“We’re quite accustomed to carrying our gear into the field, after all,” Cleo said, her normal smile back in place as she replied to Pettigrew. “We appreciate you allowing us access to the sarcophagus, Mister Pettigrew. It’s most extraordinary.”
“Oh, gracious.” Pettigrew closed the door behind them and spread his hands in a welcoming fashion. “I like to think that were our positions reversed, you would also allow me access to such an amazing discovery. Then again…Mistral does have its reputation.”
Eleanor knew Mistral had a reputation for not sharing and barging in to lay claim to things they had not rightly discovered. She wondered if Pettigrew meant something else, however, having known Irving as he had. “As do you, Mister Pettigrew,” Eleanor said, strangely defensive of her new employer. “Where will we be working today?”
Pettigrew inclined his head. “Follow me, ladies.”
The halls of the house were wide, reminding Eleanor of Karnak’s hypostyle hall—halls formed by row after row of massive, decorated columns. This amused her mostly because she had seen the same design at Hatshepsut’s temple. She wondered if everything that crossed her path now would remind her of the place where her grandmother’s name was writ upon the walls. It was an annoyance she didn’t need or want, but feared she would never be able to set that place aside, no matter the desire to do such.
One could have easily wheeled four sarcophagi side by side down the halls and had room to spare. It did not surprise her that every column they passed was decorated with hieroglyphs and reliefs, and based on what she was able to read, precisely replicated from Karnak. But her reading was cut short when she realized that between nearly every column pairing, the space had been turned into a display niche. Most of these niches held mummies, preserved behind glass, suspended on barely-seen lines so as to appear floating, menacing. Eleanor counted twenty such mummies before they turned into a new hall, and the deeper into the house they went, Eleanor wondered if they would ever find their way out of the labyrinthine halls without a ball of yarn unspooling behind them.
The room Pettigrew led them to was striking and despite the gruesome displays in the corridors, Eleanor had a stab of envy at the sight of it. The space was high-ceilinged, a row of clerestory windows flooding the space with natural light. The ceiling was painted blue, splattered with golden stars much as she had seen in tombs, and her stomach lurched at the memory of flying through the heavens with Anubis. Cabinets and shelves had been built into the walls beneath the windows, but it was the machinery set within the high ceiling that caught and kept Eleanor’s attention.
“How like Da Vinici’s crane!” Cleo exclaimed as she entered and Pettigrew, on her heels, laughed.
“You are acquainted with his designs, then?”
Eleanor stared at the masterpiece of olive wood and honeyed bronze. It looked like a spider, crouched against the ceiling with its pulleys and gears. She could see the entire contraption had been made to lower and notch into the floor, where each of its four massive hooks could latch onto an artifact—in this case, sarcophagi by the boatload—and prise them open.
“There have been some modifications, of course…”
Eleanor was only vaguely aware of Pettigrew and Cleo conversing; she moved deeper into the room, studying everything as she set her parcels upon a cleared table. It was the room of a precisely organized soul, a person who knew where things were at all times and exactly how to use them.
In the relative center of the laboratory floor, beneath the crane, stood the serpentine sarcophagus, cracked open just as much as it had been the other night. That small gap, large enough to fit a hand, was like a portal to another world; Eleanor wanted to slip her own hand inside, wanted to know the suck of the honey and discover if there were anyone entombed inside. The other three sarcophagi were lined up against the far wall.
“I had these brought, too,” Pettigrew said, “in case one might tell you something of the others, but they are strange, are they not? These of cartonnage and the one of stone. I am not entirely certain they go together at all.”
Eleanor couldn’t entirely agree, but Cleo voiced the thought before she could.
“If the serpentine was meant to hold the honey, it’s no surprise,” Cleo said. She settled her cases of equipment upon a bare length of table. “The cartonnage would never hold it without leaking. Not for thousands of years, in any case.” She flashed Pettigrew a bright smile before she began to open her cases and settle her equipment into place.
“Nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first understood, isn’t that right?” Pettigrew asked, a crooked smile turning his mouth upward as he eyed Eleanor.
“Da Vinci claimed so,” Eleanor said. She nodded toward the crane hanging above them. “You will position the crane so we can fully open the sarcophagus? I presume you have years of experience in such matters, Mister Pettigrew.” She kept her own smile sweet, the venom of the statement lingering just under the surface. The idea of the mummy-lined corridors infuriated her, as he likely knew.
Pettigrew’s fingers glanced over his tie tack again, not, Eleanor guessed, a nervous habit, but simply a habit. She wasn’t sure this man would show nerves should she drop her human guise here and leap at him as a jackal. She wondered what he would do, but forced this idea aside as Pettigrew made a short bow.
“Ladies who do not waste time. But of course.” Pettigrew crossed the room and opened a cabinet filled with controls.
Pettigrew operated the devise with the ease of a man who had done it countless times before, and much as its namesake bird, the crane unfolded itself, all wooden legs and metal wings, from the high ceiling. It was a delicate dance that Eleanor could not take her eyes from.
“See the claws?” Pettigrew asked as the central pole of the crane notched itself securely into the floor. “We simply attach them and swing the lid off, no matter its weight.”
It always astounded her, the weight of sarcophagi, but then, the kings of Egypt had not wanted them opened easily or at all. Still, Eleanor helped settle each hook into place, so they might continue down this dreadful road Pettigrew had set them upon.
“What do you hope to accomplish with them all, Mister Pettigrew?” Eleanor was mindful of the lid edge as she slid the claw between it and the base of the sarcophagus, but the claw was made in such a way that it could not possibly mark the stone. It was ingenious and she very much wanted her own. “All of the mummies you have opened.”
Pettigrew’s smile was as easy as ever. “Only knowledge, Miss Folley. Watch your miraculous fingers, Miss Barclay. Here we go.”
The lid came away slowly as Pettigrew ratcheted the crane arm up. The floor had been built to capture anything that might spill or escape during an opening, but nothing came loose with this lid. Long strings of gleaming honey drizzled from the lid, precisely back into the coffin given the angle of the lid edge that channeled the honey. A rich scent began to infuse the room.
“What is that?” Cleo asked in a whisper. She gave an audible sniff.
Eleanor took a deep breath and Pettigrew did the same. It wasn’t the scent of a dead body, nor of the dust of ages. It was thick and cloying honey, but below that sweetness, there was another layer that was…
“Flowers?” Eleanor asked. It had to be. What the honey had come from, before it had flooded the—
Body. Eleanor stepped closer to the sarcophagus, to peer inside. Within the pool of golden honey there was yet a body, preserved though not entirely. It was as if she were viewing the memory of a man through a thick pane of bubbled glass. She could make out his hands, folded against his chest, even though his chest had begun to dissolve into darker veins of ancient honey.
“Oh.”
The soft exclamation came from Cleo at Eleanor’s side. Eleanor did not look away from the body within the honey, presuming Cleo’s face would look much like her own: struck by the idea that someone had been preserved within the honey, even though they had known it was a possibility. A likelihood.
“It was always supposed to be a legend, wasn’t it, Miss Folley?” Pettigrew asked. “I read about it within the pages of Li Shizhen’s Bencao Gangmu. And you?”
“I don’t remember the first time I heard of such a thing,” Eleanor admitted as Cleo moved away and began to assemble her tools. “But the Bencao Gangmu was one place.” She eyed Pettigrew with a new interest, wondering if rather than a foe, he would prove to be an ally as they studied the sarcophagus. And yet, her mind came back to the rings at the auction, how one paired up with the one left upon her notebooks. Were they tied to Pettigrew? Had he lured them here? And for what reason or purpose?
Perhaps it was the sarcophagus that rested between them, redolent of flowers Eleanor could not name. Perhaps Pettigrew knew he had stumbled across something remarkable indeed, something that went above and beyond the usual sarcophagi he cracked open. Eleanor wanted to be appreciative for the opportunity, but caution tempered her gratitude.
The work was slow, but satisfying. Eleanor did not find it odd that Pettigrew did not leave them to their studies; he was just as interested in their work and discoveries and though he didn’t understand every tool Cleo implemented, he knew enough to ask questions that spurred her onto other exploratory avenues.
As she made a study of the honey, Eleanor made a study of the body within it. She turned to a fresh page within her sketchbook and drew it as precisely as she might. In places, the skin was well-preserved, but nearing the wrist the skin and muscle had begun to decay. Eleanor supposed “dissolve” might be a better word, given that the honey would prevent any decay, keeping the body sealed up as well as, or better than, any sarcophagus. Without the brush of air, the exposure of light and heat, the body was suspended as it had been upon its point of death.
“I have read,” Pettigrew said softly as Eleanor sketched and Cleo slid a daub of honey beneath her microscope, “that these men were not victims, but rather volunteers, intrigued by the idea of what would become of them in the future. By the idea of being medicine.”
Eleanor drew a careful line in her book, pausing as she came to the wrist and fingers. The skin looked abraded, not dissolved; injured prior to being encased in the honey. The honey was not clouded with blood.
“Were they simply…entombed in the honey?” Cleo asked.
Eleanor looked up from the hand, holding her silence to see how Pettigrew would answer it.
“Oh not simply,” he said. “These men were fed a diet of strictly honey, until their bodies began to ooze it. Until they even began to defecate it. When they died, they were sealed into more honey, until they became…” He gestured to the sarcophagus. “What we see here. What is that honey telling you, Miss Barclay?”
She shook her head and peered back into her microscope. “It appears as any other honey. I brought a sample from the hotel, and visually, they are identical…”
Eleanor turned her attention back to the hand within the honey, sketching. But as she drew a curved line sliding across one of the fingers, she realized it was a ring. Upon the hand of the body in the honey, a ring. Eleanor’s breath stuck in her throat.
“What is it, Miss Folley?” Pettigrew asked.
At the sound of his voice, showmanship was foremost on Eleanor’s mind; she told herself to remember his tone of voice, because it carried the way it had the night of the unwrappings. He was asking a larger audience what she, his volunteer, had discovered. But the reasonable part of her mind was pushed to the side at the sight of a ring submerged within the honey. It could not be, and yet it was.
“It’s a ring,” Eleanor whispered and she set her notebook to the side, rolling up her sleeves before she could reconsider. There was only that circle of metal and the memory of the rings that had carried her mother away. She wanted it, was enthralled by it, and was already reaching for it when Cleo’s mechanical fingers closed gently around her forearm.
“Eleanor.”
The cool touch of the metal fingers startled her back into the here and now. She looked at Cleo, who pulled her back from the sticky edge of the sarcophagus.
“Let me. If it is a ring, I can probably retrieve it without causing the body any stress.” Giving up her hold on Eleanor slowly, as though she were trusting her against her will, Cleo pulled a pair of leather gloves from one of her cases and slid them on, tightening them with the pull of a single lace bound into the upper hem.
“Here.”
Pettigrew pressed a leather-bound square box into Eleanor’s hands. With the flick of a switch upon its upper edge, clean bright light poured out of it. She aimed it into the sarcophagus, surprised when candle wax did not run from the case, but the light source was fully contained behind a glass lens.
“Wonderful!” Cleo exclaimed.
Eleanor angled the light toward the hand, not daring to hope she was seeing what she thought she was seeing. Rings were not uncommon, she told herself as Cleo delved a precise hand into the thick golden river. It looked as if Cleo were shaking hands with the man, sliding her hand into his before her exact fingers latched onto the ring upon his smallest finger. It came slowly free and Eleanor found she was holding her breath as Cleo brought it from the honey.
“And here.”
Pettigrew offered a metal specimen tray and Cleo carefully deposited the ring into it. It was not corroded as the others were, a beautiful and perfect circle of metal within the puddle of honey. The metal was marked with patterns Eleanor had never seen, patches of bright and dark metals both. Pettigrew pressed the tray into Eleanor’s free hand. Eleanor snapped the light off, staring at the circle of metal.
It was smaller than she had guessed, though the honey might well have magnified its appearance. It was so small, Eleanor couldn’t help but wonder if it belonged to a woman. The metal appeared tarnished, unlike anything Eleanor had ever seen outside of the ring left atop her notebooks, the ring at the auction.
“Did you know this was here?” Eleanor whispered. She stared at Pettigrew, as if she could break him open with eyes alone and know every answer to every question. He only returned her stare, devoid of the anger and suspicion; his look was even, without even a trace of surprise at the accusation.
“Miss Folley, I am certain I had no idea, given that we have only just opened the sarcophagus.”
“Eleanor—”
Eleanor shushed Cleo, surprising even herself at the action. Pettigrew’s denial made perfect sense, and yet she could not shake the idea that they were part of an elaborate, ongoing spectacle, with Pettigrew as audience and conductor both. There was no stage, but for Alexandria herself, nor lights, nor music as there had been at his unwrapping party, but Eleanor still thought they were being watched and toyed with.
“The metal of that ring resembles two other rings I have come into recent possession of.” She looked at Cleo now. “You cannot possibly believe in that much coincidence.” Eleanor noted the way Cleo’s throat worked as she swallowed hard. Letting the honey drizzle from her glove, Cleo shook her head.
“There have been too many of those of late.”
“Similar to two other rings you have come into recent possession of,” Pettigrew said. He laughed at this and reclaimed the light box from Eleanor. “And here you criticize my own collection of artifacts. How dare you?”
“Rings are not people,” Eleanor insisted. She looked at the ring that stood within the pool of honey in the specimen tray. Clues, so many clues, but nothing that connected them, nothing but Pettigrew.
“These…” Pettigrew gestured to the sarcophagi around them, a gesture made without anger, filled with a deep passion for his subject as he warmed, “are no longer people, Miss Folley. There remain only shells that once housed such. These people have flown, much as Egypt’s own glory flown for she too is only presently a tarnished bauble dangled before countless white tourists. Fingerprints upon fingerprints, greedy hands shoveling what they may into their gaping maws.” He set the light box aside and walked a careful circle around the sarcophagus, until he reached
Cleo’s side. He leaned in, his voice falling to a rough whisper.
“How do you stand it? You both carry Egyptian blood, do you not? Or is that why you stand it? Because any preservation is better than utter destruction and complete loss? You see this world fingerprinted to clouds and footprinted into dust because it would at least remain in some way beneath these awful trespasses. We are none of us more than this body here.” He stabbed a finger toward the honey mummy. “Forever dissolving into the world around us. There was no grand and glorious afterlife to carry this man into, was there? Anubis did not scoop his heart into his hand for judgment. This man was flesh and bone and rot, as are we all.”
The jackal within Eleanor pressed so hard that Eleanor feared she would lose her human form before Pettigrew and Cleo. She wanted to silence Pettigrew, her teeth in his throat, because his words touched on truths she didn’t like to examine. What had become of the glorious Egypt that had once been? With shaking hands Eleanor pressed the specimen tray with its ring into Cleo’s hands.
“B-bring that t-to me later?” Eleanor stepped back from the sarcophagus, struggling for each step she took.
“Eleanor, where are you—” Cleo moved to follow, but Eleanor held up a hand.
“I will s-see you at the hotel.”
“Miss Folley.”
The hard edge of Pettigrew’s voice was somehow as compelling as the ring itself, but she shook her head and fled the room. She was aware of his pursuit and feared he would overtake her, because he knew the halls of his home and she did not. She was surprised to find a series of lamps in the corridors, however, illuminated to show her the path out. She ran, not questioning these lamps until she burst outside and found evening had arrived. They had scheduled a driver to come for them mid-afternoon, but he had never… He had never…
The Honey Mummy (Folley & Mallory Adventure Book 3) Page 10
