The Serpent on the Crown (3 page)

“He will cry,” said Fatima darkly.

Our former cook had burned the food when we were late. This one wept.

“Tell him we will be as quick as we can. Young woman, I will give you ten minutes to explain, apologize, and remove your—er—impetuous brother. You might start by introducing yourself.”

“Harriet Petherick. This is my brother, Adrian.” Her eyes went back to Ramses. “I beg you will let go of him. He is quite calm now. Aren’t you, Adrian?”

“Yes, of course.” He gave a brief, embarrassed laugh. “I can’t think what came over me. Come along, Harriet, we mustn’t keep these people from their dinner any longer.”

“Not just yet,” said Emerson, removing his pipe from his mouth. “Ramses, let the fellow go. And pick up that damned gun. Excuse me for not rising, Miss Petherick; I do not consider that your behavior warrants your being treated like a lady. Sit down, both of you, and explain yourselves. I take it that you are the children of Pringle Petherick, whose widow called on us this afternoon.”

Miss Petherick nodded. She led her brother to a settee and sat down next to him, holding his hand in hers. Ramses scooped up the pistol and examined it.

“German,” he said.

“A war souvenir,” said Adrian Petherick, smiling.

Bertie let out a soft exclamation and came forward, staring at Petherick. If he had intended to speak, he was not given the chance; Miss Petherick at once launched into the explanation I had requested.

“Mrs. Petherick is our stepmother. We accompanied her to Egypt, at her request, on what she described as a sentimental pilgrimage in memory of her dear departed husband. We had no idea that she had the statue with her, or what she intended to do with it, until she returned to the hotel this evening and informed us she had given you one of the most valuable objects in Father’s collection. We are both fond of Mrs. Petherick, and Adrian is quite protective of her. He believed you had taken advantage of a grieving woman who is not, perhaps, as intelligent as she might be. His indignation explains his action, I believe.”

“No, it does not,” said Emerson. “Your high-handed manner may intimidate some persons, Miss Petherick, but I am not one of them. Does your brother often have attacks of dementia?”

She reacted as if he had struck her, with a loud gasp and a hand raised in protest. Emerson’s steady blue gaze did not alter. After a moment she said, “It is not what you think. He has never injured anyone. He would not have injured you.”

“Hmph,” said Emerson. “We will leave that aside for the moment. Mrs. Petherick told us that the object she gave us was accursed. That it had killed her husband, sucking the breath out of him.”

There was no reaction from young Mr. Petherick, who was staring off into space. His sister frowned. “I am not surprised she should say that. But her superstitious fantasy does not alter the facts of the case.”

“How did your father die?” I asked.

“Of purely natural causes,” said Miss Petherick. “He had a stroke, which left him partially paralyzed. The second finished him.”

Emerson took out his watch. “Let me be brief. Maaman will be sobbing into the soup, and I want my dinner. I will of course pay Mrs. Petherick a reasonable price for the artifact, or return it to her, should she prefer that.”

“She wants it back,” said Miss Petherick. “She sent us to retrieve it.”

“Oh, come now,” Emerson shouted. He had kept his temper under control until that moment, but hunger always makes him irascible. Brother and sister flinched, and Emerson skewered them with a terrible glare. “You insult my intelligence, young woman. I don’t know who the legal owner of this object may be. I intend to hang on to it until I find out. I shan’t bother asking you, since I wouldn’t trust your word in any case.”

Miss Petherick recognized that she had met her match. She scowled.

“Hmph,” said Emerson. “Do you know from whom your father purchased the statuette?”

“No.”

“Did he ever discuss his purchases with you?”

“No.”

“So your only interest in his collection is in its monetary value?”

The young woman flushed angrily. “You have no right to imply that.”

“Oh, bah,” said Emerson. “Go away.”

Miss Petherick rose. “If that is your attitude, Professor Emerson—”

“Ramses,” said Emerson. “Hand Miss Petherick her wrap and escort her to her carriage.”

When Ramses attempted to put the garment around her shoulders, she snatched it from him. “Come, Adrian,” she said. Her brother stood up, smiling vaguely. She took his arm and swept out of the room, followed by Ramses.

“Dinner,” said Fatima, in a near shriek, “is served.”

C
yrus had not relaxed his grip on the statuette. He carried it with him into the dining room and was with difficulty persuaded to put it down in order to pick up his napkin.

“What a family,” Emerson grumbled. “The stepmother is a hysteric or a liar, the brother a lunatic—”

“And the sister has a fist like a boxer’s,” said Ramses, whose cheek was beginning to darken.

A wordless grunt from Fatima, who was serving the soup, indicated her opinion of the proceedings. She had been in a happy frame of mind since, for the first time in many years, she did not have to share the cherished chore of serving meals with our butler, Gargery. He was really too old for the strenuous activities that accompany our excavation seasons, but he had agreed to remain in England only because our ward Sennia, whom he adored, had also stayed behind in order to further her education. She was twelve, and bright as a button; the schools of Luxor and Cairo had nothing more to offer her.

“You ought to have given the confounded girl a good hard shove,” said Emerson, who would have done nothing of the sort. He swallowed a mouthful of soup and made a face. “Salty. Well, Vandergelt, what do you think?”

“You did the right thing,” Cyrus said. “I remember hearing that Petherick left nothing except his collection. It’s worth a pretty penny, but I don’t know who his legal heirs are. Maybe the kids are trying to put one over on the widow.”

“If she really believes the statue carries a curse, she won’t take it back,” I remarked.

“Emerson,” said Cyrus piteously, “I’ll pay the lady. Anything she wants. I’ve got to have that!”

Emerson pushed his soup plate away. “Frankly, Vandergelt, I don’t give a curse who gets it. What I want to know is where it came from.”

“A dealer, one presumes,” I said.

“And before that?”

I shrugged. “Another dealer. A tomb robber or illicit digger. What are you getting at, Emerson?”

“Tell her, Ramses.” Emerson picked up the little statue and handed it to his son.

“Yes, sir. We may or may not be able to trace the object back through its previous owners; but the statue itself offers certain clues as to where it was found.” Holding the statuette up to the light, he ran an appreciative finger along the delicately modeled cheek and down the curves of the body. “It’s one of the Amarna kings.”

I nodded agreement. “The style is unmistakable—the soft outlines of the body, the delicate fingers and toes. Since this artistic technique was only employed during the reign of the so-called heretic king Akhenaton and his immediate successors, we can pin it down to a period of—oh, I would say fewer than fifteen years, since it is of the later Amarna style rather than—”

“Amelia,” said Emerson forcibly. “We know that.”

“Katherine was looking a trifle confused,” I explained.

“Thank you,” Katherine said with a smile.

“The term Amarna,” I continued, before Emerson could stop me, “refers to the site in Middle Egypt where Akhenaton founded a city dedicated to the worship of his sole god, Aton.”

“Can it be Akhenaton himself?” Cyrus asked. “There’s no name on it, I looked.”

Ramses turned the statuette upside down and inspected the soles of the little golden feet. “I think it stood on a pedestal, with perhaps a back column, which would have been inscribed with the name of the king.”

“Maybe,” Cyrus said doubtfully. “But that doesn’t tell us where this came from, does it?”

“There are only a few possibilities,” Ramses said. “Amarna itself is the most obvious. Mother and Father excavated there in the 1880s, and there have been archaeologists at work off and on ever since—not to mention local diggers. The site is huge. This might have come from a shrine in a courtier’s house, or from a sculptor’s workshop like the one the Germans found before the war.”

Emerson shook his head. “Unlikely, my boy. Borchardt found plaster models, intrinsically valueless. Everything that could be reused was taken away when the city was abandoned. A statuette of solid gold certainly wouldn’t have been overlooked.”

“You can’t be sure of that,” Cyrus objected. “Maybe the owner buried it to keep it safe, and died before he could retrieve it.”

“Anything is possible,” Emerson retorted. “But don’t pack up and head for Amarna just yet, Vandergelt. We know that Akhenaton’s successors returned to Thebes. One of them was buried in KV55, the tomb Theodore Davis ripped apart back in ’07.”

“Unless the mummy in that tomb was Akhenaton himself,” Cyrus said. “Weigall believes—”

“Weigall is wrong,” Emerson said flatly. “The remains have to be those of Smenkhkare, Akhenaton’s son-in-law. That’s beside the point. This statue is precisely the sort of thing that might have been part of the tomb furnishings, which, as you recall, were a hodgepodge of objects belonging to different royals. You may also recall that Davis’s workmen made off with some of them. And so did another individual. Isn’t that right, Amelia?”

All heads turned, all eyes focused on me. Emerson’s bright blue orbs were as hard as sapphires.

Bertie, chivalrous chap that he was, broke the silence with an indignant question. “Surely you aren’t accusing your wife, Professor?”

“No,” I said. “He is accusing his brother.”

There was no need to explain which one I meant. Walter, Emerson’s younger brother, was a reputable scholar and a man of integrity. Seth, their illegitimate half brother, was…not. Even Katherine knew his strange history; before I reformed him, Sethos (to give him his nom de crime) had been the most successful dealer in illegal antiquities ever to operate in Egypt. His keen intelligence, his skill at the art of disguise, and his charismatic personality had placed him at the head of an organization that had wreaked havoc with the Service des Antiquités and caused us no little personal inconvenience. All that was in the past. Sethos had served his country honorably during the war and had sworn to me that he had given up his criminal activities.

However, it was the past to which Emerson referred, and I had to admit that Sethos was the most logical suspect. I knew for a fact that he had looted Davis’s tomb.

So did Emerson. I keep nothing from my husband (unless it is unlikely to accomplish anything except to arouse his formidable temper). A violent explosion had, in fact, ensued, when I described my somewhat unusual and (in Emerson’s opinion) unnecessarily intimate conversation with Sethos following the excavation of Tomb 55; but once he cooled off he agreed there would have been no point in pursuing the matter. Sethos had calmly admitted taking a number of antiquities from the tomb, but by the time I learned this it was too late to prevent them from being sent out of the country. They were irretrievably lost, and so was Sethos, who could change his appearance as readily as he did his name.

“By the Almighty,” Cyrus exclaimed. “Well, but Sethos is now a reformed character and a friend. All we have to do is ask him—”

“Whether he took the statue,” Nefret cut in. “A man is innocent until proven guilty, isn’t he?”

She had always had a weakness for Sethos. Most women did. Ramses shook his head. He did not have a weakness for his uncle. Most men did not.

“When it comes to Sethos’s past history, the reverse is true. He usually
was
guilty. Where is he now?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He is still working undercover for the War Office.”

“I can’t see that it matters,” Nefret declared. “Mr. Petherick was the legal owner.”

“It does matter, though,” Ramses said. “If Sethos denies taking this from KV55—and if we believe him—we must look elsewhere for the origin of the statue.”

“Hmph.” Emerson tossed his napkin onto the table and stood up. “Let’s get to work.”

I knew what he meant to do, and understood his reasons, but I felt obliged to protest. “Emerson, it is very late, and we have guests.”

“We aren’t guests,” Cyrus said, rising in his turn. “I reckon we’re of the same mind, Emerson. It’s a pity David isn’t here. He’s the best artist in the family.”

“We may be able to hang on to the statuette until he arrives next week,” Emerson said. “But if we are forced to return it we will at least have a record—photographs, scale drawings, perhaps a plaster cast.”

“It will take all night,” I protested.

“What does that matter?” Emerson demanded.

I
t did take most of the night, for Emerson was not satisfied until the object had been photographed from every angle and detailed notes taken. Under close examination, certain minor flaws were apparent in what had seemed a perfect work of art. One of the small fingers had been broken off. The long embroidered sash and the wide collar had once been inlaid with tiny bits of glass or precious stone; almost all of them were missing. There was a hole on the Blue Crown, in the center of the brow. Here the uraeus serpent, the symbol of kingship, had reared its lordly head. It must have been a separate piece, inserted into the crown, and it had fallen out.

“Poor little king,” I said whimsically. “Without the guardian serpent on his brow he was helpless to prevent the humiliation of being passed from hand to greedy hand, and exposed to the gaze of the curious.”

The only person who responded to this poetic statement was Emerson. “Stop talking nonsense, Peabody.”

After the Vandergelts had left and Ramses and Nefret had gone to their house, Emerson dropped off to sleep immediately. I never allow fatigue to keep me from my nightly routine, so I sat before my dressing table giving my hair its customary one hundred strokes. Candles on either side of the mirror lent a ghostly softness to my reflected face, and the soothing effect of the repeated strokes allowed my mind to wander.