Mr. Impossible

  She didn’t need to know what these feelings of his were. She knew they were fleeting, because he was not the sort of man whose interest in any woman could last. She knew she could not trust her heart to his feelings, and that was all she really needed to know.

  “It’s Egypt,” she said. “It’s the excitement. It’s the narrow escapes from death. These make us feel more than we would do otherwise. That’s what I meant about the Arabian Nights. We’re living a romantic adventure. But it’s only temporary. Once we find Miles —”

  “It will be over,” he finished for her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What a pity.” He shrugged and unrolled a map. “Your brother is headed to Dendera. Is that near Thebes?”

  What a pity. That was all. He accepted her decision. Why should he not? What had she expected him to do: plead with her?

  She turned her attention to the map. “There is Qena,” she said, pointing.

  “Three or four days from here, it looks like, if the wind holds,” he said.

  “There is Dendera, you see, across the river near the site of ancient Tentyris,” she went on. “The famous Temple of Hathor is there. She is the Egyptian goddess of…love.” She added quickly, “Thebes is forty or fifty miles upriver, if I recall aright.”

  “Another few days, then,” he said without looking up from the map. “That’s supposedly Noxious’s stronghold at present. What do you wager he’ll head that way rather than turn back to Cairo?”

  She stared at the map while possibilities chased one another through her mind.

  “You said the papyrus was reputed to describe a Theban tomb,” he said. “Perhaps Noxious would like to help your brother find it.”

  IT WAS TYPICAL of Faruq to hide right under his enemy’s nose, in Lord Noxley’s own domain.

  The remains of ancient Thebes sprawled over both banks of the Nile. On the west bank, close by the river, lay the ruins of the village of Qurna, destroyed some years earlier by the Mamelukes. Rather than rebuild their huts, the Qurnans decided it was more efficient to live where they worked, in the Theban tombs. They did not, like other Egyptian peasants, get their living from agriculture. They got it from excavating tombs and selling papyri and other “anteekahs” they’d stripped from mummies.

  They were reputed to be the most independent people in all of Egypt, with the possible exception of the Bedouins. One army after another had come to subdue the Qurnans…and failed. They did succeed, however, in reducing the population from some three thousand to about three hundred.

  The survivors had hidden in the distant Theban hills, which contained thousands of tombs and an intricate network of passages connecting them. Here Faruq had taken refuge.

  Unluckily for him, Ghazi had a way with tomb robbers. He set fire to the nearer tombs, where the old women resided, shot their vicious watchdogs, and killed their cows, sheep, and goats. Had he been after one of their own, this method would have failed. But the Qurnans were disinclined to sacrifice their mothers, grandmothers, and livestock to protect a foreigner.

  This was how Ghazi located Faruq so quickly, within days of leaving Lord Noxley. The Qurnans, who knew all the best hiding places, also helped him find the dispatch bag under a heap of ransacked mummy parts. Once Ghazi had made sure the objects he wanted were inside, he rewarded the Qurnans generously, as his master would wish. He also rewarded Faruq as the master would wish, by beheading Duval’s chief agent before a large audience of Qurnans.

  25 April

  WHEN LORD NOXLEY and his friend disembarked from the Memnon at Luxor, they found Ghazi awaiting them. He proudly produced not only the papyrus and the interesting copy with its numerous notes but also — in a basket rather than a dispatch bag — Faruq’s head.

  Lord Noxley’s face lit at the sight of these offerings, and he felt as sunny within as he appeared without.

  Miles Archdale’s face was ashen.

  “You must develop a stronger stomach,” Lord Noxley told him. “These people respect only force, especially the Qurnans. Now they will think twice before harboring any more of Duval’s friends.”

  Ghazi had other news, which he conveyed privately to his master as they set out for the house: Archdale’s sister was not waiting quietly in Cairo, as everyone had assumed. Despite Ghazi’s best efforts, the authorities had failed to charge Hargate’s moron son with either the murder of the two men in the pyramid or that of Vanni Anaz. Consequently, Carsington was at large and at present taking Mrs. Pembroke up the Nile in search of her brother.

  “By the time these things happened, I was far from Cairo,” Ghazi said. “Even if I had known —”

  “You couldn’t turn back then.” Lord Noxley slowed his pace, so they might lag behind the rest of the party. He considered for a time, then his expression brightened. “Perhaps it’s for the best,” he said. “We’re here now. Why should she not be? Do go fetch her. As to Carsington, I should like it very much if you would make him go away.”

  SEEING FARUQ’S HEAD gave Miles his first inkling of something being not quite right with Noxley’s.

  In Dendera, Noxley had mentioned a “nasty business.” Until it was settled, he told Miles on the way to the boat, Miles would be safer in Thebes, where Noxley could rely upon the loyalty of the Turkish soldiers stationed there. The French kept clear of Thebes at present.

  It was not as though Miles had any choice but to go where his friend chose. Once the Memnon set sail, though, Noxley explained the “nasty business.”

  By “the French” his lordship meant, it turned out, a man named Duval, whom Miles vaguely recalled meeting at a consulate affair. Noxley said this was the man who’d hired the kidnappers. When they ransacked Miles’s belongings, they were looking for the papyrus. The next day, others of Duval’s henchmen went to the house and took both the papyrus and the copy.

  In other words, Duval believed not only the story about the treasure-filled pharaoh’s tomb but also that Miles could read hieroglyphic writing.

  So far, to Miles’s relief, no one had discovered the truth about Daphne. He preferred to keep it that way. She was vulnerable enough as it was.

  Had she not been out at the time of the theft, she might have been taken, too, as a hostage, to make Miles cooperate with the French lunatic. But she’d been at the consulate, trying to make them do something, which, as everyone knew, they never did, unless the something involved getting ancient artifacts on the cheap. The theft sent her to Noxley, who had promptly set out to recover both Miles and the papyrus.

  Clearly his lordship had succeeded on both counts.

  Clearly Duval was a dangerous man.

  Still, the business of the head…

  It was all well and good to say, “When in Rome…” But the English had stopped cutting off people’s heads and displaying them for the edification of the masses some years ago, and Miles saw no reason for recommencing a barbaric practice merely because one was among barbarians.

  Preoccupied with making sense of his friend’s behavior, he took little note of his surroundings beyond observing that the present-day Egyptians had built their houses in, around, and on the ancient temple of Luxor. Where the pharaoh and his high priests must have once performed sacred rituals, the peasants had built pigeon towers.

  Noxley’s house, which occupied a corner of the southern end of the temple, was not the most imposing structure. No doubt it would easily fit in the entrance hall of his lordship’s ancestral home in Leicestershire. By Luxor standards, though, it was spacious and elegant, boasting upper and lower floors, the former airy and ideal for summer sleeping quarters.

  At the house, Noxley suggested locking up the papyrus and the copy in a strongbox. Miles agreed, though he wondered who’d have the temerity to try to steal anything from anybody with Ghazi about.

  Miles retired to his assigned chamber, bathed, and collapsed on the divan. He slept until a servant woke him for dinner.

  When he rejoined Noxley in the comfortably appointed qa’a, Miles found
he hadn’t any stomach for dinner.

  “My poor fellow, pray forgive me,” Noxley said. “You must be sick to death of native fare. Let me tell Cook —”

  “It isn’t the food but Faruq,” Miles said. “That head preys on my mind. Are you quite sure it’s wise to encourage persons like Ghazi in these barbaric practices?”

  “Why is it any more barbaric than hanging a man at Tyburn?” Noxley said. “I should say it was more merciful. It can take a good while to die on the end of a rope, you know. As to keeping the head for display, this is the only way to make sure the word spreads. We want to leave Duval in no doubt of his chief henchman’s demise. Then he’ll know he’s lost the papyrus as well as you.” Noxley smiled. “He’ll be frothing at the mouth, like the mad dog he is.”

  “I only met him the once, and he seemed sane enough to me,” Miles said. “Yet he cannot be, to believe that anyone has deciphered hieroglyphs yet. He must be madder still to act as he has, upon such a delusion.”

  “It is a delusion, beyond question?” Noxley looked up from his plate, his expression oddly childlike.

  “The papyrus contains royal names,” Miles said. “That’s all any scholar can ascertain at present.”

  “You didn’t buy it because you believed it described a royal tomb, as Vanni Anaz claimed?” Noxley said, still watching him with that childlike expression. “Nothing about it told you it might be a treasure map of some kind?”

  Miles shook his head. He’d bought it for Daphne. Because it was beautiful, in near-perfect condition. Because she had nothing half so fine in her collection. Because he knew her eyes would light up as they used to do, a long time ago, before she wed Pembroke. Her eyes had lit, and Miles had never seen her happier than when she set to work on it. To him, this made the thing worth ten times what he’d paid.

  “I heard the French consul general, Drovetti, offered Belzoni ten thousand pounds for the alabaster sarcophagus he found,” Miles said. “I thought the papyrus, another rare specimen of great artistry, was of proportional value.”

  “Perhaps you’ve explained Duval’s problem, then,” said Noxley. He signaled a servant to take away the dinner tray.

  When the servant had gone, he said, “Duval has always believed the French ‘discovered’ Egypt, because of the scientific expedition and the Description de l’Egypte. He hates the English partly because we beat them but mostly because we took the Rosetta Stone as spoils of war.”

  “Good gad, that was twenty years ago,” Miles said. “It isn’t as though the French never took valuable items from nations they conquered. I haven’t noticed them giving any of it back.”

  “Try telling that to Duval,” Noxley said. “Still, he was no worse than any of the other antiquities hunters until recent years.”

  Since you came and took men like Ghazi into your employ? Miles wondered. But the recollection of Faruq’s head made him cautious. “Any idea why?” he said.

  “Belzoni,” Noxley said. “Duval has been in Egypt for more than twenty years. Belzoni was here for less than five, and now he’s famous around the world. Duval had excavated in the Biban el Muluk, the Valley of the Tombs of Kings. He never found a royal tomb, but Belzoni did — a magnificent one, containing a rare alabaster sarcophagus. Neither Duval nor Drovetti could find the entrance to Chephren’s pyramid, but Belzoni did. The French couldn’t find a way to move the head of Young Memnon, but Belzoni did, and now it’s in England.”

  “Twenty years of work and nothing to show for it,” Miles said. Rather like Virgil Pembroke’s case, he thought. “He must have been mad with jealousy.” Again, like Pembroke, so jealous of Daphne’s gift for languages.

  “Imagine what he felt when he heard about the papyrus Anaz had sold you,” Noxley said.

  “The last straw,” Miles said.

  Noxley smiled. “I’ll admit I felt a twinge of jealousy, too. Anaz must have taken a liking to you. He’s dead, by the way, poor fellow.”

  Chapter 18

  26 April

  RUPERT SAW HIS FIRST CROCODILES ABOVE Girga, half a dozen of them basking on a sandbank.

  The river had grown shallow, and sandbanks formed a maze of obstructions through which the Isis must pass. Previously he’d gazed at flocks of pelicans and wild ducks gathered upon them. That was to say, his eyes had been turned in that direction. His mind had been elsewhere.

  On her.

  On getting off the boat and finding someplace private. They were drawing closer to Thebes by the hour. Time was running out. Once they found her brother, nothing could be as it was.

  Rupert told himself he ought to be planning how to get her brother out of the villains’ clutches. He ought to be planning how to protect the women and children.

  Instead, his mind was busily devising and discarding schemes for slaking his lust on Daphne Pembroke’s magnificent body.

  Even now, gazing at the crocodiles, he was wondering how they might help him get her naked.

  All his brain produced was an excuse to see her. He left the deck and went inside, where she’d lately been spending the hottest part of the day. He found her not in the front cabin but in her own. The door stood open for ventilation.

  Spread out upon the divan was a familiar document bearing three kinds of writing. It was a copy of the Rosetta Stone. Her lap held a notebook.

  He tapped on the open door. She looked up. A flush overspread her creamy countenance.

  He wanted to kiss all that rosy skin. And all the paler parts. Then work his way down.

  “Crocodiles,” he said.

  “Really?” She set the notebook aside. “Where?”

  He found an umbrella and led her out to the deck. He held it over her while she gazed raptly at the strange creatures. It was a long time before she spoke.

  He didn’t need to say anything. It was enough to be near her, to watch her surprise and pleasure transform everything he looked upon. The crocodiles somehow became more exotic and miraculous. With her, one always felt as though one gazed upon marvels.

  “I can scarcely believe they’re real,” she said at last. “Look, one slithers into the water. It is like a dream.”

  Rupert became aware of two boyish voices nearby, quarreling, by the sounds of it. He sent a quelling look in their direction.

  Tom hurried to him. “Please, sir, I must speak to you.”

  But he could not speak in front of the lady, the boy said. This was talk for men. With a shrug and a smile, Daphne went back inside, out of the baking sun.

  “This had better be important,” Rupert told the boy.

  “Oh, yes, sir. Yusef is very sick.”

  Rupert studied the other lad, who hung back, looking abashed. His turban was all askew and his clothes hung crooked.

  “Illness is the lady’s department,” Rupert said. “I’m not the doctor here.”

  “He is sick with love, sir,” Tom said. “This is why he has no care for his clothes.”

  “Love?”

  “Yes, sir. For Nafisah. His suffering is very great. I told him that you are our father now, and you will arrange for his happiness, but he does not believe me.”

  Rupert looked again at Yusef, whose expression had become pathetically hopeful.

  Rupert reverted to Tom. “Since when am I your father?”

  Tom explained. The plague had taken most of his family. His uncle Akmed had disappeared. Yusef had no family, either. Muhammad Ali’s soldiers had burnt his village to the ground two years ago and killed everybody.

  “Now we belong to you,” the boy concluded. “You are our master and our father.”

  At that moment, the baby began to cry.

  Rupert looked about him. A baby. Women. A pair of adolescent boys.

  He was the father.

  DAPHNE STARED DOGGEDLY at the cartouches, but it was no use. She couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking before she heard the tap and saw Mr. Carsington in the doorway.

  She remembered the way he’d trapped her against
that door on the evening after their visit to Memphis.

  The kiss, the magical kiss. The tenderness and playfulness of it and the strange discovery it was, as though no one had ever kissed before in all the world.

  Then all the memories she’d tried to shut away came flooding back and left her sick with longing.

  She could have borne the ache more easily if he’d been the lout he’d pretended to be. But no lout could have restored her confidence as he had done, and made her feel fully normal — even likable — for the first time since her girlhood. A lout would not stand beside her holding an umbrella to shield her from the sun. A lout would not play with the baby, or sit up late at night telling the boys stories, or let a mongoose use him for a playground. A lout would not be able to make everyone about him love him.

  Including me, she thought. Including stupid me.

  “Daphne.”

  She looked up, expecting to see nothing, because she was only wishing, and the deep voice she heard came from her imagination.

  But no, he stood in the doorway again, head tipped to one side, because the space was a few inches too short for him. The north wind had made a tangle of his thick, dark hair. His eyes glinted with humor. She remembered how he’d whistled in the darkness of the dungeon, laughing at danger, as though it had been made purposely to amuse him.

  Now she saw that he’d been driving away her own darkness, day by day. And day by day, she’d changed. Because of him, she’d become more than she’d been — or perhaps more truly herself. Because of him, she’d learnt to like and trust herself again. Because of him, desire had become a pleasure, not a shame.

  I love you, she thought.

  He gazed at her for a long moment. Then his mouth curved lazily upward. “Ah,” he said. “That’s better.”

  “What’s better?”

  He came inside the cabin. He closed the door.

  “You know,” he said.

  “You should not close the door,” she said, while her heart thrummed, wicked thing, in anticipation.