In the absence of alternative entertainment, I sat back, muttering dark imprecations behind my veil. Miss Lindquist chose to ignore my disgruntlement and began. I add the story here, free of her mutilation of the English tongue, you’ll be happy to know.
***
Ranulf Lindquist’s Notebook
I blinked and found myself under canvas, sturdy, cream-coloured canvas that flapped and strained against the framework of poles and ropes that tethered it to the ground. Outside, the wind raged as though furious the tent was in its path. It slapped the sides, hurling volleys of sand. There was sand everywhere and more was getting in, coating the floor and the furnishings with a layer of golden dust.
Between two low cots stood a small table - little more than a stool - laden with books and charts. Curious, I unrolled a sheet of parchment, hoping to find some clue to my whereabouts. I did not fancy poking my head out into the sandstorm, I can tell you, and getting my nose blasted off.
The sheet was filled with annotated diagrams - there was a schematic of the Nile. Tiny crosses marked out Cairo, Luxor, Memphis...
Egypt, then...
But Egypt, when?
Something about the style of the penmanship, even the very nature of the parchment, suggested I was not in my own time.
A roar like a pouncing lion alerted me to the entrance of someone into the tent. It quieted again as the flaps fell back into place and shut out the wind. I spun around to find a man swathed in the voluminous long shirt and bulbous turban of the natives. His mouth and nose were covered by a neckerchief, which he lowered before addressing me. I saw that beneath the sand-tinged orange of his cheek his jaw was that of a white European. He asked me, in French, what I thought I was doing in his tent. I muttered apologies, wilting beneath the penetrating stare of his piercing grey eyes. He drew a revolver and directed me to a chair.
“Anglais!” he sneered, as though diagnosing leprosy. “You are with Lord Dandycroft’s party, no?”
“No!” I corrected him on the matter of my nationality. If I am to be shot, I would prefer it to be as a Scandinavian rather than a Brit.
Dandycroft... The name rang a distant bell... I raided the tomb of memory. Dandycroft... a peer who sank much of his personal fortune into archaeological expeditions. But that was ancient history - well, perhaps not that ancient, given the context, but at least seventy years...
“Who are you then?” He cocked the gun. “S’il vous plaît.”
I held up my hands at shoulder height, keeping my eyes focussed on the black hole of his gun barrel. Within lay oblivion and it could come hurtling toward me like a runaway train through a tunnel and I would know nothing about it.
“Monsieur, please,” the fellow was waxing impatient.
But what could I tell him? That I had somehow materialised here out of thin air? One moment I was on the banks of Loch Ness and the next I was here in Egypt, decades before I was born?
I couldn’t see that going down well - especially given the woeful quality of my halting French.
“Very well,” I met his gaze, hoping he would not notice the tremble in my fingers and the wavering of my voice. I plucked a name out of the air. “I work for the renowned archaeologist Dr Sandy Blower. But the pay is chickenfeed and the old man overbearing. Therefore, I should like to jump ship, as it were, and work for you, Monsieur - and for Lord Dandycroft, of course. I have some facility with map-reading and I can wield a shovel with the best of them.”
The Frenchman nodded. He stepped back but kept his firearm trained on me. With his free hand he unwrapped his head covering, revealing a shorn scalp, which he scratched vigorously before side-stepping to a dressing table. He snatched up a wig of luxuriant locks and attempted to put it on. The gun was proving an encumbrance.
“Allow me, Monsieur.” I approached. He waved the pistol to ward me off; he would rather sport the damned thing skewwhiff than risk an assault or an escape attempt from me. I kept my hands raised but I took another step. My eyes moved to a notebook splayed open on the desk. “That cartouche,” I nodded. “I think you’ll find it should read ‘reed, reed, twisted flax, ankh, reed.”
Frenchie frowned. “Nonsense!”
“I can assure you,” I said, “I have considerable knowledge of hieroglyphs.”
I refrained from telling him my knowledge came from reading his own studies, published some thirty years hence. The notebook informed me of my captor’s identity. I was being held at gunpoint by none other than Michel Le Clerc, pioneering Egyptologist. Ground-breaking, in fact. Literally.
His professional pride piqued, Le Clerc scowled at his sketches. “What are you saying? The space - the gap on the stone - it should be another reed?”
“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I shrugged.
“Not a water-bearer? Or a lion?”
“Think about it, Monsieur Le Clerc.”
His eyebrows shot up. He was gratified to be recognised; I was correct to play to the man’s vanity. He relaxed somewhat and, though he held on to the pistol, it was no longer pointing at me. He pored over the notebook, comparing it to a chalk rubbing he had made from a stele somewhere or other.
“Nom de plume!” he gasped. “If what you say is correct, we are digging in the wrong place absolutely.”
“It certainly looks that way.”
“Merde!” He paced around the desk. I consulted a map.
“Really, you ought to be concentrating your efforts here,” I pointed at a spot.
Le Clerc peered over my shoulder. “You think?”
“I think!”
Only then did Le Clerc lay down his gun. He put his hands on my shoulders, spun me around to face him and kissed me on both cheeks.
“Monsieur, you have got yourself a job!”
Marvellous, I thought. At least access to maps and charts might enable me to find a way out of there. There must be something, I reasoned, some connection between this location and the banks of Loch Ness. With Le Clerc insisting I go over all his papers, I was in the best position to find out what that was. And how could Le Clerc object? Without my correction, he may never have gone on to make his greatest discovery.
***
“Hold on, old girl!” I broke the cardinal rule and spoke. “This doesn’t add up. If your father had not intervened, Le Clerc would not have become a famous Egyptologist, meaning he would not have published the study of hieroglyphs that enabled your father to correct the error that led him to the discovery that made his name.” Miss Lindquist stared at me. I could almost feel the icicles darting from her eyes.
“That is not important,” she said flatly. “Shall I continue?”
“Not right now, old stick,” I got to my feet. “Call of nature, don’t you know?”
“Your veil!” she cried.
“Oopsy daisy!”
I covered my face and made my way along the juddering corridor to the facilities.
***
When I emerged, having adjusted my dress before leaving, a fellow tipped his hat to me, which was fair enough, given my feminine attire, but he also leered at me in the most alarming manner. He uttered a scandalous, suggestive remark involving a saveloy that I shall not record between these pages and clicked his tongue. I swung my handbag at him and tottered away as fast as my too-small boots could take me, caroming off the corridor walls like a billiard ball.
I shut the door to our compartment and braced myself against it. Miss Lindquist was poring over her father’s journals and was ignorant of my plight - until I told her all about it.
“You are being welcome to my world,” she rolled her eyes to dismiss my distress. “This is what it is meaning to be a woman.”
I squirmed and shuddered. I could still feel that lewd fellow’s eyes on me, all over me.
“Be sitting down and be stoppi
ng wriggling,” Miss Lindquist commanded. “I have found another passage that is being most intriguing and may be proving instructive.”
Loath as I was to cease barricading the door, I took a seat beside her and followed the lateral movements of her finger as she read.
***
“So! This is the fellow to whom we are so deeply indebted!”
Lord Dandycroft sprang from his desk and clasped my hand in both of his. His tent was much larger and grander than Le Clerc’s - he even had potted plants and a piano. Lace doilies adorned every surface. It was quite the stately home from home.
“Bien sûr,” Le Clerc grinned, patting me on the back. “Without him, we would have been up the Swanee.”
I felt myself blush and made noises to belittle my contribution. At last, Lord Dandycroft released me and, bounding over to a globe that doubled as a drinks cabinet, offered me a snifter.
He was a spindly man, made skinnier by his safari suit. His legs were pale and extruded from his baggy shorts like inverted milk bottles. Only his cheeks showed a little colour but whether that was from cognac or exposure to the Carnac sun, I could not determine. Sculpted facial hair - the moustaches joining up with the sideburns - made his other features sharper. His cheekbones, his hooked nose, displayed a patrician air. I suspected the face fuzz was to disguise a rather weak and receding chin.
“I dread to think,” he clinked his glass against mine, “of the time we would have wasted had you not corrected Le Clerc’s error. And never mind the time, think of the money! No, on second thought, don’t! I’ve sunk a good deal from the family coffers into this expedition already but, thanks to you, I should soon be able to recoup my losses and a lot more besides.”
He proposed a toast, to my embarrassment and to Le Clerc’s chagrin; I noticed the Egyptologist did not raise his glass with anything approaching the enthusiasm of His Lordship.
Le Clerc was quick to change the subject. “Have you taken time, Milord, to peruse the day’s find?”
“Have I!” Lord Dandycroft cried. “I’ll say!”
He bustled to his desk, downed the brandy, and got down to business.
“This is only an artist’s impression, of course.” He unrolled a charcoal sketch, “But I believe it is truly exciting.”
The drawing showed the remains of a pillar, buried centuries ago by the ever-shifting sands. The artist had expanded a detail to afford a closer view: a cartouche on the column. Dandycroft invited me to translate. It was the work of seconds.
“Why, this is a doorway!” I exclaimed. “The door to the tomb of a pharaoh!”
“Go on!” Lord Dandycroft beamed at me like I was his nephew unwrapping a birthday present. “Whose tomb?”
I scanned the symbols again and again.
“Good God!” I gasped.
“That’s right.”
He fetched the decanter to recharge our glasses.
We had discovered the final resting place of the mighty king, Nort-Ist-Hep.
***
Dandycroft insisted I be present when the tomb was opened. Without my intervention, he said, the discovery might never have been made, or - worse! - have been found by one of his rivals.
A week of digging ensued. Teams of local men worked around the clock. I used the time to study Le Clerc’s library of maps and charts. He caught me, one day, marking up his atlas.
“Scotland?” he frowned. “My friend, there are no Egyptian tombs there! Or do you perhaps believe the Chieftains took great wealth with them to the grave? A golden haggis, perhaps?”
“Something like that,” I muttered. How could I tell him the truth? That I was trying to track a mysterious portal that followed so-called fairy paths?
At last, the day came. Dandycroft was beside himself with giggly excitement, all his Christmases come at once. He could not wait for us all to don our helmets - his fitted him like a coal scuttle - and hurry to the dig. We stood in a trench, Dandycroft, Le Clerc and I, before a nondescript wall of cracked plaster over rough bricks.
“Remarkable!” breathed Dandycroft in awe. “To think that no one has set eyes on this partition for over four thousand years!”
I suppose, put that way, he had a point.
A bearer handed him a chisel and a mallet and then sharply backed away. I noticed then there were no natives at the scene to witness this momentous moment.
“It is one thing to dig in the dirt,” Le Clerc explained, “Another to desecrate a tomb.”
“Desecration? But we are here in the interests of history and scientific advances.”
“Ah, Mr Lindquist,” Dandycroft smirked in a patronising fashion. “How little you know of human nature! Oh, well; those who do not help to remove the treasure shall get no share of the spoils.”
He placed the bevelled tip of the chisel in the powdery mortar between two stones at eye level. Between blows of his mallet against the chisel handle, he grimaced from the effort and sneered with disdain for the natives. “Superstitious fools! They believe the tomb to be cursed! How you ever heard such claptrap?”
Having worked around the brick, he handed Le Clerc the mallet and took up a crowbar with which to tease out the stone.
“Curse?” I muttered to Le Clerc. The Frenchman made a facial shrug.
“A primitive means of deterring grave-robbers. It need not concern the educated man.”
Dandycroft used his fingertips to coax the brick from its bed. He handed it to Le Clerc, who, staggering slightly from the weight, placed it reverently on the ground.
A black oblong now gaped in the wall, like the mouth of a pillar-box.
“Light!” cried Lord Dandycroft, practically bouncing on the spot. “I must see!”
Le Clerc passed him a flaming torch. Dandycroft posted it through the slot. We heard it drop to the floor. The oblong now glowed like a hole in a furnace door. Dandycroft pressed his face against it to get his first look inside the tomb.
“Marvellous!” he gasped. “I see wonderful things! Gold, gentlemen, and plenty of it - and - Ahh!”
He screamed and staggered back on his spindly legs. He tripped over the brick he had removed and landed on his backside. With the back of one hand to his mouth and the other pointing at the hole in the wall, he tried to scurry away along the trench floor. Le Clerc and I rushed to him.
“No, no!” he waved off our assistance and scrambled to his feet.
“Milord?” said Le Clerc. “What is it?”
“What did you see?” I glanced nervously at the wall.
“Eyes!” cried Lord Dandycroft, his face drenched in sweat and his eyes wide with terror. “A face! Looking right at me!”
“A mask,” Le Clerc was dismissive. “A statue or a moulding on a sarcophagus.”
“No, no!” Dandycroft clung to the Frenchman’s arm. “It was alive! And looking right at me!” He turned to me and whimpered. “It was you! It was your face I saw! You devil! You demon!”
His speech deteriorated into incoherent babble. Le Clerc’s arms folded around him and he looked at me with a mixture of bemusement and alarm.
“What is the meaning of this, Monsieur?”
I had no answer. Beyond the wall, the torch burned out. I turned to find a pistol pointed at me. Dandycroft had regained some of his senses.
“I see it; I see how it is!”
I deemed it politic to raise my arms in a gesture of surrender.
“You are working for my rival,” Lord Dandycroft raved, “You and your identical twin! He became trapped in the tomb and you used my resources to dig him out.”
I considered his hypothesis. It was certainly no more far-fetched than anything I could come up with except I never had an identical twin.
My mind was racing like a runaway locomotive. How had I got in there? It could only be the port
al. But how could I be in two places at once? Or rather, in the same place twice?
“My lord, please put away the gun. There must be an explanation for this extraordinary turn of events.”
“Then let us have it!”
“I am afraid I have none to give.” I nodded at the wall. “We shall have to ask him.”
***
“Curiouser and curiouser!” I pulled a face. “Well, don’t stop there, Miss Lindquist. I am frightfully keen to find out how this all turns out.”
My travelling companion shook her head. “We have reached the final page in the notebook. I am hoping our friend Laird Baird is having the sequel.”
“Dash it all!” I swore - in front of a female, too! “Do you think that is likely?”
“My father was staying at Baird Hall and made use of the extensive library there. It is being possible that some of his effects are still being there, being abandoned since his last disappearance through the Hole.”
I grunted, frustrated not to hear the end of the tale; I have never been one to defer gratification. “Just a minute,” something occurred to me, “Didn’t you say something about something in the story being of help to me? About Cuthbert, I mean.”
She nodded. “Be thinking about it. My father is able to be coming and going through the Hole and also through time and space. It is being altogether likely that your Cuthbert is being safe and sound and to be coming out of the Hole of his own accord.”
“Oh, yes...” Her words gave me some little comfort.
“The question is being not just where but when.”
All the comfort drained from me. Cuthbert could pop up anywhere and at any time in history. Miss Lindquist appeared to read my thoughts.
“But only along the fairy paths, sister dear. Therefore, it is being imperative that we are accessing Laird Baird’s archives as soon as is being possible.”
I was about to give voice to my agreement with her statement when we were alerted by the opening of the compartment door. I had just enough time to pull down my veil. A raised eyebrow from Miss Lindquist prompted me to adjust my posture to a more feminine one. I straightened my back and clapped my knees together - tears sprang to my eyes; I can tell you.
Beware The Peckish Dead! Page 10