Egyptian Enigma

by LJM Owen

  —

  She was right. The following morning, at the appointed hour, Elizabeth walked into the Main Reading Room. She felt wretched, but adrenaline infused her limbs increasing with every step towards her confrontation with Judy. She heard the shuffling of books being sorted into pigeon holes behind the customer-service desk and stopped to collect herself.

  A grinning face popped out and surprised her instead. Amy!

  ‘Hello, you. You’re in early. Did you get a call too?’

  ‘I…aah…’

  ‘In need of a coffee? Me too.’ Amy stepped clear of the desk and waved a book in Elizabeth’s direction. ‘I’ll just finish sorting these, then how about we nick downstairs and grab a cappuccino?’

  ‘Sounds, ah…good. What do you mean, a call?’

  ‘Judy’s had to go away. Family emergency.’

  Only by dint of supreme effort did Elizabeth refrain from cursing a blue streak.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Although it was a little too warm for such activities, the following Thursday night found Elizabeth curled up on her bed with a steaming cup of Turkish apple tea in one hand, a shedding cat in the other and a rather sleepy Henry on the screen.

  ‘I’ve been through all the scrolls we’ve managed to track down from the Golden Tomb now,’ Henry said, ‘and translated them to the best of my ability.’

  ‘Could you bring them up on the screen?’

  ‘The originals or my translations?’

  ‘Your translations.’

  Elizabeth shifted the screen down page after page, reviewing Henry’s work. ‘They’re unusual, certainly, but they all seem to be either innocuous lists of goods, lists of ancestors or variations on spells and incantations from the Book of the Dead. It’s slightly unusual to have business letters in a tomb but certainly not unheard of.’

  ‘I concur, but somehow…it’s like something’s off. I just can’t figure out what.’

  Elizabeth had to agree.

  ‘And all of the scrolls had those little star shapes and semicircles somewhere on them. Whoever inscribed the Golden Tomb scrolls, I’d say they were all prepared by one person. Would that be unusual?’

  ‘I’m not sure, to tell you the truth. Perhaps each tomb was assigned a main scribe to prepare the prayers?’

  ‘Perhaps…’ Henry looked at Elizabeth closely. ‘Are you okay? I thought you’d be feeling great after last week’s sleuthing session.’

  ‘I do…well, I did…things are a bit all over the place at the moment, actually.’

  ‘Tutoring?’

  ‘I still feel as though I’m not managing the class properly, and I’m annoyed that’s it’s taking me so long to figure out which Pharaoh we need to concentrate on.’

  ‘I thought it was Siptah.’

  ‘That seems like the right idea, but I still can’t prove it and…’ Elizabeth hesitated to mention the letter from Judy. She was so frustrated at being denied answers about her father’s death she sometimes felt like screaming. ‘Oh, I don’t know. And then it looks like I have a date this weekend, but I’m not sure whether it’s such a good idea.’

  ‘Ooh. With Nathan?’

  Elizabeth was nonplussed. ‘No, Llew. Why did you think it would be with Nathan? He’s not interested in me that way, is he?’

  Henry paused for a little too long. ‘Ah, no. He’s never said anything like that. I just guessed…incorrectly.’

  In the phrenic library, Oliver suggested that Henry was not being entirely truthful. Did Elizabeth need to worry about Nathan’s feelings? Surely if he was interested in her, he would have said something by now.

  —

  Trying hard not to be excited, in case this wasn’t actually a date, Elizabeth stood outside the soaring glass entrance to the National Arboretum centre. Plantations of infant trees covered the surrounding hills as Canberra sought to make the best of a terrible legacy: the devastation wrought by a record-setting firestorm that had painted the midday sky red, then black, from horizon to horizon as ash and burning leaves rained down. Lives, houses and a huge swath of forest had been consumed by that fearsome bushfire. The Arboretum had risen from the ashes.

  Elizabeth smoothed down the front of her favourite aqua dress, adjusting the thin red belt around her waist. She had dressed beautifully – hopefully in an understated way – in case she had misunderstood Llew’s intentions. The wait was not made any easier by the fact that he was late.

  Five minutes was understandable, ten maybe excusable. But he was now fifteen minutes late with no message to explain why. Self-respect dictated that Elizabeth should leave at this point, or at the very least call to find out where he was.

  As she reached for her phone, it rang.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Llew’s liquid Welsh tones said. ‘My car broke down. Could we reschedule to next weekend?’

  Trying not to be annoyed, Elizabeth returned to her car. Including preparation and travel time, she would have wasted two hours that could have been better spent going through the sinus scans of Nineteenth Dynasty Pharaohs that Nathan had sent her.

  As she turned the corner into her street Elizabeth spotted Llew’s car peeking from her driveway. Why had he come here? Then she spotted Alice’s and Nathan’s cars. What was going on?

  Working hard to keep her natural paranoia under control, Elizabeth opened the front door. ‘Hello?’ she called, as she walked into Taid’s library.

  There was no-one there.

  ‘Hello?’

  In fact, there was no-one in the house.

  ‘Taid? Grandmère?’

  Wandering into the kitchen…

  ‘Surprise!’

  Elizabeth clutched at her chest, taking in the sight of her whole family and snoop of sleuths gathered in the beautifully decorated conservatory. They threw their hands into the air and cried, ‘Happy birthday!’ She had been so focused on Judy, work, tutoring and the Golden Tomb that she hadn’t given her upcoming birthday a single thought.

  From the middle of the group, Llew waved, looking as stunning as ever in a form-fitting black shirt and jeans. As his subterfuge had clearly been for a good cause, Elizabeth’s annoyance with him evaporated.

  ‘I made your favourite!’ Matty yelled, his blue dress shirt shimmering in the light of myriad white rice-paper lanterns. ‘Duck à l’orange in the proper salt crust and everything.’

  ‘Yum!’

  Five small but rich courses of incredible fare later, Elizabeth, her family and four friends slumped in their chairs around the long wrought-iron table in the back courtyard. Softly lit rice-paper lanterns floated above them and purring furry bellies were strewn across the ground below.

  ‘Now for your presents,’ Sam said, dabbing a drop of sparkling water from her yellow cowl-neck top. ‘And we’ve broken the rule!’

  It was family tradition to receive one present from the family each year. Wondering what more this wonderful break from her usual Saturday-night slog in front of the computer screen might bring, Elizabeth closed her eyes as directed…

  And opened them to the golden funerary mask of Khaenweset!

  Elizabeth gasped. ‘How?’

  ‘Rhoz found the data online, I printed it out, then Nathan covered it with gold leaf,’ Alice said.

  Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, thank you! You have no idea how much this means…’

  ‘And,’ Llew exclaimed, not to be outdone, ‘as we all know how much you admire her, we’re pleased to present you with this.’ He held out a conservator’s box adorned with a museum label: One set of skeletal remains, Hatshepsut

  ‘Oh, my.’

  ‘We hope you like it, Beth,’ Taid said. ‘Both gifts are from all ten of us, though your friends came up with the ideas.’

  Feeling overwhelmed, Elizabeth’s throat wouldn’t work properly as she tried to thank them.r />
  ‘We know,’ Grandmère said simply. ‘Now, who would like another coffee?’

  Hours later, after a round of cake, a tale of averted duck disaster from earlier in the day, and a heated debate between Rhoz and Llew on the gender of some of Britain’s most famous generals, everyone crowded around the front door of the house to say their goodbyes.

  As he crunched down the gravel driveway Nathan, who had said little all night, turned to face Elizabeth. ‘I hope you had a great day?’

  ‘It was fabulous!’

  ‘To make it even better I’ll send you more of the sinus data tonight.’

  ‘X-rays of skeletal material are a girl’s best friend!’ said Elizabeth, only half in jest.

  Rhoz was the last of her friends to leave. Leaning in to give her a quick hug, Elizabeth was reminded again of how tall, stunning, strong and impressive the Breton librarian was. Closing the door behind her, Elizabeth sighed…

  And heard two echoing sighs.

  She looked askance at Sam and Mai, who had stayed with her as she said goodbye to her friends. All three sisters giggled in unison. Elizabeth could make an educated guess as to what lay behind Sam’s sigh, but as for Mai’s she had no idea. ‘It was really nice of Nathan to suggest this,’ Sam said.

  Elizabeth felt a tinge of concern. ‘What?’

  ‘This was all Nathan’s idea,’ Mai said. ‘He came to see me at the Library. The mask, the birthday party…it was all his idea.’

  Oh dear.

  —

  The following Saturday morning, after several extreme­ly late nights reviewing all the images Nathan had sent through, Elizabeth sipped a sustaining cup of Earl Grey from her favourite Eeyore mug. Biting into a lemon and currant Welsh dragon biscuit, she pored over the results of her analysis.

  She had examined the sutures where the bony plates of the skull had fused over time in all ten of their Pharaohs and all seven of the Golden Tomb mummies. She had counted and recorded the positions of their foramina – the tiny openings for blood vessels – across their crania and jaws. She had looked at the shape of their ossicles, the tiny bones of the middle ear. Then she had assessed the shape of each person’s sinuses.

  Was each person’s frontal sinus – the space behind the forehead – bean-shaped, leaf-shaped, fan-shaped or pyramid-shaped? Were their maxillary sinuses – the ones sitting behind their teeth – triangular, leaf-shaped, scapular or kidney-shaped? Were the spaces behind their eyes square, trapezoid, round or ellipsoid? Finally, were their nasal cavities – the very ones hinted at by Elizabeth’s many dreams of stone noses lost from ancient Egyptian statues – triangular, trapezoid, pear-shaped or scalloped?

  And the answer was…exactly as Elizabeth had thought it would be. Running all the data through the usual analyses she would have applied to a dental non-metric analysis, she produced neighbour-joining trees that showed how each individual was related to all the others. Lo and behold, Golden Tomb mummies two to five grouped tightly; they were closely related to Tomb mummy one in one direction, mummy seven in the other, and Siptah somewhere in the middle. Tomb mummy one grouped closely with Seti the Second and Tausret, with Merneptah close by. The five Ramesses and Seti the First also clustered in one part of the tree, closer to mummy one and most distant from mummy seven.

  Mummy six sat off to one side, not as distant from the Pharaohs as Tomb mummy seven, but not particularly related to anyone else in the tree either.

  The results were fine, and reinforced Elizabeth’s confidence that she was able to assess skeletal remains reasonably well. But they still didn’t provide an answer as to which Pharaoh had commissioned the Golden Tomb and which of the mummies had been laid to rest inside the coffin.

  Arrgh! What else could she try? There had to be another way to figure this out.

  ‘Lizbet, could you please let Cho and Mai know lunch is ready?’ Grandmère called from downstairs.

  Elizabeth bit down on her frustration at being interrupted, not daring to ask if Sam or Matty could go instead. ‘Oui, Grandmère.’

  As Elizabeth pushed the walled garden’s gate open she caught sight of Mai doubled over, clutching her stomach. Nainai Cho was patting her back.

  Elizabeth raced to her sister’s side and knelt beside her. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Nainai’s expression signalled deep concern.

  Mai was gulping in huge lungfuls of air. ‘I’m just… I’m just… I can’t stop crying.’

  Elizabeth and Nainai guided Mai to the garden table, carefully removing a trowel from her grasp.

  ‘Can you tell us what’s wrong?’ Elizabeth asked.

  ‘It’s…it’s everything Dr Strzelecki was saying. My mother really did love me, does love me, she just can’t say anything. I just…’

  ‘Mai, my darling,’ Nainai said, reaching for Mai’s hand. ‘I’m certain Dr Strzelecki is right. Your mother loves you. And I’m certain she tells you in the ways she can.’

  Mai turned a tear-stained face to her grandmother. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘From what you’ve told me I imagine her spirit has been crushed…by tradition, by her own parents, by having to hide from the world that you are her daughter.’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Yǐn shuǐ sī yuán,’ Nainai said. When you drink water, remember its source. ‘I can be sure because, despite all the disapproval she’s faced, the sadness she’s lived with by being unable to speak to you directly as her child, she still raised you to be a strong person.’

  As her sobs eased Mai began to hiccup.

  ‘Even if she doesn’t say the words,’ Nainai continued, ‘I’m certain she tells you that she loves you. Perhaps it’s not in a way you have noticed yet.’

  Mai’s expression was like the sun peeking through storm clouds. ‘She always squeezes my hand when no-one else can see.’

  At a loss as to what to say or how to lessen Mai’s pain, Elizabeth could only make an approving noise in the back of her throat.

  ‘It’s a shame she didn’t know nüshu, or some other means of communicating only with you,’ Nainai said.

  ‘Nüshu? Women’s writing?’ Mai translated.

  ‘A women’s-only script in Hunan province for passing secret messages,’ Nainai said. ‘It was used by friends, women in business, women in families, to keep important information from prying eyes. If you didn’t know it existed, if you thought you were looking at normal writing, you could mistake it for a regular message about something completely different.’

  Ping! Images of tiny stars and moons in the margins of ancient papyrus scrolls flashed through Elizabeth’s mind. The door to her phrenic library began to open…

  ‘I wish we’d had something like that,’ Mai was saying.

  Elizabeth exerted every ounce of willpower to focus on her sister. She was determined to ensure Mai was okay before thinking about the scrolls from the Golden Tomb. For once, archaeology could wait. ‘I don’t want to rush you at all,’ she said, ‘but Grandmère Maddie sent me out to get you for lunch. Would you like me to let her know we’ll be a while? And I can get you some water, Mai?’

  ‘Could you let Madeleine know Mai and I will be having a late lunch, and everyone else should go ahead without us?’ Nainai said.

  ‘If you’re sure?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ Mai said, wiping her cheeks.

  The door to her phrenic library wrenched itself open as Elizabeth turned to exit the garden. A secret language. A hidden code. Was it possible? Could the stars and moons actually mean something? Could this be the clue she needed to determine who was buried in the Golden Tomb?

  Chapter Seventeen

  After a short walk by the lake in the summer heat to focus her thoughts, tracked the entire way by black swans and the occasional seagull, which presumably hoped she was about to drop a potato chip, Elizabeth headed to Addendum cafe to explain he
r new idea to Nathan and Rhoz. Llew was apparently at a conference in Sydney.

  Lining up to order their coffees had become an exercise in seeing just how far the waiter would push Rhoz’s temper.

  ‘And what can I get you fine ladies – and sir – today?’ he asked.

  ‘Three cappuccinos,’ Nathan said. ‘And today is on me.’

  ‘That’s different. After I went to all the trouble of remembering your order, you go and change it?’ the waiter said to Rhoz, winking.

  ‘Thank you, but a cappuccino is what I’d like today.’

  ‘Always changing their minds, aren’t they?’ he commented to Nathan, who stepped back, shaking his head.

  ‘Who’s they?’ Rhoz asked loudly.

  ‘I wasn’t speaking to you,’ the waiter answered, just as loudly. Heads at nearby tables turned toward them.

  ‘I thought you were.’ Rhoz seemed to fill the space around her more solidly than usual. ‘Perhaps you would remember coffee orders the first time around if you focused on your job instead of flirting with the customers.’

  ‘Can I help you?’ An older man had walked out of the kitchen.

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ the waiter said.

  ‘Everything is not fine,’ Rhoz said. ‘Each time I come here to place an order this man makes a comment about my looks or my being a woman. I’ve made it clear I’m not interested. I just want a coffee!’

  The waiter had turned red. ‘I’m only being nice. You should appreciate it while you can.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the older man apologised. He turned to the waiter. ‘You’ve had two warnings about this already. Take the rest of the day off, and be at my office at nine in the morning to discuss if you have any kind of future here.’

  With a face like thunder, the waiter puffed out his chest. ‘You can’t do that to me!’

  His manager fixed him with a steely gaze, then smiled. ‘Yes, I can.’

  Yanking off his apron, the waiter balled it up and threw it across the counter at Rhoz. ‘This isn’t worth it.’ He sneered at Rhoz. ‘You’re certainly not worth it. I’m outta here.’ He turned on the heel of his right foot and stormed into the kitchen.