The Alexandria Affair

by Ashley Gardner

  We’d hired donkeys at the water’s edge, not to convey us but the baggage Grenville had brought. We’d need refreshment, he’d explained, and shade. Not confident we’d find any on this side of the river, he’d brought it with us. It took some time to load the donkeys, and then we were off.

  The sun had reached its zenith. The sky was a blank, light blue, tinged with dust. The pale tan color of the desert floor was the same in every direction, unchanging from where we stood all the way to the horizon, which was swallowed in haze.

  The first thing we beheld was the Sphinx, its head thrusting up from the sand beside the narrow trail. I looked at the rounded rectangular shape meant to be the neck up to the well-carved face. Despite the shattered nose, the eyes, ears, and hood of the king were rendered in great detail. I wondered if the rest of it had been as detailed before the sand and wind had taken its toll.

  The Sphinx, while remarkable, was dwarfed by the enormous pyramids that rose a little way behind it.

  Astonishing. I could think of no other adjective to describe the Great Pyramid, which was the first we reached, except colossal. The base was a perfect, enormous square, while the sides rose and rose to a peak, the exposed stones like stair-steps for giants.

  I ignored the others, the Egyptians and foreigners who were either milling about between the pyramids or digging trenches or pits, the Egyptian men’s voices raised in song.

  I forgot the heat, the pain in my leg, the dry dust caked around my lips, the sun beating on my head through my hat. I walked to the bottom of the Great Pyramid and looked straight upward, my neck aching as I tilted it back and back and back.

  Blocks had been stacked together to form a “step” a little higher than my chest. There was nothing for it but that I found another smaller slab of stone, climbed upon it, and pulled myself up to the first block of the pyramid. There were many, many more blocks above me, but I was seized with the need to climb all the way to the top.

  I had clambered up to the next step when I heard Grenville calling below.

  “Ahoy, there, Lacey! Have a care. If you fall, I am the unfortunate man who will have to explain to your wife.”

  I waved down at him. “I’ll not go far.” I turned and heaved myself up to the step above that.

  My knee began to hurt, but the pain was swept away on a tide of fevered excitement. I’d never felt such a thing before, the frenzied need to stand on this very ancient monument, to touch it and become part of its past.

  Herodotus had stood where I did now—indeed, we knew the name of the king who built it—Cheops—because of him and other Greek historians. Ancient Romans had come to look upon this place, some even leaving their names marked in the stone. The Arabs who’d conquered this world must have looked upon it in awe. The pyramid might have been built by an ancient king, but now it belonged to the world.

  At this moment, it belonged to me.

  I heard huffing behind me, and Brewster heaved himself up to sit on the stone below. He drew out a handkerchief and mopped his face.

  “Looking after you will be the death of me, guv.”

  “Grenville has raised his pavilion.” I pointed at the open tent where Bartholomew and Matthias were setting out folding chairs. “You can wait there out of the sun.”

  Brewster ignored this offer. “You ain’t going all the way to the top, are you?” he asked wearily.

  “A few more steps,” I said. “Here—boost me up, and I’ll pull you after me.”

  Brewster climbed to his feet with a grunt. He didn’t argue, merely heaved me to the next step, his strength unnerving.

  I turned around and helped him climb up beside me. Step by step we ascended about five more blocks, then we halted, both of us out of breath.

  I turned to view the plain that spread under us. The Sphinx waited patiently, its face to the tourists as they approached the pyramids. A second pyramid, this one with white stone smoothing part of its sides, stood nearby, and another still smaller pyramid peeked from behind that one.

  These were houses of the dead, tombs of kings and queens. So why did I feel so alive standing here?

  I decided at once that I’d return to Egypt as soon as I could, next year perhaps, and bring Donata and Gabriella with me. Grenville could ensure that they traveled comfortably—he was experienced at it. Both Donata and Gabriella had a keen curiosity and resilience, and I would show this world to them.

  Grenville had seated himself at the edge of the pavilion, in the shade, with his sketchbook. He took up a pencil from the box next to him and began to draw.

  As I scanned the view of the second pyramid again, I started and lifted my eyes to shade them from the merciless sun.

  “What is it?” Brewster was on his feet beside me, peering into the glaring brightness.

  “Is that Marcus?” I pointed to the man I’d seen striding into the desert away from the second pyramid. He had the height, the build, the gait.

  “Why don’t we find out?”

  Brewster, without hesitation, began climbing down, helping me descend, and we struck out into the desert after him.

  Chapter 16

  I strode quickly across the hot ground, the heat penetrating the soles of my boots.

  Grenville looked up from his sketching as we hastened by, his pencil aloft. “Where the devil are you going?” he called.

  “To ask someone a question,” I answered in a hard voice.

  Grenville dropped the sketchbook and pencil to the table, snatched up his walking stick, and joined us.

  The wind had risen. As I’d climbed the Great Pyramid, the air had been still as death, but now that we hurried across the open ground, gusts blew from the desert, stirring the sand.

  Fewer people gathered around the second pyramid, with much of its limestone facing still intact, fewer still around the third. We passed trenches dug along the bases of the pyramids where men were searching for something, I knew not what. They look up and stared curiously at the three mad Englishmen heading into the open desert.

  I’d seen the man called Marcus, most definitely, and so had Brewster. Brewster led the way, moving nimbly over rocks and sand with the silent speed I’d observed in him before.

  The desert beyond the pyramids was wide and featureless. I knew that at Sakkara, to the south, more tombs and pyramids awaited, but I could see nothing of those places in the emptiness of earth and sky.

  I could not see our quarry either. I slowed, breathing hard, wondering where the devil he’d gone. Grenville fell in beside me, holding his hat in place with a gloved hand, his fine suit coated with a layer of pale dust.

  Brewster continued at the same rapid pace. I saw him pause on a slight rise, and then he simply dropped out of sight.

  I ran forward in alarm, Grenville hard on my heels. My walking stick sank into sand, barely supporting me.

  I slipped and slid as I climbed the low hill Brewster had ascended, then I stopped at the top in surprise.

  Below me spread a maze of steep-walled riverbeds, all dry, hidden from the plain behind me by the rising ground. The Spanish called such places arroyos, dry riverbeds that filled during floods, though I guessed this one hadn’t flooded in centuries.

  Brewster was running along the bottom of the riverbed, his battered hat firmly on his head as he gave chase to our man, who was some way in front of him. I climbed down to join him, sliding badly on the earth and landing heavily, barely keeping to my feet. The top of the wash rose above my head, its sides sheer.

  Grenville started to follow, but I held up a hand. “Wait. We might need someone to pull us out of here.”

  Grenville studied the drop, let his gaze follow Brewster, and nodded. “Brewster’s gone left about twenty feet ahead of you. I can’t see the other fellow anymore.”

  I lifted my walking stick to him in thanks and hurried off down the cut.

  Grenville walked above me, shading his eyes and calling out the directions I was to go. Wind whipped his clothes, but down here in the cut the air was st
ill, though plenty hot.

  I heard shouting in the distance and made for it. My hat tumbled off, caught by a chance gust that blew through the cut, and I left it in my haste.

  I rounded a sharp corner and found Brewster with his hands around Gabriel Marcus Lacey’s throat.

  Marcus was again in Egyptian dress, one end of his turban dragging down his back. He had a knife in his hand, which was poised against Brewster’s ribs.

  I caught the hand with the knife and twisted it. Brewster, lips curling in fury, let go of Marcus’s throat only to punch him in the face.

  Marcus’s head rocked back, and he started to laugh, a crazed sound. “Out to make certain I never get your ruins in Norfolk?”

  Blood ran from the cut Brewster’s blow had opened on Marcus’s cheek. Marcus screwed up his eyes and kept laughing.

  “What is the matter with you?” I demanded. “And why are you out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Do we have to share everything now?” Marcus asked. He spat blood, and Brewster closed his hand around his throat again. “A grandfather, a tumbledown estate, a face, our plans?”

  “Speak plainly,” I said. “Tell me what you meant—how is it possible that my father had a brother no one ever knew of? Are you saying my father went in search of yours to murder him? It is absurd, even for my horror of a parent.”

  “Call off your man,” Marcus said, his voice hoarse. “I’ll tell you.”

  “Let him go, Brewster,” I said quietly.

  Brewster threw me a look of anger, but he deliberately lifted his hand and stepped back.

  Marcus rubbed his neck, red from the imprint of Brewster’s fingers. His skin was tanned deeply from the sun and coated with dust.

  “My father was born of our grandfather’s first wife,” he said, his voice filled with anger that ran deep. “The marriage was perfectly legal, but she was half-caste—her father French, her mother a native of the people called Mississauga. My father was raised by his mother and her people when our grandfather abandoned them to return to England. My grandmother died of grief—our grandfather married again, as you know, this time to a tame Englishwoman of Norfolk, who dutifully gave him a son, fully English this time, one Roderick Lacey.”

  My father. I’d never met my grandmother, who had died long before I’d been born. My grandfather had passed away when I’d been a young child. If I remembered him at all it was as an enfeebled man my father had been very impatient with. But both my grandfather and grandmother had been from Norfolk, well known to the village of Parson’s Point.

  The wind rose above us, dust filling the air. I heard Grenville call out, but I was too fixed on Marcus and his words to pay attention.

  “I still cannot understand how no one knew of this,” I said. “If the marriage was legal, there will be a record.”

  “Oh, there is a record.” Marcus gave me a dark look. “And I know where. Grandfather Lacey lived with a French family in what is now the town of Kingston, on Lake Ontario. My father grew up there with his Indian relations, joining the British colony when they pushed out the French. His marriage to an Englishwoman was legal as well—my mother died in the having of me. My father was murdered when I was all of two, by your father’s hand. The family who raised me, friends of my mother, told me all, showed me proofs.”

  I listened, dumbfounded. Grenville had postulated that my grandfather could have left his first wife and returned to England, possibly denying he’d ever married her.

  I had tried to fathom a reason a man would do this, but if his first wife had been half-caste, our grandfather might have been convinced he’d made a mistake, that the marriage would never be considered legal. Or perhaps he was simply embarrassed by her. I’d known men in India who’d taken wives among the native women, and then not known what to do when their fellows derided them for it.

  I looked for signs of the Mississauga woman in Marcus, but could see none. The Lacey blood had erased it. Considering how aggressive Lacey men could be, I was not surprised.

  “Why not come to me?” I asked him, my anger not assuaged. “Why not simply present yourself and explain who you were instead of trying to kill me and hurt my family?”

  Marcus’s jaw firmed. “I have told you again and again, I meant to hurt no one but you. They are as much victims of the Lacey cruelty as I am.”

  “That does not undo the fact that they were hurt!” I shouted. “Nor am I entirely convinced of your tale. You could be anyone following me about with a story of being rightful heir to the Lacey estate. Why you’d want it, God knows.”

  “Because it is mine.” Marcus slammed his palms to his chest. “I am a gentleman’s son, an Englishman of the bloody landed classes. I grew up working my hands to the bone helping the man who’d adopted me, lifting and carrying loads bigger than me while you went off to your schools and were waited on hand and foot.”

  I burst into laughter as wild as his had been. “Then you know nothing about English schools and life with my father. I’d have been glad to work like a drudge instead of being caned every day because I could not respect the shallow-minded fools who tried to teach me.”

  “You had everything I should have had,” Marcus said stubbornly. “Even when I was in the army, I sweated in malarial swamps while you rode to glory on the Peninsula. You, the son of a murderer, stole my life.”

  “If all this is true, prove it,” I returned. “Go through the courts, produce the records. If all is as you say, you may take over the house in Norfolk and I will wish you happy. My wife will be relieved not to have to spend the money to repair the roof.”

  I could hear Donata’s cool tones in the back of my mind, pictured her holding my gaze with a warning look. Do not be so hasty, Gabriel. Calmly wait for evidence before you give away all you have.

  Marcus had stirred fury in me I hadn’t known in a long time. All he said might be true, but he had stalked me, threatened me, terrorized my stepson, and nearly killed my friend. I would not embrace him readily even if he proved to be a long lost cousin. He needed to make amends.

  Marcus shook his head, spattering blood to the sand. “Proving it takes money, and you know it. I’ve labored for every penny I have.”

  “Obviously you could afford to travel to England and then to Egypt. You have a friend in the governor of Alexandria.”

  “I worked for him.” Marcus’s eyes flashed with anger. “I taught English to his sons. He kept me nearly a prisoner. I had to escape him to come to the Nile to …”

  He trailed off as though realizing he’d been about to confess what he was doing out here. He hadn’t come down the Nile to follow me. He’d departed Alexandria before I had.

  “To what?” I asked him. “What are you looking for? Not me—not today.”

  Marcus went silent, averting his gaze. Not in submission. His mouth had the stubborn set I recognized in myself.

  Brewster took a step forward, silently offering his services to beat the truth out of him.

  Just then, we heard Grenville call again. “Lacey! There’s—”

  His words were lost in a shriek of wind. I looked up to see a wall of sand rushing at us down the arroyo, obliterating sky, walls, and very soon, us.

  Chapter 17

  I turned my back to the wind, but my mouth and nose quickly filled with sand. I jerked my coat loose and covered the lower half of my face, straining to see Brewster in the sudden storm.

  I was completely alone in a whirl of sand, which was dense like the thickest fog London ever produced. But while London fog surrounded one with clammy fingers, the Egyptian sand threatened to burn my skin from my bones.

  I dropped to my hands and knees, groping my way to the wall of the arroyo. My hand found a boot, one thick enough and wide enough to belong to Brewster.

  The boot was upside down, my touch landing on its sole. I found Brewster stretched out facedown, and my hand fell on a warm stickiness in his hair.

  I tore my coat from my mouth to call his name. “Brewster!” I shook
him.

  To my immense relief, Brewster stirred and coughed.

  I jammed my coat back over my nose and mouth and crouched against the rock wall. An overhang jutted out a foot or so, which kept the rain of sand from my face somewhat. I helped drag Brewster to a sitting position, hearing his groans even over the howl of the wind.

  The sky darkened, the cloud turning an opaque gold color. All the sand in Egypt, it seemed, was rushing down this arroyo. Brewster and I sat shoulder to shoulder, the two of us huddling behind my spread coat. Brewster breathed heavily, his body sagging against mine.

  “Are you all right?” I tried to ask, but sand grated in my throat and my words barely sounded.

  He must have understood, because he nodded. “Didn’t hit me,” he croaked. “Were a rock.”

  I had to wonder, though, if the rock had been wielded by Marcus’s hand.

  Of Marcus, there was no sign. I don’t know if he’d been able to flee, or whether he crouched in the wash not far from us. I wondered what had become of Grenville as well. We were somewhat sheltered down here—Grenville had been exposed at the top.

  I worried about him but we could not leave to look. Sand crept in around us. Would we be found hundreds of years from now, bones buried in the dust? We had rushed out here with no water. I had heard that sandstorms in the Egyptian desert could last for days; my morbid thought was not so farfetched.

  I reflected that running out here after Marcus had probably been one of the most foolish things I’d done in my life, and I’d done many a damn fool thing. I wanted to apologize to Brewster, but I knew I needed to keep my mouth closed so it wouldn’t dry out. If we survived, I’d apologize profusely.

  We sat, immobilized, hot, and thirsty. Time dragged on. I pulled out my watch, which hung from a fine fob Donata had given me, and brushed sand from it. It told me that it was four in the afternoon, but as I studied it, the ticking slowed then ceased.

  I let out a breath and tucked the watch away. The sand rendered the sky a dark yellow, light fading as the sun was swallowed.