by Gill Paul
The butler, Taylor, showed them through the saloon into the drawing room, where Porchy was sitting, whisky in hand, by the windows that looked out toward the stables. She noticed he’d hung a painting of Catherine above the fireplace, looking as beautiful and luminous as when they first met, before the booze marred her looks.
The butler poured them each a sherry and gave Porchy a generous refill of whisky, adding a splash of water before returning the jug to the sideboard.
Porchy took a swig. “Do you know, I’m still getting begging letters from Almina’s creditors?” he complained almost as soon as they sat down. “I got one yesterday. She seems to have promised all kinds of hangers-on that she would leave them money in her will, and instead all she left was debt. But try getting them to believe that . . .”
“It wasn’t her fault.” Eve had spent years trying to broker peace between the two without success. “She was brought up with money on tap and could never reconcile herself to it drying up after Alfred de Rothschild died. She was too generous, always a sucker for an underdog story.”
“She was hideously irresponsible!” he exclaimed. “We could have lost Highclere because of her. I’m still negotiating with the tax office, signing over paintings right, left, and center.” He glanced up at his ex-wife hanging on the wall.
“At least you won’t have to pay death duty on Almina’s estate if she left only debt,” Brograve commented. “The rates are sky-high under Harold Wilson’s government.”
Eve knew he was trying to steer conversation away from a contentious area. Her brother’s arguments with her mother had been a source of great sadness to her. She picked up a silver table lighter that had belonged to Pups, and ran her finger over the engraving of his initials: GESMH. It was complicated when an estate was inherited by the eldest son while the wife was still alive, but there was no doubt that if she’d been in charge, Almina would have run the place into the ground. She never had any sense when it came to money.
All the same, it had been cruel of Porchy to force her to declare bankruptcy. Brograve took his side, saying it was the only prudent course of action, but Eve used to slip her mother money in secret. Poor Mama. She had been a rather distant mother but it wasn’t her fault. The train of thought brought to mind Ana Mansour and her separation from her children.
“I wonder if you ever found any Tutankhamun relics lying around at Highclere?” she asked Porchy, interrupting a conversation about the shortcomings of the Wilson government. “I think there may be a few bits and pieces Pups brought back from the tomb.”
He snorted like a horse. “You ask me this every bloody time we talk on the phone, Baby Sis. You’re getting senile. I told you his entire collection went to the Met.”
“Are you sure it all went?” she asked. “Was nothing left behind?”
Her father’s Egyptian collection used to be housed in two cupboards built into the wall cavities between the drawing room and the smoking room. There were shelves inside, and artifacts were kept in old tobacco tins. As a child, Eve loved to explore the treasures, which she knew off by heart. “Test me!” she’d demand, and Pups would choose a tin at random and show Eve the contents. Without fail, she would be able to relate the provenance of the item, the dates, and the symbolism of the ancient imagery of gods, ritual ceremonies, and strange composite animals that were part this and part that.
“I wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law,” Porchy backtracked. “There are three hundred bloody rooms here, so maybe the odd Egyptian knickknack is gathering dust somewhere.”
“Would you mind if I have a poke around tomorrow? Just out of interest?”
Before Porchy could answer, Taylor cleared his throat. “Pardon me for interrupting, sir. I believe there are some small items in the old cupboards, behind the panels.” He pointed toward the wall adjoining the smoking room. “They were boarded up during the war, when we heard evacuee children were coming to stay. I assumed you knew about them, sir.”
Eve’s stomach gave a lurch. She got up and went to the spot where the cupboards had been, in the doorway between the two rooms. When she knocked on the panels, she could hear it was hollow behind.
“Good god,” Porchy said. “I suppose we had better have a look, in that case. I’ll get a man to remove those panels tomorrow morning. Maybe you can help to identify things, Baby Sis. You were always more interested in those crumbling old relics than I was.”
Eve glanced at the walls, feeling a mixture of curiosity and apprehension. Maybe there would be something there to help Ana Mansour get back to see her children. She shivered. It felt as if there might be a ghost or two lurking inside.
Chapter Forty-One
Highclere Castle, April 1973
As soon as the first corner of the paneling was removed, Eve caught a whiff of musky scent. It made her cough.
“Can you smell that?” she asked Brograve. “Doesn’t it remind you of the tomb?”
He sniffed, then shook his head. “To me, it smells of damp.”
The panel splintered as Porchy’s man used a chisel to pry it from the wall, nails popping out and scattering on the parquet floor. Behind, Eve could see the old cupboard door. It wasn’t locked, thank goodness, and when he pulled it open she saw rusting tins on the shelves: Lambert & Butler Gold Leaf; Player’s Navy Cut. She stretched an arm out and grabbed the first tin she could reach. Nestling on some yellowing cotton inside was part of a blue faience necklace.
“I know this,” she said. “It’s from the tomb of Amenhotep III. KV22.” She was delighted her memory hadn’t let her down. “It’s broken. Perhaps that’s why Howard didn’t include it in the sale to the Met.”
She reached for another tin. This one had a sand-colored scarab beetle inside, just an inch long. “Did you know that walking anticlockwise around scarabs is supposed to make wishes come true?” she told the men. “I think it’s five times around to get a husband and seven times for a child.”
“Well, it worked for you,” Brograve replied, but Porchy rolled his eyes in a derogatory manner and said, “Honestly, what tosh!”
“Oh look!” she cried, pointing to the top shelf. “That’s one of Merneptah’s embalming oil jugs. I found them, you know. My claim to fame!”
“The handle’s broken,” Porchy commented. “Couldn’t you have found an intact one?”
Brograve smiled and rolled his eyes.
Eve didn’t mind; she was delighted to see the jug again. “We found thirteen, actually. The Egyptian government got seven and we got six. I suppose the intact ones went to the Met.”
Porchy’s man turned his attention to the cupboard on the other side. Once again the door behind the paneling was unlocked and there were cigarette tins on the shelves. It took Eve right back to childhood, when she used to love looking through these treasures with Pups. It was their special place.
“Don’t touch anything with your bare hands,” she warned the men. “You need to wear gloves. The sweat on our skin can cause decomposition.”
“Do you think there’s anything valuable?” Porchy asked.
“Maybe.” Eve opened another tin and looked in to see three carnelian bracelet plaques. She remembered when Howard brought them, before the war. The First World War, that was. They were also from the tomb of Amenhotep III, and were inscribed with the name of his wife, Queen Tiye.
“His principal wife,” she heard Pups’s voice correcting her. She felt close to her father in there, as if his spirit was lingering in the air. She was glad they had come here to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It was the right place to be.
“It’s definitely worth getting an expert to check them,” she said. “If you call the British Museum, I expect they’ll send someone. Meanwhile, do you mind if I have a poke around?”
“Be my guest,” Porchy said. “Brograve and I are going to the stables to look at the new bloodstock. We’ll see you for luncheon at one.”
As soon as they left, Eve began to hunt for Tutankhamun relics. She had a
crystal-clear memory of the items Pups had pulled from his pockets in Castle Carter the night they crept into the tomb. There had been an amulet of Wadjet, the cobra goddess, made out of beaten gold, a clay wine jar, and that wooden goose varnished with resin. She asked Taylor to bring her a stepladder and a pair of gloves and he returned with both, but insisted he should be the one to climb the ladder.
They worked methodically through the shelves and Eve discovered many items she hadn’t seen in decades. A lot had been left behind when Howard sold the collection to the Met, and not all of it was damaged. Perhaps he had wanted Highclere to keep its links with Egypt.
Howard had become quite the celebrity in the 1920s, in demand all over the world, but he and Eve remained close and every time he passed through London he would visit her. At first he tried to persuade her to return to Egypt, but when he realized she was adamantly against it, he brought her the firsthand news from the Valley of the Kings instead.
It was February 1924 when he finally opened the lid of the stone sarcophagus that had been inside the blue and gold shrine. It was cracked, he told her, and the crack had been hurriedly filled with gypsum, as if there had been an accident while it was being lowered into place. It made the job of lifting it more difficult, in case it fell apart at the weak joint.
Inside they found the first of the anthropoid coffins, its solid gold mask shimmering in the arc lamps Harry Burton had set up. From its size, Howard guessed there must be several more coffins, and so it turned out, each one tucked inside the last like a set of babushka dolls. There was enough solid gold to fill Fort Knox, he told her. Security had to be tight.
The funerary mask was the image most people associated with the tomb now: the striped headcloth with a uraeus on top, the lifelike kohl-lined eyes, painted with white calcite, the pupils made of obsidian, and the beard of lapis-colored glass. Howard had sounded overawed when he described it to her.
“Truly phenomenal. You know I’m not much given to displays of emotion, Eve, but I had to sit down because my knees were trembling. I only hope you’ll see it sometime . . .”
She was glad not to have been present for the uncovering of the mummy; the very thought made her shiver. She heard from Howard that the resins poured over the corpse had meant it was stuck to the inside of the coffin and had to be examined where it lay, in an autopsy that began in November 1925.
The results were fascinating. Tutankhamun had been short, just five foot four and one-eighth inches, and he had a club foot. They could tell that he died around the age of eighteen, which fitted with what they knew from other sources. Experts couldn’t agree on the cause of death. Could it have been tuberculosis, which was rife in Ancient Egypt? Or malaria? Was the head injury they could see the result of heavy-handedness during the embalming process or a fatal blow to the head? Did he break his leg in a chariot accident, then catch blood poisoning from the wound?
It was all too morbid for Eve. Death had been everywhere in the 1920s. First there had been Pups, then his half brother Aubrey, and so many other people who visited the tomb started to succumb. A railroad millionaire caught pneumonia and died just a month after Pups. An Egyptian prince was shot dead by his wife later that same year. A high-ranking official in Egyptian military intelligence was assassinated in Cairo while his car was stuck in traffic. An Oxford scholar, the author of numerous books on Egypt, hanged himself in a hotel room, leaving a suicide note written in his own blood that read “I have succumbed to a curse.” The professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland burned to death in a house fire.
Then there were some victims she knew well. Poor Arthur Mace, who had accompanied them on the Aswan cruise, had died of unexplained arsenic poisoning. And Richard Bethell, Howard’s private secretary, had been smothered in bed in a Mayfair club and his murderer never found. His distraught father threw himself from a seventh-floor window, unable to cope with the loss, and on the way to the father’s funeral, the hearse ran over and killed an eight-year-old boy. Eve had been aghast when she read of this tragedy in the Express.
She remembered Howard’s dismissive answer when she asked him if he thought there could be a link among the deaths.
“Do you know how many thousands of visitors I showed around the tomb?” he asked. “Statistically, fewer of them have died than might have been expected in a random sample of the population.”
Always the scientist, Eve thought. Always an answer for everything, just like Brograve. To her mind, his explanation addressed the number of deaths, but not the sheer oddness of some of them.
Chapter Forty-Two
Highclere Castle, April 1973
When she had finished checking the cupboard on one side of the doorway, Eve turned to the other. One item there was swaddled in a length of discolored cotton and she unwrapped it to find the wooden goose Pups had taken from the tomb, its black resin coat daubed with gold on the breast, its neck curved in swan-like fashion, and a white beak pointed coyly downward. Heart beating a little faster, she laid it, still in its cotton, on the coffee table between the sofas in the drawing room.
The amulet of Wadjet turned up next, its beaten gold gleaming. It was covered in intricate carvings showing the segments of the snake’s body, the feathered wings, and the human head wearing a headdress. It was in mint condition, as if the artist had buffed up his work that very morning. She placed it beside the goose.
Several clay wine jars were stacked together on an upper shelf and Taylor lifted them all down for her. They looked similar and Eve couldn’t decide which one might have come from the tomb. She squinted at the tiny cartouches carved on the bases but couldn’t make them out. Fortunately Porchy had left a pair of reading glasses lying around, so she put them on to examine the jars, soon spotting the hieroglyphic letters that spelled Tutankhamun on one of them. She was sure the jar had a hint of the cloying muskiness of the unguent container. Arthur Conan Doyle had told her the Ancient Egyptians used unguents and oils imbued with elemental spirits, or so she remembered.
“Mr. Conan Doyle also believes in fairies,” Howard had scoffed when she mentioned that. “Did you see the article he wrote for Strand Magazine about the little girls in Cottingley who claimed to have photographed fairies? The man’s a gullible fool!”
Looking back, Eve remembered being convinced by Conan Doyle when she first met him. He had seemed like an authority. But afterward, when he kept writing to her with dire warnings about the curse, trying to get her to agree to exorcisms and such like, it grew rather wearisome. Howard would never have agreed to an exorcism in the tomb. He would have mocked the notion.
Eve searched through the remainder of the objects Taylor brought down from the shelves, but there was no sign of the gold container, so she hadn’t hidden it there. It was disappointing but she hoped Ana Mansour would be pleased to receive three of the artifacts from her list. With any luck, she could take them back to Cairo and get her job back, then start her legal battle for access to her children. Eve hated to think it was her fault Ana hadn’t been able to return sooner.
* * *
When she met Brograve and Porchy for luncheon in the dining room, Eve told them of her finds. Porchy’s reaction—entirely predictably—was to ask whether they could sell them at auction to the highest bidder.
“I don’t think so,” Eve said, “given that they are stolen goods. Pups shouldn’t have taken them from the tomb. It seems to me we should give them to Ana Mansour to return to the Cairo Museum, where most of the other Tutankhamun relics are kept along with his sarcophagus.”
Brograve objected: “You can’t just hand over priceless artifacts to a woman we’ve only met twice. We don’t know anything about her. It should be done officially. I’ll ask Cuthbert to inquire through the British Council.”
“Who’s Ana Mansour?” Porchy asked. “If we’re giving them to anyone, it should be the British Museum, then I can claim tax relief on the gifts. They are mine, after all—contents of the house, and all that.”
Eve began to wish she had just sneaked them into her suitcase without mentioning them. She wanted to give them to Ana, but it would be difficult now that the cat was out of the bag.
After lunch, Brograve telephoned Cuthbert and explained the sensitive nature of the find. “We think they are missing artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb,” he said. “Dr. Ana Mansour from Cairo University gave us a list of items that were mentioned in Maya’s tomb in Saqqara, and these appear to be three of them.”
Cuthbert asked a few questions, then promised to make inquiries and get back to him.
“Maude sends her love,” Brograve told Eve afterward. “She wants to have lunch with you when you get back and—her words—‘hit the sales.’” He raised an eyebrow in a comical manner that made her laugh.
Money had never been an issue between them. She knew lots of men just gave their wives an allowance to cover the housekeeping, but right from the start Brograve insisted they have a joint account and said she could spend whatever she liked. In fifty years, she couldn’t remember a single occasion when he had criticized her spending—not even when she gave money to Almina. He had a generous soul.
* * *
Over dinner that evening, once he’d sunk a few whiskies, Porchy returned to his familiar rant about their mother. He seemed obsessed. Eve suspected her presence had rekindled his anger and the booze was stoking it.