Shadows on the Nile (29 page)

‘Monty!’

She waved both arms and he raised a hand to her. He pushed forward, but his path was barred by servants rushing towards the garden, arms piled with blankets. He saw Jessie slither off the lion’s back and splash through the water, so fast that she slipped and disappeared from view.

Oh Christ, Jessie
.

He dived around a cluster of white robes where heads were locked together in heated discussion and forced a gap in front of him. Where was she? Where the hell had she …?

She slipped into the gap. He reached out to take hold of her but something about her made his hand pause in mid-air. She was standing there, eyes huge, with her shoulders hunched over, her chest shuddering, her body looking like a doll that has had its stuffing torn out. Her white dress was sodden up to her thighs, clinging to her legs like seaweed, and she seemed so vulnerable that it felt indecent to be looking at her at all. Worst were her hands. They hung at her sides, shaking.

‘Jessie,’ he whispered softly and opened his arms to her.

For a split second she didn’t move. Then she flew to him and he folded his arms around her so tight that she uttered a moan. She clung to him, hands locked behind his neck,
her body jammed against his, as though she were trying to climb inside him. He buried his face in her neck and inhaled the sweet knowledge that she was alive.

‘Come,’ he said quickly. ‘We must leave.’

But she didn’t release her grip on him. She pulled back just enough to look up into his face. With shock he realised her eyes were no longer blue. They were choked with flecks of black, like soot from a steam train, but this soot had risen from somewhere within her.

‘Monty, I thought you were dead.’ Her eyes filled with tears but she blinked them back. ‘I thought I had lost you too.’

They didn’t talk. On the taxi ride back to their hotel there were too many words in their heads to let them out. They sat on the rear seat with a gap yawning between them, their hands resting in it, their fingers scarcely touching.

The route out of the city was convoluted on account of the chaos around the palace, but the car skirted the black chasm that was the Nile, and once out on the rough road up to Giza, the desert air tumbled in through the open window and Monty felt his mind clear. He was able to pull together the fragments of the evening and think carefully about what they meant. What happened back there had changed things.

The moon had risen and its flat light skated over the black landscape, creating startling shapes and hollows that weren’t there. As they approached Mena House, the hotel complex stood out alone in the darkness, a bright oasis where they could draw breath. The car passed through the gates and entered the avenue of palms, the sound of their leaves fretting in the breeze. He hated this awkwardness between Jessie and himself, as though this evening they had gone too far too fast and seen too deeply into each other. She seemed now to have withdrawn inside her shell. He wanted to make her laugh and have her treat him to one of her teasing stares, eyelids half lowered.

Instead he rolled down the window further and said,
‘Jessie, we should count ourselves lucky. Not many were hurt. It was clearly intended more to scare than to kill.’

‘But why would they bomb the prince at all? Surely he’s an Egyptian, one of their own. It doesn’t make sense. It’s the British who are regarded as the oppressors.’

‘Yes, but the Nationalists would see Prince Abdul as a collaborator. Just look at all the top brass there tonight, bristling with military medals and knighthoods. Like a red rag to a bull.’

He felt, rather than saw, the movement of her head in the dusty air as she turned to look at him.

‘Don’t you think it’s a strange coincidence that Dr Scott is here too?’ she asked.

‘No.’

They were talking. That was something.

He said goodnight to her outside her door.

‘You’ll be all right?’ he asked. Her skin was white with exhaustion.

‘Of course. I hope you sleep well.’

‘Thank you.’

All so formal. He leaned forward and placed a brief kiss on her forehead. She gave him a half-smile and before he did anything stupid, he walked away.

‘The museum tomorrow,’ she called after him.

‘Yes. The secrets of the king’s treasure.’ He waved goodnight without looking back.

He had learned to be an expert at never looking back.

When the soft tap came on the door of his room, it startled him. He had been thinking about Scott and his thoughts had turned sour. He padded in bare feet to the door, expecting a servant to be there, though why one of the servants would be tapping on his door at midnight, he had no idea. But when he opened the door, it wasn’t a servant standing there. He’d got that all wrong.

‘Jessie!’

‘I forgot to say something to you.’

She was standing in the half-light of the corridor, her hair
loose and entangled with shadows, an oriental robe of dragonfly-blue silk wrapped around her.

‘May I come in?’

He stepped back. ‘Of course.’

After a moment’s hesitation, she did so. She glanced around the room, at his white shirts hung neatly in the open wardrobe, at the half-glass of whisky by the bed. But she passed no comment.

‘Can’t sleep?’ he asked.

‘As I said, there’s something I forgot to say earlier and I saw the light under your door, so …’

He spread his hands. ‘As you see, I’m not exactly busy.’

‘I’m sorry that I …’ she swallowed, as though the words had formed a ball in her throat, ‘… over-reacted earlier. It was foolish.’ He saw a flush rise to her cheeks and it struck him that she might be talking about what happened in the garden, rather than after the explosion.

‘Jessie,’ he said softly, and he moved towards her, as careful not to startle her as he was when tending a young doe on his estate, ‘please don’t apologise. There is no need. All it takes is a spot of blood and gore on the scene, and we all “over-react”.’

She nodded, but still the sooty flecks were there.

‘Would you care for a drink?’ He waved a hand at the bottle on the chest of drawers.

‘That wasn’t what I came to say.’

‘Ah.’ There was more.

She looked him full in the face. ‘I want to say thank you. For before.’

Before? Before what
?

‘No need for thanks,’ he assured her. ‘No need for apologies. I’m here to watch your back, remember?’

‘But who is watching yours?’

‘It’s all right. I have eyes in the back of my head.’ He touched a spot at the back of her skull. ‘Just there,’ he assured her.

A small chuckle escaped her lips. He saw the tension
in her slide down a notch. He walked over to his drink, knocked the last of it back and poured a fresh one from the bottle.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Get this down you. Now we’re here in Egypt, let’s talk seriously about what the hell that brother of yours might be up to.’

She took the drink and set it down on a table. Outside, the wind swept across the arid wastes of sand and scree, hurling a fistful of it at the window. Automatically Monty glanced towards the sound, and when he looked back Jessie was so close to him that he could smell the perfume of the soap she’d used on her skin.

He couldn’t not touch. It was beyond him.

The back of his hand gently stroked her long throat and she raised her chin a fraction, like a cat wanting more.

‘Jessie, let’s talk about Tim. I’ve asked at the reception desk here and no one can recall whether he was alone or with others. It’s the possibility of
others
that we have to consider. If he is …’

Two of her fingers stole onto his lips, silencing them. Her eyes were huge.

‘Tonight,’ she murmured, ‘Tim is not here. We are.’

Her arms encircled his neck and drew his head to hers. He wrapped an arm around her, aware of how easily these delicate bones could have shattered tonight. He felt the heat of her body under its skin of Chinese silk and the rise of her hip-bone, the fall of her slender ribs beneath his fingers. He pulled her close.

Her body seemed to melt against him as his lips found hers, small animal sounds whispering out of her. He kissed her softly at first, light easy brushes of his lips over the corners of her mouth, but the ache for her made the kisses grow fierce and hungry. Her mouth opened eagerly to his. He tasted the ripeness of her tongue, the delicate insides of her cheeks, softer than honey and twice as sweet.

She was opening up to him, letting him explore the convoluted twists and turns of her. Not just physically. It was more than that. Far more. He could sense the closed doors of her mind letting him in, exactly as her soft lips were doing, and it touched him deeply. How was it that she could create such a storm of emotion
within him, such a rush of tenderness for this unpredictable creature who possessed an endless capacity for loyalty?

His hands caressed her, swept over the tight curve of her buttocks and up again to the sharp angles of her hip. He heard her suck in her breath when his palm circled her breast and she uttered a raw sigh when his kisses descended into the valley between the folds of her robe. When he drew back his head to look at her, to scrutinise this different Jessie, she was no longer regarding him from behind a safe wall, as if expecting to get bitten. Her eyes glittered and her cheeks were flushed. He kissed her nose. It was a gently curved nose with flared nostrils that gave her a look of arrogance that was misleading. The one thing Jessie was not was arrogant. A tremor rippled through her.

‘We’re alive,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s what counts. The rest we can deal with.’

Her eyes widened. ‘It’s not shock, if that’s what you think.’ Her lips looked fuller, softer, as though the string that held them tight together had come untied. ‘I’m not deranged by the terrible events of tonight.’ She said it with an attempt at a laugh, but the sound of it hooked into the flesh of his throat.

He pressed his lips to her forehead and kept them there, conscious of her thoughts crouched on the other side of her skin and bone. ‘Let’s breathe in this moment, no other.’

She tipped her head to one side and gave him her slow teasing grin. ‘I thought that you Chamfords, like the pharaohs, only care for your grand dynasty. For the past and for the future of your name. The present is merely a blink in time.’

He frowned. ‘I shall have to prove you wrong, won’t I?’ he said and whisked her up into his arms. She laughed and slid a hand under his shirt as he carried her to his bed.

Georgie

England 1930

The thing is, we have a problem. The problem
is Flinders Petrie.

You sit sideways in one of the art deco chairs with your long legs over the arm and kick the back of your heel against the beautiful maple wood. It makes the same noise as rain on the roof. I tell you to stop. You grunt. You are not happy about Flinders Petrie.

W.M. Flinders Petrie is the greatest archaeologist who ever lived. That’s what I think. That’s what you think. You call him a force of nature, though that doesn’t make sense to me. This is what he is: the founding father of modern methods of excavation. He introduced new standards.

He strides out across the sands of Egypt with his bushy beard, trowel in hand, his young wife Hilda at his side, and conducts the most painstaking digs anyone has ever done, recording, photographing and studying every aspect of a site and its artefacts. He is the one who trained Howard Carter, and he has had some amazing finds – like the origin of the Merenptah temple and the
discovery of the Israel stele. He has supplied the museums of Cairo and London with many historical objects, including mummies.

When in England, rather than in Jerusalem where he now spends most of his time, Sir Flinders Petrie lectures at University College, London. He is a professor.

This is the problem: you are studying archaeology at University College. Sometimes you let me write your assignments for you – the last one I did was on preservation techniques when on location in Egypt. The Egyptians were profligate in their use of fine layers of gesso on woodwork, before they painted scenes on it or applied an overlay of gold leaf. But over centuries the wood shrinks and so the gesso buckles. The answer – surprisingly – is initially hot paraffin wax to fix everything in place, and a spray with a solution of celluloid in amyacetate. Beads are another nightmare for excavators. Egyptians were passionate about them. Everything had to have brightly coloured beads. A single mummy might wear so many necklaces, collars, bracelets and girdles that there are thousands and thousands of beads to recover whose threads have all rotted away. Answer? A thin layer of soft plasticine to hold them in the correct arrangement before being rethreaded in a museum laboratory. Papyrus must be wrapped in a damp cloth for hours before straightening, limestone objects must have the salt washed out of them, whereas faience needs …

‘Come with me,’ you say. ‘To Petrie’s lecture next week.’

There is the problem.

My heart stops. Literally. I feel it stop.

‘I am not allowed out of here,’ I say.

As if you don’t know already.

‘I could try to smuggle you out.’

We have been here before. You should know better.

‘Do come with me, Georgie. You will love it.’

I will hate it. We both know that. But you are bursting with so much enthusiasm, you look like a balloon that is about to pop.

‘I cannot,’ I say.

‘You mean you will not.’

‘There will be too many people. Too close
to me.’

‘I’ll keep them away from you.’

‘How?’

‘I will pick you up in a taxi. The lecture is in the evening, so it will be dark. No one will see you.’

‘But I will see them.’

‘Not if you wear a blindfold.’

‘A blindfold?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘It’s the same as being inside your wardrobe.’

‘It’s not a bit the same. It doesn’t rain inside my wardrobe. There aren’t other people in my wardrobe.’

‘I want you to try, Georgie. To try the outside world.’

‘I go in the garden.’