by Gill Paul
“This is not like you, Pups. What on earth did you argue about?”
Pups gave an exasperated sigh. “He thinks I shouldn’t have done the deal with The Times, and complains it’s made everything twice as hard for him because it’s got the Egyptians’ backs up. But I had no choice! Last September I told him I couldn’t afford another season’s excavation, and now there are many more expenses to cover than I ever dreamed of back then. It’s my right to seek sources of revenue wherever I can find them.”
“He must see the logic in that.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” He shook his head. “He’s also complaining about the dignitaries who turn up wanting to be shown around the tomb, saying they interrupt his work. I replied that I’m afraid it is part of his role for the foreseeable future.”
Pups was red in the face. The argument had clearly bothered him.
“I’m sure you’ll kiss and make up tomorrow,” she said. “It’s just a spat, and it only happened because you’re both under pressure.”
“I think it might be rather more than a spat.” Her father frowned. “He has banned me from setting foot in Castle Carter ever again.”
“Oh dear,” Eve said. “He has a fiery temper, but I expect he has calmed down and is already regretting his hasty words. I’ll call on him later.”
“Tell him he’s an employee of mine and that he should bloody well know where his bread is buttered,” her father snapped.
Eve decided she wouldn’t pass on that exact message.
She traveled across to the Valley on her own for the first time, feeling slightly nervous about dealing with the Egyptians in a language she didn’t understand. As it happened, she managed just fine, apart from being vastly overcharged by the donkey cart driver, but when she reached the tomb, Pecky Callender told her that Howard had gone home with a “gippy tummy.” Eve got her driver to take her back down the road to Castle Carter.
Howard opened the door, looking rather green around the gills. In response to Eve’s inquiry, he said he had been suffering from stomach problems for some months now and would seek a second opinion at her mother’s hospital in the summer. Nevertheless he invited her into his sitting room and called for the houseboy to bring some tea.
“I’m sorry to hear you and Pups have fallen out,” Eve began. “He can be a tad brusque when he is stressed and you seem to have borne the brunt, but you must know he doesn’t mean anything by it. He has the greatest respect for you.”
Howard leaned back in his chair, linking his hands in his lap. “You say that, Eve, but he is not showing me respect. I have given him my considered opinion, based on twenty-five years’ working in Egypt, and he is dismissing it because it doesn’t suit him.” He shrugged. “I may have a certain responsibility as his employee—as he was at pains to remind me—but I have a greater responsibility to archaeology. I must make sure this tomb is properly preserved and recorded for posterity, and that is my top priority.”
Eve hastened to reassure him. “It’s Pups’s top priority too. The difference between your positions is negligible. He’s very upset about falling out with you.”
Howard glanced out the window, his expression stony. “I don’t have time to be upset with him. I have work to do.”
The houseboy brought in a tray with a pot of fresh mint tea and two tall glasses painted with gold and purple swirls. He poured one for each of them, then bowed before leaving the room.
“Can I assure Pups that you will carry on the good work?” Eve asked, picking up her glass and blowing on the tea.
“Of course! He knows I’m not the type to walk out on the job.”
Eve struggled to find wording that would appease her father without making Howard feel as if he had backed down. “Can I say that you are sorry the argument happened?”
He glared. “Please don’t report the word ‘sorry’ as coming from my lips. I stood up for what is right and I’m not sorry about that.”
Eve decided it was going to be easier to get Pups to apologize. His temper cooled quickly after a flare-up and he never held a grudge.
“Is there anything I can send to help your stomach?” she asked. “I have some Andrews liver salts and Bayer aspirin in my medical chest.”
“There’s no need,” he insisted. “But thank you all the same.”
When Eve returned to the Winter Palace, she found her father in the salon chatting with Arthur Mace, the Egyptologist from the Met, and his charming wife, Winifred. Pups looked rather more relaxed than he had earlier.
“We’ve had a top-notch idea,” he told her. “We thought the four of us might charter a boat and cruise up the Nile to Aswan, just for a week. I’ve never been that far upriver before. Will you join us, Eve?”
She clapped her hands. “I’d love to!” she cried. “How marvelously exciting!”
Arthur hired a boat with three luxury cabins, and staff on board to look after them.
“Before we go,” she asked Pups, “please will you send a note to Howard? I suspect he is not the type who finds it easy to apologize, so why don’t you do it?”
“You’re right, little Eve,” he said. “I will.”
Later that evening he showed her the letter he’d written, and she was impressed by its warmth and humility: “Whatever your feelings are or will be for me in the future, my affection for you will never change,” it said. “I’m a man with few friends and whatever happens, nothing will ever alter my feelings for you.”
“Well done, Pups,” she said, kissing his cheek before she took it to the concierge to be dispatched straightaway.
Chapter Thirty-One
The Nile, March 1923
Their cruise boat chugged slowly upriver through the stunning colorscapes of Egypt: the deep sapphire-blue of the Nile, the lush green of the date palms in the fertile strip irrigated by the river, and then the shimmery golden desert beyond. The weather was pleasantly warm with a slight breeze. Sitting on deck with a glass of guava juice, chatting with Arthur and Winifred, was a delightful way to spend a few days. Eve could see her father winding down. His complexion looked healthier and the sparkle was back in his eyes. He was only fifty-six years old but he’d suffered bouts of poor health since a car accident in 1909 when the Panhard rolled over, crushing his ribs.
They hired a guide to show them around the sites in Aswan: the Qubbet el-Hawa tombs of nobles from the Old Kingdom; the botanical garden on Kitchener’s Island; the Aswan Dam, Kitchener’s pet project to stop the Nile floods from destroying farmlands every year; and the temple complex of Isis, located on the island of Philae in the upper Nile.
While at Philae, Eve slipped away from their party and wandered down to the water’s edge to look out across the lake formed by the dam. She knew some villages had been deliberately flooded and lay beneath the twinkling water, but there was no sign of them now—just a wide, choppy lake. Tiny waves made a slapping sound against the shingle where she stood.
Suddenly a shout rang out and she turned to see their guide running toward her, waving his arms wildly. “Rujiet!” he was repeating. “Rujiet!”
When he got close, he grabbed her arm and yanked her roughly back from the water’s edge, hurting her. She gave a yelp. He had spoken English earlier but his words were incoherent in his agitation.
“What is it?” she cried, rubbing her wrenched shoulder. “What’s the matter?”
“Crocodile!” he shouted in English and pointed to what she had thought was a log of wood floating on the surface of the water just a few yards away.
Eve started shaking. Now she looked closely, she could see the wide slit of the mouth and the languid blink of a yellow eye just above the waterline. It had been gliding toward her. One lunge and she would have been in its jaws. She turned and ran to her father and threw her arms around him.
“Let’s get out of here,” she begged. “Please!”
Pups was furious with the guide. “Incompetent fool! Why didn’t you warn us? If anything had happened . . .” He didn�
��t specify what he would have done, because he was too busy consoling Eve.
She just wanted to get as far away as she could in case the crocodile waddled ashore. The guide assured them it wouldn’t but she didn’t have much faith in him because he seemed very shaken.
As they got a carriage back to the Cataract Hotel, where they were staying in Aswan, she couldn’t stop shivering despite the heat. If it had lunged at her and dragged her into the water, she doubted the men of the party would have been able to save her. She thought of that menacing yellow eye and knew she’d had a narrow escape.
When she wrote to Brograve that night she decided to turn the incident into a joke, so as not to alarm him, but that eye continued to haunt her.
* * *
It was hotter in Aswan than Luxor, a scorching heat that sapped their energy. The air cooled as soon as the sun set, but then mosquitoes surrounded them in a whining swarm. Their guide had taken Eve and Winifred to a market earlier where a stallholder sold them a lemon-scented oil that he guaranteed would keep mosquitoes away, and all of the party had applied it to their exposed skin. It seemed to work, because they sat out in the hotel garden for dinner without any of them getting bitten.
An old Bedouin man came to perform a coffee ceremony for them. He roasted the beans over an open flame, ground them, boiled, then sieved them, before pouring each of them a small cup from a spout held high in the air.
Eve sniffed her cup. There was some herbal ingredient besides coffee.
“Cardamom,” Winifred told her, after taking a sip. “It’s delicious!”
The old man explained through a translator that they must each drink three cups: one for the soul, one for the sword, and one because they were guests. It was tradition. He had brought a hookah and the men puffed on it while the women watched, amused. The smoke smelled sweetly herbal, like scented hay.
On their last night in Aswan, Pups was careless in closing his mosquito net when he went to bed and got a large, itchy mosquito bite on his cheek. Eve’s lemon oil must have rubbed off on the pillow.
“It looks like a teenager’s blemish!” Eve teased him over breakfast in the grand dining room. “At your age, Pups, you should be rather proud of that.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Cairo, March 16, 1923
From Aswan, Eve and Pups caught a train directly to Cairo, where he had plans to meet Pierre Lacau to discuss the management of the tomb. They checked into the Grand Continental Hotel overlooking Opera Square and Eve changed her clothes, ready to meet some friends of Pups’s for dinner, then to watch a film. When she knocked on Pups’s door, he said he couldn’t face dinner.
“My face is aching where that dratted mosquito bit me,” he said, cupping his palm over it.
Eve had a look close-up: the bite seemed inflamed, with a tiny cut at the edge where he had nicked it while shaving. She found some iodine in her medical kit and dabbed it on, staining the skin brown.
“I’ll cancel our dinner,” she said. “We can eat in the hotel. I’m sure you’ll feel better after an early night.”
The next morning, when she went to Pups’s room to collect him for breakfast, he answered the door looking baggy-eyed. His forehead was burning, and when she touched the glands in his neck, as her mother had taught her to do, they were hard and swollen. Pups knew an English doctor in Cairo, by the name of Fletcher Barrett, so Eve telephoned and asked if he would stop by. It was probably just a mild infection, she told herself. He might need a few days’ bed rest.
Dr. Barrett examined the mosquito bite, listened to her father’s chest, checked his vital signs, and asked several questions about his health in recent days.
“That mosquito bite has become infected,” he said at last, “and I fear it has caused blood poisoning.”
Eve felt a cold chill of fear. “What should we do? How long will it take to heal?”
The doctor sat down and addressed them both, his tone serious. “A fit young man with a strong constitution would probably fight this off in no time, but I’m afraid your father’s medical history could cause complications. I suggest you send your mother a telegram. She will be aware of the implications of blood poisoning.”
There was a buzzing sound in Eve’s ears and she was conscious of the beating of her heart. “What treatments can you give him? I put iodine on the bite last night. Shall I keep doing that?”
He nodded slowly. “Let me take a blood sample to confirm my diagnosis, and I’ll return in a couple of hours with some medicine. Make sure he keeps sipping boiled water or light broths, and apply cloths soaked in tepid water to his brow and pulse points.”
Eve was glad to be given tasks. First, she scribbled a telegram to her mother and got the concierge to send it, then she asked for plentiful boiled water to be brought to her father’s room, along with some light chicken broth and a pot of tea for her. She would be his personal nurse, and she’d do everything in her power to make him well again. No patient would ever have been nursed as well as she would nurse him.
What if he dies? a voice in her head asked. She shook herself. It was unthinkable. She simply wouldn’t let him.
While Pups slept that afternoon, she telephoned her uncle Mervyn, who promised to visit, and she sent telegrams to Howard Carter, to Lady Allenby, and to Brograve. To each of them she said that the illness was serious, but that he was receiving the best of care and no word should be leaked to the press. She knew her father would not want it to hit the headlines.
Her mother sent a telegram by return saying that she was flying out immediately in a De Havilland monoplane. They would have to refuel several times en route but it was by far the fastest way. That’s when Eve knew it was a matter of life and death, because her mother was petrified of flying. A sob formed in her throat and wouldn’t shift.
Brograve telegrammed offering to come to Cairo to support her. She replied that he should wait for now. She was spending all her time at her father’s bedside and wouldn’t be able to see him if he turned up.
Some friends visited the hotel, but Uncle Mervyn was the only one she admitted to Pups’s sickroom. He was fevered and anxious, dozing fitfully, and often groaning in his sleep. Mervyn tried to talk to him but didn’t get a coherent response.
“Call me, day or night,” he told Eve. “Anything you need, I will arrange it.”
“I need him to recover,” Eve said, and Mervyn squeezed her hand hard.
The following morning, Pups seemed more lucid. Eve fed him spoonfuls of broth and they talked about the book Howard was planning to write about the tomb, along with Arthur Mace. It would be illustrated with Harry Burton’s photographs, and Pups was to contribute a foreword. The public were crying out for information and this would be the first reliable source.
Pups fell asleep again, and when he wakened later, he was less coherent. “We shouldn’t have disturbed the spirits,” he murmured.
“What spirits?” Eve asked. “What are you talking about?”
“The spirits in the tomb,” he said. “Malevolent spirits. We disturbed them.”
“There weren’t any spirits, Pups,” she assured him, but she remembered the cloying scent that had irritated her throat, and that feeling like a finger poking at the back of her skull. And then Marie Corelli’s warning came back to her: “A disease no doctor can diagnose.” But that wasn’t true because Fletcher Barrett had diagnosed it. What nonsense! She tried to wipe the thought from her brain.
The next morning, there was a brisk knock on the door and Almina bustled into the room, already in nurse mode despite the challenging journey. Eve had never been so glad to see her. Say what you liked about Almina, she was a talented nurse. All her ex-patients raved about her.
“What’s his temperature?” she asked, and Eve told her the latest reading. She picked up his wrist to feel his pulse and tutted.
“Is it bad, Mama?” Eve whispered, trying not to let her panic show.
Her mother sucked air through her teeth. “Only time will tell.”
When Fletcher Barrett came, he examined the patient, then talked to Almina in a low voice. Eve could hardly hear, but she made out the words pneumonia and critical and dug her fingernails into her palms. This couldn’t be happening.
After he left, Almina started to weep, very softly. That was a huge shock. Eve had never seen her mother cry before—not ever. She leaped to her feet and rushed to hug her. It felt odd, because she and Almina usually exchanged only the most cursory embraces, but now they clung to each other.
“Please don’t cry, Mama. I’m sure he’ll recover now you’re here. Between us, we will save him.”
That made her mother cry harder and Eve cried too. Who would have thought it? Almina didn’t spend more than a few weeks a year with her husband, but she clearly cared deeply for him.
“Your father’s a very dear man, who’s been good to me,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a lace handkerchief. “It wasn’t ever a romantic match, not like you and Brograve . . .”
Eve was surprised by that. It almost sounded like grudging approval of her choice of husband.
“But we gave each other a lot of freedom in our marriage and it worked for us.”
Eve was alarmed that she was talking in the past tense. “You could still have years ahead, Mama. No one dies of a mosquito bite. It’s absurd!”
Almina looked at her sadly. “I hope you’re right,” she said, and turned to place a cloth on the patient’s brow. Eve felt glad that Pups was with two women who loved him, and hoped the strength of their love would tether him to this world like invisible ropes.
