Mr. Impossible

  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 continued irritably. “It might compensate Lord and Lady Hargate 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. Carsington 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 of Cairo.”

  “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.”

  THE BATHS WERE a sinful luxury Daphne had discovered early in her stay here. The tiled chambers of the women’s bath shut out the outside world and its troubles. Here one need only yield to being pampered and listen to the other women laugh and gossip.

  Even today the bath worked its magic. She left with a clearer head and a calmer spirit. She was perfectly capable of working out a method for finding Miles, she told herself as she mounted her donkey. She only needed a man to do what she couldn’t. In that case, the bigger the better, as Leena suggested — and Mr. Carsington was taller by a head than most of the men hereabouts. He had to be strong, too, to survive a collision with Muhammad Ali’s brutal soldiers. All Mr. Carsington needed was a brain — and Daphne could supply that.

  Letting the drivers manage their donkeys and clear the way through the crowded streets, she and Leena proceeded at the usual fast clip — dodging camels, horses, peddlers, and beggars — to the house in the Esbekiya.

  Outside its gate they dismounted. Leaving Leena to pay the donkey boys, Daphne entered the shaded passageway bordering the courtyard. She was nearing the stairs when a tall form emerged from the shadows and a deep, instantly recognizable voice said, “Twenty quid?”

  She stopped short, and her heart skidded to a stop as well, then started again, far less steadily.

  The area was well shaded, but it wasn’t nearly as dark as the Citadel dungeon.

  She had no trouble seeing him now, even through her widow’s veil. He was tall and broad-shouldered, as she’d discerned in the darkness. What she had not been able to see was the starkly handsome face.

  Black eyebrows arched over dark, laughing eyes that looked down at her over a long, insolent nose. Laughter lurked at the corners of the too-sensuous mouth.

  Heat washed through her in waves, burning away her hard-won calm and confidence and leaving her, for a moment, swamped in self-consciousness, like the gawky schoolgirl she’d once been.

  But she’d never been as shy as she ought, as Virgil had made clear often enough. She wasn’t too shy now to take in the rest: the exquisitely tailored coat, waistcoat, and trousers, the crisp shirt and neckcloth. The instant’s glance was enough to sear into her mind a vivid image of the lean, powerful body the close-fitting garments only emphasized.

  Her mouth went dry and her brain went away, and for a moment nothing made sense at all. Only for a moment, though. Her brain came back, and “Mr. Carsington,” she said as soon as she got her tongue untied.

  “Twenty quid,” he repeated. “Three purses. That’s what you argued Sheik Whats his name down to. At the baths I learned it’s the going rate for a eunuch.”

  “The more expensive eunuchs, yes,” Daphne said, quickly adding, “I did not expect to see you so soon. You’ve even had time to bathe. Miraculous.” Her mind produced an image of the gentleman wearing only a mahzam — a Turkish towel — wrapped about his waist.

  She told her mind to stop it. She should not have smoked at the baths, even to be polite. It left a bad taste and made one dizzy. She should not have listened to the women’s lewd talk. It had given her smoke-addled mind all sorts of improper ideas.

  Ordinarily she took no notice of men, except as obstacles in her path, which in her experience appeared to be their primary function.

  She moved past him and started up the stairs, talking rapidly. “It is amazing, is it not, Leena? The Turks usually take hours and hours for the smallest negotiations. I had thought we’d no hope of getting started before tomorrow.”

  “I don’t doubt the sheik would have liked to drag on negotiations in the usual leisurely style,” Mr. Carsington said, “but you wore him out.”

  “The prison was disgusting,” Leena informed him as she trailed Daphne up the stairs. “To get rid of the stink, we went to the baths. We smoked, we talked with the other women, we learned some rude jokes, and now we are not so sick in the stomach and crazy in the head.”

  “Smoking?” he said. “Rude jokes? Excellent. I knew this would be more interesting than collecting stones.”

  RUPERT WATCHED MRS. Pembroke continue up the stairs and through the door in an angry swish of black silk. She had flounced away from the sheik in much the same fetching way.

  Since he’d found her entertaining, Rupert was delighted to learn, shortly after her departure, that she was not, as he’d assumed, of Tryphena’s generation — old enough, in other words, to be his mother.

  Beechey had told him that Miles Archdale, the missing brother, was an antiquarian scholar in his early thirties, and the sister a widow a few years young
er.

  Rupert had also learned that the plague, which had kept him confined to Alexandria for weeks, had trapped those in Cairo as well. The quarantine had only recently been lifted. Otherwise, Mr. Archdale and his sister would be in Thebes by now. According to the secretary, Archdale was eager to test his language theories on the temples and tombs of Upper Egypt.

  Beechey also said that the brother was bound to turn up sooner or later, perhaps the worse for dissipation. One couldn’t tell the sister this, of course, but the consul general was certain the servant Akmed had lied.

  Cairo offered entertainment for all tastes, and men “disappeared” for days into brothels and opium dens. Archdale was probably still carousing in such a place. No doubt his servant had smoked too much hashish, and ended up annoying somebody, who paid him with a flogging.

  Rupert was on no account to enlighten Mrs. Pembroke. He was to humor her.

  “You might inquire at the guardhouses and that sort of thing,” Beechey had said. “I’d advise you to question the servant privately. If you do run Archdale to ground, or he turns up on his own, as is more likely, give her whatever version of events he prefers. I cannot stress enough the importance of remaining on cordial terms with them. They are in a position to contribute a great deal to our efforts here, in both the scholarly and financial senses. Mr. Salt relies upon you to exercise the utmost discretion, tact, and delicacy.”

  Rupert had nodded wisely while privately wondering if Beechey, like Archdale’s servant, had been smoking too much hashish lately.

  Any sober person would have understood that Rupert Carsington was exactly the wrong man for any assignment requiring discretion, tact, and delicacy. Rupert himself could have said so, and normally would. But he liked the way Mrs. Pembroke twitched her skirts when she was vexed, and he wanted to see what she looked like. And so for once he held his tongue and tried to look tactful and discreet.

  It wasn’t a pose he could maintain for long, he knew.

  He followed the maidservant up the stairs and into the house, through a zigzagging series of halls and rooms — each a step up or a step down from the previous one — and finally into a lofty room.

  At one end was a raised area, its floor covered with Turkey carpets. Along its three sides ran a low banquette covered with cushions. A wide, squat table, heaped with books and papers, occupied most of the space in the center of the raised area. A narrow shelf on one side of the room held a great lot of small wooden figures.

  The widow looked at the table, then sank to her knees and started shuffling through the heaps.

  “Mistress?” said Leena.

  “This isn’t the way I left it,” Mrs. Pembroke said.

  “How can you tell?” Rupert said.

  “I was working on the new papyrus,” she said. “I always arrange the materials in a certain way. The papyrus to the right for reference. The copy in the center. The table of signs below. The Rosetta inscription here. The Coptic lexicon alongside. The grammar notes here. There is an order. There must be. One must work systematically, or it is hopeless.” The pitch of her voice climbed. “The papyrus and the copy are gone. All that work…all those days unrolling it…all my care in making a precise copy…”

  She rose unsteadily. “Where are the servants? And Akmed. Is he all right?”

  “Check on the servants,” Rupert told Leena. To Mrs. Pembroke he said, “Calm down. Count to ten.”

  She looked at him — or appeared to have her head turned in his general direction.

  “Do you never take that thing off?” he said impatiently. “He must have been remarkable, the late lamented, to warrant so much grief.” He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the heavy veil and the black silk. “It must be as hot as Hades under all that. No wonder you’re addled.”

  She went on looking in his direction for a moment, then abruptly threw the veil back from her face.

  And Rupert felt as though someone had given him a sharp thump in the head with a heavy Turkish staff.

  “Well,” he said, when he’d mustered the wind to speak again. “Well.” And he thought that maybe they should have worked up to it more gradually.

  He saw green, green, deeply shadowed eyes set above high cheekbones in a creamy heart-shaped face framed with silky, dark red hair. She wasn’t pretty at all. Pretty was ordinary. She wasn’t beautiful, either, not by any English standard. She was something altogether out of the common run of beauty.

  Tryphena owned numerous volumes dealing with Egypt, including all of the French Description de l’Egypte that had been published thus far. Rupert had seen this face in somebody’s color illustration of a tomb or temple. He remembered it clearly: a red-haired woman, naked but for a golden collar about her neck, her arms stretched toward the heavens.

  Naked would be good. His experienced eye told him the mortal lady’s figure might well be as extraordinary as her face.

  Rather like a temperamental goddess, she pulled off the gloomy headdress and flung it down.

  Leena hurried in. “They have disappeared!” she cried. “All of them!”

  “Really?” Rupert said. “That’s interesting.”

  He turned to the widow. Her face was chalk white. Devil take it, was she going to faint? The only feminine habit he feared and hated more than weeping was fainting.

  “We all thought your brother was lost in a brothel,” he said. “But this news makes me think, maybe not.”

  A flush overspread her too-pale countenance, and her green eyes sparked. “A brothel?”

  “A house of ill repute,” he explained. “Where men hire women to do what most women won’t do unless you marry them, and oftentimes not even then.”

  “I know what a brothel is,” she said.

  “Apparently, the Cairo brothels make the Paris ones look like Quaker nurseries,” he said. “Not that I speak with absolute certainty. The truth is, my recollections of Paris are hazy at best.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “What you do or do not remember of Paris is of no relevance whatsoever at present,” she said.

  “I only wanted to point out how immense a temptation it is,” he said. “Only a saint — like one of my brothers — could resist it. So naturally, not knowing how saintly your own brother was —”

  “You and your associates simply assumed that Miles was cavorting with prostitutes and dancing girls.”

  “And what with the hashish and opium and whatnot, we supposed he’d lost all sense of time.”

  “I see,” she said. “And so you were assigned to keep me occupied until Miles came or was carried home.”

  “Yes, that’s how it was all explained to me,” he said. “It seemed simple enough. A brother missing — we can put it down to drugs and women. But now we’ve lost a papyrus, not to mention the servants. Matters grow complicated.”

  “I do not understand how bad people could come here,” Leena said. “The doorkeeper Wadid was in his place when we came. He said nothing of any disturbance.”

  “That fellow sitting on the stone bench near the gate?” Rupert said. “He seemed to be praying. He certainly paid me no heed.”

  The mistress and the maid exchanged glances.

  “I will go to Wadid,” Leena said.

  She went out.

  The widow turned away from Rupert and returned to the ransacked table. She knelt and moved a book to the left. She shook sand off a paper and set it under the book. She picked up pens from the floor and set them back on the inkstand. The angry spark was gone from her eyes, and the flush had faded, leaving her face dead white, which made the smudges under her eyes appear darker than ever.

  Rupert wasn’t sure what made him think of it, but he had a vivid picture in his mind of a long-ago time: his little cousin Maria weeping over her dolls after Rupert and her brothers had used them for target practice.

  He didn’t have any sisters, and wasn’t used to girls crying, and it made him frantic. When he offered to try to glue the dolls’ mangled parts back together, little Maria whacked him wit
h one of the larger mutilated corpses and blackened his eye. What a relief that was! He vastly preferred physical punishment to the other thing: the nasty stew of emotion.

  The dark smudges under Mrs. Pembroke’s eyes and the cold white of her face affected him much as his cousin’s tears had done. But he hadn’t broken any dolls. He hadn’t hurt this lady’s brother — wasn’t sure, in fact, he’d ever clapped eyes on the fellow. Rupert certainly hadn’t touched her precious papyrus. There was no reason for him to feel…wrong.

  Maybe it was something he’d eaten. The prison swill, perhaps. Or maybe it was a touch of plague.

  “The thing’s definitely gone, then?” he said lightly. “Not misplaced, or mixed in with the other papers?”

  “I should hardly confuse an ancient papyrus with ordinary papers,” she said.

  “Well, I’m dashed if I can make out why anyone would go to so much bother for a papyrus,” he said. “On the way here, I was accosted at least six times by Egyptians waving so-called artifacts in my face. You can hardly pass a coffee shop without some cheery fellow popping out to offer you handfuls of papyri — not to mention his sisters, daughters, and extra wives. Virgins, all of them, certified and guaranteed.”

  She sank back on her heels and looked up at him. “Mr. Carsington,” she said, “I believe it is long past time we settled one important matter.”

  “Not that I’d be interested, if they were the genuine article,” he went on. “I could never understand the great to do about virgins. In my view, a woman of experience —”

  “Your view is not solicited, Mr. Carsington,” she said. “It is unnecessary for you to ‘make out’ why this or that. You are not here to think. You are to provide the brawn in this undertaking. I am to provide the brain. Is that clear?”

  It was clear to Rupert that irritating her was an excellent way to prevent waterworks. The light was back in her eyes, and her skin, though still pale, was not so taut and corpse-white.