Essie leant back against the taxi’s stiff upholstery and dabbed her tears with a handkerchief as Cairo’s familiar streets rushed past the window. The failed attempt to make peace with her stepmother and half-sister had broken her.
She lifted her father’s fez to her nose. It had been many years since it had last rested on his head, but it still bore his gentle scent – a warm blend of talcum powder and hair pomade. Despite the passage of time, it was still comforting.
The last time she could remember feeling truly safe was when she’d felt her father’s arms wrapped around her. Her early childhood in Palestine had been idyllic. Before the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the close of the Great War, her father had been a government official, and although the imposition of British rule over their lands disrupted the status quo, Omar Shadid retained his standing within the Arab community and was called upon as an advisor by the administrators of the British Mandate.
As the daughter of a community leader, she’d been enrolled in a school along with her two older sisters. Each day she passed through the tiny entrance set into the monumental brass-studded door that opened into a vast interior courtyard where the sound of chattering girls resounded off the ancient stone walls of the building that had once been a Mameluke palace. After the principal inspected their uniforms to make sure they were observing the school’s strict standards, the girls peeled off to their classes, where they were taught English and French, mathematics, geography and history. At the end of each day, she and her sisters bolted home between fragrant rows of citrus trees to share their newfound knowledge with their parents.
Her teachers identified her as a student of precocious intellect with a remarkable capacity for learning. When informed of his daughter’s talents, it went some way towards salving her father’s lingering disappointment, never voiced but always acknowledged, that he’d not yet sired a son. Essie suspected that was why she’d been inspired to conjure up an imaginary twin brother when she’d used her own childhood to furnish a life story for Eris Patras, the woman she was when she met Benedict Hitchens. It was as if she could give her father in death what he’d secretly wished for in life.
Occupied as she had been with childish things, she’d never been fully aware of the terminal fractures that were developing in the fabric of her homeland. But as the worry lines inscribed into her father’s forehead and around his mouth deepened, and she overheard snatches of impassioned adult conversations from the groups of men who periodically gathered in the salamlik, she understood that something was terribly wrong. Her mother, never one to involve herself in political debate, joined what she’d called the ‘women’s movement’, marching in protest to the British High Commissioner’s headquarters in Jerusalem. Essie was never certain what, exactly, her mother was protesting against; her parents were determined to shield their daughters from the festering political unrest and never explained what it was that was beginning to cause such disruption in their lives.
Omar could never have imagined how absolute that disruption would be. With the bitter wisdom of hindsight, he wished he’d opened his daughter’s eyes a little so she might have been able to brace herself for what was to come. But Essie knew there was nothing that could have prepared her for the horrors she would have to endure. From the dark memories of what followed, the only recollection she could bear was the talcumy scent still preserved in her father’s fez. It was the smell that had saved her sanity the day so long ago when a mob of settlers inflamed with rage by an Arab assault on a Jewish homestead attacked her village, baying for blood.
Fighting in the streets to help defend his neighbours, a phalanx of Jewish fighters had blocked Omar from his own home. By the time he broke through the line of attackers, he found his world destroyed. She was the only survivor, hurried into a hiding place by her mother as they heard the mob battering down the front door. Her father discovered her cowering beneath winter rugs in her mother’s dowry chest, white faced and struck dumb with fear. While he carried her to safety through their house, she’d buried her head in the crook of his neck, blocking out the stench of blood and bad things with the smell of him. She never saw her mother or two sisters again.
The local leaders of the Jewish paramilitary organisation, Haganah, had offered an unconditional apology to Omar Shadid for what they attributed to the undisciplined actions of a fringe group of extremists within the organisation, men who would eventually join the radical Zionist group, Irgun. But their words were meaningless to a man who’d lost everything. ‘An eye for an eye, and the whole world goes blind,’ she’d once heard her father say to his more militant-minded friends while he was arguing for a peaceful resolution with their Jewish neighbours. But that was before. Omar took his only surviving child to Cairo and swore vengeance on the people who’d murdered his family.
Determined that Essie’s education should continue in Cairo, he enrolled her in the American College for Girls. She decided the only way she could make any sense of the loss of the people she loved, whose absence left a raw-edged and hollow place in her heart, was to immerse herself in schoolwork. If she could understand the world, she reasoned, perhaps she could find a larger purpose to a tragedy that – to her nine-year-old way of thinking – seemed pointless.
In time Omar remarried, in part because he believed his daughter needed a mother. Fatima was a far more observant Muslim than the mother Essie grieved for every waking hour, and she’d tried her best to care for the pensive and serious- minded girl who wanted nothing more than to be left alone. But by the time Meera was born, Essie was becoming a woman, and tiring of the strictures placed on her life by a conservative guardian who disapproved of her ambition to become something other than a respectable Muslim wife and mother.
As her curves began to blossom, Essie secretly altered her thobe – a modest gown designed to hide the wearer’s physical assets – so it clung to her breasts and hips. She began to highlight her almond-shaped eyes with kohl to bring out their coppery gleam. It wasn’t long before she was attracting the eye of every eligible young man in Al-Azbakiyya. But the boy who most interested Essie was living with his cousin in the Greek quarter and reminded her of the movie posters she’d seen of Gary Cooper. He was, of course, a completely unsuitable match.
Word of Essie’s furtive liaisons with the dark-haired and dashing young man reached Omar’s ears. Her now grim and stern-faced father beat her and warned her never to be seen with him again. Pride and back stinging, Essie made sure she was never seen with him again – instead, she concocted more cunning means of meeting up with her young lover. She never dared venture out to meet him when her father was home. But when Omar embarked on one of his regular expeditions to Palestine, where he continued his fight against the Jewish settlers in his homeland, Essie had no qualms about defying her stepmother’s wishes and would leave the house for hours at a time.
The last time she was caught by Fatima trying to sneak out of the house, it was Essie’s seventeenth birthday. With her father absent again, she ran from the Ottoman mansion she’d called home for almost ten years, and fled to Xander’s side. Vowing their undying love for each other and likening their plight to that of the teenaged star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet, the couple left the city together and embarked on a ferry to Xander’s home in Cyprus.
Docking at the harbour in Paphos, Essie received a wordless and chilly reception from Xander’s Orthodox Christian family. She wasn’t surprised and knew it was as warm as the one Xander might have expected from her own Muslim family in Cairo if the situation had been reversed.
To explain her sudden arrival, Xander’s family told their neighbours that Essie was the disgraced daughter of a Muslim housekeeper who worked for their wealthy relatives in Cairo. According to the elaborate – and implausible – lie, she’d been sent to Cyprus to work for them as a servant and to escape public shame. It didn’t matter that the story was utterly unbelievable, because it was nothing more than a face-saving exercise for the family.
The you
ng foreigner became the favourite topic of conversation for the gossips who gathered each morning around the village well, but none dared confront the matriarch of Xander’s family about what was such an obvious lie. And so the deception worked. It also gave Xander and Essie an excuse to be seen together – nobody in the village cared if one of their sons had a dalliance with a non-Christian girl, provided he eventually married one of the flock.
It was a month before any of his family members said a single word to Essie, and that was only when Xander approached his father about marrying his young lover. A marriage between their good Christian son and a Muslim girl was condemned as an abomination, even if it had not been impossible under the strict rules of the Church. Essie half-heartedly suggested converting – as far as she was concerned, it made no difference whether you were a woman under the watchful eye of the Christian or the Muslim god, it was a dismal existence either way. But of course, the marriage was never going to happen. And as it turned out, it was just as well.
During that time, there were many occasions when Essie had watched mournfully as the ferry between Paphos and Alexandria pulled away from the shore, and wished she was on board and headed back to Egypt. But the overinflated and easily wounded pride peculiar to youth could never allow her to admit that she’d erred. The thought of begging her father and stepmother’s forgiveness was inconceivable. So she stayed by Xander’s side.
Xander, who spoke Arabic, taught Essie Greek. He also introduced her to the family’s stock in trade: ripping antiquities from tombs and lost cities on Cyprus to sell to international dealers, who sold the purloined treasures to collectors and institutions in Europe and America. Essie proved to be an able student, mastering ancient languages and demonstrating a natural instinct for finding things buried beneath the soil. Her reluctant new family begrudgingly began to acknowledge her skills and entertain the thought that perhaps she wouldn’t be the burden they’d anticipated when she first appeared on their doorstep.
Essie spent every spare moment she had at the Cyprus Museum in Nicosia, learning about long-dead civilisations and the artefacts they’d left behind. It became a sanctuary for her, and even today, there was nowhere she felt more at peace than buried in the mausoleum-like surrounds of a museum with the remnants of ancient worlds around her.
It was there that she retreated the day she thought a return to Cairo was inevitable. She should have guessed that Xander’s family would conspire to end their relationship. With crocodile tears in his eyes, he’d announced to Essie that he’d been forced to carry through with the betrothal that had been arranged for him since birth. Adrift and shame-faced, she’d fled to the museum, where she’d hidden behind a teetering glass cabinet of turquoise-blue faïence ushabti figurines and sobbed, the rows of tiny sarcophagi making her feel lost and homesick.
Although Essie was devastated, she suspected her distress was caused as much by humiliation as anything else, and so it was a blessedly short-lived period of mourning. The truth was that after arriving on Cyprus, she’d soon realised the swarthy young Greek was deliciously pretty, but not blessed with much of a mind – and certainly not one that could keep pace with her own fierce intellect.
She mourned the loss of his body for a moment or two, then set about establishing her own business doing what she’d learnt from Xander and his family. But she had much bigger ambitions than those of her estranged Cypriot family. Recruiting workers from Xander’s team wasn’t difficult. Loyalty was easily bought, and in the time they’d worked with Essie, they quickly realised the young Arab woman was ten times the businessman Xander was. Not to mention, she had an uncanny knack for the craft – they knew she’d lead them to far greater riches than he ever had. And they were right. Despite her youth, she used her multilingual skills to form relationships with other outfits working across the Aegean and became a central point of contact with the international trade, arranging shipments and sales for a cut of the profits while also conducting her own illicit excavations. She tried not to enjoy it too much when Xander appeared at her door begging her for help re-negotiating a sale with a Dutch dealer that had fallen through. Though she did make him pay for the privilege.
Her past was a wraith that always followed close on her heels, surprising her on occasion during the infrequent moments she had time to reflect on anything other than her work. She saw the news from Palestine while she was nursing a cup of thick, sweet Greek coffee and waiting for the arrival of a boat from Crete at a kafeneion by the harbour in Limassol. Ignoring the disapproving glares of the white-whiskered old men who were already discomfited enough to find a woman in their midst, she stood and took the newspaper from where it sat on the counter. A series of photographs on the front page depicted three Palestinian rebel leaders executed by the British. Her father’s features were unmistakable – unrepentant and proud. She caught herself as a surge of grief rose in her chest. Throwing a handful of coins onto the table, she squeezed the newspaper into a ball and stumbled out to the water’s edge.
The sea was placid and seemed to dissolve at the horizon, bleeding into the pale blue sky. She was, now, truly alone. She’d loved her father dearly. And there had been many moments when she’d regretted the pain she knew she must have caused him when she left. That guilt was amplified by the sorrow that welled from the marrow of her soul at the knowledge that she would never see him again.
Her solution had been to throw herself into her work. For most of Europe, the coming of the second great war was apocalyptic. But for Essie, it was a godsend. It made her job easier as Europe turned its attention to the wholesale slaughter of its population rather than the defence of its cultural heritage, leaving archaeological sites untended and unguarded. And the war brought her other opportunities. It was on the island of Crete that she’d met Josef Garvé and formed a professional relationship that had enriched them both. It was also thanks to Josef Garvé’s machinations that she’d crossed paths with Benedict Hitchens.
Essie sighed heavily and placed her father’s fez in her lap. It was only ever meant to have been another job – entrap the American and convince him to authenticate a priceless collection of antiquities. But it hadn’t quite worked out that way. Of the many men she’d known, he was the only one she’d ever continued to think of with deep longing. Her peculiar relationship with Ben had given her the only moments of joy and meaning she’d experienced since her father’s death. But he was gone. And she was alone. Again.
Steeling herself, she pushed to one side the memories that hurt. Life had taught her many things; the futility of floundering about in self-pity foremost among them. Her reason for visiting the city hadn’t resulted in the outcome she’d planned, or hoped for. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t make the most of what might otherwise be a wasted trip. With the expedition into the Sinai Desert just days away, she’d take the opportunity to revisit the Egyptian Museum and double-check the inscription on the statue, just to be certain she hadn’t missed anything when she last visited.
Essie couldn’t afford to fail. If she was correct in her interpretation of the clues they’d found that seemed to point towards the Emerald Tablet’s hiding place, the financial rewards would be substantial enough that she could step back into semi-retirement. She’d spent much of her life running and was tired and empty. All she really wanted was a chance to stop for a moment to gather the pieces of her life together again.
She was fairly sure she could find the tablet, but had no idea whether or not it would do all the things it promised. She didn’t really care, either way – all that mattered to her was that the material benefits of finding it would buy her the luxury of time. But she couldn’t imagine the consequences if she’d made an error. An elaborate and extremely complex plan that placed a great many people’s lives at risk had been put in motion on the basis of her research. She was comfortable playing with people’s money; but lives were another matter altogether, and the responsibility she bore weighed heavily upon her shoulders.
She could onl
y hope her instincts were right.
15
Cairo, Egypt
‘Old’ has a smell, Ben thought as he passed by the monumental statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep the Magnificent and his queen, Tiye, that towered over the inner courtyard entranceway of the Egyptian Museum.
It wasn’t an unpleasant aroma – and it was something more than just the dusty remains of mummified Egyptians, unceremoniously lifted from their protective sarcophagi and put on display in the public viewing galleries, their withered limbs protruding from yellowing linen wrapping and shedding musty particles into the air. It wasn’t just the scent of the ancient cedars brought to earth in the mountains of Lebanon and traded by the Phoenicians to the pharaohs, the timber used to line their burial chambers and the oil used for embalming the dead. It was also the scent of ancient leather; of dust, soil and charcoal; of papyrus and parchment; stale air, baked mudbricks and wood-fired kilns; rusted ironwork and broken, sun-bleached clay. It was a smell Ben was certain had permeated his own skin over his years spent in the field, and one he always found comforting.
‘Dr Hitchens, I presume?’ A tall and barrel-chested man stood at the top of the stairs, his heavy black eyebrows arched quizzically above deep-set black eyes. A coif of silvery hair was swept back in shiny waves from a high forehead, and his pale linen suit and white shirt were immaculate. Whatever his other personality traits, there was no overestimating the depth of Professor Hosni Zahir’s vanity. The pristine state of his clothing also confirmed that the Director of the Egyptian Museum wasn’t a man who liked to get his hands dirty. He took in Ben’s comparatively shabby presentation with barely veiled disdain.
Always heard you were a show pony, Ben thought rather uncharitably. Zahir had acquired a reputation as being very quick to claim others’ discoveries while demonstrating an impressive capacity to curry favour with social and political powerbrokers around the world, who rushed to invest their capital in worthy cultural projects that made them feel they were ‘doing good’. As the custodian of the remains of one of the three civilisations that were, to moneyed patrons, the marquee stars of the ancient world – the other two being Greece and Rome – Hosni Zahir knew exactly how good the hand was that he’d been dealt. And he had no hesitation playing it when he felt it would work to his advantage. Which apparently was most of the time.
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