Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

Wednesday 4 April

RUPERT ARRIVED AT the widow’s domicile at daybreak as ordered.

He found they would travel with a retinue. All of her cowardly servants but Akmed, it turned out, had skulked back to the house by the time she returned the previous evening. She’d decided they must come along to Giza today.

It took Rupert a while to take this in because he was still trying to digest her appearance.

She’d abandoned the black silk for a costume: a gold-trimmed maroon jacket over full Turkish trousers of a bright blue. And a turban. They would pretend she was a man, his Maltese translator, she said.

She did not in any way resemble a man, Maltese or otherwise. She made Rupert think of harems and concubines and dancing girls. In those thoughts clothing of any kind was not a prominent feature.

He remembered how surprised he was when he lifted her off the donkey: she was smaller than he’d guessed, though quite as generously curved. He could almost feel it still: the inward turn of her waist…the flare of her hips where the edge of his hand had rested. A familiar heat, having nothing to do with the morning’s temperature, settled into his nether regions. As a consequence, a long moment passed while he tried to get his mind on business.

The ludicrous turban didn’t help matters. It begged him to unwind it by spinning her round and round like a top until she was giddy and giggling…then pick her up…

But he couldn’t. Not yet. If he moved too quickly and put his mouth or hands where she thought they didn’t belong, she’d send him back to Salt. Rupert would end up toiling in the desert, supervising natives shifting sand and rocks. Lord Noxious would have the fun of a search with her and fights with unsavory, very likely French, persons, while Rupert died of boredom.

Picturing Noxious with his hands on her waist promptly squelched Rupert’s lascivious urges.

He turned a skeptical eye upon the cringing servants. He made his expression stern, and adopting the same disdainful tones his father used on such occasions, said, “I should like to know, madam, what good you expect this lot to do, except give you a prime view of their backs the instant trouble threatens.”

“We cannot travel unaccompanied,” she said. “Not only is it not respectable, it is not at all safe. And we haven’t time to apply to the local sheik for replacements.”

If they had to apply to a sheik for servants, it would take forever. While Rupert understood almost nothing of Arabic, he knew that phrases such as “make haste” or “we must not lose a minute” or “I mean now” were not in the local lexicon.

In short, he must make do with the material at hand.

“Leena,” he said, “please be so good as to tell these fellows that there will be no running away today. Tell them that no matter what terrible thing threatens, it will not be half so terrible as what I will do to them if they desert their mistress.” He provided a brief, vivid description of what he would do to them, emphasizing with gestures.

Leena rapidly translated.

“For all the good it will do,” Rupert said, half to himself. “I should have to catch them first, shouldn’t I?”

“They won’t run away,” Mrs. Pembroke said.

He turned back to her, and his stern demeanor crumbled before the turban and the strange, heart-shaped face that didn’t belong under it.

“Won’t they?” he said, smiling helplessly.

“Rumors have spread that you are a genie,” she said. “Wadid by now has told them what you did to him yesterday, and the feat has been exaggerated beyond all recognition.”

“Good,” Rupert said. “That saves me deciding which of them to use for the demonstration.”

A WHILE LATER, fists on his hips, the long, muscled legs straddling a gap between masses of broken stone blocks, the man who’d brought Daphne to Giza without a murmur of objection stood looking up at Chephren’s pyramid.

By swift degrees, Mr. Carsington had discarded his gloves, hat, neckcloth, and coat. Now barely dressed and glowing in the sun’s glare, he seemed a bronze colossus.

Daphne was only dimly aware of the pyramid, one of the world’s wonders. All she could see was the man, and far too much of him: the shirt taut across the broad shoulders, the thin fabric almost transparent in the harsh light, revealing the contours of muscular arms and back.

It was some comfort to know she wasn’t the only one whose gaze he drew. Her servants cast him frequent, wary glances. The men who loitered about the pyramids to help visitors ascend to the top or penetrate its interior also watched him from a respectful distance.

And she might as well have been his shadow. The guides hardly noticed her or seemed to care who or what she was.

They all felt it: the magnetism of that tall figure, the danger crackling in the air about him. All understood that an unpredictable, uncontrollable force had come among them.

Daphne had felt it even before she could see him, when he’d been only a shadowy figure in the dungeon’s gloom.

“It’s big,” he said at last.

“Yes, it is,” she said. “I suppose you want to climb it.” Men could not resist.

“Not at the moment,” he said. “If I climb to the top, it’ll only be a prodigious long stairway. No, for the present I like it as it is, immense and impressive.” He turned to her. “Unless you think we might find a clue at the top?”

She shook her head. “Miles said he wanted to study the interior. He seemed to think it held clues that would help us find other tombs.”

The guides hadn’t any useful information about Miles. Yes, they remembered the Englishman with the “white” hair. He had come a few days ago. No one recalled anything unusual about the visit.

Mr. Carsington climbed down from the stones and joined her. He’d unfastened the button at the neck of his shirt, which allowed the garment to hang open in a large V. She directed her gaze away from the expanse of bronzed chest and toward the pyramid.

“Why did Lord Noxious find your brother’s reason for coming here so odd?”

“Lord what?”

“You heard me,” he said. “I wondered how that insufferable bore could be your brother’s — or anyone’s — boon companion. But English-speaking fellows are thin on the ground, I notice. Noxious must have won the position by default.”

“You didn’t like him,” she said. Which was about as astute an observation as Mr. Carsington’s remarking that the pyramid was big.

There was too much male in view — too much insufficiently clothed male. It was shocking, really. Small wonder she couldn’t think. She ought to tell him to put his clothes back on.

“It wasn’t my liking he was after,” he said.

Her gaze shot back to him. The black eyes glinted.

“How concerned he was for you,” he said. “So understanding of your predicament. He didn’t assume your brother was lolling about in a whorehouse, visiting the Garden of Allah by means of a hashish pipe. No, indeed. His lordship was properly sympathetic and desperately eager to do your bidding.”

“I should like to know how this makes him noxious,” she said.

“He was so quick to imagine the worst,” Mr. Carsington said. “Most men would say, ‘There, there now, I’m sure it’s nothing to fret about. There’ll be a simple explanation — a message gone astray or some such.’ Instead, he made a great to-do about it, shoveling on veiled and unveiled suggestions to make you more anxious, rather than less.”

“I detest ‘there, there now,’ ” she said. “It is patronizing. And I vastly dislike being made to feel like a child who is imagining things. That is how Mr. Salt behaved toward me. It is exceedingly provoking.”

“Maybe the consul general likes the way your eyes flash

when you’re provoked,” said Mr. Carsington. “And the way the pink comes into your cheek, right here.” With his forefinger, he drew a line along his cheekbone.

He stood well away from her, yet she felt the touch, as though his long finger grazed her skin instead of his.

She felt the heat climb there, and knew the pink he described must be deepening. She ought to blush — with shame for being so susceptible. “You have a knack for straying from the subject,” she said. “You asked what was odd about my brother’s reasons for coming here.”

“Yes. Why shouldn’t your brother find clues here? Why couldn’t the mystery tomb be here, in fact? They’ve still another pyramid to penetrate.” He nodded toward the third, unopened pyramid of Mycerinus. “And haven’t they uncovered a great lot of mummies somewhere hereabouts?”

Her gaze went to the third pyramid, then shot back to meet his, as innocent as a little boy’s. She was not a little girl and was not taken in. “You know all about this place,” she said. “You were playing with us, asking those absurd questions about where and what Giza was.”

He only smiled and looked away from her toward the group of guides. “I don’t feel like a long climb in the blazing sun today,” he said. “But I’m perishing to have a look inside. I should like to see for myself what’s so odd about the idea.”

“Mr. Carsington,” she said. She wanted an explanation.

But he’d already caught the eye of a guide, to whom he signaled. The man quickly joined them. Mr. Carsington pointed to the entrance Belzoni had discovered three years earlier, now a black rectangle on the north face of the pyramid.

The guide summoned another, and the two men led them up through the clearing in the rubble that had for so many centuries concealed the entrance.

Daphne knew it was wiser to save her energies for the ordeal ahead. She reminded herself that she was doing it for Miles’s sake, that she loved him dearly and would do whatever she needed to bring him back safe. She told herself that what she felt in the small passageways was irrational, mere emotion. She was a rational being. All she had to do was concentrate on facts.

THE ENTRY PASSAGE was four feet high, about three and a half feet wide, a hundred and four feet five inches long, and descended at an angle of twenty-six degrees, Mrs. Pembroke informed Rupert.