Mr Impossible (46 page)

“
I don’t
think—”

“
You haven’t
time to think,” he said. “We need to leave before the
guards begin to sober—or someone smells the hashish and gets
suspicious,” he said.

She rubbed her
face. “Hashish?”

“
Remember
your drugged doorkeeper? So cheerfully useless? How else do you think
I could climb up the side of the house without setting off an
uproar?”

“
I can’t
leave Miles,” she said.

“
I know, but
he’s not conveniently situated at the moment,” Rupert
said. “I can’t get to his window, and I can’t go
through the house. We couldn’t drug everybody, and there are a
great lot of people in the way. A maidservant sleeping outside your
door. Other servants elsewhere, everywhere, underfoot. And then there
are the guards prowling the passages.”

“
How do you—”

“
Leena’s
been spying for us,” he said. “Made friends with a
talkative servant girl. Can we go into the details later? We can’t
dawdle.”

“
I cannot
leave Miles,” she said. “If I disappear, he’ll
pay.”

“
No, he
won’t. He’s too valuable for them to harm. We’ll
devise a cunning plan to get him out. By tomorrow. I promise.”
He rose from the divan. “Where’s your cloak?”

She rose slowly.
“He isn’t valuable,” she said.

“
You know
that and I know that,” he said, “but—”

“
Noxley knows
my secret,” she said.

THERE WAS A short,
taut pause. Then, “Yes, of course,” he said, “I
should have known this would be complicated.”

“
I told him,”
she said. “I had to. Miles could never keep up the pretense,
living under the same roof, day in, day out. He started drinking to
avoid answering difficult questions, and he has no head for liquor.”

“
I
understand,” he said. “I assumed it couldn’t be
helped. We’ll deal with the problem. In the meantime—”

“
Miles
believes Noxley’s insane,” she said. “I’m not
sure of that. I am very sure
he
won’t do anything to Miles. Noxley likes to appear noble and
kind.” Another fraud, like Virgil. “He has others do the
dirty work for him: torturing, maiming, killing people.”

“
Daphne—”

“
Shhhh.”
She laid her fingers over his mouth.

Sounds. Footsteps.
Voices. Outside the door.

He looked that way.
He heard it, too.

She pushed him
toward the window. “Go.”

“
Not without
you.”

She didn’t
want him to go without her, either, but they had no choice. And no
time to argue.

She made a fist and
hit him backhanded in the chest. “You’re alive,”
she said. “Stay alive, or I’ll never get out of this.
Go
.”

The sounds grew
louder.

Daphne hurried back
to the divan.
Go
, she begged silently.
Please go
.

She felt rather
than heard him move away.

There was a quick,
impatient rap at the door. A maidservant’s voice called softly:
was all well with the lady?

Daphne lay down and
drew up her thin blanket. The door flew open.

She sat up hastily
and looked about her, in the manner of one abruptly awakened.

A maidservant stood
in the doorway, holding an oil lamp. Behind her a tall, bulky figure
loomed.

“
The guard
heard sounds,” the servant said, holding the lamp aloft.
“Voices, he says.”

“
Did he?”
Daphne said. “I must have been talking in my sleep. I had very
strange dreams.”

May

DAPHNE WENT WITH
Noxley and Miles to Karnak again on Friday. It was amazing how
glorious the place seemed, now the black weight had lifted from her
heart. She soon filled her notebook, and Lord Noxley sent a servant
to Luxor for another. She spent the latter part of the day in a small
room called the Chamber of Kings. Under the various pharaohs’
sculpted images were their hieroglyphic names, which she copied.

“
You will not
be bored, I think, if we return tomorrow?” Lord Noxley asked
her as they started back to Luxor at sunset.

“
I believe I
could spend a month and never grow bored,” she said. “But
another day will suffice, if you have other plans.”

“
We can
always return,” Noxley said. “But perhaps if you made a
general survey of Thebes, you might then choose the places of
greatest use to your studies. I thought we might make a tour of the
western bank next week. I do suspect you will find that area even
more fascinating, Mrs. Pembroke. There one may study not only temples
and palaces but the tombs as well. Equally important, the Tombs of
the Nobles will supply you amply with papyri.”

He went on to
denounce the inhabitants of western Thebes, the Qurnans, who
destroyed the tombs, tore mummies to pieces, and burnt beautifully
decorated mummy cases for firewood.

“
It was their
ancestors who stripped bare the kings’ tombs in the Biban el
Muluk, you may be sure,” his lordship said. “The whole
greedy, thieving tribe should have been eradicated long ago, but the
Turkish authorities will not bestir themselves. The trouble is, no
one here considers tomb robbing an important crime. The Turks are
diligent only in collecting taxes and bribes and bullying the
peasants. They are barbarians who do not understand or care about
bygone civilizations. They dismantle ancient temples to build
factories.”

“
We’re
not so different,” Daphne said. “We of supposedly
enlightened nations plunder and destroy, too. It cannot be right to
violate the dead, to tear mummies to pieces to find jewelry and
papyri. But without the papyri, how are we scholars to understand the
past? Is it right to leave the monuments here, at risk of
destruction? Or is it right to take them away to our palaces and
museums and mansions abroad? I don’t know what the answer is. I
only know that my papyrus came from one of those tombs—courtesy
of the Qurnans.”

Noxley shook his
head. “Yours came from no ordinary Theban tomb,” he said.
“It came from a
king’s
tomb, from the Biban el Muluk.”

“
That’s
what Anaz claimed,” Miles said.

“
Now that
I’ve had an opportunity to study it closely, and compare it to
a host of others, I am more inclined to believe him,” Noxley
said. “The cartouches, for instance. I’ve seen any number
in royal tombs and on temples and other monuments, but never on a
papyrus. Still, most papyri are written in the script, you know, not
the picture signs, so I may have seen royal names without realizing.”

Daphne had not seen
enough papyri to make any such generalizations. “How many other
papyri have you studied?” she said.

“
I should
never presume to say I’ve studied them, not as you have,”
he said. “I’m an explorer, not a scholar. But I’ve
seen a great many—and at present I have at least two score.”

“
That is a
great many,” she said. More than twice as many as she owned.

“
You are
welcome to make use of them,” he said. “I know your visit
to Thebes started off on the wrong foot, but I am determined to make
it right. Let me begin fresh by speaking frankly and honestly, as you
clearly prefer. I should dearly love to discover a royal tomb. And
you, I know, wish to unlock the secrets of the hieroglyphs. Working
together, as allies—I shall not presume to speak of anything
more, at present—but as allies, as a team, we are more likely
to realize our ambitions, do you not think?”

“
And Miles?”
Daphne asked. “What is his role?”

Noxley turned a
sweet smile upon her brother. “Arch-dale, you deceived me
dreadfully. I was furious at first, to think what a fool you’d
made of me. But you only did so on this lady’s behalf. And so I
forgive you. I am sure you’d rather try to discover a royal
tomb than spend your time learning Coptic and solving word puzzles.
You had some ideas, I believe, about locating tomb entrances. Perhaps
we might put our heads together?”

“
Certainly,”
Miles said. “Much more agreeable than having it cut off.”

Lord Noxley
laughed, as though it were a joke, and went on to talk about
Belzoni’s tomb and the likelihood of there being others even
more impressive.

The conversation
lagged as they reached Luxor and had to make their way through its
narrow byways. Shortly before they reached the house, an old woman
accosted Daphne and offered to tell her fortune.

Noxley gave her a
coin and told her to come another time: the lady was weary today. The
crone took the coin and offered to give the lady a charm for good
fortune. Noxley shrugged.

The fortune teller
took Daphne’s hand and muttered, too low for anyone but Daphne
to hear, “He comes with fire. Be ready.”

THOUGH SHE WAS his
sister, Miles had always understood that men turned into drooling
idiots on account of Daphne’s figure.

That was natural
enough.

What he didn’t
understand was why those who managed to get close to her must be
queer in the attic.

The poetically
handsome Pembroke, with his sweet, gentle ways, had turned out to be
a pious hypocrite of a tyrant. He was possessive, madly jealous of
other men, and even more madly jealous of Daphne’s superior
intellect.

Noxley was another
one with a beautiful exterior and charming ways and a black heart.
And he was a fine one to speak of Miles’s deceiving him,
considering how he had completely taken in Miles.

Like Pembroke,
Noxley was possessive to an extreme. This was a man, after all, who
thought all of Thebes belonged to him. He was also a torturer and
killer by proxy. And when someone presented him with a man’s
head in a basket, he lit up like a child who’d got a new
hobbyhorse or a set of toy soldiers.

The closest he came
to a redeeming quality was his lack of jealousy of Daphne’s
mind. But then, he believed her mind would eventually lead him to a
great discovery, if not a great treasure. Noxley wanted fame and
power, but he wasn’t averse to increasing his wealth, either.

But Daphne said
they had to go along, and she was right. They were prisoners in
Thebes. They were watched constantly. They couldn’t get away
without help, and everyone here was either too corrupted or too
terrified to take such a risk.

At the moment,
you’d think Noxley was the dearest, sweetest fellow in the
world.

They’d had
their dinner and as he’d done before when only Miles was here,
Noxley brought out the papyrus. This evening, though, he had several
others brought in, and he was laying them out carefully on the carpet
for her perusal.

Daphne knelt beside
him, her attention completely on the documents. Noxley’s
attention was completely on her, especially her bosom, as she
launched into one of her stunningly boring lectures on Dr. Young’s
work and where she agreed and disagreed with him, and why.

Perhaps because his
mind was elsewhere, it did not put Noxley to sleep as you’d
expect. Still, he did eventually acquire the vacant, dazed expression
with which Miles was more than familiar. Those who could stay awake
always looked that way after listening to Daphne for a time.

Boring, studious
Daphne. If she didn’t have her nose in a book, she had it
smudged with ink, while she drew her little charts and her rows and
columns of alphabets, signs, words. Shy, reclusive, logical Daphne.

The same woman
who’d set out—with Rupert Carsing-ton! Hargate’s
Hellion!—on a mad scheme to rescue her brother.

This wasn’t
the sister Miles thought he knew. Yet this was Daphne, beyond
question, droning on about Coptic and other brain-strangling arcana.

“
The sun
sign, for instance,” she was saying, pointing to a cartouche.
“Here it stands alone, and I am quite sure it is
ra
or
re
, the Coptic for sun, whereas Dr. Young puts it in combination with a
pillar symbol and gives the god the name
Phre
—”

A bloodcurdling
scream cut her off. Another followed, then shouting.