Wrapped

by Jennifer Bradbury

  “I cannot make it out,” he said, sounding painfully confused.

  “I believe you established that several moments ago—,” I began.

  “No,” he interrupted. “I can’t ’cause it’s in French.”

  I was now thoroughly convinced that this Egyptologist was little more than a dustman. “Mr. Stowe, if that were French, I’d have no reason to trouble you—”

  “Would you listen? Not the message you brought me,” he said, handing me a magnifying glass and making room at the cart. “This one.”

  He repeated his motion with the scrap stretched across the warm glass of the lantern. The letters he had dismissed as meaningless remained, but incredibly a new message appeared in faint white script. It slanted at an angle, the words seeming to have been written hastily.

  And recently.

  I stood and whispered before I could catch myself, “Bloody hell, it does look like French!”

  “Miss Wilkins, you—”

  I froze. “How do you know my name?”

  “You pretended not to know me,” he accused.

  “And you me!” I shot back.

  He relented quickly. “I . . . recognize you from the party. I had to write your name in my ledger.” He paused. “And you were rude to me.”

  I shook my head. “Not you,” I said quickly. “I was objecting to Showalter’s treatment of you. But how did you know if you do not speak French?”

  “An insult in any language has the same ring of superiority about it,” he said hotly.

  I started to protest, but instead reached out and snatched the jackal’s head from him. I leaned over to press it up against the lantern myself, then watched the words reappear.

  This time I peered closer and actually read the line.

  I read it a second time.

  And then a third.

  It can’t be . . . , I thought.

  “Well?” Mr. Stowe prodded.

  I stood.

  “Are you all right?” he asked me, offering his arm.

  I shook my head. “The message . . .” I faltered, leaned against a display case. “The message reads ‘15 May 1815—Cairo. W’s standard in the great London pyramid. This is the key. Emperor advised and awaiting delivery.’“

  My head swam and my heart raced, though I still could barely credit the reason.

  “The emperor?” Stowe said. “But if it’s written in French and references the emperor, they can only be talking about—”

  “Napoleon,” I finished for him. “The message speaks of Napoleon.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Napoleon?” Stowe said. “You’re sure?”

  “This is common French, there is but one emperor—”

  “You having me on?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “This is no joke.”

  I thought of all the events of the last two days. The party, the strange fates that had befallen those of us around the corpse. The nature of the message. And I began to feel something like the fear I’d felt that night the man had followed me in the garden.

  Mr. Stowe swallowed hard. “You sure you’re not having a laugh?” he asked again, this time sounding as if he wished I were.

  I shook my head, fought to control the trembling of my hands.

  “Swear it,” he said, nerves fraying his voice, eyes wide.

  “I promise,” I said.

  “Tell me again what it says,” he demanded, grabbing pencil and tablet.

  I held it back to the heat of the lantern light and read it again. “‘15 mai 1815—Le Caire. Standard de W dans la grande pyramide de Londres. C’est la clé. Empereur ausé et attend livraison.’”

  He looked up at me. “English, please?”

  I nodded and repeated my translation slowly as Mr. Stowe recorded the words on the paper. As he wrote, I asked, “How is it you speak ancient Egyptian and not French? I thought any classically trained scholar would have had at least some French.”

  He wrote for a moment more, then looked up. “My learning is a bit of a gallimaufry.”

  I squinted. It was the third or fourth time he’d used a word I wasn’t entirely familiar with. I knew it was slang of some sort, the thing Mother would call gutter talk. But it chapped me a bit to think that I might converse freely with an Indian, but couldn’t keep up with a young man from a different neighborhood in London.

  He noted my confusion. “A hodgepodge? A bit of this and that, made up of what I can manage?”

  I still wasn’t understanding. He rolled his eyes, sat up taller, and put on a voice a bit more posh. “My training has not been what one might consider classical.”

  I waited for him to elaborate.

  “I’m something like an apprentice,” he said.

  “An apprentice,” I repeated, wondering exactly whom I’d finally managed to trust my secret to.

  Mr. Stowe read the message again, as I pressed the scrap against the light. The strokes that appeared were uneven and messy, as if they’d been written hurriedly. Perhaps it was the years of eavesdropping on Father’s fireside conferences, but cryptic references to a standard and London pyramids sounded suspiciously like code. And coupled with the fact that it was written in some sort of invisible ink and tucked inside the wrappings of a mummy . . . it was more than even Father would believe.

  I stood and found Mr. Stowe eyeing me with suspicion. “You didn’t get this at a party last year, Miss Wilkins,” he said, pointing at the transcription he’d recorded on the paper. “The date of the message gives you up.” He paused, then stepped forward and closed a hand around the jackal’s head as if to take it from me. I held fast.

  “Where’d you get it?” he demanded.

  “Mr. Stowe, what is your exact position with the museum?” I shot back.

  There was a long pause where we both stared, each with a hand on the jackal’s head, the iron closing the circuit passing between us. His gaze was bold, serious, but the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth surprised me.

  “Birds of a feather, we are,” he said finally, adding, “Of the bald-faced lying variety.”

  I failed to suppress my own smile.

  “I am an apprentice here,” he began. “In the main, I clean exhibits and assist senior researchers. I’ve no formal training, but I know a fair bit.”

  “And how did you acquire this knowledge?”

  “Through my father, mainly,” he said. “He was a surveyor in the British army when I was a boy. He was on the ground with the lobsters in Egypt when Nelson’s fleet routed Napoleon at the Nile. He’d no learning either, but he was bright and curious. When he returned, he filled my head to bursting with stories, and I’ve been hungry for more since.” He shrugged. “Been here at the museum in varying capacities for almost three years now.”

  “And your work with the Rosetta Stone?”

  “A bit under the rose,” he said, adding, “But just because they don’t know about it doesn’t mean I’m not on to something. I’m quite close to a breakthrough, I believe. And when I achieve it, my future will be assured.”

  At his confession, I decided I must make one of my own.

  “I might have brought the jackal’s head from Lord Showalter’s party by mistake,” I admitted.

  “By mistake?”

  “It might have found its way into my bodice when no one was looking.”

  “You filched it?”

  I shook my head, then told him my reasons for keeping it—that Showalter had promised me we would be permitted to take the items home with us, that it seemed so insignificant, that by the time I realized what was happening it would have been impossible to return it without making a scene. I left out the part about being unwilling to invite Showalter’s attentions once again.

  “It came off the mummy?” Mr. Stowe’s eyes widened even farther. Clearly, pilfering an artifact from an antiquity was a greater sin than merely nabbing a trinket off someone’s mantel.

  I nodded meekly. “When I took my turn at the unwrapping.”

&nbs
p; He slumped against a case of jars, each labeled with cards covered in precise script. LIVER, MASON, UPPER NILE DELTA, 1000 AD. HEART, PRINCESS, LOWER ASSYRIA, 1100 AD.

  “And people looked at me as if they worried I might nick the silver candlesticks,” he muttered.

  I tried to tug the jackal’s head away from him. “Do you intend to scold me or help me?”

  “Help you what? Return it? Pawn it?”

  “Of course not! I—,” I began, but the truth was, I was even less certain what to do now than I had been when I walked in. If the message did indeed reference Napoleon, would that make it valuable enough to kill for? Was this responsible for the waiter’s fate?

  He looked puzzled. “You have no plan?”

  I shook my head.

  “Lord Showalter doesn’t know you’re here?”

  “No one does,” I said.

  “The authorities?”

  “No one,” I repeated. “I thought it best to gather more information before trusting someone else. It’s what Father would advise.”

  “Your father?” he asked, pulling a face.

  I explained Father’s position and expertise, as well as how my plans to speak with him had been thwarted thus far. “But that was before I realized this could be so serious as to involve Napoleon and the war,” I said, fighting the fear rising in me. I should have been more persistent with Father yesterday.

  “When’s he back?” Mr. Stowe asked.

  “Tomorrow evening,” I said quietly. “Though sometimes these trips turn into even longer affairs. . . .”

  “One day is a long time,” he said, nodding his head, “long enough for all manner of things—”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” I said quickly. “Perhaps I should find someone else to tell, someone Father might approve of.” One of his trusted associates might be still in London. But I didn’t know where to begin, and suddenly, holding something potentially so important in my hands made me even more wary of trusting anyone.

  “No!” he said, holding out his hand. “That’s not what I meant. I meant that it’s long enough for—”

  I looked up sharply. “For what?”

  He released his grip on the jackal’s head and leaned against the edge of the open case. He stared at the floor for several moments before continuing. In the silence, I thought of turning and going, reasoning that I’d learned as much as I could hope to present to Father. But Mr. Stowe knew my secret, and that fact kept me rooted to the spot.

  “What if this is an opportunity,” he began, looking at me, “for us to help each other?”

  I crossed my arms. “In what way?”

  He stood, leaned closer. “You’ve committed an indiscretion—”

  I flushed. “It was nothing so scandalous.”

  He waved a hand at me. “Never mind the scandal. But you find yourself needing to return a sensitive object and make sure no one finds out that you filched it.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “And then you have me,” he said, placing his hand on his chest. “A young man with nothing but his passion for his field to recommend him. No connections, no paper from Oxford—”

  “The point, Mr. Stowe!” I said.

  He smiled as he leaned even closer. “But if I brought to my superiors a mysterious artifact . . . an artifact of great interest to Bonaparte . . . and I had a chance to study it, work out its significance—”

  “You would use this object to buy your future,” I said quietly.

  “Earn it,” he corrected. “But whatever word you prefer, the solution is clear as clear can be, right?”

  I took a step back. “Enlighten me.”

  “Give it to me,” he said. “I will relieve you of the burden, discover its importance, and ensure that I don’t spend the rest of my life dusting cases. When your father returns, you can tell him all and he can do as he wishes. But in the meantime, I have a day to try to figure what’s what, and you can return to the very important business of fancy dresses and balls.”

  I hugged the jackal’s head to my chest and felt my face grow warm. “You think that’s all that matters to me?” I said, drawing myself up taller. “I wouldn’t have come if that were all I cared about!” I spoke loudly enough now that my voice echoed off the vaulted ceiling, loudly enough that Mr. Stowe took a step backward.

  He looked surprised, shocked even that I wasn’t as eager to relieve myself of the mess as he expected. “I meant no offense—”

  “How do I even know that I can trust you? How do I know that you were not the intended recipient of this object and its message all along?” It felt good to accuse him, though I didn’t believe it even as I said it. It merely assuaged the sting of having been mistaken for a silly, empty-headed girl.

  His mouth fell open. “Me? I had even less reason to be at that party than you. I was only standing in for Banehart. He took ill at the last and sent me.”

  “You could be lying,” I pointed out.

  “Wouldn’t I have already taken it from you if it were meant for me?” he asked, shaking his head. “A simple offer of assistance to a lady in distress and this is what it gets me . . .” He turned and walked a few paces away from me.

  I looked at his back. He was handsome enough to be the rakish sort of fellow who broke hearts and promises in an A Lady novel. Ambitious enough, certainly. And maybe I was as foolish as any of those girls who fell for a Willoughby or a Wickham.

  But Mr. Stowe was right on one point at least. I could not do this alone. Already having stumbled into trusting him, I should wait now for Father before risking more. And when I did speak to Father, if I could bring with me some evidence that someone with Mr. Stowe’s experience could supply, so much the better.

  “I need no rescuer,” I said evenly, “but I do need your help.”

  He turned and looked at me.

  “We will work together,” I said finally.

  Stowe squared his shoulders, lifted an eyebrow. “Together?”

  “Only until Father returns.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “So long as you promise to ask him to speak on my behalf.”

  “Agreed,” I said, extending my free hand. “And if we are to work together, please call me Agnes, Mr. Stowe.”

  “If you like,” he said. He eyed my hand, still hanging out in the air, but he didn’t move to take it.

  I pulled it partway back. “And I’ll go on calling you Mr. Stowe, then?”

  “Oh!” He closed the gap between us, tugged off his glove, and placed his palm against my own.

  “Caedmon. My name is Caedmon.”

  His touch was warm and dry, slightly calloused at the fingertips. “This could be dangerous,” he pointed out.

  “Shaking hands?” I said.

  He released his grip. “You know what I mean.”

  I nodded. It was already dangerous. I’d already taken the jackal’s head. The man at the party had already been murdered. My neighbors had already been vandalized. I was already in too deeply now to abandon the cause. And if it was possible that Napoleon was after something that we could prevent him from getting, then I was obligated, wasn’t I?

  “You’ve pluck about you, Agnes,” he said, releasing my hand. “I’ll give you that.”

  I almost blushed. In truth, I surprised myself. As dangerous as all this might be, as inconveniently as it might have been timed, part of me was grateful. Grateful that I’d been given the gift of something important, something exciting, perhaps something that mattered more than cotillions and curtsies. In a part of me that I would never reveal to anyone, it felt like a last blessed grasp at living before I settled into the life everyone else was planning for me. That same part of me silently thanked heaven that Father had been as busy and unavailable as ever.

  After too long a silence, I cleared my throat and spoke again. “Where should we begin?”

  He looked at the jackal’s head resting in my other palm. “It seems we have two challenges: divining the meaning of the message on that scrap, an
d sussing out who might have been meant to receive it.”

  “It could be anyone,” I began, “anyone at the party—”

  “A guest, or a member of Showalter’s household,” Caedmon mused. “Or even the rum ned himself.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said, wrinkling my nose. “It is far more likely to be someone working with the museum if the body was meant to come here in the first place!”

  “Then we begin with the message itself. Shall we have another go?”

  He did not wait for my reply as he turned and grabbed his tablet. “W’s standard,” he read aloud. “That seems to be the first order—” But he caught himself, looking over my head toward the entrance to the room. I turned to follow his gaze. A man in a black suit wandered in and began a circuitous path between the cases. The point of a finely carved cane tapped the wooden floorboards with a muffled thud.

  “Perhaps,” Caedmon whispered as I turned back, “perhaps we should continue this somewhere more private . . . at another time?” He quickly replaced the lid on the case he’d been cleaning and began to secure the items on his cart.

  I knew he was right. We couldn’t risk discussing the jackal’s head in front of anyone, and if I didn’t get back home soon, I’d face more questions than I could come up with answers for.

  I stared at the jackal’s head, reluctant. If someone truly was looking for this, they’d come looking for it at my door soon enough. I wasn’t sure I could hide it properly at home.

  “Will you keep it for me?” I whispered hastily.

  He looked taken aback. “I—I—”

  “It will be safer for all of us if you do. No one knows I’ve been here.”

  “Now you would trust me?”

  “I already have,” I said, folding the jackal’s head into his hand.

  He nodded gravely. “All right.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow. I should be able to slip away in the afternoon,” I said.

  “Not here,” he whispered. “Meet me at the south gate of the Tower,” he said, referencing the old fortress on the Thames. “I know someone who can help.”

  “Can he be trusted?” I asked, rankling at how already he was taking charge.