The Ancient Spirits of Sedgwick House (Grayson Sherbrooke's Otherworldly Adventures Book 3)

by Catherine Coulter

  Lord Lyle rushed to him, looking distressed. “Bloody hell, sir, forgive me. I should have warned you immediately. Are you all right? Is the pain unbearable? Oh dear, I myself touched the boy’s nose once—only once—and nearly jumped to the ceiling the pain was so great. Nothing would alleviate it, not the physician’s potions, not any of my dear Lucy’s creams. It was as if my finger had been flayed open. Raw and pulsing and putrid matter oozed out of it. The physician believed he would have to amputate my finger, for he claimed a poison was inside me, but I wouldn’t let him. My Lucy agreed with me and dismissed the physician.

  “Then, as if by magic, after exactly twenty-four hours, the pain stopped and my finger looked as if nothing had ever happened. I’m sorry, sir, but now you must suffer for a full day. Is it dreadful?” Lord Lyle made no move to examine Grayson’s finger. With the description he’d just been given, Grayson didn’t blame him.

  Grayson said carefully, “Exactly a full day?”

  “Yes. It was as if whatever it was that had attacked my finger knew when the clock struck the twenty-fourth hour and left. No more pain. My finger was once again whole, no sign of a burn, no sign of rot or pus, no sign there was ever a wound. Shall I ask Lucy to examine your finger, Mr. Sherbrooke? Are you in terrible agony? Is your finger raw and red?”

  Grayson quickly pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped it around his finger. “Do not worry, sir. I will deal with my finger myself.”

  Lord Lyle studied the young man a moment, marveling at his fortitude, for surely the pain should be making him scream, but no, he looked to be in no distress at all. He said, staring at the wrapped finger, “I had of course touched the sarcophagus both before and after I’d bought it, and nothing ever happened. It was always warm to the touch, nothing more. Then I remembered there’d been a golden guard molded over the nose, for protection, I came to realize. It was evidently lost during the journey to England. More like stolen by one of the sailors because it was pure gold.” His eyes fastened again on the stylized boy’s face. “It was the sheerest happenstance I chanced to touch the nose—only the nose—and I was blighted. I look at you, Mr. Sherbrooke, and I am amazed, sir.”

  Grayson ducked his head, said nothing, and pretended to study the panels of the boy’s coffin.

  Lord Lyle said, “I have come to believe that touching the boy’s nose is a warning of the curse’s potency. It certainly gives evidence of a long-lived curse. Perhaps a preview of what would happen if one were tempted to open the sarcophagus.” He paused a moment, looked uncomfortable, and plowed ahead. “Mr. Sherbrooke, I know of your reputation. I have read your novels about otherworldly beings—ghosts, demons, wicked spirits, all dispatched by your hero, Thomas Straithmore. And I have wondered: are your stories based on your own experiences? Are they fact rather than fiction? I have read your new book, The Resident Evil at Blackthorn Manor is about vicious demons in Scotland and how Thomas Straithmore destroyed them. A pity it won’t be published for six more months as your books both amuse and terrify. I was told you spoke of Loch Leven in this book. I know you have an aunt and uncle who live in Vere Castle, on the shores of the loch. So will the experiences be fact?”

  Yes, he had written the real name—Loch Leven. Well, he’d have to be more careful in the future. But Grayson was well used to this question, and so he repeated what he always said when asked: “It is all fiction, my lord, all fiction. I used Loch Leven for the simple reason it is well known to me, and my direct knowledge added verisimilitude. Nothing more than that.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Lord Lyle studied Grayson’s face for a moment and sighed. He appeared philosophic. “I can usually tell when a person is lying to me, but you, sir, are quite excellent at it. A lie? I cannot be sure.”

  Lord Lyle sighed again. “Oh well, I suppose what is inside the coffin will remain a mystery for all time. I hope you and your family will enjoy yourselves here at Sedgwick House. My man, Manu, is not accompanying me this time to Egypt. He tells me he gets bilious onboard ship, and he no longer wants to roast in the interminable heat in Egypt. He will see to your needs. Manu once asked me to call him George, said it made him feel more acceptable in this sodden foreign land, which he has come to love. I told him I could not, he was not a George. If you hear him refer to himself as George, simply disregard it and call him Manu.

  “Now, if there is one single month in the year when you won’t perhaps be soaked to your bones by continuous rain, it is the end of August through September. Come, Mr. Sherbrooke.”

  Grayson gave one last look at Anubis, standing still and tall in his guardian’s place hovering over the golden arm cuff, Nefret’s arm cuff.

  Lord Lyle carefully locked the door, turned back to Grayson, and pressed the key and a small book into his hand. “It is my journal, sir. I ask you to read it. I hope you will find it enlightening. Perhaps it will make you curious. Ah, if you feel so inclined, perhaps you can discover who or what is in the small gold coffin. I know there is something inside—there is weight, something heavier than the expected ushabti. It moves about when you lift the coffin. Is it the unknown boy’s mummy? Or something else?

  “Let me caution you not to allow your children into the room. I venture to say it might not be healthy for them to wander amongst the marvels.”

  Grayson nodded. He wasn’t about to let any of them cross the threshold.

  Lord Lyle looked to where his lachrymose wife—twenty years his junior and nearly blind as a bat—stood in the long, wide entry hall, speaking with Miranda, Pip, P.C., and Barnaby, all three children, for once, standing still and quiet beside Miranda, staring up at the very pretty lady who couldn’t see them clearly.

  He said low to Grayson, “Lucy hides it well, but truth is, without her glasses, I have to lead her around. Even with her glasses it isn’t much better, but my Lucy has a fine inner-eye. It was she who convinced me that paying five hundred pounds for that boy’s sarcophagus was a bargain.” He leaned in close. “She knows when something ancient is real or fake. She assured me the sarcophagus is quite real. When I told her you and your family were coming, she smiled and patted my arm and told me you wouldn’t be able to resist a mystery needing to be solved.” He paused, frowned. “Your finger, Mr. Sherbrooke. I do not understand. You do not appear to be suffering as you should, as I did.”

  Grayson was prepared this time. “Perhaps I didn’t touch the nose in precisely the cursed spot.”

  Lord Lyle nodded. “Yes, yes, that must be it. Otherwise, you would be bellowing with the agony of it. Do you know, my beloved wife did not tell me I shouldn’t touch the nose? Ah, I suppose an inner-eye cannot see everything, but who knows when—” Lord Lyle shook his hand, bowed to Miranda, gave a nervous look to the three children, and shepherded his wife, in mid-sentence, to the waiting carriage.

  “Papa, we want to go to the treasure room!”

  Did all children have bat ears?

  “Yes, sir, please, we will not touch anything,” P.C. said, giving him her best pitiful orphan look, which would have smote him not long before, but not now. Barnaby tried to look as pitiful as P.C., but he couldn’t manage it since he was bouncing on his feet, his blue eyes blazing with excitement.

  Grayson said in his sternest parent voice, “Listen to me carefully, all of you. I have the only key, so no one will go into that room. I want all of you to promise me you won’t try to pick the lock on the door.”

  He gave each of them a hard look and said again, “Promise me.”

  Slowly, unwillingly, P.C. and Barnaby nodded, but Pip was made of stern stuff. “Why, Papa? Mrs. Moon told us it was a ‘bunch of nasty foreign gods,’ and who cared?”

  “That’s right, sir,” P.C. said. “She said paying good English money for godless statues was foolish, probably wasn’t right.”

  Pip said, “I want to see the foreign gods. I’ve only seen your statue of Anubis. You can go with us. Please, Papa?”

  “No, Pip. And that is final. Do not ask me again.”
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  Miranda cocked her head at him in question. She was wondering, of course, at his extreme reaction. Thankfully, she kept her own voice stern. “P.C., Barnaby, you will obey Grayson. You will not ask again.”

  “But—”

  “No, Pip,” Grayson said, “and that’s an end to it.” He left the entrance hall quickly to avoid more pleas, and walked into the drawing room, long and narrow, with windows giving onto the beautifully scythed lawn that sloped down to Lake Windemere. He unwrapped his handkerchief from around his finger. He felt no searing agony, saw no sign of rot, no pus, no sign that anything harmful had happened. He knew Lord Lyle hadn’t invented the story of the twenty-four hours of agony. He’d seen the remembered pain clearly in his eyes when he’d spoken of it. Grayson was left with questions: Why hadn’t the curse struck him the same way? Or was his simply a warning rather than—what? Punishment? Why? Did it have anything to do with Nefret? Jabari?

  His knowledge of hieroglyphs was indeed rudimentary—he hadn’t lied to Lord Lyle. So how had he been able to read the curse so easily? And what of the young girl and Jabari and smelling pomegranates? He felt the familiar rush of excitement. It was the unknown calling.

  He heard the children arguing in the entrance hall, heard Miranda’s soothing voice and the magic words—lemonade and cakes—then running feet toward the kitchen at the back of Sedgwick House.

  He looked down at his finger and wondered.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning was sunny and warm, and thankfully dry. A stroke of good fortune, or more like a miracle, Mrs. Moon, the housekeeper, had said, shaking her tightly curled gray head.

  Grayson sat cross-legged beneath an oak tree on the bank of Lake Windemere, Lord Lyle’s journal in one hand, an apple in the other. He read:

  Khufu is a wily old man whose entire village of Tiye has robbed tombs for centuries, he proudly told me, and they live well off the proceeds. Khufu is their representative, their mayor of sorts and leader of the village, who assigns tasks. I told him I wanted something special, something I could donate to the British Museum after my death and be known forever.

  Ah, he said, and Khufu and his three sons settled me onto a donkey, who liked to bare his big teeth at me. After leaving Lucy to drink lemonade in the shade of a mulberry tree with villagers hovering about her offering her dates and figs, we rode to the Valley of the Kings, a vast royal burial site across the Nile from Luxor and Karnak, once known as Thebes, the capital city of Egypt. I remember being astounded to learn that at its height, eighty thousand people lived in Thebes. I was told this was possible because the inundations had never failed in living memory. Inundations are the yearly flooding of the Nile that cover the surrounding lands with rich and fertile mud to grow barley, wheat, and flax. But I digress.

  Khufu had disguised the tomb entrance with piles of rocks and spiny shrubs. I was grateful for my high thick leather boots because scorpions and venomous snakes abounded. I followed Khufu and his three sons into a hot, fetid, low-ceilinged tunnel, their torches providing the only light. It smelled vile, like ancient death and rot. We walked for what seemed an hour before Khufu stopped beside a wall, pressed a rock, and a large stone section slid open. He said one of his sons had accidently shoved on the wall in that exact spot, and it had swung back. We passed into a small chamber, empty save for a small golden sarcophagus lying on a granite slab, and beside it another granite coffin in which the small golden one had rested. The lid was gone and it was quite empty, which was to be expected. Khufu told me there had been nothing else in this small hidden room, no ornaments, no statuary, no treasures, no artists’ rendering of gods and goddesses and workers and servants. I stood there mesmerized by the boy’s features, as stylized as any I’d seen, yet there was something more realistic about his face than other sarcophagi. His vivid black eyes were lined deeply with kohl, the amazing headdress studded with turquoise, lapis lazuli, and hematite, as bright today as millennia ago. Surely he was the child of a very wealthy family, even a royal prince, since he held the crook and flail over his chest. I was drawn again to the boy’s face, and it was then I saw the molded piece of gold covering his nose. Khufu didn’t know what it meant, but he urged me to leave it in place, and I saw he was glancing furtively about the small chamber, as if that ancient devourer of souls, Ammut, would leap out and drag him away. I must admit, I felt something in that still, dead air that made me shudder.

  As suddenly as the fear had hit me, it was gone. The sarcophagus beckoned to me, not with unknown ancient words ringing in my head to frighten me, but the air around it seemed to pulse, to draw me in, make me want to touch it, more, to protect it, and I knew I was meant to have the sarcophagus. I am not a superstitious man, not a man prone to fancies from the Other Side, nor am I a stupid man, but oddly, I did not haggle with Khufu. I told him immediately that I wanted to buy it.

  Khufu drew me aside from his three sons and said that before I bought the sarcophagus he had to tell me the warning. The village priest—an ancient specimen whose eyes were covered with white veils and who sat on palm leaves all day, seeing nothing and everything, so it was said—had warned Khufu the sarcophagus was never to be opened, that what was inside would destroy him and his family, mayhap even the entire village, mayhap all the world, mayhap even Amun-Ra and Osiris in the underworld. He said he would be blasted if he did not tell me. How he could possibly know this, I do not know, but I believe Khufu told me the truth only because the old priest ordered him to, and I saw clearly Khufu was afraid. Of course Khufu told me he’d only agreed to sell it to me because all knew of my respect and reverence for the gods and goddesses of Egypt, and thus he knew the sarcophagus was meant for such as me, that I would honor it, keep it safe. He was right about that. He added slyly it was very likely a pharaoh’s son, didn’t I agree? I mean, the gold, the crook and flail, the exquisite gemstones inside in the gold?

  Five hundred pounds Khufu demanded.

  Like many others, I studied the carved hieroglyphs with no success until Jean-François Champollion announced in 1822 that hieroglyphs were an actual language, and he’d gleaned this understanding from the Rosetta stone with its three languages saying the same thing. At last, at last, I would be able to make out most of the hieroglyphs on the granite coffin. I found myself wondering if the sarcophagus held the mummy of the boy king, Tutankhamun, for I’d heard his name whispered in the village among the old men, but perhaps their hints that this could be Tutankhamun were meant simply to convince me to part with five hundred pounds. In Egypt, I could only trust my own brain, my experience, and my wife, Lucy.

  I remember when I placed the boy’s coffin in my treasure room, Lucy rested her palm on its chest, then withdrew it. She said only that she wondered if what was within the coffin had journeyed to the Land of the Reeds—the Egyptian afterlife for those who’d passed the feather test, a reference, of course, to the banks of the Nile, which brought life to all the inhabitants.

  And then she said, “I wonder if what is within was placed there by the mighty Seti, father of Ramses II, or perhaps by Amun-Ra himself. But I do know, husband, whatever is inside must remain locked away.”

  Amun-Ra, the most powerful god of all that vast Egyptian lot of deities? He was the Egyptian Zeus and Jupiter—not just one of the gods, he was The God.

  Then Lucy whispered, “To open the sarcophagus will invite havoc. Do not be tempted to do it, my husband.”

  “What sort of havoc?” I asked her, but she didn’t know, said she saw a veil and it lifted for just an instant, and she beheld chaos, screaming, wailing, blackness. I asked Manu, my faithful servant, a native, and utterly loyal to me, about a veil and chaos. You see, Manu had told me he descended from a long line of priests who had special knowledge, all the way back to Ramses II. Manu leaned in close and whispered that demons and spirits preferred a child’s sarcophagus. They liked to snuggle with each other around and into the small mummy and make their plans. What plans? Manu didn’t know. It was simply knowledge buried
deep with him and all those priests before him. I asked him why he was a servant and not a priest like his ancestors, and he merely shook his head and would not reply. But I remember he gave me a long look I could not decipher.

  Khufu had said he’d refused to sell it to others, only to me. That was a lie, clean and simple. Five hundred pounds. Of course no one had bought it.

  Lucy reminded me I was paying Manu such a low wage, and he as loyal to me as a tick, willing to do anything I asked of him, that it quite offset the five hundred pounds for the sarcophagus. Yes, she told me, it was a bargain—in the long run. And so I paid the five hundred pounds and brought the unknown boy’s sarcophagus to England.

  Grayson thought, And you continue to pay Manu a low wage? But he didn’t say it aloud.

  “Papa, Miranda said we’re going to feed the swans, and she sent me to invite you to come.”

  Grayson looked up to see Pip standing over him, his precious face so like his mother, Lorelei, except for his Sherbrooke blue eyes and stubborn jaw. He would be tall like the Sherbrooke men when he gained years, and he was sturdy, thankfully as healthy as a stoat, again like the Sherbrookes. Pip grabbed his hand and began tugging. “Come on, Papa, the swans are hungry. We must hurry or they’ll chew on Miranda’s fingers.”

  Grayson closed the journal, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and walked toward the dock, where at least a dozen swans were circling Miranda, Barnaby, and P.C. as they walked toward him, all three of them laughing, Miranda and P.C. flapping their skirts to keep them back, Barnaby yelling at a nipping swan. Grayson realized in that moment the five of them had become a family, his family, and such a short time it had been. Beautiful Miranda, a widow he’d met such a short time ago; her precocious eight-year-old daughter, P.C., whose real name she refused to say aloud; and Barnaby, who had no last name, a babe left on the steps of the village church and brought to Wolffe Hall by Miranda’s father-in-law, Lord Wolffe, known far and wide as “The Great,” and become a stable boy, a boy who’d always seemed somehow familiar to Grayson. And his own small son, Pip. They’d all come together after the strange adventure at Wolffe Hall.