Wrapped (3 page)

“Perhaps you’ll even be so kind as to decorate our entire house so that I might have time to concentrate on my studies?”

Mother shook her head. “Education is for children. And you’ve already had far more than your share. I let your father keep finding those language tutors for you, but there comes a time when every girl must step out of the schoolroom and into the life that awaits her.” She held my eye. “And that time for you is come at last!”

At this, the seamstresses stepped away and looked to Mother. She circled round me, studying every stitch and hem and pleat and ruffle and fall of fabric.

“Very good,” she said finally.

I looked at myself in the mirror. Still a girl in a lovely dress, my auburn hair pinned back, waiting for Clarisse to do with it what only she could.

But what that girl in the mirror felt surprised me. I’d spent months arguing with Mother about allowing me to continue my studies, pleading with Father to convince her to delay my debut. And yet, in this dress . . .

I looked beautiful. How odd a sensation. Mother was beautiful. I was not. And yet in the dress I looked like a girl ready to make her debut, a girl who belonged at a party, or a coronation or something important. And then an even odder shiver ran through me: I wanted to see what could happen at parties and dinners for a girl dressed like I was. At least it would be something new, possibly exciting, even if it was a quick step into the rest of my life.

Suddenly all of me couldn’t wait to wear this dress tonight.

Mother must have noticed the change.

“You wear it well,” she said.

And for once I could not argue.

Chapter Two

That night we found ourselves in a corner of Lord Showalter’s gardens, four houses east of our own residence. Summer cottons and silks billowed on the warm breeze as a few dozen guests glided across a lawn so perfectly trimmed I was almost sorry to walk on it. Nervous whispers rippled through the crowd around me as we followed our host through an ivy-covered archway and onto a broad stone patio. A hedge of oily torches spat plumes of smoke, beckoning us closer to the object we’d all been invited to see. Amid the ring of firelight sat a table draped in scarlet velvet.

A mummy lay upon it.

Lord Showalter, resplendent in a waistcoat of blue the color of the night sky above us, opened his arms as we crowded onto the pavers. It was clear he could sense the same unease and curiosity that ran through us all, though he seemed to relish it, letting the silence build as he surveyed our faces.

His eyes landed on me, seemed to hold there a bit longer, and I was reminded of how Mother and half the women of the Park described him.
Magnetic.
Showalter could hold an entire room in his gaze at once but still make each person feel as if he or she were its most important occupant. Mother explained it was a gift, the talent of a natural-born host and leader, the type of man who inspired loyalty and ardor in equal measure.

But I was a girl in a beautiful dress, a girl capable enough of giving back as good as she got. I nodded, smiled demurely, and held his stare.

His eyes never strayed from mine as he smiled mysteriously, then asked, “Who will be the first to dare upset our Egyptian guest on his journey through the underworld?” He looked at each of us, even though I was quite sure he’d determined who’d be first even before sending out the invitations. But I wasn’t expecting what he said next.

“Agnes Wilkins!
You
must take the first pass,” Showalter boomed, beckoning me forward.

“Me?” I asked in alarm. Whispers rippled through the crowd.

My boldness of a moment before retreated as I flushed. Showalter was showing me some preference.

“Of course,” he said. “In honor of your pending debut, Miss Wilkins.”

I waited for Mother to intervene, to tell Showalter that I couldn’t possibly—we’d
agreed—
but the expression she wore when I glanced her way told me I was on my own. Had Showalter’s choice outweighed all her opinions about how lurid this affair was? Was the whim of a would-be suitor already overriding her
principles
? Finding no help in Mother, I looked back to Showalter. He was waiting, his stare so loaded with expectation that I found myself taken aback again. Was I imagining that there was an invitation to more lurking beneath that sly grin?

Finally I found my voice. “Your kindness is most generous, but I could not presume—”

“I insist,” he said, taking my elbow and steering me to the foot of the mummy. I could imagine the eyebrows rising behind me and felt my throat tighten. I expected Mother was by now beaming triumphantly, scheming about how best to announce an engagement that apparently she’d been plotting for months.

I was not the only girl at the party who was meant to enjoy her first season this summer. I knew Julia Overton was supposed to be here. Dr. Clerval, the physician to half the residents of the Park, had brought his daughters. There was another girl, the niece of one of the new families at the south end of the Park, here as well. We were all in new gowns, all novices at social events like this, all fresh from the schoolrooms or tutors.

But Showalter had singled me out.

“Just there, Miss Wilkins,” he said, his breath warm on my shoulder.

“Lord Showalter—”

“Just take the blade here”—he slipped a small silver knife under a band of the linen—“and slide upward. Then you peel the wrappings back a layer at a time.”

“Sir,” I began to protest, but he’d already disappeared back into the crowd of his guests to fetch others to join me for the entertainment.

But there’s a person in there,
I thought, trying not to wince. At least the remains of one. Someone who’d been folded carefully up inside those layers of fabric, someone who hadn’t meant to be seen again at all.

Someone who hadn’t expected to be put on display, ogled by curious eyes.

Someone a little like me.

As oddly flattering as it felt to have caught the eye of Showalter, here was one feeling I was certain I would never enjoy: the sensation of all these eyes staring at me, appraising me, sizing up what my future was meant to be.

I sought Father’s face in the crowd, and found him eyeing me from the periphery, an unreadable smile on his lips. The one that walked so fine a line between mockery and contentment.

“Don’t look so frightened, Agnes,” my brother Rupert whispered as he joined me at the body, proud to be among those chosen to cut first. “It’s just some old bones and linen.”

“I’m not scared of the mummy,” I returned.

“You and your nonsense talk about women being the equal of men.” My oldest brother shook his head. He reached for his own knife and a handful of the linen.

“Lord Showalter didn’t say we could begin,” I pointed out, though etiquette concerning affairs of this sort was a bit muddled. Even Mother had been unsure of the protocol.

“Didn’t say we couldn’t. Trust me, Agnes. Fellow from down at the club”—he paused briefly to saw through a bit of the linen—“he told me all about these things. He’s got an uncle worth sixty thousand a year who’s already hosted one unwrapping. He said you just grab a knife and start digging away. There’s all sorts of little things the old natives used to wrap up in the cloths—trinkets mostly, items they reasoned the body would need in the next world.”

“I’m familiar with the purposes of mummification,” I said.

“But the good bit,” Rupert continued, ignoring my jab as he hacked away, “is that sometimes they would hide some valuable items. And not just old things that are valuable because some museum might want them. Jewels and precious stones and so forth.”

“It just doesn’t seem right somehow,” I said, “disregarding the last wishes of a human being.”

He shrugged. “Just a body, Agnes. Don’t let your imagination get the better of you. Though I fear those novels you are so fond of have made you afraid of the real world.”

I felt it unwise to point out that a horde of London’s wealthiest and most fashionable citizens preparing to pillage a centuries-old Egyptian mummy like a Christmas pudding was perhaps as far from the real world as I could imagine.

But to Rupert, past twenty but with no more sense than he’d had at fourteen, this was real.

Our host placed a third and final guest at the body, Lady Kensington. Showalter stared at us gravely, but the volume of his voice carried out to the thirty or so other faces watching eagerly in the firelight. “Begin! But beware awakening the mummy and rousing its curse!” He managed to keep his stony expression for a few seconds before he collapsed into a giggle, and motioned to the sitar player who had followed us outside from the dining room to offer some musical accompaniment to our macabre task.

What a sitar had to do with Egypt, I couldn’t tell, except that Showalter and many of his guests seemed content to lump all things exotic and foreign into one tidy category.

I realized sadly that this might be the closest I ever came to glimpsing the wonders of the world beyond England. How I longed to board a frigate to Egypt—or anywhere, for that matter—wander through a bazaar, ride a camel to the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings with a veil pulled across my face. I’d rather hear street musicians plink away at odd instruments than listen to a sitar player and a string quartet fail to reproduce the mystery of North Africa. I looked at the mummy then for what it truly was—an emissary from the world I would likely never know or taste or feel—and it nearly broke my heart.

Rupert had already dug a swath a few inches wide, revealing only more wrappings. Lady Kensington swallowed hard and picked up her own knife, delicately sliding it under an edge. I steeled myself to my task, reasoning that the sooner I began, the sooner I’d be excused. But my eye fell on a living person as out of place here as the mummy. A young man sat perched on a stool just outside the firelight. He suddenly rose to his feet, balancing a great ledger book across one arm, a grease pencil waiting in his other hand.

He was no guest. His coat was too shabby and his shoes too low at the heel to merit an invitation. But his height, his intent brown eyes, and the square shape of his jaw more than made up for any indignity in his dress. He rivaled even my imagined picture of Mr. Darcy. I forced my eyes away, afraid of being caught staring by the mysterious young man or anyone else.

“Agnes,” came Lord Showalter’s voice at my ear. “Others are waiting. You must take your pass and find what you will.”

I understood why it mattered to him that I enjoy this. That others see me enjoying it. He’d made that clear when he called me out first.

But I didn’t understand why I felt both flattered
and
annoyed by his attention.

I picked up my own small, sharp knife, but still I hesitated. I studied the bundle that sat before me, wondering if it was a trick of the torchlight that made the wrappings where I stood seem a bit lighter in color. I was about to ask Showalter if he noticed it as well, when he spoke again.

“Please, Miss Wilkins,” he said. “If you are uncomfortable—”

“I’m not,” I said quickly. But now I was irritated and wanted only to get this over with.

“What is that young man doing?” I asked him as I felt the first bit of linen give way under the knife. The stranger hovered near the head of the body now, furiously jotting notes into his ledger as Rupert and Lady Kensington hacked away.

Showalter followed my gaze. “He’s someone from the museum. They like to catalog the bodies, describe the remains and the condition of the wrappings. Claim it helps to document every specimen, even ones for private parties. I don’t even know this fellow’s name, but Banehart at the museum sent him over.”

“Hmm,” I said, cutting through more of the layers, the dust of the linen making my fingers slippery.

“Don’t worry, my dear, he can’t take any of the things we find. I paid for this mummy—and half the ones in that museum. So what’s here is ours to keep. Certainly if something is precious enough we might choose to donate it to the collection, but it is my greatest wish that you’ll return home tonight with a lovely memento of this auspicious evening.”

“Aha!” my brother cried, chest thrust out, golden hair falling into his eyes as he extracted a small ankh from the furrow of linen he’d plowed. The trinket was lovely, burnished gold crested with a dark green stone. My brother, however, seemed to think that he was the one worth admiring. Rupert held the ankh above his head for the crowd to see, grinning as if he’d just rescued it from a pit of hissing asps.

As the guests surged forward to inspect this prize, I continued in my course, determined to find something and have done with my part in desecrating the grave of a fellow human—be it male, female, pharaoh or merchant.

Blessedly, we were still nowhere near the actual remains. But the pile of linen already unwound from the body seemed impossibly large, spilling off my narrow end of the table, coiling about my feet, as if I were the next in line to be immobilized and preserved for all eternity. I glanced at Showalter. Perhaps I was.

“A fine discovery,” Lord Showalter said to my brother, holding the ankh up to catch the torchlight. If Showalter had a natural gift for commanding an audience, he was equally adept at keeping one enthralled. He appeared to enjoy this role immensely, particularly when he could pontificate on a subject he knew as well as Egypt. “The cut and color of the stone are consistent with artifacts from a certain Theban dynasty.”