The Visitors

by Sally Beauman

  And down, down, down we went, descending flight after flight of crumbling steps, negotiating a rough wooden bridge over a deep black well-shaft; into one great subterranean hall, and then on again down more steps and along more hot dark corridors until I felt we must be a mile underground… and then forgot distance, because every step of the way we were accompanied – by depictions of the dead king himself on his journey to eternity, and by an escort of gods and goddesses, Ra, Atun and Isis, her green protective kite wings outspread in the beams of our flashlights.

  The deeper we went, the quieter my mind became – Winlock had been right about that three-thousand-year effect; all the turmoil of the day seemed to slip away from me. I could recognise only some of the painted gods that lined the corridors, but I could feel the reassurance of their power. I could sense something else too: I took it for fear at first, and then decided it was holiness. It was the first time I’d ever experienced such a thing. I’ve sensed it on many occasions in the long decades since – it’s caught me unawares, surprised me in the hush of an English country church, stolen upon me in a mosque or a temple. But the first time I ever truly felt that breath on the back of my neck was in Seti’s tomb, when we reached the last room, three hundred feet into the rock, the final space that Winlock had called the Holy of Holies.

  When we came to that last chamber, her father hung back, and Frances took my hand. She switched off my flashlight, and then her own, and we stood side by side in the absolute dark. ‘Now, look up, Lucy,’ Frances whispered.

  She switched on the torch again, training its beam across the high vaulted ceiling of the Burial Chamber. It curved over us, I saw, so wondrously beautiful and strange that I gasped: a blue night sky of planets, constellations and their ruling deities, still protecting a dead king whose body now lay five hundred miles away in a glass case in a museum. The gods’ hands were spilling stars and their eyes were eternally watchful; the paint was as fresh as if it had been applied yesterday.

  We stayed longer than intended in the underworld of the tombs and visited more of them than perhaps Winlock had first planned. When we finally emerged from the last, the sun was beginning to set in a sky stained the purple of blackberries. The tourists and their guides had long gone: just three boys were waiting for us in the distance, at the donkey shelter where the two branches of the Valley divided. We began to walk back, Winlock striding ahead, Frances and me lagging behind. None of us spoke. The heat of the day was already being sucked back into the sky, and the air was chill. I shivered.

  My donkey was docile, old and reluctant to move. I stroked the coarse cross of fur on her neck and whispered words of encouragement, while the boy in charge of her, skipping behind, gave her an assortment of slaps and barefooted kicks, all of which she ignored. She proceeded on, at an obstinate arthritic pace, and gradually the gap between me and the Winlocks widened. By the time I approached the soaring rock spur that marked the throat of the Valley and its exit, I was fifty yards behind, and Frances and her father were already out of sight. I looked back – knowing the Valley would be deserted, yet sure I’d glimpse the spirits who reclaimed it when darkness fell. In the velvety creeping dusk I did see a man’s shape and, for one second, took him for a ghost. Then I realised that it was Howard Carter; perhaps waiting for the Valley to empty of people, he had now returned to occupy it.

  He was standing in the belly of the Valley, at the navel point marked by the tomb of Ramesses VI. I watched him clamber up a high mound of scree by the mouth of that tomb. Hatless and in his shirtsleeves, he started off at a run, but it was a reeling, ungainly climb; he missed his footing several times, whirling his arms to get his balance. When he finally reached the summit, he stood there, scowling at air. The declining sun silhouetted his figure, and as I looked back, I saw him stoop, pick up a stone and hurl it against the rock face behind him. First one stone, then another, then violent handfuls of them in rapid succession – in the clear air, I could hear their ricochet, like a spatter of gunfire.

  My donkey, tired and refractory, had come to a halt at the mouth of the Valley; the boy gave her a hard smack on her rump. She kicked out at him and shied, nearly dislodging me from the saddle. By the time I’d regained my balance and she’d been persuaded to move on again, Carter had flung himself down on the shale, with his back against a rock.

  Looking back one last time, I saw him take a flask from his pocket; there was a flash of silver as he raised it and drained its contents. We rounded the rocks, and set off at a sober pace for the American House, leaving Carter alone, in possession of the Valley.

  15

  The next morning, when we were at breakfast at the American House, a handwritten note was delivered to Helen. We were coming to the end of our meal: Frances and I were sitting at the foot of the long refectory table; most of the working archaeologists, including the amiable Harry Burton, had left by then. Minnie Burton remained, seated near the table’s head. She had eaten a large breakfast, helping herself to bacon, eggs and pancakes, kept warm in chafing dishes on a sideboard. Now she was delicately munching toast and marmalade, with her head bent over a book that she’d continued to read throughout the meal. She looked up and watched the delivery of this note with close interest, I saw – but then Minnie kept an eye on all activities at the house, and very little escaped her scrutiny. Helen read it, smiled, shook her head and showed the note to her husband, on his way out of the door and late for his dig.

  ‘Astonishing.’ Winlock laughed. ‘That’s the nearest thing to an apology you’ll ever get from Carter. Consider yourselves honoured.’

  The note was handed to Miss Mack, who raised her eyebrows but made no comment; finally, since we were also addressed, it was passed to Frances and to me. It read:

  My dear Helen, likewise Miss Mackenzie, Frances and Lucie,

  I shall be at my dig in the Valley today and you are welcome to visit it should that prospect be of interest. If it appeels I can offer you tea afterwards at my ‘Castle’ hoping it will,

  Sincerely yours,

  Howard Carter

  ‘He can’t spell, Myrtle. Never could.’ Helen sighed. ‘Or punctuate. Or, indeed, bring himself to apologise. In fact, he’s impossible and an unmannerly bear, but––’

  ‘It’s a charming note. Touching in its way.’

  ‘Shall I accept? I’d love you and Lucy to see Carter’s house. We could go this afternoon? His boy Hosein is waiting for an answer.’

  ‘Can we rely on his temper this time, do you suppose?’ Miss Mack asked, in a dry tone.

  ‘Not in the least. But let’s risk it, shall we? Come and help me, Myrtle – I think I should write a very ceremonious reply, don’t you?’

  The two women left us. Minnie Burton ostentatiously turned a page of her book. ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘Lunch with Carnarvon and Carter yesterday. Castle Carter this afternoon. Aren’t you popular little girls?’

  ‘I guess we must be, Mrs Burton,’ Frances replied demurely, her tone a precisely judged one millimetre away from insolence. ‘I wonder why?’

  ‘I wonder too.’ Minnie looked up and gave us both an appraising stare. ‘One thing you can be sure of – Howard Carter never bothers with people unless they are useful to him. So either you two have been useful to him already, or he plans to make use of you very soon. Which would you say it was, my dear?’

  ‘Gee, I can’t think,’ Frances answered, in an innocent tone. ‘I guess it’s just that he likes us. He says Lucy has remarkable powers of observation.’

  ‘Does he indeed? How flattering. And do you share her abilities?’

  ‘What, me, Mrs Burton? Gosh, no. I just goof around. I make him laugh, maybe.’

  ‘Well, I can’t say I share his sense of humour.’ Minnie’s cold blue eyes rested first on Frances’s face, then on mine. ‘In my day, children spoke rather less than you do, Frances. They endeavoured to be seen and not heard.’

  ‘Then we go one better,’ Frances smartly replied. ‘We try not to be heard or seen, Mr
s Burton. We endeavour to be invisible. And we often succeed.’

  There was a silence, and it was not a comfortable one. ‘And so I am beginning to realise,’ Minnie replied at last, colour mounting in her cheeks. She rose to her feet, frowning. ‘Most amusing. All I will say, Frances, to you and your little friend, is that your private jokes may entertain you, but they do not entertain me. You may smirk to your hearts’ content, and no doubt consider yourselves very clever – but you know the expression “He who laughs last, laughs longest”? You’ll discover the truth of that one of these days.’

  She picked up her book, marked her place in it with an old envelope, tucked it under her arm and left us. Frances made a face at her departing back.

  ‘Oh well done,’ I said. ‘Brilliant, Frances. Now she knows we’re spies.’

  ‘She knew anyway. She must have worked it out – she’s not stupid. She must have seen us on the terrace at Shepheard’s and now she’s put two and two together. What do I care? There’s nothing she can do anyway. She wouldn’t dare say a word about Poppy, not after that dressing-down Lord Carnarvon gave her… except, what did that last remark of hers mean? Could you see the title of that book she was reading?’

  ‘No. I looked, but she kept her hand over it. Could you?’

  ‘I tried but she was too quick. It was too fat to be a novel – Queen Min doesn’t stoop to fiction anyway, she’s a snob about books and people. A biography? Some reference thing? You saw the way she kind of flourished it and hid it at the same time?’

  ‘I did. Was it one of the books from the library here, maybe? I thought I could see some kind of stamp on the cover.’

  ‘I’ll check. Anyway, it’s a clue, Lucy. We’ll keep a watch on her – she’s up to something.’

  Burton-watching was a fine game; we tried hard to keep it up after breakfast, but our spying activities were thwarted time and again. Frances checked the American House library, stacked with works of archaeological reference in the main, but the results were inconclusive. For the rest of that morning, we were kept occupied. Neither Helen nor Miss Mack approved of idleness, so we were banished to our room to practise our ballet steps, then spent an hour over hieroglyphs and Egyptian history on the veranda; finally, easels were set up for us outside the house, so we could paint industrious watercolours of the Theban hills.

  Minnie Burton reappeared as Frances and I were embarking on our watercolours, remarking acidly to Helen that it was good to see the children occupied for once. ‘Maybe Frances will inherit your talents, Helen,’ she said sweetly. ‘I was saying to Harry the other day, such a pity you never trained – for an amateur, you really do paint so charmingly. You must do a little sketch of me, one day – just as a keepsake, you know.’

  ‘Beyond my powers. I know my limitations.’

  ‘You’re too modest. I don’t mean a full-scale portrait, nothing ambitious, dear.’

  ‘Minnie, I’d never do you justice. The result would be unflattering. You must excuse me – I need to get the girls organised. Now, where did I leave my spectacles?’

  Helen extricated herself, and, once Frances and I were engaged on our paintings, retreated to the far end of the veranda to sit in peace with Miss Mack. Minnie Burton, watched carefully by Frances and me, settled herself in a planter’s chair and opened her book. She studied it minutely, turning its pages back and forth, while Frances and I concentrated hard on being invisible. I painted a tight circle of toothed rocks, but my sky-paint ran down and ruined them. Frances painted a route through the rocks that was purely imagined: no such view was visible from this vantage point. Then, bored with the inanimate, she added a figure in an unlikely hat, which she claimed was Jones, the sad tubercular Welsh archaeologist, gazing at the Theban hills and seeing his homeland. When the luncheon gong sounded from the depths of the house our opportunity finally came. The adults were scarcely through the doors before Frances was on the veranda, the suspicious book in her hand.

  ‘KV,’ she said, as I reached her side. ‘Quick. She’s forgotten it at last. Sit on it. If she comes looking for it, say you haven’t seen it. Give me two seconds, Lucy. Don’t move.’

  The weighty book, its leather cover stamped with the Met’s insignia and, as suspected, borrowed from the American House library, proved to be Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage. I sat on it. Minnie Burton, fond of food, always punctual for meals, querulously eager to find fault with Mrs Lythgoe’s menus, must have been distracted. She did not return in quest of the book – but a few minutes later an excited Frances reappeared; she had a cut-throat razor in her hand.

  ‘I knew it!’ she said, snatching Burke’s from me. ‘It’s Mrs Lythgoe’s copy. She keeps tons of this stuff, umpteen volumes of the Social Register, and the Almanach de Gotha as well – they help with all the precedence and placement nonsense when she gives a big dinner here. And we’re in luck – just in time! Queen Min’s reached page 250 – she’s halfway through the “G” section. She’s working her way through it alphabetically, because she doesn’t know the exact name to look up. But I do. Thank goodness she hadn’t got as far as “H”, then we’d have been in trouble… Wait a second, let me find it – now hold the book steady. Oh, perfect, I can cut it here, and here, and the whole section will come out cleanly. Unless she looks at the page numbers, which she won’t, she’ll never know.’

  With an unwavering hand, Frances flicked the razor open and sliced through the paper. She handed me the two-page section she’d removed, inverted the book, shook it to ensure no other pages had come loose, and replaced it on the table. This surgical operation took less than a minute. We raced back inside the house, and were chattering in the hall, when Frances hissed ‘KV’ again as Mrs Burton emerged from the dining room.

  ‘Did I leave my book outside?’ She glared at us as she passed. ‘What a mess you’re in. Paint all over your faces – you look like two little savages.’

  ‘I didn’t notice your book, sorry, Mrs Burton. Just going to wash,’ Frances called over her shoulder, and dragged me down the corridor. She nipped into her parents’ bedroom, replaced her father’s razor on the washstand, then pulled me into the American House’s bathroom, bolting the door.

  ‘Old witch,’ she said, leaning against the doors. ‘I knew she was looking for something – and that’s it, near the beginning of the “H” section, right there.’

  She jabbed a finger at the second page she’d extracted. I peered at the small print, trying to make sense of the peculiar abbreviations Burke’s employed. The meaty section Frances was indicating spelled out the lineage of a family of Hampshire baronets named ‘Hallowes’. At the end of the long list, I came to the last of their line, a Captain Sir Roland Hallowes, MC, DSO. No issue; he had died five years previously, unmarried, aged twenty-one, in 1917 at the Battle of Arras.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said. ‘Who are these Hallowes people? Why would Mrs Burton be trying to look them up?’

  ‘Go up a line.’

  I did as she bid. I saw that Captain Sir Roland had two sisters, named Octavia and Poppea; all three were the children of one Sir Quentin Hallowes, deceased 1912. I stared at these sisters’ names, dates of birth and marriage details: a familiar sick, smoky unease began to swirl around in my mind.

  ‘Tell me it isn’t. Frances, it can’t be… ’

  ‘Of course it is. This edition is out of date, so it only cites Poppea’s first marriage – but that would have been enough: as soon as Mrs Burton saw that, she’d know she was on track. Poppea is Poppy, of course – and Roland was her brother. Poppy told me about him once, he nearly got a posthumous VC. He was stupendously brave – well, Poppy’s brave too, in her way. He was in a cavalry regiment. They charged their horses straight at a German machine-gun emplacement and every single man was––’

  ‘That can’t be right. Frances, look – this Poppea’s father is dead. He died ten years ago.’

  ‘I know. Poppy adored him. She talks about him all the time.’

  ‘But he can’t be
dead. He’s at his villa in France, he fell ill very suddenly, the doctors thought it was pneumonia, Poppy’s with him now.’

  ‘Oh, Lucy – don’t tell me you believed that!’

  ‘Of course I believed it. Lord Carnarvon explained it. He was as clear as could be.’

  ‘I know – wasn’t he brilliant? I wish I could tell lies that well. But it was a white lie, and told for honourable reasons to protect Poppy, so it’s just a fib, anyway. Queen Min must have suspected and she was trying to make sure – well, she won’t now!’

  I turned away to the washbasin. The tap gushed rusty water. I washed all the yellows and scarlets and blues from my hands. My watercolour had been a runny mess: I couldn’t paint, I couldn’t detect lies, I was useless as an observer, truth eluded me. I thought of Rose and Peter; of a small boy waving from the hotel balcony. After a long pause, I looked up. Frances was drying her hands. ‘So if none of that was true,’ I asked carefully, ‘if Poppy isn’t in France with her father, where is she?’

  For the first time I saw doubt and anxiety betray themselves in Frances’s eyes. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. No one will tell me anything, Lucy – I’m as much in the dark as you are.’

  ‘But Rose and Peter think she’s on her way back now. What lies have they been told? Rose must know their grandfather’s dead, even if Peter doesn’t understand.’

  ‘I don’t know what they were told. Maybe that Poppy is with friends. No one wants them to worry. You mustn’t tell them, Lucy – promise me.’

  ‘I won’t say a word – of course I won’t. But it’s so cruel and wrong to let them think she’s coming back any moment – Frances, anything could have happened, Poppy could have gone anywhere, it might be months before she deigns to show up again. Oh, this is horrible! I can’t think why I liked her, why I was taken in by her. I don’t believe she cares for them at all – if she loved Rose and Peter, she’d never put them through this. No mother would. She’s nothing but a selfish, vain, stupid woman.’