The Lord's Inconvenient Vow

‘Sam!’

‘Well, you objected to my saying posterior yesterday.’

‘I admit defeat.’

‘You keep saying that and yet you persevere. Go away, the sun is sinking and I want to finish this today.’

He walked away and she felt the silence around her more keenly. Contrarily she wished he had stayed. Then she heard a grunt and the slither of sand and smiled to herself. He sat beside her again and she noticed a small fresh scratch along the edge of this right hand where he braced it on the roof beside her and she resisted the urge to reach out.

‘You scratched your hand,’ she said instead and he raised his hand, inspecting it.

‘So?’

‘So nothing. It was merely an observation. Or an opening so you can berate me for that as well.’

‘I can hardly blame you for my clumsiness.’

‘It would not be the first time. Remember Saqqara, two years ago?’

His frown fled before another of his surprising smiles.

‘Good Lord, yes. Well, that was your fault. What the deuce did you think you would find clambering over those piles of rubble?’

‘I thought I would make a great discovery. I did not expect to fall into a tomb and be attacked by bats.’ She shuddered at the memory.

‘Of course not. Why would bats congregate in a dark, dank tomb and, even more surprising, why would they take alarm when someone tumbled into their lair and swamped it with daylight?’

‘I did not know there was a shaft entrance hidden under the rubble!’

‘Well, if you had not climbed there, you would not have fallen through and dragged me into it as well.’

‘I apologised. Several times.’

‘So you did. So you should have.’

‘You still hardly spoke to me for the rest of your stay.’

‘I am certain you regarded that as a reward, not a punishment. And since anything I said might have led to a bout of fisticuffs with your brothers, it is good I held my peace. You were a menace, Sam.’

‘Were?’

‘You have mellowed with age, apparently. Despite your tendency to climb the antiquities, nothing horrible has happened since my arrival and, with only a couple days remaining before my departure to England, we might yet scrape through without any disasters.’

He spoke lightly, but there was a peculiar note to his voice and she shivered, as if she was back in that tomb, huddled in a corner while he shielded her from the swooping bats and told her precisely what he thought of her. She’d known he was leaving, but somehow she had managed not to absorb that fact. Now it was unavoidable and so was an equally unwelcome realisation.

She did not want him to go.

Somewhere inside her a pit opened wide. Her cheeks tingled with heat and she closed her sketchbook carefully. She felt she was dangling over a ledge, a little dizzy, a little queasy. What was wrong with her?

She stared at the line of the hill, the sweep and dip and then the ragged collapse into the valley. Though the colours were monotone once the sun rose fully, trapped in shades of pale brown and yellow against a stark blue sky, it was a landscape of contrasts and surprises. Not all of them pleasant.

‘But you were in England only a couple of months ago.’

‘So?’

‘But... I thought you would be joining your uncle on the expedition to Abu Simbel next week.’

‘Not this year. Next year I will likely return with Dora.’

‘Dora?’ The pit yawned wider.

‘Miss Theodora Wadham. I met her in London and we are to be married in June. I’ve asked Poppy and Janet not to discuss it because she is still in mourning over her father’s death, but I’m surprised your eavesdropping abilities haven’t ferreted out the information yet. It hardly matters now since we will announce our betrothal as soon as I return to London. She is looking forward to seeing Egypt. I have told her all about it and she finds it fascinating.’

Dora.

June.

Married.

Edge?

The dizziness was clearing, revealing sharp, distinct quills of anger and pain. She had not even realised she liked Edge. He was annoying and opinionated and always so right one simply itched to kick him. Certainly it made no sense for her whole body to ache like this because he was to be married. No sense at all.

As the silence stretched he took her sketchpad, leafing through it again.

‘You really are very good. I like the way you capture the heat over the valley here. I don’t know how it shows that, but it does. This one I like in particular. That is a strange angle... Don’t tell me you climbed the statue of Horus to sketch that?’ He laughed again. ‘You are bound to break your head; do you know that? This is what comes of growing up tagging around your brothers. I told them you would get into trouble one day.’