The Other Guy's Bride (2 page)

1905, T
HE
B
RITISH PASSENGER SHIP
, T
HE
L
YDONIA, BOUND FOR
A
LEXANDRIA
, E
GYPT

“People don’t die of seasickness, Miss Whimpelhall,” Ginesse Braxton said. She wasn’t absolutely certain of this, but she had long held the belief that a thing only counted as a lie if you knew it to be false. Unfortunately, rather than bolstering her patient’s spirits, her words seemed to have the opposite effect.

“They should.” An older woman dragged herself over the side of her bed and clutched the rails, her long, lank ropes of red hair swinging in time to the ship’s pitch and toss. “It…would be…a mercy.”

Ginesse patted her patient’s hand. She’d spent the last four days listening to variations on this same theme, and while she felt a good deal of sympathy for poor Miss Whimpelhall, she could not really empathize—she had a disgustingly robust constitution.

She stuck her foot out, catching the china basin sliding past on the floor, picked it up, and held it out it invitingly. Miss Whimpelhall shook her head, closing her eyes tightly. After a few seconds, she sank back on the bed. “I am sorry to cause you so much trouble, Miss Braxton. Please, forgive me. I am a terrible nuisance.”

“Not at all.” Ginesse had never met so meek or apologetic a creature as Mildred Whimpelhall, and as neither Ginesse nor any member of her immediate family was overly familiar with either trait, she was understandably fascinated. Even more fascinating was Miss Whimpelhall’s personal story; she was on her way to marry her fiancé, who commanded an English garrison in Egypt. Which made Miss Whimpelhall a bona fide heroine.

Ginesse knew all about heroines. As an only daughter, she’d escaped the unpalatable reality of life with six grubby little brothers into a world of books where men were identified by their gallantry and courage rather than by their farts and belches. Later, after she’d been banished from Egypt to England, she’d assuaged her homesickness by writing her own adventurous tales. Indeed, the penny press had even published one.

Not that she advertised her predilection. She kept it strictly to herself. People, especially men, found it so hard to reconcile a romantic disposition and intelligence. She didn’t need any other strikes against her while trying to establish an academic reputation.

Miss Whimpelhall moaned again. “Maybe this is hell,” she whimpered. “Maybe this is hell and I’m going to feel like this for the rest of etern…etern…et—” She didn’t make it to the end of the sentence. Luckily, Ginesse still held the china basin.

“Well,” Ginesse said, a few minutes later, “if this is hell, then I must be a demon, and
I am not a demon.”
She chuckled to prove how silly such an idea was. “Oh, my, no. No, indeed.”

She waved the air lightly with her hand. “Oh, perhaps comparisons may have been made when I was just a child and like many children given to acting imprudently.” Her voice sounded less jovial than she’d have liked. “Nothing that would justify being stigmatized with an unsavory reputation.”

She forced her voice to relax. “But as I said, that was when I was just a child. A long,
long
time ago.”

A wan smile appeared on Miss Whimpelhall’s lips. “So long ago? You are still very young.”

“I am twenty-one,” Ginesse replied. “And I hold a degree in ancient history and will soon hold another.” And, if all went well, she’d soon win the esteem of the archaeological world.

And that of her family.

“Oh.” Miss Whimpelhall sounded vaguely disapproving. “Regardless, you have been an angel of mercy to me ever since my faithless maid deserted me at the first port,” she said. “How do you manage without one?”

“I’ve never had one.” Her family had never been able to find an applicant who was both suitable and willing, for which frankly she was glad. She couldn’t imagine always being shadowed by another person.

“Oh.” Miss Whimpelhall nodded. “Well, thank God He put you in the cabin next to mine and gave you the divine inspiration to somehow intuit my distress.”

There hadn’t been anything divine about it; their adjoining cabins had thin walls.

A sudden wave crashed against the porthole, sending the ship pitching sideways. The door to the wardrobe swung open, flinging Miss Whimpelhall’s possessions across the floor.

Miss Whimpelhall blanched and groped for a nearby towel, shoving it against her mouth. “I
want
to die. Please. Let me d—”

“Why don’t you tell me more about your fiancé?” Ginesse suggested, lurching across the room to gather Miss Whimpelhall’s scattered belongings. “You said you’ve been engaged to him for six years, during which time he has been entirely in Egypt.”

“I did?”

“Yes. That must have been very difficult.”

“It was. We did see each other occasionally.” Miss Whimpelhall held out her hand, and Ginesse put a glass of water in it. She took a sip. “He was granted a four-month furlough two years ago when his father died.”

“You must have missed him very much. And he, you. I cannot imagine being separated from a loved one for so long.” At least she’d been allowed to return to Egypt for the holidays.

“Life is about making sacrifices, Miss Braxton,” Miss Whimpelhall said. “Colonel Lord Pomfrey could not have advanced so quickly to so prominent a position had he remained in England.”

“It’s a wonder you didn’t marry sooner. I’m sure you would have been a great asset to his advancement,” Ginesse suggested carefully. She was being unconscionably forward. Her “unladylike interest in other people’s lives” was just one of her unfortunately many character flaws. She couldn’t help it. People were a never-ending source of fascination to her.

Miss Whimpelhall didn’t seem to take it amiss. “The army frowns on junior officers marrying. It distracts them from their duty in the field. But once they achieve a certain rank, marriage is very much encouraged as a steadying influence. Indeed, in the letter in which he proposed, Colonel Lord Pomfrey wrote that his general quite expected his senior staff to wed.”

Ginesse smiled, albeit weakly. She wasn’t certain she’d want to be proposed to in a letter, and she definitely wouldn’t want someone asking for her hand in order to fulfill his superior’s expectations. But then, she was hardly in a position to criticize.

“How
did
he advance so quickly? He must have proved his value in some notable way.”

The seas had calmed down a good bit, and Miss Whimpelhall gratefully accepted the distraction, launching into a long and painstakingly detailed answer. Ginesse, who’d already heard most of her stories about Colonel Lord Pomfrey, continued picking up the room, her thoughts drifting to other matters.

This evening they would be arriving in Civitavecchia and from there begin the final leg of their journey to Egypt. Once in Cairo, she needed to find some way, any way, to hire men and porters to take her out to the dig site—generally an easy proposition if one had the necessary funds.

Her problems were twofold. First, she did not have the necessary funds, and second, the archaeological site where she planned to dig at was hundreds of miles out in the Sahara. Even if she did find the money, she stood little chance of convincing anyone in Cairo to guide her across the desert. No one in his right mind would risk endangering Harry Braxton’s daughter on such a dangerous expedition no matter how much money she offered them.

Of course, she could always claim that she had her father’s blessing, but Egyptians were not generally gullible.

No, she would simply have to bide her time, trusting to Fate and her own ingenuity that a way would make itself known. After all, she could never have imagined that while working as a glorified clerk for Professor Lord Tynesborough and transcribing a boring bill of lading for some ancient caravan she’d stumble across a spectacular discovery. At first, she hadn’t realized she’d found a clue as to the location of one of the Egypt’s greatest legends: Zerzura. The White City. The Oasis of Little Birds. Home to a dead king and queen, guarded by black giants.

When she told Professor Tynesborough about it, he’d discounted it as wishful thinking and deemed it not worth further investigation. Then he’d invited her to dinner.

She’d been
vastly
disappointed. She’d rather liked Professor Tynesborough, the youngest distinguished professor in the history of Cambridge University, and she’d thought he’d respected her. But he’d simply proved to be another man who assumed she didn’t know what she was doing.

So, she’d quit her job and begun researching on her own. It took months of laborious hunting and cross-checking, painstaking investigation, and informed guesswork to finally piece the puzzle together, but she had.

She didn’t let anyone know what she’d discovered, not her fellow antiquarians or her professors. And most certainly not her family. As much as she loved them, she wanted, no, she
needed
to step out from behind her family’s very long shadow and prove herself.

Her father was the most successful locator of tombs in Egypt, and her mother was a linguistic prodigy renowned worldwide for her translations of ancient Egyptian poetry. Her great-grandfather, Sir Robert Carlisle, was the world’s leading expert on Egyptian papyri, and her oldest brother Thorne—though two years her junior—was already sought after for his expertise in ancient embalming techniques, an interest she personally thought rather disturbing though no one else seemed to find it so. And at only eighteen years of age, her brother Francis had recently been acclaimed for his uncanny genius in detecting forged artifacts—a talent that sprang, Ginesse suspected, from his skill at manufacturing them.

And she…?

The only thing she was known for was a series of unfortunate incidences in her childhood that had resulted in her being labeled a
djinn
and an
afreet
—Egyptian equivalents of imps and devils—and sent to a boarding school in England. Her parents had assured her it was for her own safety, but it had always felt like exile. She’d been an outsider there, a little too this, not enough that. Ever since she could remember, she’d been defined by her differences.

No more.

Henceforth her achievements would define her. And her first achievement would be discovering Zerzura. That is, if she could get there before Professor Tynesborough. A friend in the library had told her he’d been spending hours in the ancient manuscripts room, poring over the same materials she’d used in her investigation.

Then her great-grandfather had written from Cairo. Sir Robert had convinced the director of antiquities to interview her for an internship position at the Bulak Museum opening later that year. Obviously, Fate meant her to uncover the White City. Then, finally, she would put to rest all the nonsense about her being a jinx, and rather than being a source of amusement—and, yes, apprehension—she would inspire admiration and respect. She would earn her rightful place amongst her celebrated family.

“—a colonel after that, could they? And perhaps later than one would have expected. Though far be it from me to question their wisdom.” Miss Whimpelhall’s question recalled Ginesse from her daydream. “Oh? Oh. Indeed, yes. You paint a most dashing picture.”

“Dashing?” Miss Whimpelhall echoed. “That was not my intent. ‘Dashing’ is not a qualification one seeks in a husband. But I am sure you already know this.”

Ginesse did not answer; she considered dashingness to be a definite asset in a husband.

“Oh, my,” Miss Whimpelhall tsked lightly. “I can see you disagree. I am loath to take the part of advisor, my dear Miss Braxton, but,” her unhappy voice dropped to a whisper, “I know of whence I speak. A beloved cousin opted for ‘dashing’ over ‘dignified’ with tragic consequences.”

Ginesse was riveted. She leaned forward to catch every word. “Really?”

Miss Whimpelhall nodded. “She became engaged to a man who was not what he claimed to be. Luckily, all was revealed before they wed.”

“And the tragic consequences?” Ginesse asked before she could stop herself.

Miss Whimpelhall looked at her askance. “Why, the scandal, of course. She did not even visit London the following Season.”

That was the tragic consequences?
She stayed home?

Miss Whimpelhall nodded sagely. “So, you see, my dear Miss Braxton, how important it is to be wary of ‘dashing’ gentlemen.”

Ginesse had never met a dashing gentleman. In fact, she knew few gentlemen at all except for Professor Lord Tynesborough and her father, who, for unknown reasons, absolutely refused to be called a gentleman. Frankly, she would like to meet a man whose first thoughts in the morning weren’t about dusty manuscripts, broken bits of ancient pottery, or desiccated limbs.

“Dashing or not,” Ginesse said, “your fiancée is bound to be eager to see you. I imagine he will be waiting dockside, pacing impatiently, wringing his hands, his gaze fixed with expectant longing on every ship that enters the harbor.” She sighed happily. “And when he sees you, he will sweep you up in his arms and—”

“Oh no, he will not
,
” Miss Whimpelhall interjected. “He would never subject either of us to so vulgar a display. Colonel Lord Pomfrey is most dignified in all things. As, I hope, am I.” Her momentary distress faded. “Besides, he won’t be meeting me at all.”

“Oh?”

“He cannot neglect his duty as commander and abandon the garrison simply to fetch me. It would be unseemly. And I would never ask it of him.”

“Of course not.”

“He has arranged for some fellow to escort me to him.”

“Some fellow?”

Miss Whimpelhall gave a little shudder. “Yes. Colonel Lord Pomfrey says he is an unsavory character.”

Ginesse frowned. “I don’t understand. Why ever would your fiancée entrust your care to an unsavory character?”