‘The twelfth baronet, no less. His ancestral home is in Hurlstone.’
‘Not heard of the blighter.’
‘You should be ashamed of yourself, Sir Montague.’
‘Enlighten me.’ He stubbed out his cigarette.
She reached forward, picked up a peach, warm and soft in her hand, and tossed it across the room to him. He caught it smoothly, washed it in water from the bottle on the table and bit into it with relish. She watched him.
‘Well?’ he prompted, juice on his lips.
‘Sir Reginald Musgrave is a character in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual.’
Monty’s mouth dropped open. ‘Pardon?’
‘Tim signed the register as Musgrave because he knew I’d recognise it.’
‘Really? Are you sure about this Musgrave business? It seems to be carrying the Conan Doyle theme a bit too far, if you ask me.’
‘There’s no such thing as too far. Not for Tim.’ Colour crept into her cheeks as she added, ‘Not for me.’
Monty put down the peach-stone. ‘You do realise,’ he pointed out, ‘that it means Tim must be travelling on a false passport. If this hotel has him registered as Reginald Musgrave, that’s the name that must be in his passport.’
‘I know.’ She rose to her feet and went over to Monty’s chair, stepping over the reach of his long spidery legs to stand in front of him. ‘How does Prince Abdul al-Hakim know you are here?’
There was something in her voice. She didn’t mean it to be there, but she heard it. So did he. Something not quite right.
His eyes fixed on her. ‘Are you accusing me of …?’
‘No!’
‘The sultans and princes of this country are bound to have a network of watchers, men spying on people who enter or leave the country. King Fuad himself will let nothing slip by unnoticed. It is a land of bitter rivalries and great wealth in high places.’
She thought about it and nodded. It made sense.
‘I recall Tim telling me that the British High Commissioner was accused of allowing King Fuad too much control of the government. Not a policy to go down well back home in Westminster. Tim thinks that Sir Percy’s days are numbered.’
‘Is that what you did together? Discuss Egypt?’
‘Sometimes, yes. We talked about his work or my work – you know, like brothers and sisters do.’
He said nothing and she remembered that he had no siblings. He was the only heir, with all that entails, and she was aware of a sense of isolation within him. On impulse she squatted down on her heels in front of him. ‘You were good with that desk clerk,’ she smiled, ‘very bossy. I can’t decide whether to be impressed or frightened.’ She tapped his knee. ‘Thank you.’
He took hold of a lock of her hair and threaded it through his fingers, staring at it as though he had never touched hair before.
She didn’t move. She didn’t want him to stop.
Instead she spoke in a voice loud enough to replace the silence, but soft enough to leave the thoughts in his head undisturbed.
‘This place, the Mena House Hotel, is where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to stay when his wife, Louise – whom he called Touie – was ill with TB. For the dry air. It’s supposed to be good for the lungs, though I’d have thought the sand that is carried in the wind might be a problem for lungs.’
Her eyes were fixed on the rhythmic rippling of the blonde strand through his fingers. She could feel the slight tug of it on her scalp, as if it were deciding which one of them it belonged to.
‘Tim knew that I was aware of this visit of Sir Arthur’s. He knew that if he directed me to Egypt with his first Nile clue that I would come here. It’s the obvious place to start.’ She paused.
‘I understand.’
‘Now this second clue. Sir Reginald Musgrave.’
His eyes flicked to hers. ‘What is the story about?’
‘It’s not one of his best, to be honest. Written in his twenties for The Strand when he was still a practising doctor.’ She smiled. ‘But good old Sherlock is as impressive as ever. The story is about Sir Reginald who comes to him and tells him that the butler and housemaid have gone missing from his ancestral pile – a bit like yours, I suspect. He calls it a labyrinth.’
He smiled.
‘Listen to me, Monty. This is important.’
He released her hair. It swung back into place and for a second Jessie felt bereft.
‘In the story,’ she told him, ‘the butler is found dead in a cellar beside an empty chest. He has been shut in there to die. Like a tomb.’
Monty sat forward.
‘Sherlock works it out in his usual brilliant fashion from a riddle,’ Jessie continued, ‘that in the chest had lain the ancient gold crown of King Charles I, but it was stolen by the missing maid.’ Jessie tapped his knee once more. ‘So you see …’ She spread her hands. ‘It’s blindingly obvious.’
Monty nodded slowly, but it was a reluctant movement. His expression did not strike Jessie as one of joy.
‘Come on, Monty, It’s easy,’ she said quickly. ‘It’s either the King’s crown …’
‘Which means Cairo museum, the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities. That’s where the golden trappings of King Tutank hamen are kept.’
‘Or …?’
‘The tombs. In Luxor.’
‘Exactly. We’ll find Tim in one or the other, I’m sure.’ She was breathing fast. ‘We’re so close now.’
Monty stood up abruptly. ‘We’d better get changed for this evening’s reception.’
Jessie was baffled by his sudden change of mood. Uncertain what to say.
‘Aren’t you pleased?’ she asked, as he headed for the door. ‘Can’t you be pleased? For me? For Tim?’
He stopped as he approached the door and looked back at her.
‘No, Jessie, I find I’m not pleased.’
The bluntness of it hurt.
‘Why?’ she whispered.
‘Because …’ he said, ‘I do not ever want to find you next to an empty chest. Shut in there to die.’
26
Georgie
England 1930
Some days we just sit and read. And then we talk about what we’ve read. These are the easy days. I like the days when you are not trying to change me.
We talk of astronomy and the French Revolution and the Eye of Horus. We read together the Viking sagas and long to own a blue dun stallion like Hrafnkell’s Freyfaxi and to string up Dr Churchward from the roof beams by his Achilles tendons, a routine punishment in the Iceland of legend.
But most of all we read about Ancient Egypt. I love Ancient Egypt. I can recite the names and dates of all the pharaohs and list all the gods. You call it obsessed. I call it focused. I teach myself to read the Ancient Egyptian alphabet and some of their hieroglyphs and then I teach you.
When Howard Carter – a brilliant Egyptologist and archaeologist, though an artist by training – in 1922 discovers and opens the tomb of King Tutankhamen, you bring me all the newspaper reports on the wonders he’s found and you tell me that the world has gone Egypt-crazy. Together we read Carter’s own account of the excavation in his book, The Discovery of the Tomb of King Tutank-hamen. I read it twenty-one times.
You bring me a magnifying glass, so that I can study the photographs of the artefacts in greater detail – the lion-headed couch, the golden throne with the king’s cartouches and winged serpents, the corslet of inlaid gold with the Kheper beetle supporting the solar disk. Kheper is one of my favourite gods. Imagine the power he must possess. To roll the sun across the sky. It makes the hairs on my neck stand on end each time I take a look at that photograph. The Egyptians were a highly intelligent and skilled people. I admire that. But they were also highly creative. I admire that even more because I am not.
They watched the scarab beetle – scarabaeus sacer – rolling a ball of dung to its burrow, the ball held between its antenna, and they made a huge jump of imagination. The ball became the
sun, and each day without fail in the hot climes of Egypt the god Kheper – in the form of a scarab – pushes it across the sky.
That is what I do not possess. An imagination. It is why I like a sunny day, so that I can sit at my window and try to imagine Kheper at work.
But the Kheper corslet is not the best artefact in the book. Oh no. Howard Carter has more in store for me. The best object is one I would cut off one of my fingers for. Just to hold. It is a royal staff. Listed as A in Plate LXXI. This staff, it says, is decorated with ornamental barks and is inlaid with elytra of iridescent beetles.
Elytra. Of iridescent beetles.
My pulse bangs wildly at the thought.
An elytron – elytra is the plural – is the tiny hardened forewing of a beetle. Its function is to act as a protective wing-case for the hindwings underneath which are the ones used for flying. If Howard Carter did not state it as true, I could not believe it. I peer at them on the staff through the magnifying glass for hours and resent the black-and-whiteness of the photograph when they should be iridescent colour.
But the whitecoats take the magnifying glass from me. When they find it, they say I might use the glass to hurt myself. When I tell you this, you are so angry your cheeks go red and you start shouting at the whitecoats. I do not like it. I ask you to stop but you rage downstairs to Dr Churchward’s office and I go inside my wardrobe.
I know that Dr Churchward will tell you.
I sit in the darkness and hear you return. You throw open the door of the wardrobe and I hide my face against my knees.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I press my eyeballs so hard against my knees that I see flashing lights. I concentrate on the colours of the lights and wonder if this is what the aurora borealis is like.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, Georgie? That you have cut yourself before.’
Your voice is big. Big enough for both of us, so I say nothing. You stand there for a long time, so still. I cannot see you, but I can hear your breathing. It sounds the way I think a train must sound. I hear another sound, a kind of strangled wailing and I hate it because I know it is coming from my own throat. You close the wardrobe door, leaving me to the comfort of my own darkness. It is a long time before I come out but when I do, you are still there.
‘Well,’ you say as if we are in the middle of a conversation, ‘I’ll bring the magnifying glass each time I come.’
And you do.
27
I am he who crosses the sky, I am the Lion of Ra.
I am the Slayer.
Not exactly the welcome Monty expected. The words were carved a foot high into the huge marble archway into the great hall of the palace. Prince Abdul was clearly no slouch when it came to getting his message across, reinforced by the two life-size bronze lions standing on each side of it.
‘From the Book of the Dead,’ Jessie whispered at Monty’s side. ‘That’s the list of spells used in Ancient Egypt to help the dead survive the dangerous journey through the underworld and into the afterlife. Very important to them.’
Monty regarded her, surprised. ‘So I’m not the only one who hoards useless knowledge, I see.’
‘It comes of having an Egyptologist for a brother. Some of it rubs off.’
He found it hard to look at her. And hard not to. There was no sign of fatigue about her, despite the long journey of the past three days. She was dressed in a plain white summer frock, a simple effortless design that showed off her slender waist and made her look young and fresh. Around her bare shoulders she had draped a shawl of exquisite antique lace that caused other women to turn and look. The men turned and looked anyway, but not because of the lace.
‘The lion-god Aker guards the gateway to the netherworld, Duat,’ she elaborated for him. ‘The sun must pass through it each day. It’s all about death and rebirth.’
He raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Let’s hope this evening is just about rebirth, shall we? Frightfully gruesome, those Ancient Egyptians.’
He watched her smile. Watched the way she held her head, her throat poised and almost as pale as the lace. He watched her hair, pinned up on one side by a mother-of-pearl clip. The way it moved, as though each strand possessed a life and an energy of its own. They were standing in a line of guests shuffling forward to be presented to their host, Prince Abdul al-Hakim, so Monty took time to gaze around. To drag his eyes from her.
There is not one single word in existence that can describe an Arabian palace, he realised. Sumptuous. Resplendent. Gilded. Luminous. Yet when mixed together these words might just suffice, but only if combined with ‘unrestrained’, ‘ostentatious’ and ‘downright idiosyncratic.’ Thirty-four massive columns encased in intricate gold filigree towered over the guests, while the marble walls around them were draped in luxurious cloth of gold. On the floor stretched swathes of Persian rugs, and covering the wide sofas were rich materials edged with blood-red jewels and brilliant peacock-blue beads. Brass cobras raised their heads in corners and the skins of cheetahs lay unheeded underfoot.
It was a world etched in vibrant colour. As if to beat back the relentless desolation of the arid desert that was only a breath away. Was that it? Did the people of Cairo, prowling the streets of their city at night like jackals, hear the hiss and the sigh of the sand as it shifted restlessly in the wind?
Around the edges of the grand room stood a hundred chairs of carved ebony, with sphinx armrests and heavy lion’s paw feet that made Monty think of Coriolanus at home in front of his estate manager’s fire. But it was the throng of guests in the room that drew his attention. He gave a wry grimace. So this was it, the cream of Cairo. The colonial grandees had turned up, all togged out in their Sunday best: elegant gowns, Savile Row dinner jackets and military dressuniforms of every hue and from every nation. The scent of hair oil and cigars, of fine perfume and false smiles drifted aimlessly towards the archway, bringing with it the sound of lies and laughter.
‘I stand out,’ Jessie nudged him. ‘In my mufti.’
‘They’ll park you in a corner and throw rotten dates at you, I expect.’
She laughed, and they moved forward behind a man in Italian military uniform who smiled at Jessie in a way Monty didn’t like and said, ‘Buona sera.’ She did stand out, she was right about that, but not because she was in mufti. Suddenly he was drawn forward and found himself shaking hands with Prince Abdul, a western custom obviously adopted out of courtesy to the country’s masters.
‘Welcome, Sir Montague,’ the prince said warmly in an impeccable English accent. ‘It is an honour for the whole of Cairo to receive such a distinguished visitor.’
‘Thank you, Your Highness. This is my first visit to Cairo and I appreciate the invitation tonight.’
The prince was a well-fed man in his forties, magnificent in flowing white robes and kufiya that were intricately embroidered along the hem with the traditional patterns of Ancient Egypt. He waved a hand, his knuckles weighted with nuggets of gold, at the crowded room, sending his robe swirling through the air like a startled flock of egrets over the Nile.
‘Take your pleasure here,’ he boomed through the profusion of his beard. ‘May Allah bless your first evening in the beautiful heart of Egypt, Sir Montague.’
‘Thank you, you are generous. May I introduce my travelling companion, Miss Jessica Kenton?’
He was glad to see that Jessie knew better than to offer her hand to a Muslim male. Instead she touched her hand to her heart.
‘I am honoured to meet you, Your Highness.’
The prince bared his splendid teeth at her. ‘The pleasure is all mine, Miss Kenton.’
They were supposed to move on. The next guest was waiting, but Jessie stayed rooted to the spot. Monty touched her elbow.
‘Your Highness,’ she said, her wide blue eyes fixed on her host, her lips curved in a respectful smile as she leaned just a fraction closer than was wise, ‘you have great knowledge of your country. You know its ways and its troubles. You are well infor
med.’ She paused.
Monty felt his heart scramble up to somewhere behind his teeth. No, Jessie! His grip tightened on her elbow.
The prince inclined his royal head.
‘You know its secrets,’ Jessie added softly.
The prince’s black eyes narrowed. ‘Your meaning?’
‘You knew Sir Montague was here almost before he arrived.’
‘My dear Miss Kenton,’ the teeth gleamed in a practised smile but the eyes didn’t change, ‘you overestimate my prescience, I assure you.’
‘I doubt that very much,’ she smiled at him, and swung back her thick blonde hair. Instantly his desert wolf eyes sank to her throat. ‘I am looking for someone.’
Don’t, Jessie. We don’t know this man.
‘I’m looking for a dear friend of mine, Sir Reginald Musgrave. He came to Cairo recently.’
‘I hope you find your friend, Miss Kenton, inshallah. What makes you think I know anything about this Musgrave?’
‘I thought you might have invited him to one of your receptions. Such a distinguished young gentleman would be deeply honoured to meet the renowned and respected Prince Abdul al-Hakim.’
The teeth chuckled. ‘Nothing would give me greater pleasure, Miss Kenton, than to be of assistance to you. But almighty Allah in his everlasting wisdom has not granted me the eyes to witness all that occurs in this great city, so I am sorry but I cannot help you.’
She touched her hand to her heart again. ‘I am grateful for your time.’ She dipped her chin in respect to him and finally allowed Monty to steer her away.
‘What the hell was that about?’ he asked in a low voice as they entered the crowded room. ‘I thought the whole idea was to keep the search undetected.’
‘He knows who does or doesn’t enter this country.’
‘My sweet Jessie, we can’t be certain of that.’
‘A twelfth baronet? The famous Sir Reginald? Of course he knows, just like he knew you were here.’
‘Even if that is true, it doesn’t mean he has any idea of Tim’s whereabouts now, does it?’
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