“You would think I was trying to seduce men rather than coax prepositions from a piece of crumbling parchment,” she said bitterly. “A common harlot could not meet with more disapproval, scorn, disgust.” She laughed, but it was an angry sound. She was still fighting. It still hurt. She was so tired of fighting, pretending.
“Maybe you were associating with the wrong sort of people,” he said.
“What other sort is there?” she demanded. “The sort who laugh at intellectual women instead?”
“There’s the sort like me,” he said.
He didn’t move, but physical distance didn’t matter. She’d let him get too close because she’d let emotion loosen her tongue, and her secrets had tumbled out into the open.
She took a step back, into Ramesses’s stony forearm.
Mr. Carsington’s mouth curved a very little, like that of the stone pharaoh, and he closed the distance she’d tried to make between them.
“You could probably coax a proposition from me,” he said, “if you set your mind to it.”
“Preposition,” she said. “I said prep —”
He slid his hand to the back of her head, into her hair, and she froze, on the outside, that is. Inside, a ferocious hammering started, and the place where her brain used to be was now a wild whirl of dark fragments as elusive as the lost language she’d struggled to decipher.
He tilted his head a little to one side, studying her. “Ah, well, so much for slow sieges,” he said. He leant in, and she was too slow to duck or draw back, and so his mouth fell upon hers, and the bottom dropped out of the world.
She lifted her hand — to push him away as she must. As she ought. But his mouth moved boldly over hers, firm and sure, and she clung instead, her fingers curling round his upper arm. It was as hard as the stone figure blocking her retreat, yet warm and alive, its heat electric. Her fingers tingled, and the current shot under the skin. Every particle of her being reacted, as though galvanized.
The dark fragments in her mind swirled into a haze, and the mad hammering wasn’t simply in her heart, but beating through vein and muscle.
She tightened her grasp, holding on with both hands now, as though the very ground were giving way beneath her, just as everything within was giving way. One powerful arm slid round her waist and pulled her closer. She stiffened at the collision with that rock-hard body, but in the next heartbeat she was melting in its heat and molding herself to him. It wasn’t enough. She dragged her hands up over the broad shoulders and up his hard jaw. The pulse in his neck beat against the edge of her hand. Cupping his face, she parted her lips, offering herself. He teased her first, his tongue playing over her lips, then he stole inside, and the world spun as the taste of him swirled inside her, strangely cool and sweet and infinitely immoral.
His hand slid further down, curving over her buttock and pressing her closer yet, until her belly was crushed against his pelvis. It was wrong, completely wrong, but she was wrong, too — born that way — lacking the will to break away. She yielded to the shattering physical awareness of him — the long, sinewy body and the pressure of his hardened rod against her belly. She surrendered to the simmering heat between them and the tempest of feeling within.
Deep-buried longings clawed their way out of hiding. They tangled about her heart and coiled and twisted in her belly. She couldn’t name them. This wanted a new language, or no language at all. Meaning narrowed to the taste of his mouth and his skin and to the scent of him, dark and dangerous and so familiar that she ached, as though it were a cherished memory or a reawakened grief.
She should have battled her baser self and pulled free of the woman-trap he was. Instead she struggled to get closer, her hands tangling in his thick hair while her tongue tangled with his. So wrong. So lewd.
And so strange and exciting, like crawling through a pyramid in utter darkness.
He and what he awoke within her were far more dangerous. At this moment, though, she loved danger, and she would have gone on, straight to ruination. But his hand slid from her bottom and his mouth left hers, and with the broken contact, she became aware of the sun and the tall palms and birds singing and the stone giant against whose arm she had so stupidly lost control — along with her self-respect and any and all claims to virtue.
She pulled away. “Oh!” she said. And then, because she didn’t know what else to say — hadn’t a good reason to blame him or any plausible excuse for herself — she did what she’d used to do when she felt this way, when she and Miles were children. She balled her hand into a fist, swung her arm, and hit him, backhanded, hard in the chest.
PANIC.
One black, ghastly moment. Rupert must say something — conceal, divert, distract — but it meant thinking, and his mind wasn’t up to the job.
The blow settled everything handsomely — and about bloody time, too.
“Sorry,” he said. “I got carried away.”
That was too uncomfortably true.
“Carried away?” she repeated indignantly.
He could have said she was a fine one to wax indignant when she’d cooperated fully, thank you very much, rather too fully, in fact. Rather more than he was prepared for — or any man could be prepared for.
He still saw stars — and moons and planets, too. The whole universe was spinning. Dizzy, he started to look about for the large object — a stone falcon for instance — with which she must have thumped him in the head.
He caught himself in the nick of time.
There wasn’t a weapon. She was the weapon. She’d struck with her softly wicked pouting peach of a mouth and her body, the curving miracle of a body the Devil himself had designed to drive men distracted.
And then there was the passion, ocean-deep and as wild as any sea storm.
Rupert had a strong suspicion what it was her husband had died of.
He gestured about him. “The…um…romantic scene. The woman of mystery.” With the magnificent rump. And a raw, rare talent for kissing a man deaf, dumb, blind, and deranged. “The mood of the moment. And no one about.”
That was to say, he hoped there had been no witnesses. He looked past her, over the gigantic Ramesses he’d assumed would shield them from prying eyes. Their guide and the handful of servants and crew members who’d come along had gathered a respectful distance away. They sat in the shade of a clump of palm trees, smoking their pipes and listening to Tom talking nine to the dozen. In the other direction, the donkey drivers remained with their beasts and talked in the same animated Egyptian manner.
“I am no mystery,” she said crossly. “I told you —”
“Your mind is so intriguing,” he said. “So filled with learning. And all those secrets, too. Complicated. Fascinating.”
Her expression grew wary. “My mind?” she said. “You kissed me for my mind?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “Do you want to see the pyramids?” He pointed. “They’re that way.”
Chapter 9
DAPHNE WANTED TO RUN BACK TO THE BOAT and hide in her cabin, which was childish and silly, she knew. When she did get back to the boat, she would give herself a good talking-to. She could not revert to the heedless schoolgirl she’d once been, ruled by her passions. Then she’d paid with a prison sentence of a marriage. Now she would pay with her reputation, shaming Miles, who’d made it possible for her to continue her work and to whom she owed her sanity.
If your honor means nothing to you, she told herself, at least consider his.
Aloud she said, with all the composure she could summon, that she would very much like to visit the pyramids — as soon as she made copies of the cartouches.
Mr. Carsington unloaded her drawing supplies from her saddlebags, then kept out of her way while she worked. It did not take very long, and she was surprised, when she was done, to look round and find him standing under a palm tree, sketching.
“I didn’t know you could draw,” she said.
“It’s one of my deep, dark secrets,” he said. “Actually,
it’s the only one. Not much of a secret, either. My father believes a gentleman must know how to draw as well as fence and shoot. If I go home with no pictures, I’ll never hear the end of it. There.” He showed it to her.
The sketch was of the colossal Ramesses — and of her, seated on her stool, copying the signs on the stone pharaoh’s wrist.
“It’s very good,” she said, surprised. She felt a surge of pleasure, too, because she was in the picture, and a chill of anxiety, because she was in the picture, and the portrayal struck her as…intimate. But that was ridiculous, emotion playing tricks on her reason. Who’d ever know it was Daphne Pembroke, that tiny figure next to the immense pharaoh who’d fallen on his face?
THE SAQQARA PYRAMIDS were reputedly older than those of Giza. They were still imposing structures, Daphne thought as they crossed the plain. The main one, the Pyramid of Steps, was their destination.
When they reached the pebbly sand slope leading to the pyramids’ plateau, she and Mr. Carsington dismounted, to spare the donkeys.
Debris littered the way. He paused for a time, studying it, an odd expression on his face. She said nothing, simply watched, surprised, as his countenance hardened and he turned into someone she scarcely recognized. The cold mask reminded her of the change in his voice when he found the bodies in the pyramid. He’d sounded like a stranger then, so cold and detached.
She saw the same stranger now. Usually, even when he wasn’t smiling outwardly, she’d felt the smile was there all the same. In his dark eyes she usually discerned a gleam of amusement, as though he knew a very good joke. That, no doubt, was why one was so easily deluded into believing him an amiable idiot.
The good humor was completely gone. He straightened and, without a word, walked quickly on, taking long, angry strides she couldn’t hope to match.
Puzzled, Daphne squatted to look more closely at the rubbish covering the ground. Bits of marble and alabaster. Pottery shards. Shiny blue and green slivers. Shreds of dirty brown linen. Some odd bits of dark material. And white…bones.
She rose and gazed about her.
The place was a pillaged burial ground. These were the contents of graves. The pieces of dark material were what remained of mummies. The linen was the remnants of their winding sheets. The other bits must be the vestiges of burial objects.
“Oh, you poor things,” she whispered. Her throat closed and ached.
She rubbed her eyes and sharply told herself to stop being maudlin. Her collection of papyri had been plundered from the graves of ancient Egyptians. The same was true of her little wooden Egyptians.
“What an idiot — and a great hypocrite — you are, to weep about them now,” she chided herself. But she’d been an idiot from the time she woke up this day, it seemed. She rubbed her itching eyes and took a steadying breath, and continued to the pyramid.
She found Mr. Carsington at an ominous-looking black hole in the north face. The cold, hard look was gone, and the gleam was back in his eyes. A European in Arab garb stood with him. Mr. Carsington introduced the man as Signor Segato. He was excavating the pyramid for the Baron Minutoli, she learned.
“He tells me the interior is wonderfully complicated,” Mr. Carsington said. “Makes Chephren’s tomb look like child’s play, by the sounds of it. This is the way in.”
Daphne ventured nearer the hole. It was much larger than the entrance to Chephren’s pyramid.
“The shaft is only eighteen feet deep,” Mr. Carsington said.
“It can’t possibly be that easy to get inside,” she said.
“No, that’s the beginning,” he said. “The burial chamber’s about a hundred feet below, under the pyramid.”
“A hundred feet,” she repeated while her heart beat a fearful No, no! No, no! No, no!
“It’s gradual,” he said. “Miles of descending passages and stairs. Some pits and such. And a place where the stones are threatening to fall in. Are you game, Mrs. Pembroke?”
She did not want to go down into that hole, be it ever so large. Every natural instinct recoiled, and common sense warned against it.
“There are hieroglyphic signs on a doorway,” he said.
“Inside?” she said. “Inside a pyramid?” She’d never heard of anyone’s finding hieroglyphs inside a pyramid. But this excavation was very recent. She turned her gaze to Signor Segato and fired a series of questions at him in Italian.
Yes, yes, he agreed with the signora: this was most unusual. He was greatly surprised when he found them: birds, snakes, insects, and the other little pictures. The chamber itself was decorated, very beautiful.
She swallowed. “Very well,” she told Mr. Carsington. “I should like to see this inscription.”
It was a beastly long and uncomfortable way to the chamber, and the heat so far below ground was sufficient to bake bricks. But once they’d amassed torches enough, and she stopped coughing from the smoke, she could appreciate the interesting labyrinth of passages and the complex of chambers, so unlike the simplicity of Chephren’s pyramid at Giza. This one, too, was empty of treasure, which could surprise no one. In Egypt, plundering tombs had been not simply a fact of life but a profession since the time of Cheops at least.
She found treasure enough for her, though, deep in the bowels of the pyramid.
The chamber was all and more that Signor Segato had promised. Upon the dark blue painted ceiling gleamed golden stars. Turquoise-colored tiles covered the walls. But most wondrous of all was the doorframe. Above it and along the sides were hieroglyphs, beautifully cut in low relief.
A repeated motif adorned the sides. A falcon wearing the pharaoh’s crown stood upon a rectangular pedestal divided into two squares. The top square contained three signs: at top, the hatchet that signified a god; beneath this, the almond shape she’d decided must be the r sound; and under it a sign less familiar: a rattle, insect, flower, or musical instrument, she couldn’t be sure. Four vertical sections divided the bottom square. Did these signify pillars? she wondered. Doors?
“Is that the god Horus?” came Mr. Carsington’s deep voice from behind her.
The voice went straight down her spine and up again. In self-defense, she adopted her pedantic mode. “So it appears,” she said. “The sign below him is the one Dr. Young interprets to mean god. As you see, Horus wears a pharaoh’s crown. The kings were believed to be gods. Perhaps this one was closely associated with Horus.”
“The signora can read the ancient writing?” Signor Segato asked.
“Ah, no,” Mr. Carsington said quickly. “She has read a little Greek, though.”
“Herodotus,” Daphne said quickly.
She really must learn to keep her hieroglyphic speculations to herself. As Noxley had remarked, the Egyptians loved to talk, and news traveled swiftly. If the explorer mentioned an Englishwoman who could read hieroglyphs, all of Egypt would soon hear of it…including the mad villains who’d kidnapped Miles — and who wouldn’t hesitate to come after her.
“She uses a little Herodotus and a great deal of woman’s intuition,” Mr. Carsington said, in precisely the patronizing tone one would expect from a superior male.
Normally, the condescension would have had her seething. Now she almost laughed — with relief — at how adeptly he’d covered her blunder.
Ironic that she could trust him to keep her secret better than she could do.
She did not half understand him, she realized, and she apparently had a less than perfect understanding of herself.
It seemed she understood only her work. She gazed at the hieroglyphs, at the familiar cobra and vulture and bee and hatchet. She pondered the significance of the semicircles under most of the figures. Baskets, the larger ones with the round side down? What of the smaller ones, round side up? Sound or symbol? Thus questioning, speculating, theorizing, she swiftly forgot everything else.
GETTING MRS. PEMBROKE away from the confounded falcons and what-you-call-’ ems took steady and patient coaxing.
This was not what Ruper
t wanted to be doing.
While he watched and listened to her, he wanted to get her naked.
There was the seeing-stars kiss, from which he still suffered aftereffects, something like the morning after a debauch — except that his head wasn’t what ached.
There was whatever she was doing to him now, and he wasn’t sure what that was.
She managed — just barely — to hide her learning from Segato. She couldn’t conceal her excitement, though. It set the very air vibrating.
Since she couldn’t run about the place, openly gesticulating and theorizing and talking six languages simultaneously, she stuck close to Rupert. And when she couldn’t contain herself — which happened every few minutes — she’d clutch his arm and tug to bring his ear near her mouth, so that she could whisper.
He had to feel her breath on his ear and neck and cheek and be aware of how close her mouth was and how all he had to do was turn his head to taste it again — and see stars.
But he couldn’t turn his head. He had to behave, because they weren’t alone, which was why he had to endure the whisper torture.
Luckily for her, Segato was Italian. Assuming the whispers were romantic rather than pedantic, he kept a tactful distance.
This belief wouldn’t do Mrs. Pembroke’s reputation any good. Still, the alternative was worse.
It wasn’t hard to guess what Duval and his underlings would do if they found out they’d kidnapped the wrong sibling. They’d come after her, and they’d murder whomever happened to be in the way: captain, crew members, Leena, and Tom.
If Mrs. Pembroke’s secret got out, none of them would be safe.
Keeping the secret was going to be more difficult than Rupert could have foreseen. Every time she met a hieroglyph, she’d act like this: vibrating like a tuning fork, the gigantic brain bubbling over and spilling out its secrets: Greek and Latin and Coptic and names of scholars and who believed what and this alphabet versus that one and phonetic interpretations versus symbolic ones.
The day was waning when they finally climbed out of the pyramid. She was not waning in the least.