The Mummy or Ramses the Damned (54 page)

“Ramses, I remember!”

In the dress shop, the look on the woman’s face! The serving girl screaming. And the young man, the poor young man who had looked down and seen the bone!

Ye gods, what have you done to me!

She turned, staggering away from the light, but it was all around her. The mirror was ablaze. She went down on her knees, her hands on the warm green rug. She lay down, tossing, turning, trying to push away the fierce power that penetrated her brain; that penetrated her heart. A great pulsing vibration had caught her entire form. She floated in space. And finally lay still
in the great vibrating drift, the hot light blanketing her skin, an orange fire against her eyelids.

Elliott sat alone on the deep veranda. The empty bottle sparkled in the light of the morning sun. He dozed as he lay against the cushioned back of the chair, mind now and then wandering. Fasting, drinking, the long sleepless night, all had sharpened him and left him slightly mad; it seemed the light itself was a miracle streaking the sky; it seemed the great glossy silver car rumbling up the drive was a joke of sorts; and so was the funny grey-haired man who climbed down off the high seat and came towards him.

“I’ve been with Winthrop all night.”

“You have my sympathies.”

“Old man, we have an appointment at ten-thirty to clear everything up. Can you manage it?”

“Yes. I shall manage it. You may depend upon me. And Ramsey can be there if … if … you’ve obtained full immunity.”

“Full and complete as long as he’ll sign a sworn statement against Stratford. You know of course he struck again last night, robbed a shop—woman was in there with a full drawer of cash. He took everything.”

“Hmmmmm. Bastard,” Elliott whispered.

“Old man, it’s very important you get up out of this chair, have a good bath and a good shave and be there.…”

“Gerald, on my word. I shall. Ten-thirty, the governor’s palace.”

Blessed quiet. The ugly car had gone away. The boy came again. “Breakfast, my lord?”

“Bring a little something, and some orange juice with it. And ring my son’s room again. And check the desk. Surely he’s left a message!”

It was late morning before her young lord finally awoke.

Rome had fallen. And two thousand years had passed.

For hours she’d sat at the window, dressed in a “fine blue frock,” watching the modern city. All the bits and pieces of what she’d seen and heard were now a complete tapestry. Yet there was so much to know, to understand.

She’d feasted, and had the servants take away the evidence;
she did not want anyone to see the bestial manner in which she’d consumed so much food.

Now his small banquet waited for him. And when he came towards her out of the bedroom, “So beautiful,” she said under her breath.

“What is it, Your Highness?” He bent to kiss her. She wrapped her arms around his waist and kissed his naked chest.

“Take your breakfast, young lord,” she said. “There are so many things I must discover. So many things I must see.”

He seated himself at the small draped table. He lighted the candles with the “matches.”

“Aren’t you joining me?”

“I’ve already feasted, my love. Can you show me the modern city? Can you show me the palaces of the British who rule this land?”

“I’ll show you everything, Your Highness,” he said, with the same unguarded gentleness.

She sat across from him.

“You’re very simply the strangest person I’ve ever met,” he said, and again there was no mockery or meanness in it. “In fact, you remind me of someone I know, a very enigmatic man … but that doesn’t matter. Why are you smiling at me like that? What are you thinking?”

“So beautiful,” she whispered again. “You and all of life, my young lord. It is everything and nothing. So beautiful.”

He blushed like a girl and then laid down the silver tools and leaned across the table and once again kissed her.

“You’re crying,” he said.

“Yes. But I am happy. Stay with me, young lord. Do not leave me just now.”

He appeared startled, then transfixed. She combed the past slowly; had she ever known anyone so gentle? Perhaps in childhood, when she’d been too stupid to know what it meant.

“I don’t want to leave you for the world, Your Highness,” he said. He appeared sad again for a second, half disbelieving. And then at a loss.

“And the opera tonight, my lord, shall we go together? Shall we dance at the opera ball?”

Lovely the light that came to his eyes. “That would be heaven,” he whispered.

She gestured to the plates before him. “Your food, my lord.”

He picked at it in mortal fashion. Then lifted a bundle from
beside his plate, which she had taken no notice of before. He tore off the wrapping and opened what appeared to be a thick manuscript covered over with tiny writing.

“Tell me what this is.”

“Why, a newspaper,” he said, half laughing. He glanced at it. “And awful news, too.”

“Read aloud.”

“You wouldn’t really want to hear it. Some poor woman in a dress shop, with her neck broken like all the rest. And they’ve got a picture of Ramsey with Julie. What a disaster!”

Ramses?

“It’s the talk of Cairo, Your Highness. You may as well know now. My friends have been involved in a fair bit of trouble, but that’s just it, they’ve nothing to do with it. They’ve only been associated with it. There … you see this man?”

Ramses.
They are friends of Lawrence Stratford, the archaeologist, the one who dug up the mummy of Ramses the Damned
.

“He’s a dear friend of my father and of me. They’re searching for him. Some foolishness about stealing a mummy from the Cairo Museum. It’s all hogwash. It will soon blow over.” He broke off. “Your Highness? Don’t let this story frighten you. There’s nothing to it, really.”

She stared at this “picture,” not a drawing like the rest but a dense image, rather like a painting, yet it was all done in ink, undoubtedly. The ink even rubbed off on her fingers. And there he stood. Ramses, beside a camel and a camel driver, dressed in the curious heavy clothes of this age. The print beneath said “Valley of the Kings.”

She almost laughed aloud; yet she did not move or say a word. It seemed the moment stretched into eternity. The young lord was talking, but she couldn’t hear him. Was he saying that he must call his father, that his father must need him now?

In a trance, she watched him move away from her. He had laid the paper down. The picture. She looked at him. He was picking up a strange instrument from the table. He was talking into it. Asking for Lord Rutherford.

At once she was on her feet. Gently she took the thing away from him. She set it down.

“Don’t leave me now, young lord,” she said. “Your father can wait for you. I need you now.”

Baffled, he looked at her; he made no move to stop her as she embraced him.

“Don’t bring the world to us just yet,” she whispered in his ear, kissing him. “Let us have this time together.”

So completely he gave in. So quickly came the fire.

“Don’t be timid,” she whispered. “Caress me; let your hands do what they will as they did last night.”

Once again he belonged to her, enslaving her with his kisses, stroking her breasts through the blue frock.

“Have you come to me by magic?” he whispered. “Just when I thought … when I thought …” And then he was kissing her again, and she led him towards the bed.

She picked up the newspaper as they went into the bedroom. As they sank down on the sheets together, she showed it to him, just as he removed the robe.

“Tell me,” she said, pointing to the little group of figures standing by the camel in the sun. “Who is that woman beside him?”

“Julie, Julie Stratford,” he said.

Then there were no words, only their frantic, hurried and delicious embraces; his hips grinding against her; his sex pumping into her again.

When it was all over, and he lay still, she ran her fingers through his hair.

“This woman; does he care for her?”

“Yes,” he said sleepily. “And she loves him. But that doesn’t matter now.”

“Why do you say this?”

“Because I have you,” he said.

Ramsey was at his best, evincing that easy charm that had subdued everyone on the voyage out; he sat back, spotless and carelessly fashionable in the white linen suit, his hair tousled, blue eyes sparkling with a near boyish vigour.

“I tried to reason with him. When he broke the case and removed the mummy, I realized it was hopeless. I tried to get out on my own, but the guards, well, you know the story.”

“But they said they shot you, they—”

“Sir, these men are not the soldiers of ancient Egypt. They’re hirelings who barely know how to fire their guns. They would not have beaten the Hittites.”

Winthrop laughed in spite of himself. Even Gerald was charmed. Elliott glanced at Samir, who dared not crack the smallest smile.

“Well, if only we could find Henry,” Miles said.

“No doubt his creditors are looking for him, too,” Ramsey said quickly.

“Well, let’s get back to this question of the jail. It seems there was a doctor there when you—”

Gerald finally intervened:

“Winthrop,” he said, “you know very well that this man’s innocent. It’s Henry. It’s been Henry all along. Everything points to it. He broke into the Cairo Museum, stole the mummy, sold it for profit, went on a drunken rampage with the money. You found the wrappings in the belly dancer’s house. Henry’s name was found in the loan shark’s book in London.”

“But the whole story is so …”

Elliott motioned for silence.

“Ramsey has been subjected to enough, and so have we. He’s already made the crucial statement that Henry confessed to the murder of his uncle.”

“He made this very plain to me,” Ramsey said dryly.

“I want our passports returned immediately,” Elliott said.

“But the British Museum …”

“Young man,” Gerald began.

“Lawrence Stratford gave a fortune to the British Museum,” Elliott declared. Finally he could take no more. He had reached his limit with this farce. “Listen, Miles,” he said, leaning forward. “You clear this up, and now, unless you intend to become a social recluse. For I assure you that if my party, including Reginald Ramsey, is not on the noon train tomorrow for Port Said, you will never be received again by any family in Cairo or London which hopes to receive the seventeenth Earl of Rutherford. Do I make myself clear?”

Silence in the office. The young man blanched. This was excruciating.

“Yes, my lord,” he answered under his breath. At once he opened the desk drawer and produced the passports one by one, laying them down on the blotter before him.

Elliott managed to scoop them up with a neat quick gesture before Gerald could do it.

“I find this as disagreeable as you do,” he said. “I’ve never said such words before to any human being in my life, but I want my son released so he can go back to England. Then I’ll stay in this bloody place as long as you want me here. I’ll answer any question you like.”

“Yes, my lord, if I can tell the governor that you will stay …”

“I just told you that, didn’t I? Do you want a blood oath?”

Enough said. He felt Gerald’s hand on his arm. He had what he wanted.

Samir helped him to his feet. They led the party out of the anteroom, through the hallway and onto the front veranda.

“Well done, Gerald,” he said. “I’ll call you if I need you. I’d appreciate your notifying Randolph about this. It’s a little more than I can bear at the moment. But I’ll write a long letter soon.…”

“I’ll soften everything. No need at all for him to know the details. When Henry’s arrested, it’s going to be dreadful enough.”

“Let’s worry about that when it happens.”

Ramsey was clearly impatient. He started down the steps towards the waiting car. Elliott shook Gerald’s hand and then followed.

“Are we quite finished with this little performance?” Ramsey said. “I am wasting valuable time here!”

“Well, you have a lot of time, don’t you?” Elliott said with a polite smile. He was a little light-headed suddenly. They had won. The children could get out. “It’s imperative that you come back to the hotel now,” he said, “that you be seen there.”

“Foolishness! And the idea of the opera tonight is positively ludicrous.”

“Expediency!” said Elliott, climbing into the backseat of the car first. “Get in,” he said.

Ramsey stood there, angry, dejected.

“Sire, what can we do until we have some further evidence of where she might be?” Samir asked. “On our own, we cannot find her.”

This time the little room that moved did not scare her. She knew what it was, and that it was to serve the people of these times, as the railroad served them and the motor cars, and all the strange devices that had seemed to her earlier as instruments of horror, things exquisitely capable of bringing suffering and death.

They didn’t torture people by packing them into the little room and making them travel up and down. They didn’t drive the big locomotives into advancing armies. How strange that she had interpreted things in terms of their most malicious uses.

And he was explaining things to her now, freely and easily—in fact, he had been talking for hours. It wasn’t important to ask him specific questions, except occasionally; he liked telling her all about the mummy of Ramses the Damned, and how Julie Stratford was a modern woman; and how Britain ran its great empire, and so forth and so on. That he had loved Julie Stratford was obvious; Ramsey had “stolen” her, but again, it didn’t matter. Not at all. What he’d thought was love wasn’t love but something paler, more convenient, and altogether too easy. But did she really want to hear about his family? No, talk of history, then, and Cairo, and Egypt, and the world.…

It had been a great chore to keep him from calling his father. He felt guilty. But she had used all her persuasion and all her wiles. He did not require fresh garments; his shirt and jacket looked every bit as fine as they had last night.

And so off they were going now through the crowded lobby of Shepheard’s, to drive in his Rolls-Royce, to see the Mamluke tombs and all the “history” that she had asked about; and the tapestry was becoming fuller and fuller.