Mr Impossible (45 page)

Lord Noxley’s
head came up. “
Your
papyrus,” he repeated. “You
said—”

‘
It’s
mine,“ she said. ”Miles bought it for me. Because I’m
the one. He is the famous scholar Miles Archdale, but I am his
brain.“

AT SUNSET SHE stood
at the window of her room, looking out over the river.

Like London, Thebes
was built on both sides of the river. There the resemblance ended.
This was truly another world. Here, above the fertile plain of the
eastern bank rose the immense temples, obelisks, and pylons of Luxor
and Karnak. On the plain of the western bank the Colossi of Memnon
sat upon on their thrones. Behind them loomed the vast necropolis,
with its temples and tombs. The latter, cut into the flanks of the
Libyan hills, honeycombed the eastern slope. She gazed at the
mountains that concealed the Biban el Muluk and its royal tombs.

“
Is your mind
poisoned, too? Have you completely taken leave of your senses?”

She turned toward
the door, where her brother stood. “Has the sun boiled away
your brain, Daph?” he said. He came in, slamming the door
behind him. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “He
is—he is—” With his forefinger Miles made a
circular motion near his temple.

“
I don’t
care what he is,” she said, turning back to the window. “We
have no pressing reason to return to Cairo, as he pointed out. He’s
most eager to accommodate us. He’s promised to send to Cairo
for my books and materials. There may be a difficulty in replacing my
Coptic lexicons—they were aboard the
Isis
—but he’s promised to make inquiries at the Coptic
monasteries.”

“
Daph, you
must have heard how his fellows ‘make inquiries,’ ”
Miles said. “They beat the soles of a man’s feet with a
stick. For hours. And that’s the mildest sort of
interrogation.”

“
I’ll
ask him not to abuse the monks,” she said. “He wants to
keep me happy.”

“
Of course he
wants to keep you happy,” Miles said. “You’re
filthy rich. With your backing, he could excavate the entire valley.
He could make himself king of Thebes. You’re like the goose
that lays the golden eggs: an endless supply of money.”

Virgil’s
conscience money, she thought. It had been easier for him to leave
her everything after he was dead than to treat her with respect and
kindness while he lived.

“
We shall be
able to explore all of Thebes unhindered,” she said. “All
the royal tombs, including the one Belzoni found. I’ll have
hundreds upon hundreds of samples of hieroglyphic writing. It is a
great opportunity. And I shan’t have to pretend to be someone I
am not.”

“
And he’ll
be able to make either of us do whatever he wants simply by
threatening the other,” Miles said.

“
Then it
would be wise not to provoke him to use threats,” she said.

“
He’s
got it in his head to marry you,” Miles said. “Can’t
you see? He must be master of everything: of you, of your money. And
mad or not, Golden Devil or not, he looks at you the same way other
men do.”

She remembered the
way Rupert looked at her, the glint of laughter in his eyes. She
remembered that last afternoon on the
Isis
..

We could marry.

Her throat started
to close up. She bowed her head and willed the grief back. If she
gave in, she’d sink and never find her way out again. She would
be lost. She couldn’t afford grief. She had to be strong and
hard if she hoped to survive this and find a way out.

“
Use your
head,” she said, her voice harsh. “Your friend won’t
let us go. We have to make the best of matters.”

“
The way you
made the best of Pembroke?” Miles said. “Do you think I
want to see you suffer again?”

She made herself
look at him. She smiled crookedly. “If I could survive Virgil,
I can survive anything,” she said. “We’ll get out
of this somehow. But it will take time and thought and care—and
you must learn to have more confidence in me.”

ON TUESDAY AND
Wednesday they toured Luxor, which, as she’d already discerned,
was a grander spectacle when viewed from a distance, from the other
side of the river or when tidied by the artists of the
Description
de l’Egypte
. The reality, at close quarters, depressed her spirits, although
that may have simply been her state of mind.

The place seemed to
close in on her: the hovels squeezed into every corner and crevice,
the squalor, the pigeons, the refuse, the mounds of sand and rubbish
choking obelisks, pylons, columns.

Still, she made
herself view it with a scholar’s eyes. On Wednesday she
borrowed a notebook from Lord Noxley and began copying inscriptions.

On Thursday, they
went to Karnak. It was no great distance away: less than two miles.
They rode their donkeys along the Avenue of Sphinxes, or what was
left of it. At present, most of the sphinxes were destroyed, and the
southern part of the avenue was covered with soil and rubbish.

Yet this
destruction failed to diminish the place. Neither did the monuments’
being half buried make them any the less overwhelming. The vast
pylons, the giant forests of columns, the obelisks, colossi, and
sphinxes—it was all as the
Description
de I’Egypte
had illustrated, at length and in detail. Nonetheless, the reality
far exceeded anything Daphne could have imagined.

As they made their
way along the principal avenue in the hypostyle hall, she gazed up at
the avenue of twelve immense columns—the largest in any
Egyptian building, Noxley said—and wondered what Rupert would
have made of it.

In her mind’s
eye she saw him looking up at one of the lotus-shaped capitals much
as he’d gazed at Chephren’s pyramid: fists on his hips,
the breeze ruffling his black hair. She could almost hear the deep
voice saying, “It’s big.”

And she smiled, but
her lips wobbled, and her throat ached, and tears blurred her vision.

She closed her eyes
and willed back the tears. She must keep working, employ her
intellect instead of her emotions. Her work had given her strength
before and would again. Her mind was the one ally she could always
rely upon. In time, it would show her the way out.

THAT NIGHT DAPHNE
dreamt of a pharaoh’s tomb.

She descended
sixteen steps into an entrance passage. At the end of it was a
chamber crowded with various objects: boxes, baskets, jars, and
articles of furniture shaped like animals. Her gaze was drawn to the
right, to two figures guarding a door. She passed the two figures and
stepped through the doorway into a dark chamber.

A faint light
showed her a pair of doors. She opened them. An immense golden
sarcophagus stood within. Goddesses stood at its corners, their wings
spread out, protecting what lay within.

Daphne climbed a
set of steps and looked down into the sarcophagus.

There lay Rupert
Carsington, as though asleep, wearing a small, sweet smile like the
one on the statue of Ramesses the Great at Memphis.

He wore a kilt of
gold cloth and lay with his arms crossed over his naked chest. In the
soft light, the muscled planes of his torso gleamed a darker gold.

She reached down
and touched his face.

“
Miss you,”
she whispered.

Tears trickled down
her face and onto his.

He said, “Daphne,
wake up.”

No. She didn’t
want to leave the dream. She would never see him again except in
dreams.

“
Daphne, wake
up.”

She tried to say
no, but nothing came out.

She opened her eyes
to darkness. A hand covered her mouth. It wasn’t her hand. It
was big, and… familiar.

There was the
scent. Man-scent.
His
.

A deep voice
growled, “No screaming. No weeping. No fainting.”

She choked out the
three words on a sob, as her arms went round his neck: “I.
Never. Faint.”

Chapter 20

UNDER THE THIN
BLANKET, SHE WAS SOFT AND wondrously curved and practically naked. As
he pulled her tight against him, Rupert discovered that there was
almost nothing in the way: a scrap of thin fabric, her
kamees
, bunched up at her waist. All the rest was skin, clean and
silken-smooth and… strange.

Something was
missing.

He buried his face
in her neck and sniffed.

He raised his head.
“What have they done to you?” he whispered. “Something’s
missing. The goddess scent.”

“
What have
they done to me? To
me
? I thought you were dead.”

“
I know. I
thought I was, too, at first.”

“
I saw you
shot,” she said. “You clutched your chest and went over.
You didn’t come up again.”

“
The ball
grazed me, just under my arm,” he said. “A scratch. But I
tripped. Lost my balance and went over. And, as usual, I hit my head.
I came to my senses a good ways downriver, clinging to a piece of
boarding plank. It was deuced embarrassing.”

“
Embarrassing.”

“
The boys
look up to me,” he said. “I’m a hero. Heroes don’t
trip. Heroes don’t knock their heads on the way down. I must
have looked a complete clodpate.”

She pulled his face
to hers and kissed him. So gently and sweetly at first. He tasted
tears. He should have said,
No weeping
again, but he couldn’t.
The tender kiss started a queer ache inside him, not quite happy and
not quite sad. It was the thing she did to him: stirring up feelings
he had no names for.

He’d been
wild, half-mad, when he finally caught up with the
Isis
and
clambered aboard, wet and bruised but scarcely bleeding at all,
though you’d never know it to hear everyone carrying on. It had
taken him most of the five days’journey to Thebes to calm down,
collect his wits, and realize how lucky his clumsiness was.

If the villains
hadn’t believed he was dead, they would have made sure of it.

Now they wouldn’t
be expecting him. They wouldn’t be looking for him.

He had to make the
most of the opportunity.

In a minute.

Right now, he was
starved for the taste of her, the feel of her, the warmth and
willingness and wickedness of her. He slid his hands down her smooth
back, and brought them down to enclose the delicious inward turn of
her waist. He grasped her wonderfully naked backside and crushed her
against his groin,

“
I missed
you,” she murmured against his mouth. She rubbed her cheek
against his, in that way she had, and something opened up inside him,
deep and dark. He didn’t know what it was or why.

But he remembered
the emptiness. He remembered how he’d see a strange bird and
turn to point it out to her, and then remember she wasn’t
there.

He remembered
looking into her cabin, where they’d made slow, silent love. He
couldn’t stop himself from picking up a cushion and pressing it
to his face, hungrily seeking her scent… running his fingers
over the covers and spines of her books… staring into the
pages of her notebooks at the neat script and the words he didn’t
understand and the sketches: the little figures and signs, all
incomprehensible.

“
I missed
you, too,” he said. He’d missed her terribly, beyond
anything he could, have imagined.

He wanted to
capture her mouth again, and everything else, and claim her in the
most primitive of ways.

There wasn’t
time.

He drew away. “Well
then, we’d best be going,” he said.

“
Going?”
she said in a dazed voice. “We’re going?”

“
Yes. Now.
You. Me. The window.” He sat up, silently ordering his privy
councilor to settle down. “Where are your clothes? Never mind.
A cloak will do. You’ve clothes on the boat.”