I sat back in the chair, clasping the ledger to my chest. It was unthinkable, and yet I was thinking it. The mummified babies in the priest’s hole. It was possible, I thought, with a sudden sick twist in my gut.
I had to find the natron, I decided. That was the first, logical step. If the natron was still here, both barrels full, I must be wrong, and I would thank God on my knees for it.
Just as I rose Brisbane entered, his hair windblown from coming across the moor, dark crescents shadowing his eyes. He took one look at my stricken face and came straight to the point.
“What is the trouble?”
I put out my hand with the ledger. “Natron. He ordered two barrels of it from an unnamed source two years ago.”
I said nothing more; I did not need to. Brisbane scrutinised the ledger, then drew in a deep, shuddering breath.
“We must search for the natron,” he said finally. “If it is intact—”
“Then Redwall Allenby did not make a habit of mummifying babies,” I finished. He gave me a grudging nod.
“Precisely. We will search after supper if you are up for it,” he said, his tone lightly mocking.
“I am perfectly well, thank you,” I told him, although in truth I was feeling rather wilted and longed for my bed. A good plate of supper and a few strong cups of tea would restore me, I promised myself. And a stiff whisky.
We separated then to wash for supper, and I went to look in on my pups. I tapped lightly at the door and Godwin opened it, looking a bit the worse for wear. His hair was standing out around his head in great gold tufts and his expression was jubilant.
“Four strong, healthy pups,” he told me. “All born alive, and all taken to the teat,” he announced proudly.
“Indeed?” I said, my voice a trifle faint. “How splendid.”
“Aye, an ugly bunch, but charmers all the same,” he said. He stepped back so I could peek at them. They were all nestled against Florence, nursing happily while she looked down at them with a faintly embarrassed expression. They were ugly, I admitted to myself. They mixed Puggy’s protuberant eyes and lumpy head with Florence’s long nose and skinny legs. It was not a prepossessing combination, but they were winsome in spite of it.
Portia entered then waving several lengths of silk ribbon.
“I’ve brought yellow for the girls and this lovely green stripe for the boy,” she announced. Godwin guffawed and I gave her a repressive look.
“I rather think we could see the difference without ribbons,” I pointed out. She ignored me and began to tie a pretty bow at each pup’s neck.
I turned to Godwin. “Thank you for your help. I am really very grateful. You must choose a pup for your own if you would like one to keep.”
His blue eyes danced merrily. “Would I not? There is nothing grander than a new wee pup in the house.” He nodded toward the fattest of the lot, a peculiar mottled thing with fur that managed to be black, brown, and white at the same time.
“I’ll have tha’ lad there, if you don’t mind,” he told me. Portia tweaked its bow, shooting me a dark look as she did so.
“Excellent choice,” I told him. “You may have him as soon as he is weaned.” Portia grumbled a little, and I fancied then I knew what ailed her.
Godwin tugged his forelock then, in his mischievous little gesture of respect and took his leave. I turned to Portia. “I mean to keep one myself to keep Florence company, and you ought to have one for Puggy.”
She brightened instantly. “I cannot decide,” she announced. “Of course, Godwin took the biggest and the only male, but this one here has the prettiest markings. Isn’t she lovely? Or perhaps this one?” She was asking questions, but expected no answers, and I was grateful. There were too many questions to answer at present, and the most horrible of them was whether or not Redwall Allenby had done something unspeakable to a pair of infants in the name of science.
THE TWENTY-SECOND CHAPTER
Upon such sacrifices, my Cordelia,
The gods themselves throw incense.
—William Shakespeare
King Lear
The evening was a strained one for conversation. Godwin tried his best to talk of pleasant things, but Hilda would have none of it. She merely curled her lip at him and took the first reasonable opportunity to escape to her room. Valerius watched her go, his expression thoughtful as he worked on the plans for the henhouse, labouring with a pencil and rubber over the same drawing until it was sprawling and grubby. Portia prattled on about the puppies and kept dashing upstairs to peek at them. Brisbane was unusually quiet as was I, and I fancied we were both thinking of the coffin lying in the priest’s hole. As soon as the clock struck the hour, we made our excuses to each other, and even Godwin seemed pleased to make an early evening of it.
I looked in on Portia and the pups and listened to Morag grumble for a full ten minutes about her room being turned into a puppy nursery. I appeased her by promising her my pillow in exchange for her nasty one and hastened back downstairs. In the short time I had been upstairs, Brisbane had managed quite a lot. As there was little room to manoeuvre in the study, he had given up part of his bedchamber for our task. The writing table had been swept clean of paper, pens, inks, and blotters, and in their place was a clean sheet and a few instruments, the looks of which I could not like. There were wickedly sharp scissors, blades, hooks, and something that looked like a double-headed corkscrew. I only hoped we would not have need of it.
For lighting he had gathered as many lamps as he could find and stoked up the fire, with the effect that the room was uncomfortably warm. To offset this, he had opened a window to the cold evening air.
He was just bringing in the coffin when I arrived. He did not greet me, but placed it carefully atop the sheet and disappeared back into the study for a moment, returning with a notebook and pencil.
“I locked the door,” he said in reply to my questioning look. “I thought it best if we were not interrupted.”
I nodded and took the notebook. The entire affair was putting me painfully in mind of the occasion upon which Brisbane and I had conducted an informal post-mortem together. He had been recovering from his bullet wound at the time, and I had had to function as his hands. The memory of it still chilled me.
“I’ll take notes, shall I?” I asked brightly.
Brisbane had already stripped off his coat and waistcoat and loosened his collar, dropping his discarded neckcloth over the end of the bedstead. He was folding back his cuffs, baring strong brown wrists when he noticed I was staring at him. I ducked my head instantly and began to scribble nonsense into the notebook.
“You have seen me often enough without my shirt. I did not think it would distress you to watch me take off my waistcoat,” he remarked, tucking the cuffs into neat points.
“I am not disturbed, and you are quite right. I have seen altogether too much of you,” I retorted, still not daring to raise my eyes.
In fact, it had disturbed me, but not in the sense he thought. My husband had never disrobed in front of me, and the times I had seen Brisbane without his shirt—and there had been several—I had come upon him already disrobed. I had never been a witness to the slow, graceful gestures, the unveiling of solid male flesh like a glorious statue being revealed for the first time.
With an Herculean effort, I pulled my thoughts back in line and stepped a little closer to the cool breeze from the window.
“Are you sure you can see properly from there?” he asked.
“Oh, yes, perfectly,” I lied. I made a hasty sketch of the coffin while he removed the lid and laid it aside. When I was done I held it out at arm’s length to gauge its likeness and decided it looked more like a loaf of bread than a coffin. I sighed and turned to a fresh page.
Brisbane was bending over the coffin, inspecting the little remains carefully. I crept closer as he leaned nearer still, running his gaze over every inch of the tiny, linen-wrapped bodies. He put a hand into the coffin and slid it under the first child.
“I shall lift the body out and I want you to hold it while I look underneath.”
“Why can’t you simply put it down on its face?”
“Because I do not wish to damage it further. There may be some clue in the wrapping, and I would like to at least make a cursory examination. Now hold out your arms.”
“No,” I said stepping backward. “I won’t.”
He flicked one quick glance of those imperious witch-black eyes at me. “Yes, you will. Now put down that notebook and take the child.”
I made a rapid calculation. Either Brisbane and I could stand and argue for some minutes and I would end up holding the child, or I could capitulate now and save us both the time and aggravation.
I dropped the notebook and held out my arms. He laid the child gently in them, and I felt a queer, sick lurch in my stomach. He went onto his knees and peered up at the underside of the mummy.
“Oh, do hurry, Brisbane. It is awful,” I murmured.
To his credit, it was but a moment before he relieved me of the grisly burden and replaced it onto the table. He gave me an odd look, but said nothing.
We spent the next several minutes examining the linen wrappings and the tuft of blond hair at the top.
“I must know for sure,” he said finally. “The lozenge pattern of the wrappings is one I have never seen before. I think whoever prepared this child for burial created it, and there may be other clues as well if there are the usual amulets inside the wrappings.”
The next half hour was one of the most gruesome of my life. Each layer of linen had to be carefully unwrapped, every inch of the fabric scrutinised for clues to the child’s identity. I knew what Brisbane and I both suspected, and I knew how desperately I wanted to be wrong. Inch by inch, layer by layer, the linen was unrolled. It gave up a pair of amulets, a peculiar knotted image and an animal, both fashioned of gold.
Brisbane held them up to the light. “It is a tyet,” he said. “The Knot of Isis. Common enough.”
He passed it to me, and I saw a resemblance to a few pieces I had seen in Redwall’s collection already. Brisbane laid the other aside and proceeded with the unrolling.
I scarcely dared to look now, but I could not betray my squeamishness a second time. It was oddly out of character for Brisbane to invite me to participate in an investigation with such good humour; I was not going to let him regret it.
“At last,” he said softly, lifting the last bit of linen free and laying it aside. What remained was barely human. It was clearly a perfectly formed child, born at its full gestation, or very nearly. There was no deformity, no violence upon it, save for the damage inflicted by the rotting coffin. The rest was grotesque, yet oddly peaceful. There was something timeless about the tiny face, a nobility I would not have believed possible. The skin was perfectly dried and stretched taut over its features, giving it the look of some ancient deity come to rest in a faraway land. I could not take my eyes from it.
Brisbane looked away for a moment, then at me, his jaw hardening into an expression I knew quite well.
“This mummy is not ancient,” he said flatly. “I would put it at perhaps two years, and likely less.”
I said nothing for a long moment, wishing he was wrong, and knowing he was not.
“I knew he was a devil, but even I would not have thought him capable of this,” he said, his voice thick with anger.
“You are quite certain about the age of the mummy?”
He gave me a vicious look and I waved him off. “Very well. You are certain.”
“Yes, I am,” he returned coldly. “Those wrappings were no ancient pattern. The amulets are wrong, and there is no heart scarab, not even a place where one ought to have been. And even if the mummy were not wrong for an Egyptian, it is quite wrong for four thousand years ago. Look at the skin, Julia. It is barely dried. Look at the hair. It is bright gold. Gold. Not a colour one usually associates with Egyptians, as you pointed out to me.”
“I know,” I said, spreading my hands. “I just wish you were wrong. I wish I did not know that a man could be capable of such things.”
Brisbane dropped his head, his hands braced on the table. After a deep, shuddering breath, he looked at me, his eyes on a level with mine. “Men are capable of every evil. I should have thought you would know that by now.”
“It is one thing to know it intellectually. It is entirely another to see a dead child that has been butchered for someone’s amusement,” I snapped.
We were both breathing hard, angry and disgusted, and perfectly willing to take out our bad tempers upon one another.
“I do not know it,” I said finally. “I thought I did. I thought I understood evil after the last two investigations. This is some new wickedness I could never have imagined. You don’t think he killed them deliberately?” I asked, still clinging to the hope that Redwall might not be quite the monster I feared.
To my relief, Brisbane did not laugh. “No, this child was dead when the mummification was begun. There are no other signs of violence. It is likely it died of natural causes.”
“How do you—never mind. I do not want to know,” I amended hastily. “But if he did not kill them, where did he get them?”
Brisbane shrugged. “If we want to know that, we must examine the other child.” He gave me a sharp, searching look. “Are you up to it? You went quite white when I handed you the first.”
“I am perfectly fine,” I told him. “Go and get the other.” He took me at my word and turned to retrieve the other mummy, and I was glad. If he questioned me further, I might have told him that when he had put the mummified child into my arms, all I could think was that the first time he had laid a baby in my arms it was a cold, dead, lifeless monster. It had not seemed a good omen for any happiness between us.
The examination of the other body yielded little more information, save one interesting fact: the children appeared to be twins. They were remarkably identical in appearance, even after enduring so invasive and grotesque a procedure as mummification. One was a boy, one a girl, but their features were astonishingly similar, and both had the same curling, gilt hair, and each was missing a lock, shorn close to the head, to what purpose we could not say. The second child had been buried with the same amulets, wrapped in the same pattern. There was no doubt they had been mummified by the same hand, and it seemed certain whose hand it must have been, particularly as there was not a speck of natron to be found in the study. We turned over bowls and peered into baskets and barrels, but nothing remained of the preservative salts Redwall Allenby had ordered.
When we had put the study back to rights, Brisbane laid the babies out carefully next to one another for purposes of comparison. The amulets were arranged next to them, identical golden talismans, the Knot of Isis and the other, a stylised animal I could not identify. I put a fingertip to one of them gingerly.
“What animal is this meant to be? Some sort of livestock,” I hazarded.
“A ram,” Brisbane said grimly.
“A ram?” I straightened, my mind racing. “You don’t suppose this could be some sort of clue?”
“In what way?” he asked, studying the children’s heads closely.
I smothered a sigh, irritated that he could not tear himself away to give a moment’s consideration to my idea. “We believe Redwall mummified these children. The question is where did they come from? Whose children are they? And I am suggesting that those amulets might present us with a starting point.”
I had his attention now. He looked up from the tiny blond heads and gave me a shrewd glance.
“As a joke on Redwall’s part? Or something else?”
“Who knows? Perhaps he paid for the children’s corpses and did not like to leave them completely unidentified after he had conducted this monstrous experiment. If it was an experiment,” I fretted.
“It was.” Brisbane spoke with perfect confidence. “He wrote several articles on the subject for various Egyptological periodicals. He had a mania for
the subject. He was extremely well-informed, and made quite a name for himself before he was twenty. All of his writings were limited to the rituals of embalming and mummification. I believe he began with a snake. The last article he published was about a cat he had successfully mummified. It was only a matter of time before he moved on to humans.”
“That is revolting.”
“That is science,” he returned, nodding toward me meaningfully.
“If you are referring to my brother’s experiments, I can only point out that Valerius has aspirations to becoming a physician. And his patients have all been willing to be butchered, unlike these poor babies,” I finished, wilfully overlooking the fact that I had once suspected my own brother of graverobbing to support his studies.
Brisbane was considering the mummies thoughtfully. “So let us suppose Redwall decides to take the next obvious step in his studies of Egyptian embalming. He brings home from Egypt an embalmer’s kit, orders natron, and is wise enough to conceal his source, even in his own journal. He has only to find the babies.”
“Why babies?” I put in suddenly.
“They are smaller, quicker to embalm. And he could handle them by himself. It takes at least two men to mummify a fully-grown man.”
“No, why babies? As in more than one,” I asked again. “Why two of them? Why not just one?”
Brisbane shrugged. “For purposes of comparison, I presume. Take two infants of the same age and subject them to the same procedures. Store them for a certain period of time, then unroll them and see which has survived intact and figure out why. Perhaps he altered the formula slightly between them. Embalmers in ancient Egypt devised their own compounds of resins and aromatics to use upon the dead. If Redwall was attempting to perfect the art of embalming, it would have served him very well to use two formulae and compare the results.”
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