Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

Even when they set out, her mind was not upon their destination.

She rode with Mr. Carsington along a causeway, scarcely aware of her surroundings, for a number of reasons. Watching him undress was one of them.

He’d started out well enough this morning, in a species of Eastern attire. He’d replaced his torso-hugging coat with a tunic, and exchanged his snug-fitting trousers for loose Turkish ones, which he tucked into his boots. But now, as they rode away from the river, he first cast off the handsome green tunic, then undid his neckcloth, then completely unbuttoned his pale yellow silk waistcoat, thus exposing nearly all of his shirt — his underwear — to public view.

Naturally she couldn’t stop looking at him.

She ought to tell him, very firmly, that it was most improper: the Mohammedans were people of modesty, and he ought to respect their sensibilities, even if he had no regard for English standards of propriety. She ought to insist he put his clothes back on.

She’d always had more trouble than she ought with oughts.

Like the undisciplined girl she’d once been, she kept stealing glances. She noticed the way his upper garments stretched across his broad shoulders and the way at certain moments and at a certain angle the wind and sun turned the shirt into a billowing, translucent curtain. Through it she clearly discerned — and could hardly look away from — the silhouette of his muscled arms and torso, the latter tapering to a narrow waist.

She ought not look lower than that.

She did though, covertly studying the part of him resting on the saddle. The loose trousers couldn’t completely disguise his narrow hips. His bottom was no doubt as taut and hard as the rest of him.

She felt suddenly overheated and faint.

And then Virgil intruded, his voice and image in her mind bringing a chill, as ghosts reputedly did.

A saint, Mr. Carsington had thought her spouse.

Oh, very saintly. In the course of her marriage, she’d never seen Virgil undressed.

Even when they made love, it happened in the dark, and he wore his nightshirt and she a nightgown; and there were rules, so many rules — too many for her, at a time when she didn’t want to be thinking.

She didn’t want Virgil in her head again. She was still angry, out of all reason angry, and it had started the instant she uttered his name, earlier, on the boat.

She remembered the way he’d close his eyes when she mentioned Egypt, and the patient little smile he wore when he opened them again, and the patient tone he invariably adopted while patiently reminding her that all a lady needed to know of Egypt was writ down in Holy Writ, in the books of Genesis and Exodus.

But she was here, and she would not let Virgil spoil this journey, even if everything had gone wrong. At present, she could do nothing about Miles. Until the wind changed, she could either fret about the present and seethe about the past or make the best of matters.

She looked about her…and found the world had changed, utterly.

They had entered a forest of date palms. The tall, graceful trees rose from a carpet of vividly green grass dotted with flowers of pink and purple. They rode past glistening pools beside which goats watched over their frolicking kids. Above them, a bird burst into song, then another.

At last they came to a grassy hollow.

Here, by the side of a pool reflecting the green surroundings and the brilliant blue of the Egyptian sky, an immense stone pharaoh lay on his face, his mouth curved in a small, secret smile.

Captivated, Daphne slid from the saddle, barely aware of what she did, and walked to the statue’s head, her fingers at her lips. “Oh,” she murmured. “How beautiful.”

Not until this moment did she fully grasp how little she knew of Egypt, how little she’d seen of it. Pictures in books were all very well, and they had captured her imagination, but mainly as mysteries to be solved once she solved the riddle of the ancient writing.

The pyramids were wondrous, an achievement impossible to grasp, quite. But they were dark and empty within, colossal heaps of stones without. They were tombs, grand monuments to the dead.

This, too, was grand: some forty feet long, even with the king’s lower extremities missing. But it was more than a fine monument. It was art carried to near perfection. One knew it was stone, yet stone so finely carved as to appear to be flesh and blood. The smile, the secret hint of a smile, was magical.

She became aware of Mr. Carsington close behind her.

She fought her way out of the enchantment the place had cast over her and shifted into her pedantic mode, where she felt safest: with facts instead of the confusing clamor of feelings.

“If I recall aright, this was discovered only last year,” she said. “According to Herodotus and Diodorus, this is Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. It is said to have stood before the temple of Vulcan, or Pthah, which is the Egyptian name. Statues of his queen and four of his sons were there, too.”

She walked alongside the vast frame, and paused at the elbow. She bent and tipped her head to examine the markings on the girdle encircling his waist. “There is his cartouche,” she said, pointing.

“I’m not sure it’s decent for you to be looking at his cartouche,” said Mr. Carsington.

She was aware of the remark, aware of the heat slithering up her neck, and a niggling anxiety that he’d caught her studying his anatomy before. The statue exerted a powerful pull, though, and all other concerns evaporated in the sweetness of that enigmatic smile.

“I told you what a cartouche was,” she said, crouching for a better look at Ramesses’s front side. “Ovals containing hieroglyphic writing. There on his girdle, you see. And on his wrist. Oh, and I see another on his breast and on his shoulder. There seem to be several, but I cannot be sure. Two seem predominant.”

“Has he two names, then?” Mr. Carsington asked. “Or perhaps a name and a title. You know, like the king — His Majesty George Augustus Frederick IV. Then he has that other lot of names: Prince of this, Duke of that.”

“Very possibly,” she said absently, her mind as well as gaze riveted upon one of the cartouches. She crouched down for a better angle of view and a thrill coursed through her. “That is the sun sign, certainly. In Coptic, the word for sun is ra — or re — oh, what one would give for a proper vowel. But there are the three tails tied together, next to the hook shape. The same as in the cartouche for Thuthmoses. The combination must be moses or meses. Dr. Young was mistaken, as I had thought. This cartouche cannot possibly belong to Maenupthes, as he maintained. This statue’s identity is beyond dispute. Everyone agrees it is Ramesses the Great. Ergo, the signs in the cartouche must read Ra-mes-ses,” she concluded triumphantly.

“Fascinating,” Mr. Carsington said.

Daphne slowly straightened, her heart racing. Caught up in the excitement of discovery, she hadn’t realized she’d been thinking aloud. She’d said far too much, given herself away. But no, not to him. He was no scholar. To him, it must have been meaningless babble.

He stood watching her, arms folded over his big chest, his dark eyes uncomfortably penetrating. “It isn’t so much what you say as how you say it,” he said. “That first day, when you knew immediately that someone had disturbed the materials on the table. You had been working on the papyrus, you said.”

“I told you. I assist Miles.”

“You knew exactly where each item had been,” he said.

“He has a system,” she said.

He smiled and shook his head. “You give yourself away. When you are on sure ground — on your ground — your voice changes, and a wonderfully arrogant look comes into your eyes, and you hold your head i

n a certain way.”

Did she? Was she so obvious? “I fail to see the relevance of the way I hold my head,” she said.

“It says you know. And when you speak of a sign and a sound,” he went on, “and when you know the Coptic word for sun, and when you coolly dispute the famous Dr. Young’s interpretations, I can only conclude —”

“Miles —”

“I doubt it,” he said. “You told me what your brother’s trunks contained. You never mentioned his books. How odd that a language scholar should travel without books.”

“Actually —”

“You, on the other hand, travel with a remarkable assortment,” he said. “Greek. Latin. Hebrew. Persian. Arabic. Turkish. Coptic. Sanskrit. And the usual: German, French, Spanish, Italian. Did I miss anything?”

“Apparently not,” she said tightly. “I missed a great deal. You are supposed to be a great, dumb ox.”

“I am,” he said. “I only seem so brilliantly insightful because I’ve a hieroglyph fanatic in the family. Cousin Tryphena is not like you, though, and it isn’t simply that she’s older. She’s usually impossible to understand. You even I can follow, more or less. She’s hardly ever interesting. You always are. You have so much passion.”

Daphne winced at the word, at its myriad meanings, so many of them dangerous. “You don’t know me in my normal state,” she said. “I’m a great bore.”

“I find you intriguing,” he said. “It must be the air of mystery that comes of leading a double life.”

“I have no choice!” Daphne burst out. “I am not mysterious. I am not a person drawn to intrigue. I am dull and bookish and content to spend hours alone memorizing a new vocabulary and grammar or staring at a single cartouche. But one can’t work in isolation. Those who do end up repeating others’ mistakes or wasting time on disproved theories.” Like Virgil, who’d wasted decades. “My sex and circumstances isolated me,” she went on. “I had a choice: either give up my work or practice deception. I could not give it up.”

“Passions are beastly difficult to give up,” he said.