The Serpent on the Crown (4 page)

The astonishing events of the evening had postponed a serious discussion about our future plans. In previous years Cyrus had shared with us the site of the workmen’s village at Deir el Medina; while we excavated in the village itself, Cyrus and Bertie investigated the tombs on the hillside. We were shorthanded this year, and it had become increasingly evident to me, though not to my stubborn and self-centered spouse, that we were on the verge of momentous changes.

Hitherto we had depended on friends and kin to assist us in our archaeological labors. Selim, the son and successor of our dear reis Abdullah, could be depended upon for many more years, and the younger members of his family were filling the positions left vacant by death and retirement. It was a different matter with David, Abdullah’s grandson, whom we had freed from his cruel master when he was still a child. He had amply repaid that favor, if it could be called such, with years of loyal and skilled service; but he had built a successful career of his own as a painter and illustrator. He and his wife, Lia, Emerson’s niece, now had four children. I need not explain to any mother of four why Lia had given up her career as an archaeological assistant. Her father was a philologist, not an excavator, and he had finally confessed that the arduous life of a field archaeologist had become too much for him. His wife, Evelyn, preferred her role as grandmother to that of staff artist.

That left us with Nefret and Ramses, neither of whom had uttered a word of complaint; but I foresaw a time when they would want more freedom from the bonds of family and from Emerson’s dictatorial control. Nefret was able to employ her medical skills in the clinic she had opened in Luxor, but I suspected she secretly yearned for a more specialized practice, such as the one she would have in Cairo in the women’s hospital she had founded some years earlier. Too many “buts”! The children’s needs for schooling, Ramses’s interests in other areas of Egyptology—everything pointed to the same conclusion. We must let our dear ones go their own ways, and that meant we must hire a new staff. How I was going to convince Emerson of this without a battle of epic proportions, I could not imagine. However, I rather looked forward to the argument. Emerson is at his most imposing when he is in a rage—and I had never yet lost an argument that really mattered.

A breeze swayed the candle flame. I leaned forward, peering more closely at my image. Was that…

It was. They seemed to be occurring more frequently these days, the silvery strands in the black of my hair. Well! That was another argument I did not mean to lose. Glancing over my shoulder to make sure Emerson still slept, I took out the little bottle of coloring liquid.

FROM MANUSCRIPT H

The children woke at dawn. Dragged out of heavy slumber by the piercing voices of his dear little offspring, Ramses groaned and pulled the blanket up over his head. He hadn’t had more than two hours’ sleep. It wasn’t entirely his father’s fault; there had been an additional distraction, once he and Nefret were alone.

The blanket didn’t help. Lowering it, he turned over and looked at his sleeping wife. And, as usual, his bad humor was dispelled by the very sight of her: golden-red hair spread across the pillow, white arms and shoulders bared by the narrow straps of her nightdress. It seemed impossible that they had been married for six years. He had worked longer than that to win her, almost as long as the fourteen years Jacob had served for his beloved Rachel.

He lifted a tangled strand away from her eyes. They opened. After a moment the hazy look of sleep was replaced, not by the appreciation he had come to expect, but by consternation. “Oh dear,” she groaned. “It can’t be morning already.”

“Stay in bed,” Ramses said, wishing he could do the same. “I’ll tell Father you’re a little under the weather.”

“No, don’t do that. He’ll think…you know what he’ll think.”

“Yes.” The twins were four years old and his father had taken to dropping not-so-subtle hints about another grandchild. Oddly enough, his mother had not.

“There’s no need for you to get up,” Ramses insisted. “Today is Friday. The men won’t be working anyhow. If I know Father, and I believe I do, he’s planning one of two things: tracking Sethos down, or calling on Mrs. Petherick. I’ve never seen him so fascinated by an artifact.”

Nefret sat up, knees raised, arms wrapped round them. “I wouldn’t miss that for the world!”

“Which?” Ramses asked, returning her smile.

“Either.” She flung the covers back. “Though I can’t imagine how he hopes to get on Sethos’s trail.”

Leaving the children eating—and dropping bits of egg and buttered toast into the waiting jaws of the Great Cat of Re—they made their way along the winding tree-shaded path that led to the main house, where they found the parents at their breakfast. Emerson greeted them with his habitual complaint: “Why didn’t you bring the twins?” and his wife countered with her habitual response. “Not until they stop throwing food at each other and the cat.” The Great Cat of Re had stayed behind. Ramses was his preferred companion, but Ramses didn’t drop as much food on the floor as the twins did.

His mother was looking particularly bright-eyed and alert, her hair the same unrelieved, improbable jet black, her chin protruding. Ramses deduced that they had interrupted a parental argument. These disagreements were not uncommon; his mother and father both enjoyed them, and they were seldom deterred by the presence of their children. As soon as Fatima had served them and returned their greetings, his mother went back on the attack.

“Your proposal to go to Cairo in search of Sethos is perfectly ridiculous, Emerson. He could be anywhere in the Middle East, or in the world. I don’t know why you have got this particular bee in your bonnet. Not only must we cope with Mrs. Petherick and her eccentric children, but you cannot abandon your work.”

“Who said anything about abandoning Deir el Medina?” Emerson demanded. “I will only be away for two days. The rest of you can carry on quite well without me for that length of time. Which reminds me—where the devil is Jumana?”

Ramses had finished his eggs and toast. Fatima, who thought he was too thin, immediately replenished his plate. He looked up with a smile of thanks. Her round, friendly face, framed by the neat folds of her headcloth, bore an uncharacteristic frown.

His mother had got the bit in her teeth and was going full steam ahead. “You know perfectly well, Emerson, that Jumana goes to the site with the Vandergelts, since she is living with them for the time being. Which reminds me that you never settled her precise duties with Cyrus. He needs her even more than you, since he has only Bertie to supervise his men. I have been meaning to talk with you about this for some time. The fact is that we are shorthanded and—”

“Excuse me, Mother,” Ramses said, knowing she could go on like that indefinitely. “Fatima, you look worried. Is something bothering you?”

“Thank you, Ramses, for asking me,” said Fatima. “I want to know whether those two will come here again, or others like them. I could not keep them out, they pushed me away. I have told Jamad he must guard the door.”

Her outbursts of sarcasm and complaint were so rare that they all quailed before her, even Emerson. “Er,” he said. “Sorry, Fatima. But there is no need—”

“There is need, Father of Curses.” She folded her arms and gave him a stern look. “In Cairo we had a proper doorkeeper to announce visitors or send them away. On the dahabeeyah we had always a guard at the gangplank. Here it is all open. It is not fitting that strangers can come as they please.”

“She’s right, you know,” Nefret said. “The Pethericks aren’t the only ones who have invaded our privacy. Remember that awful woman last week who offered Father ten pounds to show her round the sights of Luxor? Tourism is flourishing and some of these people have no manners.”

“There have always been people without manners,” said her mother-in-law, frowning. “But what can we do? I refuse to give up the veranda, it is too pleasant, and if we build a wall it will spoil our view.”

“We might build a guardhouse or lodge, some distance down the road from the house,” Nefret suggested. “And get one of the older men to sit there during the day. Jamad has enough to do.”

“Do as you like,” said Emerson impatiently. “Thanks to your mother’s fussing I have missed the morning train. Just as well, perhaps; Ramses, I want you to come to the Valley with me.”

“The Valley of the Kings?” Ramses asked in surprise.

“There is only one Valley in Luxor,” said Emerson, emphatically if inaccurately.

“Yes, sir. May I ask why?”

“I promised Carter I would keep an eye on the place.” Emerson pushed his plate away, took out his pipe, and made a great business of filling it. “He and Carnarvon are dillydallying about in England and won’t be out for several more weeks.”

His wife fixed him with a steely stare. Like Ramses, she had recognized the signs. Emerson wasn’t exactly lying, but he was concealing something.

“That is unfair,” she said. “Howard had a serious operation last month and is still recuperating. Why did you promise him that?”

“It is the least a fellow can do for a friend,” said Emerson.

“Bah,” said his wife. “No one could possibly carry out an illegal excavation in the Valley, there are too many tourists and guards—even if there were any tombs yet to be found. Howard has been excavating there off and on for years, without success. What are you up to now, Emerson?”

“Are you impugning my motives?” Emerson demanded, with a fair show of righteous indignation. “I resent that, Peabody. Come, Ramses.”

“What about Mrs. Petherick?” his wife asked.

Emerson, already halfway to the door, came to a stop. “It is up to her to make the next move.”

He didn’t sound as decisive as usual, though, and his wife took immediate advantage. “Nonsense. When you accepted that object you had no idea of its value. Your motives
will
be impugned if you don’t return it at once, or at least offer to do so.”

“Curse it,” said Emerson.

“Mrs. Petherick ought to be informed of her stepchildren’s bizarre performance last night,” his wife went on. “You said you were uncertain as to who the legal owner of the statue may be. Well, isn’t she in the best position to answer that question? She may also know the name of the dealer from whom her husband purchased it. That is surely the most practical way of discovering its origins, by tracing it back from one purchaser to the—”

“Yes, yes.” Emerson turned to face his wife. “You have made your point, Peabody, you needn’t hammer it into my liver. We’ll pay the cursed woman a visit. As soon as possible. I want to get it over with.”

“I am glad you agree, Emerson. I dispatched a little note to Mrs. Petherick this morning, inviting her to take luncheon with us at the Winter Palace.”

“Hmph.” Emerson took out his watch. “What time?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Then Ramses and I have plenty of time for a visit to the Valley. We will drive the motorcar.”

“Not unless it can be driven with only three wheels,” his wife said. “I don’t believe you and Selim ever got round to putting the fourth one back on.”

“Oh.” Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin. He had bought the motorcar over his wife’s strenuous objections. She had pointed out, correctly, that its use was limited by the lack of good roads, but her chief objection was the way Emerson drove—at full speed, with complete disregard for objects in his way. However, the car spent most of the time in the stable annex, since Emerson and Selim kept taking it apart.

“We will ride the horses, then,” Emerson said. “You needn’t come, Peabody.”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Emerson.”

R
amses hadn’t been in the Valley for months. The firman was held by Lord Carnarvon, whose excavations, under the direction of Howard Carter, had been going on intermittently since 1913. He had found nothing except a few workmen’s huts and a cache of calcite jars. It was generally agreed that Carter was wasting his time. There were no more royal tombs in the Valley.

As they walked along the dusty path from the donkey park, where they had left their horses, Ramses was conscious of a certain nostalgia. Excavation wasn’t his primary interest, but there was no site on earth more evocative than the burial place of the great pharaohs of the Empire. The family had been allowed to work on the more obscure and uninteresting tombs until 1907, with the grudging consent of the American dilettante Theodore Davis, who then had the sole right to search for new tombs. He’d found a lot of them, too, or rather, his archaeological assistants had. It was Davis’s mishandling of the enigmatic burial in KV55 that had driven Emerson into a particularly outrageous explosion, and M. Maspero, then head of the Service des Antiquités, had been forced by Davis to ban them from the Valley altogether.

What a season it had been, though! As they passed the entrance to KV55, now blocked and sealed, Ramses felt a remembered thrill. He would never forget his first sight of the pieces of the great golden shrine lying dismantled and abandoned in the entrance corridor, the shattered but magnificent inlaid coffin, the canopic jars with their exquisitely carved heads. The excavation had been badly botched, no question of that, but if Emerson hadn’t insulted Maspero, they might have had a chance of getting the firman when Davis gave it up. Of all the sites in Egypt, it was the one Emerson yearned for most.

But Emerson passed the entrance to KV55 with only a sidelong glance, pushing through the throngs and muttering anathemas against empty-headed tourists. As they went on, past the side branches that led to the most popular of the royal tombs, the crowds decreased. The sun had risen over the enclosing cliffs. Ramses took his mother’s arm.

“I’m ready for a rest. How about you?”

The pith helmet shadowed the upper part of her face, but he saw her tight-set lips relax. She was limping a little that morning, or rather, trying not to limp. He had noticed it once or twice before, but she would never admit fatigue or pain. “If you like, my dear.”

Emerson came back to ask why they were stopping. His wife, who was wearing her famous belt hung all round with various “useful objects,” unhooked her canteen and offered it to the others. Nefret accepted gratefully, and so did Ramses, after his mother had had her turn. Emerson shook his head. He could go without water as long as a camel, and his son had often wondered why he had never collapsed from dehydration.