where are we? And why do I feel better tonight?”
“We’re on a boat, traveling down the Nile. And you’re better because I poured away the drugs Mrs. Orles was giving you and substituted tea, instead. Also I gave Mrs. Orles a dose in her coffee.”
“I am glad.” Safiya’s expression hardened. “She is evil, that one. Although not so evil as the man.”
“Lord Sonnebourne?” Zoe wouldn’t disagree.
“I do not know his name. He came to my school, where I was studying in England. He said that he had been sent to me by my brother, Selim. He said”—reflexively, her hand went to the scar that ran down one cheek. “He said that he knew of a doctor who could take this away for me. The blond woman was with him. She said that she would go with me, so that it would all be respectable, proper, and I need not fear coming away alone with a man. They brought me to a place—a doctor’s surgery, they said. They said that they would give me an injection, and I would sleep, and when I woke, the scar on my face would be gone.”
She pressed her eyes closed a moment. “My brother and my father would be so disappointed in me if they knew how foolish I had been. I do not remember any more, except …” Her brow furrowed. “Except small bits. A train? And a boat?” Her gaze suddenly sharpened, turning more fully aware. “Did you say that we were in Egypt?”
“Yes. Lord Sonnebourne has hired a dahabeeyah to take us down the Nile. We’ve just passed Aswan.”
Safiya looked as though she were struggling to take everything in. “I do not understand. Why should they bring me back to Egypt? Unless they know—”
“Know what?” Zoe asked.
“Nothing.” Safiya pressed her lips together.
Zoe didn’t believe her. She’d seen the quick flash of fear cross the girl’s expression. But trying to persuade Safiya to confide in her would waste time—time they didn’t have.
“Are you feeling well enough to walk?” she asked.
“I think so.”
Safiya swung her legs down, but her knees buckled at once when she tried to get to her feet. Zoe caught her, and felt a jolt of fresh alarm at how hot the girl’s skin felt. She’d been right that Safiya was running a fever.
“Just rest a moment,” Zoe told her. She lowered Safiya back onto the edge of the bunk, her heart hammering. She couldn’t hope to carry the girl; Safiya was taller than she was, and if she couldn’t even stand on her own—
Safiya struggled to stand again, though, and this time managed, only leaning slightly against Zoe. “I am all right,” she gasped. “But how will we get off the boat?”
Zoe had been asking herself that question.
“The crew sleep at the front of the boat, on the deck,” she said. “And Lord Sonnebourne and Mr. Morgan have gone, at least for the time being. Can you swim?”
Although even if the answer was yes, she didn’t think Safiya would be strong enough to manage.
“I can. But we should not have to,” Safiya answered. “I have never sailed on a boat like this one before, but I have seen them. There should be a small … what do you call it? A boat with oars?”
“A rowboat?”
“Yes. One used by the crew to get to shore so that they can buy fresh food and drink along the way.”
Zoe’s heart quickened. They would still have to rely on an astonishing degree of luck, but at least the thing seemed a fraction more possible.
“Let’s go, then. Quickly,” she whispered.
Safiya was dressed already; Mrs. Orles never bothered to help her change into night clothes for sleeping. Zoe helped her find her shoes, ignoring the fact that just the effort of bending over to put them on left Safiya breathless.
Safiya stood up, holding Zoe’s hand again for support, and they started across the room. Halfway across, a floorboard creaked, sounding loud as a pistol shot to Zoe’s keyed-up nerves.
They both froze. Safiya squeezed her eyes shut, and Zoe had to fight the urge to do the same—as though they were children playing at hide-and-seek, hoping that if they couldn’t see, they wouldn’t be seen, either.
But nothing happened.
Zoe counted to ten, then resumed their stealthy progress across the cabin, reached the door, and eased it open.
Outside, the corridor was dark and silent.
She locked the door from the inside, then pulled it closed after them. When Mrs. Orles woke, she would come along with the key. But it might delay the discovery of their escape by a few hours, if Sonnebourne or Morgan took it into his head to check on them when they returned.
“Come.” Zoe led the way towards the back of the boat, where a short flight of steps led up to the small deck at the rear of the cabins.
Safiya had to pause every few steps to rest, leaning against one of the walls, and Zoe fought the urge to beg her to hurry.
Finally, though, they were outside, and peering over the boat’s railing to the river below.
The moonlight was brighter out here, making Zoe feel as exposed as if she were standing on a lighted stage. But it also enabled her to see that the rowboat was there, just a few feet below them, tied to the dahabeeyah by a length of rough hemp cord.
“I’ll go first,” Zoe whispered. “Then I can help you.”
She hoisted herself up and over the side of the railing, then dropped down, hanging by her hands until her feet touched the wooden planks of the rowboat’s bottom. The small vessel rocked alarmingly, threatening to pitch her head first into the water, but she managed to steady herself, planting her feet and bracing her hands against the side of the dahabeeyah.
“All right, come ahead,” she whispered up to Safiya.
Safiya tried to clamber over the railing as Zoe had done, but she couldn’t manage it. Her muscles shook and she fell back onto the deck with a thump that Zoe fully expected to rouse the sleeping crew.
“I cannot.” Safiya’s eyes were wide and tear-filled in the moonlight. “You should go on without me. At least you will be able to get away.”
Zoe shut her eyes for a second, not knowing what to do. If her imaginary version of Sherlock popped up in her mind with advice, she’d be nothing but grateful at this point. But even he was silent.
Apparently even inside her own mind, Sherlock Holmes was maddeningly uncooperative and inconvenient.
“We are both of us getting away.” Since she couldn’t raise her voice, Zoe made her whisper as fierce as possible. “Either we get safely off this ship together, or neither of us does! Now, try again.”
Safiya obeyed, this time managing to pull herself up and over the railing.
“Good.” Zoe caught her, prayed to anyone who might be listening that the boat wouldn’t capsize under them, and helped Safiya to sit down in the rowboat’s narrow hull.
She let her breath out in quick relief, then looked up at the rope that was still keeping them moored fast to the dahabeeyah.
“I don’t suppose you have a knife?” she murmured to Safiya.
Eyes wide and frightened, the Egyptian girl shook her head.
Zoe didn’t have a knife, either. Even if she had thought about trying to secure a weapon of some sort before this—which she hadn’t—Mrs. Orles kept all sharp implements well away from their cabin. Greedy and poisonous the housekeeper might be, but she wasn’t a fool. Zoe hadn’t seen so much as a pair of nail scissors in weeks.
A handicap which you ought to have taken steps to overcome before this, Sherlock’s voice commented in her mind.
“Of course, now you decide to start talking to me again,” she muttered.
“What?” Safiya gave her a startled look.
“Nothing.
” Since the only other option was to climb back on board and start ransacking the boat for a knife, Zoe attacked the knot that fastened the rope to the rowboat’s mooring ring with her fingernails.
She broke two of her nails, but finally the knot gave way, the rope slipped through the mooring ring, and they were free.
“Where shall we go?” Safiya whispered.
Zoe took hold of the oars—which bumped awkwardly in their wooden crutches—and then hesitated. The sensible, the only logical thing to do was to get as far away from here with as much speed as possible.
But Sonnebourne was meeting with someone, presumably someone important, on the island.
Reason also dictated that Zoe was the only person who could find out the purpose of that meeting, and, moreover, what Sonnebourne was intending to accomplish here in Egypt.
And logic—and her own experience of the man—also stated that if Sonnebourne was allowed to accomplish his purpose here, innocent people would die.
“You can choose,” she whispered back to Safiya. “Sonnebourne and Mr. Morgan have an appointment here at Philae. We can try to run away—row for the opposite bank of the river. Or we can go ashore here at the island first, and try to overhear what their meeting is about.”
She waited, the beats of her own heart loud in her own ears. A small, cowardly part of her was hoping that Safiya would take the first option, to run.
But almost immediately the Egyptian girl shook her head. “We go ashore here,” she whispered back. “If we can, we must find out his plans.”
CHAPTER 18: FLYNN
“Here,” Becky said. “I found it.”
She held up the volume from Mr. Holmes’s files she’d been flipping through and read out loud, stumbling a bit over the unfamiliar Egyptian words. “The ʻUrabi revolt, also known as the ʻUrabi Revolution, was a nationalist uprising in Egypt occurring between the years 1879 to 1882. Led by and named for Colonel Ahmed ʻUrabi, the nationalists sought to depose the Khedive Tewfik Pasha and end British and French influence over the Egyptian nation.”
“What happened?” Flynn asked.
They’d snuck out of Becky’s house all right, without attracting any notice from Constable Polk. Now they were alone in Baker Street, since Mr. Holmes had packed Mrs. Hudson off to visit her sister in the country, where she’d be safe while he was gone.
“I mean, I’m guessing ‘Urabi and his fellows didn’t win?”
Becky frowned at the page again. “It says here that the uprising was ended by an Anglo-Egyptian War and takeover of the government.”
“What about ‘Urabi?”
“He was captured and exiled to the Island of Ceylon,” Becky said.
“Think he’s one of Farooq’s lot?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t see how he can be, not unless he escaped from Ceylon,” Becky said.
“He’s important somehow, though. Otherwise Farooq and the other man wouldn’t have been talking about him. And Selim wouldn’t have turned green just at the mention of his name.”
“I know.” Becky stood up, putting the volume of Mr. Holmes’s files back on the shelf. “And I don’t know what it all means—yet. But we need to go to the Diogenes Club. Mycroft can send word to Mr. Holmes about this straight away.”
CHAPTER 19: ZOE
One of the men must have brought a lantern from the dahabeeyah. Zoe could see the glow of it as, crouching down so far that she almost bent double, she crept up the stone staircase towards the temple ruins.
The oil flame cast sufficient light to reveal, at the top of the steps, a wide courtyard, with shadowy columns on either side and a towering columned building beyond.
Zoe could imagine robed Egyptian figures, lining up to enter the building so that they could worship their animal-headed gods.
But more to the point were the figures of the three men she could see standing amidst the half-broken columns beyond the courtyard.
She could also hear a faint murmur of voices, but she was too far away to catch any words.
She shut her eyes, wondering whether she was inviting disaster if she tried to move closer.
At least she was alone. Safiya had been much too weak to risk making the climb up the stone steps.
Zoe had dragged their rowboat around an outcropping of rock, where it would be well screened from the view of anyone coming down the stairs. Safiya was with it now, in what Zoe hoped would be a safe hiding place.
She edged sideways into the deepest shadows at the edge of the courtyard, praying that she wouldn’t send any stones or chunks of rubble clattering in the dark.
One other small circumstance in her favour: the men’s night vision would be hampered by the lamp, making it hard for them to see anything beyond their own small circle of illumination.
She took a cautious step, another, and another, pressing herself against the stone pylons and crouching behind half-tumbled down stone walls until she caught a few distinct words.
“The drugs will not harm my men?”
The voice wasn’t Morgan’s or Sonnebourne’s, so it must be that of the third man.
Risking a quick look from around the edge of the column, Zoe could see him, big and broad-chested and wearing a hooded dark robe.
“They need not even take them.”
That was Sonnebourne talking.
“The drugs need only be found in the evening rations. Sprinkled liberally, of course, but that need only be done with the rations that remain after the men have eaten. Then they feign sleep. As long as they are to be trusted?”
The hooded man spat on the ground. “They hate the Englezi. And some of them have lost homes—farmland—to the construction.”
“Fine. But pick one other supervisor, and drug his food, so that he genuinely becomes insensible. Possibly a guard. One you do not like. The charade will be more convincing if you can manage that.”
“We understand one another,” the hooded man said. He glanced briefly towards the river and the landing steps.
“The twenty-fourth?” Morgan asked.
He sounded nervous, Zoe thought, and he kept glancing around them as though he disliked the ruined temple’s atmosphere—or feared they were being observed.
“The twenty-fourth. You have the funds?”
Sonnebourne raised something he was holding in one hand.
A suitcase or satchel, Zoe thought. The clasp gleamed bronze in the lamplight.
“Local currency,” Morgan said.
The other man reached for it, but Sonnebourne didn’t let go straight away.
“Fail me, and one day I will see you killed. You, and your family, as well. You will watch them die.”
The hooded man didn’t answer, only took the suitcase and turned on his heel, striding off into the shadows.
After several long moments, Sonnebourne and Morgan followed, passing so close by Zoe’s hiding place that she could have put out her hand and touched them.
But neither man noticed.
“Hold up the lantern,” Sonnebourne said. “Reis Hassan said he would await our signal to come back for us on his skiff.”
“Very well.”
Zoe pressed herself more deeply into the shadows as the lantern light swung in a wide arc that thankfully missed her place of concealment, and then the two men kept walking.
As they started down the stone steps, Zoe heard Morgan say, “You realise how many people will be killed if this scheme comes off?”
Zoe didn’t want to risk looking, but the rattle of Sonnebourne’s steps paused, as though he’d stopped walking. “I hope, my friend, that you are not developing a conscience at this late date.”
His voice was dangerously soft.
“Hardly.” Morgan barked a laugh that had an edge of nervousness to it. “I’m thinking about the consequences if we’re caught.”
“In that case, I suggest you do your utmost to ensure that we are not caught,” Sonnebourne said.
They started walking again. Zoe waited until their voices had faded into
silence, and then several long minutes more.
She listened all the while for any sound that might mean they’d discovered the rowboat and Safiya, but none came.
At last she crept to the top of the stairs and looked down. Reis Hassan had indeed come to fetch them; the moonlight showed the reed skiff gliding back over the still waters to the dahabeeyah, with Sonnebourne and Morgan on board.
Zoe watched them climb back onto the deck of the sailing vessel. Then she picked up her skirts and ran down the stone flight of steps as quickly as she dared.
CHAPTER 20: FLYNN
“Something’s wrong—something’s happened,” Becky said.
Their cab had just rolled up within sight of the Diogenes Club, and Flynn could see that even though it was barely seven o’clock in the morning, there was a crowd of people outside the white-columned entrance. Some of them were wearing the livery uniform of the Diogenes club servants. Some looked like passers-by who’d just come to see what all the commotion was about.
Several wore the blue uniforms and helmets of policemen.
A sick, cold feeling sprouted in the pit of Flynn’s stomach. He shoved some money at their cab driver and then jumped down, not even waiting for the driver to give him change or for Becky to scramble down.
He knew she’d be right behind him anyway.
He raced towards the entrance, elbowing his way through the crowd.
“What’s going on?” he asked the fellow next to him, when he’d shoved his way as far towards the front of the mob as he could get.
It wasn’t easy to be heard. Everyone else was pushing and shoving and talking, too—and up closer to the Diogenes club building, a couple of the policemen were trying to hold back the crowd and telling them to move along.
The man Flynn had asked looked like a city gent: morning coat, top hat, lemon-coloured gloves, and shiny gaiters on his shoes. He had a monocle on a gold chain and a long, horsey kind of face. Probably belonged to the Diogenes Club—and he was definitely the type who wouldn’t ordinarily give Flynn the time of day. But right now he also looked like something had scared him badly enough that he wasn’t paying too much attention to who he talked to.