Wrapped

by Jennifer Bradbury

  Deacon leaned toward me. “He took forty thousand troops into Egypt, where he knew he’d find no opposition, and proceeded to occupy the entire Nile Delta, sending out archaeological teams. He’d dug up half the country by the time England decided we couldn’t allow him a strong base from which to threaten our empire in India.”

  “And some say he still hadn’t found what he’d come for in the first place,” Caedmon interjected.

  “This standard?” I guessed. Both men nodded solemnly. “But how did he even know to look for it?”

  “Boney’s an odd one,” Deacon said, “which is what’s made him so difficult to outflank all these years. He’s as taken with Egypt and the Old Kingdom as he is with overthrowing royals and chasing women. And he’s been after that standard for ages.”

  “But it’s just a hunk of metal!” I protested.

  Deacon took too long to reply. “I saw things in Egypt that I cannot explain. Things that haunt me still.” He shifted in his seat, stared out the dingy window, and shook his head softly, remembering.

  “But you can’t believe that this standard actually has some sort of supernatural power?”

  He looked at me. “I don’t disbelieve it,” he said carefully, his caution eerily reminiscent of Showalter’s two mornings ago at breakfast.

  Caedmon went on, “If what we reckon from the history is right, the standard could only be wielded by true kings.”

  “And Napoleon certainly fancies himself that,” Deacon agreed.

  “But what can it possibly do besides fetch a premium from a collector? Why would he bother looking for it now?”

  Deacon shifted in his seat. “All the available sources indicated three things about the standard’s mystical properties. First, it meant that the bearer could not be defeated in battle. Second, it assured that the bearer—when he did die—would ascend immediately to the skies and bypass the potential unpleasantness of judgment and the underworld.”

  “But that’s just superstition, isn’t it?” I asked, looking uncertainly to Caedmon.

  Deacon and Caedmon were quiet long enough to exchange a glance, long enough to indicate that neither was ready to discount any rumor regarding the standard’s power. “There is still more,” Deacon said quietly. “It is also said that whoever bears the standard can summon Wepwawet’s power to bridge the kingdoms of the living and the dead.”

  “I don’t understand.” The room seemed to grow colder.

  “It means,” Caedmon said gently, “that the pharaoh who carried it could resurrect an army of the dead to fight alongside his living soldiers.”

  “Now you’re trying to scare me!” I forced a laugh.

  Neither Deacon nor Caedmon cracked a smile.

  Finally I found my voice. “But that’s preposterous! There can be no more power in this thing”—I pointed toward the drawing in the book—“than there is in a cup of twice-steeped tea leaves.”

  “If I learned anything in my time in Egypt,” Deacon said, “it’s that the foolish man disrespects legend. And foolish men did not survive. There are powers and things beyond our understanding. And if history is correct, this standard is one of the most powerful weapons ever forged.”

  I realized I desperately wanted a rational explanation. “All of London is now mad with notions of the mummy’s curse, but we know it’s someone searching for this!” I waved the jackal’s head before them.

  “Fair point,” Deacon said. “So let’s suppose that the standard really is nothing but a plate of bronze with a harmless figurine atop it. Consider the example you just shared with me. You said yourself that all of London is under the spell of this mummy curse. They have almost no evidence to support it, but the idea has taken hold nonetheless.”

  “Museum attendance has increased tenfold since Showalter’s party,” Caedmon offered.

  Deacon nodded. “Compare that fervor with what might result from an actual object once carried by the rulers of the world’s first empire. An empire ruled by kings revered as gods.”

  “Men like Napoleon,” I whispered.

  He nodded. “Think on it, Miss Wilkins. Bonaparte has already cheated death countless times, and politically resurrected himself from death twice. He’s done the impossible again and again. He stands poised to overrun the Continent, leaving little hope that England will be able to outlast him. He enjoys almost fanatical adoration from his people. So give that man an object that supposedly gives him complete invulnerability . . . and the power to raise an army of ghost soldiers from the millions of Frenchmen who’ve died for his cause—”

  “And people will believe in the legend whether there’s evidence to the contrary or not,” I said quietly.

  “Precisely,” Deacon said. “Alexander the Great went to the Oracle at Delphi to receive his prophecy, ordering the seer to tell his generals who’d accompanied him that he could not be defeated in battle. The Oracle inhaled the vapors at the altar and foretold the exact place and time of Alexander’s death. But when he dragged her by the hair outside the temple and held a knife to her throat in front of his men, she said exactly what he wanted them to hear. And he went on to win countless battles that according to all historians should have been utterly unwinnable. He understood something fundamental about leadership. Far more important than your actual ability is what those who follow you believe you can do. Napoleon knows this better than any man alive.”

  “To say nothing of what it might mean if it actually works . . .” Caedmon trailed off.

  “And I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss a mummy’s curse in the end,” Deacon said carefully.

  I waited for him to go on. “I was present at excavations in Egypt a time or two,” he began, “and things never seemed to go well for the people involved. I once observed the removal of some items from a tomb near Alexandria—”

  “Father told me about this,” Caedmon said, leaning forward.

  Deacon nodded. “He was there with me. Within a fortnight six of the crew—including the senior archaeologist—had died.”

  I gulped. “Six?”

  “All in different ways—one from a fall, another seemed to have some sort of stroke, still another was bitten by a snake. There was nothing to connect the deaths. The men were from different villages, of different ages, all in fair health. . . .”

  “Then you mean . . .” My voice failed with the knowledge of what they were telling me.

  “If there are curses,” Deacon said carefully, “sometimes the means by which they are visited on the offenders are more subtle than we might imagine.”

  “You’re saying the person responsible for the break-ins might actually be the instrument of the curse?”

  “Stranger things,” Deacon said quietly.

  My heart seemed to have slowed. The room was eerily still, but my thoughts roiled. An object of possible mystical power, a curse that might be real, a curse that still might find its way to my door eventually.

  I tried to forget my own possible peril and focus on the greater problem at hand. “Then what you’re saying,” I said evenly, “is that if Napoleon recovers the standard, whether it functions according to legend or not—”

  “Then God help us all.”

  I thought of my brother aboard his ship, somewhere at sea. Of all those soldiers marching on the Continent.

  “But he doesn’t have it yet,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “We have the message—perhaps its location. What is the great London pyramid?”

  “Well,” Deacon hedged. He shook his head, turned to Caedmon. “I’d heard a few years ago that French archaeologists and historians had taken to calling your museum something like that.”

  Caedmon sat up straighter. “The museum?”

  “Frogs still resent having their hard work stripped of them all those years ago. And since we’ve occupied Egypt, their access to artifacts and dig sites has been carefully controlled,” Deacon explained.

  It taxed even my imagination to see the pillars and square profile of the former
mansion as anything so exotic as a pyramid. I fell quiet as I considered this, tracing the seams between the stones of the uneven floor with my eyes. Outside, a brief chorus of cawing erupted from the ravens at the Tower.

  “There’s logic there,” Caedmon said as he began to pace the small room, the space of which he covered in three strides before he had to turn back around. “If a pyramid was for piling up all the treasures and riches and history of a life so that it could live forever with the owner . . .”

  “Then a museum becomes the modern equivalent,” I said, rising to my feet.

  “Which means that the standard is somewhere in the museum,” Caedmon said, sounding less enthusiastic than I’d thought he might.

  “Then all we have to do is find it!” I cried. Perhaps we’d succeed after all, perhaps our efforts to keep the standard from the hands of Napoleon would cancel out whatever evil I’d managed to rouse when I took the jackal’s head.

  “Easier said,” Caedmon replied, lifting the paper up. “If this message came from Egypt with the mummy, it means it was planted by a French agent there. According to the date, a month has passed.”

  “So?”

  “So . . . artifacts flow in and out of the museum all the time, some on loan to high-water patrons, some simply stored elsewhere because we haven’t the space to study or exhibit them. On top of that, there are thousands of items currently on display or in the back rooms,” Caedmon said, leaning against a door frame.

  “We could ask for help,” I offered, though as I said it I knew it was a bad idea.

  “What would your father say to that, Miss Wilkins?” Deacon asked.

  “My father?”

  He nodded. “What might he have to say about involving a larger group of people in the search for this item?”

  “He’d say that the more individuals with intelligence of this kind, the greater the chance of the message making it to the ears of its intended recipient.”

  Deacon nodded. “And that’s the most pressing question for the moment, at any rate,” he said. “You can assume, at least until a second message might make its way from the Nile, that no one of consequence knows the truth.”

  “So you suggest that we figure out who this message was meant for instead of recovering the standard?” I asked.

  “Short list of suspects,” Caedmon said.

  I turned to him. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it had to be someone who was meant to receive the mummy in the first place. Not many a man in London with the coin to traffic in ’em.”

  I shook my head. “Not your Showalter suspicions again.” I stifled a laugh at the thought of my neighbor engaged in high treason. When Caedmon didn’t break a smile, I sobered. “Come now—it’s far more likely the person awaiting the message works within the museum. They’re the ones who commandeered the mummy away from Lord Showalter. Isn’t it at the museum now?”

  Caedmon nodded. “And far worse for the wear. By the time I saw it the morning after, it looked to have been properly gutted. And no one’s in a hurry to really do anything with it.”

  “Odd, given how urgently they required it of Lord Showalter,” I said. “Makes whomever demanded its surrender fairly suspect.”

  Deacon nodded. “She’s right, Caedmon. There are a few sharks over there I’d keep an eye on, if I were you.”

  “Not many beside Banehart who could have given such an order,” Caedmon offered.

  “He’s as likely as anyone to be mixed up in this,” Deacon said.

  “True. But we can’t dismiss the possibility that if it’s not Showalter—”

  “You only suspect him because he was rude to you that evening,” I put in.

  “You refuse to entertain the possibility because he’s caught your eye!” Caedmon said.

  I gaped at him. “He’s done nothing of the sort, and if you think for a moment—”

  Deacon rose to his feet and raised his hands. “You two can bicker when we’ve sorted other more pressing matters. For now, perhaps we can all agree that it could just as easily have been someone within Showalter’s household, or someone the sender knew would be at the party.”

  “Someone like me?” I said hotly, still smarting from Caedmon’s accusation.

  Caedmon sighed and rolled his eyes. “No, maybe that waiter, or—”

  “Oh!” I yelped, another face coming to my mind. “Tanner—Showalter’s valet. He’s got a runny eye. Always lurking. I saw him follow when the waiter slipped away from the party that night.”

  “A runny eye and penchant for lurking are not the tells of a great spy,” Deacon said with a kind smile, “but he’s worth being wary of.”

  Outside I heard the bells above the Tower toll. Woolsey would have been waiting now for nearly an hour. I sprang to my feet. “I must go,” I said, feeling a bit like Cinderella at her ball.

  Caedmon started, “Already?”

  I shook my head and explained my abandoned driver and the fact that Mother expected me at home to receive the Martins. I felt silly as the words passed my lips; I wished I had something legitimately urgent to carry me away.

  I wished it even more when I noticed the withering look Caedmon sent my way. And at the same time, a fury tore through me. “Who are you to judge—,” I began, my voice as hot as my temper.

  “Enough!” Deacon roared. “We all do the best with what we can. And I must ask you both again to save your bickering for a time more convenient.”

  Deacon’s outburst silenced us both.

  “Now,” he went on. “Caedmon, you will return to the museum and make a careful inventory of any object bearing any relation to Wepwawet’s cult—however tenuous the connection might appear.”

  Caedmon nodded.

  “And you, Miss Wilkins,” he said, turning to me. “You will speak to your father about this at the earliest possible moment. You are right to be cautious in trusting others, but your father most certainly must know what is afoot.”

  “Yes, Mr. Deacon,” I replied.

  “Have your father send for me as soon as you have spoken with him,” he ordered, wrapping up the jackal’s head and handing it back to me. I held it a moment before returning it to Caedmon. It was still safer with him than at my home.

  “Right, then?” Deacon asked us both.

  Caedmon and I looked at each other. I looked to Deacon. “Fine.”

  Deacon studied us as if he didn’t quite believe us. “You’ve fallen into something here,” he said carefully. “But soon enough we’ll make sure the matter is in safer hands.”

  He crossed between us and opened the door. “Now walk her to the end of the lane,” Deacon ordered Caedmon. “And no arguing on the way. You’ll draw far more attention if you’re picking at each other in the street than you will if folks think you’re simply a couple out for a stroll.”

  My cheeks burned as I ducked out the door and hurried up the alley.

  I heard Caedmon exchange good-byes with his mentor before he ran to catch me.

  He fell into step beside me. “I’m sorry if I gave offense,” he offered.

  I kept walking, eyes ahead, but slowed my pace. “Thank you,” I said. When I spoke next it was to ask him if he agreed with Deacon’s plan.

  He hesitated. “Deacon knows his business.”

  “I will still recommend you to Father, if that is your concern,” I said.

  “It’s not,” he said, “but I’m obliged.”

  We sidestepped a hansom cab barreling up the lane. “I had no right to sing small of your duties,” he said, “when mine amount to little more than cleaning up displays and carrying post for my employers.”

  “You like your work, though,” I said. “And toil in hopes of greater fulfillment to come.”

  “Don’t you?” he asked quickly. “Have hope?”

  I thought about Showalter. About the life a marriage with him would promise. A life free of worry, conflict, want, and complication.

  And then I thought about my life at this moment. A life so terr
ifying and thrilling and challenging . . .

  “It is hardly a fair comparison,” I said, sounding sadder than I meant to.

  He smiled. “You’re welcome to come paw through moldy papers and crammed storage rooms with me.”

  “Oh, that I could,” I said, smiling sadly. “I don’t know how I might slip away, though. I’m running out of excuses for Mother.”

  He grinned. “Should you change your mind, you’ll know where to find me. I’ll be at the museum all day. Might even rough it there tonight.”

  “Won’t you be missed at home?”

  “No one at home,” he said simply.

  “You live alone?”

  He nodded. “Mum passed five years before Pa. My sister had enough education to secure a position as a governess in the Lake District. I haven’t seen her in three years, though we write now and again.”

  “You must be lonesome,” I said, stealing a glance at him. And as many times as I’d wished to be able to do what I wanted, to have no one directing me, I wondered now, looking at Caedmon, if I ought not be more careful what I wished for. I began to pity rather than envy him, began to think how hollow life might be without Mother or Father, or even Rupert to spar with.

  “I’m rather lucky, I think,” he said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced. “No distractions, free to focus on my work . . . to pursue my ambition.”

  I wanted to press more, to ask more, to find out if there was anyone—a landlady or a flatmate or a sweetheart—who might wonder where he’d gone. It shouldn’t have concerned me, but for some reason it did. For some reason I didn’t like to think of Caedmon working away in anonymity only to be just as unnoticed or unmissed at whatever place he might call home.

  We reached the end of the dressmakers’ street, where I’d left Woolsey and the coach. “This is far enough,” I said.

  “You’re sure I can’t walk you the whole way?” he asked.

  We were far enough from my neighborhood and it was early enough that it was unlikely I’d be seen or recognized by anyone of consequence. Still, I’d probably tempted fate far enough walking with him as long as I had.