Instantly he was up, and in another moment he was out of the cabin, onto the deck, knife in hand. Something slammed into him, and he went down.
DAPHNE WAS AWAKE, too, sharply awake, her heart pounding because of t
he dream, so real that when she first woke, she thought she’d actually done it all, every forbidden, unwomanly act.
In the dream she wore only a transparent veil. She stood in the doorway of Mr. Carsington’s cabin and smiled at him and let it drop to the floor.
He lay on his back on the divan, looking up at her, a light dancing in his dark eyes. He laughed a deep, wicked laugh and beckoned with his forefinger.
She went down on all fours and crawled to him, and over him. She bent and trailed her tongue along the bronzed skin near the opening of his shirt. She let her hands roam over his big chest. She undressed him. She kissed him everywhere, touched him everywhere. She used her tongue as boldly as she did her hands. She took him inside her and rode him until she collapsed, satisfied, exhausted.
She broke every single one of Virgil’s rules.
She’d always hated those rules, because she wasn’t like other women. She had a brain that belonged in a man’s head, attached to a man’s body. It put unfeminine ideas in her head, aggressive, animal ideas. It made her want to go after what she wanted instead of waiting for it to come to her. It made her want to crawl on top instead of lying quietly underneath. It made her want to do as well as be done to. It made desire a wildcat inside her instead of the sweet kitten Virgil wanted.
She lay there, eyes wide, staring into the darkness, her nerves taut as though she’d been caught doing what she’d dreamt.
She knew the wildness and wickedness were inside her. But it was like the experience in Saqqara: she knew there were snakes. She knew they sheltered from the burning sun in dark places. But that was an abstract idea, worlds away from the real thing appearing suddenly, fangs bared, carrying instant death.
She was supposed to have grown tamer, to have quieted with maturity and learnt to rule her passions instead of letting them rule her. But Mr. Carsington had come into her life, and then…
She’d thought he was the genie let out of the bottle, the dangerous force released. But she was the one set free. Discovering who and what she’d become was like lifting the rock and seeing the snake spring up.
She lay staring into the darkness, wide awake, painfully alert. That was why she noticed the splash, then the movement shortly thereafter — in a nearby cabin or the passage, she couldn’t tell. But the sound brought her bolt upright. She grabbed her wrapper and shrugged into it.
She didn’t waste time fumbling about in the dark, looking for a weapon, but snatched up one of her boots. She tiptoed past the sleeping Leena to the cabin door and slipped into the passage.
Even before Daphne reached the deck she heard the muffled grunts and thuds. The rational part of her brain told her to run the other way, back to her cabin. She almost did so. Then she noticed the door to Mr. Carsington’s cabin was ajar. He was out there — in trouble, very likely.
She muttered a quick prayer and burst through the entryway onto the deck. A dark form came at her. Not his. She struck with the boot as hard as she could, and the man stumbled backward. Why hadn’t she brought something heavier, deadlier? Where was Mr. Carsington? Not dead. Dear God, he could not be dead.
She was opening her mouth to call for him, when the man growled a curse and sprang at her again —
And let out a yelp and fell hard upon the deck. He did not get up.
The boat was stirring, men coming to life, sleepy voices calling to each other.
Out of the darkness came Mr. Carsington’s deep voice, cool and calm: “Pray don’t trouble yourselves, gentlemen. It is merely a villain come to cut our throats, rob our stores, and ravish our women. No need for alarm. Mrs. Pembroke has the matter in hand.”
LATER, IN THE front cabin, while she picked splinters from Rupert’s hand, Mrs. Pembroke told him the Egyptians didn’t understand irony or sarcasm in any language.
“Perhaps not, but it made me feel better,” he said. “I think you missed one.” He didn’t know or care how many splinters his collision with the deck had given him. He only wanted her to go on holding his hand and peering closely at it while he watched the lantern light make red-gold and garnet and ruby threads in her hair. It streamed over her shoulders, a fiery waterfall against the muslin nightclothes.
Her bedtime attire was plain and severe, the very antithesis of provocative.
So naturally he wanted to get her naked. Naturally his privy councilor swelled with hope.
“You should not have crept out onto the deck to investigate,” she said, plying the tweezers again. “You should have made a stir. If I had not happened to be awake, I should never have heard —”
“You had a sleepless night?” Was he keeping her awake, then, the way she did him? What a tragic waste of nighttime! “I’m sorry to hear it. That is, I would be if you hadn’t turned up at a crucial moment.”
He couldn’t believe he’d allowed a sullen oaf of a villain to take him by surprise. This was what came of too little sleep and too much celibacy: bodily humors horribly out of balance.
“I was not sleepless,” she said. “I woke from a bad dream. That was when I heard the noise. Splashing. And other sounds that didn’t seem right. Then I saw your door ajar, and guessed there was trouble.”
She’d come to help him — to save him, darling girl. It was touching, really. And terrifying. She might have been raped, murdered.
“You should not have crept out onto the deck to investigate,” he said, mimicking her. “You should have cried out and woken everybody. If I’d been an instant slower to recover my wits, the villain would have had you.”
“In future, I shall keep a knife under my pillow,” she said. “It hadn’t occurred to me before to go to bed armed. Even now I can hardly believe a lone prowler tried to sneak onto a vessel containing so many people.” She frowned. “But it would have been worse had several ruffians come. You had better teach me how to use a gun.”
“Mrs. Pembroke, I’m not at all certain I want you shooting firearms in the dark. A pistol isn’t like a boot. If you’d struck me, thinking I was the intruder —”
“Oh, I knew it was not you,” she said. “He was too short and square, and the smell was completely wrong.”
“The smell?”
“Dirty and wet. From the river.”
She smelled wonderful. So clean…with a ghost of a fragrance hovering about her: smoke and herbs, like incense. Rupert leant in a hairsbreadth closer.
“I could have been wet,” he said. “I might have had a whim for a midnight swim.” Now he thought about it, a vigorous swim before bedtime would probably help calm him. Until he found a dancing girl, that is.
“You wouldn’t be so idiotish as to go for a swim in the dead of night without warning anybody,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to throw the crew into an uproar.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, we’ve manned our vessel with some of the world’s soundest sleepers,” he said.
“All the more reason for me to be better prepared for attack,” she said. She gave him back his hand.
“A heavy candlestick would do,” he said. “You might easily incapacitate an attacker while still giving him a chance of surviving the blow. On the other hand, if you put a ball through a man, he’s likely to die. And the trouble with this is, you might put the ball through the wrong man.”
“All the more reason,” she said, “for you to teach me how to do it properly.”
THE SECOND LOT of villains had proved more civilized than the first. Miles hadn’t been sure, in fact, that they were villains. They came peaceably enough to the cave, weapons tucked into their girdles instead of in their hands.
Still, the leader Ghazi knew his name, and this put Miles on guard — for all the good it did, when he was outnumbered a dozen to one, and none of the others appeared to be convalescing from a bout of fever.
“This is not a fit abode for you, my learned friend,” Ghazi said. “I have a fine tent and food and drink. You must accept my hospitality.”
“Must I?” Miles said, uneasy at the “learned.” Butrus had b
elieved him “learned” enough to read papyri…and had spoken with happy anticipation of using torture to encourage Miles’s brain.
Ghazi smiled. “I hold no knife to your throat, no rifle to your head. But in the village is the young widow who told us where to find you. If you refuse our hospitality, perhaps one of my men will take this as an insult. Perhaps he will kill the woman for sending us to be insulted. Then her baby will be an orphan. Perhaps it would be a mercy to kill the child as well. What is your opinion?”
“I believe I’d better do as I’m told,” Miles said.
Ghazi smiled his approval. Unlike Butrus, he had all his teeth.
They traveled to an encampment a few miles distant. There they fed Miles a good meal and gave him fresh clothing. This was at least more kindly treatment than he’d received from Butrus’s lot, who’d ransacked his belongings. What they’d expected to find he had no idea, but their grim expressions told him they hadn’t found it. They’d left him only one shirt in addition to what he’d worn when they kidnapped him. Both shirts were filthy and ragged, and the one not on his back remained deep in the cave, with the incriminating remnants of his chains.
This new batch of cutthroats most politely invited him to mount a camel the following morning. He decided it was best to follow instructions lest one of Ghazi’s sensitive minions be offended and avenge the insult on innocent bystanders.
They didn’t tell Miles what their destination was. He only knew they traveled south, and he’d as soon have done so on a mode of transportation other than the camel.
The creatures bore heavy inanimate burdens calmly enough. But his showed a marked aversion to being ridden. The camel made insulting noises as Miles circled it, looking for a place to get on. The animal complained loudly and cursed him bitterly in camel language when he was finally seated. It snarled and growled and turned around to give him venomous looks. Then, as you’d expect, it flatly refused to obey him. When Miles tried to turn its head, it tried to bite his feet. When he snapped at the animal to behave, it promptly lay down. When at last the humor seized it to get up, it made sure to throw Miles back and forth violently in the process.