The Gilded Scarab (34 page)

“Yes. Two or three days before Christmas.”

“I’ve been thinking that it isn’t fair of me to expect you to be celibate. If you wish it, I’ll arrange an account there for you.”

I stopped on the stairs. Ned was a step or two below me when he realized I’d halted. The light from ionic discharge lamps is often harsh and uncomplimentary, but where it fell on Ned’s upturned face, it was softened, sliding down over his cheekbones and pooling tiny shadows under his chin. I had to swallow quite hard and think pure thoughts. Cousin Agnes was particularly useful in such circumstances. She always had a rather dampening effect.

“What do you mean, arrange an account?”

When Ned grinned, the light and shadows shifted in a most mesmerizing way to shade over his bottom lip. “I own Margrethe’s, Rafe. Your future visits will, of course, be on the house.”

Well, that was one minor puzzle solved, and explained why the maître d’ there knew Edward Fairfax wasn’t Ned’s real name. Owning the most select molly house in Londinium was quite a sideline for the Gallowglass First Heir! Still, there were more important things to be parsed out than that little snippet of information, interesting though it was and definitely something to be followed up later. “Are you saying you won’t mind if I go there for a night with someone else?”

His gaze was steady, but he reddened a little. “I will try not to mind.”

Bless the man, but could he have said anything more romantic? It was very hard not to smile in triumph. “Well, that’s very kind of you, Ned. But you know, I’ve been waiting for you for a little while now. Actually, if I’m honest, I think I’ve been waiting for you since that night in November. I can wait a little longer.”

Ned held out his hand for me to grasp. “Perhaps not too long.”

The stares we exchanged then were of the nice, satisfying variety, the kind ripe with promise and potential. It could have been
a moment
, but for Hawkins’s deep sigh echoing around the enclosed stairwell. I did hope, I said, that when it came to it and all my patient waiting was rewarded, Hawkins would just
be
somewhere else
. Ned laughed, tugged me down two steps to join him, and we carried on.

He kept my hand in his. That was nice.

There is a warren of basements, subbasements and sub-subbasements underneath the museum building. Three floors of dark, silent rooms with inadequate lighting, filled with bits and pieces of every civilization known to man. And by that I mean the sort of small portable bits and pieces far too valuable to leave behind when our expeditions depart foreign shores, even if we can’t find room for them in our already stuffed museums. Ask the Greeks. They’ll tell you how light-fingered we British are.

Down on the third level, Ned unlocked a door that would have been a worthy protection to the Bank of England vault. It had three heavy steel locks, a security-coded alphanumeric pad, and a thumbpad keyed to his thumbprint alone. When the door swung back on pneumatic hinges, with only the slightest hiss of steam, I understood why. The room beyond was stuffed full of wonderful things. Everything he’d dug up at Tanis last winter: coffins, grave goods, disassembled furniture, and even a dismantled chariot.

A long trestle table stood against the far wall, under a set of strong ionic discharge lamps. A set of canopic jars stood on it beside their box, a marvelous thing covered in carved ivory plaques. The jars themselves gleamed gold—jackal, hawk, baboon, and man, holding embalmed organs in their gilded embrace. Another box, sides painted with exquisite scenes of goose hunting in marshes thick with water reeds and fan-like papyrus, spilled little gold shabti figures over the scarred wood of the tabletop.

I saw it all in a single glance, because Ned went straight to the center of the room and caught my attention. In a transparent-aluminum case sealed against the destroying air lay a gentleman introduced to me as Hor-Pasebakhaenniut. Ned obligingly spelled the name out for me. Several times.

The mummy looked like any other, bound in swathes of grubby linen. Its bandages were in an intricate pattern, true. Its hands were crossed on its breast, a gold-handled flail tucked into the right, and a mask covering the head and shoulders, the face of the Pharaoh in life. The mask was worthy of a stare or two. It appeared to have been cast in gold.

It was gold. It had to be. And that meant the canopic jars were likely gold, that the shabti figurines—and there had to be near a hundred of them—were gold. A single shabti was probably worth the value of my beloved coffeehouse.

Daniel’s discontent at not being the one to find the tomb became understandable. He’d have been set for life on the proceeds of this find, because I don’t suppose for a moment that much of it would have found its way into the museum. Daniel would have sold it to his patrons.

Ned stood with one hand on the case with the mummy. “The grave was almost intact. And, as you can see, Daniel wasn’t exaggerating about how many wonderful things came out of it. My students and I are working on classifying and restoring it all ready for exhibition. The artifacts are very well preserved, but some need stabilization now they’re out of the enclosed atmosphere of the tomb.”

He might as well have preceded his speech with a fanfare of trumpets, he was so proud, and I had another glimpse of the Ned who’d answered the schoolboys with such patience and kindness, the one whose face had lit up when he talked to me about shabti or amulets or the
Book of Going Forth By Day.
This was so obviously his great love.

Although I had every intention of pushing it into second place.

I’d read Ned’s books from cover to cover more than once. I’d read as much as I could find on the various sites under excavation: Amarna, Luxor, Philae, Tanis, Sais. I had begun to grasp how important it was that we learn as much as we can about our past, if only to ensure we don’t repeat the mistakes of it in our future. I did understand how wonderful Ned’s find was and why it filled him with passion and excitement. I understood he was sharing his life’s work with me, showing me a lot of the Ned Winter who wasn’t First Heir, but the scholar and the archaeologist and the man. It was a humbling moment. It was important that I acknowledge it, that I say something that marked the emotional and philosophical significance.

“Good God!” I said, leaning in closer. “Is that mask solid gold?”

Ned stared and choked, all wide-eyed and drop-mouthed astonishment, and started to laugh. I didn’t care that Hawkins was there. Ned’s mouth was close to mine, slightly parted, the lips moist-looking and pink.

So I kissed it. A little, close-mouthed kiss, a brushing of my lips against his. A promise of a kiss, a declaration of a kiss.

“There’s my clever scholar,” I said. And I let my pride and admiration show.

Ned kissed me back.

Hawkins’s sigh would have blown out a candle the size of the Monument. But I didn’t care.

It was another step forward in the game we were playing. A step we were taking together.

Chapter 22

T
HE
DAY
of the Stravaigor-Plumassier wedding at the end of June started out as a real red-letter day.

The postman arrived early, bearing with him a letter from my eye doctor, Carrington. I’d seen Carrington twice since the initial consultation at the turn of the year, and he was pleased with my progress. The man was much less windy in print than in person, and the missive merely enclosed a completed form (in triplicate, naturally) for me to take to the Aero Ministry to have my military flying license converted to a civilian one. My hands had a most unaccountable tremor in them when I showed the forms to Hugh.

“Told you you’d be all right there,” he said stoutly, slapping me on the back so hard he probably left marks.

“I know I would have no trouble flying a civilian machine,” I agreed. Still, it was nice to have a medical expert’s confirmation.

Another slip of paper had fluttered out of the envelope. Ah. Not nearly so welcome. A bill, of course, but I’d deal with it later. The form, in all its thrice-blessed glory, was far more important.

The wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square, of course, was fashionably late in the day. I calculated I had enough time to nip into the ministry in Whitehall, spend half the day in a queue, and still get back to the flat to change in time for the service, which was to be followed by dinner and a ball at Stravaigor House.

It wasn’t as though my absence would close the coffeehouse. I had staff now to run it for me. Hugh had hired Alan Jenkins while Ned and I were still at the museum that day, and I had been presented with the fait accompli when I got back.

“Did you want to interview him?” Hugh had inquired when I mentioned the speed at which the process had happened. “I had him make a couple of cups of coffee. He wasn’t bad, and the stuff was drinkable. What more do you want?”

It’s a terrible thing when a man is bullied by his staff and they laugh at him when he complains. Hugh was right, though. Alan was a year or two older than me, in the midthirties, perhaps. He walked with a pronounced limp and on a bad day needed a cane, but assured me that with a high stool behind the counter, he’d cope admirably with the work. He did too. He had never before worked a coffee machine, other than the small one in the Gallowglass barracks, but he was another pair of hands, and he learned as quickly as Hugh himself had. Within a week, he had the basics mastered, and Hugh had proved to be a formidable supervisor. If I’d had the money, I’d have doubled Hugh’s pay. As soon as I did have the money, I
would
double his pay. Triple it. I couldn’t manage without him now.

Hugh and Alan were already intending to hold the fort between them for the afternoon and evening. They didn’t cavil at letting me loose for the morning too. In fact, they were so indifferent to the notion that I was put out. Not too put out to take advantage of their generosity, of course, so I sent Ned a short note to say I would see him in church.

It was an unconscionably long wait at the ministry, and boring enough to atrophy the brain. I was glad I’d taken my small datareader with me, tucked into a pocket, and that my eyes could cope with it now. Wells’s latest book about invading Martians whiled away the time. As I sat for hours on a hard chair in a waiting room painted a bilious green, not daring to leave to find so much as a cup of tea in case I missed my turn to be sneered at by the Minister’s minions, I concluded the place would be enlivened by having a few unearthly creatures armed with heat rays and fighting machines let loose upon it. At least the alien hordes would chase away the boredom, and with luck, their heat ray machines would put paid to the awful green paint. But it was worth it in the end. It was a great moment when I finally took the signed license from an indifferent clerk’s hand.

The skies weren’t closed to me any longer. One day. One day, I didn’t know how, but I’d be back. I had the skies back.

If I had to disappear into the WC to compose myself for a few moments, I will never admit to it. There may have been a great deal of dust in the air. That’s all.

I got home with little time to spare to scramble into my evening clothes. Hugh left Alan in sole charge while he reverted to batman mode, rushing to iron a new cravat when I ruined the first by hurrying too much, brushing my coat clear of lint, and being firm about me wearing my grandfather’s sedate gold hunter instead of “that gaudy bug thing, sir, that you oughtn’t be wearing with evening dress.” He called me back as I was leaving to hand me the wedding present for the bride, which he had wrapped in plain white paper, before pushing me into an autohansom and waving me off.

Thanks to Hugh, I looked unexceptional and gentlemanly, and I made it to St. George’s in time. I slid into a pew at the back a moment or two before the bride was escorted down the aisle by her doting father. She looked rather pretty. She didn’t wear hunting dress, which would have at least had the benefit of novelty, but the usual frothy confection of silk, tulle, and lace. My mother’s rubies shone on her breast and in her dark hair like blood-ice, gleaming in the evening sun. The jewels were magnificent and caught the lights in the church admirably. Better on her than sitting lifeless in a vault at Garrard’s, anyway.

The service was like most weddings I’ve been to. The groom spent the ceremony looking as if he’d faint any second, and I’d wager he would have very little memory of it save one of overwhelming terror. The bride watched the priest like a hawk, giving the impression she’d pull him up sharp if she detected anything other than the highest of ceremonial standards as he riveted her to her prey, and when it was all over, she gave everyone a smile that rivaled her diamonds for glitter. It was a rather indecent display of triumph. A Stravaigor to the core, that one.

When it was all over, the bride and her groom promenaded back down the aisle. Everyone shuffled out of the pews to follow them to the door, blocking the aisle, chatting and milling about and generally getting in my way. Navigating a route out of church resembled a polite rugby scrum. I was wriggling through the press of bodies to collect Ned, and trying for the least possible contact with everyone else, when a hand closed over my shoulder. I turned my head, startled, and froze.