Mr Impossible (18 page)

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 theNileare 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 atWaterloo?” 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. “Egyptseems 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 theHoly 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 theHoly Land.”

“
Reis Rashad
says we’re very nearMemphis,” 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 inMemphis. Recent events had banished
all thoughts of exploring. To the extent she had thought about it,
she’d vaguely pictured a desert plateau likeGiza, 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 rucked 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 mentionedEgypt, 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 ofEgyptwas 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 ofEgypt, 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 Harnesses the Great. It is said to have stood before
thetempleofVulcan, 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.