King of Kings

by Wilbur Smith

  “I wonder who else they caught,” Evelyn mused. He drew another photograph from the packet and went visibly pale. “Good God is that . . . ? And is that a . . . ?” He replaced it swiftly. “And that is supposed to be pleasurable?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir.” The clock ticked very loudly. After an agonizing pause, Sam cleared his throat. “As to who else they caught, sir, I am told a significant amount of coded traffic emanated from the Italian, German and American consulates shortly after this was delivered to me.”

  Evelyn Baring crossed his legs and stared out of the window into the blistering blue of the Cairo sky.

  “And you think this is the work of Ballantyne, do you?”

  “I do.”

  “Why did he not simply give all of the material to us? It would have been a boon to the government, once these horrors were destroyed, of course, to have such material on our European cousins,” Sir Evelyn mused.

  Sam shook his head. “Ballantyne does not work for us. His aim was the destruction of the Duke of Kendal. I understand that proof of some of the duke’s crimes—the murder and coercion of union officials and so on—has been sent to the newspapers. Penrod sends this material to us and the other consulates to demonstrate he has no interest in it or use for it.” Sam shifted uncomfortably. The old wounds in his legs seemed to hurt a great deal more whenever he thought of Penrod Ballantyne. “He means to reassure us.”

  “How very high-minded of him,” Baring said dryly. “And what of the duke?”

  “With your permission, I should like to call at his house personally and as soon as possible.”

  Baring nodded, then closed the folder and pushed it across toward Sam. “Of course. I would like you to burn those photographs first, however. Do it personally, Sam. And bury the ashes.”

  •••

  Sam did as he was asked and then, taking only his adjutant, rode out to the duke’s house. No guards were at the gate, and even from the roadside, Sam could see the windows were shuttered. He walked unchallenged through the gardens and up the broad steps, thinking of when he had come here with Ballantyne. The door was slightly ajar. Sam called out, but the house was silent. He could see the place had been looted, a mirror smashed on the tiles, the drawers of the heavy side tables in the hall pulled out and emptied, some items of clothing scattered down the stairs. He imagined all the duke’s impressive servants grabbing whatever they could get their hands on and running.

  He turned to his adjutant. “Go back onto the street. See if you can find anyone who saw what happened here.”

  The door to the duke’s study was locked. Sam noticed the bloodstains on the wall outside and found the body with an arrow through its throat rolled into the drawing room. That room had been emptied of its valuables too. Sam thought of the servants stepping back and forth over the corpse.

  His adjutant was quick. A water-seller had seen two of the servants of the house leading away one of the duke’s chargers. The horse had been laden with hurriedly packed sacks of clothing and, indignant at being treated as a beast of burden, had broken free and galloped toward the outskirts of the city. The servants had followed, stopping to gather whatever treasures the animal managed to shake loose from its back.

  “Very well,” Sam said. “Break down the door of the study.”

  He lit a cigar while the man kicked at the lock until it cracked and gave. The adjutant stumbled into the room with the momentum of his final kick. Sam heard him swear and retch. He took another puff of his cigar, then pushed the door fully open. A body was seated on one of the green leather armchairs, facing the door. It wore evening dress, and a shotgun lay on the Turkish rug beside it. The face was obliterated, a mess of tissue and bone fragments, and the wall behind the chair was splattered with a great plume of blood and brain matter.

  “If you are going to vomit, Captain, do it outside,” Sam said, then approached the corpse. The hands were resting on its knees, palms up. White, delicate hands, the gold band of a signet ring on the little finger. Sam turned the left hand, feeling the stiffness of death, and saw the arms of the duke engraved on the ring. He lifted the lapel of the jacket and felt carefully in the inside pocket. A monogrammed wallet with some hundred pounds in it. Sam could find no note of any kind, only the concealed safe, concealed no more, open and empty, which was, in a way, Sam supposed, note enough. He took another long draw from his cigar and turned to his suffering adjutant.

  “Inform the civil authorities and post a guard outside to prevent further looting. What was the name of the duke’s secretary?”

  The adjutant still looked pale but managed to reply, “Carruthers, sir.”

  “That’s the one. See if you can find out where he has scuttled off to.”

  The adjutant saluted, then left the room with all possible speed. Sam examined the shattered face of the corpse.

  “I am glad I never made you really angry, Penrod,” he said to the lifeless room, then left to make his report to the consulate.

  •••

  Amber did not realize how lonely she had been at the camp until she found herself back in Massowah. She and Patch had traveled with Ato Asfaw’s son, Fassil, to guide them, and Fassil’s wife, Subira, to act as Amber’s maid and chaperone. Amber had insisted she needed neither, but Asfaw was firm. His sense of propriety would allow nothing less. Subira’s eyes grew wide as they approached the city, glittering on the edge of the water in the heat like a mirage in the desert. They grew bigger still when they saw the Italian women, wives of the officers posted to the city, in their corsets and heeled boots, their hair piled high on their heads.

  Ato Bru gave them a warm welcome, and when he heard of Rusty’s death, lowered his eyes and put his hands together, offering up a silent prayer for their friend’s soul. He insisted on welcoming them and their guides into his own well-appointed compound. Then rested and fed, Amber and Patch set to work. Arranging a line of credit from Amber’s accounts in England was relatively straightforward, then Patch began the business of leaning on all the good will Rusty had built up in the telegraph office to find another source of mercury and arrange for its transport.

  “This is going to take a month, Miss Benbrook,” he said, coming home after his first day on the wires and settling into a wicker chair on the veranda of Ato Bru’s dining chamber. “At least the men there talk English, so I don’t need you translating for me.”

  “I’ll find us someone who understands mercury then,” Amber said cheerfully and sipped her tea. She felt Patch watching her, his mouth slightly open, and looked up again. “What is it, Patch?”

  He sniffed and scratched the pink scars that ran across the right side of his jaw. “Only . . . I can’t help wondering, Miss Amber. You made all this money from your book. Don’t you want to leave this country, go live your own life? I see you love your sister, and she and Ryder are going to stick it out in Tigray, whatever gets thrown at them, but why should you stay buried out there in the wilds?”

  Amber thought of the wild leap of pleasure and excitement she had felt coming into a city again, even one as small and out of the way as Massowah. Then she thought of the sights and sounds of Cairo, and the fizz of champagne on her tongue. Patch was right, she had the money to go anywhere and her book had won her admirers in every European capital. For a moment the idea glimmered with promise, then she thought of Penrod. He was out there somewhere, probably married to Lady Agatha by now. To see them together would kill her, and the dread of seeing them cast deep shadows over every fantasy of life in Cairo or London or Paris her mind could conjure up. At least in Tigray she was free of that fear.

  She shook her head. “Don’t fret about me, Patch. I have work to do.”

  •••

  It took three weeks of patient inquiry to find the man Amber needed. Stefano Di Moze was a trader who had been brought up in the silver mining town of Argentiera in Sardinia and studied chemical engineering for some years before taking up his current profession. Amber could not persuade him or his wife
to come to Tigray, but she did arrange to buy from him a number of technical works, souvenirs of his studies, which included useful entries and tables about the use of quicksilver. Amber was so delighted to have them, along with a bundle of old journals and a volume called Metalworking Among the Ancients, the fact they were all in Italian seemed only a minor difficulty. Stefano’s wife, Valentina, insisted on giving Amber an Italian–English dictionary. The English wife of an officer made her a present of A Grammar of the Italian Language Arranged in Twenty Lessons, and a pair of other similar well-thumbed volumes. Valentina also thrust into her hands a copy of The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni in Italian, “Because it is impossible,” she said, her hands sketching patterns in the air, “you should learn my beautiful language reading only books such as Nuovo Trattato di Chimica Industriale.”

  They were taking tea together and discussing the final arrangements for Amber’s journey back to Courtney Mine when Valentina put an English newspaper into her hands.

  “Amber, I hope you do not think me rude. But I read your book with much pleasure and I had friends in Cairo who told me a little of this Lady Agatha and how she was . . . tangled in your affairs. I thought perhaps you might not have heard of her sad end, and that of her papa.”

  Amber didn’t reply, but put down the coffee cup with a shaking hand and took the newspaper from her hostess. She had to reread it three times before the words started to make sense. Lady Agatha was dead, her father had committed suicide and his empire had collapsed in scandal. Agatha gone! She felt a strange stab of pity. Amber could not blame her beautiful rival for loving Penrod, after all.

  “Are you ill, Amber? Did I do wrong to show this to you?”

  Amber tore her eyes from the newsprint. Her hostess’s face was crumpled with concern.

  “No, no. Thank you, Valentina. I am glad you showed it to me. Only I admit it is a great shock.”

  She had to read the article again before she managed to understand what the carefully constructed paragraphs were hinting at: that the Duke of Kendal’s actions had led to Lady Agatha’s death, and that the collapse of his business seemed to be the act of some avenging angel. Amber had no doubt as to whom that avenging angel was. This was Penrod’s work. No one else could have managed it. She felt a burst of pride in her chest, then a confusion of pain as she thought how he had done this remarkable thing for Agatha. She bit her lip. Where was he now? She could not help herself. She imagined sitting on the veranda, not of this small house in cramped and waterless Massowah, but of Shepheard’s Hotel, seeing Penrod walking by, the moment he would turn and look at her.

  Saffron will understand, she thought to herself. And Ryder is so good at languages, he’ll make sense of the books in the end. If I could just see Penrod one more time . . .

  “May I keep this?” she said at last, and Valentina nodded.

  For another half hour they discussed the best places in Massowah to buy seeds for Amber’s garden, then shaking hands with cheerful cordiality, Amber left to thread her way back through the chatter and bustle of the marketplace to Ato Bru’s compound, stopping only to book her passage on the next sailing back to Cairo.

  •••

  The night before the sailing, Amber wrote a long letter to her sister and another, shorter one to Ryder, explaining the books she had bought and where the seeds she enclosed should be planted. Not that Ryder would plant them, but she was sure he’d put someone responsible in charge of her gardens—Tadesse, perhaps. Then she had a cheerful farewell supper with Patch and Ato Bru. An hour before the steamer was due to sail, she found herself seated in the first-class salon, with an iced glass of seltzer water in front of her, her travel bag safely stowed and a sense of delighted excitement fizzing through her blood. She had been watching the activity on the shoreline for a while when a liveried steward offered her a folded copy of the Pall Mall Gazette. She took it from him, reveling in the crisp unread pages of print. Every newspaper that reached them in the highlands had passed through a hundred hands before they saw it, so to have a clean copy of her own felt like giddy luxury. She turned a few pages, humming softly under her breath as she did, then came to a sudden halt.

  Another victim? the headline read. The report was only a few paragraphs long. A woman, Mrs. Gloria Martin, and her son had been found murdered just outside the city limits of San Francisco. The house where they were found had been rented by a man who worked for the Duke of Kendal and it was reported in the neighborhood that neither mother nor son had been seen in several months. The newspaperman speculated that they might have been held captive for some reason. A thorough search of the house had produced no clue as to the murderer’s destination, only a telegram from Cairo dated on the day that Kendal had blown his brains out. It read: Burn everything and get out.

  Amber felt sick. She remembered where she had seen the name of the victim, Gloria Martin, before—on the back of the photographic postcard that had fallen from Dan’s hand just before Rusty was killed. The card with the message “we depend on you” written in shaking handwriting on the back. Amber had a strange sensation, as if a key had just turned in her mind and a door had swung open, casting a clear, bright light over everything that had happened over the last few months. It was Dan. Dan had been blackmailed to make sure the mine failed, and they had used this woman to force him to comply. He had tried to convince them the mission was doomed, and when Rusty had succeeded in bringing them the quicksilver, which might make the mine a success, then—Amber almost gagged as the realization hit her—he had murdered him.

  The liveried steward heard a crash behind him and turned. The beautiful young woman to whom he had offered the newspaper only a few minutes ago had disappeared, knocking over her chair in her haste to be gone. He raised his eyebrows and crossed to the table to set the chair on its legs again. The ice in the seltzer glass crackled and a movement on the gangplank caught his attention. The young woman was dashing back to the shore, holding her wide straw hat on her head with one gloved hand. The crowd waiting to board parted and she disappeared from sight back into the city.

  Ryder drove his people hard in the weeks following Rusty’s death, but as no one worked with more dedication than he did himself, the men lowered their heads and responded to the task ahead of them with a determination that matched his own. He ordered two men, who he believed thought the mine cursed, to leave and he was certain he could trust the men who remained.

  Operations below ground were suspended, and all efforts were bent toward building the processing works according to what they recalled of Rusty’s instructions. First the arrastra was begun, a shallow circular pit some twelve feet in diameter where the smashed and sorted ore would be ground and quicksilver and water added. Dan went up into the hills to find the slabs of rock that would line it and the huge grinding stones that mules would drag through the ore to reduce it to a fine pulp. He came back after three days, having found a place further up the valley where they could mine blocks of quartz-porphyry, then float them down on rafts to the mine as they were needed. Ryder sent a dozen of his best men and food for a week back upstream to fetch the blocks.

  While they were gone, Ryder led the construction of a flume leading down from the Lion Dam. His design included a series of gates and traps, so the water could be distributed around the processing works as it was needed. The river below them was too changeable in its flow and force to serve their needs, but the small dam they had built before the rains in a higher valley would provide a reliable resource for the workings. For a week the camp echoed to the sound of axes striking wood rather than stone, and the men came home smelling of sawdust and resin.

  As the flumes were being built and tested, the arrastra lined, and the grinding stones fitted at the correct height and angle, work began on the patio where the ground ore would be mixed with salt, copper sulfate and more quicksilver. It would need to be turned and trodden by men and animals every other day for at least a month, but when those weeks were over, the waste pulp would be washed awa
y, leaving an amalgam of silver and mercury.

  Then the process would become one of fire rather than water. The amalgam would be hauled up the other side of the valley to the bank of furnaces, built where the breezes would carry off the fumes, and close to the wooded slopes where their charcoal was made. Heat would persuade the mercury to loosen its grip on the precious silver. What was left was further refined via a retort and furnace. Then, and only then, after weeks of labor and the actions of mercury, water and heat, would Courtney Mine produce its first ingot of silver bullion. If, that was, Patch and Amber returned with more quicksilver and they could work out the proportions in which it should be used with the ore they had recovered.

  When he was certain he had done all he could to prepare, Ryder set the men to digging out more ore and watched the horizon for Patch, Amber and their precious cargo.

  Gebre, the head metalworker at the mine who supervised the building of the furnaces, and on his own forge worked their precious supplies of iron into brackets and rivets, staples and chains, came to see Ryder in his hut that evening.

  Saffron made him welcome and put a drink in his hand, then returned to playing with Leon in the far corner of the room; mother and child were passing each other pebbles and sticks with great solemnity. After a little talk of the work still to be done, Gebre handed Ryder a heavy roll of cloth.

  Ryder opened it and found in its soft folds an iron stamp.

  “What is this, Ato Gebre?” he asked, peering at it in the firelight.

  Instead of replying, Gebre took it from him and cleared aside a few of the rushes on the earth floor at his feet, then pressed the stamp into the surface. The stamp was a simple circle around the interlocked initials “C” and “M.”

  “For Courtney Mine,” Gebre said shyly. “You must stamp it on the ingots as they cool. Miss Amber showed me the lettering before she left.”