Closer to the sun and so much later in the day, the heat was nearly crippling in its ferocity. She had kept the mustard-colored hijab from the morning’s ride and it draped her in smooth graceful folds down her back, protecting her nose and mouth from the incessant blowing sand. Instead of riding boots—which she didn’t have—she wore silk slippers. Fearful of her foot slipping through the stirrup with the unpredictable pony, she pulled up the leathers and crossed them across her lap so that her legs could hang free or tighten on the animal’s sides. Next time, she decided she’d do away with the saddle altogether.
In no hurry, Ella walked her pony carefully along the cliff tops. As she rode she could see the workmen—like crazed ants digging, carrying, and dumping—and looking back to the east she could see the Nile. Beautiful and meandering, undulating like a dazed serpent amid the tall reeds along the banks.
She realized this place spoke to her. This land seemed to fill her with a sense of peace that she had never felt before. She shook her head. Of course you’ve never felt it. When did you have time to just wander around on horseback taking in the sights? The only item she had on her agenda was getting back in time to bathe and dress for dinner. If you had told me a week ago that I would actually like the idea of that, I would have said you were mad.
And Rowan, never far from her thoughts, seemed to fill them now as she rode. The clarity of her love and knowledge of him that had often escaped her in 2013 Dothan was immediate and unassailable here. When she thought of the things that Carol had said about the kind of person Ella was with Rowan—selfish and recalcitrant—she was horrified to admit Carol had been at least a little right. A protective, loving mother, Carol had instantly seen what Ella lacked in relation to her son. Something had failed when she and Rowan returned from Heidelberg. But what was the answer? Go back to 1620 Heidelberg? She shivered at the thought. They had barely escaped with their lives as it was.
It’s only two weeks, she thought. What are two measly weeks in the scheme of things? Just as soon as they returned to Cairo, she would race to the old market wall and find the damn crack and be on an Egyptair flight back to the States before she totally ruined her chance of a happy-ever-after with her big, handsome cowboy.
She looked out over the Valley of the Kings and willed herself to imagine him sitting next to her, alert, engaged, alive, on his own horse but just out of sight. Rowan loved archaeology. He loved history. He would love this world. She wished so dearly that he were here now. She reminded herself that ninety-one years in the future, the man she loved was worried sick. He was frantic and wondering what could possibly have happened to her. And probably thinking the worst.
And what was she doing? She was sitting on a horse at the rim of the Valley of the Kings, looking down on the stage where King Tut was about to be uncovered, and knowing she didn’t deserve Rowan’s forgiveness for putting him through hell. Knowing his mother was right about her.
And even so, she found herself saying, Not yet. I’ll come home but, please…
Not quite yet.
Chapter Eleven
Cairo 1922
The bazaar was a far cry from the one he had just walked out of. This one was alive like a writhing, unpredictable animal. Small shops and stores lined with shelves and cupboards bordered the narrow walkways with a constant streaming of people. The merchants sat smoking and talking beneath the cupboards smoking and talking. Everywhere Rowan looked, he saw shops displaying a wide variety of items: saddles and leather goods, shoes in every kind of fabric and material, rugs, and a cascade of vegetables, fruit and meat displayed on staggered display shelves. Everything looked dirty and foreign and authentic. His first emotion at recovering his senses from the journey from the back of the baker’s square where Yeena had taken him was an overwhelming sense of relief nothing like what he had felt when he first arrived in Cairo.
Ella was here. She was now. He felt her alive to him and the feeling energized and buoyed him. And if what Yeena had said was true, Ella had had no say in coming to this time period.
She had not willingly left him.
Yeena had taken him to her shop, locked the door and told him the impossible. Excited to see him, she had held his hand in both hers and told him that she had sent Ella to the time she was born to be in. At first, he didn’t believe what she was saying to him. He thought she must have helped kidnap Ella, but then why search him out? She had clearly been waiting for him to appear.
And she knew about Heidelberg.
“Your wife didn’t want to believe either,” Yeena said. “I feared that she would not go when I could see she must.”
“And why must she?” Rowan figured there was a fine line between mumbo-jumbo spiritualism and batshit crazy. If he hadn’t spent three weeks living in the seventeenth century, he might have been more skeptical. As it was he’d been too far and seen too much not to go on a little faith where time was concerned.
“I see the future in shadows,” she said, shrugging. “But she has gone back to find you. To save you.”
“How is that possible since I’m here?” Rowan said. His stomach tightened. He wasn’t sure whether he was playing her or she was playing him.
“How are many things possible?”
“Gone back when?”
“I cannot be certain of the time.”
“I’ll settle for a guestimate.”
“Howard Carter has yet to find the Boy King. But very soon now.”
“1922. Okay. And you said she went willingly into the past?”
“Willingly, yes. But not knowingly.”
“I see.” Rowan felt the hairs on the back of neck tingle.
“But she willingly stays,” Yeena said. She waved a hand in her shop as if that were proof. “Do you see her here? Has she returned to Alabama?”
Rowan was getting frustrated and he wasn’t sure he was getting any closer to the information he needed.
“You said you told her to get something before her flight. Isn’t that right?”
“The Book of the Dead.”
“As a souvenir for me.”
“Those were her words. But, yes, it is for you.”
“And now? Am I supposed to just believe this crazy story and hang around drinking Darjeeling waiting for her to materialize back from 1922?” He raked his hand through his shaggy brown hair and looked at her in bewilderment.
Yeena steepled her hands in front of her on the table between them. She cocked her head to look at him as if her were an interesting specimen.
“You would not be the man I know you to be if you did that,” she said.
Using a handful of the antique coins Yeena had given him, Rowan bought a piece of bread stuffed with ground lamb at one of the food vendors. He knew that Ella had started her life in 1922 in this bazaar. But she wouldn’t have stayed in the area. It was too unpredictable, too native. He wolfed down his food and walked out into the street, unsure of how to hail a taxi drawn by a horse. He returned to the curb and waited, trying to decipher the traffic flow. He looked up at the sky. Should he try walking to the center of town? Was the center of town where the British were? That’s where Ella would have headed, he was sure of it.
Suddenly a hand tugged at his sleeve and he whirled to see a young Egyptian boy standing on the curb grinning at him.
“Effendi is lost?” the boy said.
Rowan saw the young man’s eyes dart to Rowan’s coat pocket where a wallet might be.
“I need a taxi,” Rowan said.
“You are British? I am very helpful to the British. I am Ra.”
Rowan didn’t bother correcting him. “Great, Ra,” he said. “Hail me a taxi.”
“Where would effendi like the taxi to take him? Are you staying at Shepheard’s Hotel like all the British nobility?”
“Yes, that’s exactly where I’m going. Take me to Shepheards Hotel.”
Thanks to Yeena, Rowan had enough 1920’s bills to pay for a hotel room. He couldn’t help but wonder how in the world Ella mana
ged with just a purse full of useless Visa cards and 2013 Egyptian money.
The Shepheard’s Hotel was elegant—too much so for Rowan’s taste—but it was crammed full of Brits. He marched up the grand front staircase, brushing past the doormen who bowed deferentially as he entered the hotel. He was dressed in khaki slacks and a buttoned down shirt under a dark cotton blazer. He had seen enough of the clothing on the surrounding white men to know that he at least somewhat fit in. Watching the women in their long dresses, gloves and hats, he found himself hoping that Ella wasn’t arrested as a prostitute as soon as she “landed.”
Rowan registered at the hotel, asking if there was a Miss Stevens registered. The request was met with a frown and the response that guest registration was private. Rowan pocketed his room key and went directly out the front door. Outside, he spotted young Ra again and held up a coin.
“I need information,” he said.
The young man eyed the coin hungrily and nodded.
“I can help, effendi,” he said. “Whatever you are looking for, I can find it for you. Women? Drugs?” His eyes glanced down to Rowan’s clothing. “Tomb treasure?”
Rowan tossed him the coin. “Let’s start with a decent menswear store,” he said.
An hour later, Rowan was in his hotel room dressing for dinner. It was obvious that Shepheard’s was the place to be in 1920’s Cairo if you were white and wealthy. While Ella only qualified for one of those characteristics, Rowan felt sure she would naturally have gravitated to the center of English-speaking society. While he had no real idea of how to behave in this time period, he assumed his natural confidence would get him over the roughest hurdles. As it turned out, he wasn’t wrong.
Upon entering the Shepheard’s dining room, he was escorted to his table but before he even flapped his linen napkin out across his napkin, a stern-faced Shepheard’s maître d approached him with an invitation. “If Mr. Pierce is dining alone tonight,” the man said, “Miss Newton of Arlington, Virginia, would like to extend the invitation to dine with her party.” The invitation was delivered in flat monotones as if the bearer would not dream of influencing Rowan’s decision in any way.
Rowan twisted in his chair to look around the dining room. A plump thirty-something woman with auburn hair waved at him from the center of a large table of six people—none of whom could be accused at first sight as looking either dignified or elegant. Rowan smiled and waved back.
The evening, although tiring in every sense of the full definition of the word—and Rowan was used to some pretty exhausting stakeouts as a US Marshal—was a rousing success.
They had heard of Ella. And even better, they knew where she had gone.
“Oh, they left the day we arrived,” Marvel Newton said, shaking her reddish-brown curls so that they jiggled and vied with her hanging ear-bobs. “But of course the whole place was talking about it because she was with Howard Carter’s party.”
Holy shit! Rowan found his excitement building in spite of himself.
“Can you believe we just missed him? Half the people in my party are amateur Egyptologists. They would have killed to meet the great man, himself.”
“In what way was she with his party, do you know?” Rowan spoke as casually as he could without belying his interest in Marvel’s response.
“Well, I don’t know the specifics,” Marvel said, refilling her own wine glass. An extremely wealthy American heiress, she had made it clear that she cared little for ceremony or class distinctions. For that, Rowan was grateful. “I’m sure I could find out, though. Are you related to her in some way?”
Rowan picked up on the coyness of his benefactress’ question and he hated to do anything which might dam up the flow of information. But in the forty minutes that he had spent with Marvel Newton, if he knew anything else about her, he knew she could smell a lie and wouldn’t tolerate bull shit. Which was just as well, Rowan mused, since he typically didn’t bother with either.
“She’s my wife,” he said bluntly.
“Oh.” Clearly, that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “A runaway wife, one may presume?”
“It’s complicated.”
“My dear, it always is.”
Howard Carter Camp, Valley of the Kings, 1922
One morning, after Ella had been at Carter’s camp a week, William surprised her by joining her on her ride. In the days since they had arrived at the camp, she had fallen into a routine of riding the perimeter of the valley mornings before it got too hot. On the second day, she had gone out after lunch when there was no one to warn her not too (except Julia) and twice she nearly wilted and toppled from her pony before she could get back to camp. While determined not to admit to anyone she had been so foolish, she assumed that the fact that she kept to her tent the rest of the day too ill to appear at dinner probably told the embarrassing truth of her actions.
Mad dogs and Englishmen, she thought, as she tacked up her pony for her morning ride. Normally too busy with his camp chores and servile attendance on the noxious Viscount Digby, William had somehow managed the morning off.
She loved the company of the quiet little man. His English was flecked with accented uplilts at the end of his sentences which made it sound as if he was always asking a question. In a strange way, it reminded her of the way Southerners speak and it felt oddly familiar and comforting amidst this strange world.
She was particularly glad for William’s company today because he was leading her away from the valley to new scenery. They walked their ponies slowly across the rocky ground at the base of the foothills that formed not a half a mile from the valley of stony, barren landscaping, its cliffs studded with the black openings of the discovered tombs. While William talked little as they rode, Ella found herself feeling restored and relaxed in his presence. She let him lead and simply watched the scenery change from rockscape to green, tilled fields. Presently, they came upon a village of small mud huts with cornstalk roofs. The houses were bunched around a main courtyard with a stone fire pit. Around the fire pit were several women who were cooking. As they rode into the village, the men who were standing together in small groups smoking stared at her. She was dressed in her riding clothes and a pith helmet. She pulled up her hijab to shield her face. She wore it less as a display of modesty than to protect her face against the relentless, airborne desert sands.
The women of the village were engaged in a flurry of activity: grinding meal, sewing, weaving baskets, and cooking. The children were naked and running around with dozens of half-wild dogs. The narrow streets of the village were lined with garbage, making them smaller still. Even though the village was surrounded by fields, sand coated every surface. Ella had already discovered that the wind never stopped blowing.
The poverty of the little village was a slap in the face to Ella who suddenly thought of the clean linen sheets on her camp bed, the roast beef she had eaten off a china plate for dinner the night before and the pot of tea she had enjoyed that morning. As she watched the children stop playing to stare at her, she saw swarms of flies on their faces. They didn’t even bother to wave them away.
William dismounted and dropped the reins of his horse on the ground. Ella knew this was a signal to the horse to stay. She wondered how the Egyptians taught their horses to do this and realized that in the desert without hitching posts, it was a very valuable trick. She remained mounted while William approached a grey-bearded old man who sat squatting by the fire. Ella tried to imagine her own father, easily twenty years younger than this old fellow, managing to sit in that position without falling over.
William spoke slowly and respectfully to the old man, who nodded several times and watched Ella closely. For one mad moment, Ella got the impression that William was talking about her. The whole village was staring at her which clearly had nothing to do with what William was saying. An image of a white slave market flashed through Ella’s mind but she scolded herself from even thinking of it.
When William finished talking to the villager, he went
to his saddlebag and pulled out a small leather bag. Ella knew that Carter employed men from the villages around the dig site but she also knew that payday was only once a week. The day after they arrived, she had seen the men toss down their pickaxes and shovels, their baskets and ropes, and queue up in long sluggish serpentine lines to receive their pay from Carter himself. He sat at a table, writing in a huge ledger, as he gave the coins to each man and boy.
William gave the small leather bag to the old man then jumped back on his horse. He turned his horse around to leave the way they had come. Ella followed and smiled at several children who had dared come close to her as they departed. They broke into wide grins. She was struck by what a handsome people the Egyptians were. A quick glance at the village women reminded her of how quickly this arid, hard life aged and ruined that beauty.
After they had ridden out of the village, William explained that Mr. Carter worked harder than most to keep good relations with his workers—above and beyond paying them fair wages. By honoring the elders of their villages, he helped ensure that when problems arose—as they always did—he had some foundation from which to reason with them.
“The poorest Egyptian is superstitious,” William said as they rode back to camp. “All believe in efreets and the spirits of the disturbed dead.” He waved a hand to encompass the valley of tombs before them. “Here they have lived for dozens of centuries among the dead of our kings, our people.”
“I guess they don’t really see the difference between archaeology and grave-robbing.”
William looked at her with interest. “That is exactly true,” he said. “When it is your ancestor’s graves that are being breeched by foreigners, it can be difficult to understand.”
Journey to the Lost Tomb (Rowan and Ella Book 2) Page 10