The Alexandria Affair (Captain Lacey Regency Mysteries Book 11)

by Ashley Gardner

  I had the feeling Brewster had only added the begging your pardon to keep himself from hauling Grenville up by the lapels and shouting his point into Grenville’s face.

  Grenville made a conciliatory gesture. “I meant no offense, Mr. Brewster. But the streets are crowded, and the men are dressed similarly.”

  “It were him,” Brewster repeated.

  “I believe you,” I said quickly. “But who the devil is he, and why is he a guest in that house? Either that or he paid these men to block our way.”

  I looked at the Egyptians, tall and lean in their ankle-length garments. They turned faces toward us with interest, waiting to see what we’d do next.

  When I’d been in India, the natives would often turn and flee when they saw Englishmen or make themselves as invisible as possible. Here, we were the objects of great curiosity and even entertainment. I supposed that, in India, I’d been part of an army in the habit of crushing natives, while here, we were guests, just tolerated by the pasha.

  The Egyptians’ interest increased when the rest of our walking party caught up to us, clearly wondering why we’d dashed down this particular street. The Florentine spoke the Arab language well and soon had the men on the street laughing.

  A few of the Egyptians gestured for us to follow them. Grenville nodded and began to comply.

  “Come along, Lacey,” he said. “They want to make it up to us.”

  Brewster, of course, didn’t like the idea. “You’re going to leave ’im in there, to come out and have a go at you again?”

  “Not much we can do,” I said. I chafed as well, wanting to lie in wait for our quarry.

  But the men had surrounded Grenville and his party, urging us on, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if we refused. Besides, if we befriended these men, they might be persuaded to keep a lookout for my hunter and alert me when he emerged again.

  I hobbled quickly after Grenville, waving Brewster to follow. He did, grumbling.

  The men took us to a cramped shop, open to the street, where we were served thick, spicy coffee. Then the proprietor and a lad that looked enough like him to be his son produced a tall, cylindrical brass tube attached to a glass bowl of water and set it on the table between Grenville and me.

  The top of the elegantly curved tube held a brass bowl with a lid—smoke issued through slits in the top. Several leather cords wrapped around the contraption, each with a brass mouthpiece at the end.

  Grenville thanked the man graciously as the son set more pipes on the tables of our friends. “Have you ever tried a hookah, Lacey?” Grenville asked me.

  “In India,” I said. I hadn’t liked the experience, which had given me a raging headache, so I took up the mouthpiece in trepidation.

  “It’s a bit different here.” Grenville lifted the cord to his mouth and inhaled in a practiced way.

  I took a sip of my coffee and lifted the mouthpiece to my lips. While the crowd that had followed us watched, I sucked in the smoke, making the water bubble in the glass bowl.

  The sensation was much better than what I remembered. The smoke was as pleasantly spiced as the coffee, the bite smooth rather than bitter. I did not feel lightheaded at all when I removed the mouthpiece and exhaled.

  The Egyptian men watching me gave me approving looks. I also caught glances between them, as though they’d wagered that the pale Englishmen would fumble with the hookahs and perhaps topple over when the heady smoke trickled into them.

  “I bought one of these last time I was out here,” Grenville said after he took another pull, the water bubbling agreeably. “But a dratted porter broke it while I was disembarking in Venice. We will have to visit a market and purchase all manner of trinkets to prove we were actually here.”

  “Of course,” I said. The act of inhaling the smoke through burbling water was soothing, though it could not erase my frustration. Brewster had wandered back down the street to watch the gate of the house, but I doubted it would do him much good.

  After a long time, when the hookah was empty of tobacco and our cups drained of coffee, we departed the shop, taking leave of our new Egyptian friends.

  I made it clear through the Florentine gentleman’s translation that I’d be appreciative of information about the man who’d gone into the bey’s house, and received a cacophony of promises that I would be informed the moment he stirred a step out of the gate. Grenville dispensed coins all around, hands thrusting out, none too proud to accept.

  “I wouldn’t put too much hope into it,” Grenville said as we walked away. “These men might tell you any number of things for more baksheesh.”

  “I would not want them to be hurt, in any case,” I said, beginning to regret I’d asked for their help. I didn’t trust my hunter to be kind to any who got in his way. Besides, he might have promised them still more baksheesh to inform him about me.

  Grenville’s planned outing had included a visit to the local market, and he saw no reason to alter things. Resigned, I followed him around the corner and into a colorful marketplace that was buried among the narrow lanes.

  Vendors lined the walls under hanging tents, wares spread out on cloths at the men’s feet. All manner of things seemed to be for sale here, from rusty nails to beautiful bolts of cloth to beads to “antiquities” of dubious provenance. The smells nearly overwhelmed us—burning wood, incense, coffee, charred meat, and closely packed animals and humans.

  One of the vendors pointed at a stone with markings of a beetle on it. “From the pyramids,” he said in halting English.

  I had no idea whether this statement held truth, but I paused to look. The vendor also had a collection of bones, and alarmingly, hidden in a box that he opened for me, a mummified hand.

  “Of a queen,” he assured me. “Mummy is very good for the humors.”

  I decided to forgo the shriveled skin and bones of the mummy’s hand and take the stone. I liked it—one side was carved into the shape of a beetle, and the other side had been etched with hieroglyphs. I made out a hawk, a symbol that looked like a looped rope, a circle with a smaller circle inside, a beetle, and a u-shaped symbol.

  “A seal,” Grenville said as we walked away after he’d purchased a hookah pipe and quite a lot of other trinkets, including a necklace of wide plates of beaten gold. He touched the hieroglyphs. “This side was pressed into wet clay and would leave a mark. This might indeed have come from the tomb of a king.” He withdrew his hand and shrugged. “Or copied last week and faked.”

  “No matter,” I said, sliding it into my pocket. “Curiosities interest me. Be careful—I might soon have a collection to rival yours.”

  “I sometimes wonder why I bother with it, Lacey,” Grenville said in sudden moroseness. “I have no sons to pass it all to.”

  I regarded him with surprise. I’d never heard him worry about such a thing before.

  “You have a beautiful daughter,” I reminded him. Claire was a very successful actress, and Grenville had only recently learned that he was her father.

  “Yes, I do.” Grenville brightened and his look turned fond. “I intend to shower her with gifts when I return.” The thought seemed to cheer him, and his brief melancholia passed. “I believe this Egyptian journey will be very good for me. Even meeting Lady Mary again has made up my mind about a few things.”

  He had no intention of sharing what he meant, only adjusted his hat and began to whistle.

  * * *

  The soiree that evening took place at the home of Lord Randolph Carver, the third son of the Marquis of Highworth. Third sons were often shunted off to the military, a commission purchased for them to get them out from underfoot, but Lord Randolph had learned how to invest winnings from his rakehell gambling days, and made a fortune.

  In his fifties now, Lord Randolph traveled restlessly around the world, enjoying the benefits of that fortune. He had taken the finest house available to foreigners in Alexandria and there he hosted the most lavish parties.

  Grenville and I were admitted t
o find a throng already there. The house, similar to the one we let, surrounded a courtyard, but this courtyard was vast and filled with orange trees and greenery. Greek-style pillars with sculptured busts of famous men of antiquity lined the walls, and so we were greeted by Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Alexander, and many others.

  The guests were English, with the exception of a few Frenchmen and those from Italian cities, such as the Florentine gentleman who’d been in our walking party today. These gentlemen dressed as pristinely as they would at a gathering in Mayfair, with the exception of two who had taken to wearing Turkish-style dress. I was given to understand that those gentlemen were regarded as eccentrics.

  The courtyard led into public rooms, which were whitewashed and painted with figures and landscapes meant to resemble ancient Greek art. Nothing Egyptian was anywhere in sight.

  The guests were mostly gentlemen. I glimpsed few ladies in the crowd—one of them Lady Mary. I preferred the company of ladies whenever possible, and I steeled myself for an evening of male bluffness.

  I had stood, a glass of claret in my hand, at such soirees often enough in India. But there was a difference here, I sensed, and not only the fact that I no longer wore my regimentals or was expected to dance attendance on a commander’s wife.

  In India, the ladies and gentlemen had done their utmost to pretend they were anywhere but India. It might be steamy hot and the air filled with insects, but they strove to behave as though they dined at the finest estate house in England.

  The guests at this soiree were in Alexandria by choice. Whether they’d come to hunt a fortune, or for the adventure, or were on assignment by the British ministry, they acknowledged that they were surrounded by an ancient Greek city. Here the legendary men we’d read about in our schooldays had walked—Alexander, Julius Caesar, Marc Antony. We’d read Tacitus in Latin and acted out the battles.

  Of Egypt itself, however, I found only talk of delving it for treasure and not much about its history. Lord Randolph’s secretary, a scholar from Oxford, told me about Lord Randolph’s excavation sites in Memphis and one in Thebes, and offered to guide me around them if Grenville and I journeyed that way.

  I resolved then and there to encourage Grenville to obtain the firman he said he might be able to in Cairo, and find for us a place to dig through rubble ourselves.

  I still felt cheated of the site I had been taken to yesterday evening. The desire to find antiquities of my own surged, the more hieroglyphs on them the better. I imagined myself triumphantly presenting my finds to the scholars working to decipher the Rosetta stone, perhaps discovering the very piece that would break the code.

  As I finished speaking with the gentleman, agreeing we’d pause in our travels to watch Lord Randolph’s men unearth things, I saw Lady Mary setting sail across the room to us.

  Tonight she wore a silver gown covered with black netting that was unfortunately tight on her plump figure, and garish slippers that flashed with brilliant red and violet beads. Her headdress, also silver and black, sported a profusion of feathers that waved as though in a hurricane wind. Even my wife, who enjoyed the rather ridiculous at times, would have lifted her brows at this concoction.

  The secretary had turned to speak to others. I avoided an encounter with Lady Mary by simply pretending I did not see her, and moved steadily across the courtyard, my walking stick tapping.

  I slid into an anteroom that appeared deserted and let out a sigh of relief. A crush affected me as much in Alexandria as it did in Mayfair.

  But, to my disquiet, I was not alone. A man stepped out of deep shadow on the other side of the room. He wore the dark blue uniform of a British cavalry regiment, had a head of unruly dark brown hair, a once-broken nose, and eyes the same color as mine.

  He halted without surprise, and I found myself face-to-face with my double, the man who hunted me.

  Chapter 10

  I did not move or speak as I looked into eyes that could have been a reflection of mine. My conviction that he was my father’s by-blow increased, though I could not open my mouth to ask him whether this was so.

  While I stood in silence, the man looked me up and down. “Which of us, I wonder,” he said quietly, “will emerge from this room as Captain Gabriel Lacey?”

  His even tones sparked my rage. My shock fell away, and I seized him by the shoulders and bore him back against a painted stone wall.

  I never felt my injured knee, forgot to be afraid. I ought to have shouted for Brewster, for Grenville—for anyone—but my famous temper had taken over my senses.

  “You went after my family,” I snarled at him. I thumped his head into the wall, against the painted foot of a modestly clad Greek lady. “You shot my friend. I will kill you for that.”

  In the next instant, he’d broken my hold and shoved me away. I landed on my hurt left leg, and at last I felt pain.

  We were about matched in strength and age, but his body was whole. He had me against the adjacent wall in no time, his face close to mine.

  “I only wanted you,” he growled, his breath hot on my face. “They put themselves in the way.”

  I was too enraged to remember the incidents clearly. I only saw young Peter, Donata’s son, in danger of being run down, Brewster crumpling in a heap with blood pouring too quickly from his side.

  “Why?” I demanded. “Who the devil are you?”

  He looked me straight in the eyes, his as dark as mine. “I am Gabriel Lacey.”

  I stared at him for one stunned instant, than my fist came up and went for his throat. He caught my hand in a practiced grip and slammed me into the wall once more. He kicked my injured knee, and I bit down on my tongue, tasting blood.

  “My father’s bastard son,” I said furiously. Bloody spittle came out with my words and landed on his face. “He gave you my name? Or did you take it?”

  “No, you idiot—”

  His words cut off as the very large gloved hands of Brewster landed on his shoulders and yanked him backward. The imposter struggled but couldn’t break Brewster’s tight grip.

  The man snaked his hand into his coat and pulled out a glittering knife. I yelled a warning and grabbed his arm, but he twisted and cut me across the palm, ripping through my glove and leaving a streak of red.

  Ignoring pain, I seized his wrist and clamped my fingers around it, forcing his hand open. The knife clattered to the stone floor.

  Brewster turned the imposter around, one giant hand holding him up while he balled up his other fist and punched the man full in the face. The imposter’s head snapped back, and blood poured from his nose.

  “That’s for shooting me,” Brewster told him, his anger clear.

  The imposter’s dark eyes held maddened rage above the scarlet trickle. “I wasn’t aiming for you, man. I wanted him.” He thrust his finger in my direction.

  “Tell that to me wife,” Brewster growled. “She was ready to put pennies on me eyes and send me to the ferryman. Then she had to wait on me like I were a baby until I got better. This is for putting her frew that.”

  Brewster balled his fist again. The imposter braced himself, turning his cheek to take the blow, but when Brewster let fly, his strike landed in the man’s gut instead. The imposter grunted, folding in on himself.

  “What the devil?” A cultured voice rang from the doorway. “Captain Lacey?” A tall gentleman with a thick head of light hair going to gray gazed in distress at Brewster and the imposter, then he pinned me with a blue-eyed stare. “And who are you?”

  It took me a moment to realize that this man had addressed my double as Captain Lacey and was asking me for my identity.

  The gentleman was Lord Randolph—I hadn’t yet been introduced to him, but I’d seen him greeting other guests before I’d slipped away from the crowd. He wore a well-tailored suit and pumps made for a Mayfair drawing room, and held me with the imperious gaze of a man used to others giving way before him.

  I drew myself up, wiping a trickle of blood from my lip. “I am Capta
in Gabriel Lacey.”

  The imposter heaved a laugh. He hung in Brewster’s grip, the silver braid on his regimentals spattered with scarlet. “Lord Randolph already knows that I am the true Captain Gabriel Lacey.”

  “I do not understand.” Lord Randolph’s voice contained the cool sangfroid of Grenville’s along with a note of authority that said his ancestors were bashing away at the barbaric Saxons long before my ancestors were even conceived. “You there—” He switched his glare to Brewster. “Release him at once.”

  Brewster didn’t move, not a man who instantly obeyed.

  “He is not Gabriel Lacey,” I said. I pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed my mouth. “He is my father’s illegitimate offspring. I suppose he is trying to use my name for his own purposes.”

  The imposter laughed again. Not crazed laughter, but that of a man who has heard something absurd. “I am not a bastard, you fool. I am as legitimate as you are, even more so. Your father never sired me. He was a madman. And a murderer.”

  I stared at him, wondering what the devil he meant by that, but just then Grenville and others poured into the room, coming to investigate the commotion.

  “Grenville,” Lord Randolph demanded, pointing at me. “Who is this?”

  Grenville regarded us both in bewilderment. “My friend Captain Lacey, of course. I told you about him, and you invited him here tonight.”

  “Then who is he?” Lord Randolph moved his pointing finger to the other man.

  “I haven’t the faintest bloody idea.” Grenville’s quizzing glass came out, and he fixed it on the imposter. If we had been at White’s, the false Captain Lacey’s social ruin would have been complete.

  “I met him yesterday,” Lord Randolph said, puzzled and angry. “At the home of the bey of Alexandria. He told me he was Captain Lacey. We discussed my dig at Memphis, and the legend of Alexander’s tomb. He is well-informed.”

  “Well, I’ve never met him,” Grenville said. He sniffed and dropped the quizzing glass back into his waistcoat pocket. “He has been following us about, attempting to assassinate my friend, the true Captain Lacey.”