A Treacherous Curse

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “Last year?” I asked quickly.

  Lady Tiverton took up the thread of the story. “You see, each expedition is granted a firman or permit to dig, and it specifies where one is allowed to excavate. My husband was climbing on the very limit of the perimeter of our firman, so when he discovered what he thought was a possible find, naturally we said nothing at first to the authorities.”

  “For fear it was not within your rights to excavate,” Stoker finished.

  Lady Tiverton nodded. “Exactly. To all outward appearances, the impression in the rock was just a cave, but the pottery shards persuaded him that it had been put to a far more interesting use,” she said, darting him a quick look of pride. “We studied the charts and maps and realized the tomb lay just outside the permitted area for us to dig. Without official permission, we would have no claim to anything we excavated in the tomb.”

  “So you applied for permission to dig in the area where you already knew there was a tomb?” Stoker asked.

  Lady Tiverton’s smile was gentle. “It sounds dreadfully underhanded, but it is common practice amongst Egyptologists. Everyone has their pet theories as to where something wonderful may be found. And everyone jockeys for permission to dig in their likeliest spots. We were terribly lucky. The tomb is located in a particularly remote wadi or canyon. No one else was interested, so we had no competition for a firman. We returned to dig this season with great hopes of what we might find.”

  “And you found a princess,” I observed.

  “By the grace of God,” Sir Leicester said with fervor. “As Fairbrother said, the tomb was unfinished, the roughest sort of cave, completely lacking in decoration, and she was crammed in there like so much wool in a bag. There were grave goods from at least seven other burials as well.”

  “How do you account for that?” Stoker asked. “I thought Egyptian royals were buried with their own possessions.”

  “In theory, they were,” Fairbrother explained. “Ideally, each member of the royal family would have his or her own tomb, a suite of rooms elaborately decorated and furnished with everything they would require for the afterlife. But rock-cut tombs are notoriously difficult to create. As I said, they take a long time, and unfortunately, death doesn’t wait for everyone. Many royals have been discovered stuffed into someone else’s tomb—rather like sharing your granny’s crypt at Highgate,” he finished with a grim smile.

  Sir Leicester nodded thoughtfully. “Another complication was the existence of grave robbers, even in antiquity. No sooner were the tombs sealed by the mortuary priests than someone would come along and bash them open, looking for gold and despoiling the mummies. To prevent this, some mummies were removed from their tombs with as many of the grave goods as the priests could haul. They were stashed wherever space could be found.”

  “I have heard of such a thing,” I said, recalling some vague mention of a hoard of mummies being unearthed sometime before. I mentioned it and Stoker nodded.

  “Eighteen eighty-one,” he said. “People were still discussing it when we were in Cairo the following year. A whole family of royal mummies had been unearthed near one of the villages in the Valley of the Kings.”

  “Deir el-Bahri,” Lady Tiverton supplied. “Near the Necropolis of Thebes. They were discovered by a particularly accomplished clan of grave robbers from the village of Gurneh, the el-Rasul family. The fellows had been discreetly removing grave goods and selling them on the antiquities market until suspicions were raised. The cache was investigated and the entire tomb cleared immediately to put a stop to the illicit trade.”

  “But where did they come from?” I asked.

  Sir Leicester shrugged. “No one knows. The original tombs were never discovered. But at some point, millennia ago, the priests tasked with guarding the bodies of the pharaohs feared for their safety, so they removed them. We believe the same thing happened to our little princess.”

  “Do you know who she was? Anything besides her name?”

  We turned as one to Patrick Fairbrother. “I have deciphered every marking upon her sarcophagus, but aside from her name, there is precious little information of any use. Except the curse,” he said with a slow smile.

  “There is actually a curse upon the sarcophagus?” I could not conceal my amazement. I had thought it some invention of an enterprising newspaper reporter.

  “Oh, yes. And rather a good one.” He drew in a long breath, clearing his throat. When he spoke, he intoned slowly, in a deep, stentorian voice quite unlike his usual tones. “‘Cursed be those who disturb the rest of the daughter of Isis. Death will come to the despoiler on the wings of the vulture, and Anubis shall feast upon his bones.’”

  Just then a log collapsed in the fireplace, sending up a shower of sparks, and in spite of the warmth of the fire, I shivered.

  At Fairbrother’s pronouncement, Lady Tiverton’s hand had gone to her throat, fingering the scarab brooch.

  “Are you quite all right, my lady?” Stoker asked gently.

  She nodded. “Yes. Quite. Only, hearing the words, spoken aloud like that, it makes it so easy to believe—”

  “Rachel,” her husband said, frowning slightly.

  “Believe what?” I said, ignoring the baronet.

  “That Anubis really has come for us,” she said, her voice almost inaudible.

  “What makes you think Anubis has come?” Stoker pressed.

  Lady Tiverton lifted her head, leveling her sorrowful dark gaze.

  “I have seen him.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  If Fairbrother’s pronouncement was dramatic, Lady Tiverton’s simple statement was utterly chilling. Had she wept or wailed, it would have been far easier to dismiss her words as the ravings of a madwoman. But I had seldom seen a more self-possessed lady. She spoke calmly, with perfect composure, and from the lack of surprise demonstrated by her husband and Patrick Fairbrother, it was apparent they had heard the story before.

  “When did you see him?” I demanded. “Where?”

  “In Egypt,” she replied promptly. “I sometimes have trouble sleeping when we are excavating. It is so terribly quiet there, you see. No city traffic or muffin men or church bells to break the peace. Only that great, desolate silence, like a living thing. And then the jackals. They make quite an eerie sound when one is not accustomed to them.” She gave a rueful smile. “I was brought up in Egypt, but in the bustle of Cairo, not the barren wastes of the Valley of the Kings. It is quite the eeriest spot I have ever been. When I am wakeful, I always rise and potter about, trying to do something useful. I find it makes me more inclined to sleep when I return to my bed. One night, as I fixed together a few pieces of pottery, I heard a jackal. Not uncommon, of course, but this one was very close to the expedition house. I was wondering whether I ought to rouse my husband to order the guards to shoot it. I looked out the window to see if I could determine how far away it was, and that’s when I saw it—him,” she corrected.

  “Anubis?” Stoker asked gravely.

  She nodded. “He was simply standing in a pool of moonlight. I could see him as clearly as if it were day—the profile of the jackal’s head atop the body of the man. It was a mask of sorts, like the ancient priests would have worn. They fashioned such things out of cartonnage and wore them during sacred rites. I knew what it was, and yet I cannot describe the effect of it. It was otherworldly. His chest and legs”—she colored slightly at using the word—“were bare. He wore sandals and a sort of breastplate of beadwork with a traditional linen kilt. Really, he looked just as if he had stepped from the wall of a tomb, a funerary painting come to life,” she finished.

  “And you could tell nothing else about him from his physique? His mannerisms?” I asked.

  “What sort of question is that?” Sir Leicester demanded. “D’ye think my wife is in the habit of seeing men prancing about half-dressed?”

  �
��Not at all,” I soothed. “I merely thought that her ladyship might have seen something familiar in the way he moved, something that might call to mind an acquaintance with a penchant for practical jokes perhaps.”

  “He did not move,” Lady Tiverton explained. “He merely stood there in profile, perfectly still, until a bit of cloud obscured the moon. It caused a shadow to pass over him, and when the shadow disappeared, he was gone.”

  “Gone?” Stoker echoed.

  “Without so much as a sound.”

  “I presume you looked for footprints?” I suggested.

  Sir Leicester nodded. “Naturally. There were no traces of the fellow to be found—no stray beads dropped from his breastplate, no marks of his sandals in the dirt.”

  “But you believe in this apparition?” Stoker asked.

  “Of course I do! If my wife says she saw it, that’s good enough for me,” Sir Leicester replied stoutly.

  “I saw it myself,” Patrick Fairbrother said quietly. “Several nights after her ladyship. It was the dark of the moon by then, so my view was not nearly as clear as hers, but there was no mistaking that profile.”

  Stoker steepled his fingers together thoughtfully. “Did anyone else see it?”

  Fairbrother shrugged. “Dozens of people. The fellow walked right through one of the villages of workers clustered at the edge of the Valley. Whole families shuttered their doors and windows and refused to come out again until morning.”

  “How dramatic,” I murmured.

  “It was a damned nuisance, if you’ll pardon my language,” Sir Leicester said. “After that, not a man from fifty miles around would work our site. I had to import fellahin from upriver to do the job. And of course, none of them know the first thing about proper excavation work. They made a ham-fisted business of it, destroying half of what they carried out,” he finished bitterly.

  “That is why we were preparing to leave early,” her ladyship explained. “We simply could not manage a proper excavation with untrained workers, not to my husband’s standards. We decided to empty the cave to the best of our ability and call it a day.”

  “And there was Jonas,” Fairbrother said softly, looking at his hands.

  Lady Tiverton made an inarticulate sound of distress, pressing her lips together.

  “Jonas?” Stoker asked.

  “Jonas Fowler. The expedition director,” Sir Leicester said, the words coming quite quickly. “He took sick and died. It was not unexpected. The poor fellow had a weak heart. He’d been waiting to pop off for years. Everyone knew this was his final season, but he did hope to last to the end of it.” He stopped speaking, his mouth working soundlessly.

  Patrick Fairbrother picked up the thread of the narrative. “Jonas was a good old sort, rough in his ways. He liked living with the workers, eating their food and so forth. We used to joke that his constitution was as stout as a donkey’s. But it was a hollow jest, as it turns out. He fell ill. He was unable to rise from his bed for several days, and then his heart simply gave out.”

  “We hadn’t the spirit to go on after that,” Lady Tiverton said in a muffled voice. “And without proper workers, it all just seemed so terribly pointless.”

  “Of course,” I assured her. “It must have been a dreadful blow.”

  “To Sir Leicester most of all,” Mr. Fairbrother said, giving his patron a generous nod. “His friendship with Jonas was of the longest duration.”

  Sir Leicester seemed overcome with emotion for a moment, and I hastened to change the subject from Jonas Fowler’s untimely death.

  “It seems curious that a single sighting of Anubis would put off well-trained and experienced workers to begin with,” I began slowly.

  Her ladyship tipped her head. “Have you ever met the average Egyptian villager, Miss Speedwell?”

  “I have,” Stoker put in.

  “Then you will understand they are unique. They might be touched by the modern world, but they are not of it. They live in the desert wadis, marking the seasons by the inundation of the Nile, just as their forebears have for millennia. They dwell, quite literally, amongst the bones of their ancestors. It is little wonder that they still believe, at least a little, in the ancient gods. Tell me the average English farmer would not tremble to see the Green Man in a forest glade,” she finished with a smile.

  “It’s damned barbaric,” Sir Leicester grumbled.

  Her ladyship seemed to take no offense at this criticism of her countrymen. She merely gave her husband a look that was sweetly chiding.

  “You only say that because they inconvenienced you,” she told him. “You are the first to champion the Egyptian worker as a marvel of industry and courage.”

  “Well, they are not shy of a hard day’s work,” he said grudgingly.

  I cleared my throat. “Presuming that Anubis, god of the underworld and keeper of tombs, was himself otherwise occupied, we may safely theorize that your visitor was simply a mortal man playing a prank. Now, it might have been just a bit of harmless flummery, but it threw your excavation into confusion just after you made a significant discovery. The timing of it strikes me as interesting. Can you think of anyone who might profit from your expedition being interrupted?”

  “Such as John de Morgan?” Stoker offered.

  “That was my thought,” Sir Leicester said quickly. “And his disappearance only confirmed it. Trouble through and through, he was.”

  “Possibly.” I clucked my tongue. “But why go to the bother of masquerading as Anubis if he planned to run away with the diadem? What purpose did it serve him?”

  “To further confuse us?” Sir Leicester suggested. But he sounded doubtful, and Stoker shook his head.

  “Unlikely, I should think. I wonder, do you have any professional enemies? People who might have been jealous of your find and eager to drive you away from it?”

  Sir Leicester and Lady Tiverton exchanged glances with Patrick Fairbrother.

  “There is one,” Sir Leicester began.

  Lady Tiverton touched her scarab brooch again. “We have no proof,” she murmured.

  “The blackguard threatened me in the lobby of Shepheard’s!” her husband blustered. “Horace Stihl,” he said succinctly. “This has the stink of him all over it.”

  “Horace Stihl, the American millionaire?” I asked.

  “The same,” Lady Tiverton confirmed. “He and my husband were excavation partners for many years. Last year’s season was their final joint expedition.”

  “What caused you to part ways?” Stoker asked Sir Leicester.

  The baronet shifted. “I wouldn’t like to say.”

  “Sir Leicester,” I said in my most beguiling voice, “surely you see that any information might help us understand John de Morgan’s disappearance and recover your diadem? Perhaps Mr. Stihl was involved.”

  Lady Tiverton made a little noise of distress. “You mean to suggest that Mr. Stihl might have bribed John de Morgan to steal the diadem? And then paid him to disappear? I cannot bear to think of it. It is horrid enough to imagine that Mr. de Morgan might have stolen the jewel for his own gain, but I could understand it. He has a wife to support and limited prospects. The temptation would be too much, perhaps. But for him to succumb to conspiring with Horace Stihl . . .” She let her voice trail off, pressing a hand to her lips.

  “What can you tell us about Mr. Stihl?” I prodded.

  Sir Leicester exchanged glances with his wife. “As you said, he is an American and a wealthy one. Doubtless you have heard of his businesses—mining, railways, steamships. He was a millionaire twice over by the age of thirty. But what business acumen he has was acquired on the streets, as it were. He decided after he turned thirty to remedy the defects in his education, and took up the study of Egyptology. He had already established a name for himself in that field when my wife—my first wife,” Sir Leicester corrected with a
hasty glance at the present Lady Tiverton, “began to publish her books. He was most impressed by them and they struck up a sort of friendship. In due course, we formed a partnership and launched the joint Tiverton-Stihl Expeditions.”

  He fell silent then, his complexion warming, and Lady Tiverton spoke.

  “Mr. Stihl was, for a very long time, a devoted friend to the Tivertons. I am sorry to say that he never entirely warmed to my presence in the family.”

  Sir Leicester covered her slim hand with his own beefy one. “Damned fool,” he muttered.

  Lady Tiverton gave him a gentle smile.

  Sir Leicester continued. “His given name is Horace, but thanks to his work in Egyptology, my first wife gave him the nickname Horus after the god king. It amused him.” He shook his head, his expression suddenly mulish. “For more than a decade we dug together. But at the end of last season I told him I would not partner with him again and he took it badly. He made a scene in Shepheard’s, threatened me with a pistol,” he said in a tone of indignation. “Americans and their guns,” he muttered.

  “Did you tell him about the tomb you discovered?” I asked mildly.

  The baronet flushed deeply. “I did not. Horus always ridiculed my idea of anything of value being concealed in the wadis in that part of the Valley. He thought it a waste of time to poke about, looking for a find. But I was right,” he added stubbornly. “We were discussing where to dig this year when he began nettling me about my ideas. Well, why should I tell him the truth when he was forever carping about my lack of scholarship? My flights of fancy? I did not want to share it with him. I wanted to dig it all up myself and then force him to acknowledge that he was wrong. So I simply told him I refused to continue the partnership.” He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “I would not give him a reason, and that is what angered him more than anything.”

  “And he was back in the Valley digging this season?” Stoker asked.

  “He chose to dig at Amarna instead,” Mr. Fairbrother corrected. “Quite a distance from our location in the Valley, but Mr. Stihl visited other friends in the area often. It made things rather awkward.”