The Emerald Embrace

by Briskin, Jacqueline;

  The light of Yacub’s candlestick faded down the hall toward the back stairs. We were alone. Stephen went unsteadily to the table, pouring two glasses of red wine. He swayed on his feet. His face was set in grim determination. I barely recognized him.

  I stood irresolutely in the open doorway of the dining room, unable to move, wondering how this drunk and furious stranger would behave.

  “Come join me,” he said.

  “I’m very tired.”

  “I should imagine you are. Dancing with half the admirals of Europe, and then renewing your acquaintance with that big pompous slave dealer, Thornton.”

  “He only owns slaves,” I said. “That’s bad enough.”

  “After the war he bought a slaver. Prides himself on running her fast and full.”

  “How ugly,” I said. My voice rang hollow in the shadows.

  Stephen looked up. The flames of the candelabra reflected in his eyes. “You’re afraid of me, aren’t you?”

  With a shiver I realized Stephen did frighten me.

  Squaring my shoulders, I walked into the dining room. Stephen unbuttoned the high, gold-braided collar of his uniform, pulling at his snowy neckband. His neck muscles were very strong, and his gold-fringed epaulets tremendously wide. He stared at me until my gaze fell.

  “Why’re you standing like that?” he demanded. “Sit down.”

  I pulled out the chair across from him, and the Sèvres china and heavy silver glowed between us while cold meats gave off a heavy odor.

  “Drink,” he ordered.

  I picked up the stemmed glass, managing a sip.

  “That’s better,” he said, and drained his own glass.

  “Stephen, isn’t that enough?”

  “You lived in Islam too long. You’ve forgotten the uses of alcohol. Drinking imparts courage. Drinking enables a man to do what must be done.”

  My body began to shake. Carefully I set down the wineglass.

  “Damn you, do you really believe I’d harm you? You, the bravest women I ever met, terrified of me! Am I so despicable? I know what you intend doing, and I’ll help you. Do you really think I’d harm you for wanting to go back to your husband?”

  “The Pasha?” My shaking hand jerked with surprise, and my wineglass spilled. Dark red spread like blood on the damask cloth and neither of us moved. “Why would I go back to him?”

  “You answer that, Liberty.” Stephen’s voice was so slurred with drink and pain that for a moment I couldn’t comprehend the words. “You tell me why you’re so bound to him.”

  “Out of deepest guilt,” I whispered and knew it the truth. “He married me honorably and according to his faith, and I accepted that. Then I ran off like a sneak thief.”

  “Guilt? Is guilt why you praised him to the skies to King Louis? Is guilt why you risked all our lives to keep his gift? Is guilt why you so often stare into the distance with a lost sadness on your face? Is guilt why you can’t bear to have me touch you?”

  “Stephen—”

  “No. Let me finish. I spent the night getting drunk enough to say this. I’m not blaming you, Liberty. I’m the fool. I fell in love with a girl too beautiful, too spirited, too brilliant to be interested in an ordinary man. But being a fool, I spent years searching for her. And when I found her she was married to the greatest ruler on the earth, surrounded by every luxury.” His voice choked with pain. “She lay willingly in another’s arms.”

  He picked up the decanter and as he poured himself another glass, my chaotic brain centered on the facts. Stephen always had been faintly shy with me—and for the same reason I was shy with him. I thought him too far above me. Seeing me through a similar haze, he thought himself unworthy of me. He believed my rejection proof of his unworthiness!

  “Only that one night aboard the Hassam was ever right for me,” I murmured.

  He didn’t seem to hear. “I couldn’t believe my years of searching were in vain. No, I had to bring you away, to risk your life. My God! You were so brave! To kiss me at the height of the hamseen—I should have died then, when I was happy. But here we are, and you’ve never truly left Egypt.”

  He came lurching around the table, his large, sun-browned hands on my shoulders forcing me to my feet. He peered down at me. Then, abruptly, his arms went around me in a bearlike hug. His roughness crushed my ribs and I cried aloud, for this maddened stranger terrified me. His mouth covered mine and he was kissing me with a savagery that threatened to suffocate me, and though my hands flailed against the hard muscles of his back, his mouth continued to bruise mine. My heart pounded in frantic, erratic throbs.

  He released me so suddenly that I staggered, almost falling.

  “Give me what you gave the Pasha,” he muttered.

  My frightened brain whirled. I must get upstairs, I must escape to my room and barricade my door against this drunken, powerful stranger.

  I ran into the darkness of the hall, but with a seaman’s swift reflex, he caught up with me, gripping my arm. He tore the pelisse from my shoulders, and fumbled so violently with the Emerald Embrace that the gold cut into my neck before he could pull the lotus clasp free.

  “There!” he panted. “Get rid of what ties you to him!”

  He hurled the golden collar across the dining room and it clanged against something either glass or china. I heard the crash but couldn’t see what broke, for his mouth was again on mine in a hard kiss that parted my lips, and then he was kissing the pulse at my throat and muttering passionate endearments. This Stephen Delaplane was no tender lover, no shyly decent suitor; the only familiar thing about this strong, merciless stranger was his smell, the faint, clean tang of the sea.

  All at once my fear left, for I was overwhelmed by the shaking tremors of his body, by his insistent, bruising kisses, by the strength of his desire. In a sudden burst of need, I clasped my arms around him.

  He tore at my satin bodice and buttons scattered. Next, with both hands he pulled my chemise and ripped the fragile silk. My breasts, swollen by desire, were bared and he bit kisses into my flesh, pressing me backward, arching my spine until I stumbled. When I fell, he sprawled atop me, his weight pressing me into the carpet. He pulled up my skirt, yanking at my undergarments, and I undid his breeches with shaking, hasty fingers. Mine was a vastly different passion from that inspired by the necklace. As he knelt between my eager thighs, I didn’t pause for those lingering, intimate kisses. My hips rose to welcome him as he plunged into my moist, waiting flesh. He rushed toward the depth of my body, seeking, thrusting, and I surrendered to ecstasy, ecstasy that for the first time in nearly five years was mine.

  Calling his name over and over, I shattered into a million glowing stars.

  Stephen’s naked thigh was pressed, warm and heavy, over my legs. The bed curtains were open and the sunlight streaming through the windows was yellow as butter. It must be nearly noon, I thought, flushing. I had intended to awaken before the servants so I could collect the clothing strewn about downstairs. Yet mingled with my embarrassment was a rapturous relief. Before Stephen had carried me to the bedroom, he had taken me again and again on the Tabriz rug, and my answering passions had been truly my own. I’m a whole woman, I exulted, and kissed his bare shoulder.

  His eyes opened, he smiled drowsily and turned his head on the pillow to kiss me.

  At a rap on the door we jerked apart.

  Uisha carried in a breakfast tray set for two. She was not shocked, but happy for us. Yet Stephen reddened and I raised the sheet to my chin. She put the tray on the bed between us, bowing before she slipped from the room.

  After we finished our coffee and brioche, Stephen went across the hall to his room to dress.

  Uisha returned, her arms piled with my ball clothes. She had ironed the sea-green satin, replacing its buttons, and she had mended the ripped chemise. She put away my things, her expression free of questions. Since that day in the slave souk she had known all there was to know of my intimate life. She accepted my body with an earthy Eastern rea
lism that I could never possess.

  As she started to put the Emerald Embrace back in the drawer, I said, “Leave that out, Uisha. At the ball I met the scholar whose book I used in the ruins—remember? Monsieur Champollion. I’m seeing him this afternoon and I promised to let him examine the writing on the necklace.”

  Four

  “Can you return for me?” I asked the ruddy-cheeked fiacre driver as he handed me from the carriage block.

  “At what hour, mademoiselle?”

  “Six.”

  “I’ll be here at six on the dot,” the rubicund man promised.

  The bright morning had become a chill, foggy afternoon, and I clasped the leather jewel box with cold gloved hands as I went up the steps of the narrow house with cracked stone cornices. The front door burst open. The hunched little scholar stood there beaming.

  “Mademoiselle Moore, how good to see you without Monsieur Thornton,” he said, then added, “I have not offended you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Last night he offended me. To hear him attack your father’s excellent theory!” In the dim front hall he helped me off with my coat, talking volubly. “Monsieur Thornton has a good mind. Unfortunately his vanity makes it imperative for him to destroy any rival.”

  We went into his book-crowded study. In a place of honor opposite the cozy fire hung a large wax copy of a broken stele. It was engraved with three different kinds of writing. Across the top were three lines of hieroglyphs, then a broad band of the Arabic-looking script that is demotic Egyptian and on the bottom, Greek.

  “Voilà!” the scholar said. “An exact casting of the Rosetta stone. It’s three feet nine inches high and four feet four inches wide. The original in the British Museum is black basalt. The writings, however, show up better on this wax.”

  I moved toward it. “I can make out the Greek, of course, and a little of the demotic script,” I said. I peered up at the hieroglyphs at the top. “And some of these are familiar.”

  “The hieroglyphs?” he asked in excitement.

  “I copied identical ones in Thebes and Luxor.”

  His thin, lined face shone. “You are your father’s daughter! When may I examine them?”

  “They aren’t in Paris.…” Had the Pasha, in his hurt rage, thrown them instead of me into the Nile? “Haste forced me to leave them in Egypt.”

  Monsieur Champollion drew his meager body erect. “Mademoiselle Moore,” he reproached. “To have been in the very cradle of civilization, Thebes and Luxor, and to have abandoned your work.”

  “It was unavoidable,” I murmured.

  His scholarly anger dissipated. “I’ve drawn enlargements of all the ancient symbols,” he said. He searched in the rat’s nest of papers on his desk, extracting one. “See this loop?” he asked.

  “It’s called a cartouche,” I replied.

  I had regained his respect. “The cartouche,” he said, “has enabled me to make a great advancement in deciphering.”

  “How?”

  “I have deduced beyond a shadow of a doubt that the loop always encloses the name of royalty.”

  I understood only too clearly his annoyance with me, for I was experiencing the same intellectual anger toward him. How infuriating that he, the most renowned of Egyptologists, had taken years to realize what the Pasha’s unschooled gray eyes had comprehended after a few brief glances.

  Monsieur Champollion drew a chair to his desk for me. “May I see your necklace?”

  I opened the flat leather case. Monsieur Champollion bent until the gold rims of his spectacles nearly touched the green glaze of the central falcon. He pulled back, putting his fingernail on a cartouche enclosing a beetle and abstract symbols. “This one says, ‘Lord of Upper and Lower Egypt, Thutmose.’”

  A chill went through me.

  “Ah, here’s a different cartouche. Another royal name.” Now Monsieur Champollion took out a magnification glass. “Mmmm,” he said, searching through his papers.

  The wall clock sounded three-thirty. He found drawings, discarded them, came up with birds, froglike creatures, zigzags, shuffling in total absorption. Finally, as the clock clanged four, he looked up at me.

  “As nearly as I can make it out, this second cartouche reads, ‘Wife and beloved of Thutmose, the Lady Nefer.’”

  A far colder chill raised the fine hairs on my neck. “Nefer,” I said in a reedy whisper.

  He was sketching the cartouche with quick, jabbing strokes. “Did you say something?” he asked.

  “Nefer,” I repeated in that odd, thin voice.

  He sanded the sketch, handing it to me. “The name means the Beautiful One.”

  Paper slipped from my nerveless fingers. The Beautiful One, my Islamic name. Monsieur Champollion returned to his scrutiny of the Emerald Embrace. My mind clutched like a fist around the two names. Naksh and Nefer. Nefer and Naksh.

  The scholar looked up. “I believe this is a map of sorts,” he said, holding the glass over a symbol.

  I stared at the pyramid topping a curved line. “Yes,” I said, my voice as mechanical as the ticking of the wall clock. “The curving line is the Nile and the pyramid is the mountain to the west of the Valley of the Kings.”

  “So it really is a map?”

  “Yes.”

  “The burial place of the Pharaohs,” he mused.

  “You have a theory?”

  He nodded. “As you know, Mademoiselle Moore, the ancients’ belief in the afterworld was absolute. And completely material. They believed that a person’s ka, that is to say his spirit and vital energy, his very essence, continued to live forever. That’s why such treasures were mounded up in tombs. Jewels, fine furniture, wigs, weapons, games as well as the necessities of food and water. The ka was expected to have the same needs and pleasures as the living person.” He stopped, looking sheepish.

  “Go on, Monsieur Champollion.”

  “You mustn’t think me a romantic, illogical charlatan.”

  “Egypt has much that can’t be explained by reason,” I said, thinking of dear Lullah Zuleika.

  “Well,” he said, hesitating, then the lines of his face grew deeper. “I believe that certain very special funerary objects were enhanced by priestly magic.” He glanced at me as if expecting to see a smile.

  “Magic? For what purpose?”

  “To enable a couple to be reunited. I hypothesize that your pectoral is just such an amulet.”

  “Because of the map?”

  “Let’s put it this way, Mademoiselle Moore. Last night, when I invited you here, I gave you my address. I also asked yours, so I could instruct you on a route here. You had a starting point—”

  “That’s the Valley of the Kings?”

  “Precisely. And you had a destination where we would meet. Mademoiselle Moore, I realize how foolish this must sound. But you have to remember that ancient Egyptians accepted both sorcery and an afterlife as quite literal realities.”

  “There was a magic itinerary set down so a man and woman could meet in the next life?”

  “That’s my belief, yes.” He gave an embarrassed cough.

  “And on my necklace an itinerary is written?”

  “Possibly,” he said. “I think that you may own a magnificent piece of jewelry that is also a unique funerary object.”

  And he bent over to begin copying the mysterious writing.

  I sat by the fire. If the Emerald Embrace were a funerary object that would explain why I hadn’t seen it in my visions. But why did I have these visions? How had I come under the necklace’s power?

  Was it random chance?

  Or were the hard, hawk-nosed Pharaoh and his Nefer, the Pasha and me, the four of us, connected in a recurring pattern of eternity? My mind went burrowing after the illogical yet irrefutable facts. The similarities were only too obvious. Both men ruled Egypt, both were wed to blond foreigners. Naksh … Nefer … the Beautiful One. Maybe if Father’s concept were proven, I would learn that the Island of Western Mists indeed
meant England, so we could share a common heritage. But what did it mean?

  Gazing into the fire, I realized that the mysteries were more impenetrable than ever.

  Two facts, though, couldn’t be denied. As Monsieur Champollion had theorized, the necklace held a sorcery rooted in the Valley of the Kings. There, the pull had been greatest, there each night the despairing love that had outlasted eternity drew me to the Pasha’s arms. There at the mouth of the Bir Oman Pass I had battled the Emerald Embrace physically—and lost.

  So deep in brooding conjecture was I that when the door knocker sounded, I gazed about in surprise that Monsieur Champollion had lit the candelabra.

  He went into the hall, returning immediately.

  “A groom is asking for you.”

  “I asked the hackie to return at six.” I glanced at the clock. “He’s a few minutes early.”

  The carriage was a different one. When I went into the foggy night I saw through the obscuring dampness that it was a leather-topped barouche. The carriage lanterns cast misty pools to shine on matched black horses. A driver sat on the seat. Still deep in my musing, I didn’t question the groom. Instead, I merely told myself that the ruddy-faced driver had passed me on to a better equipage.

  As the groom helped me up the block the lacquered door swung open.

  “I thought you’d be ready to leave now,” said Amos Thornton.

  He extended his beefy hand. Taken by surprise, I let him pull me inside. A whip cracked. We lurched forward.

  In the close quarters of the carriage I was more than ever conscious of Amos Thornton’s enormous size. A power seemed to emanate from him.

  “Order the driver to turn back.” I forced myself to speak evenly. “A hack was to pick me up at six.”

  “You shouldn’t ride in public conveyances,” he said.

  The horses splashed through mud and the carriage lurched.

  “Where—where are we going?” I asked. My mouth was dry.

  “Faubourg St. Germain. I have business with Delaplane.”