We have now reached the start of the 20th century during the heyday of the British Egypt Exploration Society. This had been founded in 1882 (as the Egypt Exploration Fund) mostly due to the enthusiasm of writer Amelia B. Edwards. It helped finance the work of Flinders Petrie, one of the most important of Victorian and Edwardian Egyptologists, but it also helped preserve and protect Egyptian antiquities. Thanks to the Society the science of Egyptology moved forward significantly.
Gillian Linscott is the author of the award-winning series about Nell Bray, suffragette and occasional amateur sleuth, whose adventures began in Sister Beneath the Sheet (1991).
It was like being inside a one-eyed skull, a dark dome above, rock floor where the jawbone would be, one round opening with a little light coming through. The air in the tomb smelled mostly of old resinous dust, with a tang of something acrid underneath. There were five men to breathe it. Three of them were Arab workmen, waiting near the entrance with a plate camera, measuring rods, sketch pads, impassive because this was their work, like any other work. The other two were Europeans. The younger one stood back a little from the stone sarcophagus, holding a paraffin lamp. He was so nervous that the light from it swung up and down the rock walls and the face of his older companion was sometimes in shadow, sometimes flooded with light like a character in a pantomime. Even without the lighting effect the older man had a striking face, like a philosophical pirate with a beak of a nose, bright eyes, grizzled beard and jutting eyebrows. Some of the more conventional members of the British Egypt Exploration Society even called him The Buccaneer because of his disdain for all rules but those of scholarship. His real name was Professor Brightsea.
“Well, Thomas, we know what we’re going to find inside, don’t we?”
His deep voice rolled round the cave. His assistant made a pleading gesture that set the lamp swinging more wildly. The professor laughed.
“Not sure? Well, in that case, you may have the honour of discovery.”
Looking sick, Thomas put the lamp down on the floor and advanced to the head end of the sarcophagus. It was already open, the stone lid lodged against the rock wall. As he got nearer, the acrid smell increased and his nose wrinkled.
Brightsea laughed harshly. “You should be used to it by now.”
Thomas made a choking sound and fell on his knees, arms hooked over the stone rim. Brightsea strolled over, reached into the sarcophagus and straightened up with something white and cylindrical between his fingers.
“Just as I predicted. See?”
He waited while his assistant got to his feet and came, shoulders hunched, into the circle of lamplight.
“So, Thomas, would you care to put a date to this artefact?” Thomas wouldn’t or couldn’t speak. “Well, then, hazard a scholarly guess. This year’s, would you say, or possibly last year’s? The fifth year or the sixth of the reign of Pharaoh Edward the Seventh?” Then, impatiently, tiring of his bitter joke, wafting the smell of it under his nose, “Come on, man, is this a cigarette butt from 1906 or 1907?”
Back in Cairo, Tutty Brightsea was profiting from his father’s absence on a field trip to follow his own studies into Egyptology. He and a friend were in a room in a small white cube of a house near the bazaar, watching a man unwrapping a mummy. Her feet were the first things revealed – sticking up at right angles to the narrow trestle table under yellow lamplight. Smells of resins and spices mingled with sweat from the small crowd pressing round the platform. There were a few middle aged Egyptians present, but the audience was the usual cosmopolitan mix of Cairo, with British predominating. An Egyptian man in the black robe looped the stained bandages carefully over his arm and stood back so that everybody could see.
“It’s all wrong, of course,” said Tutty cheerfully. He was large, pink-complexioned and fair-haired, taking after his late mother rather than his piratical father, 22 years old but alternating like a schoolboy between over-confidence and self-consciousness.
“I suppose it’s the inside that matters,” the friend said.
The man put down his armful of bandages, resumed unwrapping. There was a general intake of breath as ankles then calves appeared, the outline of them clear under a thin gold drape. The man beckoned his young assistant to prop up the figure so that he could unbandage the lower torso. A jut of hip bones emerged under their gold chemise-shroud, then a gently rounded stomach. The trail of Tutty’s cigar smoke made a wavering line in the air and he gave a little groan.
“Oh, I say.”
His face was red and sweating. The unspooling bandages made regular little flip flop sounds against the trestle. Elbows were revealed, folded close against the rib cage like wings of a trussed chicken. Flip flop. Brown arms, wrists then hands clasped together over where a heart should be. Flip flop flip flop. The smooth swell of gold-shrouded breasts, ornamented with beaten-gold leaves and blue beads of lapis lazuli. Tutty stared in a trance of desire, pushing against the men in front to get a better view. Only the shoulders and neck were still bandaged and, presumably, the head under its blue and gold painted funerary mask with the rearing royal cobra over the forehead. The painted eyes, eternally open, stared up at the low ceiling. The hands clasped on the golden breast looked as brown and plump as a young child’s.
“She moved. Her leg moved.” Tutty’s triumphant bray rang out across the room. When heads turned towards him his face went even more red. It had seemed the only safe way to release the desire building up in him and he’d said it – as he did so many things – without thinking. From the platform, the black-robed man gave him a poisonous look. His eyes, naturally dark and large but accentuated further with kohl, looked as unearthly as those on the funeral mask. Tutty went quiet. The man turned slowly, put his hand to the painted mask. The minute he touched it, the thing happened. A sneeze exploded from under the mask, a sneeze blowing out two thousand years of sand and dust or perhaps 20 minutes of burnt resin, dried sweat and cigar smoke. The mask slipped and brown hands unclasped themselves and rose up from the gold breasts, tearing at the head bandages. Tutty made a move towards the platform.
“She’s choking. It’s not a joke. Undo her, somebody.”
Peter grabbed his arm.
“Don’t make an exhibition of yourself. She’s all right.”
The young assistant too had moved forwards, but the black-robed man pushed him away. Less ceremoniously than before he spun the loose covering of bandages away from the head, one hand firmly on the girl’s chest to stop her writhing. The face revealed was red and gleaming with sweat and snot, eyes screwed up. The man and his assistant each took one of the girl’s hands and helped her off the trestle to her feet. The assistant produced a flute from his robe and as the thin notes from it wavered into the air the girl began to dance, slowly at first as if dazed, bare feet padding on the platform, upper body moving from side to side. The flute player followed her every move with big, sad eyes. She used her hands to wipe her face, trying to make it look like part of the dance. The man in black hissed something at her and the movements became more inviting. Her rouged lips smiled mechanically, black-rimmed eyes throwing flirtatious looks out over the audience, but at random, not caring if they hit a target or not. Another hissed instruction from the man in black and her hands came down, fingers massaging the gold-draped breasts. Tutty’s face was pouring sweat.
“You’d better come out and get some air,” the friend said.
Tutty followed him obediently through a curtain and into the street, with a last glance back at the girl, now miming a shuddering climax with her upper body thrown back and her legs apart. Outside it was a golden evening, with the smell of the Nile in the air. There was a cafe opposite, with tables under an awning. They made their way there and Tutty clicked his fingers for a waiter, ordered whisky and coffee. He was trying to get back his composure, lounging in his chair like a man of the world.
“I don’t think my respected father would have cared for it, do you?”
“Won’t he be shirty if he knows you’ve been there?”
“He won’t. My father takes no interest whatever in anything less than two thousand years old. I swear the night he begot me he was thinking more about Queen Hatshepsut than he ever did of my poor mother.”
“Tutty, people will hear.”
“Let them. There’s another thing, what do you think it does to a boy to go through prep school called Thutmose? I was conceived in ancient Egyptian, swaddled in mummy clothes, cut my milk teeth on a chip of the Rosetta stone.”
“I’m sure not literally.”
“Near enough, though. I hate Egypt. All I want to do is get back to London, find a job in a bank and marry a good-tempered girl who thinks Ptolemaic is something you take for colic.”
“I hope you haven’t told your father that.”
“I’d have to write it down in hieroglyphics before he’d take any notice.”
“You were making a bit of an exhibition in there.’ ”
“I thought the poor girl was choking.”
“You didn’t do her a favour. You saw that man’s face when she sneezed. I shouldn’t be surprised if he isn’t giving her a bruise or two to remind her not to do it again.”
Tutty gaped. “He wouldn’t, would he? She couldn’t help it.”
“It was probably from trying not to laugh when you yelled out that she was moving. Did you notice the language, by way, when he whispered to her?”
“No.”
“I only caught a few words, but I’d swear he was talking English.”
Tutty was caught childlike, between guilt and self-defence. “You’re saying the brute’s hitting a girl – an English girl - and it’s my fault.”
“I don’t know. Forget I said it. Drink up and let’s go and have dinner.”
But Tutty was staring at the little white cube of a house on the other side of the road with the dark curtain over its doorway.
“You go ahead. I want another drink.”
Still staring at the house, he clicked his fingers for the waiter. His friend gave him an exasperated look and left.
Professor Brightsea and Thomas travelled back to Cairo on a horse-drawn wagon, empty except for the unused camera and measuring rods. The Egyptian foreman who always accompanied the professor on his excavations sat disconsolately with his legs hanging over the back of the cart, aware of loss of money for him and loss of face for them all. The sunset was a red flare of sand particles, the air full of the scent of thorn fires and camel dung. The professor’s mockery had turned to bitter anger.
“The fifth time, Thomas. The fifth time and the worst. You know where the mummy and mummy case will be now? In the hold of a ship en route for New York or Hamburg, whoever bid higher.”
“Couldn’t the police . . .?”
The professor made a contemptuous sound, mimed the counting out of bribe money. “Besides, even if they could be brought back - which they can’t – the damage is done. The whole point of what we do is finding burials undisturbed and recording them. Every little detail, the very faintest trace in the dust, has got something new to tell us. Imagine seeing a handprint and knowing that the person who made that print might have looked on the living faces of Amenhotep and Queen Tiy. And for profit, for simple financial profit, this . . . this creature, this worse than murderer, destroys irreplaceable evidence of the most fascinating civilization that every existed on earth. The smallest particle of dust from the bandages of the meanest mummy is worth more to the world than the whole of his contaminated, disease-ridden body.”
Miserable at the professor’s disappointment and anger, Thomas murmured, “They say he does other things too. Brothels and so on. Drugs and dancing girls. Anything to make money.”
Brightsea shrugged, as if to say that these things were only to be expected, but were insignificant compared to tomb robbery.
“And the sickening thing is, Thomas, that this corpse-maggot, this smear of slime is one of our own fellow countrymen.”
The cart rolled on towards Cairo.
Tutty was staring at a bare white arm, still streaked here and there with greasepaint, pitted with five red marks of fingers and a thumb.
“It’ll be black and blue by tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll have to put the stuff on thicker to hide it.” Her voice was Cockney and choked up with a cold. She sneezed again. “And then he gives me what-for if I use up the grease paint too thick. Whatever I do he belts me, doesn’t matter what.”
They were sitting on either side of the table in a little back room. The table was covered with unrolled bandages. As she talked the girl was rolling them up again, methodical as a nurse.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I made you sneeze.”
She was still wearing her thin golden costume. Seen close to, you could tell it for the cheap dyed muslin it was, and the beads on her breasts were painted clay, not lapis lazuli. He could hardly take his eyes off them. When he did manage to look up her eyes were blue too. He found that so disturbing that he looked down again at the beads, but they were no help.
“Ain’t your fault. I’d probably have done it anyway. Back in London, when a man said did I want to travel with him to Egypt I thought, well, that’s supposed to be hot, isn’t it, so at least I won’t get colds there like I always do here, only it’s worse. Must be all that dust from the dead people.”
“Why don’t you go back home?” he said.
“Home?” She made a little huffing sound, finished rolling a bandage and tucked the end in, threw it into a basket by her bare feet and started on another.
“Why not? I could pay your fare. I’ve got a bit of money saved up.”
Wildly he imagined himself sailing back to England with her, delivering her to friends and family, her aged parents blessing him.
“I can’t get away.”
“Why not, if he beats you?” A thought struck him. “You’re not married to the fellow, are you?”
She shook her head. “Worse than that.”
“What could be worse than being married to a brute like that?”
“Somebody’s put a curse on me so I have to stay here and do as I’m told.”
“What?” The surprise of it jerked his gaze up from the beads to her eyes again. They were scared, brimming with tears.
“An old Egyptian curse. There’s this man who brought me here. He was a priest in another life, hundreds of years ago, that’s how he knows all about mummies and so on. He said all these words over me like prayers in a foreign language, only they were curses. And he had this special old dead beetle the priests used for cursing people.”
“A scarab?”
“Nothing to do with scabs. A dead beetle, like I said. So he put this curse on me, then he took me to meet this man Abdul I do the mummy act with and said I was Abdul’s slave until he came and released me. If I go away without the priest man saying I can go, I’ll be dead in agony before the next sun rises. That’s what the curse is.”
He laughed, unbelieving. “You don’t believe that nonsense?”
“It’s true. I tried it and its true. One day when Abdul beat me worse than usual I thought, well, anything’s better than this, so I ran off. I hadn’t got no further than the end of the street when this dog came out of nowhere and bit me. Look, I’ve got the marks.” Still rolling bandages, she shot out her leg towards him, almost touching his knee with her toes. Just above the ankle he saw a crescent of white marks.
“I thought it had rabies and I’d be dead in agony by morning, like he said.”
“But it hadn’t. I mean, you’re still here.”
He was stammering, not able to take his eyes off the leg she was presenting to him.
“He says next time it will be rabies, or something even worse. It was a warning to me.”
“But don’t you see, it’s just a lot of hocus pocus to scare you? You could walk out and nothing would happen to you.”
She shook her head, sulky with him for doubting her misery.
“This man, the one who makes out he’s a priest, is he an Egyptian?”
“No, he’s English, just like you and me.”
“What? Oh, look, this is ridiculous. He’s no more a . . .” Then the idea hit him, just at the point where his eyes, travelling up from her ankle, had got as far as a pink and rounded knee, streaked with brown like a sugared almond dropped in mud. He paused, realizing that his hated education hadn’t been a waste of time after all, had been leading up to this moment. “Well, if your Englishman was only a priest in ancient Egypt, I outrank him by miles. I was a pharaoh.”
It fell flat. “A what?”
His heart bounded at her ignorance. He could have kissed her, almost did.
“A kind of king. If he can put curses on people, I can lift them, just like that.”
He clicked his fingers. She looked puzzled.
“There,” he said. “I’ve just lifted the curse. You can go where you like.”
“It’s not right to laugh about it.”
She snatched her leg away, placed it sedately beside the other one.
“I’m not laughing. I tell you, I’ve lifted his curse.”
But she gave him a hurt look and started rolling another bandage. He stared at her, like a willing horse face to face with an unjumpable fence. But there was a way round it, there had to be. The feeling in him was as strong as if the rest of his life depended on getting this right.
“All right, I’ll come back tomorrow and bring you something to protect you, something that will keep you safe against any curse.”
“What?”
“A scar . . . I mean a beetle of your own, only a lot more powerful than his beetle. You can wear it round your neck and it will protect you.”
He saw from the look in her eyes that he had her. Something to touch, something to hold was what she wanted. An amulet. Any ancient Egyptian would have understood.
Tutty hadn’t expected to find his father and Thomas back home already. He gathered from the atmosphere in the house that their field trip had not gone well, but was too full of his own affair to take much interest. He said he wasn’t hungry, fended off questions from Thomas about whether he’d got a touch of sunstroke and went straight upstairs to his room.
He lay on his bed with the window open and the breeze coming off the river. His father’s study was directly below. With both windows open he could hear the murmuring voices of him and Thomas, the rustle of papers. The endless conversations about cataloguing and classifying, every little fragment of carved stone, sliver of painted frieze, flake of gold or gum assigned to its place and dynasty. Slow, long-distance arguments by letters and learned articles among people just like his father and Thomas here in Cairo, in London, New York, Paris, Berlin. Usually the very thought of it annoyed him but tonight he was filled with a happiness, a rightness with his place in the world that made him tolerant. He heard Thomas saying goodnight to his father, coming upstairs to bed in the room opposite his own. Then, soon afterwards, Thomas’ snores. He listened for his father’s footsteps but this must be one of the nights when he was working late on his own because he was still moving about downstairs. When Tutty struck a match to look at his pocket watch, it was nearly midnight.
He dozed for a while and woke to hear a knock at the side door to the yard. Normally one of the servants would have answered it, even at this hour, but his father must have been waiting because he was there almost at once, asking in Arabic where they’d got to, why were they late. Tutty could understand his father’s Arabic, but not the low reply in the same language. The door closed, then there were at least three voices in the study below, the clink of coffee cups. Tutty thought wearily, Site foreman and friend, probably. On past experience, the haggling over coffee cups about workmen’s pay and food rations on excavations could go on for hours. So it was a pleasant surprise when the visitors left after not much more than half an hour, his father’s slow footsteps came upstairs at last and the house went quiet. Tutty waited another half hour to make sure then tiptoed down to the study in stockinged feet. He lit a candle and looked round the familiar chaos of his father’s study. Every horizontal surface was either covered in papers or crowded with porcelain figures of gods and goddesses, scarabs, fragments of mummy cloth. The growing candle flame wavered over a shelf with a row of small bronze Bastets, their shadows swaying on the wall like a line of cat-headed chorus girls. The jackal jaw of Anubis reflected the flame from the top of a funerary jar. All of those were so familiar to Tutty that he hardly glanced at them. The scarabs, annoyingly, were kept in no sort of order and were hiding all over the place as if they’d uncurled their carved or moulded legs and scuttled there, on shelves, under papers, on top of books. He picked up and rejected some of the more valuable-seeming ones in ivory or semi-precious stones, not wanting to deprive his father more than necessary. One, being used casually as a paperweight, seemed promising. It was larger than the rest, deeply but crudely carved, made of black stone that absorbed the light rather than reflecting it. The feel of it in his hand was weighty and satisfying. Because he hadn’t been able to block out entirely the life-long conditioning of his Egyptian upbringing he recognized it as a heart scarab – black basalt from the New Kingdom, fairly common, found in mummy wrappings and believed by some authorities to represent the heart of the dead person.
“You’ll do, beetle,” he mouthed at it, put it in his pocket and went back upstairs.
He waited until after the performance the following evening to take it to her, watching from a cafe table as the audience strolled out into the sunshine. With his new sense of mission, the men seemed to him to have a nasty glossiness to their faces as if they’d feasted on sticky cakes. A few minutes later the black-robed man and his assistant came out too and walked away up the street. Within seconds Tutty was across the road, through the curtain and into the back room. She was rolling up her bandages, just like the night before, and looked scared when she recognized him.
“There, I’ve got him.”
He put the scarab down in a nest of jumbled bandages on the table. She gave a little scream.
“It’s just like his.” He blessed his luck, but then heart scarabs weren’t especially rare. She put out her hand to touch it, then looked up at him. “What happens now?”
“Pick it up.”
She picked it up, biting her lower lip with sharp little blue-white teeth. The look on her face, half-scared, half-trusting, went to his heart. He realized that simply bringing it to her wasn’t enough. The other Englishman had used some mumbo-jumbo ceremony to put the curse on and he must do the same. While he was desperately trying to think of something she gave him his cue.
She didn’t say it in a coquettish way but humbly, like patient to doctor. He nodded, struck dumb, and followed her to the room where the performances were given. She got up on the trestle table and lay back, arranging her swathes of dyed muslin neatly round her legs, then clasped the scarab to her breast with both hands. Tutty stood by the table, throat dry, struggling for words. He knew not a syllable of Egyptian but then the bogus priest almost certainly didn’t either. Anything would do as long as it sounded foreign. A dim memory of prep school days came to his rescue. “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” She gave a little shudder of satisfaction and closed her eyes.
Tutty wasn’t missed because dinner tended to be an irregular meal at his father’s house and that night didn’t happen at all. The professor was out somewhere and Thomas dined off dates and lemonade in the study, while getting on with the task of cross-indexing recent finds – pitifully few of them and not especially interesting, but it had to be done. He’d worked through a couple of columns of them and had gone to the window for some air when he heard the rumbling of cart wheels in the street below and the foreman’s voice, telling the driver to be careful. This surprised him because the professor had said nothing about new discoveries. He went outside and saw the cart drawn up by the house and the professor and foreman standing in the back of it, staring at something wrapped in reed matting. Heart bounding with hope, he called out to them.
“Ah, Thomas, come and look at this.”
He clambered into the back of the cart. The thing under the matting was the right shape for a mummy case and the professor looked unusually pleased with himself. With his eyes on Thomas, he signed to the foreman to uncover it. Blue and gold glinted in the low sun. A royal, impassive mask stared up with a rearing cobra over its forehead. Thomas took a step forward, lifted the painted lid and registered the smell of the emptiness inside.
He stared at the professor, wondering for an instant if anger had sent the man insane, but found a grin on the piratical face.
“Of course it is. We’ve just bought it in the bazaar. Not a very expert fake, but it will serve its purpose.”
Later, still labouring over the cross-indexing, Thomas heard the cart lumbering away.
Tutty chanted his way through all the tags he could remember from Caesar’s Gallic Wars then, because the girl still hadn’t moved, launched himself on Arma virumque cano and the next dozen or so lines of Aeneid I, filling in the gaps with irregular Latin verbs. When even those failed him he took a deep breath and intoned as sonerously as he could manage Te absolvo. Nunc dimittis servum tuum in pace, hoping that she didn’t happen to be a Roman Catholic. She sensed at least the finality in his voice, opened her eyes and sat up.
“Is it done?”
He nodded, exhausted. She sat there for a while, still clasping the scarab to her breast, like a bird staring at the open cage door and not knowing what to do with freedom. Then a smile spread across her face. She raised her arms, slid off the table and did a wild little dance round the room chanting, “Free, free, free,” muslin drapes flying back from her knees and calves. Tutty’s feeling of happiness and rare achievement was stronger even than desire. He wouldn’t have traded it for all the wisdom of all the kingdoms of Egypt. Her dance took her to the curtain between door and street. She twitched at it, looked out. Then, “Oh.” She dropped the curtain, froze.
“Not another rabid dog, is it?” Tutty asked.
She shook her head. “It’s him. The priest. The one who put the curse on me.”
He went past her, looked out through the gap between curtain and doorframe.
“Him, you mean? The tall one in the panama?”
A tall, over-elegant man in a white linen suit and panama stood so close that if Tutty had shouted to him he’d have heard. He was in his late thirties or early forties with a pale, oval face with gold-framed glasses and a little pointed black beard. He wore an assortment of antique rings on his fingers and carried a black cane topped with the silver hawkshead of the god Horus. He was standing there reading a note, smiling to himself.
“He’s come to get me.” She was shrinking against the wall. “He knows what you’ve done and he’s come to put the curse back on me.”
“No, of course he’s not.” Anger at seeing all his good work ruined made Tutty resourceful. “We’re stronger than he is. You can put a curse on him instead.”
“I can? How?”
“Just put the beetle between your hands and say what you want to happen to him. Or you don’t even have to say it, just think it. But quickly before he goes.”
The man was folding up the note, tucking it away in his pocket with dandyish care so as not to spoil the line of the jacket. The girl stood motionless, eyes shut, and hands in prayer position at her chest with the black scarab between them. She was gripping it so hard that anything less tough than basalt might have cracked. The man flicked a piece of straw off his shoe with the end of his ebony cane, took a slim gold watch out of his waistcoat pocket and consulted it. Then he turned and walked away, in no hurry.
“He’s going,” Tutty told her. “Have you cursed him?”
She nodded, eyes huge and greedy, and came to stand beside him. They watched as the pale back receded down the street then blurred into the red-gold dusk. Then suddenly she put her arms round Tutty, pressed her mouth against his. He was so surprised that he didn’t start to return the kiss until it was too late and she took her arms away.
“I’m ever so grateful. Really, I’m ever so grateful. Can I keep the beetle?”
“Of course.” Then, seeing the excitement on her face, it occurred to him to ask her. “So what did you curse him with?”
She looked at him, as if he should have known the answer. “Death, of course. I cursed him with death.”
She wouldn’t go away with him at once. She said she had things she must do. If he wanted he could come back later, much later when it was dark. Feminine stuff to pack, he supposed. She must have clothes other than blue beads and gold muslin. Although it would have been a more satisfying end to his drama to whisk her away at once, at least the delay gave him time to think. He did his thinking walking round the city, first the crowded bazaar with the lamps lit outside the stalls and smells of spiced meat everywhere, then to the river bank and the slanting masts of the moored feluccas against a white sky. The night was hot and heavy, with distant lightning flickering towards the Nile delta, palm fronds hissing against each other like cockroaches in a faint breeze. The toughest question was how to explain her to his father. If he followed his original plan of escorting her home to England, even though the two of them would be travelling as chastely as sister and brother – or very nearly - the professor would have to know and couldn’t be expected to like it.
After hours of walking, and many cups of coffee in small cafes, he decided that it was late enough to go and fetch her. The best thing would be to put her up at a hotel for the night then go home and face the music. With that settled, he walked quite jauntily back through the city towards the white cube of the house, thinking he’d like another chance to manage the kiss better, with some warning next time. He watched from across the road in case the brute had come back, but saw no sign of activity so crossed and pulled the curtain a little aside.
“Hello. I’m back.”
It came to him that he didn’t even know her name. There was a scuffling in the back room, a little light coming through. He got to the doorway in two strides.
“Hey, stop that.”
His first thought was that the brute had come back after all and was trying to throttle her. It was only when his eyes adjusted to the lamplight that he saw what he’d interrupted. She was wearing normal clothes, a pink dress, a straw hat with a ribbon but the hat was disarranged because when he came in she’d had her arms round the flute player and the two of them were kissing with a confidence and enthusiasm that showed it wasn’t the first time. At his shout they sprang apart, but not very far.
“What’s going on?” He wished, even as he said it, that he didn’t sound so much like a village constable, but what was a chap supposed to say?
“This is Lou. He’s French.”
She said it quite defiantly in her little voice, as if that explained everything. The lad – no more than 17 or 18 surely – stood there smiling at her. In normal clothes, he was even better-looking than in his flute-player’s robes, hair dark and curling, eyes wide, lashes long and thick as a calf’s. Lebanese-French, Tutty thought, or Syrian-French. Not that it mattered.
“Well, we’re not taking him too.”
“Lou and I are going away together,” she said.
There was a new confidence about her. He noticed a bulge under the bodice of her dress. She saw his eyes going to it and pulled out a little linen bag, hastily cobbled together.
“We’ve wanted to for weeks, only I couldn’t because of the curse. Now I’ve got the beetle, it’s all right.”
She popped it back inside her dress.
“Where are you going?”
Her forehead wrinkled. “Where the river comes out to the sea. Alex . . .”
“Alexandria,” the boy said obligingly, probably catching onto one of the few words he understood. “I play, she dance.”
His fingers mimed flute playing while his body imitated her sinuous dance movements.
“But you can’t go back to that.”
“Why not? Specially now we don’t have to give all the takings to that bastard. There’s more money in the Alex place, from the sailors.”
“What about your parents?”
“What?” She stared. He might as well have been speaking Latin again.
“Won’t they want you back?”
She laughed, a harsh little sound. “You’re joking. They chucked me out when I was thirteen.” Then, as if to get away from the memory, “Come on, Lou. Time we were going.”
She moved towards the door. The flute player picked up a small bag and followed. Bemused, Tutty stood aside for her. She swept past then turned back suddenly, put her arms round his neck and kissed him again, taking him as much by surprise as before.
“Thank you. I’ll never forget you. Thank you for the beetle.”
Then the curtain flapped and they were gone.
It was past midnight and several drinks later when Tutty turned for home at last. He thought, on the whole, that he’d probably made a bit of an idiot of himself, but not too much of an idiot when all was said and done. And it had been a difficult situation. She wasn’t the kind of girl his kind of chap married. Even if it hadn’t been for all the other reasons against it, the memory of her small, hard voice, I cursed him with death, placed her in a different and harsher world than his own. At least now there wasn’t a lot of explaining to be done to his father – unless he missed the scarab. On that score, there were no guarantees. In the usual confusion of his father’s study it could be months or years before that happened. On the other hand, if he suddenly wanted it to illustrate some point or other, there’d be no peace for the household until it was found. If so, he’d just have to confess and give him some suitably edited version of the story. Still, he couldn’t help being apprehensive as he approached the house. By then, his father and Thomas should be in bed. He decided to go in through the side door from the little yard to save waking up the servants. It was annoying, in his tired and nervy state, to find the yard blocked by his father’s expedition cart, drawn up practically touching the house wall. To squeeze past it he had to put a foot on its back step, which brought his eyes level with the thing in the cart.
He screamed. He’d seen mummies before, all too many of them, all his life. But none like this. None with bandages so fresh and white, standing out from the shadows of the mummy case and practically glowing in the dark. None with an oval face as white as the bandages and fresh as if it had died that day. None with a bristling black beard. Never, in all kinds and conditions of mummies, one that wore gold framed glasses. A voice was screaming in his head and screaming out of his head, not caring who heard.
“We cursed him. We cursed him and he’s come back to me.”
His father was there almost at once, fully dressed and wide awake. He got Tutty inside and up to his study, fending off inquiries from the rest of the household, ordering them sharply to go back to bed and stay there. With the study lamp lit and the dancing Bastets wavering over the wall, Tutty poured out his whole story.
“I never believed any of the curse stories. I know you didn’t either. But she cursed him – she meant it, with the black scarab – and now he’s come to my doorstep. A mummy, you see. He made her into a mummy – so when she cursed him – I didn’t believe it, you see, but I did it – so it made him into a mummy instead and . . . oh, God.”
He sipped the brandy his father had poured for him and shivered. The professor waited. After a while Tutty said, “I suppose he really is dead.’
“Oh, yes, he’s really dead.”
Tutty hung his head. The professor didn’t speak for a while, roving round his study. Then, at last: “What scarab did you say you took.”
“The black one, the heart scarab.”
The professor laughed. “After all these years, you still can’t tell a fake.”
“What?” Tutty’s head swung up.
“A fake. The bazaars are full of them. I bought one so that I could show my students the differences between a bazaar souvenir and the real thing. Your death-cursing scarab was hacked out a few weeks ago by a ham-fisted faker with a cold chisel. It’s no more a real scarab than you’re a real Pharaoh.”
“From Caesar’s Gallic Wars? My dear boy, if that’s the best you can do with an expensive education, I should have had you apprenticed to a plumber.”
“But he’s dead. He’s out there wrapped up in a mummy case and he’s dead.”
“Yes, but it’s nothing to do with you. This was meant to be kept secret so I want your promise not to tell anybody else, but at least it will set your mind at rest from this nonsense. Your promise?”
Tutty nodded.
“The man out there was a dealer in Egyptian artefacts. He had certain other businesses as well, hence that degrading peep-show you attended. He died today. Because of his interests, some of his associates thought it appropriate that he should be buried in the old Egyptian manner – or at least as close to it as modern sensibilities permit. For instance, no attempt was made to hook his brain out through his nostrils.”
Tutty groaned and spluttered brandy.
“It was done with some secrecy, so as not to offend the bureaucratic meddlers,” the professor said. “Later tonight, his body will be transported along the Nile towards its final resting place. I’m sure nobody could wish a more appropriate ending for him than that.”
“He was a rotter,” Tutty murmured.
“You may be right. If so, he won’t be the first man to be more honoured in death than his life deserved. Now, my boy, drink up and go to bed. Tomorrow we’ll talk. It may be time to think of sending you back to England.”
“Oh, yes, please.”
Almost a prayer. The professor helped Tutty to his feet, watched his unsteady progress across the study and the door closing behind him. Idly he picked up a few assorted scarabs from under his papers and arranged them in a row. He would miss the heart scarab, which had been a good example of its kind, and assuredly no fake. If a man were inclined to superstition – which of course he wasn’t – he might even think it had played some part in ending the career of a man who had defiled the old gods. But there were too many things to be done before morning. First, the little bags of gold coins to be sorted out for the foreman’s friends, who had done their job efficiently, wrapped and delivered the goods precisely as ordered. Then, with their help, the mummy case must be lidded, straw-swathed and carted with its contents to the waiting felucca that would carry it as quickly as possible downriver to the docks. One other thing – the job the professor had been thinking about when his son screamed from the yard – was filling in the delivery label. The dead man had two particular customers, both rich and secretive collectors, both – in the professor’s view – richly deserving what he had to send. New York or Hamburg? He smiled, enjoying the luxury of hesitation, his hand unconsciously rearranging the line of scarabs.