Cynthia Bailey Pratt Read online

  She felt quite certain that nothing she’d said had improved his opinion, either of her or her sex. Perhaps this was not a good moment to mention that the first three words of his question were the truest. “That is my fondest hope.”

  “Dismiss it. I would not take you even if you were precisely as I imagined you to be. Egypt is no place for a gently reared Englishwoman.”

  “My mother was a Scot.”

  “Regardless.” Suddenly, he smiled. A warmth and a humor appeared in his eyes that transformed him from a very good-looking man into one of great attractiveness. He looked younger, more tolerant, and friendly. It was as if the man in the letters had come to life.

  He rose from behind his desk and came around to sit on the edge of the crowded surface in front of her. “Miss Hanson, the very idea of a woman being involved in a dig is impossible. On remote sites, such as where I found the tomb of An-ket, one doesn’t see a European face for days, sometimes weeks. A young woman might find herself in a very unsavory position without a husband’s or father’s protection.”

  “Unfortunately, my father is a wool merchant with very little intention of ever visiting Egypt. If he were in cotton, now ...”

  “And you have no husband in mind?”

  She couldn’t bring herself to meet his eyes. “One day, I hope ...”

  Simon’s chuckle was warm. ‘There’s always some man in the back of a lady’s mind, even if she wouldn’t admit it on the rack, eh? Is he nice?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Ah!” He nodded in an odiously sage fashion. “Take my advice, Miss Hanson. We have had a charming correspondence but no man likes the woman he’s set his heart on writing letters to another man.”

  “We are not to write to one another anymore? But how foolish! I may not be the eighty-year-old spinster you imagined, but I am twenty-seven! That makes me practically an antique myself! Certainly everyone at home has long since despaired of my marrying. In short, Mr. Archer, I am on the shelf as thoroughly as ... as that broken shabti up there.”

  She nodded toward a fragment of limestone on one of a series of shelves stuffed with a variety of objects, most very dusty. Simon stood up, looking toward the shelves.

  His hip nudged one thing on his desk, which pushed another, which toppled a pile of small stones. The last thing to fall was a sandwich of glass, a tattered scrap of papyrus sealed up with wax between the two sheets of glass.

  With a speed that she blinked to see, Simon jumped to catch the precious casing. In a twisting slide that he must have learned on the rugby field, he succeeded in getting under it, though not without sending a stack of papers fluttering to the floor.

  Julia came over to him, stepping carefully among the sheets of paper that covered the floor like a snowstorm. She took the protective glass that Simon handed her. As he stood up, rubbing his hip, she gazed on the faded letters written in brown and red ink. “Sweet sister,” she read aloud, charmed as always by the tiny perfection of each symbol. “Sit with thy brother upon the river bank to discuss the exact moment when first we loved....”

  Simon stood before her, his hand outstretched, silently demanding the return of the papyrus. She gave it to him with a smile, hoping he’d notice that she’d translated at sight. She said, “I always wonder that they lived a thousand years before Christ and yet their voices are so fresh they might have lived and loved only yesterday.”

  Despite himself, Simon was impressed. He himself could read hieroglyphics, but not with such an easy familiarity. He’d put off reading this love poem, despite its beauty, because he felt slightly impatient these days with all such soft emotions.

  “There’s little room for such sentiment in ...” Simon looked down at the papyrus. There were dozens of symbols yet his glazed vision saw only two sets. “To discuss” was made up of the symbol of an erect phallus over a half loaf of bread, both of which were immediately repeated, followed by a cow’s ear. “Exact moment” was very similar. The Egyptians used everything in their natural world to make sure their written language and their drawings were crisply delineated, concealing nothing.

  He felt a flood tide of embarrassment stain his cheeks. She apparently felt nothing of the kind. She looked at him with those big, bright eyes that seemed every moment to be asking him some question he could not understand.

  Simon tried to force an avuncular tone into a suddenly rasping throat. “You may believe yourself to be beyond the age of marriage, but you are still young enough to be a bride. Take my advice. Go home to Yorkshire. Take an interest in dress and dancing and capture this fortunate man, whoever he is.”

  “I’m sure that is excellent advice, but I have no intention of taking it. You will see me in Egypt, Mr. Archer, where I am certain to be of great assistance to you, if only in helping you translate your papyrus.”

  She really had a most determined chin, but he could be determined, too. “No, thank you. I no longer find myself in need of help. I’ve been applying myself rigorously ... day and night.”

  “You’re taking my hieroglyphics away?”

  “They are not yours, you know.”

  “Yes, but I...”

  He laid the glass sandwich that he was hiding behind him on the desktop. “I’m sorry I shan’t be able to show you the exhibition today. I must prepare myself for this evening. Would you like me to ask the porter to summon you a cab?”

  “Mr. Archer, I—

  “Really, Miss Hanson, I have a great deal to do.” He started to herd her toward the door. He slipped around her to hold it open.

  “You aren’t being very fair. It’s not my—

  “Good day, Miss Hanson.”

  He had never been frightened of a woman before, but something in Miss Hanson’s expression made him fear that she would cry. Somehow it hurt him to think that he’d brought tears to those eyes. He was glad to close the door so that he would not see her break down. There was a few moments of silence, in which he could hear his heart beating. Then her footsteps sounded, slowly moving away.

  Simon told himself that he was doing the right thing. No young woman’s eyes should look upon such things as erect phalli, some in the process of emitting fluids, and women giving birth—the word being the image. It might be too late to restore Miss Hanson’s lost bloom, but he would if he could prevent her from coarsening herself with his connivance. Decent Englishwomen had a place in the world and it was not in a camp in the midst of the Egyptian desert. He’d swear to that.

  Yet why, then, did he feel so guilty? He felt as though he’d murdered something, if only a dream. It was as well that he would never see Miss Julia Hanson again. She was much too disturbing to his peace of mind.

  Chapter Three

  This wing of the museum was not yet twenty years old, the great quadrangle beyond only just more than a plan on paper. Yet already the museum in the heart of the Bloomsbury residential district was stuffed full of the great art of the Western world, as well as a bizarre assortment of things too good to be lost on the rubbish heap of history but hardly classifiable as classical.

  It reminded her irresistibly of the home of the dowager countess, Beryl of Haye, right down to the slight smell of must. That lady had left the family seat upon the earl’s marriage to a young lady of whom the dowager did not approve. In addition to her personal effects, she insisted on claiming various family heirlooms—the bigger, the better. The earl had not objected, for his bride did not admire antiques. The Dower House was a charming villa set in its own grounds but no room was on the majestic scale that the dowager had been accustomed to dwelling in for the past forty years. The result had been rooms in which one moved sideways, if at all.

  Julia had often visited the dowager, seeing in her the kind of gleefully unmanageable old woman that she hoped to become herself. The dowager was one of the few who encouraged her in her dreams. “Egyptology is a ridiculous profession for a woman, but if that is what you want, permit no consideration to prevent you! As for your father, men are trifling creatures,
upset by the slightest deviation in routine. It’s very good for them.”

  Perhaps, Julia thought as she maneuvered sideways between two Abyssinian lions, that was what was wrong with Simon Archer. He did not seem to be a man who enjoyed having his ideas shaken out like a mattress. She should have, she now saw, approached him much more obliquely. Rushing straight to her point had been a mistake.

  She frowned up at a crack in one lion’s waving stone beard. From his letters, he’d seemed so different, like a friend who would understand her. It never occurred to her mat he would be so obstinate! Little did he realize that he’d met his match.

  A footstep interrupted her musing. Julia froze, sweeping back her skirt so that her outline would not be visible behind the flowing toga of a stone Caesar, eternally addressing the senate from atop a half-column.

  The watchman, a portly man who was lamentably pigeon-toed, passed by, the keys at his waist jingling. As he moved across the floor, he passed from square to square formed by the moonlight pouring down through windows very high up in the walls. The grids were in the shape of cutout stars and the pattern decorated the light-colored squares of the floor.

  When his footsteps faded, Julia emerged from her haven, giving Caesar’s sandaled foot a pat of thanks. The Egyptian antiquities were jumbled into a room of their own slightly farther down the corridor, which was itself packed with relics from every conceivable civilization from a huge copy of Hammurabi’s column of laws to glass cases full of tiny ivory carvings from Japan. She passed Byzantine diptychs hung on the wall alongside Persian carpets brilliantly colored but soft to the hand. All of it was magnificent in its own way; none of it moved her.

  She turned to enter the room where the Egyptian antiquities were kept. Almost everything here came from the two collections the museum had bought, at a bargain price, from Henry Salt, once British consul in Egypt. One set had been purchased in 1818 for a meager two thousand pounds. The other had come to the museum after Salt’s death in 1827. Salt was one of those destructive collectors who seemed to care only for the “biggest,” the most “magnificent,” and never gave a thought for the damage the removal of the huge granite sphinxes and obelisks caused. But he did have taste.

  For a few minutes, Julia wandered in a daze through the large room. Until this moment, the only true antiquities she’d seen had been those few statues and curiosities collected by the late earl on his grand tour. There’d been a small basalt Anubis, looking very much like an alert black border collie, which was here repeated in a statue three times her own size, its ears and collar lit with gold. The earl had owned a crudely carved obelisk, raw when he’d purchased it, hardly thirty years old even now. Dimly in the moonlight, she could see another at the back of the room, thirty centuries old. From the glass cases and from a coffin, the moonlight gently polished gold to a soft shimmer.

  Julia laughed softly in the darkness. How right she had been to wait until she was alone to experience this! She pressed her hand to her heart to keep it from bursting from sheer happiness. Then she caught her breath, for she glimpsed something near the entrance that was undoubtedly the most valuable item in all the Department of Natural and Artificial Production.

  It was not very interesting to look at. An irregular piece of black basalt, the surface was so covered with writing that it looked gray in some lights, brownish in others. She wished she could see it clearly but had to content herself with running her fingers over the surface.

  “ ‘Ere,” a voice said sharply. “Wot you doin’?”

  A woman stood in the entrance, holding aloft a lantern muffled by amber glass. The light showed more of her than it could have revealed of Julia. The woman was somewhere between fifty and sixty. Over her shapeless black dress, she wore a reddish shawl pinned tightly up to her throat. She wore broken men’s shoes that matched the greasy jockey’s cap she wore on her neatly bound hair.

  “Who are you?” Julia asked.

  “Mrs. Pierce. I do for these deaders.”

  “Do?”

  “Dust abaht. Pick up wot’s been dropped by them wot comes to stare. Found me h’ever so many handkerchiefs. Wunst I found me a whole ell of ribbon. Naow, wot’s a body want ribbon for in this ‘ere room? H’answer me that, iff’n you can.”

  “I can’t imagine. An ell of linen, now, might come in handy.”

  “I ain’t never seen none o’this lot comin’ unwrapped,” Mrs. Pierce said. “An’ it wouldn’t be fittin'. This was scarlet ribbon! Made h’ever such a nice trim for my h’eldest’s trousseau.”

  “You have many daughters?”

  “Three. An’ each one’s a ‘andful! The h’eldest was the worst—worrit, worrit, worrit every day that comes.”

  “What does she worry about?”

  “Money, that’s wot. She married up, d’you see? ‘E runs a little shop for his dad. Naow she’s tryin’ t’keep up appearances on frippence a week, nearly. An’ a baby’s on the ... ‘ere! Who are you?”

  “I’m Julia Hanson, Mrs. Pierce. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  “Wot you doin’ in ‘ere so late, dearie? Your mother’s bound to be worrying.”

  “I’m studying these artifacts in the peace and quiet.

  And I’m afraid I lost my mother years ago.”

  Mrs. Pierce clicked her tongue sympathetically. “I know wot that’s like, my dearie. ‘E weren’t much, Mr. Pierce, but he gave me my three luvs afore he went on to his reward. An’ he did make for such a luverly funeral. Six plumes we ‘ad on the horses. ‘Hang the expense,’ I says, Tm only burying one ‘usband in all me born life and it’ll be done h’according to ‘oyle,’ I says.”

  “That sentiment does you great credit. If I marry, I’ll be sure it’s a man about whom I can say the same.”

  “ ‘Tis the only way to be ‘appy,” Mrs. Pierce said with a sniff that was half sentimental, half businesslike. “Well, I best get on with it.” Behind her trundled a little wagon, such as children use to play ‘farm.’ A bucket of water slopped as she pulled it forward, while a scrub brush slipped around the inside.

  “I alus says there’s nothin’ amiss with old images as we got ‘ere that a mite of Glee’s soap and a good scrubbing wouldn’t cure. But them wot pays me wages won’t let me do nothin’ ‘ere but dust. Fair goes to me ‘cart to see wot a shockin’ condition some of ‘em are in.”

  Thinking of Simon, Julia said, “I imagine some of the men who run the museum could do with a good dusting themselves!”

  Mrs. Pierce gave an unexpectedly girlish giggle. “ ‘At’s right. Fair musty, some of ‘em. Some of ‘em are awright, I must say. Dr. H’archer, f’r instance. Gave me a whole ‘arf crawn—last year abaht this time o’ year.”

  “He returns from Egypt every May.”

  “You know ‘im, then?”

  “Yes. I’ve been corresponding with him for several years.”

  “Coo, ‘e’s an ‘andsome one, h’ain’t he?”

  “I hadn’t noticed,” Julia lied with a sniff.

  “You need specs, miss? ‘E reminds me o’some of these ‘eathen images; not this lot,” she said with rather a dismissive glance at the Egyptians. “But that bunch o’ Romans in the ‘all. ‘Specially them wot wears that fancy h’armor.”

  Julia said, “I really can’t see the resemblance.”

  “Oh, well. Funny you being ‘ere so late. Kinder nice to ‘ave somebody to talk to. This lot don’t say much.” While she spoke, she was flicking her dustcloth over the cases that held faience and alabaster beads. “Tawdry stuff,” she said. “I much prefer that lot o’ pretties over there. Them gold ‘uns. She must ‘a been a one, eh?”

  “You mean An-ket?”

  “Don’t know ‘er name, but you h’only gots to look at ‘er to know wot I mean.”

  Mrs. Pierce carried the lantern over to the golden coffin that lay in the place of honor on a long plinth in the middle of the floor. Her death mask was inlaid in colored stones, smiling carnelian lips, bright obsidian eyes and brows, the eyes
outlined as in life with broad black bands against the broiling Egyptian sun. The contours of her face were smooth, not as if the metal had been beaten into shape with hammers, but as though it had been formed and softened by countless strokes of a loving hand.

  “Spoilt!” Mrs. Pierce pronounced. “My neighbor’s girl, wot lived in the next street, ‘adjust the same smile. ‘Wot h’ever I wants, I gets,’ she used ter say. ‘Er mother couldn’t keep ‘er in line, bless my soul, no! But didn’t the menfolk just flock ‘round.”

  “What happened to her?” Julia asked. Mrs. Pierce lowered her voice to a confidential register, despite the fact that nobody in the room had been able to overhear a conversation for approximately three thousand years. “Abaht two years ago, she gets ‘erself a position as a dresser to an h’actress at Covent Garden.”

  “That must have been a great opportunity for her.”

  “You h’ain’t from Lunnon, are you, dearie?”

  “No, Mrs. Pierce. I only just arrived from York.”

  “York?” She might have been trying to remember if it were part of the British Empire or not.

  “It’s away north,” Julia said before she could stop herself, and then grinned.

  “Oh, there! Well, ordinarily I wouldn’t say nothin’ to an h’unmarried gel, it not being fit, but I alus says, ‘forewarned is forearmed’ and a gel’s got to be wise to h’every rig in town if she’s to get on. Maisie makes ‘erself some gentlemen friends—’ow we will not lower h’ourselves to wondering! Next fing you knows she’s gorn off and changed ‘er name. Maisie Linstock was good enough for her mother, but not for ‘er! Mind, I don’t say she don’t send money ‘ome regular, but I’d not live on me daughter, not gettin’ ‘er money that way.”

  “What way?”

  Mrs. Pierce pressed one finger to her lips. “She’s on the stage....”

  “No!”

  “As Gawd’s me witness! An’ this one ‘ere might ‘a’ been a-lyin’ in ‘er box since Jesus went fishing, but you can tell she’s just another o’ the same.”