The Buried Pyramid (17 page)

They were excused without further delay, and when they were alone Stephen said, with a dry chuckle, “Actually, I had to get Miss Benet away before she flew to defend the young Egyptian’s honor. I quite liked Mrs. Travers before all that rot came driveling out. I’m sure if I’d asked for more suspects she would have been accusing the Africans in the boiler room next. However, since we are away, let us go and search the room.”

“Do you have any thoughts, Mr. Holmboe?” Jenny asked. “Since you rightly dismiss that accusation of Rashid?”

“A thread of a thought,” Stephen admitted. “Sir Neville, you seem to know Colonel Travers fairly well. Have you heard any rumors that he or his wife are in financial difficulty?”

“It has been years since Travers and I served together,” Neville said, “but I still have friends at the military clubs. I didn’t hear anything there, nor have I caught any such hints from the other officers aboard—a few of them are real gossips, too, and not so fond of their commander that they would hesitate to spread scandal.”

“Jenny, anything on the ladies?”

“Nothing,” she replied promptly. “Both Mrs. Travers and Mary’s clothing is fashionable, but not beyond what would be reasonable for them. They certainly aren’t spending overmuch in the shops. Neither seems to gamble—at least Lady Cheshire hasn’t been able to get either to take a flutter when we’re playing cards.”

“Fine,” Stephen said. “There are other ways of running into debt—someone could be being blackmailed, for example.”

“Really, Stephen!” Sir Neville protested. “I hardly think that likely.”

Stephen grinned a trace sheepishly. “Very well. For now we’ll work from the assumption that no one in the Travers family pretended to steal the jewels either to claim on the insurance or in order to sell them in Egypt. Besides, they were willing to let us search their cabin. That speaks well for them.”

“And the servants?” Neville asked. “Atkins and Hamlin?”

“Both men,” Stephen said, unlocking the door to the Traverses’ cabin, “have good characters. Let us not sully them until we have exhausted other options.”

“Then what shall we do?” Jenny asked.

“Mrs. Travers appealed to Auguste Dupin, not to me. I keep thinking of one of Dupin’s adventures. Therefore, like Dupin, I shall not pursue the unlikely until I have exhausted the likely.”

“Whatever do you mean?” Jenny persisted.

Stephen leaned against the edge of one of the bunks and began speaking as if he were a lecturer before a much larger audience. “We all agree that none of the probable thieves—the Traverses themselves, their man Atkins, the steward Hamlin, and, of course, young Rashid—are likely to have taken the jewels. In most cases they have opportunity and means, but not motive. The servants especially have more to lose than to gain, for they might lose their character and position simply on the suspicion of being involved. The profit gained from selling Mrs. Travers’s jewels would not be sufficient to repay them for this—at least I have not seen Mrs. Travers wearing a rajah’s crown or wielding a diamond-tipped scepter.”

Jenny laughed. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you do have a point. All this talk of jewels has made me forget what Colonel Travers himself admitted: Their value is primarily sentimental. Who would risk everything for the price of a few cameos or a matched set of garnets?”

Stephen maintained his pose of urbane sophistication, but Neville was certain the younger man was pleased with this praise.

“Let us examine the cabin,” Stephen continued, “keeping in mind that most of the disarray we see is most likely the result of the earlier search.”

“I’ll start here,” Jenny said, kneeling next to the bunk and opening a drawer built into its base. This revealed a frothy mass of lace-trimmed white and ivory fabric. “I suppose the idea is to see if the case is buried under some of these rather generous underthings?”

Stephen colored slightly, but nodded.

“Sir Neville, why don’t you and I take the rest of the cabinets? I’ll start with those on the right, you the left. Miss Benet, when you are finished there, would you check the area around the washstand? Mrs. Travers may have absentmindedly tucked the case into one of the cubbies when she was attending to her toilette. I know my sisters are always doing such things.”

They conducted their search steadily until not a cabinet had been left unopened or a drawer unprobed. They confirmed that the Colonel had laid in a considerable supply of his favorite pipe tobacco, that Mrs. Travers had a fondness for candied violets, and that someone—Jenny suspected Mary—had hidden a partially eaten box of chocolates beneath a pile of writing paper. However, they did not find the jewelry case.

“What next, Dupin?” Neville asked, closing the last cabinet drawer, and turning to where Stephen stood with head propped against his fist.

“I’m thinking,” Stephen muttered. “My instincts tell me that the case is still in this room. I must be right! Too many innocents stand to lose if I am not. I will not let that happen.”

“But where can we look?” Jenny asked. “Will you have us prying up the floorboards next?”

She looked quite ready to attempt this, so Neville was relieved when Stephen replied, “No, not the floorboards . . . The mattresses!”

“I looked under these bunks already,” Neville reported. “No luck.”

Stephen’s grin did not fade.

“We are not inspecting, sir, we are ratiocinating! Put yourself in Mrs. Travers’s place. She is a woman, no longer young and not in the best condition. She has dressed for the day, and needs to put her jewelry case away. However, she has chosen to keep it in a drawer that requires her to kneel beside the bed. She is stout, and tightly corsetted.”

“A discomfort you have to feel to fully appreciate,” Jenny interjected, poking at her own less than fashionably restricted waist.

Stephen began to mime out Mrs. Travers’s presumed actions.

“She sets the jewelry case on the lower bunk, but she needs both hands to open the drawer. See, it sticks a bit. Something halts her—a servant with hot water, a question from her husband, Mary asking her to do something to her hair. What it is does not matter. Mrs. Travers leaves the jewelry case on the lower bunk. Later, something pushes it back—perhaps someone sitting on the edge of the bunk to put on shoes. The case is slid back, and . . .”

Stephen leaned over the mattress and poked his hand between it and the wall.

“The case falls into the crevice and becomes wedged there.”

He felt around, seized something, and drew it forth.

“Voila,
mes amis!
The missing jewel case!”

Neville and Jenny burst into spontaneous applause. Mr. Watkins, who had apparently been waiting in the corridor, flung open the door. His face lit with joy when he saw the box in Stephen’s hand.

“Oh, Mr. Holmboe, you are a wonder! That must be the very box. See, there are her initials on the lid.”

Stephen gave the box a slight shake.

“The box is locked, but from the sound I believe you will find the contents intact. Let us hurry to the library and inform the Traverses of our find.”

“I wonder,” Jenny said as she hurriedly led the way, “why Hamlin didn’t find the case when he was making up the bunks.”

“Quite probably because he was not looking for it,” Stephen said. “He may even have heard a faint thump when he was tucking in the bedclothes, but thought nothing of it. Those bunks are deuced hard to make up, as I found when attempting to spare Bert a bit of bother.”

The fuss Mrs. Travers made was tremendous. To Neville’s heartfelt relief, nothing more was said about thieving natives. Jenny might not have been so restrained once the lady was no longer suffering from her loss.

That evening at dinner, Captain Easthill reported the day’s events, obviously to forestall gossip that might cast a less than favorable light on his vessel or its crew.

“I have said little about the methods by which Mr. Holmboe recovered the missing jewel case,” Captain Easthill concluded. “Perhaps Mr. Holmboe would favor us with a more detailed discussion in place of the planned entertainment.”

Stephen waved a hand in a self-deprecating fashion.

“Actually, Captain, if everyone would permit, I would rather offer a reading from Edgar Allan Poe, the very story that set me on the track of the missing jewels. It’s a grand little piece called ‘The Purloined Letter.’ ”

6

Alexandria

By the time
Neptune’s Charger
arrived at Alexandria, Jenny had memorized a handful of useful phrases in Arabic, but felt she was no closer to getting a grasp of the language than before. She actually felt better about elementary hieroglyphs. Stephen had assured her that there was so much repetition in the texts carved and painted onto the walls of burial complexes that she would be able to recognize common names like Osiris and Isis. She greatly looked forward to doing so.

However, her first glimpse of Egypt came as a complete surprise. Along with most of the other passengers, she was gathered by the rail, watching Alexandria’s square skyline take shape.

“It’s so green!” Jenny exclaimed. “I thought Egypt was all golden brown desert.”

“There is plenty of desert,” Uncle Neville assured her. “This, however, is the Delta region. It is one of the most fertile areas in all the world. With the inundation of the Nile just ended, it is also a very busy farming area. The Turkish rulers have tried to introduce some modernization, but most of the farming is still done by hand, and at the caprice of the floods.”

Stephen added with a pedantry that still seemed jarringly at odds with his love of a pun, the worse, the better, “It is astonishing to realize that the greatest advances in Egyptian farming were brought in by the Hyksos in the late Middle Kingdom. They introduced both the
shaduf
and the horse and chariot, yet remained reviled by the Egyptians until they were unseated from power.”

Colonel Travers snorted, “Damn natives are all alike. Here we’ve been helping them along since we ousted Napoleon for them in 1801. Does that make a difference? No. Their educated classes are still more likely to go to France than England for their education. They affect French fashions, blending them in with their Turkish ways in the most peculiar manner. Still, England will stick by them.”

Jenny had been reading something about contemporary Egyptian history. Now the grinding annoyance that had been building within her at the British imperial assumption of superiority boiled to the surface.

“Don’t the British rather have to stick by them?” she asked, not bothering to keep her tone respectful. “It seems to me that I have read about how deeply in debt Egypt is becoming to various British banking and commercial interests. Those same interests hound Parliament to make certain Egypt pays those debts.”

“Man’s got to pay his debts,” Colonel Travers huffed. “Don’t see why it should be different for a nation.”

“I’m not saying it should be different,” Jenny protested, “but it seems unfair to criticize a country for being primitive and in debt, when it’s running up those debts in an effort to become less primitive.”

“Wouldn’t expect a slip of a girl to understand international economic policy,” Colonel Travers responded condescendingly.

Jenny was so certain that he understood even less than she did that she lost her temper completely.

“And I don’t suppose the Suez Canal has anything to do with the kindness that England offers to Egypt. I don’t suppose it has crossed anyone’s mind that the canal serves as a straight line for invasion of British interests in India?”

Colonel Travers was shocked out of speech, and to Jenny’s embarrassment, Uncle Neville stepped in to defend her.

“Forgive my niece, Colonel,” he said. “She is not only young, she is American, and they are rather unsophisticated in their view of the world.”

Jenny colored, then paled, and lest she be further humiliated, she left the deck. As she did so, she saw Rashid crouching in a shadowed corner. His eyes remained downcast, but his mouth twisted with sympathetic concern.

With some dismay, Neville watched Jenny retreat, but he didn’t pursue her. Being guardian to a seventeen-year-old American woman was proving to be more difficult than he had ever imagined. The fact that she looked so much like her ostensibly more tractable mother didn’t make his task any easier. He kept expecting her to act as Alice would have—while his all too practical memory made it impossible to forget that Alice had been tractable only on the surface.