Journey to the Lost Tomb (Rowan and Ella Book 2) (13 page)

           
After
lunch, with regrets from William whose chores demanded he stay in the camp, she
added a calfskin of water to her saddle and, with general directions from
William and a shake of the head from Julia, she left for an afternoon ride.
Ella had not ridden twenty minutes before she realized that she was in love
with this country. Even the rocky expanse of the dig site—as unattractive
and forbidding as a moonscape—gave her a feeling of peace and contentment.
She rode the base of the valley first, staying well away from the workers and
their growing mountain of debris. Because there were so many places that could
be inadvertently harmed by her pony’s hooves, she eventually urged him up the
steep hills opposite her morning vantage point.

           
Closer
to the sun and so much later in the day, the heat was nearly crippling in its
ferocity. She had kept the mustard-colored
hijab
from the morning’s ride and it draped her in smooth graceful folds down her
back, protecting her nose and mouth from the incessant blowing sand. Instead of
riding boots—which she didn’t have—she wore silk slippers. Fearful
of her foot slipping through the stirrup with the unpredictable pony, she
pulled up the leathers and crossed them across her lap so that her legs could
hang free or tighten on the animal’s sides. Next time, she decided she’d do
away with the saddle altogether.

           
In
no hurry, Ella walked her pony carefully along the cliff tops. As she rode she
could see the workmen—like crazed ants digging, carrying, and
dumping—and looking back to the east she could see the Nile. Beautiful
and meandering, undulating like a dazed serpent amid the tall reeds along the
banks.

           
She
realized this place spoke to her. This land seemed to fill her with a sense of
peace that she had never felt before. She shook her head.
Of course you’ve never felt it. When did you have time to just wander
around on horseback taking in the sights?
The only item she had on her
agenda was getting back in time to bathe and dress for dinner.
If you had told me a week ago that I would
actually like the idea of that, I would have said you were mad.

           
And
Rowan, never far from her thoughts, seemed to fill them now as she rode. The
clarity of her love and knowledge of him that had often escaped her in 2013
Dothan was immediate and unassailable here. When she thought of the things that
Carol had said about the kind of person Ella was with Rowan—selfish and recalcitrant—she
was horrified to admit Carol had been at least a little right. A protective,
loving mother, Carol had instantly seen what Ella lacked in relation to her son.
Something had failed when she and Rowan returned from Heidelberg.
But what was the answer?
Go back to 1620 Heidelberg?
She shivered
at the thought. They had barely escaped with their lives as it was.

           
It’s only two weeks
, she thought.
What are two measly weeks in the scheme of
things?
Just as soon as they returned to Cairo, she would race to the old
market wall and find the damn crack and be on an Egyptair flight back to the
States before she totally ruined her chance of a happy-ever-after with her big,
handsome cowboy.

           
She
looked out over the Valley of the Kings and willed herself to imagine him sitting
next to her, alert, engaged, alive, on his own horse but just out of sight.
Rowan loved archaeology. He loved history. He would love this world. She wished
so dearly that he were here now. She reminded herself that ninety-one years in
the future, the man she loved was worried sick. He was frantic and wondering what
could possibly have happened to her. And probably thinking the worst.

           
And
what was
she
doing? She was sitting on
a horse at the rim of the Valley of the Kings, looking down on the stage where
King Tut was about to be uncovered, and knowing she didn’t deserve Rowan’s
forgiveness for putting him through hell. Knowing his mother was right about
her.

           
And
even so, she found herself saying,
Not
yet. I’ll come home but, please…

           
Not
quite yet.

Chapter Eleven

Cairo 1922

           
The
bazaar was a far cry from the one he had just walked out of. This one was alive
like a writhing, unpredictable animal. Small shops and stores lined with shelves
and cupboards bordered the narrow walkways with a constant streaming of people.
The merchants sat smoking and talking beneath the cupboards smoking and talking.
Everywhere Rowan looked, he saw shops displaying a wide variety of items: saddles
and leather goods, shoes in every kind of fabric and material, rugs, and a
cascade of vegetables, fruit and meat displayed on staggered display shelves. Everything
looked dirty and foreign and authentic. His first emotion at recovering his
senses from the journey from the back of the baker’s square where Yeena had
taken him was an overwhelming sense of relief nothing like what he had felt
when he first arrived in Cairo.

           
Ella was here. She was
now
.
He felt her alive to him and the feeling
energized and buoyed him. And if what Yeena had said was true, Ella had had no
say in coming to this time period.

           
She
had not willingly left him.

           
Yeena
had taken him to her shop, locked the door and told him the impossible. Excited
to see him, she had held his hand in both hers and told him that she had sent
Ella to the time she was born to be in. At first, he didn’t believe what she
was saying to him.
 
He thought she must
have helped kidnap Ella,
but then why
search him out
? She had clearly been waiting for him to appear.

           
And
she knew about Heidelberg.

           
“Your
wife didn’t want to believe either,” Yeena said. “I feared that she would not
go when I could see she must.”

           
“And
why must she?” Rowan figured there was a fine line between mumbo-jumbo spiritualism
and batshit crazy. If he hadn’t spent three weeks living in the seventeenth
century, he might have been more skeptical. As it was he’d been too far and
seen too much not to go on a little faith where
time
was concerned.

           
“I
see the future in shadows,” she said, shrugging. “But she has gone back to find
you. To save you.”

           
“How
is that possible since I’m
here
?”
Rowan said. His stomach tightened. He wasn’t sure whether he was playing her or
she was playing him.

           
“How
are
many
things possible?”

           
“Gone
back
when
?”

           
“I
cannot be certain of the time.”

           
“I’ll
settle for a guestimate.”

           
“Howard
Carter has yet to find the Boy King. But very soon now.”

           
“1922.
Okay. And you said she went
willingly
into the past?”

           
“Willingly,
yes. But not knowingly.”

           
“I
see.” Rowan felt the hairs on the back of neck tingle.

           
“But
she willingly
stays
,” Yeena said. She
waved a hand in her shop as if that were proof. “Do you see her here? Has she
returned to Alabama?”

           
 
Rowan was getting frustrated and he
wasn’t sure he was getting any closer to the information he needed.

           
“You
said you told her to get something before her flight. Isn’t that right?”

           
“The
Book of the Dead.”

           
“As
a souvenir for me.”

           
“Those
were
her
words. But, yes, it is for
you.”

           
“And
now? Am I supposed to just believe this crazy story and hang around drinking
Darjeeling waiting for her to materialize back from 1922?” He raked his hand
through his shaggy brown hair and looked at her in bewilderment.

           
Yeena
steepled her hands in front of her on the table between them. She cocked her
head to look at him as if her were an interesting specimen.

           
“You
would not be the man I know you to be if you did that,” she said.

           
Using
a handful of the antique coins Yeena had given him, Rowan bought a piece of
bread stuffed with ground lamb at one of the food vendors. He knew that Ella
had started her life in 1922 in this bazaar. But she wouldn’t have stayed in
the area. It was too unpredictable, too native. He wolfed down his food and walked
out into the street, unsure of how to hail a taxi drawn by a horse. He returned
to the curb and waited, trying to decipher the traffic flow. He looked up at
the sky.
Should he try walking to the
center of town? Was the center of town where the British were? That’s
where
Ella would have headed, he was sure of it.
  

           
Suddenly
a hand tugged at his sleeve and he whirled to see a young Egyptian boy standing
on the curb grinning at him.

           
“
Effendi
is lost?” the boy said.

           
Rowan
saw the young man’s eyes dart to Rowan’s coat pocket where a wallet might be.

           
“I
need a taxi,” Rowan said.

           
“You
are British? I am very helpful to the British. I am Ra.”

           
Rowan
didn’t bother correcting him. “Great, Ra,” he said. “Hail me a taxi.”

           
“Where
would
effendi
like the taxi to take
him? Are you staying at Shepheard’s Hotel like all the British nobility?”

           
“Yes,
that’s exactly where I’m going. Take me to Shepheards Hotel.”

           
Thanks
to Yeena,
Rowan had enough 1920’s bills
to pay for a hotel room. He couldn’t help but wonder how in the world Ella
managed with just a purse full of useless Visa cards and 2013 Egyptian money.

 
          
The
Shepheard’s Hotel was elegant—too much so for Rowan’s taste—but it
was
crammed full of Brits. He marched up
the grand front staircase, brushing past the doormen who bowed deferentially as
he entered the hotel. He was dressed in khaki slacks and a buttoned down shirt
under a dark cotton blazer. He had seen enough of the clothing on the
surrounding white men to know that he at least somewhat fit in. Watching the
women in their long dresses, gloves and hats, he found himself hoping that Ella
wasn’t arrested as a prostitute as soon as she “landed.”

           
Rowan
registered at the hotel, asking if there was a Miss Stevens registered. The
request was met with a frown and the response that guest registration was
private. Rowan pocketed his room key and went directly out the front door.
Outside, he spotted young Ra again and held up a coin.

           
“I
need information,” he said.

 
          
The
young man eyed the coin hungrily and nodded.

           
“I
can help,
effendi
,” he said.
“Whatever you are looking for, I can find it for you. Women? Drugs?” His eyes
glanced down to Rowan’s clothing. “Tomb treasure?”

           
Rowan
tossed him the coin. “Let’s start with a decent menswear store,” he said.

           
An
hour later, Rowan was in his hotel room dressing for dinner. It was obvious
that Shepheard’s was
the
place to be
in 1920’s Cairo if you were white and wealthy. While Ella only qualified for
one of those characteristics, Rowan felt sure she would naturally have
gravitated to the center of English-speaking society. While he had no real idea
of how to behave in this time period, he assumed his natural confidence would
get him over the roughest hurdles. As it turned out, he wasn’t wrong.

           
Upon
entering the Shepheard’s dining room, he was escorted to his table but before
he even flapped his linen napkin out across his napkin, a stern-faced
Shepheard’s maître d approached him with an invitation. “If Mr. Pierce is
dining alone tonight,” the man said, “Miss Newton of Arlington, Virginia, would
like to extend the invitation to dine with her party.” The invitation was
delivered in flat monotones as if the bearer would not dream of influencing
Rowan’s decision in any way.

           
Rowan
twisted in his chair to look around the dining room. A plump thirty-something woman
with auburn hair waved at him from the center of a large table of six people—none
of whom could be accused at first sight as looking either dignified or elegant.
Rowan smiled and waved back.

           
The
evening, although tiring in every sense of the full definition of the
word—and Rowan was used to some pretty exhausting stakeouts as a US
Marshal—was a rousing success.
        

           
They
had heard of Ella. And even better, they knew where she had gone.

           
“Oh,
they left the day we arrived,” Marvel Newton said, shaking her reddish-brown
curls so that they jiggled and vied with her hanging ear-bobs. “But of course
the whole place was talking about it because she was with Howard Carter’s
party.”

           
Holy shit!
Rowan found his excitement
building in spite of himself.

           
“Can
you believe we just missed him? Half the people in my party are amateur
Egyptologists. They would have
killed
to meet the great man, himself.”

           
“In
what way was she with his party, do you know?” Rowan spoke as casually as he
could without belying his interest in Marvel’s response.

           
“Well,
I don’t know the specifics,” Marvel said, refilling her own wine glass. An
extremely wealthy American heiress, she had made it clear that she cared little
for ceremony or class distinctions. For that, Rowan was grateful. “I’m sure I
could find out, though. Are you related to her in some way?”

           
Rowan
picked up on the coyness of his benefactress’ question and he hated to do
anything which might dam up the flow of information. But in the forty minutes
that he had spent with Marvel Newton, if he knew anything else about her, he
knew she could smell a lie and wouldn’t tolerate bull shit.
Which was just as well
, Rowan mused,
since he typically didn’t bother with either.

           
“She’s
my wife,” he said bluntly.

           
“Oh.”
Clearly, that wasn’t what she wanted to hear. “A runaway wife, one may
presume?”

           
“It’s
complicated.”

           
“My
dear, it always is.”

Howard Carter Camp, Valley
of the Kings, 1922

           
 
One morning, after Ella had been at
Carter’s camp a week, William surprised her by joining her on her ride. In the
days since they had arrived at the camp, she had fallen into a routine of
riding the perimeter of the valley mornings before it got too hot. On the
second day, she had gone out after lunch when there was no one to warn her not
too (except Julia) and twice she nearly wilted and toppled from her pony before
she could get back to camp. While determined not to admit to anyone she had
been so foolish, she assumed that the fact that she kept to her tent the rest
of the day too ill to appear at dinner probably told the embarrassing truth of
her actions.

           
Mad dogs and Englishmen
, she thought, as
she tacked up her pony for her morning ride. Normally too busy with his camp
chores and servile attendance on the noxious Viscount Digby, William had
somehow managed the morning off.

 
          
She
loved the company of the quiet little man. His English was flecked with accented
uplilts at the end of his sentences which made it sound as if he was always
asking a question. In a strange way, it reminded her of the way Southerners
speak and it felt oddly familiar and comforting amidst this strange world.

           
She
was particularly glad for William’s company today because he was leading her
away from the valley to new scenery. They walked their ponies slowly across the
rocky ground at the base of the foothills that formed not a half a mile from
the valley of stony, barren landscaping, its cliffs studded with the black
openings of the discovered tombs. While William talked little as they rode,
Ella found herself feeling restored and relaxed in his presence. She let him
lead and simply watched the scenery change from rockscape to green, tilled
fields. Presently, they came upon a village of small mud huts with cornstalk
roofs. The houses were bunched around a main courtyard with a stone fire pit. Around
the fire pit were several women who were cooking. As they rode into the village,
the men who were standing together in small groups smoking stared at her. She
was dressed in her riding clothes and a pith helmet. She pulled up her
hijab
to shield her face. She wore it
less as a display of modesty than to protect her face against the relentless,
airborne desert sands.