Mr Impossible (5 page)

Rupert said. “He
seemed to be praying. He certainly paid me no heed.”

The mistress and
the maid exchanged glances.

“
I will go to
Wadid,” Leena said.

She went out.

The widow turned
away from Rupert and returned to the ransacked table. She knelt and
moved a book to the left. She shook sand off a paper and set it under
the book. She picked up pens from the floor and set them back on the
inkstand. The angry spark was gone from her eyes, and the flush had
faded, leaving her face dead white, which made the smudges under her
eyes appear darker than ever.

Rupert wasn’t
sure what made him think of it, but he had a vivid picture in his
mind of a long-ago time: his little cousin Maria weeping over her
dolls after Rupert and her brothers had used them for target
practice.

He didn’t
have any sisters, and wasn’t used to girls crying, and it made
him frantic. When he offered to try to glue the dolls’ mangled
parts back together, little Maria whacked him with one of the larger
mutilated corpses and blackened his eye. What a relief that was! He
vastly preferred physical punishment to the other thing: the nasty
stew of emotion.

The dark smudges
under Mrs. Pembroke’s eyes and the cold white of her face
affected him much as his cousin’s tears had done. But he hadn’t
broken any dolls. He hadn’t hurt this lady’s
brother—wasn’t sure, in fact, he’d ever clapped
eyes on the fellow. Rupert certainly hadn’t touched her
precious papyrus. There was no reason for him to feel… wrong.

Maybe it was
something he’d eaten. The prison swill, perhaps. Or maybe it
was a touch of plague.

“
The thing’s
definitely gone, then?” he said lightly. “Not misplaced,
or mixed in with the other papers?”

“
I should
hardly confuse an ancient papyrus with ordinary papers,” she
said.

“
Well, I’m
dashed if I can make out why anyone would go to so much bother for a
papyrus,” he said. “On the way here, I was accosted at
least six times by Egyptians waving so-called artifacts in my face.
You can hardly pass a coffee shop without some cheery fellow popping
out to offer you handfuls of papyri—not to mention his sisters,
daughters, and extra wives. Virgins, all of them, certified and
guaranteed.”

She sank back on
her heels and looked up at him. “Mr. Carsington,” she
said, “I believe it is long past time we settled one important
matter.”

“
Not that I’d
be interested, if they were the genuine article,” he went on.
“I could never understand the great to-do about virgins. In my
view, a woman of experience—”

“
Your view is
not solicited, Mr. Carsington,” she said. “It is
unnecessary for you to ‘make out’ why this or that. You
are not here to think. You are to provide the brawn in this
undertaking. I am to provide the brain. Is that clear?”

It was clear to
Rupert that irritating her was an excellent way to prevent
waterworks. The light was back in her eyes, and her skin, though
still pale, was not so taut and corpse-white.

“
Clear as a
bell,” he said.

“
Good.”
She indicated the divan opposite. “Kindly sit down. I have a
great deal to say, and it is tiring to look up at you. You needn’t
take off your shoes first. Eastern custom is inconvenient for those
wearing European dress. Not that I am at all sure why people here go
to the trouble of taking off their shoes before stepping on the rugs,
when the sand easily covers rugs, mats, divans, and everything else
with no help from us.”

He took the seat
she indicated, plumped up a cushion, and leaned back on it. As she
settled onto the divan opposite, he noticed that she had shed her
shoes. He caught a glimpse of slim, stockinged feet before she tucked
her legs under her.

He doubted she’d
done it on purpose. She was not that type of female at all. But those
nearly naked feet teased all the same, and the usual heat started
down low.

The lady opened her
mouth to start lecturing, or whatever she had in mind, and he was
turning his mind to imagining the view from her ankles up when Leena
burst in. She pulled in after her the sturdy, cheerful fellow Rupert
had waved to in the courtyard a short while earlier.

“
Drugged!”
the maid cried. “Look at him!”

Everyone looked at
Wadid. He smiled and salaamed.

“
All day long
he has been smoking hashish—or perhaps it was opium—mixed
in his tobacco,” Leena said. “I could not tell what it
was, because a perfume disguised the smell. But anyone can see that
Wadid is in a heavenly place, and looks kindly upon everyone. He can
tell us nothing.”

Rupert got up,
walked up to within inches of the gatekeeper’s face, and peered
down into his half-closed eyes. Wadid smiled and nodded and said
something in singsong.

Rupert grasped him
by the upper arms, lifted him off the floor, and held him aloft for a
moment. Wadid’s eyes opened wide. Rupert gave the man a shake,
then set him down.

Wadid stared at
him, mouth opening and closing.

“
Tell him,
the next time I pick him up, I’ll pitch him out the window,”
Rupert said. ‘Tell him, if he doesn’t want to test his
flying skills, I recommend he answer a few questions.“

Leena spoke
rapidly. Wadid stuttered an answer, occasionally darting a frightened
look at Rupert.

“
He says
thank you, kind sir,” Leena said. “His head is much
clearer now.”

“
I thought it
might be,” Rupert said. He looked enquiringly at Mrs. Pembroke.

Her remarkable
eyes, too, had opened very wide. Her mouth, previously taut with
disapproval, shaped an O. The prim expression had acted, apparently,
as a sort of corset. Freed of it, her mouth was soft and full.

He would like to
pick her up, too, and bring that amazing face close to his and test
the softness of those lips…

But he was not
that
stupid.

“
You wished
to interrogate him, I believe?” he said.

She blinked, and
turning to Wadid, launched into a stream of foreign talk.

Wadid answered
haltingly.

While they went
back and forth, Rupert departed, in search of coffee.

After a few wrong
turns in the maze, he found the stairway, and soon, on the ground
floor, what looked like the cooking area.

Its occupants had
apparently deserted the place in great haste. He saw evidence of a
meal in preparation. A bowl of chickpeas, partly mashed. Wooden
implements on the floor. A ball of dough on a stone. A pot on the
brazier.

He found the silver
coffee service with its tiny, handle-less cups, but discerned no
signs of coffee.

He stepped into a
small, adjoining room, which looked to be a sort of pantry. He
started opening jars. Then he became aware of movement. A faint
rustling. Rats?

He looked in the
direction of the sound. Several tall crockery jars stood in a dark
corner. He saw a fragment of blue cloth.

He crossed the
room. The lurker attempted to dart past him, but Rupert caught the
back of his shirt. “Ah, not so quick, my fine fellow,” he
said. “First, let’s have a friendly chat, shall we?”

Chapter 3

THOUGH ONE COULD
NOT TELL BY LOOKING AT her, though she seemed her usual controlled
self, it took Daphne a good deal more time than it did Wadid to
recover from Mr. Carsington’s demonstration of brute strength.

She had felt, for a
moment, like a character in
The
Thousand and One Nights
who’d inadvertently let a genie out of a bottle. A large,
powerful, and uncontrollable genie.

She tried to
concentrate on her few clues, but her mind wouldn’t cooperate.
It produced, too clearly, the look on Mr. Carsington’s face
when she raised her veil.

She had no name for
the look. He was a man far outside the narrow bounds of her
experience. She could hardly name her feelings, either: a wild
hammering within and a chaos of thoughts and no way to make sense of
a single one. There was only a powerful awareness—of the world
having turned wild, unpredictable, and unrecognizable— and the
sense of something dangerous let loose.

This was
irrational, she knew.

But she was too
overset to think clearly: Miles gone, the fine papyrus stolen, the
house abandoned, the doorkeeper drugged.

When her mind
worked in the proper manner, Daphne did not believe in genii, good or
bad.

She made herself
examine matters logically.

Mr. Carsington was
merely an English male of above average but by no means unusual
height, she reminded herself. He appeared larger than life because
(a) the average Turk or Egyptian was several inches shorter, and (b)
he had the muscular physique more commonly associated with certain
members of the laboring classes, such as blacksmiths—and
boxers, possibly, although she couldn’t be certain, never
having seen a boxer in the flesh.

Furthermore, the
demonstration of brute strength proved how well Mr. Carsington suited
her purposes. With him about, no one would dare intimidate her or
stand in her way or refuse to cooperate.

True, he was a
blockhead, but that, too, was to her advantage. He could not confuse
or cow her as her erudite husband had done so often and easily. Mr.
Carsington would not assume, as Miles did, that she was too
intellectual and unworldly to comprehend everyday life’s coarse
realities.

Considered calmly
and rationally, in short, Mr. Carsington was
perfect
.

Her mind once more
in proper order, she focused on Wadid.

He was more than
willing to talk now. The trouble was, he didn’t know anything.

He didn’t
know which coffee shop boy had delivered the drugged tobacco. How
could he? There were scores of such boys inCairo, he said. They ran
away. They died of plague. They found work elsewhere. Who could keep
track of them? He had no idea where the tainted tobacco had come
from—assuredly not from Wadid’s usual source, one
ofCairo’s more respectable coffee shops.

As to who had
invaded the house and driven the other servants away, Wadid was
equally in the dark. He’d been in a beautiful dream, he said.
People came and went. Dream people or real people, he could not say.

On learning that
someone had stolen the master’s beautiful papyrus, he wept and
blamed himself. He hoped the master would return soon and beat him,
he said.

But please, he
begged, would the good lady tell her giant not to tear him limb from
limb? The lady was kind and merciful, everyone knew. Had she not
brought Akmed back from the dead? The men carry him in, and all the
breath is gone from his body. Then she gives him a magic drink, and
behold, he breathes again.

Akmed had in fact
been breathing, and the “magic drink” was tea from
Daphne’s precious stores, the sovereign remedy for every
ailment, physical, emotional, or moral. But having started talking,
Wadid showed no signs of stopping. She let him carry on his monologue
while she wondered what had become of her “giant.”

He’d been
gone rather a while.

Gone back to the
consulate, no doubt, she thought grimly. And who could blame him?

She had a man’s
mind in a woman’s body. The feminine arts were a far greater
mystery to her than Egyptian writing. She had at least a rational
hope of solving the latter. But when it came to femininity, her case
was hopeless. Virgil’s efforts to change her had only
infuriated her—quite as though she
were
a man.

Had she learnt
those mysterious arts, had she behaved more prettily with Mr. Salt,
he might not have been so quick to dismiss her concerns and fob off
on her his aristocratic lummox of an aide.

She had behaved
even less prettily with Mr. Carsington. A proper woman would have
exercised more tact. Even dumb beasts had feelings, and men could be
sensitive about the oddest things.

She rose. She would
have to find him. She would return to the consulate, if necessary,
and apologize.

“
We’ll
speak more of this later, Wadid,” she said. “Go back to
your place. Perhaps while you sit quietly, you’ll remember
more.” She hurried across the room and out of the door through
which Mr. Carsington had vanished.