Heart of Light (4 page)

“The trunks?” he said.

Emily, whose father had been so strict that Emily might well think she was supposed to guess Nigel's wishes, nodded.

“The trunks,” she muttered. “I'll see to it.”

With those words and without even a look of recrimination or rebellion, she turned and headed downstairs, doubtless to roust the personnel of the carpetship and get them to carry their trunks out. Nigel waited only long enough to see her white hat and her graceful swaying figure disappear amid the crowd filling the deck. Then he thundered down the spiral metal staircase to the bottom deck—struggling against tumultuous traffic of white-aproned maids and dark-attired men servants, against trunk-carrying footmen and shrilling nannies.

They gave him an odd look. The spiral staircase was the sole domain of servants and ship's personnel. But Nigel didn't allow them time to question him—had they dared—as he ran out of the carpetship and down the lower gangway, squeezing past boisterous groups of debarking Englishmen.

Nigel would find his contact and come back up the plank before Emily ever knew he was missing.

All of Nigel's traveling—beyond his few months in London—had taken place in his mind. Thus he had formed a clear picture of himself emerging onto the crowded quay and going about unmolested, as he would have in the best London neighborhoods. He'd thought of himself slipping between groups of people, looking for a man wearing a Panama hat and a white linen suit with a yellow flower on the lapel. He knew he would not be touched by the lower orders in England. And the upper class would certainly not do anything so rude as to grab at him or attempt to detain him.

But there was more strangeness to Cairo than the white houses with no proper roofs. As soon as Nigel stepped down from the gangway, people surrounded him. Men whose skin ranged from caramel to deeply burnished chestnut babbled at him in Arabic, broken English and doubtful French. So many voices resounded so close together that he could hardly tell what they were saying or what merchandise they were trying to hawk.

Sentences surfaced occasionally from the chatter, shameless pitches for diverse merchandise:

“Elephant hair bracelets, effendi.”

“Powerful, ancient statue the likes—”

“Ground mummy. Will make your virile parts—”

“Unicorn horn.”

“Perfumes from India—”

“Opium to spice—”

Nigel stopped, surrounded by natives intent on selling him the merchandise of the whole world and took in a deep breath, fearing that someone—an enemy, a secret conspirator—had known of his arrival and had sent this mob to intercept him. But looking at the anxious eyes around him, he realized that these people only wanted money. To them, Nigel was just an Englishman who'd come to Cairo disposed to buy. How many times had Nigel heard stories in his mother's drawing room of people who'd gone to Africa, or India, or even China.
I got this so cheap, my dear, you wouldn't believe it.

Nigel, though a disbeliever by nature, could believe it once he'd seen the purported treasure: statuettes claimed to be from some ancient tomb but looking no older than a day. Or perhaps silver, so adulterated with nickel that it would break at the slightest pressure. He pushed through the crowd of vendors. Some of them tried to grab at his sleeves, others waved goods before his eyes.

“A fly swat made from an elephant's tail. Very efficacious, effendi.”

“A stuffed crocodile.” This while something scarcely larger than a lizard, its tiny jaws pathetically open in mock ferociousness, was waved in front of his eyes. “You could tell your lady you shot it yourself.”

“The god Toth of the baboon head. From ancient pharaoh tomb. Robbed at great risk. Sell cheap.” Nigel waved away the crude fakeries and looked through the crowd for his contact—for a friendly face, a pale complexion, pale hair, blue eyes, anything that bespoke England in this sweltering climate. He saw no one he could call a fellow Englishman.

The same peddlers or their near cousins had followed him, surrounding him again. “Effendi,” they said. “Buy my universal ointment.” A greasy clay jar waved back and forth across his field of vision.

The air itself felt alien, filled with the fragrance of spices for which Nigel lacked a name.

“Buy this formula for the philosopher's stone.” A greasy paper appeared beside the jar.

The crowd added its own smell to the mixture—hot human bodies, unwashed hair, and heated cotton garments that billowed around dark, wiry bodies.

“Buy this true map to lost Pharaohs' treasure.”

White and gold and startlingly blue bead necklaces wiggled in front of Nigel's face. Ivory implements, brass vases and violently colored, beautiful fabrics danced before his eyes.

“I see you are a discerning man. You'll buy this.” An obscene wooden statuette, showing a man with an impossibly large, improbably erect penis.

The breeze that blew from the west brought no relief at all to the stultifying heat. Instead, it felt like the breath from a just-opened baker's oven, hot and dry and stifling.

Nigel looked but couldn't find his contact. A throng of vendors surrounded him at all times, fresh ones rushing in to replace those who'd left to pester new arrivals. In the middle of the crowd, like a man surrounded by a swarm of flies, Nigel pushed and shoved and stood on his tiptoes. He was going to fail in this mission in an abominable way, before he even started. Foiled in Cairo, for lack of a contact and the information he was likely to give him.

Was this a test? Had they withheld the information because they thought Nigel incapable of keeping his mouth shut while still in England? Had they been afraid that he would tell all to his mother or the mistress he didn't have? Were they afraid he would reveal all to Emily's attentive sapphire-blue eyes?

If not that, then what had happened? Had his contact been betrayed?

A fine sheen of sweat covered Nigel's skin and glued his shirt to his back. He thought of Emily on the ship. He should go back to her, get her out of here. Something had gone terribly wrong.

A newspaper seller stood at the edge of the crowd, hawking his Arab-language newspapers, printed in brownish sepia tones upon nasty-looking yellow paper. He stood away from the other sellers, displaying his wares to the locals, with melodious cries of, “Buy the news.”

But Nigel read the elegant, twirling characters as easily as he would have read English, and breath arrested on seeing the headline on the first page: “Lord Widefield Dead. British Aristocrat Killed by Anarchists.”

A DEATH IN ENGLAND

Pushing aside the men who hemmed him in, Nigel
called out, “A paper, here,” while tossing a coin toward the vendor.

The newspaper seller, startled and wide-eyed like a man observing a miracle, named a price and forgot to bargain. If what startled him was Nigel's eager hand clutching hungrily for the newspaper or the melodic tones of his native language flowing from a pale English face, the man probably wouldn't be able to tell himself.

Nigel opened the brittle, crackling paper, smearing the low-quality ink with his fingers, then elbowed a clear space in which to stand and read.

Hopeful sellers continued waving merchandise in front of his face.

“Good medicine for every ailment.”

“Bracelets for your lady.”

“The softest silk.”

But as Nigel read it seemed to him as though all the voices around him receded. In his mind, he stood again in Lord Widefield's study. Ruddy and white-haired, the old man smoked his pipe while telling Nigel that the salvation of Europe, the beating back of chaos and the sort of barbaric excesses that had happened since the last century all were in Nigel's hands. Beloved Queen Victoria herself depended on Nigel to keep her throne against anarchists and other ruffians.

Cecil Widefield wore his trademark tattered brown silk dressing gown and, enveloped in wreaths of pipe smoke, looked like a genie swathed in magic while he spoke eloquently of the needs of England and Nigel's usefulness in serving them.

Yet the article before him said that Cecil Widefield—friend and confidant of the queen, beloved personal friend of the late Prince Albert—had been removed from his country estate by mysterious means that failed to disturb his many servants. His captors had carried him off to a distant field, where he was murdered cruelly after prolonged torture.

His murderers must have been anarchists—those extremists who believed all those whose birth had gifted them with high magical power should be murdered, and their power released to settle on the common run of the populace. This redistribution—which any sensible man could tell would leave no man or woman with enough magical power to bid a fireplace light itself—the anarchists held necessary to keep man from preying on man and to keep the powerful from subjugating the helpless. To create the equalitarian society their doctrine advocated.

Still, even for anarchists, the death of Lord Widefield seemed too cruel. It was as though someone had sliced him—a thin sliver at a time—with a very sharp instrument. Or rather with many sharp, small knives. It was as if the giant mouth of an animal with human patience had cut him to ribbons, in such a way that he must have remained alive through most of it.

But what could that mean? And why?

Nigel's head spun. Someone had tried to get Widefield to talk. But what did Widefield know that had any value at all? Only the information about the jewel that the queen must have to stop the mad revolutions around the globe.

What irony for Widefield to die at anarchist hands, when the jewel Nigel was to steal from the heathen temple in the heart of Africa could stop this madness.

Had Widefield spoken? If he had, surely the anarchists would know where Nigel was. He smelled his own fear, a sharp tang in his sweat. His first impulse was to turn back and run to the ship and bundle Emily out of Cairo and back to Europe as soon as possible. Whatever else happened, Emily must be sent home.

But what if Widefield had not spoken? What if Nigel's mission was not compromised?

He remembered Widefield telling him that if the contact didn't meet Nigel, there was a safe house on the outskirts of Cairo. He'd given Nigel directions.

“Nigel?” Emily's voice.

He turned around, forced a smile. Vendors pressed around him on all sides, but he was alone with Emily, alone with his fear. “Quite so,” he told Emily's blank face. “You should go to the hotel right away. Have the carpetship personnel call you a carriage, and go to the hotel with our luggage. I'll . . . I'll join you shortly.”

Emily looked bewildered. “Alone? You wish me to go to the hotel alone?” She held her parasol so tightly in her hand that her knuckles showed, bone-white through her golden skin. Tears trembled in her eyes, and her small mouth, with the prominent lower lip that gave her the look of a permanent pout, trembled.

“Er . . .” Nigel said. He looked away from her. He could not bear to cause her pain. “I must go . . . out. I have to arrange a surprise for you.”

He tore himself away from her gentle touch—from her hand on his shoulder, detaining him—and hurried into the crowd, pursued by peddlers who pushed their wares in his face. He did not dare turn back and see Emily's face, her gaze no doubt tearful and disappointed.

He'd make his peace with Emily. Later.