Mr Impossible (4 page)

THE BATHS WERE a
sinful luxury Daphne had discovered early in her stay here. The tiled
chambers of the women’s bath shut out the outside world and its
troubles. Here one need only yield to being pampered and listen to
the other women laugh and gossip.

Even today the bath
worked its magic. She left with a clearer head and a calmer spirit.
She was perfectly capable of working out a method for finding Miles,
she told herself as she mounted her donkey. She only needed a man to
do what she couldn’t. In that case, the bigger the better, as
Leena suggested—and Mr. Carsington was taller by a head than
most of the men hereabouts. He had to be strong, too, to survive a
collision with Muhammad Ali’s brutal soldiers. All Mr.
Carsington needed was a brain—and Daphne could supply that.

Letting the drivers
manage their donkeys and clear the way through the crowded streets,
she and Leena proceeded at the usual fast clip—dodging camels,
horses, peddlers, and beggars—to the house in the Esbekiya.

Outside its gate
they dismounted. Leaving Leena to pay the donkey boys, Daphne entered
the shaded passageway bordering the courtyard. She was nearing the
stairs when a tall form emerged from the shadows and a deep,
instantly recognizable voice said, “
Twenty
quid
?”

She stopped short,
and her heart skidded to a stop as well, then started again, far less
steadily.

The area was well
shaded, but it wasn’t nearly as dark as the Citadel dungeon.

She had no trouble
seeing him now, even through her widow’s veil. He was tall and
broad-shouldered, as she’d discerned in the darkness. What she
had not been able to see was the starkly handsome face.

Black eyebrows
arched over dark, laughing eyes that looked down at her over a long,
insolent nose. Laughter lurked at the corners of the too-sensuous
mouth.

Heat washed through
her in waves, burning away her hard-won calm and confidence and
leaving her, for a mo—ment, swamped in self-consciousness, like
the gawky schoolgirl she’d once been.

But she’d
never been as shy as she ought, as Virgil had made clear often
enough. She wasn’t too shy now to take in the rest: the
exquisitely tailored coat, waistcoat, and trousers, the crisp shirt
and neckcloth. The instant’s glance was enough to sear into her
mind a vivid image of the lean, powerful body the close-fitting
garments only emphasized.

Her mouth went dry
and her brain went away, and for a moment nothing made sense at all.
Only for a moment, though. Her brain came back, and “Mr.
Carsington,” she said as soon as she got her tongue untied.

‘
Twenty
quid,“ he repeated. ”Three purses. That’s what you
argued Sheik Whatshisname down to. At the baths I learned it’s
the going rate for a
eunuch
.“

“
The more
expensive eunuchs, yes,” Daphne said, quickly adding, “I
did not expect to see you so soon. You’ve even had time to
bathe. Miraculous.” Her mind produced an image of the gentleman
wearing only a
mahzam
—a Turkish towel—wrapped
about his waist.

She told her mind
to
stop it
. She should not have smoked at the baths, even to
be polite. It left a bad taste and made one dizzy. She should not
have listened to the women’s lewd talk. It had given her
smoke-addled mind all sorts of improper ideas.

Ordinarily she took
no notice of men, except as obstacles in her path, which in her
experience appeared to be their primary function.

She moved past him
and started up the stairs, talking rapidly. “It is amazing, is
it not, Leena? The Turks usually take hours and hours for the
smallest negotiations. I had thought we’d no hope of getting
started before tomorrow.”

“
I don’t
doubt the sheik would have liked to drag on ne-gotiations in the
usual leisurely style,” Mr. Carsington said, “but you
wore him out.”

“
The prison
was
disgusting
,” Leena informed him as she trailed
Daphne up the stairs. ‘To get rid of the stink, we went to the
baths. We smoked, we talked with the other women, we learned some
rude jokes, and now we are not so sick in the stomach and crazy in
the head.“

“
Smoking?”
he said. “Rude jokes? Excellent. I knew this would be more
interesting than collecting stones.”

RUPERT WATCHED MRS.
Pembroke continue up the stairs and through the door in an angry
swish of black silk. She had flounced away from the sheik in much the
same fetching way.

Since he’d
found her entertaining, Rupert was delighted to learn, shortly after
her departure, that she was not, as he’d assumed, of Tryphena’s
generation—old enough, in other words, to be his mother.

Beechey had told
him that Miles Archdale, the missing brother, was an antiquarian
scholar in his early thirties, and the sister a widow a few years
younger.

Rupert had also
learned that the plague, which had kept him confined toAlexandriafor
weeks, had trapped those inCairoas well. The quarantine had only
recently been lifted. Otherwise, Mr. Archdale and his sister would be
inThebesby now. According to the secretary, Archdale was eager to
test his language theories on the temples and tombs ofUpper Egypt.

Beechey also said
that the brother was bound to turn up sooner or later, perhaps the
worse for dissipation. One couldn’t tell the sister this, of
course, but the consul general was certain the servant Akmed had
lied.

Cairooffered
entertainment for all tastes, and men “disappeared” for
days into brothels and opium dens. Archdale was probably still
carousing in such a place. No doubt his servant had smoked too much
hashish, and ended up annoying somebody, who paid him with a
flogging.

Rupert was on no
account to enlighten Mrs. Pembroke. He was to humor her.

“
You might
inquire at the guardhouses and that sort of thing,” Beechey had
said. “I’d advise you to question the servant privately.
If you do run Archdale to ground, or he turns up on his own, as is
more likely, give her whatever version of events he prefers. I cannot
stress enough the importance of remaining on cordial terms with them.
They are in a position to contribute a great deal to our efforts
here, in both the scholarly and financial senses. Mr. Salt relies
upon you to exercise the utmost discretion, tact, and delicacy.”

Rupert had nodded
wisely while privately wondering if Beechey, like Archdale’s
servant, had been smoking too much hashish lately.

Any sober person
would have understood that Rupert Carsington was exactly the wrong
man for any assignment requiring discretion, tact, and delicacy.
Rupert himself could have said so, and normally would. But he liked
the way Mrs. Pembroke twitched her skirts when she was vexed, and he
wanted to see what she looked like. And so for once he held his
tongue and tried to look tactful and discreet.

It wasn’t a
pose he could maintain for long, he knew.

He followed the
maidservant up the stairs and into the house, through a zigzagging
series of halls and rooms— each a step up or a step down from
the previous one—and finally into a lofty room.

At one end was a
raised area, its floor covered withTurkeycarpets. Along its three
sides ran a low banquette covered with cushions. A wide, squat table,
heaped with books and papers, occupied most of the space in the
center of the raised area. A narrow shelf on one side of the room
held a great lot of small wooden figures.

The widow looked at
the table, then sank to her knees and started shuffling through the
heaps.

“
Mistress?”
said Leena.

“
This isn’t
the way I left it,” Mrs. Pembroke said.

“
How can you
tell?” Rupert said.

“
I was
working on the new papyrus,” she said. “I always arrange
the materials in a certain way. The papyrus to the right for
reference. The copy in the center. The table of signs below. The
Rosetta inscription here. The Coptic lexi-con alongside. The grammar
notes here. There is an order. There must be. One must work
systematically, or it is hopeless.” The pitch of her voice
climbed. ‘The papyrus and the copy are gone. All that work…
all those days un-rolling it… all my care in making a precise
copy…“

She rose
unsteadily. “Where are the servants? And Akmed . Is he all
right?”

“
Check on the
servants,” Rupert told Leena. To Mrs. Pemroke he said, “Calm
down. Count to ten.”

She looked at
him—or appeared to have her head turned in his general
direction.

“
Do you never
take that thing off?” he said impatiently.

“
He must have
been remarkable, the late lamented, to war-rant so much grief.”
He made a sweeping gesture encom-passing the heavy veil and the black
silk. “It must be as hot as Hades under all that. No wonder
you’re addled.”

She went on looking
in his direction for a moment, then abruptly threw the veil back from
her face.

And Rupert felt as
though someone had given him a sharp thump in the head with a heavy
Turkish staff.

“
Well,”
he said, when he’d mustered the wind to speak again. “Well.”
And he thought that maybe they should have worked up to it more
gradually.

He saw green,
green, deeply shadowed eyes set above high cheekbones in a creamy
heart-shaped face framed with silky, dark red hair. She wasn’t
pretty at all. Pretty was ordinary. She wasn’t beautiful,
either, not by any English standard. She was something altogether out
of the common run of beauty.

Tryphena owned
numerous volumes dealing withEgypt, including all of the
French
Description de I’Egypte
that had been published
thus far. Rupert had seen this face in somebody’s color
illustration of a tomb or temple. He remembered it clearly: a
red-haired woman, naked but for a golden collar about her neck, her
arms stretched toward the heavens.

Naked would be
good. His experienced eye told him the mortal lady’s figure
might well be as extraordinary as her face.

Rather like a
temperamental goddess, she pulled off the gloomy headdress and flung
it down.

Leena hurried in.
“They have disappeared!” she cried. “All of them!”

“
Really?”
Rupert said. “That’s interesting.”

He turned to the
widow. Her face was chalk white. Devil take it, was she going to
faint? The only feminine habit he feared and hated more than weeping
was fainting.

“
We all
thought your brother was lost in a brothel,” he said. “But
this news makes me think, maybe not”

A flush overspread
her too-pale countenance, and her green eyes sparked. “A
brothel?”

“
A house of
ill repute,” he explained. “Where men hire women to do
what most women won’t do unless you marry them, and oftentimes
not even then.”

“
I know what
a brothel is,” she said.

“
Apparently,
theCairobrothels make theParisones look like Quaker nurseries,”
he said. “Not that I speak with absolute certainty. The truth
is, my recollections ofParisare hazy at best.”

Her eyes narrowed.
“What you do or do not remember ofParisis of no relevance
whatsoever at present,” she said.

“
I only
wanted to point out how immense a temptation it is,” he said.
“Only a saint—like one of my brothers—could resist
it. So naturally, not knowing how saintly your own brother was—”

“
You and your
associates simply assumed that Miles was cavorting with prostitutes
and dancing girls.”

“
And what
with the hashish and opium and whatnot, we supposed he’d lost
all sense of time.”

“
I see,”
she said. “And so you were assigned to keep me occupied until
Miles came or was carried home.”

“
Yes, that’s
how it was all explained to me,” he said. “It seemed
simple enough. A brother missing—we can put it down to drugs
and women. But now we’ve lost a papyrus, not to mention the
servants. Matters grow complicated.”

“
I do not
understand how bad people could come here,” Leena said. “The
doorkeeper Wadid was in his place when we came. He said nothing of
any disturbance.”

“
That fellow
sitting on the stone bench near the gate?”