Chapter Forty-One

Highclere Castle, April 1973

As soon as the first corner of the paneling was removed, Eve caught a whiff of musky scent. It made her cough.

“Can you smell that?” she asked Brograve. “Doesn’t it remind you of the tomb?”

He sniffed, then shook his head. “To me, it smells of damp.”

The panel splintered as Porchy’s man used a chisel to pry it from the wall, nails popping out and scattering on the parquet floor. Behind, Eve could see the old cupboard door. It wasn’t locked, thank goodness, and when he pulled it open she saw rusting tins on the shelves: Lambert & Butler Gold Leaf; Player’s Navy Cut. She stretched an arm out and grabbed the first tin she could reach. Nestling on some yellowing cotton inside was part of a blue faience necklace.

“I know this,” she said. “It’s from the tomb of Amenhotep III. KV22.” She was delighted her memory hadn’t let her down. “It’s broken. Perhaps that’s why Howard didn’t include it in the sale to the Met.”

She reached for another tin. This one had a sand-colored scarab beetle inside, just an inch long. “Did you know that walking anticlockwise around scarabs is supposed to make wishes come true?” she told the men. “I think it’s five times around to get a husband and seven times for a child.”

“Well, it worked for you,” Brograve replied, but Porchy rolled his eyes in a derogatory manner and said, “Honestly, what tosh!”

“Oh look!” she cried, pointing to the top shelf. “That’s one of Merneptah’s embalming oil jugs. I found them, you know. My claim to fame!”

“The handle’s broken,” Porchy commented. “Couldn’t you have found an intact one?”

Brograve smiled and rolled his eyes.

Eve didn’t mind; she was delighted to see the jug again. “We found thirteen, actually. The Egyptian government got seven and we got six. I suppose the intact ones went to the Met.”

Porchy’s man turned his attention to the cupboard on the other side. Once again the door behind the paneling was unlocked and there were cigarette tins on the shelves. It took Eve right back to childhood, when she used to love looking through these treasures with Pups. It was their special place.

“Don’t touch anything with your bare hands,” she warned the men. “You need to wear gloves. The sweat on our skin can cause decomposition.”

“Do you think there’s anything valuable?” Porchy asked.

“Maybe.” Eve opened another tin and looked in to see three carnelian bracelet plaques. She remembered when Howard brought them, before the war. The First World War, that was. They were also from the tomb of Amenhotep III, and were inscribed with the name of his wife, Queen Tiye.

“His principal wife,” she heard Pups’s voice correcting her. She felt close to her father in there, as if his spirit was lingering in the air. She was glad they had come here to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death. It was the right place to be.

“It’s definitely worth getting an expert to check them,” she said. “If you call the British Museum, I expect they’ll send someone. Meanwhile, do you mind if I have a poke around?”

“Be my guest,” Porchy said. “Brograve and I are going to the stables to look at the new bloodstock. We’ll see you for luncheon at one.”

As soon as they left, Eve began to hunt for Tutankhamun relics. She had a crystal-clear memory of the items Pups had pulled from his pockets in Castle Carter the night they crept into the tomb. There had been an amulet of Wadjet, the cobra goddess, made out of beaten gold, a clay wine jar, and that wooden goose varnished with resin. She asked Taylor to bring her a stepladder and a pair of gloves and he returned with both, but insisted he should be the one to climb the ladder.

They worked methodically through the shelves and Eve discovered many items she hadn’t seen in decades. A lot had been left behind when Howard sold the collection to the Met, and not all of it was damaged. Perhaps he had wanted Highclere to keep its links with Egypt.

Howard had become quite the celebrity in the 1920s, in demand all over the world, but he and Eve remained close and every time he passed through London he would visit her. At first he tried to persuade her to return to Egypt, but when he realized she was adamantly against it, he brought her the firsthand news from the Valley of the Kings instead.

It was February 1924 when he finally opened the lid of the stone sarcophagus that had been inside the blue and gold shrine. It was cracked, he told her, and the crack had been hurriedly filled with gypsum, as if there had been an accident while it was being lowered into place. It made the job of lifting it more difficult, in case it fell apart at the weak joint.

Inside they found the first of the anthropoid coffins, its solid gold mask shimmering in the arc lamps Harry Burton had set up. From its size, Howard guessed there must be several more coffins, and so it turned out, each one tucked inside the last like a set of babushka dolls. There was enough solid gold to fill Fort Knox, he told her. Security had to be tight.

The funerary mask was the image most people associated with the tomb now: the striped headcloth with a uraeus on top, the lifelike kohl-lined eyes, painted with white calcite, the pupils made of obsidian, and the beard of lapis-colored glass. Howard had sounded overawed when he described it to her.

“Truly phenomenal. You know I’m not much given to displays of emotion, Eve, but I had to sit down because my knees were trembling. I only hope you’ll see it sometime . . .”

She was glad not to have been present for the uncovering of the mummy; the very thought made her shiver. She heard from Howard that the resins poured over the corpse had meant it was stuck to the inside of the coffin and had to be examined where it lay, in an autopsy that began in November 1925.

The results were fascinating. Tutankhamun had been short, just five foot four and one-eighth inches, and he had a club foot. They could tell that he died around the age of eighteen, which fitted with what they knew from other sources. Experts couldn’t agree on the cause of death. Could it have been tuberculosis, which was rife in Ancient Egypt? Or malaria? Was the head injury they could see the result of heavy-handedness during the embalming process or a fatal blow to the head? Did he break his leg in a chariot accident, then catch blood poisoning from the wound?

It was all too morbid for Eve. Death had been everywhere in the 1920s. First there had been Pups, then his half brother Aubrey, and so many other people who visited the tomb started to succumb. A railroad millionaire caught pneumonia and died just a month after Pups. An Egyptian prince was shot dead by his wife later that same year. A high-ranking official in Egyptian military intelligence was assassinated in Cairo while his car was stuck in traffic. An Oxford scholar, the author of numerous books on Egypt, hanged himself in a hotel room, leaving a suicide note written in his own blood that read “I have succumbed to a curse.” The professor of Egyptology at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland burned to death in a house fire.

Then there were some victims she knew well. Poor Arthur Mace, who had accompanied them on the Aswan cruise, had died of unexplained arsenic poisoning. And Richard Bethell, Howard’s private secretary, had been smothered in bed in a Mayfair club and his murderer never found. His distraught father threw himself from a seventh-floor window, unable to cope with the loss, and on the way to the father’s funeral, the hearse ran over and killed an eight-year-old boy. Eve had been aghast when she read of this tragedy in the Express.

She remembered Howard’s dismissive answer when she asked him if he thought there could be a link among the deaths.

“Do you know how many thousands of visitors I showed around the tomb?” he asked. “Statistically, fewer of them have died than might have been expected in a random sample of the population.”

Always the scientist, Eve thought. Always an answer for everything, just like Brograve. To her mind, his explanation addressed the number of deaths, but not the sheer oddness of some of them.