Mr Impossible (14 page)

“
Mr.
Carsington, you must speak to me,” she said.

He’d rather
not speak. He’d rather stay exactly where he was, pillowed
against her soft bosom and inhaling her scent while she gently
stroked his cheek.

“
Mr.
Carsington.” The hand left off stroking to pat his cheek, with
growing impatience.

Remembering the
lady had a short temper, he knew the gentle pats would shortly
escalate to slaps. He opened his eyes and met her green gaze, where
anxiety mingled with vexation.

“
Where am I?”
he said, though he knew the answer perfectly well. It was a delaying
tactic. Her bosom made a perfect pillow. He did not want to leave it.

“
On the floor
of Anaz’s storeroom,” she said. “You seem to have
fainted.”

“
Fainted?”
he echoed incredulously. “I was knocked in the head. I ought to
know. It’s happened often enough.”

“
That would
explain a great deal,” she said. She started to rise. Aware she
would have no compunction about letting his poor, battered head thump
to the floor, he quickly sat up.

He looked about
him. Broken crockery and small human figures littered the floor. Near
him lay a statue, about a foot tall, of a falcon. He picked it up,
testing the weight. It was made of polished black stone, and it was
heavy. With this she’d attacked the villain.

“
The falcon
is an incarnation of the god Horus,” she said. “It was
the nearest object at hand that would do any damage. Those little
figures are sweet, but they’re useless as weapons.”

The painted wooden
figures were like the ones on the shelf in her house. He picked one
up. “What are they? Dolls? Sacred idols?”

“
No one
knows,” she said. “These, along with broken bits of
pottery and mummy, are what one most usually finds in the tombs.
Robbers made off with the treasures eons ago.”

“
So many
secrets,” he said. He tucked the figure into the breast pocket
of his coat and stood. “It seems Vanni Anaz will keep all of
his until Judgment Day.”

“
Not all,”
Mrs. Pembroke said. “While you were blindly charging after
villains—without the least idea how many of them there were—I
stopped to ascertain whether the man was still alive. He was. Before
expiring he said, ‘
Cherchez
Ramesses.’ That, at
least, is what I thought he said.” Her voice was brittle.

It was then Rupert
noticed the dark stains on her cloak. She’d probably knelt to
help the dying man as she’d done Rupert. She hadn’t
swooned or shrieked or run away. She had burst into the storeroom,
snatched up a weapon, and fought the villains alongside him.

It was a stupidly
brave thing to do.

Strange things
happened inside him—a sudden rush of feeling he hadn’t a
name for. Lust was involved, naturally, since he was a man, and it
would want far more than a few bloodstains on her clothing to
make
that
go away.

Lust, though, was a
hanger-on, an old friend as natural as breathing. The thing it hung
upon was as strange and puzzling as the wooden figure tucked inside
his coat.

He didn’t
understand the feeling and didn’t try to. He did understand
that she was upset. She had reason.

“
That was
rather a lot of dead men in only two days,” he said, starting
toward her.

She held up a hand.
The tremble was so slight he might have missed it had he not been so
acutely riveted upon her.

“
Don’t,”
she said. “Don’t even think of comforting me.”

Even for him it was
instinctive. He knew how to hold a woman and let her cry on his
shoulder while he gritted his teeth and endured the weeping. He hated
it, but he could do it. Not that he would hate holding her. It was
the weeping he could do without.

“
You’ve
had a shock,” he said. “You can’t be in the habit
of finding men with their throats cut.”

“
I don’t
want comforting,” she said. “I want a bath. And a cup of
tea. Those two, in any order. But first…” She closed her
eyes, shook her head, opened her eyes again. “We’ll have
to notify the authorities.”

“
Have your
wits wandered?” he said. “You’ve blood on your
clothes. You pointed out, recollect, how fantastically stupid the
local police are. They’re bound to think we killed the rug
merchant.”

“
Running away
will appear a good deal more incriminating,” she said.

Rupert, too, wanted
a bath—and a drink of something stronger than tea. He did not
want to go to the guardhouse again and watch her argue with brainless
bullies. He couldn’t calm anybody down or lighten the
proceedings with humor, because he didn’t know the language.
And he most certainly did not want to spend another night separated
from her in a jail, unable to protect her.

He didn’t
want Beechey to come to release them, and to decide that perhaps,
after all, it was not such a good idea to assign Rupert Carsington to
look after Miles Archdale’s sister. Rupert did not want the
secretary to suggest to Mr. Salt that perhaps it would be better,
after all, to allow a civilian volunteer like Lord Noxley to assist
the lady. Per-haps, after all, it would be wisest to banish Mr.
Carsington to the desert, where, with any luck, a three-hundred-ton
obelisk would fall on him.

Most of all, Rupert
didn’t want to reveal any of these thoughts to her.

He donned an
amiably stupid expression and said, “As you wish, madam. You’re
in charge of thinking.”

WITHIN AN HOUR, Mr.
Beechey, the police, the district sheik, and a translator had
gathered in the shop. At present they stood in the front room. This,
apart from the bloodstains on the floor, appeared undamaged. The
storerooms beyond, however, had been ransacked—perhaps, Rupert
suggested, while one villain kept Anaz busy in front.

“
Maybe they
made too much noise,” he theorized, “and when Anaz went
to investigate, the first villain cut his throat.”

When this was
translated, the sheik frowned and moved away to examine the corpse.
When he was done, the body was taken away.

Meanwhile Beechey
quietly let Rupert know that the situation could become most
unpleasant. Vanni Anaz was not one of hundreds of insignificant
Egyptian merchants; he was an important foreigner who’d
performed numerous services for Muhammad Ali and for whom the pasha
had, consequently, a great affection. He was, moreover, the third
person to get himself murdered in Mrs. Pembroke’s and Mr.
Carsington’s vicinity in two days.

Fortunately, Sheik
Salim proved to be a more thoughtful and logical character than the
police. Having studied the body, he went on to examine the storerooms
and question people in neighboring shops.

He came back to
report that neighbors had seen men running from the rear of the shop,
one runner bareheaded.

An adult
non-European male not wearing a turban was as rare and strange a
sight on theCairostreets as an adult male wearing one would be on
those ofLondon.

The sheik concluded
that all the evidence accorded with the explanation the “learned
gentleman”—meaning Rupert!—had given.

It was Mrs.
Pembroke who’d explained, to be sure of a correct translation.
But when she spoke, the sheik looked at Rupert, not her, and answered
Rupert, not her. She might as well have been in Northumberland.
Rupert was sure it vexed her—even he found it provoking—but
whatever she felt, she hid it well. Or perhaps she was simply too
weary or too shaken to care. At least the sheik had paid attention.
He told them they were free to go. He would have the police comb the
metropolis for a man missing a turban and sporting a large lump on
the side of his head.

Tell them to look
for a fellow showing symptoms of concussion,“ Rupert said.
”Mrs. Pembroke gave him a healthy thump, and the statue was
solid stone.“ Beechey sent a dour look his way, but said
nothing until later, when they set out. Night had long since fallen,
and they were following Mrs. Pembroke’s entourage of police and
servants to her house.

The secretary
slowed his pace and said, “I had thought I made it clear that
Mrs. Pembroke was to be shielded from embarrassment and distress at
all costs.”

“
She doesn’t
like being shielded,” Rupert said. “She objects most
strongly to being treated like a child.”

“
That is no
excuse for you to treat her as you would one of your sporting
cronies,” said the secretary. “Did it not occur to you
that other villains might have concealed themselves nearby, and that
you should have summoned assistance immediately? While you were
leaping headlong into an ambush you should have foreseen, she might
have been attacked. She might have been killed or worse.”

Rupert came to a
halt. “What could be worse than her being killed, do you
think?”

“
I thought I
had communicated to you Mr. Salt’s opinions and wishes in the
matter of Mr. Archdale’s disappearance.”

Beechey said. “I
thought I used easily comprehended terms.”

“
You did,”
Rupert said. “I told Mrs. Pembroke about it in much the same
way.”

“
You told—”
After a pause, Beechey went on, his voice strained, “You cannot
have revealed our suspicions about the—ahem—places of
dubious repute. This is one of your jokes, I daresay. Ha ha.”

“
She said her
brother was not in a brothel or opium den and I was on no account to
go to such places looking for him,” Rupert said. “I
obeyed, as I was obliged to do. You did tell me I wasn’t to
upset her, did you not?”

There followed the
kind of furious silence with which Rupert was more than familiar.

It was not the
first time he’d rendered a listener speechless, and it would
not be the last. They walked on without talking while Rupert wondered
how much time he had before Salt sent him out to the desert.

THOUGH THE LADY was
more than amply protected, Rupert continued with the escort all the
way to her house. He remained to watch the assigned guards position
themselves at strategic spots about the place, then parted company
with Beechey and set out on his own.

It was night, and
Rupert was aware that sensible persons did not traverse
theCairostreets after dark. The safe way, however, had never been his
favorite direction.

He followed the
route he and Mrs. Pembroke had taken two days ago. Though it was
night, he found Lord Noxley’s house with no difficulty—apart
from repeated halts en route to pacify suspicious policemen, military
guardsmen, and porters.

The street was
gated and the gate locked, but by now he’d memorized the secret
password. The watchman said something foreign, to which Rupert
answered, “
La
ilaha ila-llah
.”

He might have to
see about language lessons after all, he thought, like it or not.
Looking on the bright side, learning Arabic from Mrs. Pembroke had to
be pleasanter than learning Greek and Latin from droning
schoolmasters.

Eventually, after
he’d carefully enunciated the phrases “Message from Mr.
Salt” and “British consul” several times, he was
admitted to his lordship’s house. This was against the rules,
Rupert later discovered. He was in luck, however: his visit coincided
with a jealous young woman’s temper tantrum.

The dusky beauty
he’d noticed during his previous visit was named Juman. She’d
been storming about the portico when she heard him hail the porter.
She had Rupert admitted and was soon confiding in him in prettily
broken English enlivened with intricate hand motions.

Lord Noxley had
bought her in the slave market. Eager to please the handsome
foreigner who’d saved her from life with a much older and less
attractive owner, she had painstakingly learnt English. Since she was
exceedingly handsome as well, his lordship let her please him in
other ways, too. As a result, she’d developed expectations—as
women so often did, fanciful creatures that they were—of a
permanent arrangement, preferably including nuptial rites.

Her hopes were
shattered yesterday, when his lordship departedCairoin search of the
English lady’s brother.

The abandoned Juman
was still sulking. This was why she’d told the porter that the
man from the consulate must be let into the house. This was why she
told Rupert all her master’s private business. And this was why
she offered to demonstrate the other talents she possessed besides
eavesdropping. She was exceedingly talented: it took all of Rupert’s
limited store of tact to disentangle himself.