by Anna Butler
“I rarely saw the pair of you apart.”
“I suppose John was my friend. My best friend, from prep school. Thirty years almost….” His voice trailed off, and he flashed a glance at me, a swift, unfriendly look—eyes hooded and glittering, mouth hard. “When you were born, and I was shipped off to prep school out of the way.”
Hardly my fault. It wasn’t as though I’d personally sent him to school.
He grimaced and returned his gaze to his hands. “We were friends all through school, prep school first and then Eton. He was First Heir. You don’t turn down that chance if it comes your way. You just don’t. John didn’t have many friends.”
Inarguable. John had an uncertain temper, a sublime selfishness, and a streak of mean pettiness as wide as Piccadilly. Not a winning personality.
Peter’s tone now was ruminative, introspective, as if he were pulling the past out of himself and articulating it for the first time, looking at each word and weighing it for its ability to convey meaning. “John didn’t really need friends. He needed things to own. People, I mean. He liked making them do what he wanted. Like everything else, a friend was there to be turned to his advantage. He was famous at school for knowing things about other boys and exploiting them.” Peter swallowed hard. His Adam’s apple moved in a convulsive jerk. “There was… a boy. At Eton. Younger than me. Mark Stephenson, his name was. I….” He blew out a wavering, sighing breath. “It was just at the end of the Lent Half. John came in and found us. He said he wouldn’t say anything, but after that—” Peter shook his head. “—I didn’t have any choices. Damn him to hell. No choice.”
We locked gazes, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for him.
“If John told, even now… it would have meant ruin and disgrace. Perhaps even prison…. I could never…. You can’t understand….”
He would have been surprised. I hadn’t thought Peter and I had anything at all in common. Not that I would ever tell him. “I always thought you were friends.”
“We were, I suppose. In a fashion.” Then Peter made the saddest confession. “There wasn’t anyone else to be friends with. If I’d tried, he would have exposed me. He didn’t share.”
“What happened to him? The boy, I mean.”
“Mark? I… I don’t know. He never came back for the Summer Half.”
Peter now looked away and resolutely avoided my gaze. I wasn’t too certain I believed him. He was likely complicit in a lot of John’s shady dealings, and John had evidently started early.
“I’ve always done what John wanted. Every time… it was what John wanted. I had no choice.”
What he meant was that he had no spine.
“So you’re saying that for the last twenty years, John’s held that incident over your head and you’ve danced to his tune ever since. Even when he told you to hire someone to dispose of me.”
Peter nodded. “No choice.” His gaze slid past mine. “You know, I didn’t really like him much. I don’t know what I think about him being dead.”
Dear God, he was even more pathetic than I’d thought, and believe me, I hadn’t given him much credit there.
Every muscle in me tensed and ached. I stood up abruptly and went to the window. Out in the courtyard, the table was being readied for a subdued evening meal. Everyone was still recovering from the events of the previous day and night, too out of spirits for anything but the quietest of meals.
We were silent for some time. I watched the courtyard grow dim, and Peter, I suppose, watched me.
“I’ll speak to the Pasha,” I said at last. “You’ll buy a new generator for the village, since I see no reason why Ned Winter should pay for your misdeeds, and I’ll try and get the Pasha to see that as sufficient reparation. He’ll probably send you home. When you get there, I don’t ever want to see your face. Go back to Wiltshire and manage the estate. Be a sheep farmer. But stay out of my way. I don’t expect to see you again.”
“All right.” He sounded relieved. Surprised, but relieved.
I leaned forward. The window glass was cool against my forehead. Soothing. “I don’t remember us ever getting along well.”
The growing dusk acted as a dark mirror, reflecting the room behind me in clouded shadow. Peter’s murky image looked at me, and even in reflection, I could see the twist of anger—and maybe even hatred—to his mouth.
“She never bothered with me much,” he said. “I was eight when she died, and I missed…. But she hadn’t been much of a mother to me since you were born. She only had time for you. I didn’t forget. You never forget that, being pushed aside.”
You are very like your mother.
I repeated what I’d said to the Stravaigor, all those weeks ago. “I don’t remember her at all.”
Peter’s voice was the ghost of a sad sigh. “I do.”
EL KHAWAGA Pasha arrived at about teatime the next day with a band of his gloriously scarlet-and-white caparisoned soldiers. When he heard the entire story, he agreed to Ned’s proposal to deport Peter and allow the country to wash its hands of him. “The death of the Stravaigor Heir is embarrassment enough. I would rather clear the country of those who perpetrated this tawdry little plot.” He gave me a thin smile. “You have, after all, done us a considerable favor in the matter of Nazeer Sulayman. It would be churlish to deny your wishes regarding Peter Lancaster.”
He and Ned were old acquaintances, of course, since Ned knew the Khedive. Ned had left his bed that morning but was still shaky and headachy. We three settled in the expedition house’s tiny and mostly unused sitting room, with coffee and pastries, to discuss the fates of several of the actors in the recent melodrama.
“I’ve given some thought to John Lancaster,” I said after the Pasha had assimilated the entire story. “The Coptic monastery at Sitt Damiana is nearby. I’ll have John interred there, if you agree. What do you want to do with Sulayman?”
The Pasha had stood over Sulayman’s body ten minutes earlier, nodding his approval of the arrangements we’d made to keep the body preserved until he arrived, and expressed his and his master’s satisfaction that the assassin had met his match. “Englishman Number Three, if I understand events aright. I owe your Mr. Tatlock our thanks and gratitude,” he had murmured, and his smile had been rather beatific.
“I intend to have Sulayman boxed up and taken to Cairo for an official determination of his identity. I brought an embalmer and a portable ice machine for the purpose, and my sergeant is making the arrangements. But by all means, bury John Lancaster with the Copts. Will you bury your guards there too, Professor Winter?”
Ned shook his head. “Not permanently. If I can make use of your embalmer, sir, I will make arrangements to lodge them temporarily at the monastery and take them home with me when we go. Neither had any family, except for Gallowglass. We look after our own.”
“Of course. I would be honored to assist.” The Pasha glanced at his hands, folded neatly on the papers in front of him. “What consequences might the Khedive face following Lancaster’s death? Will the Convocation Houses be involved? His Highness would prefer not to brook the Imperium’s displeasure.”
I am no diplomat, but I expect that was a difficult question to have to ask, with all its implied pleading. The Pasha must have swallowed considerable quantities of pride.
“It will not be an issue,” Ned assured him. “It was an internecine issue within House Stravaigor. I will see to it personally that no blame attaches to the Khedive or his administration here.”
“And since I now appear to have a horse in that race,” I said, “I concur. Not that it means much, but I’ll do my best to lay the blame where it belongs.”
The Pasha’s thin smile showed a momentary warmth, and he bowed gracefully. “Thank you, gentlemen. Now, if you agree, I would like to speak with those involved and then put this unsavory business behind us.”
We used the little sitting room as an impromptu courthouse. Hugh brought in Peter first, who looked worn-out and jaded.
No fight in him. He outlined the salient details of the plot for us in a thin, reedy voice that was surprisingly even and lacking in feeling. The same emotionless delivery of the automata at Madame Tussaud’s—a simulacrum of life and vitality, recounting the tale as if it belonged to someone else. We heard him out without interruption. I couldn’t even look at him, and he hadn’t been speaking for more than a moment or two before I abandoned my seat at the table to stand by the window. I spent the time trading glances with a small, bluish lizard sunning himself on the window ledge. A close cousin to the one who ate my scarab in Cairo, probably, and if I’d been a man to believe in omens, a symbol of something. Death and betrayal, likely. And all the while Peter droned on behind my back, the cadence of guilt and complicity set to a tempo both insignificant and weak. Ned told me later he cast many a glance my way, but when I never turned to look back at him, Peter grimaced and eventually faltered to a stop.
The Pasha was cold and reserved and really rather formidable when he pronounced sentence. I did turn to watch that. Peter merely nodded when the Pasha told him he’d be returned to Cairo under official escort and from thence to Alexandria and a ship home. A glance at me, a twist of the lip, and a nod, and Hugh was there to help him to his feet and return him to his room.
“He will be treated with all civility,” the Pasha said. “What of Messers Harper and Symington?”
I returned to my seat. Hugh was acting as court usher that day and brought them in.
They were both objectionable and, in Harper’s case at least, unrepentant. Yes, they’d played a few tricks on our expedition and what of it? It was no more than Ned deserved apparently, for, as Harper said, “He’s so bloody rich, and he gets whatever site he likes. It’s so bloody easy for him, isn’t it? He just waltzes in here and takes the cream, and all we get is the skimmings. It’s the same old tale of the rich man in his castle. Why not plague him a bit? Take his mighty highness down a peg or two!”
Symington, who had his head down, shrank even further in on himself defensively. By contrast, Harper was slouching to show his ease and defiance, chin thrust out belligerently.
The ungrateful, sniveling cur!
He wasn’t worthy of a response. I turned to the Pasha. “I gave you my word, sir, that if we caught the people playing tricks on us and the villagers here, they would face your justice and the Khedive’s. Do as you will.”
Symington cringed, but Harper jerked upright. “You can’t do that! You can’t turn us over to this… this”—he gestured wildly at the Pasha—“to this native! We’re white men!”
The Pasha did not react, except to turn his cold stare onto Harper.
“You are a disgrace to our profession. You are a disgrace to the Imperium.” I had never heard Ned’s tone so cold or so magisterial. It might have been his father speaking. “That your actions deliberately hurt so many poor villagers shows you are not worthy of being treated as gentlemen and scholars. You are neither.”
“You compensated them! They haven’t suffered for it.”
I snorted. Tell that to old Mahmoud, the date grower, whose heart was in his date palms.
Ned merely turned his head away. Despite Harper’s increasingly loud protests and Symington’s muffled sobbing, the Pasha’s men escorted them out and away from our lives. I am delighted to report I never set eyes on either again.
“They will spend a night or two in Abu Za’abal prison to drive the lesson home,” the Pasha said. “Then I will send them back to England. They will not be allowed to return. I will speak personally to Maspero at the Antiquities Service to ensure they are blacklisted.”
“No more than they deserve.” Ned was rightfully unforgiving. “I’ll blacklist them at the Aegyptian Exploration Society as well.”
And that was that. It was not unlike the mottoes adopted by those large department stores who cozen their customers into believing they provide prompt and smiling service. Only in this case it was Justice dispensed with courtesy and dispatch. Your every legal requirement satisfied or your money back.
And what’s more, tempered with a mercy I didn’t think I myself could have shown.
PROCEEDINGS CLOSED, the Pasha took himself off on the Khedive’s business. Having decided to stay overnight, he resolved on an inspection of the villages in the immediate area. “I’ll sleep on the launch, thank you, rather than put you to such trouble,” he said when Ned offered to find him accommodations at the expedition house. “But I would gladly join you at dinner, if I may.” The Pasha hesitated. “Would it be too much to ask to meet the other actors in this drama? The gentleman who played the Dog, perhaps, when Captain Lancaster retrieved your son?”
Ned professed himself delighted on both counts before seeing him out on his mission to put the fear of the Khedive into the local populace and scold them into repenting their superstitious belief in Dog djinns, and sent a note to Fouquet, inviting him to dine. Acceptance came within the hour.
We had a quiet afternoon, with Ned resting before the ordeal to come. When it came to dressing for dinner, it echoed our first night in Cairo. I lounged in the armchair in Ned’s room, watching as he got himself into House regalia again, this time in the Pasha’s honor.
Ned eyed me and grinned. “Is that the best you can do for a dinner outfit tonight?”
I thought the Pasha should be thankful I’d found a clean shirt, and said so.
Ned shook his head sadly. “Not up to par. You’ll have to get yourself an outfit like mine.”
I drew a veil over my response, but it did put me in mind of one thing. “I haven’t told him. The Stravaigor, I mean. He doesn’t know about John.”
“Sam allowed Tatlock access to the big Marconi to call Londinium yesterday, while you were sleeping.”
Which I might have known, if I hadn’t resolutely ignored Tatlock’s very existence since we’d left the Theban Princess. “Good. Because I’m not sure what to say to him. How do you offer condolences to a man for the son he had killed? I don’t think that one is in the etiquette manuals.”
“No, indeed.”
“I don’t understand him, Ned. He knows what I think of the Houses. He knows I’ll fight. But even if I am his son, he doesn’t really know me. He knew John. He brought him up. I know John disappointed him, but how does any father reach the point of disliking and despising his son so much he’d choose a virtual stranger to replace him?”
Ned could only grimace. I understood that, because I’d been doing a lot of uncomprehending grimacing myself over the last day or two.
“I don’t want to be First Heir, Ned. I just want to get on with my life with you, with the coffeehouse, with Hugh and Alan. I don’t want to have House Stravaigor around my neck like a bloody albatross.”
Ned stooped swiftly. He rested his chin on my head, enfolding me into a warm embrace. “You can do one of three things, Rafe, and my counsel is to think about each option carefully and not just react on emotion. You can accept everything, be the Stravaigor First Heir and all that entails. You can refuse it, which I suspect you want to do, but your Princeps’s word is law within the House. He doesn’t have to accept your refusal—probably won’t, since he’s gone to all this trouble—and your House will still look to you as Heir to do what you can to further its interests and those who depend upon it. I doubt the Stravaigor has many other options.”
I sighed. Loudly, and because it made Ned’s embrace tighten, repeatedly. “And third?”
“You always wanted a revolution.” Ned kissed the top of my head and stepped back. He smiled. “And third, my dearest iconoclast, you can change it.”
WE WERE at the port stage.
The cook, evidently impressed by the appearance of a high official in a way he had never been impressed by us, had excelled himself. The food was sublime. The conversation had been erudite and learned and, more than once, entirely above my head. Still, it was enough to sit and watch Ned’s happy expression as he and Fouquet argued about some arcane hieroglyphics in Seti’s temple and the Pas
ha looked on, smiling at the antics of these crazy infidels.
At about ten that night, Ned was called to the Marconi room. The Gallowglass was calling from Londinium, linking through the Khedive’s palace, demanding to speak to his son.
“He probably wants reassurance, if you will excuse me for a moment.” Ned put aside his napkin and got to his feet. He steadied himself against the table edge until his balance evened out. I had to force myself not to leap up and put a supportive hand under his elbow. He was very much better, he truly was, although still prone to headaches and not at all prone to being fussed over. I restrained my nurturing instincts as best I could and trusted to Bangor Bill’s opinion that Ned would be back to normal in a few days.
Conversation fragmented while he was gone. Fouquet and the Pasha bonded over the Anubis costume and a shared delight in theatrical amusements, and Causton talked with Lansbach and Baumann about returning to the excavation. Lansbach would be sitting on the sidelines for a few weeks yet: his bruised ribs were healing, but the broken arm would restrict his activities. He expressed his frustration with typically Teutonic gruffness, while Archambault and I sympathized. The students talked quietly amongst themselves at the other end of the table.
When Ned came back, his expression was very grave.
“What is it?” I was on my feet in an instant.
“I have some sad news.” Ned stood at his chair, at the head of the table in the courtyard, but didn’t resume it. He waited until everyone’s eyes were on him. “Gentlemen, I am sorry to tell you that her Imperial Majesty, the Queen, went to her eternal rest this evening, around an hour and a half ago. She was at Osborne, and her family were with her when her life drew peacefully to its close. God rest her immortal soul.”
Good Lord. In the events of the last few days, I’d forgotten that the Queen’s health was precarious. This would certainly mean I’d be ferrying Ned back to Londinium for the funeral. As a First Heir, he’d be required there.