Chapter 8
THE SWORD STRUCK THE DIVAN CLOSE BY HIM, then rose again. The boat shuddered, and the attacker stumbled. Miles couldn’t see what happened next, though he heard the ring of metal on metal. Then came a shriek, cut short. A grunt. The thud of a falling body—was it more than one? The cabin fell quiet. Outside, the fighting continued.
He felt about for a weapon. He found a knife. Cautiously he made his way out, trying to clank as little as possible and taking care not to trip over any bodies.
He was inching his way to the door when the vessel shuddered. He fell against the door, whacking his head. He heard wood cracking and groaning: they’d run aground.
The human noise outside swiftly abated. A few low voices, none familiar, all speaking Arabic. Splashing. Then no more voices. He waited a bit longer to be sure. He thought he heard footsteps, but that might be the boat breaking apart.
He headed outside anyway, and found the tilting deck nearly deserted. He made out two dark figures in a dinghy tied to the boat. Only those. No other moving figures.
The small landing boat offered his one chance of getting ashore alive. He couldn’t swim; the chains would drag him down. He’d be a fool to wait for rescue. The people hereabouts weren’t known for their charitable impulses. They were probably friends of his kidnappers. Whoever had attacked the boat must be a rival gang of brigands. Freebooters would soon come to steal what they could. Or perhaps had already come. Those two fellows in the dinghy, for instance.
If he didn’t get their boat from them, he was a dead man.
Feet shackled, one small knife his only weapon—the odds for a direct assault didn’t look good.
He would have to use his head.
He thought quickly.
Then he dragged his hands through his filthy hair, making it stand on end.
He let out a groan. The figures froze.
He began walking slowly toward them, loudly clanking his chains and reciting the “Tomorrow” speech from Macbeth in the wailing voice of a vengeful ghost.
Screaming, they dove over the side.
THE ISIS DIDN’T get far on Monday, because the wind turned against them. The reis—the captain—had the crew tow the vessel. This only stopped her traveling backward with the current. Forward, it seemed, was out of the question for the time being.
Despite Tom’s and Leena’s arguing about vocabulary, Rupert did manage to communicate with Reis Rashad, who proved helpful on several counts. Leaving Leena and Tom to quarrel about which winds were the most deadly, Rupert turned his mind to Mrs. Pembroke. She was not going to be happy about the delay.
According to Leena, the lady was awake. She hadn’t joined him in the salon for breakfast, though, and he was impatient to see her.
He and Tom had retired many hours later than the women last night. Rupert had stayed on deck long after the crew was asleep, ostensibly to make sure the boat was properly guarded. Actually, he’d needed to cool off, though there was little the lower evening temperatures could do for the kind of heat he endured.
It was the wanting-to-get-her-naked kind of heat, the wanting-to-get-skin-close kind of heat, the fire-low-in-the-belly kind of heat.
And it plagued him partly because he’d fallen on top of her—well, maybe mostly because of that: the suppleness of the soft body under his, the luscious peach of a mouth with its tantalizing bit of pout, and the green eyes, ocean deep, and the way they’d looked at him.
It was not a “get off” look. It was the kind of look Helen of Troy must have given Paris, the kind Cleopatra must have given Mark Antony. Wars broke out because of looks like that.
But that wasn’t all of it. When Sheik Salim admired her command of Arabic and marveled at her large brain, Rupert wanted to get her naked. When she talked about her papyrus and its beautiful little pictures and its columns of perfectly drawn signs, he wanted to get her naked. When he thought about those books in a dozen languages in her cupboard, he wanted to get her naked.
He didn’t know and didn’t really care why. All he understood was that she stirred him up amazingly.
So much that she kept him awake half the night.
He would have to rethink his plans for a slow siege, he decided as he made his way to the stern cabin.
He found her on her knees, sorting through the heaps of books she’d brought. She barely glanced up when he tapped on the doorframe.
“Is something wrong with the boat?” she said. “We’ve stopped, haven’t we?”
“Something’s wrong with the weather,” he said. “A southern wind. If I understood correctly, it’s called the khamsin.”
All the color drained from her face. Her shoulders sagged, and she sank back onto her heels. “Oh, no.”
“It can’t be helped,” he said. “The wind is dead set against us.”
“But the villains are days ahead of us—nearly a week.”
“Reis Rashad says contrary winds are normal at this time of year,” Rupert said. “That means other boats on the Nile are stymied, too, on occasion. Which means your brother might be a week ahead but not many miles distant.”
The color came back, enhanced with a faint wash of pink at the top of her cheekbones. “Oh, yes, why did I not consider that?” She shook her head. “I am not usually so emotional. Usually, my thinking is clear and rigorous. I do not allow myself to succumb to moods. Nor am I weepy.” She rubbed at the outer corner of her eye. “In fact, I am a predictable, boring person. This—” She waved impatiently at her extraordinary face. “This isn’t me.”
“I know what the trouble is,” he said. He eased down onto the divan, something less than an arm’s length away. “The trouble is, you haven’t enough brothers. The more you have, the easier it is to develop a certain detachment.”
“Are your brothers in the habit of getting themselves kidnapped by madmen?” she said. “Is that the sort of thing one gets used to?”
“No, I think it’s the variety of incidents,” Rupert said. “With five of us, there’s always been one crisis or another. Alistair, for instance, was in the habit of getting himself into expensive catastrophes with women. So when he went off to Derbyshire three years ago, we all more or less expected an expensive catastrophe, and went on about our business.” He frowned. “Actually, it did turn out more calamitous than usual.”
“Is this the one who was so badly injured at Waterloo?” she said. “Good grief, was that not enough? What befell him in Derbyshire?”
“He got himself engaged,” Rupert said grimly. “To be married.”
“Oh, dear. The woman was unsuitable, I take it.”
“No, he became engaged,” Rupert repeated more slowly and distinctly. “To be married.”
She folded her arms and considered him. “I see,” she said. “Marriage is the great catastrophe.”
“Well, naturally you don’t see it that way,” he said. “He was a saint, I collect.”
She looked baffled. “Your brother?”
Rupert gestured at the head-to-toe mourning she wore. “All that black. He must have been remarkable, the—um—departed.”
“Oh, you mean Virgil.” Her voice was wintry. “He was a scholar. A respected theologian.”
She became busy again, shoving back into the cupboard any which way the books he’d so carefully arranged.
“A shame he couldn’t have lived to make this journey with you,” Rupert said. “Egypt seems to be all the rage with scholars.”
“Not with Virgil,” she said several degrees more frostily.
So much for Virgil Pembroke. If the mourning had anything to do with the deceased, Rupert would eat his boots. The forbidding black was camouflage, just as he’d supposed.
“He would have taken me to the Holy Land,” she said.
“I’m sure that’s a worthy—”
“I know I ought to want to make the pilgrimage, but I don’t care,” she said. “If I’m to be hot and uncomfortable, if I’m to eat sand with every meal and look for snakes and scorpions before I put on my boots, there must be a compelling interest.” She threw him a defiant glance and slammed the cupboard closed.
“Well, then, have you a compelling interest in some ruins?” Rupert said.
“Of course I do,” she said irritably. “Egyptian ruins. That is why I am here, not in the Holy Land.”
“Reis Rashad says we’re very near Memphis,” he said. “We can hire donkeys and ride out to the ruins. There’s a broken bit of temple, and a pharaoh, I’m told. Not far from that is a great lot of pyramids. Maybe you can find a piece of stone with unreadable writing on it.”
DAPHNE WASN’T SURE what she expected to find in Memphis. Recent events had banished all thoughts of exploring. To the extent she had thought about it, she’d vaguely pictured a desert plateau like Giza, containing monuments.
Even when they set out, her mind was not upon their destination.
She rode with Mr. Carsington along a causeway, scarcely aware of her surroundings, for a number of reasons. Watching him undress was one of them.
He’d started out well enough this morning, in a species of Eastern attire. He’d replaced his torso-hugging coat with a tunic, and exchanged his snug-fitting trousers for loose Turkish ones, which he tucked into his boots. But now, as they rode away from the river, he first cast off the handsome green tunic, then undid his neckcloth, then completely unbuttoned his pale yellow silk waistcoat, thus exposing nearly all of his shirt—his underwear—to public view.
Naturally she couldn’t stop looking at him.
She ought to tell him, very firmly, that it was most improper: the Mohammedans were people of modesty, and he ought to respect their sensibilities, even if he had no regard for English standards of propriety. She ought to insist he put his clothes back on.
She’d always had more trouble than she ought with oughts.
Like the undisciplined girl she’d once been, she kept stealing glances. She noticed the way his upper garments stretched across his broad shoulders and the way at certain moments and at a certain angle the wind and sun turned the shirt into a billowing, translucent curtain. Through it she clearly discerned—and could hardly look away from—the silhouette of his muscled arms and torso, the latter tapering to a narrow waist.
She ought not look lower than that.
She did though, covertly studying the part of him resting on the saddle. The loose trousers couldn’t completely disguise his narrow hips. His bottom was no doubt as taut and hard as the rest of him.
She felt suddenly overheated and faint.
And then Virgil intruded, his voice and image in her mind bringing a chill, as ghosts reputedly did.
A saint, Mr. Carsington had thought her spouse.
Oh, very saintly. In the course of her marriage, she’d never seen Virgil undressed.
Even when they made love, it happened in the dark, and he wore his nightshirt and she a nightgown; and there were rules, so many rules—too many for her, at a time when she didn’t want to be thinking.
She didn’t want Virgil in her head again. She was still angry, out of all reason angry, and it had started the instant she uttered his name, earlier, on the boat.
She remembered the way he’d close his eyes when she mentioned Egypt, and the patient little smile he wore when he opened them again, and the patient tone he invariably adopted while patiently reminding her that all a lady needed to know of Egypt was writ down in Holy Writ, in the books of Genesis and Exodus.
But she was here, and she would not let Virgil spoil this journey, even if everything had gone wrong. At present, she could do nothing about Miles. Until the wind changed, she could either fret about the present and seethe about the past or make the best of matters.
She looked about her…and found the world had changed, utterly.
They had entered a forest of date palms. The tall, graceful trees rose from a carpet of vividly green grass dotted with flowers of pink and purple. They rode past glistening pools beside which goats watched over their frolicking kids. Above them, a bird burst into song, then another.
At last they came to a grassy hollow.
Here, by the side of a pool reflecting the green surroundings and the brilliant blue of the Egyptian sky, an immense stone pharaoh lay on his face, his mouth curved in a small, secret smile.
Captivated, Daphne slid from the saddle, barely aware of what she did, and walked to the statue’s head, her fingers at her lips. “Oh,” she murmured. “How beautiful.”
Not until this moment did she fully grasp how little she knew of Egypt, how little she’d seen of it. Pictures in books were all very well, and they had captured her imagination, but mainly as mysteries to be solved once she solved the riddle of the ancient writing.
The pyramids were wondrous, an achievement impossible to grasp, quite. But they were dark and empty within, colossal heaps of stones without. They were tombs, grand monuments to the dead.
This, too, was grand: some forty feet long, even with the king’s lower extremities missing. But it was more than a fine monument. It was art carried to near perfection. One knew it was stone, yet stone so finely carved as to appear to be flesh and blood. The smile, the secret hint of a smile, was magical.
She became aware of Mr. Carsington close behind her.
She fought her way out of the enchantment the place had cast over her and shifted into her pedantic mode, where she felt safest: with facts instead of the confusing clamor of feelings.
“If I recall aright, this was discovered only last year,” she said. “According to Herodotus and Diodorus, this is Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. It is said to have stood before the temple of Vulcan, or Pthah, which is the Egyptian name. Statues of his queen and four of his sons were there, too.”
She walked alongside the vast frame, and paused at the elbow. She bent and tipped her head to examine the markings on the girdle encircling his waist. “There is his cartouche,” she said, pointing.
“I’m not sure it’s decent for you to be looking at his cartouche,” said Mr. Carsington.
She was aware of the remark, aware of the heat slithering up her neck, and a niggling anxiety that he’d caught her studying his anatomy before. The statue exerted a powerful pull, though, and all other concerns evaporated in the sweetness of that enigmatic smile.
“I told you what a cartouche was,” she said, crouching for a better look at Ramesses’s front side. “Ovals containing hieroglyphic writing. There on his girdle, you see. And on his wrist. Oh, and I see another on his breast and on his shoulder. There seem to be several, but I cannot be sure. Two seem predominant.”
“Has he two names, then?” Mr. Carsington asked. “Or perhaps a name and a title. You know, like the king—His Majesty George Augustus Frederick IV. Then he has that other lot of names: Prince of this, Duke of that.”
“Very possibly,” she said absently, her mind as well as gaze riveted upon one of the cartouches. She crouched down for a better angle of view and a thrill coursed through her. “That is the sun sign, certainly. In Coptic, the word for sun is ra—or re—oh, what one would give for a proper vowel. But there are the three tails tied together, next to the hook shape. The same as in the cartouche for Thuthmoses. The combination must be moses or meses. Dr. Young was mistaken, as I had thought. This cartouche cannot possibly belong to Maenupthes, as he maintained. This statue’s identity is beyond dispute. Everyone agrees it is Ramesses the Great. Ergo, the signs in the cartouche must read Ra-mes-ses,” she concluded triumphantly.
“Fascinating,” Mr. Carsington said.
Daphne slowly straightened, her heart racing. Caught up in the excitement of discovery, she hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud. She’d said far too much, given herself away. But no, not to him. He was no scholar. To him, it must have been meaningless babble.
He stood watching her, arms folded over his big chest, his dark eyes uncomfortably penetrating. “It isn’t so much what you say as how you say it,” he said. “That first day, when you knew immediately that someone had disturbed the materials on the table. You had been working on the papyrus, you said.”
“I told you. I assist Miles.”
“You knew exactly where each item had been,” he said.
“He has a system,” she said.
He smiled and shook his head. “You give yourself away. When you are on sure ground—on your ground—your voice changes, and a wonderfully arrogant look comes into your eyes, and you hold your head in a certain way.”
Did she? Was she so obvious? “I fail to see the relevance of the way I hold my head,” she said.
“It says you know. And when you speak of a sign and a sound,” he went on, “and when you know the Coptic word for sun, and when you coolly dispute the famous Dr. Young’s interpretations, I can only conclude—”
“Miles—”
“I doubt it,” he said. “You told me what your brother’s trunks contained. You never mentioned his books. How odd that a language scholar should travel without books.”
“Actually—”
“You, on the other hand, travel with a remarkable assortment,” he said. “Greek. Latin. Hebrew. Persian. Arabic. Turkish. Coptic. Sanskrit. And the usual: German, French, Spanish, Italian. Did I miss anything?”
“Apparently not,” she said tightly. “I missed a great deal. You are supposed to be a great, dumb ox.”
“I am,” he said. “I only seem so brilliantly insightful because I’ve a hieroglyph fanatic in the family. Cousin Tryphena is not like you, though, and it isn’t simply that she’s older. She’s usually impossible to understand. You even I can follow, more or less. She’s hardly ever interesting. You always are. You have so much passion.”
Daphne winced at the word, at its myriad meanings, so many of them dangerous. “You don’t know me in my normal state,” she said. “I’m a great bore.”
“I find you intriguing,” he said. “It must be the air of mystery that comes of leading a double life.”
“I have no choice!” Daphne burst out. “I am not mysterious. I am not a person drawn to intrigue. I am dull and bookish and content to spend hours alone memorizing a new vocabulary and grammar or staring at a single cartouche. But one can’t work in isolation. Those who do end up repeating others’ mistakes or wasting time on disproved theories.” Like Virgil, who’d wasted decades. “My sex and circumstances isolated me,” she went on. “I had a choice: either give up my work or practice deception. I could not give it up.”
“Passions are beastly difficult to give up,” he said.
“You would think I was trying to seduce men rather than coax prepositions from a piece of crumbling parchment,” she said bitterly. “A common harlot could not meet with more disapproval, scorn, disgust.” She laughed, but it was an angry sound. She was still fighting. It still hurt. She was so tired of fighting, pretending.
“Maybe you were associating with the wrong sort of people,” he said.
“What other sort is there?” she demanded. “The sort who laugh at intellectual women instead?”
“There’s the sort like me,” he said.
He didn’t move, but physical distance didn’t matter. She’d let him get too close because she’d let emotion loosen her tongue, and her secrets had tumbled out into the open.
She took a step back, into Ramesses’s stony forearm.
Mr. Carsington’s mouth curved a very little, like that of the stone pharaoh, and he closed the distance she’d tried to make between them.
“You could probably coax a proposition from me,” he said, “if you set your mind to it.”
“Preposition,” she said. “I said prep—”
He slid his hand to the back of her head, into her hair, and she froze, on the outside, that is. Inside, a ferocious hammering started, and the place where her brain used to be was now a wild whirl of dark fragments as elusive as the lost language she’d struggled to decipher.
He tilted his head a little to one side, studying her. “Ah, well, so much for slow sieges,” he said. He leant in, and she was too slow to duck or draw back, and so his mouth fell upon hers, and the bottom dropped out of the world.
She lifted her hand—to push him away as she must. As she ought. But his mouth moved boldly over hers, firm and sure, and she clung instead, her fingers curling round his upper arm. It was as hard as the stone figure blocking her retreat, yet warm and alive, its heat electric. Her fingers tingled, and the current shot under the skin. Every particle of her being reacted, as though galvanized.
The dark fragments in her mind swirled into a haze, and the mad hammering wasn’t simply in her heart, but beating through vein and muscle.
She tightened her grasp, holding on with both hands now, as though the very ground were giving way beneath her, just as everything within was giving way. One powerful arm slid round her waist and pulled her closer. She stiffened at the collision with that rock-hard body, but in the next heartbeat she was melting in its heat and molding herself to him. It wasn’t enough. She dragged her hands up over the broad shoulders and up his hard jaw. The pulse in his neck beat against the edge of her hand. Cupping his face, she parted her lips, offering herself. He teased her first, his tongue playing over her lips, then he stole inside, and the world spun as the taste of him swirled inside her, strangely cool and sweet and infinitely immoral.
His hand slid further down, curving over her buttock and pressing her closer yet, until her belly was crushed against his pelvis. It was wrong, completely wrong, but she was wrong, too—born that way—lacking the will to break away. She yielded to the shattering physical awareness of him—the long, sinewy body and the pressure of his hardened rod against her belly. She surrendered to the simmering heat between them and the tempest of feeling within.
Deep-buried longings clawed their way out of hiding. They tangled about her heart and coiled and twisted in her belly. She couldn’t name them. This wanted a new language, or no language at all. Meaning narrowed to the taste of his mouth and his skin and to the scent of him, dark and dangerous and so familiar that she ached, as though it were a cherished memory or a reawakened grief.
She should have battled her baser self and pulled free of the woman-trap he was. Instead she struggled to get closer, her hands tangling in his thick hair while her tongue tangled with his. So wrong. So lewd.
And so strange and exciting, like crawling through a pyramid in utter darkness.
He and what he awoke within her were far more dangerous. At this moment, though, she loved danger, and she would have gone on, straight to ruination. But his hand slid from her bottom and his mouth left hers, and with the broken contact, she became aware of the sun and the tall palms and birds singing and the stone giant against whose arm she had so stupidly lost control—along with her self-respect and any and all claims to virtue.
She pulled away. “Oh!” she said. And then, because she didn’t know what else to say—hadn’t a good reason to blame him or any plausible excuse for herself—she did what she’d used to do when she felt this way, when she and Miles were children. She balled her hand into a fist, swung her arm, and hit him, backhanded, hard in the chest.
PANIC.
One black, ghastly moment. Rupert must say something—conceal, divert, distract—but it meant thinking, and his mind wasn’t up to the job.
The blow settled everything handsomely—and about bloody time, too.
“Sorry,” he said. “I got carried away.”
That was too uncomfortably true.
“Carried away?” she repeated indignantly.
He could have said she was a fine one to wax indignant when she’d cooperated fully, thank you very much, rather too fully, in fact. Rather more than he was prepared for—or any man could be prepared for.
He still saw stars—and moons and planets, too. The whole universe was spinning. Dizzy, he started to look about for the large object—a stone falcon for instance—with which she must have thumped him in the head.
He caught himself in the nick of time.
There wasn’t a weapon. She was the weapon. She’d struck with her softly wicked pouting peach of a mouth and her body, the curving miracle of a body the Devil himself had designed to drive men distracted.
And then there was the passion, ocean-deep and as wild as any sea storm.
Rupert had a strong suspicion what it was her husband had died of.
He gestured about him. “The…um…romantic scene. The woman of mystery.” With the magnificent rump. And a raw, rare talent for kissing a man deaf, dumb, blind, and deranged. “The mood of the moment. And no one about.”
That was to say, he hoped there had been no witnesses. He looked past her, over the gigantic Ramesses he’d assumed would shield them from prying eyes. Their guide and the handful of servants and crew members who’d come along had gathered a respectful distance away. They sat in the shade of a clump of palm trees, smoking their pipes and listening to Tom talking nine to the dozen. In the other direction, the donkey drivers remained with their beasts and talked in the same animated Egyptian manner.
“I am no mystery,” she said crossly. “I told you—”
“Your mind is so intriguing,” he said. “So filled with learning. And all those secrets, too. Complicated. Fascinating.”
Her expression grew wary. “My mind?” she said. “You kissed me for my mind?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Do you want to see the pyramids?” He pointed. “They’re that way.”