The Ape Who Guards the Balance (51 page)

“What about the head?” Ramses asked. He sounded quite calm, but he took a tin of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. I did not comment.

“Mr. Davis removed the pectoral—he still thinks it’s a crown. The face was damaged, but there was some skin remaining. At first. One of the teeth fell out when he . . . Well, to make a long story short, they all pranced around and congratulated one another, and Mr. Davis kept shouting, ‘It’s Queen Tiyi! We’ve found her.’ Only they haven’t, you know.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Emerson raised his bowed head.

“They wanted to send for a doctor to look at the bones,” Nefret explained. “To see if they could determine the sex. There wasn’t . . .” She glanced at me. “At least I didn’t see . . . But I might not have.”

“No,” I said. “Not if the body fell apart so completely and so rapidly. But you were there; why did they want to send for another qualified medical person?”

“Don’t be absurd, Aunt Amelia. Do you suppose any of them would consider
me
qualified? A
woman
? Ned did speak up for me, and Mr. Davis consented to allow me to have a look—chuckling merrily at the very idea. I told him it wasn’t a female skeleton, but he just went on chuckling.”

“Are you sure of the sex?” Ramses asked.

“As sure as I can be after such a brief examination. I didn’t dare touch anything. The skull was damaged, but the undamaged portions were typically masculine—the supraorbital ridges, the overall muscular markings, the shape of the jaw. They wouldn’t let me measure anything, but the angle of the pubic arch looked—”

“The skeleton was intact, then,” I said.

“Except for the head. It was in bad shape,” Nefret admitted.

“Then it is Akhenaton,” Emerson exclaimed. “The remains of the most enigmatic of all Egyptian pharaohs, pawed over by a pack of vultures looking for gold!”

“Mr. Davis still thinks it’s the Queen,” Nefret said. “He went out looking for a physician—a real physician.” Her sense of humor overcame her professional chagrin; she began to laugh. “Can’t you picture him dashing through the hordes of tourists yelling, ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’ He came back dragging an unhappy American gynecologist, and stood over the poor man exclaiming, ‘We’ve found Queen Tiyi! It’s a female skeleton. Unquestionably female, isn’t that right, Doctor?’ Well, what could the man say? He agreed, and made his escape. And so did I. I couldn’t stand it any longer.”

Ramses shifted position slightly. “Father, did you get a good look at the hieroglyphic inscription on the coffin?”

“Not good enough,” Emerson said sourly. “The cartouches had been cut out, but the epithets were those of Akhenaton. ‘Living in truth, beautiful child of the Aton,’ and so on.”

“Correct,” said Ramses, looking as enigmatic as Akhenaton.

Emerson shot his son a suspicious look. “What are you saying?”

“Don’t say it,” I exclaimed. “They are coming. I think I hear Mr. Davis’s voice. Get hold of your father, Ramses.”

I blame the entire thing on Mr. Davis. If he had passed on by with the others, I might have been able to keep Emerson quiet. But of course he had to stop and gloat.

“I hope you appreciate your good fortune, my dear,” he said, patting Nefret on her head. “To be present on such an occasion!”

“It was good of you to let me be there, sir,” Nefret murmured.

“Yes, congratulations,” I said, tugging at Emerson, who stood like a rock, and looked like one, too, for all the animation on his face. “We must go. We are very late. Good afternoon, M. Maspero, Mr. Weigall, Mr.—”

“Charming girl,” Davis remarked, beaming at me. “Charming! You shouldn’t let her mess around with mummies, you know. Bless the ladies, they don’t have the brains for such things. Can you imagine, she told me it wasn’t the Queen!”

M. Maspero cleared his throat. “Mais, mon ami—”

“And don’t you try to tell me any different, Maspero. I know what I found. By Jove, what a triumph!” And then he administered the coup de grâce. “You can all pop down tomorrow if you like and have a look. Just don’t disturb anything.”

That was when the catastrophe occurred. I will not—I cannot in decency—reproduce Emerson’s remarks. Some of them, in his execrable French, were addressed to M. Maspero, but the majority of them fell on the indignant head of Mr. Davis, who, to be fair, had not the least idea why Emerson was being so rude. And after his gracious invitation, too!

It ended with Davis demanding that Emerson be expelled from the Valley altogether. Only his kindly forbearance had allowed us to work there, since he held the firman. He had tried to be accommodating; he had made greater concessions than could have been expected of him. But, by Jove, there was no reason why he should have to put up with this sort of—er—grmph—thing!

Between him and Emerson there was a great deal of shouting. A crowd of curious onlookers gathered. Maspero didn’t try to get a word in. He stood stroking his beard and looking from one speaker to the other. Obviously he was too craven to take the necessary steps, and was expecting me to take them. I am accustomed to men doing that. Emerson would never have laid a hand on such a feeble old person as Mr. Davis, but the latter appeared to be on the verge of a stroke or heart attack, and I did not want Emerson to have that on his conscience. So I raised my voice to the pitch few can ignore, and told him and Emerson to be quiet, and Davis’s friends converged on him, and we converged on Emerson.

I managed to get my husband’s attention by standing on tiptoe and pulling his head down and whispering directly into his ear. “I have something to tell you, Emerson. Something important. Come away, where Mr. Davis can’t overhear.”

Emerson shook his head irritably, but by that time Davis’s party had got away from him and he had calmed down a bit. We were able to remove him to our rest tomb and persuade him to take some refreshment.

He broke out again just as violently when I told him of my meeting with Sethos, and for a time his profane ejaculations prevented a reasoned discussion. Ramses (who did not have his father’s prejudices against the Master Criminal) was the first to realize the import of that meeting.

“Do you mean there is a complete photographic record after all?” he demanded. “Surely not of the mummy, though. How would he manage that?”

“I am sure I do not know,” I replied. “But he told me that he—or rather, he and Sir Edward—had managed it. It is some small consolation, is it not, to know that the record exists? And David’s copy of the shrine panel and door in the corridor may be the only record of those objects.”

Emerson shot me a guilty look. “Now, Peabody, I don’t know where you got the idea—”

“It was on your desk, Emerson,” I replied firmly if not altogether truthfully. “Anyhow, I knew you were up to something that morning you went early to the Valley with the children. You know you will never be able to make it public, don’t you? You had no business doing such a thing.”

Emerson said, “Hmph.”

“A good many of our activities in that tomb can’t be made public,” Ramses remarked. “Not if we ever want to work in Egypt again.”

Emerson deemed it advisable to change the subject. “Curse it, Amelia, why didn’t you tell me this earlier? We might have caught the bas—the villain!”

“I doubt that,” said Nefret. Laughter brightened her eyes and her voice. “Anyhow, Professor, would you really have handed him over to the authorities after he saved Aunt Amelia?”

Emerson considered the question. “I would much rather have had the satisfaction of beating the rascal to a pulp—and forcing him to return the objects he stole from the tomb. Did he tell you what they were, Peabody?”

I shook my head, and Ramses said thoughtfully, “We may be able to hazard a reasonable guess by comparing what is now in the burial chamber with the list I made after my first visit.”

“Ned will be able to do the same, won’t he?” I asked.

“Possibly,” said Ramses. “But I daresay his memory is not quite as accurate as mine.”

False modesty is not a quality from which Ramses suffers. Since the statement was undoubtedly true, no one contradicted him.

“No suspicion will attach to the photographer,” Ramses went on. “There have been literally dozens of people in and out of that tomb over the past few days, including Mr. Davis’s workers. We may owe Sethos a debt of gratitude after all, for preserving objects that would have been damaged or stolen by less skillful thieves. I wouldn’t be surprised if certain objects turn up in the antiquities market.”

This indeed proved to be the case. It was Howard Carter who was shown the bits of gold and fragments of jewelry by a man of Luxor. The fellow offered them to Mr. Davis for four hundred pounds and a promise of immunity. Mr. Davis, I was told, was deeply wounded by the disloyalty of his workmen.

       
(xx)
    
From Manuscript H

“What do you suppose the Professor will do now?” David asked.

It was the first time they had had a chance for a private conference since the debacle over Davis’s tomb. For reasons known only to her, Nefret had decided to make it something of a celebration. She had given up pretending she liked whiskey, but there was a bottle of wine and some of Fatima’s sugar cakes. They met in Ramses’s room, since Horus had taken possession of Nefret’s bed and refused to let either of the men into the room.

Stretched out in his favorite chair, his feet on a low chest, Ramses shrugged. “He won’t tell us until he’s damned good and ready. But I can hazard a guess, I think. He’ll let us finish our copying at the Seti temple while he and Mother and Nefret go off selecting another site for next year.”

“Why me?” Nefret demanded. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, with the silk skirts of her blue robe spread around her, like a water nymph in a pool. “They would be much happier by themselves, and I could help you here.”

“You know better than that,” Ramses said sharply. “People would talk.”

“You needn’t sound so cross. I know they would and I don’t care if they do. Goodness, what nuisances ‘people’ are.”

“True,” Ramses conceded. “I expect we’ll leave for home earlier than usual. That will make one person happy, at any rate.”

David hadn’t even been listening. Eyes half closed, lips curved, he was in a happy trance of his own.

“Wake up,” Ramses said affectionately. He stretched out a booted foot and nudged David’s shoulder.

“I heard. Do you think we will? Really?”

Nefret laughed. “Leave it to me, David. How many times have you written her since she left?”

“Every day. But letters aren’t very—” He broke off, staring. “Where did you get that?”

Nefret struck a match and held it to the end of the long thin cigar she held between her teeth. Her cheeks went in and out like a bellows as she puffed.

“Mr. Vandergelt?” Ramses suggested, taking firm hold of the arms of the chair and trying to control his voice.

“I wanted to try it,” Nefret explained, after four matches and a fit of coughing.“I don’t see what’s so funny. Mr. Vandergelt laughed too, but he swore he wouldn’t tell Aunt Amelia. I don’t know, though. Why do they smell so much nicer than they taste?”

“You aren’t supposed to inhale,” Ramses said.

“Oh, really? Hmm.” She blew out a cloud of smoke. “I think I’ve got the hang of it. May I have a glass of wine, please?”

“So you can be thoroughly depraved?” Ramses said. He let David hand her the wine, though. He was afraid to get any closer.

“This isn’t depraved, it’s nice.” Nefret leaned back against the head of the bed and beamed at them. “It’s glorious. I don’t want anything to change. I want it to be like this forever.”

“What, drinking wine and smoking cigars? You’ll get painfully drunk if nothing worse,” Ramses said.

“I’ve never been drunk. I’d like to try it sometime.”

“No, you wouldn’t.” A picture formed in his mind, of Nefret laughing and a bit unsteady on her feet, her hair coming down and her lips parted . . . He gave himself a hard mental kick.

“You know what I mean,” Nefret said. “I like us the way we are, all of us. I could almost be angry with you, David, for changing things, but I’m not really, because Lia is a darling and she won’t take you away from us. It’s different for men. They bring their wives home, just as they’ve always done. Women have to give up everything when they marry—their homes, their freedom, even their names. So I’m not going to.”

Ramses was speechless. It was David who replied, after a nervous look at his friend. “Not marry? Isn’t that a biter—dogmatic? What if you fall in love with someone?”

Nefret waved her cigar. “Then he’ll have to take
my
name and do what
I
want to do, and come and live with you and Aunt Amelia and the Professor.”

“I’m not at all sure Mother would agree to that arrangement,” Ramses said. “She probably looks forward to the day when she can be rid of the lot of us.”

“You’ll bring your bride home, won’t you?”

“No,” Ramses said. “Not home to Mother. Not . . . Can we please talk about something else?”

David gave him a quick glance and asked Nefret where she thought they ought to work next season. The cigar was a help too; she was a little green in the face by the time she had finished it, and declared she was ready for bed. David went with her to the door and closed it carefully after her.

Ramses was sitting upright, with his head in his hands. David jogged his elbow. “Have another glass of wine.”

“No. That just makes it worse.” He went to the wash-basin and splashed water on his face, then stood dripping over the basin with his hands braced on the table.

“She didn’t mean it,” David said.

“She bloody well did.” Ramses swiped at his face with the towel, dropped it onto the floor and went back to his chair. “She’s such a child,” he said helplessly. “What happened to her, during those years, to make her so—so unaware? She’s never talked about it. Do you suppose someone . . .”

“Is that what’s been tormenting you? No, Ramses. I don’t believe she’s been hurt, she’s too loving and open and happy. She’ll come round.” David hesitated and then said tentatively, “Perhaps you could—”