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Authors: Sally Beauman

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The Visitors

BOOK: The Visitors
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Sally Beauman was born in Devon, and read English Literature at Girton College, Cambridge. She has worked as a journalist and critic in America and the UK, and is the author of seven previous novels.

B
Y
S
ALLY
B
EAUMAN

Destiny

Dark Angel

Lovers and Liars

Danger Zones

Sextet

Rebecca’s Tale

The Landscape of Love

The Visitors

COPYRIGHT

 

Published by Little, Brown

 

978-1-4055-2510-7

 

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

 

Copyright © Sally Beauman 2014

 

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

 

Map by Viv Mullett, The Flying Fish Studios Ltd

 

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

 

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

 

LITTLE
,
BROWN

Little, Brown Book Group

100 Victoria Embankment

London, EC4Y 0DY

 

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

The Visitors

Table of Contents

 

For Ellie and her parents, James and Lucy

CAST OF CHARACTERS

(the names of fictional characters are italicised)

 

CAIRO, 1922 and later

Lucy Payne
, aged eleven, visiting from England

Miss Myrtle Mackenzie
, from Princeton, New Jersey;
in loco parentis
and escorting Lucy

Hassan
, their driver and dragoman

Herbert Winlock
, an American archaeologist, field director of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art’s excavations near Luxor

Helen Chandler Winlock
, his wife

Frances Winlock
, his young daughter

 

Howard Carter
, an English archaeologist, in charge of the Earl of Carnarvon’s excavations in the Valley of the Kings

George Edward Stanhope Molyneaux Herbert
, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, of Highclere Castle, Hampshire; amateur archaeologist and collector of antiquities

Lady Evelyn Herbert
, his daughter, aged twenty

Poppy d’Erlanger
(formerly Countess of Strathaven), a beauty, bolter and divorcée

Lady Rose
, her young daughter, and
Peter
(Viscount Hurst), her infant son

Wheeler
, her maid

Marcelle
, Lady Evelyn Herbert’s maid

Albert Lythgoe
, curator of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Egyptian Art: the museum’s
éminence grise

Arthur Mace
, an English, Oxford-educated archaeologist, working with Lythgoe in Egypt. Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum, in charge of its Egyptian conservation work

Harry Burton
, English archaeologist, also part of the Metropolitan Museum’s team in Egypt, and its acclaimed photographer

Minnie Burton
, his rebarbative English wife

 

Madame Masha
, the familiar name for Countess Mariya Aleksandrovna Sheremeteva, formerly a prima ballerina in Moscow; directrice of an exclusive Cairene ballet school

Fräulein von Essen
, one of Madame Masha’s long-suffering pupils, and
Frau von Essen
, her mother, both visiting from Berlin

Lieutenant Urquhart
and
Captain Carew
, young officers in the British army, attached to the British Residency, serving in Egypt at a period when Cairo is under martial law

 

LUXOR, 1922–3

El-Deeb Effendi
, a senior officer in the Egyptian police force, seasoned detective and admirer of the works of Arthur Conan Doyle

Mrs Lythgoe
, Albert Lythgoe’s wife; in charge of the domestic arrangements at the American House, the Metropolitan Museum’s sumptuous dig headquarters near the Valley of the Kings

Michael-Peter Sa’ad
, head cook at the American House

Abd-el-Aal Ahmad Sayed
, the senior servant at ‘Castle Carter’ (Howard Carter’s home near the Valley of the Kings), and
Hosein
, his much younger brother and fellow servant

Ahmed Girigar
, Howard Carter’s senior
reis
or foreman, in charge of his excavating team in the Valley of the Kings

Ahmed Girigar
, his namesake and grandson; aged six, one of the excavation team’s water boys

 

Pierre Lacau
, Director of the Antiquities Service, in charge of all excavation in Egypt, and keen to reform its practices – a radicalism that does not endear him to his archaeological peers

Rex Engelbach
, Chief Inspector for Antiquities, Upper Egypt, and thus directly responsible for supervising all finds made in the Valley of the Kings

Ibrahim Effendi
, his deputy inspector

Mohammed
, Ibrahim’s relative and sometime rival, an energetic informant; head cook on the
Hatshepsut,
a
houseboat at Luxor hired by Miss Mackenzie and Lucy Payne

Arthur ‘Pecky’ Callender
, an Englishman, formerly an engineer on the Egyptian railways; an old friend of Howard Carter, brought in to assist with the work on Tutankhamun’s tomb

Alfred Lucas
, a distinguished English chemist working for the Antiquities Service in Cairo; enlisted to work with Arthur Mace on the conservation of objects found in the tomb

Dr Alan Gardiner
, of Oxford, the greatest philologist of his era, and an internationally renowned Egyptologist; friend to Lord Carnarvon; advising on inscriptions in the tomb

Dr James H. Breasted
, of Chicago, an equally renowned Egyptologist, advising on clay seals in the tomb

 

A. S. Merton
, special correspondent in Egypt for
The Times
; Howard Carter’s long-time friend

Arthur Weigall
, special correspondent for the
Daily Mail
; Howard Carter’s long-time enemy

Valentine Williams
, special correspondent for Reuters

H. V. Morton
, special correspondent for the
Daily Express

A. H. Bradstreet
, special correspondent for the
Morning Post
and
The New York Times

 

CAMBRIDGE, 1922 and later

Dr Robert Foxe-Payne
, classicist and Fellow of Trinity College; Lucy’s father

Marianne Emerson Payne
, his late wife, Lucy’s mother; an American heiress

Nicola Dunsire
, a young blue-stocking, putative descendant of Sir Walter Scott; recently studying at Girton College, now Lucy’s governess

Clair Lennox
, Nicola’s alarming friend, once her fellow Girtonian, now an artist

Eddie Vyne-Chance
, a handsome, iconoclastic Cambridge poet with a thirst for alcohol

Dorothy (‘Dotty’) Lascelles
, now training to be a doctor, and
Meta
, a scornful classicist, both Girtonian friends of Nicola Dunsire

Mrs Grimshaw
, wife of a Trinity College porter, cleaner at Dr Foxe-Payne’s house in Newnham for many years

Dr Gerhardt
, a Cambridge don once enlisted to tutor Lucy in German and French, and his sister
Helga Gerhardt
, a Fellow of Girton; both friends of Dr Foxe-Payne

Mr Szabó
, a Hungarian dealer in antiques and curios

 

HIGHCLERE CASTLE, HAMPSHIRE, 1922

Fletcher
, a former ditch-digger on the Earl of Carnarvon’s estate, said to be a rogue

Streatfield
, Lord Carnarvon’s butler

Almina
, Lord Carnarvon’s wife, 5th Countess of Carnarvon. The heir (and allegedly the illegitimate daughter) of the millionaire banker, Alfred de Rothschild

Dorothy Dennistoun
, a woman with a reputation; one of Lady Carnarvon’s closest friends

Helen, Lady Cunliffe-Owen
, another friend; sometimes a reluctant medium at Lord Carnarvon’s seances at Highclere

Brograve Beauchamp
, candidate for the National Liberals in the forthcoming election; an admirer of Lord Carnarvon’s daughter, Lady Evelyn

Stephen Donoghue
, a great flat-racing jockey, winner of the English Triple Crown and (several times) of the Derby

 

HIGHGATE, 2002

Dr Benjamin Fong
, an alert American Egyptologist; formerly of Berkeley, University of California, now a Fellow of University College London; conducting research for a high-budget jointly funded BBC/HBO television documentary

ONE

Sphinx Girl

Here we are in Egypt,
land of the Pharaohs, land of the Ptolemies, country of Cleopatra
(as one says in high style)… What to say? What would you like me to write? I have hardly got over the first bedazzlement. It is like being thrown, fast asleep, into the middle of a Beethoven symphony…

Gustave Flaubert, letter from Cairo to Dr Jules Cloquet, 15 January 1850

1

When I’d been in Cairo a week, I was taken to the pyramids; it was there that I saw Frances for the first time. It was January 1922, and Miss Mackenzie,
in loco parentis
, my guardian for our travels in Egypt, planned our visit with great care. She believed that if I could see the pyramids, ‘One of the greatest wonders of the ancient world, remember, Lucy, dear,’ and see them in the most powerful way possible – at sunrise – they would effect a change. They would stimulate; they would enthral; they would
snap
me back to life, and persuade me to re-engage with the world. For six days she had postponed this visit: I wasn’t yet strong enough. On the seventh day, the great moment finally arrived.

Miss Mack, who had been a nurse in the war, believed in timetables as well as pyramids. She was convinced regimes were therapeutic. So the day of our expedition was planned with zeal. The list she drew up in her neat looped handwriting went like this:

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