Beguiled by Her Betrayer

‘Stay there and have a drink and we’ll go for a walk in a minute when I’ve got my gear.’

‘Who are you talking to?’ Cleo called.

‘Delilah. We are going for a stroll, a wash and, if there’s some hot water to be had, a shave.’ The goat bleated. ‘You be quiet or I’ll shave your beard off.’

Cleo laughed, the first time he had ever heard her give way to amusement without some edge to it. It was a rather nice laugh, although he suspected she didn’t let it escape very often.

‘Come on, Delilah.’ He climbed over the gunwale, took the goat’s rope in one hand and the shaving kit Cleo had found for him in the other, and splashed ashore to look for hot water and some grazing for the goat.

He stripped off, washed in the river and dressed again, then found the angle of a branch to wedge the small mirror into while he shaved and Delilah grazed placidly around his feet.

‘Someone is going to have to milk you,’ he told her, eyeing the heavy udder as he rinsed the razor and poured away the water. The goat raised her head and peered at him down her formidable Roman nose and the recollection of the only other Delilah he knew, the Dowager Marchioness of Dawlish, came to him. Other than the fact that the old battleaxe was as flat-chested as a plank the resemblance was irresistible. Quin sat down and laughed until he cried.

‘Bredon? What the devil’s the matter with you, man?’ Sir Philip, clad in a blue-and-yellow banyan, his own shaving tackle in this hand, stared at Quin as though he had just encountered a lunatic.

Perhaps he has. Perhaps all this had addled my brain. Oh, lord, what am I doing, goat-herding in the heart of Egypt when I could be drafting communiqués, planning dinner parties or deciphering code letters? Obeying orders, he answered himself.

‘Just something that occurred to amuse me, sir,’ he said as he got to his feet and found the goat’s trailing rope. ‘Come on, Delilah. Let us hope Madame Valsac knows how to milk you.’

‘There you are,’ Cleo greeted him. ‘You haven’t milked her?’

‘I have no idea how to. Do you?’

‘Of course.’ Cleo tied a bow to secure her long braid and tossed it back over her shoulder.

That was a pity, Quin thought as he lifted the protesting animal back on board. He would have liked to see her hair loose around her shoulders.

It seemed Cleo had been preparing breakfast as well as getting dressed. ‘Here.’ She thrust a platter and a beaker into his hands as he stood up to his knees in water. ‘Can you give those to my father, please?’

The older man still was not back, so Quin laid the food on the cross-bench and splashed back to haul himself on board, conscious of Cleo’s intent gaze on him while her hands worked rhythmically, sending milk hissing into a bowl. The half-healed wound on his arm pulled painfully, but the muscles held.

‘You are very fit,’ she observed. ‘Is that because of your work?’

Diplomacy was hardly a physically strenuous activity under normal circumstances and Quin almost said as much before he remembered who and what he was supposed to be. ‘I fence, box, ride and swim,’ he answered truthfully. ‘That helps. But engineers must be capable of climbing tall structures and scrambling about half-built machinery, of course.’

‘Of course,’ Cleo agreed. Her face was expressionless as she turned her attention back to the goat. ‘I’ve almost finished—we can have milk with our breakfast.’

* * *

They reached Kene on the great bend where the river turned sharply west just as the sun was going down that night. Cleo was hanging on to her temper by her fingernails and her father was complaining that they had swept past Thebes without stopping.

For once Laurent and Quin had been in perfect accord. The captain had announced that he did not care how many of the savants were at work on the ruins that were said to have stopped the army in their tracks with wonder, Quin had declared flatly that they had no time to go chasing up the Valley of the Kings in order to sneer at James Bruce’s book about one of the tombs and, when the furious baronet offered the felucca’s owner a ridiculous amount to stop, both men agreed they would sail on the moment Sir Philip got on the shore.

Her father had to be content with glimpses of the temples at Luxor and Karnak as they had swept past.

‘You should have let him go ashore,’ Cleo said to Quin while the men were mooring for the night. ‘And left him. The villager who owns this boat would have benefited from the money and Father would have been perfectly all right with the savants and their escort.’

‘Leave your own father?’ Quin asked, his voice gently mocking.