Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

At one end was a raised area, its floor covered with Turkey carpets. Along its three sides ran a low banquette covered with cushions. A wide, squat table, heaped with books and papers, occupied most of the space in the center of the raised area. A narrow shelf on one side of the room held a great lot of small wooden figures.

The widow looked at the table, then sank to her knees and started shuffling through the heaps.

“Mistress?” said Leena.

“This isn’t the way I left it,” Mrs. Pembroke said.

“How can you tell?” Rupert said.

“I was working on the new papyrus,” she said. “I always arrange the materials in a certain way. The papyrus to the right for reference. The copy in the center. The table of signs below. The Rosetta inscription here. The Coptic lexicon alongside. The grammar notes here. There is an order. There must be. One must work systematically, or it is hopeless.” The pitch of her voice climbed. “The papyrus and the copy are gone. All that work…all those days unrolling it…all my care in making a precise copy…”

She rose unsteadily. “Where are the servants? And Akmed. Is he all right?”

“Check on the servants,” Rupert told Leena. To Mrs. Pembroke he said, “Calm down. Count to ten.”

She looked at him — or appeared to have her head turned in his general direction.

“Do you never take that thing off?” he said impatiently. “He must have been remarkable, the late lamented, to warrant so much grief.” He made a sweeping gesture encompassing the heavy veil and the black silk. “It must be as hot as Hades under all that. No wonder you’re addled.”

She went on looking in his direction for a moment, then abruptly threw the veil back from her face.

And Rupert felt as though someone had given him a sharp thump in the head with a heavy Turkish staff.

“Well,” he said, when he’d mustered the wind to speak again. “Well.” And he thought that maybe they should have worked up to it more gradually.

He saw green, green, deeply shadowed eyes set above high cheekbones in a creamy heart-shaped face framed with silky, dark red hair. She wasn’t pretty at all. Pretty was ordinary. She wasn’t beautiful, either, not by any English standard. She was something altogether out of the common run of beauty.

Tryphena owned numerous volumes dealing with Egypt, including all of the French Description de l’Egypte that had been published thus far. Rupert had seen this face in somebody’s color illustration of a tomb or temple. He remembered it clearly: a red-haired woman, naked but for a golden collar about her neck, her arms stretched toward the heavens.

Naked would be good. His experienced eye told him the mortal lady’s figure might well be as extraordinary as her face.

Rather like a temperamental goddess, she pulled off the gloomy headdress and flung it down.

Leena hurried in. “They have disappeared!” she cried. “All of them!”

“Really?” Rupert said. “That’s interesting.”

He turned to the widow. Her face was chalk white. Devil take it, was she going to faint? The only feminine habit he feared and hated more than weeping was fainting.

“We all thought your brother was lost in a brothel,” he said. “But this news makes me think, maybe not.”

A flush overspread her too-pale countenance, and her green eyes sparked. “A brothel?”

“A house of ill repute,” he explained. “Where men hire women to do what most women won’t do unless you marry them, and oftentimes not even then.”

“I know what a brothel is,” she said.

“Apparently, the Cairo brothels make the Paris ones look like Quaker nurseries,” he said. “Not that I speak with absolute certainty. The truth is, my recollections of Paris are hazy at best.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What you do or do not remember of Paris is of no relevance whatsoever at present,” she said.

“I only wanted to point out how immense a temptation it is,” he said. “Only a saint — like one of my brothers — could resist it. So naturally, not knowing how saintly your own brother was —”

“You and your associates simply assumed that Miles was cavorting with prostitutes and dancing girls.”

“And what with the hashish and opium and whatnot, we supposed he’d lost all sense of time.”

“I see,” she said. “And so you were assigned to keep me occupied until Miles came or was carried home.”

“Yes, that’s how it was all explained to me,” he said. “It seemed simple enough. A brother missing — we can put it down to drugs and women. But now we’ve lost a papyrus, not to mention the servants. Matters grow complicated.”

“I do not understand how bad people could come here,” Leena said. “The doorkeeper Wadid was in his place when we came. He said nothing of any disturbance.”

“That fellow sitting on the stone bench near the gate?” Rupert said. “He seemed to be praying. He certainly paid me no heed.”

The mistress and the maid exchanged glances.

“I will go to Wadid,” Leena said.

She went out.

The widow turned away from Rupert and returned to the ransacked table. She knelt and moved a book to the left. She shook sand off a paper and set it under the book. She picked up pens from the floor and set them back on the inkstand. The angry spark was gone from her eyes, and the flush had faded, leaving her face dead white, which made the smudges under her eyes appear darker than ever.

Rupert wasn’t sure what made him think of it, but he had a vivid picture in his mind of a long-ago time: his little cousin Maria weeping over her dolls after Rupert and her brothers had used them for target practice.

He didn’t have any sisters, and wasn’t used to girls crying, and it made him frantic. When he offered to try to glue the dolls’ mangled parts back together, little Maria whacked him wit

h one of the larger mutilated corpses and blackened his eye. What a relief that was! He vastly preferred physical punishment to the other thing: the nasty stew of emotion.

The dark smudges under Mrs. Pembroke’s eyes and the cold white of her face affected him much as his cousin’s tears had done. But he hadn’t broken any dolls. He hadn’t hurt this lady’s brother — wasn’t sure, in fact, he’d ever clapped eyes on the fellow. Rupert certainly hadn’t touched her precious papyrus. There was no reason for him to feel…wrong.

Maybe it was something he’d eaten. The prison swill, perhaps. Or maybe it was a touch of plague.

“The thing’s definitely gone, then?” he said lightly. “Not misplaced, or mixed in with the other papers?”

“I should hardly confuse an ancient papyrus with ordinary papers,” she said.

“Well, I’m dashed if I can make out why anyone would go to so much bother for a papyrus,” he said. “On the way here, I was accosted at least six times by Egyptians waving so-called artifacts in my face. You can hardly pass a coffee shop without some cheery fellow popping out to offer you handfuls of papyri — not to mention his sisters, daughters, and extra wives. Virgins, all of them, certified and guaranteed.”

She sank back on her heels and looked up at him. “Mr. Carsington,” she said, “I believe it is long past time we settled one important matter.”

“Not that I’d be interested, if they were the genuine article,” he went on. “I could never understand the great to do about virgins. In my view, a woman of experience —”

“Your view is not solicited, Mr. Carsington,” she said. “It is unnecessary for you to ‘make out’ why this or that. You are not here to think. You are to provide the brawn in this undertaking. I am to provide the brain. Is that clear?”

It was clear to Rupert that irritating her was an excellent way to prevent waterworks. The light was back in her eyes, and her skin, though still pale, was not so taut and corpse-white.