A Treacherous Curse

by DEANNA RAYBOURN

  “He said they were out of hand, giving trouble, and he wanted to hire new men from upriver, but that it would cause all sorts of problems if he simply let them all go. But if they were frightened away, then they would leave of their own accord and he would be free to take on whoever he liked. It made sense at the time,” she insisted.

  “Of course it did,” Stoker soothed. “But if your father and Fairbrother were behind the tricks in Egypt, why repeat them here? Why turn the tables on them?”

  Figgy’s expression was mulish. “Because I wanted to give Patrick a fright. He continued masquerading as Anubis here in London in order to prop up the story of a curse. He pretends to think it’s ridiculous, but he really wants people to believe it. I overheard him say it would bring heaps more attention to the exhibition if people believe in that nonsense. He’s awful,” she said, her voice nearly breaking. “I hate him. He’s always played up to Papa, acting like he’s a member of the family, and he’s not. He’s hired help,” she said, fairly spitting the word. “And I know he is up to something with her.”

  She could not bring herself to say the name, but I knew precisely whom she meant. “Your stepmother? What makes you think so?”

  “I saw her one day, coming out of Patrick’s room. She was perfectly furtive. She would have seen me, only I was reading behind the curtains and she never noticed I was there.”

  “There might be an innocent explanation,” I began.

  “I think not,” she replied in a lofty tone. “She is up to something nefarious.”

  “Is that why you followed her to the linen draper?” I asked with some asperity. “To witness for yourself the perfidy of a lady purchasing her own handkerchiefs?”

  “Oh!” Two spots of bright color rose in her cheeks. “You are horrid,” she told me. “I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I never expected you would.”

  She said nothing more, but set her mouth in a stubborn line and folded her arms over her chest.

  “We deduced that Figgy was behind the sculpting of the mask when we learnt of her skills at papier-mâché,” I told Horus Stihl. “But we did not know the identity of her partner in the masquerade until I found the sketch her mother made when they were children and read her account of their fast friendship.”

  “Indeed,” Stihl said faintly. “Until Henry went away to school, they were always together, every dig. Scrambling over rocks, pretending to run their own excavations. They painted on rocks and made their own tombs, even made their own mummies out of papier-mâché when they learnt about cartonnage.”

  “And you knew what they were doing,” Stoker said. “You knew Henry was masquerading in London as Anubis and that he was doing it with Figgy’s help.”

  Stihl held up a hand. “I most certainly did not. I might have had a suspicion, but knowing and suspecting are two different things. I don’t ask questions if I think the answer is something I don’t want to know, Mr. Templeton-Vane.”

  I turned to Henry. “I am rather curious how you managed to assume the disguise so quickly last night? And then resume your own clothes with such haste?”

  He had the grace to flush deeply. “Figgy made certain one of the storerooms was open for me. She hid the costume in there and kept my own clothes waiting for me.”

  “And the head was dropped next to the sewers so that you shouldn’t be caught with it. No doubt Figgy was able to give you detailed information about Karnak Hall. And your interest in the drains of London made an excellent cover for your study of the sewers surrounding the Hall. No one would connect quiet Henry Stihl with his fondness for all things hygiene with a god disappearing beneath the city,” Stoker supplied. “Very clever.”

  “It wasn’t,” Henry said miserably. “It was a stupid thing to do, and you and Miss Speedwell might have been badly hurt. I’m dreadfully sorry.”

  “But we did not come merely to accuse Henry Stihl of masquerading as Anubis,” I said, turning a stern eye to his father. I held out my hand. “The diadem, if you please.”

  He sighed and went to the mantel. The rather hideous painting of the deerhound swung open at a touch. Behind it was a small wall safe, neatly fitted and thoroughly discreet.

  “The latest in hotel security,” Stihl the elder told us as he turned the knob to the left and then the right. “Most establishments insist that guests send their jewels and money down to the manager to be held in the main vault, but the Allerdale is a mite more luxurious than that. Private safes in every room,” he said, opening the small steel door with obvious satisfaction. He withdrew a bundle of white linen, and as he approached, I realized what it was.

  “You wrapped it in your shirt?”

  He gave me an apologetic smile. “It is all I had to hand, Miss Speedwell. Besides, I could have wrapped this coronet in rags and it wouldn’t have done it any harm.”

  “Because it is so intrinsically valuable?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied with a grim look as he thrust it into my hands. “Because it is a fake.”

  CHAPTER

  18

  “I beg your pardon?” I blinked, looking from the American millionaire to the heap of gold resting in my hands. “A fake?”

  “Yes, indeed. A clever one, but a fake nonetheless. I realized it as soon as I saw the cartouche. There is an error in the hieroglyphics.”

  Figgy looked to him in confusion. “But that is the crown of Princess Ankheset. It was taken from her tomb.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Stoker said, working it out. “Or, rather, it was taken from the cave your father was excavating but only because he put it there first.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said stubbornly.

  “My God,” Henry Stihl breathed, putting a hand to her shoulder. “He faked the expedition.”

  “That was why Patrick Fairbrother was tasked with scaring away the local workers. Those men would have known the goods did not come from the tomb. That is also why he chose to quarrel with you, Mr. Stihl,” I said, turning to the elder Stihl. “You were partners, but he knew you would not stand for such a deception. He found the perfect site for the scheme in his remote cave, but it was located in your concession. He had to force you out of the partnership in order to carry out his plan.”

  “No!” Figgy wailed. But from the sudden collapse of her shoulders, I realized she knew the truth.

  “Tell me, Mr. Stihl,” I said. “Why did you quarrel with Sir Leicester?”

  He hesitated, then burst out, “I suppose it can do no harm to tell you now. He insulted my son,” he told us, raising his chin. “And no man gets away with calling my boy names.”

  “What provoked him to do that?” I pressed.

  Henry Stihl sighed, coloring as he stared at the toes of his shoes. “I confronted him about breaking off the partnership with my father. It bothered Father something terrible, and I was angry, really angry. So I went to Sir Leicester and told him it was an ungentlemanly thing to abandon a partner of so many years without a good reason. I called him a blackguard and told him he didn’t deserve to have Father for a partner. I oughtn’t to have done it,” he finished miserably.

  “Of course you ought to have,” his father countered swiftly. “You put your neck out for one of your own, and that’s what Stihls do.” His chest seemed to swell a little as he regarded his son. “But Leicester didn’t see it that way. He stopped me in the lobby at Shepheard’s and had his say, calling my boy all kinds of names, and I got tired of listening. So I pulled out my revolver to persuade him I meant business when I told him to hush. The newspapers got hold of the story and made it out like I was threatening him. I didn’t bother to correct them. I just wanted the whole sorry mess to go away.”

  Figgy’s head shot up and she looked at Henry. “But why did you never tell me?”

  “Because if I had, I would have had to tell you exactly what your father said to me when I spoke with him, and
those words are not befitting of a gentleman,” he said with quiet dignity. “It would have grieved you to know exactly what happened. Far better to think that our fathers had just fallen out over the concession.”

  “Henry,” she said, coloring furiously. “We’ve been friends forever. You’re awfully stupid if you think I wouldn’t believe you.”

  He blinked in surprise behind his spectacles, looking like a beleaguered owl, but Stoker and I exchanged knowing glances. Figgy might protest, but her loyalty to her father was still paramount. She had a child’s hero worship for the man, and I pitied her the day she would find his feet were—like all men’s—made of clay.

  After all the revelations of Henry’s derring-do, Horus Stihl was looking at his son with something like admiration. “I am rather surprised to find you had it in you, son. There is a bit of Stihl in your spine after all,” he added with a grin.

  Henry rolled his eyes. “Of all the errant nonsense—”

  I held up a hand. “Perhaps you could sort that out later. We are trying to piece together a conspiracy. Sir Leicester secured the concession in Egypt with the intention of salting the site—that is, filling the tomb with fake artifacts he could pretend to excavate and later sell on to unsuspecting collectors. But how could he have got fake antiquities past the Egyptian authorities?” I wondered. “Surely they would have known he was smuggling out forgeries.”

  “Not if he gave them authentic items,” Horus Stihl said thoughtfully. “That is how I would do it if I were to concoct such a plan.”

  “Pa!” Henry Stihl’s tone was one of reproach.

  “I said if, ” his father pointed out. “Leicester, like all excavators, has a substantial collection of his own. He could carry it out to Egypt in the guise of excavation equipment—household goods and so forth—and when the authorities came calling, he could just hand those pieces over and pretend they had been hauled from the cave. Even if the authorities were suspicious, they would have been satisfied with a bribe of any half-decent artifacts.”

  “So Sir Leicester secures the empty tomb, carries out to Egypt the necessary artifacts to fool the authorities, and purchases cheap fakes to be shipped home in place of the grave goods he never actually excavated. But to do this, he must have the cooperation of the workers,” I pointed out.

  “Men not from the area, so they will be far less likely to report him. Enter Patrick Fairbrother in the guise of Anubis,” Stoker said. “And whatever usual hazards befall an expedition—illness, accident—they will be chalked up to the malign influence of an offended god, another clever stroke to buy the silence of his workers.”

  “And if there are not enough hazards to persuade them, such things can easily be arranged,” I added. “A little arsenic in the teapot can go quite a long way towards conjuring illness. Jonas Fowler died, after all. And John de Morgan was unwell for much of the dig season. Perhaps their misfortunes were helped along by a malicious hand.”

  “But John de Morgan finding the crown and determining it was a fake was something they did not anticipate,” Stoker pointed out.

  Horus Stihl rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “His experience with Egyptology was limited. He wouldn’t have known from looking at the diadem that it was fake. Only an expert philologist would have seen the mistake in the inscription. No, I suspect he saw the diadem before it was supposed to have been ‘discovered’ in the tomb. When it was presented as a great find, he would have realized at once what had happened and taken steps to expose them.”

  “When he left with the diadem, it must have been a brutal blow to the conspirators,” I said, carefully avoiding Sir Leicester’s name so as not to set Figgy off again. “They had to act in order to prevent him from exposing their plot. John de Morgan had to die, and his death would be attributed to the curse of the mummy.”

  Horus Stihl broke in with a frown. “It all makes perfect sense until that point. We know he went as far as the hotel in Dover, but no further. How could anyone anticipate where he would go and arrange for his disappearance so thoroughly that his room vanished as well?”

  “That, we have yet to discover,” I told him. “But there is one more little mystery I think we might be able to clear up now.” I brought out the box with its knitted cobra and demonstrated the mechanism for the Stihls. “Your handiwork, I think, Figgy?”

  “Yes, all right, then,” she said, a trifle sullenly. “I didn’t trust you. So many strange things had gone on. I felt horrible, so alone and confused. I didn’t understand anything of what was happening. And then the pair of you appeared, and I thought you might somehow be connected. I decided to investigate you a little myself. I went to see Lady Wellie and she said all sorts of nice things about you, which almost made me decide not to leave the box, but I already had it in my pocket, and I thought if you got a good fright, it might shake things up a bit.” She broke off, but no fresh weeping ensued. Poor Figgy.

  “And you thought to shake things up even more by having Henry dress up and play Anubis—is that it?” Stoker asked her.

  She nodded. “No one tells me anything,” she said, her chin taking a suddenly stubborn cast. “They treat me like I’m a child, but I’m not. I even tried following Patrick one night, but all he did was visit a house in Kensington off the Cromwell Road. So I met Henry in secret and asked him to help me.”

  Stoker flicked a glance my way but said nothing. Figgy did not know what she had seen, but the visit to the Marshwoods was significant. It meant that Fairbrother had at the very least broken into Caroline’s rooms in an attempt to recover the diadem. I thought of Birdie’s observation that Figgy had gone out only to walk the dog and realized how much she had actually accomplished in those stolen moments.

  “And I was happy to,” Henry said, his manner stalwart. He was every inch the young St. George, willing to slay the dragon for a maiden. And yet I rather suspected that Figgy had taken a more active role than any helpless maiden. If she hadn’t had breasts, she might have played Anubis herself, I decided. It was Henry’s physique that dictated his part. There might be Stihl in his spine, but there was good mettle in hers.

  “What now?” Horus demanded.

  “We have to find proof,” Stoker said flatly. “And we must determine the extent of the conspiracy. We believe there are three conspirators, Sir Leicester, Lady Tiverton, and Patrick Fairbrother. But we do not know who is the mastermind.”

  “She is,” Figgy fairly spat. “My father would not be so evil or so clever as to devise such a scheme. And Patrick is thick as a plank. This is her doing.”

  “Then we must find the proof,” Stoker repeated.

  Figgy shook her head. “You won’t. She is too clever!” she insisted.

  Horus patted her hand. “Don’t carry on so, Figgy. We will make certain your father is not implicated if he is an innocent man.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Innocent man! When he had carried out at least the scheme to defraud the entire Egyptological community and possibly had conspired to commit murder. But Mr. Stihl had clearly cast himself in the role of surrogate father to Figgy, and was relishing his chance to manage the situation.

  “Now, in the morning, I will hire the very best Pinkertons I can find—or whatever they have in London that is the equivalent to them,” he began.

  Henry rose. “No, you won’t. Every second counts. Now that Sir Leicester has been taken ill—through my actions, actions I will have to live with the rest of my life,” he added with such an air of noble suffering, it would have done credit to Achilles, “I will find the necessary proof to bring this plot to an end before anyone else is harmed.”

  He stood tall, his shoulders squared, his jaw firm, his eyes shining, and in that moment I saw his father overcome with emotion. If Henry intended his little display to have a similar effect on Figgy, he was sadly disappointed. She merely huffed out a sigh of irritation while Horus Stihl clasped his son to his manly bos
om and choked out a few words of praise.

  He stepped back and reached into his pocket for a revolver. “Here, son. You will need this.”

  Henry Stihl blanched, and Stoker reached for the weapon, pocketing it easily. “Thank you, Mr. Stihl. It might come in handy at that.”

  Horus looked to me. “I apologize, Miss Speedwell,” he said in a jocular tone. “I am afraid I do not have a firearm to spare.”

  I bared my teeth in a smile. “Do not worry yourself, Mr. Stihl. Miss Speedwell does not need one.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  We arrived at Karnak Hall after a considerable delay. Mr. Stihl promised to escort Figgy back to the Sudbury, and I was not surprised. He was quite solicitous of her, and Henry Stihl parted from her with a lingering tender look. I had little doubt that whatever the conclusion of our perilous adventure, Figgy would land amongst friends.

  The Hall was in shadow when we arrived, and we took full advantage of the dark streets, slipping around to the alley behind. As we turned into the narrow passage, we heard a sudden scuttling.

  “Rats!” I pronounced, but the only creature to emerge was of the two-legged variety. A slim young man with a very white bottom hurried past, hoisting his trousers and muttering curses under his breath. A woman who made her living from the nocturnal arts stepped out from behind a discarded crate, blinking in the lamplight.

  “Hello, ducks,” she said cordially. “Tuppence each against the wall,” she said, jerking her chin at the shadows.

  “Good evening,” Stoker replied. “We are not in need of your services, but I do hope we have not cost you that gentleman’s fees.”

  She grinned and opened her palm, revealing a coin. “Always get the money up front,” she said sagely. “What business have you got here unless it’s my sort of business?” she demanded.

  “We are in need of a pair of sharp eyes,” I told her, pressing another coin into her hand. “Go to the end of the street, and if you see a bobby coming, whistle or sing a little tune.”