Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

“Twenty years of work and nothing to show for it,” Miles said. Rather like Virgil Pembroke’s case, he thought. “He must have been mad with jealousy.” Again, like Pembroke, so jealous of Daphne’s gift for languages.

“Imagine what he felt when he heard about the papyrus Anaz had sold you,” Noxley said.

“The last straw,” Miles said.

Noxley smiled. “I’ll admit I felt a twinge of jealousy, too. Anaz must have taken a liking to you. He’s dead, by the way, poor fellow.”

Chapter 18

26 April

RUPERT SAW HIS FIRST CROCODILES ABOVE Girga, half a dozen of them basking on a sandbank.

The river had grown shallow, and sandbanks formed a maze of obstructions through which the Isis must pass. Previously he’d gazed at flocks of pelicans and wild ducks gathered upon them. That was to say, his eyes had been turned in that direction. His mind had been elsewhere.

On her.

On getting off the boat and finding someplace private. They were drawing closer to Thebes by the hour. Time was running out. Once they found her brother, nothing could be as it was.

Rupert told himself he ought to be planning how to get her brother out of the villains’ clutches. He ought to be planning how to protect the women and children.

Instead, his mind was busily devising and discarding schemes for slaking his lust on Daphne Pembroke’s magnificent body.

Even now, gazing at the crocodiles, he was wondering how they might help him get her naked.

All his brain produced was an excuse to see her. He left the deck and went inside, where she’d lately been spending the hottest part of the day. He found her not in the front cabin but in her own. The door stood open for ventilation.

Spread out upon the divan was a familiar document bearing three kinds of writing. It was a copy of the Rosetta Stone. Her lap held a notebook.

He tapped on the open door. She looked up. A flush overspread her creamy countenance.

He wanted to kiss all that rosy skin. And all the paler parts. Then work his way down.

“Crocodiles,” he said.

“Really?” She set the notebook aside. “Where?”

He found an umbrella and led her out to the deck. He held it over her while she gazed raptly at the strange creatures. It was a long time before she spoke.

He didn’t need to say anything. It was enough to be near her, to watch her surprise and pleasure transform everything he looked upon. The crocodiles somehow became more exotic and miraculous. With her, one always felt as though one gazed upon marvels.

“I can scarcely believe they’re real,” she said at last. “Look, one slithers into the water. It is like a dream.”

Rupert became aware of two boyish voices nearby, quarreling, by the sounds of it. He sent a quelling look in their direction.

Tom hurried to him. “Please, sir, I must speak to you.”

But he could not speak in front of the lady, the boy said. This was talk for men. With a shrug and a smile, Daphne went back inside, out of the baking sun.

“This had better be important,” Rupert told the boy.

“Oh, yes, sir. Yusef is very sick.”

Rupert studied the other lad, who hung back, looking abashed. His turban was all askew and his clothes hung crooked.

“Illness is the lady’s department,” Rupert said. “I’m not the doctor here.”

“He is sick with love, sir,” Tom said. “This is why he has no care for his clothes.”

“Love?”

“Yes, sir. For Nafisah. His suffering is very great. I told him that you are our father now, and you will arrange for his happiness, but he does not believe me.”

Rupert looked again at Yusef, whose expression had become pathetically hopeful.

Rupert reverted to Tom. “Since when am I your father?”

Tom explained. The plague had taken most of his family. His uncle Akmed had disappeared. Yusef had no family, either. Muhammad Ali’s soldiers had burnt his village to the ground two years ago and killed everybody.

“Now we belong to you,” the boy concluded. “You are our master and our father.”

At that moment, the baby began to cry.

Rupert looked about him. A baby. Women. A pair of adolescent boys.

He was the father.

DAPHNE STARED DOGGEDLY at the cartouches, but it was no use. She couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t remember what she’d been thinking before she heard the tap and saw Mr. Carsington in the doorway.

She remembered the way he’d trapped her against

that door on the evening after their visit to Memphis.

The kiss, the magical kiss. The tenderness and playfulness of it and the strange discovery it was, as though no one had ever kissed before in all the world.

Then all the memories she’d tried to shut away came flooding back and left her sick with longing.

She could have borne the ache more easily if he’d been the lout he’d pretended to be. But no lout could have restored her confidence as he had done, and made her feel fully normal — even likable — for the first time since her girlhood. A lout would not stand beside her holding an umbrella to shield her from the sun. A lout would not play with the baby, or sit up late at night telling the boys stories, or let a mongoose use him for a playground. A lout would not be able to make everyone about him love him.

Including me, she thought. Including stupid me.

“Daphne.”

She looked up, expecting to see nothing, because she was only wishing, and the deep voice she heard came from her imagination.

But no, he stood in the doorway again, head tipped to one side, because the space was a few inches too short for him. The north wind had made a tangle of his thick, dark hair. His eyes glinted with humor. She remembered how he’d whistled in the darkness of the dungeon, laughing at danger, as though it had been made purposely to amuse him.

Now she saw that he’d been driving away her own darkness, day by day. And day by day, she’d changed. Because of him, she’d become more than she’d been — or perhaps more truly herself. Because of him, she’d learnt to like and trust herself again. Because of him, desire had become a pleasure, not a shame.

I love you, she thought.

He gazed at her for a long moment. Then his mouth curved lazily upward. “Ah,” he said. “That’s better.”

“What’s better?”

He came inside the cabin. He closed the door.

“You know,” he said.

“You should not close the door,” she said, while her heart thrummed, wicked thing, in anticipation.