"Well, of course she does. She's a world famous novelist."
"I'm not much for books, I must confess. Certainly not fiction. Most of what I tend to read is rather...dry." He spoke this as if it were a realization he'd only recently come to, and his embarrassment over it was fresh. "Is this your first time in Yorkshire?"
"It is my first time in England after many years."
"Ah, well...perhaps you simply remind me of someone, then."
She felt these words, and the intensity with which he'd said them, might be the first sort of clue to what had brought her here. But it was impossible to question him now, on the front steps of the house.
Edith glanced quickly over Sibyl's shoulder, a sign that more guests were arriving behind her.
"I cannot thank you enough for this reception," she said, with a bow of her head. "You have been most gracious. Both of you."
There were more thank-yous and smiles. Then she found herself stumbling down the front hallway, towards a sunlit drawing room. Just outside the open terrace doors, tuxedoed waiters stood at attention with trays full of wineglasses. Beyond, a small sea of guests mingled on the
vast green lawn in between two high walls of hedge.
"Care for a glass of wine, miss?" one of the waiters asked.
But she had already seen him, and the sight of him rendered her silent.
Mr. Ramsey. Handsome, Egyptian. Nodding and listening attentively to the person who was speaking to him now. Every detail of his physical being, from his olive skin to his handsome jawline to the startling blueness of his eyes, flooded her with such overpowering memory she found herself speechless and breathless. This was not the vague ink drawing in the news clipping. This was the man from her dreams, in the flesh.
For now she could see the man a short distance from her had appeared not just in her more recent nightmares, but in another dream as well, a dream that had stayed with her throughout her life, a dream which had formed the basis of her novel The Wrath of Anubis.
This was the man with whom she'd walked the streets of some vague ancient city. She was absolutely sure of it! The man whose face and bearing she'd never been able to recall once she was awake; whose presence had always been an awareness and little else. This was the man who had provided her with common garb and requested she view her own kingdom and her people through the eyes of one of its ordinary citizens. And his living, breathing presence before her now was like a dab of watercolor bringing richness and color to something that had been but a pencil sketch seconds before.
It had not been just a dream. He had not been just a dream.
Again this question shook the earth on which she stood: How could she have dreamed about a living, breathing man she had never before met?
Unless she had met him, somehow, somewhere. Unless it was not a dream, but a memory. A memory of a man named...
"Ramses," Sibyl whispered.
His eyes met hers through the crowd.
At that very moment, an arm encircled her waist. Too close, too suddenly intimate. She almost cried out, but she was immediately startled by a blast of hot breath against her neck. With it came the stench of hard liquor.
"Do not move," the man whispered fiercely, giving each word terrible emphasis.
The man stood behind her now like an old lover who had come to surprise her. But he was causing a sharp pressure against the base of her spine. "That's a knife you feel," he said. "Sharp as a scalpel. Move one inch and I shall drive its sharp blade into your spine. You'll lose the use of your legs instantly. You might never walk again."
When she tried to speak, her breath came out in a series of weak gasps.
"Come with me," he whispered. "Don't make a scene. We are old friends. Act any differently and I'll cut you and flee this place before anyone can see you're bleeding to death. Walk."
He was deranged, this man, deranged and drunk. But the grip with which he held the knife against her seemed utterly, terribly confident. And so she obeyed. He walked behind her, with only an inch of space between his chest and her back, one arm looped around her shoulders to give the illusion of intimacy.
They couldn't walk a good distance like this. It was too strange, too conspicuous. But he guided her quickly in the opposite direction of the guests, into the deserted first-floor rooms behind them, past the procession of servants and waiters traveling up and down the basement stairs. With each step that took them farther away from people, from the comfort of the string music outside, her terror intensified, and he relaxed his pretentious pose.
Now he gripped the back of her neck. He steered her through an empty library, down a short hallway.
"Who are you?" she gasped. "What do you want?"
In what seemed like one motion, he'd thrown open the door to a small washroom and hurled her inside. By the time he'd drawn the door shut behind him, he'd brought the knife to her throat.
"Who are you, Sibyl Parker? Who are you really? And why do you seek to destroy my queen?"