Mr. Impossible (The Dressmakers 2)

“Of course he wants to keep you happy,” Miles said. “You’re filthy rich. With your backing, he could excavate the entire valley. He could make himself king of Thebes. You’re like the goose that lays the golden eggs: an endless supply of money.”

Virgil’s conscience money, she thought. It had been easier for him to leave her everything after he was dead than to treat her with respect and kindness while he lived.

“We shall be able to explore all of Thebes unhindered,” she said. “All the royal tombs, including the one Belzoni found. I’ll have hundreds upon hundreds of samples of hieroglyphic writing. It is a great opportunity. And I shan’t have to pretend to be someone I am not.”

“And he’ll be able to make either of us do whatever he wants simply by threatening the other,” Miles said.

“Then it would be wise not to provoke him to use threats,” she said.

“He’s got it in his head to marry you,” Miles said. “Can’t you see? He must be master of everything: of you, of your money. And mad or not, Golden Devil or not, he looks at you the same way other men do.”

She remembered the way Rupert looked at her, the glint of laughter in his eyes. She remembered that last afternoon on the Isis.

We could marry.

Her throat started to close up. She bowed her head and willed the grief back. If she gave in, she’d sink and never find her way out again. She would be lost. She couldn’t afford grief. She had to be strong and hard if she hoped to survive this and find a way out.

“Use your head,” she said, her voice harsh. “Your friend won’t let us go. We have to make the best of matters.”

“The way you made the best of Pembroke?” Miles said. “Do you think I want to see you suffer again?”

She made herself look at him. She smiled crookedly. “If I could survive Virgil, I can survive anything,” she said. “We’ll get out of this somehow. But it will take time and thought and care — and you must learn to have more confidence in me.”

ON TUESDAY AND Wednesday they toured Luxor, which, as she’d already discerned, was a grander spectacle when viewed from a distance, from the other side of the river or when tidied by the artists of the Description de l’Egypte. The reality, at close quarters, depressed her spirits, although that may have simply been her state of mind.

The place seemed to close in on her: the hovels squeezed into every corner and crevice, the squalor, the pigeons, the refuse, the mounds of sand and rubbish choking obelisks, pylons, columns.

Still, she made herself view it with a scholar’s eyes. On Wednesday she borrowed a notebook from Lord Noxley and began copying inscriptions.

On Thursday, they went to Karnak. It was no great distance away: less than two miles. They rode their donkeys along the Avenue of Sphinxes, or what was left of it. At present, most of the sphinxes were destroyed, and the southern part of the avenue was covered with soil and rubbish.

Yet this destruction failed to diminish the place. Neither did the monuments’ being half buried make them any the less overwhelming. The vast pylons, the giant forests of columns, the obelisks, colossi, and sphinxes — it was all as the Description de l’Egypte had illustrated, at length and in detail. Nonetheless, the reality far exceeded anything Daphne could have imagined.

As they made their way along the principal avenue in the hypostyle hall, she gazed up at the avenue of twelve immense columns — the largest in any Egyptian building, Noxley said — and wondered what Rupert would have made of it.

In her mind’s eye she saw him looking up at one of the lotus-shaped capitals much as he’d gazed at Chephren’s pyramid: fists on his hips, the breeze ruffling his black hair. She could almost hear the deep voice saying, “It’s big.”

And she smiled, but her lips wobbled, and her throat ached, and tears blurred her vision.

She closed her eyes and willed back the tears. She must keep working, employ her intellect instead of her emotions. Her work had given her strength before and would again. Her mind was the one ally she could always rely upon. In time, it would show her the way out.

THAT NIGHT DAPHNE dreamt of a pharaoh’s tomb.

She descended sixteen steps into an entrance passage. At the end of it was a chamber crowded with various objects: boxes, baskets, jars, and articles of furniture shaped like animals. Her gaze was drawn to the right, to two figures guarding a door. She passed the two figures and stepped through the doorway into a dark chamber.

A faint light showed her a pair of doors. She opened them. An immense golden sarcophagus stood within. Goddesses stood at its corners, their wings spread out, protecting what lay within.

Daphne climbed a set of steps and looked down into the sarcophagus.

There lay Rupert Carsington, as though asleep, wearing a small, sweet smile like the one on the statue of Ramesses the Great at Memphis.

He wore a kilt of gold cloth and lay with his arms crossed over his naked chest. In the soft light, the muscled planes of his torso gleamed a darker gold.

She reached down and touched his face.

“Miss you,” she whispered.

Tears trickled down her face and onto his.

He said, “Daphne, wake up.”

No. She didn’t want to leave the dream. She would never see him again except in dreams.

“Daphne, wake up.”

She tried to say no, but nothing came out.

She opened her eyes to darkness. A hand covered her mouth. It wasn’t her hand. It was big, and…familiar.

There was the scent. Man-scent. His.

A deep voice growled, “No screaming. No weeping. No fainting.”

She choked out the three words on a sob, as her arms went round his neck: “I. Never. Faint.”

Chapter 20

UNDER THE THIN BLANKET, SHE WAS SOFT AND wondrously curved and practically naked. As he pulled her tight against him, Rupert discovered that there was almost nothing in the way: a scrap of thin fabric, her kamees, bunched up at her waist. All the rest was skin, clean and silken-smooth and…strange.

Something was missing.

He buried his face in her neck and sniffed.

He raised his head. “What have they done to you?” he whispered. “Something’s missing. The goddess scent.”

“What have they done to me? To me? I thought you were dead.”

“I know. I thought I was, too, at first.”

“I saw you shot,” she said. “You clutched your chest and went over. You didn’t come up again.”

“The ball grazed me, just under my arm,” he said. “A scratch. But I tripped. Lost my balance and went over. And, as usual, I hit my head. I came to my senses a good ways downriver, clinging to a piece of boarding plank. It was deuced embarrassing.”

“Embarrassing.”

“The boys look up to me,” he said. “I’m a hero. Heroes don’t trip. Heroes don’t knock their heads on the wa

y down. I must have looked a complete clodpate.”

She pulled his face to hers and kissed him. So gently and sweetly at first. He tasted tears. He should have said, No weeping again, but he couldn’t. The tender kiss started a queer ache inside him, not quite happy and not quite sad. It was the thing she did to him: stirring up feelings he had no names for.

He’d been wild, half-mad, when he finally caught up with the Isis and clambered aboard, wet and bruised but scarcely bleeding at all, though you’d never know it to hear everyone carrying on. It had taken him most of the five days’ journey to Thebes to calm down, collect his wits, and realize how lucky his clumsiness was.

If the villains hadn’t believed he was dead, they would have made sure of it.

Now they wouldn’t be expecting him. They wouldn’t be looking for him.

He had to make the most of the opportunity.

In a minute.

Right now, he was starved for the taste of her, the feel of her, the warmth and willingness and wickedness of her. He slid his hands down her smooth back, and brought them down to enclose the delicious inward turn of her waist. He grasped her wonderfully naked backside and crushed her against his groin.

“I missed you,” she murmured against his mouth. She rubbed her cheek against his, in that way she had, and something opened up inside him, deep and dark. He didn’t know what it was or why.

But he remembered the emptiness. He remembered how he’d see a strange bird and turn to point it out to her, and then remember she wasn’t there.

He remembered looking into her cabin, where they’d made slow, silent love. He couldn’t stop himself from picking up a cushion and pressing it to his face, hungrily seeking her scent…running his fingers over the covers and spines of her books…staring into the pages of her notebooks at the neat script and the words he didn’t understand and the sketches: the little figures and signs, all incomprehensible.

“I missed you, too,” he said. He’d missed her terribly, beyond anything he could have imagined.

He wanted to capture her mouth again, and everything else, and claim her in the most primitive of ways.