The Collector's Daughter

by Gill Paul

  “Perhaps talking to the British Museum is the best option,” Cuthbert replied. “I’m told Lord Carnarvon left a stipulation in his will that they be given first call on his collection, but his widow decided to go with the Met in New York, since they were the highest bidder.”

  “Of course she did,” Brograve said wearily. “That was my mother-in-law all over. Many thanks for your help, Cuthbert.”

  He hung up the phone feeling stunned. You read about people who preyed on the elderly. Could Ana be one of them? Might she have taken anything of theirs? Why, oh why, had he ever let her in his home?

  Chapter Forty-Five

  London, May 1973

  Eve was astonished when Brograve broke the news that Ana Mansour was not an employee of Cairo University. She tried to remember their conversations. Had she ever claimed directly that she worked for them? If she didn’t, then who did she work for?

  “I don’t think she expected me to give her the artifacts,” she told Brograve. “She just wanted information, to set the record straight.”

  “But which record would she be setting straight if she doesn’t have an official capacity? It doesn’t make sense.”

  Eve was baffled. Why had Ana tape-recorded her story? Why was she so keen to find the gold container?

  “The tape recording was a ruse,” Brograve said, “and she wanted the gold container because it sounds valuable. The Egyptians used solid gold, not gold plate. Remember how heavy that container was.”

  Eve couldn’t believe it. Ana was kind. She brought her lotus flowers. They’d become friends.

  “When we get back to London I’m going to telephone her hotel,” Brograve said, “and give her a piece of my mind.”

  Eve kept quiet. She still hadn’t told him that she and Ana had been chatting. Should she say so now? He would think she had been gullible—he often told her she was too trusting—but she couldn’t bring herself to believe Ana had deliberately deceived her. She decided that when they got back to London, she would ring first and hear her side of the story. She and Ana had become friends, and you should always give friends the benefit of the doubt.

  The note with her hotel number was in the drawer of the telephone table. As soon as they got home, while Brograve was taking their cases to the bedroom, she slipped it into her skirt pocket. She hoped it was a simple misunderstanding. Maybe Ana worked at a different university, or at the Cairo Museum. All the same, she wondered what kind of “scandal” might have led to her dismissal.

  As soon as Brograve left for his walk the next day, she telephoned Ana’s hotel.

  “How was your trip?” Ana asked straightaway. “Did you find any Tutankhamun relics at Highclere?”

  “There’s something I need to ask you first,” Eve began. “Brograve’s been told that you no longer work at Cairo University and that you were sacked from your job. Has someone made a terrible mistake?”

  There was a pause and when she spoke, Ana sounded indignant. “Did your husband write to them? Was he checking up on me?”

  “Not at all,” Eve assured her. “He asked his friend at the British Council about the proper protocols for returning antiquities. He wanted to do things by the book.” Ana didn’t say anything. “You understand, he’s cross now because he feels you lied to him.”

  “I didn’t lie, but . . . it’s embarrassing.” Ana sounded very hesitant. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to tell you this. . . . The truth is that I was sacked for having an affair with a colleague. He was married, I was married, and when it came out, I was the one who got sacked.”

  “That’s not fair!” Eve exclaimed. “Everyone has affairs nowadays. It’s hardly a sacking offense.”

  “It’s the way things work in Egypt, I’m afraid.” Ana spoke matter-of-factly. “But I was sad because I loved my university job, so I came up with a plan. I thought if I could track down some of the missing Tutankhamun artifacts and return them to my homeland, I might be reinstated. The colonialist powers who are hanging on to our ancient heritage is a political hot potato in Egypt. And after talking to you, I sensed you would agree. So that’s what I’ve been pinning my hopes on.”

  “But your children!” Eve was surprised. “Surely being with them is more important than getting your job back?”

  Eve heard the flare of a match and the gasp as smoke was inhaled. It made her wish she hadn’t given up smoking. When was that? Eons ago. She had never smoked much, just the odd puff at parties, but she still got the urge sometimes.

  “I told you, my husband won’t let me see them. Until I get my job back, I can’t afford to pay for legal advice, so I’m trapped.”

  “I wish I could help.” Eve wanted to take back the words as soon as she said them. Brograve would never let her help, not now that he knew Ana had misled them. “You’re a sucker for a hard-luck story,” he had said to her on more than one occasion, and she supposed it was true.

  “Did you find anything at Highclere, Lady Beauchamp?” Ana demanded.

  “We did,” Eve said. “Three items from your list. But my husband and brother have decided to give them to the British Museum.”

  There was a long silence punctuated by cigarette smoke being exhaled, then Ana asked: “Was the gold unguent container among them?”

  Eve shook her head. “No, I’ve got no idea where that is.”

  “Are you sure?” Ana asked. “Did you look everywhere? Surely if you found some artifacts, it means there could be more?”

  “I’m afraid if anything else turns up, my brother will also give it to the British Museum. He’s asking one of their experts to come and look through the items that remain there. I’m sorry not to be more helpful.” Eve felt bad for dashing Ana’s hopes so thoroughly.

  “Do you think it’s fair they remain in Britain?” Ana asked, sounding angry. “How would you feel if Egypt had stolen the Sutton Hoo burial treasures and was refusing to return them? Or what if we had invaded your country and made off with your Crown Jewels?”

  “I do see your point,” Eve said, feeling uncomfortable, “but it’s out of my hands now. Wrong decisions were made in the past, but this is now, and if I could do anything about it, I would.”

  “I believe you would.” Ana sighed.

  “What will you do next?” Eve asked.

  “I honestly don’t know.” She sounded defeated. “I had staked everything on this plan and now I’ve run out of ideas.”

  In the days that followed, Eve’s thoughts often returned to Ana Mansour. How could she bear to be separated from her children? Wasn’t being with them more important than getting her job back? If it had been her, Eve wouldn’t have waited for the law to run its course. She would have snatched them from their grandmother at the first opportunity and run away with them as fast and as far as she could.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  London, July 10, 1925

  Betty assured Eve that a difficult pregnancy was always followed by an easy birth. “It’s common knowledge,” she said, with a wave of her hand. “Take my word for it.”

  So when Eve started to have contractions two days after the due date the doctor had calculated, she was excited and hardly fearful at all. It wasn’t painful at first—just a gripping sensation. Brograve telephoned the doctor and midwife and they appeared at the house within the hour.

  “My cake is baked!” Eve greeted them cheerfully. “I’m still not sure how I’m going to get it out, but I believe that’s your department.”

  And then the contractions got worse. “I hope it doesn’t go on like this much longer,” she groaned, and saw them glance at each other, a look that told her there was a long night ahead. Soon she was slicked in sweat, and the pains were coming every few minutes. Goodness, it was uncomfortable. “Hurry up, little one,” she urged. Poor Brograve was in the sitting room waiting for news. She hoped he didn’t hear when she gave an involuntary scream.

  In the early hours of the morning, Eve heard the doctor whispering to the midwife that the labor was not progressing and
she began to get scared. What if the baby was stuck inside her? What if its little heart stopped with all the strain?

  Suddenly she remembered the macabre discovery Howard had made in the treasury section of the tomb: a Canopic jar containing the skeletons of two stillborn babies.

  “We are assuming they must have been Tutankhamun’s babies with his wife Ankhesenamun,” Howard had told her. “Had one of them lived, it would have changed the entire order of succession in Egypt.”

  Eve shivered. What an odd thing to keep in your tomb, and for them to be preserved for millennia. All she could think of was poor Ankhesenamun. “She must have been distraught to lose two babies.”

  “Life was more fragile then,” Howard replied, “and loss common, especially since there was so much inbreeding. Ankhesenamun was Tutankhamun’s half sister.”

  As she struggled to give birth to her own baby, Eve’s mind kept returning to those stillborn babies. How could any woman bear to go through the whole nine months, and labor too, and be told her baby was dead? She couldn’t shake thoughts of doom, increasingly convinced something was badly wrong.

  Twenty-four hours after her contractions began, when Eve felt as if her insides had been torn to smithereens, the doctor finally ripped the baby out of her using a gigantic pair of metal forceps. The midwife caught it—a slippery creature covered in blood and white mucus—and began patting it urgently. The wait seemed interminable. Eve couldn’t breathe, craning her neck to see if her baby was alive, but too scared to ask. And finally there was a mewl, like a kitten, and tears rolled down Eve’s cheeks.

  “It’s a girl,” the midwife said.

  The doctor was busy between Eve’s legs. Everything hurt. But she was alive, and her daughter was alive, and that’s all that mattered. They gave her a shot of morphine and she slid into a dreamless sleep.

  When she opened her eyes, Brograve was sitting by her bedside with the baby in his arms—a perfect child with a fluff of dark hair and a wrinkled face, eyes screwed shut against the light.

  “Look what we made,” he said, holding her out, the words catching in his throat.

  Eve was filled with a rush of emotions: relief that she had survived and the child was alive after all the trauma; a massive surge of love for her daughter; and awe at this miracle. People had been having babies since the dawn of time, but until now she had never realized quite how extraordinary it was that an entire new person had grown inside her.

  From the minute Patricia was born, Eve wanted to keep her within earshot at all times. The cradle stayed in their bedroom until she was six months old, and Eve never left the house without her in those early months. She was overwhelmed by the responsibility for this tiny creature. It was up to them to mold the type of human being she became, and that felt like magic of the most profound kind possible.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  London, May 1973

  I can’t find that slip of paper with Ana Mansour’s telephone number,” Brograve said over dinner. “Do you know where it is?” They had started eating their meals at the kitchen table. There seemed no point in carrying dishes through to the dining room only to carry them back again afterward. Besides, Eve liked her kitchen. Unruly houseplants grew on a broad sunny windowsill, alongside which sat a little cabinet painted to look like a chocolate-box cottage that contained a range of dried herbs in jars. Most were past their best, but it was a pretty object.

  “I already telephoned her,” Eve said. “She told me she was sacked for having an affair with a colleague. Hardly a hanging offense in this day and age!” She raised an eyebrow and smiled at him. “She was hoping that if she solved the mystery of the missing items from the tomb and perhaps took some back to Cairo, they might consider reinstating her.”

  Brograve grunted, still suspicious. “What about all the time you spent answering her questions? Will the tape recording be given to the museum, as she promised?”

  Eve hadn’t thought to ask about that. “I’m sure it will,” she said, then told him the story of Ana’s husband getting custody of her children and even denying her access.

  “She should have thought of that before she had an affair,” Brograve said. “Sharia law is very much on the side of men. I believe they can divorce their wives simply by saying ‘I divorce you’ three times, but women don’t have the same right.”

  “Goodness! So they could blurt it out in the heat of an argument one night, then wake up divorced the next morning? That seems harsh.” She had a sip of sherry, her favorite medium-dry one. “I feel sorry for her. I wish we could have helped.”

  “I don’t like being lied to,” Brograve grumbled. “I’ve got a good mind to contact the university and tell them she’s still sending out letters on their notepaper and pretending to be an employee.”

  “Please don’t do that,” Eve said. “After all, no harm has been done.”

  “She might be trying to trick someone else. Maybe we weren’t the only targets. And you only have her word for it that she was planning to return the items to Egypt.”

  He finished his meal and put his knife and fork together. He ate at twice the speed of Eve so his plate was always empty when she was just halfway through. She cut off half her remaining chicken breast and passed it across.

  “I can’t help wondering what happened to that gold unguent container,” she said, in an attempt to distract him from his annoyance about Ana. “Do you think there’s any chance we might have left it in Framfield, in a forgotten corner? What about the hollow behind the panel in the bathroom, where we used to hide my jewelry when we went on holiday? Or in the storage space under the window seat in the library?”

  It was a funny old house. The corridors had unexpected twists and turns, so you could easily lose your bearings. Even after living there for years, Eve would glance out a window expecting to see the front garden and instead she’d be facing the kitchen yard.

  “I checked both of those before we left,” Brograve assured her. “And now the new owners have gutted it. Knocked down walls, added extra bathrooms, created an open-plan kitchen-diner out the back. If there was anything hidden away, I’m sure it would have been found by their builders.”

  Eve’s heart ached to think of that house—her house—being ripped apart. She still mourned for it. Why did they have to leave? She pined for the garden in particular. May was one of her favorite months; the trees would be in leaf, there would be a shimmering carpet of bluebells in the orchard, and a few early roses might have put in an appearance.

  “Talking about things that are missing, have you seen my father’s gold clock?” Brograve asked. “It used to be on the mantelpiece in the sitting room. It crossed my mind that Ana could have taken it when I left her in there, the day Sionead and I had to help you to bed.”

  “Goodness, you have taken against her!” Eve raised her eyebrows. “I’ve been rearranging the ornaments in there so I’ve probably moved it somewhere safe. I’ll have a hunt later.”

  She’d been trying to return objects to the groupings they used to have in Framfield. Where had the clock been? She was pretty sure it used to be on the mantelpiece, so why wasn’t it there now?

  After they finished their meal, she walked all around the apartment, checking every shelf, but couldn’t see the clock anywhere. What might she have done with it? She had a vague memory of putting it somewhere useful, but where?

  She went to the cupboard where they kept the photo albums and dug out some Framfield ones, mostly from the late 1920s and early 1930s, soon after they moved in. They might confirm where the clock used to be. Brograve was watching a detective show on television, but Eve sat by the drawing-room window, under a standard lamp, and began to leaf through pictures of the house she had loved so much. If she spotted the clock in one of the photos, then she could work out where it was now and stop Brograve from blaming Ana for something she didn’t do. That was her plan, at least.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Framfield, 1929

  Eve hadn’t ma
rried Brograve for his money. He only launched his copper cable company in 1922 and she had no idea whether he would turn out to be any good at business, but it was already thriving by the time Patricia was born in 1925. Eve was nervous when he invited Porchy to invest, worried that mixing family and business would be a mistake, but, as it turned out, Porchy made rather a lot of money from his stake and was delighted.

  “Are we rich?” she asked Brograve, when he suggested they buy a country house.

  “Comfortable,” he replied.

  Eve liked that word. It made her feel secure.

  They drove around the Home Counties, viewing properties that were in their price range and close enough to be an easy commute from town. Patricia sat in the back seat, singing happily, always a contented child.

  As soon as they drove into the village of Framfield, Eve had a good feeling about it. There was a pretty old church, a pub, a few shops, a row of thatched and half-timbered cottages, and a large lake on the outskirts: it was the idyllic country village of her imagination. The house for sale was T-shaped, with a sixteenth-century main section and two wings that had been added in the seventeenth century, in a mixture of half-timbering and red brick. One of the best things, from Eve’s point of view, was that it was set on a remote lane, without through traffic, and she could see a group of children playing in the garden of a neighboring house.

  Patricia was an only child and Eve was keen for her to have as many friends as possible, to compensate. She would love to have given her a sibling but the damage done to her insides during the birth had made the doctor advise Eve to avoid another pregnancy. It had been a blow at the time. She desperately wanted to give Brograve a son, not least because the baronetcy would become extinct if she didn’t. He was a man who should have a son. But he accepted the decision with equanimity, and Patricia was such a delightful child, Eve couldn’t harbor any regrets.