by Anna Butler
“I came in to tell you his office just called.” Sam emerged from his excavation of one of Ned’s suitcases with a leather satchel in his hands. “You don’t have to go over straightaway. He’s holding a reception tonight and wants you there. You’re to go along a bit early to give him his letters and have a private chinwag. He’s looking forward to it, his office says.” Sam caught up a pile of letters from the bed and slid them into the satchel. I hadn’t given them much attention, but glancing at them now, I saw the top one bore the royal arms impressed upon the envelope. Sam added in a kind tone, “I expect they were just being polite.”
“Damn. That’ll interfere with our expedition dinner.” Ned frowned. “And double damn, that means formal House evening wear.”
“Just as well I packed it,” Sam said, unmoved.
“Oh, how difficult it is to be the scion of a Convocation House.” I patted Ned’s shoulder in sympathy.
“You have no idea.” Ned was gloomy enough to take comfort from my sarcasm, and only added when I laughed at him, “I’m taking the deed for the will, so to speak, when it comes to your fake sympathy. Doing the pretty with the Imperium’s allies when I really want to get to Abydos and get cracking on the dig! I’m to be pitied here.”
I was sure of it, but when it came to needing compassion and understanding, I was several streets ahead of him. Causton had gone off to locate a compatriot working with a rival expedition, while our two German colleagues settled into the hotel’s main parlor with a pot of coffee and a box of cigars. Archambault was nowhere to be seen. So when Ned looked around for someone to supervise Harry while he and Sam were gone, lo and behold, whom did he light upon? I must have had a target painted on my brow. In comparison, hobnobbing with the Khedive was a cushy number.
“I don’t imagine Harry will want to do much.” Ned slapped his disreputable hat onto the back of his head as he spoke. “He’s more tired than he’ll admit. He’ll be content to run around the Ezbekieh Gardens with Molly. Or the bazaar, if you get too bored looking at plants. Frank will keep an eye on both of them, and I’ve promised Harry he can have lemonade and a cake if he’s good. I’ll see you in two or three hours.”
I wished him luck and internally wished myself more of the same. Harry, thankfully, was keen to explore the Gardens. The entrance was on the opposite side of the road to Shepheard’s. We waved Ned and Sam off from the hotel steps and started out: me, Hugh, Harry, Frank, and another guard introduced to me as Michael Forde. And, of course, Miss Molly straining on her leash.
Harry opened proceedings with an announcement. “My legs got very tired on the aeroship. Achy.”
“Is that so?”
“Papa says we should do some running to get the aches out. You and Frank may chase me and Molly. You mustn’t catch us, mind.” Harry paused at the side of the road and slipped his hand into mine. I looked down at the top of his head. Good Lord. I wasn’t used to children wanting to hold my hand. “It smells funny, and there are a lot of people here.”
Dozens of street hawkers and beggars thronged the street, with the odd European threading his way through the crowd. A troop of donkeys, their loads as tall as I am, and innumerable carts bumbled past. One of the few autocars trundled by, belching out tarry smoke. I could understand the very strangeness would daunt even Harry. So I let him hold on.
“We’re going to have to dash across wherever we see a gap,” I told him. “It’ll be like… have you ever been on Trevithick’s Catch Me Who Can at the seaside?”
Harry shook his head. His fingers tightened their grip. “Is it nice?”
“I think so. It’s a flat space with lots of little powered locomotives, and the trick is to get around without being bumped. The other drivers try to catch you, you see, and you have to dodge ’em. Crossing the road will be like that. We’ll dodge right and left and throw ourselves between that donkey and those camels aaaannd”—I drew the word out, looking down into the brown-eyed gaze fixed on me with what I suspected was deep cynicism—“it’ll be fun!”
And on the word, we were off, Harry clinging to my hand and screeching. We ducked and dived, we wove between the groups of people and darted around a very supercilious camel, we sped up, and we slowed down, we (as promised) dodged left and feinted right, and at the end we hurled ourselves onto the pavement on the other side.
Harry, panting, stared up at me. Then he cracked the widest grin I’ve ever seen on him. “Molly liked that! Didn’t she, Frank? Can we do it again?”
“I’m sure we will, the minute we’ve had enough of me not catching you in the Gardens and head back to the hotel for our lemonade.” I glanced around to find our companions. Hugh was sedately crossing the road in an unwavering straight line with Forde at his elbow, allowing the traffic to divert around him. Frank was immediately behind me, Molly’s leash wrapped around his hand and a dark glower shadowing his face. Presumably he’d been on our heels every inch of the way, as befitted a House guard, and resented it. “Come on, then, young Harry. Let’s explore.”
For some reason, Harry forbore to drop my hand. He chattered to me instead, and I had more words out of him in five minutes than in all our previous encounters added together, mostly about our journey. Its making his legs ache put aside now as unimportant, it appeared he’d reveled in the flight to Cairo. He’d come with Ned up to the flight cabin several times, and he was full of how wonderful it must be to be a pilot.
“I’m sure I could fly our aeroship. I watched you do it.” He looked at me sidelong as if to gauge how well I would take this assertion. “I watched you very carefully.”
“I just make it look easy. Besides, you’ll need longer arms to reach the controls.”
“Oh.” Harry digested that, and I had a moment of blessed silence. Only a moment. “Perhaps when I’m bigger, then?”
I nodded.
Harry blew out a long sigh. “Everything has to wait until I’m bigger.”
“It’s one of the rules.”
Harry kicked along the path for a moment or two, then mastered his disappointment. “Papa read to me a lot on the way. Papa does a very good parrot squawk, did you know?”
“I hadn’t reckoned it among your papa’s many talents, no. Why was he squawking?”
“We were reading Treasure Island, of course.” The omitted you ninny! was heavily implied by Harry’s tone.
I sought to recoup my credit. “Can he do the pirate voices? I can.”
“Of course. He does good pirate voices. With snarls and shiver-me-timbers and curses.” Harry eyed me up and down, then nodded. “I expect you do very good voices too, Captain Lancaster.”
A ringing endorsement and perhaps a real lessening of hostilities. “I’m a Stravaigor, Harry. Of course I do good pirate voices. It’s in my blood.”
Harry snorted and grinned. Progress was being made.
We wandered along the pathways, Harry not yet fancying a run and content to patter along at my side, talking about pirates. He smothered a gasp in mid “Avast, me hearty!” when a large shiny beetle, black as Newgate’s knocker, tock-tock-tocked its way out of the low hedge lining the pathway. It stopped dead in the middle of the path and stared me right in the eye.
A scarab. A real-life scarab. Just like the one on the coffee roaster back in my coffeehouse—only bigger and not made of brass. And with the trifling difference of color, just like the gilded scarab watch I’d destroyed in the summer. That was a thought to be firmly suppressed.
However, my first real scarab beetle!
Somehow that made Aegypt seem more real, more substantial than anything else I’d seen so far. Modern Cairo with its brightness and bustle faded to the quiet murmur of sand blowing over a tomb, and more than ever, the ancient bones of the country stirred and whispered of a past so distant it was difficult to encompass it. We thought we had an ancient and noble history back home, but Aegypt was old, very old, when Londinium’s first mud huts were built in a marsh near the Thames, two thousand years ago.
Harry hung back when I stoop
ed to pick up the scarab. He came to look at it but refused my offer to share holding it, putting his hands behind his back for extra safety. He was very polite about it. “No thank you, sir. It may bite.”
He had a point. The scarab had impressive mandibles but was a well-mannered beetle. It didn’t bite. It almost filled my palm, and its feet tickled as it sought some purchase.
Hugh followed Harry’s lead when I offered him the scarab. “I can see it very well from here, Captain.” A measurable pause. “Thank you all the same.”
It appeared no one wanted to play. I returned the scarab to ground level. A sideways tip of my palm, and the big beetle ran free. It had skittered about a foot along the path ahead of us when something lithe and fast darted out from the cover of a bush, snatched it up, and leapt back to safety again.
“Oh,” I said. To have such a graphic illustration of how death was Aegypt’s defining characteristic was unexpected. It brought all my philosophical musings to a hard point.
Harry, however, had all the resilience of youth. “I expect that lizard likes crunchy things to eat. Would you like to chase me now?”
OUR ORIGINAL plan had been for the entire expedition to dine in the hotel that first evening to celebrate our arrival and then for Ned and me to celebrate more privately when everyone else had gone to bed. I had been looking forward to some postprandial revelry, but now Ned had been bidden by the Khedive to the reception at the Abdeen Palace, he’d have to demonstrate some fast footwork to get through at least one or two courses with us before haring off for his royal engagement. Not to mention some faster footwork to reconcile me to losing three or four hours of his company.
My dinner plans being far less exalted, I was dressed long before him. I lounged around in his room while he donned full House evening dress.
“I hate this part,” Ned said.
“Leaving me behind or dressing up?”
He gave me a wry little smile. “What do you think?”
“You hate dressing up.”
“I feel like a maypole bedecked with ribbons. House dress is ridiculously antiquated.” The little smile faded to a sigh. “I’d far rather spend the time with you, and you know it. I can’t get out of the reception without giving offense, but there’s nothing in the rulebook says I have to stay until dawn. I’ll look in and play nice, and as soon as I can, I’ll come back. Midnight at the latest.”
He wasn’t wrong about the quaint style of formal House evening dress. It was the worst sort of anachronism—a military jacket, heavy with silver-gilt embroidery, over pale cream breeches, silk stockings, and shoes with gold buckles. Very raffish. Of course, since it was worn at Court at presentations and other functions beloved of our Queen, and since Court dress hadn’t changed in style for over a century, Ned had every excuse for looking like a Regency rake on his way to carouse with Prinny at Carlton House.
He was having trouble with his cravat. Two-foot-wide lengths of muslin, creased beyond use, had been tossed onto the bed to lie beside his sheathed sword, the failures nervous fingers had bungled. His annoyance and agitation had him consigning the third to join them. Not that I was criticizing. I had never learned the trick of tying intricate cravats. Life was too short to do anything but flip one end through and over the other and hold the whole lot together with a jabot pin. Simplicity is all. Simplicity was not what Ned was aiming for.
Thank God I wasn’t important enough in my House to have to follow Ned’s example. I said so, adding “I’d end up creasing every cravat in Aegypt into a rag unfit for use in grooming camels.”
Sam handed Ned another and said he hoped Ned didn’t expect him to launder the ruined cravats for him. “I didn’t bring any starch.”
Ned dropped his chin to press down the folds. Successfully, this time. He pulled at the folded muslin and pinned the stock into place. The jabot pin represented his House insignia, of course—a diamond sword with a single ruby at the tip to signify the blood House Gallowglass had given in the service of the Imperium, slashing through a round shield.
Sam held up the gloriously embroidered jacket and took a swipe at it with the clothes brush. For a temporary valet, Sam made a very good guard.
He glowered when I said so. “Can’t you make yourself useful?”
“I’m too busy being impressed by the lethal way you handle that clothes brush.”
Sam smiled in a way that was not entirely friendly. “I could kill you with it, you know.”
I didn’t doubt him for a moment.
Ned shrugged into the coat and smoothed the cravat into place, taking one more look at his reflection. The braid looping from his shoulder epaulet to the second button of his coat was a little awry. He jerked it into place, getting it to fall into the proper silver-bright curve against the dull black superfine.
At that point I stopped being impressed by the cravat and found myself looking hard at the way that coat fit Ned’s shoulders, how well he filled his knee-length breeches, and how nicely his silk stockings followed the curve of his calves. The room was hot and airless all of a sudden. I think I forgot to breathe. I know my jaw was sagging.
Ned grinned at me as Sam pinned another diamond insignia to Ned’s left shoulder. “You’re drooling.”
“I am struck dumb.” Not to mention half-blinded by the glitter of diamonds and silver-gilt embroidery.
“With admiration, I hope. My mother always says that formal House dress is flattering, intended to make every House member look taller and more imposing. I think I just look skinny.”
I gave that due consideration. “No. It fits. Perfectly.”
He laughed. “Will it do, do you think?”
Oh yes. Oh very yes.
Sam stepped back and considered him. He reached up to adjust the lamp attached to the looking-glass frame, turning it on its long, pivoted arm to cast a better light onto the maltreated cravat. The aether fizzed and sizzled as the lamp moved, flashing on the diamonds in the House insignia on Ned’s shoulder and flickering shadows over Sam’s face.
“It looks fine,” Sam said, “though I don’t doubt your valet would pitch a fit ’bout them cravats if he was here to see them. Least said, soonest mended, eh? Want your ring?”
“Yes. It’s in the box.” Ned nodded toward the leather case on the dresser that held his collar studs and sleeve buttons. The ring lived in a compartment hidden under the plain pearl buttons. Ned coaxed the simple signet off the fourth finger of his right hand and replaced it with the House Heir’s ring.
“That is an excessively ugly piece of jewelry,” I said.
“It is.” Ned shrugged one shoulder, causing diamonds to glitter and sparkle. “But I could no more go to a formal reception without it than I could go unarmed. And on that note….”
He gestured to Sam, who opened a flat case holding a set of aether pistols. Ned chose the smallest, the one that barely fit into the palm of his hand, and slid it into the right-hand pocket of his breeches. Those pantaloons were very well cut. I couldn’t tell he had a hideaway gun, and believe me, when it came to pantaloons and pockets smoothing down over Ned’s thighs, I was looking very, very closely.
Sam nodded to the sword. “You’ll have to wear that too.”
Oh, I might not be able to tie cravats, but this was something I could do. “Here, let me.”
I jumped up and all but snatched the sword from Sam’s hands. A ceremonial blade, it was decorative, ornate, and of course, functional. Ned could use it, if he had to—he fenced a couple of times a week, and more than once I’d joined him in the salle d’armes for practice. He raised his arms obediently and allowed me to cinch the sword belt around his waist.
Now, this was where low cunning and a mind trained to snatch at every advantage came into play. Imagine the scene, if you will. Ned standing with that wonderful, closely fitting coat and breeches emphasizing every line of his body. Me just in front of him with my hands on his waist at his belt buckle. Ned with raised arms at exactly the right height to drop his hands onto my sh
oulders without effort. Me lifting my head from my task just as Ned turned his face toward me. Both of us chest to chest, face to face, mouth to mouth.
Intent, intense silence.
Sam groaned aloud. We ignored him.
“You know, when you’ve charmed the Khedive into letting you run home at midnight, leaving him pining over your glass slipper?”
Ned nodded, smiling.
“And when everyone will be in bed and sound, sound asleep?”
Ned nodded again. His smile widened.
My hand slid down off the belt buckle and brushed lightly over the Promised Land below it. Ned jumped. “Well, then. When finally it’s just me and you, and even Sam realizes he’s de trop and has gone off to blow something up somewhere else, what do you wager that I can… er, put some starch in your cravat?”
Chapter 12
Dear Mr. Pearse and Alan,
Here we are at Abydos! Despite all the fretting, Ned got his permit from Maspero after only four days, to excavate the Temple of Seti here.
As I told you in my last letter, we ran around Cairo while we waited on Maspero, looking at all the sights of Saqqara and Giza, climbing the Pyramids and exploring. A lot of graves were involved. I think Ned caressed each one.
After the bustle of Cairo, this little village is very peaceful. We are no longer excursionists, but a working expedition. I’ve enclosed a photographic image of us all standing in front of the expedition house, labeled on the back so you know who’s who. Doesn’t Ned look every inch the seasoned archaeologist, right down to the shabby boots and that disgraceful hat? He’s a more forceful Ned out here and doesn’t approve of my habit of avoiding manual labor. He’s insisted that I start “archaeologizing” in earnest. To paraphrase Harry’s boasting, I have my own shovel and everything.
It’s a surprisingly comfortable house to live in. We even have bathrooms and showers. They’re somewhat spartan, but functional.
The expedition house belonged to the Aegyptian Exploration Fund. A one-story mud-brick building built around a central square courtyard paved with Turkish tiles, it had bedrooms enough for the principals, with a couple of dormitories for the students. While it wasn’t luxurious, it had everything we needed: a small aether generator gave us light and power enough to work the ceiling fans to keep us cool and to pump water from a deep well in the courtyard for the bathrooms. Not to mention it powered the security fence.