Mr Impossible (3 page)

Chapter
2

THE
SOUND OF AN ENGLISH VOICE-AN ENGLISH
woman’s
voice—was more welcome than Rupert would have guessed.

He had been growing
exceedingly bored. The feminine sound instantly revived his good
humor.

He
knew which of the females had spoken. His eyes had long since grown
accustomed to the darkness. Though both women were veiled, the taller
wore European dress. He knew she was not only English, but a lady.
The cultured accents of her clear, musical voice—a trifle
unsteady at present—told him so.

He
could not, however, determine whether she was old or young, pretty or
not. He knew, too, that one could never be absolutely certain of a
woman’s figure until she was naked. But looking on the bright
side, she must possess all the necessary parts—and if she’d
made it down all those hundreds of stairs, she couldn’t be
decrepit.

“
Mrs.
Pembroke, may I present Mr. Rupert Carsington,” Beechey said.
“Mr. Carsington, Mrs. Pembroke has generously agreed to pay for
your release.”

“
Have
you, indeed, ma’am? That’s deuced charitable of you.”

“
It
is nothing of the kind,” she said stiffly. “I’m
buying you.”

“
Really?
I’d heard the Turks were severe, but I never guessed they’d
sell me into slavery. Well, well, you learn something new every—”

“
I am buying
your services,” she cut in, the musical voice frosty.

“
Ah, I stand
corrected. And which services would you be requiring?”

Rupert heard her
sharp inhalation.

Before she could
retort, Beechey said smoothly, “It is an assignment, sir. Mr.
Salt has released you from your regular consular duties so that you
may assist Mrs. Pembroke in searching for her brother.”

“
If all you
want is a brother, you’re welcome to one of mine,” Rupert
said. “I’ve four. All saints. Ask anybody.”

He was not a saint,
and no one had ever mistaken him for one.

The lady turned
toward Mr. Beechey. “Are you sure this is the only man
available?”

“
How did you
contrive to lose your brother, by the way?” Rupert said. “In
my experience, the feat’s impossible. Everywhere I go, there
they are. Except here. That was one reason I jumped at the chance
when my father offered. It came as a vast relief, I’ll admit.
When he summoned me to his study, I thought it was going to be one of
those devil-and-the-deep-blue-sea choices, like the one he offered
Alis-tair three years ago: ‘Get married or suffer a fate worse
than death,’ or something like that. But it was nothing of the
kind. It was, ‘Why don’t you go toEgypt, there’s a
good boy, and find your cousin Tryphena some more of those stones
with the picture writing on them.’ Stones and—What else
did she want? Those brown rolled-up thingums. Paper rice or some
such.”

“
Papyri
,”
came the melodious voice, strained through gritted teeth, by the
sounds of it. “The singular is
papyrus
. The plural
is
papyri
. The Latin word derives from the ancient Greek. It
is a paper made, not from rice, sir, but from a reed plant native to
these regions. The articles you refer to, furthermore, are not
‘thingums,’ but valuable ancient documents.” She
paused, then said in milder, puzzled tones, “Did you say
Tryphena? You do not refer to Tryphena Saunders?”

“
Yes, my
cousin—the one with the hobbyhorse about the comical picture
writing.”

“
Hieroglyphs
,”
said the lady. “The decipherment of which—Never mind.
Attempting to explain to you their importance would be, I have not
the smallest doubt, an expenditure of breath to no purpose.”

She turned
abruptly, in a delicious rustle of silk, and started away.

Beechey hurried
after her. “Madam, I do apologize for detaining you in this
disagreeable place. Naturally you are distressed. However, I must beg
you to recollect—”

“
That man,”
she said in low but still audible tones, “is an
idiot
.”

“
Yes, madam,
but he’s all we’ve got.”

“
I may be
stupid,” Rupert said, “but I’m irresistibly
attractive.”

“
Good grief,
conceited, too,” she muttered.

“
And being a
great, dumb ox,” he went on, “I’m wonderfully easy
to manage.”

She paused and
turned to Beechey. “Are you sure there’s no one else?”

“
Not between
here andPhilae.”

Philaemust be a
good distance from here, else the lady wouldn’t be scouring the
dungeons ofCairofor help, Rupert thought. “I’m as strong
as an ox, too,” he said encouragingly. “I could lift you
up with one hand and your maid with the other.”

“
He’s
cheerful, madam,” Beechey said, sounding desperate. “We
must give him that. Is it not remarkable how he’s kept up his
spirits in this vile place?”

Obligingly, Rupert
began to whistle.

“
Obviously,
he doesn’t know any better,” she said.

“
In the
present circumstances, fearlessness is a great asset,” Beechey
said. ‘The Turks respect it.“

The lady said
something under her breath. Then she turned to the Turk who’d
brought them—someone important, apparently, with an immense
turban—and said some-thing in one of those impossible Oriental
tongues. The big-turbaned fellow tsk-tsked a good deal. She talked
some more. He didn’t seem happy. It went on.

“
What’s
she saying?” Rupert called out.

Beechey said they
spoke too quickly for him to follow.

The maid drew
closer to Rupert. “My mistress bargains for you. I am sorry for
you that your wits are so slow. When we came, she was willing to pay
almost the full price, but now she says you are not worth so much.”

“
Really? How
much were they asking?”

“
With all the
bribes, it came to three hundred purses,” she said. “A
white girl slave—the most expensive slave— is only two
hundred purses.”

“
I don’t
suppose you know what three hundred purses amounts to in pounds,
shillings, and pence?” Rupert said.

“
It is more
than two thousand English pounds.”

Rupert let out a
soft whistle. “That does seem steepish,” he said.

“
This is what
she tells the sheik,” the maid said. “She says you are of
little worth to anybody. She says your head on a pike would be good
for entertaining the Cairenes, but this is all the value she sees.
She tells him that lords are as common inEnglandas sheiks inEgypt.
She says only the oldest son of an English lord is valuable, and you
are one of the youngest. She says your father sent you away because
you are an imbecile.”

“
Astonishing,”
he said with a laugh. “She can tell all that—when we’ve
only just met—and in the dark, too. What an amazingly clever
woman ”

The turbaned fellow
launched into a harangue. The lady shrugged and started to walk away.

The price of
release was ridiculous; no one in his right mind would pay it,
including Lord Hargate. All the same, Rupert was disappointed to see
her depart.

Searching for her
brother could be interesting. It had to be more interesting than
digging in sand for broken chunks of stone, and a good deal more
amusing than prying papyri from the clutches of ancient corpses. Yes,
he knew what the correct word was. If he’d heard it once, he’d
heard it a thousand times from Tryphena. He’d said it wrong
only to hear Mrs. Pembroke’s reaction—and that was highly
entertaining.

Now he might never
find out what she looked like.

The maid left to
follow her mistress. Beechey threw up his hands and started after
them.

Rupert watched the
taller feminine figure until the gloom swallowed her up.

Then the turbaned
man called out something.

Mrs. Pembroke
emerged from the gloom, and Rupert’s heart gave a small but
unmistakable leap.

DAPHNE DIDN’T
STAY to see Mr. Carsington released. Having settled on the price, she
left Mr. Beechey to sort out the details and distribute bribes—the
baksheesh that oiled most transactions in theOttoman Empire.

She couldn’t
wait to be away from the Citadel. Her skin crawled. She berated
herself for bargaining with the sheik for so long. But to discover
the sort of blockhead upon whom her hopes were to depend, then to be
bullied by an official who very likely couldn’t write his own
name—

It had made her
nearly wild.

Her brother was in
trouble—lost, hurt, possibly dead— and all the men she’d
encountered so far made light of it, mocked her, or tried to thwart
her. She wanted to weep with frustration.

But above all, she
wanted to get away—from the Citadel and that stinking pit and
all those callous men.

As she emerged at
last through one of the fortress’s doorways into the light, she
drank in gulps of hot late-morning air.

“
Do you know
why they put him there, mistress, so deep under the ground, in
chains?” Leena said as she caught up with her.

“
It’s
obvious,” Daphne said. “Mr. Salt said Mr. Carsington is
the man who assaulted the Turkish soldier yesterday. The man is a
brainless, brawling ruffian.”

She walked faster
toward the Citadel gate, beyond which their donkeys and donkey
drivers waited. “I truly hope the other sons are saints, as
this one claims,” she con-tinued irritably. “It might
compensate Lord and Lady Har-gate for the affliction—”
She broke off as she discerned the logical conclusion of her own
words. “Oh, what have I done?”

Daphne stopped
short, and Leena bumped into her.

When they’d
disentangled their respective veils, Daphne said, “We must send
a message to Mr. Salt, declining Mr. Carsington’s services.”

“
But you
bought him,” Leena said.

“
I wasn’t
thinking clearly,” Daphne said. “The place stank so, and
the rats were so bold. Meanwhile, there was the illiterate sheik
trying to frighten me—and Mr. Carsing-ton behaving so
provokingly with his ‘paper rice’ and ‘thingums.’
If I had not been so beset, I should have realized that no man could
be more ill suited for my purposes than he. We shall be dealing with
villains, I’m sure of it. The task wants a cool, calculating
brain. What I need is another Belzoni: a man who knows when to employ
persuasion, even guile, and when to use force.”

“
When first
we came here, and Mr. Beechey took you to meet the sheik, I heard the
guards talking,” Leena said. “They said no guardhouse
could hold this Englishman. He is quick and cunning and without fear.
This is the reason they chained him in the deepest dungeon ofCairo.”

“
Anyone who
is utterly fearless is either demented or dim-witted,” Daphne
said.

Leena pointed to
her head. “You have enough up here for six men. You do not need
a man with a great brain. You need a man with big muscles and great
courage.”

Daphne didn’t
know whether Mr. Carsington had big muscles or not. All she’d
seen was the tall, dark form. Yet there was nothing shadowy about his
presence. She’d been aware of him the entire time she haggled
with the sheik. She’d heard the deep voice in the background—a
rumble tinged with laughter, when he had nothing to laugh about.
She’d heard the scrabbling rats. She’d smelled the filth.
And she knew what his captors were like.

While she’d
argued with the sheik, her mind had wandered repeatedly to the
prisoner. Twenty-four hours he’d spent in that place, in the
dark, figurative and literal. He’d no idea what would become of
him, whether his captors would whip or torture or mutilate him,
whether his friends would ever find him or he’d die there,
alone.

Miles might be in
the same plight.

A cold knot formed
in the pit of her stomach.

“
I feel
filthy,” she said. “I need a bath. We’ll have
plenty of time. It will be an age before Mr. Beechey and the sheik
have completed all their bureaucratic rituals.”