Chapter Forty-Two

Highclere Castle, April 1973

When she had finished checking the cupboard on one side of the doorway, Eve turned to the other. One item there was swaddled in a length of discolored cotton and she unwrapped it to find the wooden goose Pups had taken from the tomb, its black resin coat daubed with gold on the breast, its neck curved in swan-like fashion, and a white beak pointed coyly downward. Heart beating a little faster, she laid it, still in its cotton, on the coffee table between the sofas in the drawing room.

The amulet of Wadjet turned up next, its beaten gold gleaming. It was covered in intricate carvings showing the segments of the snake’s body, the feathered wings, and the human head wearing a headdress. It was in mint condition, as if the artist had buffed up his work that very morning. She placed it beside the goose.

Several clay wine jars were stacked together on an upper shelf and Taylor lifted them all down for her. They looked similar and Eve couldn’t decide which one might have come from the tomb. She squinted at the tiny cartouches carved on the bases but couldn’t make them out. Fortunately Porchy had left a pair of reading glasses lying around, so she put them on to examine the jars, soon spotting the hieroglyphic letters that spelled Tutankhamun on one of them. She was sure the jar had a hint of the cloying muskiness of the unguent container. Arthur Conan Doyle had told her the Ancient Egyptians used unguents and oils imbued with elemental spirits, or so she remembered.

“Mr. Conan Doyle also believes in fairies,” Howard had scoffed when she mentioned that. “Did you see the article he wrote for Strand Magazine about the little girls in Cottingley who claimed to have photographed fairies? The man’s a gullible fool!”

Looking back, Eve remembered being convinced by Conan Doyle when she first met him. He had seemed like an authority. But afterward, when he kept writing to her with dire warnings about the curse, trying to get her to agree to exorcisms and such like, it grew rather wearisome. Howard would never have agreed to an exorcism in the tomb. He would have mocked the notion.

Eve searched through the remainder of the objects Taylor brought down from the shelves, but there was no sign of the gold container, so she hadn’t hidden it there. It was disappointing but she hoped Ana Mansour would be pleased to receive three of the artifacts from her list. With any luck, she could take them back to Cairo and get her job back, then start her legal battle for access to her children. Eve hated to think it was her fault Ana hadn’t been able to return sooner.

* * *

When she met Brograve and Porchy for luncheon in the dining room, Eve told them of her finds. Porchy’s reaction—entirely predictably—was to ask whether they could sell them at auction to the highest bidder.

“I don’t think so,” Eve said, “given that they are stolen goods. Pups shouldn’t have taken them from the tomb. It seems to me we should give them to Ana Mansour to return to the Cairo Museum, where most of the other Tutankhamun relics are kept along with his sarcophagus.”

Brograve objected: “You can’t just hand over priceless artifacts to a woman we’ve only met twice. We don’t know anything about her. It should be done officially. I’ll ask Cuthbert to inquire through the British Council.”

“Who’s Ana Mansour?” Porchy asked. “If we’re giving them to anyone, it should be the British Museum, then I can claim tax relief on the gifts. They are mine, after all—contents of the house, and all that.”

Eve began to wish she had just sneaked them into her suitcase without mentioning them. She wanted to give them to Ana, but it would be difficult now that the cat was out of the bag.

After lunch, Brograve telephoned Cuthbert and explained the sensitive nature of the find. “We think they are missing artifacts from Tutankhamun’s tomb,” he said. “Dr. Ana Mansour from Cairo University gave us a list of items that were mentioned in Maya’s tomb in Saqqara, and these appear to be three of them.”

Cuthbert asked a few questions, then promised to make inquiries and get back to him.

“Maude sends her love,” Brograve told Eve afterward. “She wants to have lunch with you when you get back and—her words—‘hit the sales.’” He raised an eyebrow in a comical manner that made her laugh.

Money had never been an issue between them. She knew lots of men just gave their wives an allowance to cover the housekeeping, but right from the start Brograve insisted they have a joint account and said she could spend whatever she liked. In fifty years, she couldn’t remember a single occasion when he had criticized her spending—not even when she gave money to Almina. He had a generous soul.

* * *

Over dinner that evening, once he’d sunk a few whiskies, Porchy returned to his familiar rant about their mother. He seemed obsessed. Eve suspected her presence had rekindled his anger and the booze was stoking it.

“Do you know what Almina said to me when I got back from the war?” he asked Brograve. “I walked in the door and went to embrace her—as any son might—but she shrank away from me, saying, ‘Have you been deloused yet?’ I’ll never forget that. Not ‘Welcome back!’ or ‘Good to see you!’ or ‘Glad you survived’ but ‘Have you been deloused?’”

“It’s not fair to criticize her when she’s not around to defend herself,” Eve argued. “Almina and Pups were distant parents but that wasn’t unusual for the era.” It’s true she had brought Patricia up with a lot more love and one-on-one attention, but times had changed, and so had attitudes on parenting.

“You always want to think well of everyone,” Porchy said, “even when it’s not justified. Don’t you remember us being bundled from house to house—or off to Eton in my case—like inconvenient pieces of baggage, never seeing our parents from one month to the next? Don’t you remember spending Christmas with Nanny Moss and only being allowed in their ‘sacred presence’ for half an hour?”

Eve shook her head. That wasn’t how she remembered it at all. They hadn’t eaten Christmas dinner together because Pups and Almina generally had guests, but they always opened presents with them on Christmas morning.

Porchy continued: “You weren’t beaten by Pups the way I was. Birch twigs, he used, on my bare backside, and bloody painful they were too.”

“No, he never beat me,” she agreed. She couldn’t imagine Pups hitting anyone, but she remembered Porchy showing her the stripes on his backside once. They had looked so sore they made her cry.

“I’ve got a good mind to write a memoir one day in which I describe the true nature of the man behind the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and his stony-hearted wife. I’d probably make a bit of money.” He slurped his drink noisily.

“You wouldn’t!” Eve cried.

“I might.” He cackled. “Whyever not?”

“It would be cruel. Besides, you never went to the Valley of the Kings. You don’t know the first thing about the tomb, and that was the high point of his life.” She felt possessive; it was her legacy, not his.

“I’m entitled to let the world know what my life has been like. I’m sure I’ll find a publisher.” He lit a cigarette and threw his lighter on the table with an air of defiance, clearly ready to escalate the argument.

Brograve did his usual trick of veering the conversation in another direction entirely. “I was looking through that wonderful book the British Museum published last year to coincide with the exhibition. The photographic reproductions are excellent. They did a grand job.”

Talk turned to the exhibition, the one Eve had forgotten about, but she couldn’t stop worrying about Porchy’s idea of writing a book. She hoped he wouldn’t. There were too many hurtful bits of family history that he could mention, in particular his destructive feud with Almina. Fifty years after Pups’s death they should be celebrating him, not maligning him.

Her heart fluttered like a butterfly trapped beneath her ribs. It was ridiculous how anxious she got sometimes. She never used to be like that. When did it start? After the accident? Or was it to do with getting older and her memory being unreliable? She hated to think that she might hurt someone’s feelings due to forgetfulness. Or go out for a walk and not be able to remember the way home. Or leave the gas on and blow up the house.

“Think of your worries as little birds,” Brograve said to her once. “Flap your wings”—he waved his hands up and down—“and let them fly away.”

She tried but it wasn’t much use. In her imagination, the little bird flew straight into a closed window and fell unconscious to the floor.