Mr. Impossible

  “The master is dead,” Ghazi said. “I am master now.”

  Daphne thought quickly.

  She remembered what Noxley had said about his men: thinking is not what they do best.

  “Very well,” she said in Arabic. “Congratulations. You’re welcome to be master. I’m sure you’ll make a fine one. But what has it to do with us? It was the Golden Devil who wanted me — for a bride. It was the Golden Devil who wanted my brother — to help read the ancient writing. Surely you can find your own brides? You don’t need to steal them.” She fervently hoped Noxley hadn’t told anybody how much his future spouse was worth in pounds, shillings, and pence. “But do you truly wish to devote your life to digging in the sand to find holes in the ground with painted walls? Did you want to be a leader of diggers and scavengers or a leader of — um — the most feared assassins in all the Ottoman Empire?”

  While she spoke, Ghazi’s expression took on a troubled and confused expression. He glanced about him. His men were looking troubled, too. He quickly regained his composure. “This is foolish talk,” he said. “The big Ingleezi has killed the Golden Devil. You have shot one of my men. And it is not the first time. You will not go free.” With his free hand, he signaled to his men. “Take her. And the other man.”

  Rupert sagged. “Oops,” he said. “Sorry.”

  He folded up and sank to the ground.

  “No!” Daphne cried. She ran toward him, pushing the astonished Ghazi aside, and sinking to her knees beside Rupert. “He’s no danger to you, you great bully,” she cried. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?”

  “I will put him out of his misery.” Ghazi aimed the pistol at Rupert. Daphne threw herself on top of Rupert.

  “As you wish,” said Ghazi. “I kill two at once.”

  “Fire your weapon,” Miles called out, “and pharaoh’s treasure goes up in smoke.”

  During the momentary distraction, he’d grabbed somebody’s torch. He held a papyrus close to the flame. “This is what the Golden Devil wanted,” Miles said. “This is what Duval wants. Worth a king’s ransom. Everybody play nice, or it’s ashes.”

  Some of the men were muttering, “What’s he saying?” because Miles made the speech in English. But Ghazi had no trouble comprehending.

  Thinking wasn’t what he did best. This, however, was simple enough to comprehend. He knew the papyrus was valuable. He knew Duval wanted it. And he knew that these old, crumbly anteekahs took fire easily.

  Still, once he had the papyrus, he’d no reason to let them get away, Daphne thought.

  “Let them go,” someone called from the crowd. “The Turkish soldiers are coming. Remember what they did to the one they thought had killed the big Englishman?”

  Ghazi threw down his pistol and advanced toward Miles.

  Miles looked at Daphne.

  “Give it to him,” she said.

  Miles gave Ghazi the papyrus. Ghazi unrolled it a bit, gave it a glance, then quickly tucked it into his girdle. He moved away, snatched up his pistol —

  And kept on walking, away from them.

  His men turned away and followed him.

  All but one, the one who’d warned about the Turkish soldiers.

  He came forward.

  “Let me help you, mistress,” he said. In English.

  She had turned away, to attend to Rupert, who was showing signs of consciousness. But the English words and something in the man’s voice made her look up again.

  She gazed into a familiar face, one she hadn’t seen in more than a month.

  “Akmed?” she said.

  “This man saved my life,” he said. “I will help you save his.”

  Chapter 21

  That night, aboard the Isis, a few miles upriver

  DAPHNE DID AN ADMIRABLE JOB OF PATCHING Rupert up, scolding him all the while she picked out bits of cloth from the knife wound. It was thanks to those thick layers of cloth — the Arab-style sash he’d worn and the lethal objects it contained — that Rupert was alive.

  The wound was rather more than the “scratch” he’d labeled it and was rather more uncomfortable than he’d expected. Nonetheless, she seemed to think he’d live. Her main concern, she said, was infection. She did not think that leaving shreds of dirty cloth in the wound would aid his recovery.

  He lay upon the divan of his cabin, occasionally peering down to see what she was doing but mainly watching her face in the lantern light. He would never grow tired of looking at her wonderful face. He was quite pleased he’d live to do so.

  He’d truly thought the wound no more than a scratch, at first. It hadn’t hurt at all. But he’d probably been too furious at the time to feel anything. They’d been having a fair enough fight, fists only, he told Daphne. But then, when Noxley realized he was losing, he cheated.

  “I cannot believe you so addlepated as to imagine Noxley would fight fair,” Daphne said, when Rupert waxed indignant on this point, calling it “deuced unsporting.”

  “But it isn’t done,” Rupert said. “Ask your brother. Ask anybody. I did not draw my pistol. I did not draw my knife. I had never killed anybody, and I did hope it would not be necessary.”

  He was a great deal more upset than he let on. He hadn’t meant to throw Noxley out the window. At least Rupert hoped he hadn’t. At such times, though, a man was not truly capable of thinking. It was all instinct. Noxley had stabbed him. Rupert had yanked out the blade and thrown it aside — and the next thing he knew, Noxley was sailing out of the window.

  Having got the wound as clean as she could, Daphne quickly and neatly stitched it up and bandaged it.

  “Pray do not distress yourself about Noxley,” she said, quite as though she’d spent the last few minutes reading his mind. “He would have killed you without a second thought, certainly with no qualms. He had no conscience whatsoever. A moral vacuum. He must have what he wanted. Anyone who stood in the way must be annihilated.”

  She turned away to the medicine case that stood on the floor nearby. Rupert couldn’t see what she was doing. After a moment, she turned back, a small glass in hand.

  “I had not realized he wanted me until his men dropped a hint,” she said.

  “I told you he wanted you,” he said. “It was obvious in the way he looked at you. He might have been mad for power and fame, but he wasn’t blind.”

  “Power and fame can be costly,” she said. “He was not in lust with my person alone. He doted equally upon my fortune.”

  It took a moment for Rupert to fully grasp what she was saying, and these mental exertions must have shown in his face because she said, frowning, “You did know Virgil left me heaps and heaps of money, did you not? All the world knew, I thought.”

  “Heaps and heaps?” he said. “Well, it was the least he could do, the lying swine. Not that I imagined you were a pauper, when you saw nothing out of the way in your brother’s spending thousands for one of those brown, rolled-up thingums.”

  “Papyri,” she said crisply, almost as she’d done that first day, in the dungeon. But he heard the note of amusement.

  “I know,” he said. “I knew. I was only trying to provoke you that day. I knew you had a temper. I could feel it, when you were twenty feet away. It was like standing on the edge of a storm. Very…stimulating.”

  “You’ve had sufficient stimulation for the present,” she said. She came close then, raised Rupert’s head, pressed it to her delicious bosom, and held the glass to his lips. “Here, drink this.”

  He’d had an unpleasant feeling the glass was for him, but the conversation had diverted his attention. The warm femininity he rested upon was an even greater distraction. “What is it?”

  “A little laudanum mixed with wine.”

  He carefully turned his head away from the glass without endangering his agreeable position on her soft endowments. “I don’t want any.”

  “You will drink it,” she said, “or I shall summon Akmed and tell him to gather the largest men aboard. They will hold you down while I pou
r it down your throat. Will you submit gracefully, or would you rather be embarrassed in front of the boys?”

  “I don’t need any laudanum,” he muttered, but he turned back and drank.

  When he was done, she set down the glass and gently but firmly transferred his head from her bosom to the pillow. “The wound is sure to become a great deal more painful as the shock wears off,” she said. “This way, you will get some rest.”

  “I wish you might rest with me,” he said, letting his hand slide to her thigh. She was dressed like an Arab man, but no man with working eyesight would ever mistake her for a member of his sex.

  “That would not be restful,” she said. “And kindly remember that my brother is now aboard.”

  Rupert sighed. The brother. Yes, of course. But the brother was not Akmed, with whom she’d threatened Rupert a moment ago. Who was Akmed?

  Oh, yes, the fellow who spoke up, just as matters had promised to grow very interesting, indeed.

  What had he said? He’d spoken in English first, then reverted to Arabic.

  “What did he say?” Rupert said. “The Akmed fellow? He called you ‘mistress.’ ”

  “That was Akmed,” she said, unenlighteningly.

  “That’s what I said,” he said patiently. Really, there were times when he wondered whether that immense brain of hers contained an empty chamber or two. “He said something, just before I…um…dozed a bit.”

  “You fainted,” she said. “Several times.”

  “I was a little sleepy,” he said. “I hadn’t slept since they took you. I was…tired. I did not faint.”

  Her delicate snort sufficiently expressed her views on the subject.

  “I wish you wouldn’t keep turning the subject,” he said. “Who is Akmed and what was he saying?”

  “He said you saved his life.”

  Rupert thought about this. “He must have confused me with someone else,” he said.

  “On the bridge outside Cairo,” she said. “He’d been badly beaten. A Turkish soldier tried to finish the job. But you stepped in the way.”

  After a period of cogitation, which went even more slowly than usual, Rupert realized who she was talking about: the dirty cripple on the bridge. “Oh, that fellow.”

  “That was why you ended up in the dungeon,” she said accusingly. “You risked your life on behalf of a miserable native you didn’t know from Adam.”

  “It wasn’t a fair fight,” Rupert said.

  She gazed at him for a good long while. Then she stroked his cheek briefly. “No, it wasn’t,” she murmured. “But only you would care.” More distinctly she added, “Akmed is the servant who went with Miles to Giza. What you saw was the results of the beating the so-called police gave him — the ones who kidnapped Miles. Akmed is the servant who ran away when the men came to my house and stole the papyrus.”

  “He’s the servant who didn’t come back,” Rupert said. “Tom’s uncle. The fellow on the bridge. One and the same. And he turned up here? Extraordinary.”

  “Not really,” she said. “Akmed knew he wasn’t safe in Cairo and being there might endanger his family as well as me. So he went to Bulaq, to get work on a boat. There he heard Lord Noxley was going to look for Miles. Akmed had no trouble getting hired. He speaks English and a little French, and he is intelligent and hardworking. He thought Noxley was a fine man. Akmed had no doubts about this until the fine man fed a few followers to the crocodiles — very possibly the same ones you and I saw above Girga.”

  “But Akmed didn’t run away then?” The lantern light was growing fuzzy — or was that Rupert’s brain? He seemed to be drifting…on a river…no, a cloud.

  “He stayed on because he was determined to find Miles,” she said. “Then, when Noxley’s men found my brother, Akmed stayed to look after him and protect him as best he could while avoiding discovery. He’d grown out his beard, and Miles didn’t recognize him. Akmed decided not to enlighten him until he could arrange for an escape for both of them. Then I turned up and complicated matters.”

  She went on, but Rupert lost track of what she was saying. Her voice became a distant music, sweet and familiar. And then by degrees the sound, too, drifted away, and he slept.

  Saturday 5 May

  CARSINGTON DID NOT wake until midafternoon. Sun streamed through the cabin window, and Miles, sitting upon the far end of the divan, had been trying to while away the time reading a book.

  He gave up the effort when Carsington pushed up to a sitting position.

  “I’m not sure you’re allowed to sit up,” Miles said.

  Under lifted eyebrows, the coal-black eyes regarded him steadily.

  Miles remembered that the patient was not to be agitated, either. “On the other hand,” he added, “I’m not sure who could stop you. Daphne, maybe, but I finally persuaded her to get some sleep. She sat up all night with you. Worried about a fever, she said.”

  “Not very likely,” Carsington said. “How should I look them in the face, I ask you, was I to get infected and feverish and such — over a bit of a cut? They’d laugh themselves sick, the lot of them.”

  “The lot of whom?” Miles said.

  “Family,” Carsington said. “My brothers. Alistair was at Waterloo, you know.”

  “I know.”

  All the world knew. Alistair Carsington was a famous Waterloo hero. Why couldn’t he be the Carsington in Egypt? Or any other one of them? Why did it have to be this one?

  “They shot three horses out from under him, sliced him up with sabers, and stuck him with lances,” Carsington said. “Some cavalry rode over him and a couple of soldiers died on him. Did he get infected and feverish?”

  “Did he not?” Miles said.

  “Well, not very much,” Carsington said. “He lived, didn’t he? If he could live through that, I can jolly well live through a nick in the belly.”

  “I hope so,” Miles said. “I think Daphne would take it very ill, were you to require planting.”

  He couldn’t imagine what she’d endured when she believed Carsington dead. He felt like a fool for not realizing she’d become attached. But she had concealed it so well.

  Besides, Daphne never noticed men — or if she did, it was to regard them with mistrust. Why should Miles think Carsington’s case any different? Why should he, of all men, turn out to be the one she’d risk her life for? Miles could scarcely believe his bookish sister had risked her life on his own account, and he was her brother.

  Belatedly he recollected the instructions and explanations she’d given before departing the cabin. “I’m to offer you a glass of water,” he said. “Daphne said she’d given you some laudanum, and you might wake up feeling dry.”

  “I feel as though someone moved the Arabian Desert into my mouth while I was sleeping,” Carsington said. “Along with the camels. Am I allowed to have a wash and a shave and clean my teeth at least? But never mind what she allows. She’s asleep. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

  “Yes, but you really must move as little as possible,” Miles said. “To avoid putting pressure on the wound. You will not want all her work to go for naught?”

  Carsington instantly stilled. “No, of course not. She was picking out bits of cloth — the merest threads — for hours, it seemed. What a beast I should be, to undo all her efforts.”

  Miles blinked, once, twice. He was not sure what he’d expected. He knew Carsington was unmanageable. Everyone in the world knew it. Even his formidable father appeared to have given up the case as hopeless.

  Miles did not wonder at his lordship’s sending his fourth son to Egypt. He only wondered at the earl’s not sending the son to China, or Tierra del Fuego, or the Antipodes.

  “I’ll valet you,” Miles offered. He collected the bowl, ewer, and towel. He found Carsington’s toothbrush and shaving kit, and placed all within easy reach.

  While he was playing manservant, the mongoose ran into the room. She rose up on her hind legs and watched the proceedings.

&nbsp
; When Miles had settled back into his place, she crawled into his lap and watched from there. “I heard her name is Marigold,” Miles said.

  “She’s in love with your shirt,” Carsington said.

  Miles had already heard the story, and put two and two together. While Carsington set about his toilette, Miles told of his adventures in Minya and the limping mongoose he’d fed.

  “Obviously it’s the same one,” Carsington said. “What a wicked deceiver she is. I thought she was fond of me. Yet I’ve never seen her sit still for so long. She usually grows bored with my shaving in a minute or two. I now realize she was only using me to while away the interval until she saw you again. You’re the one she truly loves.”

  Miles stroked the creature. “You seem to have collected several strays on the way upriver,” he said.

  “Marigold collected us,” he said. “The rest is Daph — Mrs. Pembroke’s doing.”

  At that moment, Miles silently bore what he hoped was the last of the shocks. Daphne had not simply formed an attachment. She had formed an intimate attachment.

  With Rupert Carsington, Lord Hargate’s famously wild and famously untamable scapegrace son.

  Still, Miles reminded himself, there were worse men in the world. Noxley, for instance. Pembroke.

  Meanwhile this man had beyond doubt won the affection and loyalty of the crew and servants. They had nothing but praise for him. They’d fought for him. The mongoose liked him, too.

  Even the cats had wandered in once this afternoon and deigned to sit at the foot of the divan and stare at him while he slept.

  When the toilette was done, Miles helped him into a fresh Arab-style shirt, of the style that came nearly to the ankles. It was not elegant, but it was cool. The long front opening allowed easy access to his wound.

  When he was dressed, and Miles had helped prop him up with another pillow, Carsington made him feel a little better by saying, “That was wonderfully quick thinking on your part last night: the torch and the papyrus.”

  “That curst papyrus,” Miles said. “I should be glad to be rid of it, if not for Daphne. She had done so much work, and it was a fine manuscript, superior even to the immensely long one illustrated in the Description de l’Egypte. Now the French will have this one as well, plague take them.”