Chapter Twenty-Six

London, January 1973

Brograve wakened Eve when the doctor came to check up on her at eleven. It seemed she had fallen asleep on the sofa with the Tutankhamun cuttings folder on her lap.

The doctor pulled up a chair alongside her and opened his bulky leather medical bag, rifling through for the equipment he needed. Eve peered in at the jumble of stethoscope, tweezers, bandages, and syringes, all in separate pockets and compartments. She had missed his name when he came the day before and it seemed too late to ask now, but he was friendly as he carried out the routine tests, checking her reflexes, her eyes, her heart, and so forth.

“Did I pass muster?” she asked as he packed up again. “Not time for the knacker’s yard yet, is it?”

“You’ve made a remarkable recovery from last year’s stroke,” he said. “You deserve a medal for effort. You’re an inspiration.”

But she caught snatches of the conversation as he talked to Brograve by the front door afterward. “It may have been a TIA,” he said, and she knew that meant “transient ischemic attack,” a kind of mini-stroke. “Keep an eye . . . avoid stressful situations . . .”

She’d been in a good mood earlier, looking through her Tutankhamun cuttings, but overhearing the doctor’s words upset her. She knew TIAs were not a good sign. Her stupid brain! Why did it keep misbehaving? It was horrible to think another major stroke might be just around the corner and then she’d be back in the hospital, learning how to swallow all over again. Or worse. What if she died, and the truth about the tomb died with her?

Since she started having strokes, the possibility of dying had always been there. Each time could be the last. She tried not to dwell on it, because otherwise she would sit around feeling anxious, but it lent an urgency to her search for the gold container. She had to find it and return it to Egypt while she was still capable.

* * *

After the doctor left, Eve picked up the cuttings folder to take it back to the cupboard and a letter fell out. A handwritten letter, with large, loopy writing, dated December 1922. She checked the signature—Marie Corelli, a popular novelist who wrote mystical melodramas with titles like The Sorrows of Satan and Treasure of Heaven. She was much maligned by the literati of the day for her belief in reincarnation and out-of-body experiences, as well as her overblown writing style.

The letter had been waiting when Eve got to Highclere for Christmas Day 1922, flushed with triumph from her visit to the palace with Pups. A weird feeling had crept over her as she read the words:

I understand the excitement you must feel about your father’s discovery but I am bound to warn you of the danger you and your loved ones could face if the pharaoh’s burial chamber is disturbed. I’m sure you have read of the curses placed by ancient priests on other tombs. In that of Khentika Ikhekhi were found the words “as for all men who shall enter this tomb, there will be judgment . . . an end will be made for him . . . I shall seize his neck like a bird.”

Eve thought of Howard Carter’s canary and shivered.

According to the letter, another curse read: “They that shall break the seal of this tomb shall meet death by a disease no doctor can diagnose.”

She ran to the library, then the smoking room looking for Pups, and finally found him out by the stables. “Look!” she cried, and waited for him to read it. “What do you think?”

He rubbed his forehead with his knuckle. “Marie Corelli is seen as a fantasist in spiritualist circles, but I have certainly heard of curses of the pharaohs before now. Perhaps I should ask Sirenia’s advice.”

Eve winced. She had no faith in the histrionic clairvoyant her father used for his séances. “Howard has been entering pharaohs’ tombs for over twenty years now without suffering ill effects. Perhaps we should consult him on our return to Egypt.”

“Howard is bound to dismiss it,” her father said. “He’s a scientist to the core.”

“Then perhaps we should dismiss it too,” Eve said. “I can’t imagine how an Ancient Egyptian could have cast a spell that would affect us three thousand years later.”

“Their knowledge was advanced in many areas, so I wouldn’t rule it out,” he replied.

As it happened, other business got in the way and Pups was forced to return to London before he was able to consult Sirenia. Marie Corelli wrote to the newspapers about the “curse in the tomb” and soon after that, Arthur Weigall of the Daily Mail picked up the story and the other papers followed. Some speculated that microscopic spores in the air could cause fatal illnesses in those who visited it, or that there was a disease spread by bat droppings; others stuck to the supernatural interpretation.

Eve told herself it was all nonsense, but still she had a moment of trepidation when she caught a cold that January. Was it just a cold? Or her reaction to spores in the tomb? She had felt uneasy in the burial chamber, maybe for good reason.

* * *

Looking back now, at the age of . . . She hesitated. What age was she again? Seventy-one . . . As the first person in the chamber, she should have been the first victim of any curse, yet here she still was, fifty years later, having lived to tell the tale. And Howard had lived almost two decades after the tomb was opened.

Brograve came in to tell her luncheon was ready and asked what she was reading, so she handed it over.

“I remember this,” he said, glancing at it. “What a load of tosh. The woman should have stuck to novels. She clearly had a lurid imagination.”

Eve frowned, a memory coming to her. “That’s exactly what you said at the time. Those exact words. Did I show it to you? Were we married in nineteen twenty-two?”

“Engaged,” he said, taking the folder from her and slipping the letter back inside.

That puzzled Eve. She could remember them getting engaged but she couldn’t remember Brograve being her fiancé when the tomb was discovered. Why hadn’t he been there with her? Events had gotten shuffled in her head and now they were out of sequence, like a card index that has been dropped on the floor and hastily shoved back together.

“I’ve been trying to decide what to do about Ana Mansour,” he said. “She’s keen to talk to you again while she’s in London, but I don’t want you to be under any pressure. Why don’t I write to her saying that we are looking through our family archives and that we’ll get in touch when we have anything to share?”

“It’s the truth. We are, aren’t we?” Eve realized she had gotten waylaid. She’d meant to look for the gold container that morning and instead she’d lost herself in the cuttings folder. She closed her eyes, trying to picture where she had put her memento from the tomb. Fragments of memory floated around her brain, too vague to pin down. She had the impression she’d been in a rush. And she could remember thinking she wouldn’t tell Brograve. But that didn’t make sense. Why shouldn’t he know?

Thinking about it gave her a creepy feeling, like a ghostly finger pressing on the back of her skull. It reminded her that after all the excitement of finding the tomb, events became darker and everything changed for the worse.