“It is believed to be the work of a single person,” Mallory continued after glancing behind him to ensure they were still alone. “A person with intimate knowledge of the museum and its security. A person who knew the Lady remained when so much else had been moved.”
Eleanor’s head came up sharply and she looked at Mallory, surprised to find his eyes on her. She knew the conversation was about to take a fateful turn. Mallory would know about her past—he was with Mistral, was he not? He would ask for her help and dredge up everything Eleanor had tried to leave behind for her father’s sake. She wanted to tug Juliana away before Mallory could say more, for there was much her friend did not know.
“Miss Folley—”
“No, Agent Mallory.”
A person with intimate knowledge of the museum and its security procedures. A person who knew the Lady remained when so much else had been moved. Eleanor could picture the steady hands bypassing locks, the shadowy form slipping past any guard. Fear whispered Christian in her ear, but she refused to believe him responsible for the theft.
Surely he would not—
Yet he so easily could.
How many valuable artifacts had she discovered with Christian Hubert? How many dangerous situations had they been in during their time together—and managed to get out of? She could not count. Could he have slipped into a museum, silent as snow, melting into shadows when the need arose?
Eleanor returned the photograph to Mallory and reclaimed her book from her father. The leather cover held the heat of his embrace, familiar and safe the way it had been that long-ago day. “Eleanor, to me!”
Her mother crying out for the arm. Men on mechanical horses, clockwork steads stronger than their living counterparts, emerging from the desert sands. Her mother running with the arm until those horses caught her. Until those men dismounted and—
Their mouths were not human . . .
“My reply to anything you may have to say is no,” she added when Mallory appeared as if he were about to speak again. She set her jaw, an ache winding through her. “The Lady was lost to us years ago. Let her rest.”
This was the line her father asked her to walk, the path from which she tried not to stray. But how could she not stray with that body still lost under ancient sands? With a ring now stolen, how could she not leap wholeheartedly from that path?
Eleanor left the men and Juliana to their own devices, too conflicted to stay. She hated the hope she felt—that all the mysteries could be solved; that, with answers, she might be able to put it all at last to rest. Her father would tell her no, please don’t, as he ever had.
She left the gallery on trembling legs, to take deep, steadying breaths of the crisp October air outside. The Exposition would close at month’s end. Why did Mallory have to find them now?
She pressed herself against the glass-and-iron flank of the building and stared down at her scarred hand. The worst of the marks were hidden beneath her sleeve, but every day they reminded her of the Lady, her mother, and the loss of both. Eleanor looked at Eiffel’s tower rising against the blue sky. Only then did she decide that her father was right. Young men were not worth the trouble.
Giza Plateau, Egypt ~ October 1881
Egypt tasted as Eleanor remembered: gritty, dry, and full of a hundred thousand secrets. She licked her lips and peered down the long corridor before her. A shadow moved across the ancient tomb walls.
Her grip closed hard on her lantern handle. The shadow did not come again, so she took a step toward the corridor’s end, where according to her map it intersected with another long corridor. Eleanor had paid good money for the map and hoped it was accurate; she had no desire to get lost in this home of ancient bones. She reasoned that if another person were already in the tomb, she could follow them as easily as she could her map. But to what end? Who were they and what did they want here? This tomb was small, supposedly not well known. Foolish to follow them, she decided, studying her map once more before tucking it into her trouser pocket. She wasn’t about to have come all this way only to have a shadow spook her. She was determined to sketch the hieroglyphs of the tomb’s limestone walls, another step in her quest, and exit as neatly as she had entered.
“Imagination,” she said, and her voice echoed back to her. “That’s all. Only—” The shadow came again, resolving into the unmistakable shape of a body large enough to be male. “—imagination.”
Eleanor lowered her lantern flame and stood in the half-light, listening. She heard the crunch of boots. As quietly as she could, she withdrew her revolver from its holster and moved down the shadowed corridor, toward the flicker of light that glowed around another corner.
At the corridor’s end, the god of eternity, Heh, crouched above the doorway with open arms. In one hand he held the looped cross of an ankh, the symbol for “life,” while the other clutched palm reeds. The shen ring—sign of infinity—was carved beside his head. Eleanor could not help but stare; the carving was flawless, blackened by time but otherwise untouched.
The man—were it such a creature rather than a minotaur or other beast of myth—had headed left, and Eleanor followed, foolish though it was. East, toward the sun and the burial chamber of a simple artisan. Simple perhaps, but still revered, for his tomb was beautiful and sparked Eleanor’s imagination at every turn.
She could not imagine, however, what she discovered in the final chamber. The hieroglyphs were ruined, the walls defaced, history pummeled into small fragments, the floor strewn with debris. The man—quite solid, no longer a shadow—crouched beyond the sarcophagus with his lantern in front of the only untouched section of wall. He was prying out a section of the inscribed stone.
“No,” Eleanor whispered.
The man turned to appraise her, his eyes colorless within the lamplit room. “Took you long enough,” he said in a rumble of French. He turned back to his task. Large hands well suited to the work moved around the jagged slab of stone, working with hammer and chisel.
Despite her anger, Eleanor easily understood the French, even if she didn’t immediately understand what he meant—took her long enough to what? Her anger clouded everything. Had he destroyed every marking, only to take the surviving panel with him? Eleanor looked at the carved desert hare beneath his hands, the word for “open,” and the shining sun, “illumine.” She saw no more, for the stone crumbled with his next chisel. He clicked his tongue.
“How could you?” Eleanor rushed forward as his hands came away, broken stone cascading over his boots, dust clouding the air between them. “Did you destroy everything? Is it all—”
“Gone.”
He sounded as defeated as Eleanor felt. He stood and angled his lamp upward, the light slanting across the ceiling. Eleanor followed its path to see only a few gold stars remaining amid chipped blue paint. She looked to his lamp-brightened face and realized who he was.
Christian Hubert was well known in archaeological circles, an explorer beyond compare. He was the stuff of legends: wealthy, highly skilled, arrogant, and apparently leaning toward Egypt rather than Greece when it came to unearthing the ancient world. Knowing who he was, Eleanor rejected the idea that he’d meant to demolish the carvings, or inflict the rest of the damage around them. Then who had? His earlier words settled in.
“Took me long enough?” she asked.
Hubert tucked hammer and chisel into his rolled leather pack. If he was still disappointed by losing the final panel of stone, he didn’t show it. “What’s a little girl like you doing in a place like this? You should be at a tea party.” His tone was balanced on the edge of laughter.
Eleanor’s entire body trembled, not from anger, but despair. She looked away from Hubert, to the destruction of the chamber. Symbols remained here and there, but only in partial. Heads of horned vipers, tails of winged owls, nothing that would ever read as whole again. The words Eleanor had sought, the words that might explain where her mother had gone were rubble and dust around them.
Her father’s words
crept back to her, even in this place. She’s dead, Eleanor, she went where the dead go. Eleanor could not believe that.
Hubert laughed when she didn’t answer him, and soon the light around Eleanor faded. He had left and taken his lamp with him. For a long minute, she didn’t care, could hardly muster the energy to turn the flame up on her own lantern to search the walls again, for something, anything. Even the broken sarcophagus in the center of the room was empty. Nothing remained of the artisan who had once made rings for a lady’s hand.
Eleanor drew her notebook and pencil out, forcing her hands to steady, to at least make a record of what little remained. What had Flinders Petrie said—that Egypt was like a house on fire and one must preserve her before she vanished entirely, as though she had never been? Would this bit help Eleanor find what she sought? Her shaking fingers traced the fragment of a horned viper upon the wall, then fell away.
Outside again, the sunlight was dazzling and almost painfully warm compared to the cool shadows of the tomb. She was relieved to find her camel where she’d left it and no sign of Hubert. Eleanor hadn’t thought he, the Great Explorer, would stoop so low as to steal the beast, though many in the desert would. She pressed her gauze-draped pith helmet back onto her head, but still found herself squinting against the sunlight as she mounted the camel and left the tomb site. She had placed too much hope within it.
She sought the smoky dimness of a tavern, numbing herself with cool draughts of black, foamy Egyptian beer. The men in the tavern paid her no attention, not even when she lit a cigarette. She was on her third when a large hand covered hers and drew the cigarette down from her lips.
“Those are bad for you, little girl.”
That same amused and mocking tone. Christian Hubert spoke again in French, and while Eleanor was not yet fluent, French was coming easier than Greek or Latin. He lowered himself onto the bench beside Eleanor and stamped out her cigarette before helping himself to a long drink of her beer. He gestured to the bartender for another round while Eleanor tried to slide away from him. There was nowhere to go, save the end of the bench that led to a corner of the wall.
“What do you want?” she asked, keeping to French.
“I was going to ask you the same.” The waiter arrived with more beer and Hubert paid, dipping his head in thanks. The thin shaft of sunlight snaking through the carved screen of the high window illuminated Hubert’s golden hair; his eyes were revealed as green and not colorless as they had been within the tomb.
Eleanor closed her eyes and drank more beer. “Why couldn’t you have sailed to Greece?” she asked. “There is plenty of marble left to unearth and cart away.”
“How poetic you are with beer in your mouth.”
She looked at him, wishing he were the dust of a thousand years. She was both impressed and repulsed by him—would he help or hinder her quest? Was he also on the path of the rings? If so, why? She sat a little straighter.
“How old are you?” he asked. “And a woman, at that.” His eyes skimmed over her, taking in blouse and trousers, boots and weapons. “Folley’s girl, hmm? They talk about you, raised amid the tombs. Some say you have more in common with the dead than with the living.”
People talked about her? Good Lord. “And you?” she asked, feeling the sting of his words. Fresh from schooling at her father’s side, she knew what she was doing, at least, unlike so many tomb robbers who destroyed much in their effort to reach gleaming gold. “Forty?”
Hubert tipped his head back and gave such a pleased laugh that many in the bar turned to look at them.
“Such poetry.” He finished his beer and poured more from the clay pitcher. Dark and foamed at the edges, like old rivers, Eleanor thought.
“Age doesn’t matter,” Hubert said and clinked his mug against hers. “But may you live to catch me in years.”
They sat in silence, Eleanor content to watch him drink while she tried to make sense of things. Why had he been in the tomb? Before she could ask—
“What were you doing in that tomb?” he asked. “The tomb is small, and you . . . Well.”
Eleanor flinched. That single word felt like a barb in her skin. “Why were you there? No one cares about it. What does an artisan matter, when the pyramids of Giza could be visited?” That only made the destruction of the tomb more confusing. If the artisan didn’t matter, why destroy his burial place?
“Exactly.” Hubert touched the bracelet around Eleanor’s right wrist, hemp and shells. She withdrew her hand before he could look closer and see the scars beneath it. “Tell me that you’ve come to see firsthand what you learned. Lectures weren’t enough. You needed to see it for yourself.”
“If that story pleases you, by all means.”
His mouth moved in a smile, one that made Eleanor think of jackals. He was enjoying this game. “But it doesn’t. That’s not why you were there.”
Eleanor wanted very much to leave the tavern, but she could not escape the table without Hubert moving. With a steady hand, she reached out to touch the long fall of golden hair against his cheek, tucked it behind his ear, and let her fingers linger. This was more foolish than following his shadow, she thought, noting that his neck was smudged with dust. She suspected her own was as well.
Took you long enough, he had said. He knows what I’m doing . . . but why?
As she thought it would, her touch spurred him to motion, but not away from her, rather toward. She should have been shocked, but men were confusing creatures. She slid her hand down to his neck in an effort to keep him at bay.
“I don’t think you had better—”
Hubert’s mouth closed over hers in a kiss tasting of dust and beer. Eleanor leaned forward, as if to return the kiss, but her hand tightened on him and her teeth dug into his lip. Hubert pulled back, laughing. He stood from the bench and lifted his nearly empty glass to her.
“To your next raid, little girl,” he said. “May it be more profitable.”
Eleanor could only agree with the sentiment as Hubert left the tavern for the relative cool of an Egyptian evening. Her heart hammered madly in her chest and she shook her head. Entirely foolish.
Paris, France ~ October 1889
Eleanor brought her father his evening tea and settled into the patchwork-covered wing chair across from him. Their rented rooms were comfortable, and they had burrowed deeply in, having been there since May for the start of the Exposition Universelle. Juliana had retired to her own room some time ago, leaving Eleanor and her father to while away the evening as they were accustomed. Eleanor wished Juliana would join them more often, but understood why she didn’t; it was difficult to spend time with a man one might be falling in love with when that man’s mind was constantly either on his work or occupied with memories of his dead wife.
Eleanor moved one of her pawns on the chessboard between them, which drew a grunt from her father as he sipped his steaming tea. Needing something to do with her hands while he planned his next attack, Eleanor picked up her needlework, but could not concentrate on the innumerable stitches before her. It was ridiculous, making patterns on fabric when she should be quizzing Agent Mallory on the missing ring. Her mind could not let go of the image of the Lady’s hand without its ring.
Beyond the fourth-story windows, the Paris rain poured. Eleanor wanted to vanish within the storm; perhaps it would silence her mind to the Lady and Christian, to her mother and Egypt. She wished she could take her own advice and allow the Lady to rest, wished again that Juliana had lingered, for she could have excused herself from her father’s preoccupied presence and talked to the woman long into the night about such matters.
Juliana would save her from herself as she had so many times before in the small hours when she could not sleep. Juliana would hold Eleanor’s hands so Eleanor wouldn’t be tempted to slide her fingers into the ring she wore about her neck and ask it to carry her away.
Her father captured one of Eleanor’s knights and she stared at the board, angry with herself. It was a mist
ake she had made as a child. She discarded her needlework and saw only defeat on the chessboard battlefield before her. The ancient game of Senet was more to her liking, but that board stood dusty in a far corner of their home in Ireland, neglected since her mother’s disappearance—as so much had been.
“You’re distracted,” Renshaw said. He added his tea cup to the flotsam on the table: a bookmark without a book, a worn notebook with a fraying bind, a handful of shelled almonds, a tea strainer, a pencil chewed nearly to its core. Renshaw steepled his fingers and considered Eleanor over them.
“Don’t study me as though I’m a tomb. I’ve set everything aside that you asked me to.”
Having changed into more comfortable trousers earlier, Eleanor drew her knees to her chest. As always, there hung over her the feeling that her father’s eyes could look into her very soul. He would see every minuscule crack, would pry each open and peer inside to discover what she did not want him to see. Eleanor moved her bishop to claim a pawn, but there was little to gain from the move.
“Even the most hidden tomb eventually gives itself up,” he said. “The ground shifts, the sands part, and there is the past laid clean before us.” He exhaled and reclined into the chair. “I wish Mallory had not come to us today.”
“No, he is—” she drew a breath, conflicted again “—the last thing we needed.”
“His is not the first disturbance into this little life of ours.” Her father pushed his glasses from the tip of his nose back to the bridge and did not consider the chessboard, though Eleanor hoped his attention would fall there. “I know you, and you have not let the Lady rest. The lady—you, dear Eleanor—protests too much.”
Even if he didn’t immediately understand something he saw, Renshaw Folley filed it away until the day came that he did understand. Had he seen Eleanor reading the books he asked her not to read? Had he leafed through her notebooks?
Rings of Anubis: A Folley & Mallory Adventure Page 2
