The Egyptologist

by Arthur Phillips

  Constance held her child tightly to her. “I am very sorry, my love.”

  “Why sorry? Must the princess stay up with you and Papa?”

  “Of course not. You are her lady-in-waiting. She would be lost upstairs.”

  “Here she shall be free of royal worries, for a spell”: Angelica unknowingly quoted a storybook. She crossed to the tiny dressing table, dragged its small chair over her mother’s protests, stood upon it to peer out the front window. “I can see the road.” She stood on her toes at the very edge of the chair’s scarlet seat, pressed her hands and nose against the window’s loose pane.

  “Please be careful, my love. You must not do that.”

  “But I can see the road. That’s a chestnut mare.”

  “Come to me, please, for a moment. You must promise me that if you need me, you will not hesitate to call or even come and rouse me. I will never be angry if you need me. It shall be just like it was, truly. Sit upon my lap. Yes, the princess too. Now tell, are you pleased with these arrangements your father has dictated for us or no?”

  “Oh, yes. He is kind. Is this a tower, because of the window?”

  “Not a tower, no. If it is a tower you desire, you slept in a higher point with us, upstairs. It is I, up in the tower.”

  “But you have no tower window looking at the horses far below, so this is the tower.” So the child was happy.

  “Will you not be frightened to be alone when you sleep?”

  “Oh, Mamma, yes! I will! It’s very frightening,” and her face reflected the thought of her dark night ahead, but then brightened at once. “But I will be brave as the shepherdess. ’When the woods crow dark / and by faint stars impale / God’s light leave its mark / then does her heart wail / God’s light leave its mark. . . . When the woods crow dark . . .’ “

  Constance smoothed the girl’s hair, touched the small soft cheeks, brought the round face close. “ ’When the woods grow dark / and by faint stars and pale / does God’s light leave its mark / then does her heart quail. But . . .’“

  “ ’But her faith’s like a lamp,’ “ Angelica interrupted proudly, but then stumbled again at once. “ ’And God . . . God slow, God sl. . .’ I can’t recall.”

  “ ’And God’s love is brighter . . . still . . . than . . .,’“ her mother prompted.

  “Shall I see a moon through the tower window?”

  Angelica’s excitement was unmistakable as night approached. Twice she looked closely at Constance and said with great seriousness, “I am frightened to be alone tonight, Mamma.” But Constance did not believe her. Angelica claimed to be afraid only because she could sense—for reasons beyond her understanding—that her mother wished she were frightened. Her claim of fear was an unwanted gift—a child’s scribbled drawing—offered in perceptive love.

  Still, those transparent lies were the exception to her candid anticipation. Constance washed her, and Angelica spoke of the princess’s adventures alone in her tower. Constance brushed her hair while Angelica brushed the princess’s, and Angelica asked if she could please go to bed yet. Constance read to her from the blue chair, and in mid-sentence Angelica uncharacteristically claimed fatigue, then sweetly refused her mother’s offer to sit with her until she fell asleep.

  “Should I leave the door open, my love?”

  “No, thank you, Mamma. The princess desires her solitudary.”

  Constance likely waited in the narrow hall, tidied the linens in the armoire, straightened paintings, lowered lamps, but heard no protest, only muttering court intrigue until that, too, faded.

  Downstairs Joseph had still not returned. “Is all well in the child’s bedroom, madam?” the maid asked.

  “In the nursery, Nora. Yes, thank you.”

  When Joseph did arrive, he did not inquire but assumed his dictates had been smoothly instituted. He spoke of his day and did not mention Angelica at all, did not even—as they extinguished the downstairs gas and rose to the third story—stop on the second to look upon his child in her new situation. His cold triumph was understood. “Angelica resisted the new arrangements,” Constance allowed herself in mild rebellion.

  He showed no concern, seemed even to take a certain pleasure in this report or, at least, in Constance carrying out his will despite resistance. She was curious if any description would inspire him even to mere sympathy, let alone a retraction of the deadly orders. Besides, the child’s actual satisfaction tonight was surely temporary, and Constance wondered what sort of response he would offer when the child’s courage finally broke, and so she said, “Angelica wept herself to sleep, so isolated she feels.”

  “She shall adjust, I imagine,” he replied. “No choice in the matter, and where there is no choice, one adjusts. She shall learn this readily. Or not.” He took her hand. New whiskers were emerging, a spreading shadow at the edges of his beard. He put his lips upon her brow. He released her hand, rose to the basin and looking glass. “She shall adjust,” he repeated and examined himself. “Further to all this, I have been giving thought to her education.”

  It seemed he would not be satisfied with his victory today, as a dam that has held for years before yielding to its first crack will then collapse in minutes. “Surely there is no urgency to act upon that as well,” Constance attempted.

  “Surely I might speak before you indulge your passion to contradict me.”

  “I apologize.” No longer regretting her lie, wishing only that his child’s weeping could cause him any pain at all, she occupied herself with a hairbrush.

  “I have not concerned myself sufficiently with her education. She has achieved an age where her formation as a thinking person should be monitored.”

  “You believe she has suffered under my eye?”

  “You must not start at shadows, my dear. More of her father’s influence is necessary. I mean to give more thought whether a tutor is in order or if she should go to Mr. Dawson’s. I will decide presently.”

  “You would have her spend her days away from me? She is too young.”

  “I cannot recall opening a debate on the point.” He crossed to her, took her hand. “The day may yet come when she considers me her friend.”

  “When she considers me her friend”: a familiar phrase, spoken as it had been to a stationer’s girl not so many years before, though Constance had then had the face of a woman far younger. “You may in time consider me a friend,” Joseph had said to the girl he meant to win.

  And he gazed at her tonight, his desire unblinking. This then was how rapidly he meant to breach their long-standing agreement—this very night. Though the child wept below stairs (as far as he knew), he would charge hungrily forward, no thought for Constance’s risks, betraying by his very appetite the absence of all tender love for her.

  “I must look in on Angelica,” she said. He did not reply. “It is her first evening separated from me. From us. She was upset. She will be a bit adrift, you must be patient with her.” He did not speak—his intent to charm her likely wrestling with his irritation—but he made no move to stop her. “You are quite understanding,” she concluded, and left when he turned away.

  She sat below and watched Angelica sleep. Surely he could not intend so soon, so purposefully, to menace Constance’s safety. Surely a fatal disregard for her was not possible. Yet he had long been losing interest in her; indifference even to her well-being could certainly result from such extended coldness.

  Constance returned when she felt certain he must be asleep. She watched him silently from the threshold then lay down beside him. She did wish to be affectionate and dutiful, but without inflaming him. She dozed then awoke, fully awake in an instant, cast out from sleep. A quarter past three. She slid from under Joseph’s grasp, lifted a candle and matches from the ebony side table, and in the lightless night stepped onto the thick crimson carpet.

  The stairs croaked under her so insistently that she could scarcely believe the noise did not rouse both Joseph above her and Angelica beneath her. She lit her can
dle and walked the corridor to Angelica’s oversized chamber. Nora slept below: tonight Angelica slept nearer to the maid-of-all-work than to her own mother.

  She was so small in this giant’s bed, in the clouds of linen. Constance brought the candle closer to the round face and the black hair. She was terribly pale. She touched the high forehead, and Angelica did not stir. She brought the candle closer still. The girl was not breathing.

  Of course she was breathing. These relentless fears from the moment she was born! The girl was fine and well. There was no longer anything to fear for her health. Constance could be forgiven if old habits of thought still troubled her, but the truth was evident: Angelica was sturdy, Joseph’s old term for her.

  “Sturdy,” he had reassured Constance on their holiday the summer before, when he forced Angelica to stay out after dusk, poking at insects until she fell deathly ill, and it had taken the local doctor (whom Joseph had resisted summoning) all his skill to save the girl, while Joseph clucked about the expense and behaved as if the whole matter were a source of amusement. “A sturdy girl,” he had jabbered at Constance, as if she were an imbecile to question him.

  The candle unfurled a spiral of smoke, and its wax wept and froze into marble tears, and from the blue chair Constance watched. Such a depth of sleep, a kitten’s sleep. How enviable to allow sleep to cradle you so deeply that you seem to approach that other dark state—no adult can sleep like that, she thought, only the innocent child. Constance’s own brothers and sister had allowed themselves to sleep too deeply.

  Her head snapped forward, and she blinked at the cone of candlelight, a full inch lower than it had floated a moment before. The old nonsense, “slept too deeply”—that seed her own mother had planted in her when she was not much older than Angelica, the phrase Constance had then clung to in terror for so many years, fearing the dark and sleep. She felt that childish fear for an instant even now, grown and in her own daughter’s room, then let it leave her as the years returned. It had been twenty years or more since her mother held her, wetting her face with tears, squeezing so fiercely that Constance’s shoulders ached: “You mustn’t let yourself sleep like that, Connie, you mustn’t, mustn’t leave me.” The facts, though, squatted unimpressed by maternal notions: Alfred had died of typhus, George and Jane both of cholera from the bad well.

  Years later, in a chapter of their courtship, I know that Constance—during a walk they had stretched over hours, city to park to café to park—confessed to her suitor that she was an orphan. She felt this admission would likely be the end of their brief time in each other’s company, and that her fantasies of his love for her (furtively enjoyed even in solitude) faced certain doom. Still she spoke, as if offering a hanging judge the extenuations of her stained character. She told Joseph of her siblings, and in her description of death after death she said, “They slept too deeply. My mother used to tell me that.” He did not banish her, only asked if she would accompany him to his home; he wished to show her something. It should have been out of the question—but it was an insult she recognized but did not feel, for she would by then have sunk to any depth for his approval. She gladly entered his grand home and was led into his study, this very room where her daughter now slept by candlelight. “These are your enemies,” he said and bid her look inside the black cylinder of his microscope at loops and threads. “These are the beasts that steal lives. Your brothers and sister did not sleep too deeply. On the contrary, they likely prayed for it. Sleepless, brows damp with anguish, sickness most violent and unremitting, torment for patient and parent alike.” Quite a lecture to a young woman he was courting. The biology lesson had ended with his taking her hand. They had very nearly come to an understanding right then, surrounded by laboratory apparatus and restored memories of her family’s destruction, the handsome scientist explaining the cruelties of Nature, while she felt no sorrow, only a prickly warmth in her fingers and cheeks, and a desire for his hand to stay wrapped around hers.

  She knew Joseph’s descriptions were accurate, but she could not recall events as he painted them. Her most certain recollections (though certainly false) glowed as incontrovertible as holy relics or newspaper reports: wishing her healthy, strong elder brother Alfred good night, then sitting at his bedside, watching him fall asleep, deeper, deeper, until he simply all at once turned white and cold, and a last visible puff of steam escaped from between his cracked and blackened lips. By the light of Joseph’s slow instructive conversation, she could prove that this fantastic memory was impossible: she had been younger by far than Alfred, would never have put him to bed or watched him fall asleep, and, of course, that was simply not how human souls were called to their reward. She must have seen his body at burial, ashen and cold. Perhaps that was one of the fragments from which she had created this figment: her own breath in the November cold steaming on his behalf, her own lips cracked in the dry air.

  She had been younger than Angelica was now when Alfred died, and he was the first to go. Alfred, George, Jane, Father, Mother. Invisible string-beasts steal into the blood and devour us. Joseph laughed when she asked, “How ever are doctors expected to catch such tiny devils as these?” She recalled that at the time she thought his laughter kindly. “They cannot be caught. One can only deny them the conditions that favor their growth,” he said lightly.

  What could a mother expect to do in a world where enemies such as these assaulted children? What could she prevent, if not the illnesses that had caused her own mother such suffering, child after child after child melting away from her? What could Constance’s weak arm accomplish against germs or murderers or the black men who, she read in the newspaper this evening, slaughtered fifty-six defenseless English women and children in their homes in a faraway land? The truth blazed brightly against this black London night: she could not protect Angelica from threats large or small, human or inhuman. To be a mother was to be sentenced simply to watch, never to prevent, only to wait for something horrible to happen to her child, and then to sit by, wailing and useless. To think now, as a grown woman with her own beloved child, what her mother must have felt: it was neither surprise nor sin that she had finally fled the heartbreaks of this world, left Constance alone.

  She lit another candle and melted its base onto the head of its stumpy predecessor. Her hair had come loose. She meant to gather it, but the next moment Angelica was a bridge, her legs on her bed and her hands on her mother’s knees, the room gray and yellow throughout. “Mother, mother, mother, mother!” Angelica laughed at Constance’s difficulty waking, mimicked her rapid blinks, her confusion at the wick, black in a pool of grease. The girl shouted with morning joy, squeaking as much as speaking. “Hush, mouse,” said Constance. “I love your little face in morning light.”

  “You slept here with me,” marveled the girl. “In a chair!”

  “I did,” said Constance, crawling under the bedclothes next to Angelica.

  “You were asleep, and I woke you.”

  “I was, and you did.”

  “Where’s Papa?”

  “Still abed, I should think. Shall we rouse him?”

  “No,” said Angelica. “Mamma and baby.”

  Constance kissed her child’s hair. “Yes indeed and very nice.”

  “Mamma and baby very nice.”

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2004 by Arthur Phillips

  Excerpt from The Tragedy of Arthur copyright © 2010 by Arthur Phillips

  Excerpt from The Song Is You copyright © 2009 by Arthur
Phillips

  Excerpt from Prague copyright © 2002 by Arthur Phillips

  Excerpt from Angelica copyright © 2007 by Arthur Phillips

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Phillips, Arthur

  The Egyptologist: a novel / Arthur Phillips.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Egyptologists—Fiction. 2. Archaeologists—Fiction. 3. Antiquities—Collection and preservation—Fiction. 4. Americans—Egypt—Fiction. 5. Egypt—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3616.H45E46 2004

  813'.6—dc22 2003065543

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  ILLUSTRATIONS © BY JACKIE AHER

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.