Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

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.