The Ancient Spirits of Sedgwick House
The Third GRAYSON SHERBROOKE OTHERWORLDLY ADVENTURES
Catherine Coulter
The Ancient Spirits of Sedgwick House
All Rights Reserved © 2018 by Catherine Coulter
eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
Published by Catherine Coulter
Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgements
To my brilliant and very nearly perfect personal assistant/secretary/right brain, Karen Evans. Thank you for your excellent input on The Ancient Spirits of Sedgwick House.
To Jessica Fogleman who has edited the three novellas. Thank you for your continued excellent commitments to Grayson and his cohorts. I’m so pleased you enjoyed this one so very much.
CHAPTER ONE
Sedgwick House
The Lake District
Bowness-on-Windemere, England
Saturday, End of August, 1841
I’m being watched. Eyes are following my every step. Grayson stopped in his tracks and looked around Lord Lyle’s large treasure room filled with artifacts from ancient Egypt. Of course there were eyes, painted eyes of long-ago Egyptian gods and goddesses, staring but not seeing, watching. Still, he’d learned never to ignore when he felt something strange touch his senses, something that could harm him.
Was that a soft heartbeat he heard? Grayson laughed aloud at himself. His writer’s brain was working hard to scare him to death. He breathed in the heavy still air and looked into the black eyes of the jackal-headed Anubis, protector of the dead. He felt a skitter of gooseflesh on his arms. He’d always felt uneasy whenever he saw a status of this particular Egyptian god. Even saying his name—Anubis—made his heart speed up. He reached out and touched the raised arm, looking at the black jackal head, the white, blue, and gold of his headdress and cloth skirt all looking as if they were painted yesterday, not over three thousand years ago. Anubis was a foot-tall statue, carved millennia ago, as threatening as a doorstop, yet it still made him uncomfortable. He looked more closely. It looked as if Lord Lyle had placed Anubis to hover over the blood-red velvet-draped stands displaying Egyptian jewelry. There were gold arm cuffs, some studded with malachite and jasper, others plain gold, necklaces of turquoise and serpentine, delicate earrings, and bracelets twisted in intricate loops and coils. He realized then that Anubis wasn’t watching over all the jewelry; no, his black painted eyes were fixed upon a plain gold arm cuff set alone on its own velvet-covered stand. Why? And this particular arm cuff? And why was it set away from the other jewelry, by itself?
He picked up the cuff and felt immediate warmth. He lightly ran his fingers over the smooth gold, and he would swear it pulsed gently in his hands. Then he saw her, right in front of him, warm, breathing, alive. He felt the shock of it, the slap of fear, then got a grip on himself, accepted that he was somehow seeing a glimpse the long-distant past. He studied her. She was very young, only fourteen, fifteen, glowing with health and a girl’s fresh beauty. Her long straight hair, black as a moonless night sky, fell down her back over her white linen robe belted with a golden sash. Her skin was a dusky cream, so very soft looking, and her kohl-lined eyes were black as her hair, alight with intelligence, and deep, holding secrets close. Secrets? How could this young girl have secrets?
He watched her caress the plain golden cuff circling her arm, the same cuff displayed on the red velvet stand, guarded, it seemed to Grayson, by the god Anubis, the same gold cuff he now held in his hands.
She turned to look out over the water, and he heard her thoughts. They were crystal clear in his mind.
It’s such a fine gift, this beautiful cuff, and I shall wear it always. Imagine an old priest telling Jabari it is special, timeless, both in and of our time and world, and of others as well. I will ask Jabari what the old priest meant when we walk by the water reeds and breathe in the scent of the sweet pomegranates. Shall I tell him? No, I cannot, but still, he must know it cannot be.
Then, like wind whisking away smoke, she was gone, simply gone. All that remained was her name clear in his mind—Nefret—and sadness. What couldn’t be? What didn’t she want to tell Jabari? Who were they? Grayson shook his head. He was asking the sorts of questions his fictional hero would ask when weaving his way through a baffling fictional conundrum. As for Grayson himself, it was true he’d had the occasional vision, even dealt with strange beings, but nothing compared to his fictional counterpart, Thomas Straithmore, who battled spirits and ghosts and demons from other realms, in other times. Thomas always stepped up and stopped whatever malevolent creature from bedeviling the modern man or woman.
Grayson drew in a deep, steadying breath. It didn’t matter now what had happened millennia ago. It was today, here and now—his world, not hers, the modern world. Nefret and Jabari were far in the past, long dead, long forgotten.
Grayson set the gold cuff back on its red velvet and stepped back, but still his brain was working madly. What had the old priest meant -- the cuff was timeless? Both in this world and in others as well?
Who was she? And Jabari? Were they lovers? So long ago, he thought, so very long ago. Timeless, he thought, the cuff was timeless. Had the vision of her been somehow embedded in that gold cuff, and something about him had set it in motion? Had she appeared to others? Grayson couldn’t help himself. He reached out and lightly touched his fingertips to the golden cuff. He felt warmth flood through him, felt her soft sweet breath against his face, smelled the faint scent of jasmine, and heard the whisper of a thought.
Every day is as every other day. Pain then, pain now, joy then, joy now. It is all of a piece.
His pulled back his hand, forced himself to look away from the golden arm cuff. Pain then, pain now. Had she thought it to him? He shook his head. No, surely not, but the fact was he’d never had that particular thought in his life. He would not touch the arm cuff again. He didn’t want to be hurled into another vision from long-ago Egypt. He was here, now, in Bowness-on-Windemere, with beautiful Miranda Wolffe, her daughter, P.C., Barnaby, once an orphaned stable boy whose status continued to be in limbo, and his own small son, Pip. They’d accepted Lord Lyle’s invitation to spend a month at Sedgwick House. They were here for pleasure, not for ancient spirits. It was a precious time to relax and enjoy, not to write, not to worry about what had happened in ancient Egypt. He tur
ned away, forced himself to walk to where a dozen Egyptian gods and goddesses, many of them he couldn’t identify, were displayed on beautiful velvet-draped stands. Of course he recognized the three statues of Amun-Ra, the king of the gods, the sun god, supposedly the first pharaoh of Egypt. The first statue presented him as a man wearing a double-plumed crown; the second, a snow-white ram; and the last one, oddly, Amun-Ra was a goose. Each statue was a foot tall, each painted with still-vibrant colors in exquisite detail, down to the placid look on the goose’s face that made Grayson smile and lightly touch his fingertips to the smooth surface. Luckily, the goose didn’t look at him or say anything.
A voice came from the doorway. “It always seemed strange to me that Amun-Ra would choose to present himself as a goose, but his name—Amun—means ‘hidden one’ or ‘mysterious of form.’ So aside from enjoying species ambiguity, I suppose Amun-Ra didn’t want anyone to know who he was when he strolled about through Egypt—or waddled. I wonder if anyone was fooled?”
CHAPTER TWO
Grayson turned to his host, Vivien Hastings, Lord Lyle, a friend of his father’s. Lord Lyle was an Egyptologist of some renown with enough money to plunder tombs with enthusiastic abandon and bring his booty back to England. Grayson said, “If they didn’t recognize the goose as Amun-Ra, he could have ended up in a family’s cook pot.”
He’d tried for a jest, but Lord Lyle said in all seriousness, “I’ve wondered the same thing myself, but I suppose that as the god of everything, Amun-Ra would squawk or wave a wing, and the family would fall prostrate at his webbed feet. Your father told me that in addition to being a popular author of otherworldly adventures—and yes, I have read several of your novels and enjoyed them immensely, scared me half to death—ah, where was I?”
“My father, sir?”
“Oh yes, your father told me your interests are far-ranging, Mr. Sherbrooke, as evidenced by your success as an author. He assured me you are not an ignoramus in Egyptology.”
Well, not quite an ignoramus. Grayson pictured the small statue of the god Horus—a man’s body with its hawk head, the son of Osiris and Isis, protector of kings—given to him by his father on his ninth birthday. “When I was very young,” he said, “my father took me to visit Lord Ingelthorpe in Norwich, who’d returned from Luxor with a score of stone tablets covered with pictures and hieroglyphs. Since we couldn’t read the hieroglyphs, my father and I studied the drawings of the men and women, and I made up stories of what the people were thinking, doing, what they would say to each other. Some were recognizable as farmers, weavers, beer makers. As I recall, there were always demons and other malevolent creatures involved, hovering, ever close.”
“Ah, even then you were a weaver of tales.”
“Not very good ones, I’m afraid,” Grayson said, but he remembered how his child’s ghost stories had scared his cousins witless. Then again, ten-year-olds were not a terribly critical audience. “Later, I was fortunate because my don at Oxford was an Egyptian enthusiast. His pride and joy were two small statues of Isis and Anubis.”
Lord Lyle wrapped his hands around the statue of Anubis, the one Grayson knew guarded Nefret’s gold arm cuff. “Ah, Anubis,” Lord Lyle said, his voice filled with affection. “How I love his name. It flows off the tongue. You know Isis was his aunt. Anubis shepherded the dead to the hall of judgment. I shouldn’t have wanted Anubis’s job, for if the dead person’s heart failed to balance Ma’at’s ostrich feather of truth, Anubis handed him over to Ammut, the devourer of the dead.” He paused. “I’ve wondered if my heart would balance Ma’at’s feather of truth or be dragged off by Ammut to be thrown to a crocodile. I find it strange the Egyptians believed paradise was lazing about by the Nile, sipping barley beer.” He shook his head. “On the other hand, the Nile is rightfully regarded as the giver of life.”
“So their afterlife mimicked life itself.”
Lord Lyle grinned. “Just as our heaven does, I suppose. Imagine if you failed Ma’at’s feather test. An ostrich feather determining your afterlife fate? It fair to makes my blood curdle.”
Grayson wondered if his heart, which also contained his soul, would balance the feather of truth. Would his good deeds outweigh his rotten deeds?
He watched Lord Lyle gently pick up the golden arm cuff from its red velvet bed. It didn’t appear Lord Lyle was affected by the cuff at all. He stared at it a moment and set it back on its stand.
Grayson pointed to a small sarcophagus set apart from three other large sarcophagi, a shining gold beacon studded with silver, lapis lazuli, jasper, and garnets. Beside the small sarcophagus sat its outside larger granite coffin, open, covered with carved hieroglyphs, the artists’ renderings of gods and goddesses and the workers and servants who accompanied the deceased to aid him in the afterlife—several women wearing white robes to their knees, making wheat into bread or weaving the flax into linen for clothing.
He pointed to the hieroglyphs on the granite coffin. “I see no name of the child who is inside.”
Lord Lyle gaped at him. “What is this? You can read the hieroglyphs, Mr. Sherbrooke?”
“I assure you, sir, my knowledge is rudimentary. I was fortunate that Champollion was translating the hieroglyphs when I was at Oxford, and I was a member of the Christ Church Hieroglyph Club. I’ve many times wondered if the Rosetta stone had never been found, would we still not realize hieroglyphs are a language.”
“Man is many times an embarrassment, a violent one at that, Mr. Sherbrooke, in his ignorance, in his assumptions. He is also endlessly curious, always seeking, wanting to know everything. I believe we would have come to the truth, with or without the Rosetta stone. How? I don’t know. You’re right about the boy in the gold sarcophagus—there is no name.” Lord Lyle pointed to hieroglyphs carved into the empty granite coffin beside it and read aloud, “I pass to the world of the dead with no name. I beg Osiris, oh mighty god of judgment, to grant me mercy.” Lord Lyle ran a finger down the side. “It is exquisite, is it not? A coffin fit for a prince. It is not pure gold, of course, but plaster covered with gilt. Look at the crook and flail he holds tightly over his chest, and his headdress -- incredible detail and covered with gold, turquoise and lapis. It bespeaks wealth, mayhap royalty. But if so, why has he no name? It makes no sense to me. Inside I would expect to find his mummy surrounded by ushabti. Do you know what ushabti are, Mr. Sherbrooke?”
Grayson nodded. “Funerary figurines—manual laborers, hoes on their shoulders, baskets on their backs, ready to do any physical labor in the afterlife. Aren’t there any ushabti in the sarcophagus?”
“Alas, I do not know—I will never know. When the sarcophagus was moved, I did hear something move inside. Perhaps ushabti, but I don’t know, mayhap something much larger. I would like to know, of course, but I was warned if I opened the sarcophagus my family would die painful deaths. One would usually take such a nonsensical curse with a grain of salt, but if you read the hieroglyphs on the side of the granite coffin, you will take it as seriously as I do. Come, look, Mr. Sherbrooke.”
Grayson looked and read the inscription.
Open this keeper of my spirit
and know the agony of a thousand burning spears.
See your children disappear into the stygian blackness,
shrieking their pain and hatred of you.
Attend me or you will know mortal agony without end.
Grayson hadn’t realized he’d read the curse aloud, in English, fluently, without pause.
CHAPTER THREE
Lord Lyle looked shocked. He whispered, “Young sir, you amaze me. Your ability is far beyond rudimentary.”
Grayson’s heartbeat had kicked up, but he managed to say easily enough, “The curse is straightforward and simply transcribed.” He realized Lord Lyle was still staring at him, so he quickly added, “Why the curse, I wonder? I grant it is a meaty one, but if an unknown boy lies within, royal or not, who would care? Or is the curse simply to frighten tomb robbers away?”
Lord Ly
le said, “I don’t know. Look beneath the curse. These are the only drawings of the boy, if it is indeed he.”
Grayson went down on his haunches and studied the panels. The boy, about Barnaby’s age, prepared to throw a silver disc to a running young man, looking over his shoulder at the boy, his hand raised to catch it. But the boy didn’t throw it to the young man; he hurled the disc into the fast-moving waters of the Nile. The disc didn’t sink. It hovered over the water before coming to settle atop a small wave, floating light as a feather. The boy raced after it. The next painting showed the same small boy lying on his back on a narrow bed, wearing only a loincloth, his arms crossed over his thin chest, his eyes closed. He looked dead. He was alone. There were no more drawings.
Lord Lyle said, “I have studied the final drawing, as have those I consider experts. All agree since there are no visible wounds, mayhap he caught a deadly fever or drowned. But if he did not die by natural causes, then why would the scribe beg Osiris for mercy?” Lord Lyle paused and drew himself up. “I have concluded the boy was poisoned. By whom? If he was royalty, it was to remove him from the path of succession.”
Grayson nodded. “You have found nothing about the boy, who he was or who his family was? About what the disc means? His hurling it into the river—the Nile, I assume?—and watching it float away?”
Lord Lyle traced his fingers over the hieroglyphs. “No one can explain it. The Nile, yes. Some agree with me, some do not. I even wrote to Monsieur Champollion, but he never deigned to reply. He’s French, of course.”
Suddenly Lord Lyle yelled, his hand out, “No! Mr. Sherbrooke, do not touch the boy’s face!”
His warning came too late. Grayson had lightly touched his fingertip to the gilded boy’s nose. As if he’d touched a flame, burning heat seared into his flesh. He jerked his hand back and rubbed the finger. As quickly as it had struck, the stab of heat was gone, simply gone as if it had never happened. He stared down at the stylized mask of the boy’s face. Thankfully, he hadn’t been drawn into a vision. What would have happened?
The Ancient Spirits of Sedgwick House (Grayson Sherbrooke's Otherworldly Adventures Book 3) Page 1