“All’s well,” I reported, and tiptoed toward the divan where Emerson lay.
I did not mean to sleep for more than an hour, but even as I reclined the skies were darkening, and the gentle murmur of rain must have lulled me. It was the sound of heavy footsteps that woke me – the running steps of a person in haste. I sat up with a start and reached into my nearest pocket. It was the wrong pocket. I was fumbling in another, trying to locate my little pistol, when a man burst into the room and came to a stop. He was breathing heavily and water poured from his soaked garments.
Emerson was thrashing around and muttering, as he always does when he is suddenly aroused, but Ramses was on his feet, alert and ready. The newcomer, too breathless to speak, held out empty hands in the universal gesture of conciliation. I could not see him clearly, the room was rather dark. I knew him, though.
“Ah,” I said. “So here you are at last. It is all right, Ramses.”
“No – it – isn’t.” Sethos got it out one word at a time. “Where’s – Edward?”
“He isn’t here?” I asked.
“No.”
Emerson had finally got his wits together. “It’s you, is it?” he demanded, squinting through the gloom. “High bloody time.”
“Bloody too late,” said Sethos, beginning to control his breath. “Did Edward tell you where -”
“We were not even aware of his departure,” I replied. “Please compose yourself so that we can converse rationally.”
“And get out of those wet clothes,” Nefret said.
“What, here and now?”
Ramses had lighted several of the lamps. Sethos threw his shoulders back and tried to look as if he were in command of the situation, but he was a wretched figure, every garment saturated and even his beard dripping.
“A chill can bring on malaria,” Nefret said calmly. “Get them off at once. I’ll ask Mustafa to make tea.”
“And something to eat,” I called after her, as she hastened from the room.
“And something to wear,” said my brother-in-law resignedly. He pulled off the sodden lump of his turban and the fez round which it had been wrapped. “This is as far as I am prepared to go, Amelia, while you remain in the room.”
Anxious as I was to hold the long-delayed discussion – urgent as were the questions to be asked and answered – physical needs took precedence. Sethos had had malaria before. It would be extremely inconvenient if he came down with it again.
“Come with me,” I ordered, and led the way out of the room.
Selim, still lying romantically across the girl’s threshold, woke instantly when we approached – and no wonder, on that hard floor. He sprang up, reaching for his knife.
“He is a friend, Selim,” I said. “Perhaps you would be good enough to help him change his wet clothing.”
“I do not require a damned valet,” Sethos snarled.
“Selim isn’t a valet. You require assistance, and that is what you are about to get. Follow me, both of you.”
A large cupboard in the other bedroom contained an extensive wardrobe, ranging from abas and galabeeyahs to a nice tweed suit that Sethos had borrowed from Ramses the year before. I left them to it, and returned to the saloon. Mustafa had scraped together a rather extraordinary meal – tinned tongue and bread and fruit, and, of course, tea. Before long, Selim and Sethos joined us, the latter in dry garments, his unruly hair still damp.
“Well, this is cozy,” said Sethos, with a decidedly sardonic inflection. “A jolly little family gathering. I’ve been chasing you across the countryside all night.”
“Were you at the rendezvous?” I asked.
“Not until after you’d left. Would you like to know what happened?”
“Very much so,” said Emerson, with a snap of his teeth.
“I had to make a run for it,” Sethos explained. “I – er – miscalculated a trifle, you see. I didn’t expect Sahin would move so quickly or so decisively. He’s a very efficient man, with a well-organized network of supporters hereabouts. It didn’t take him long to find out you were in Khan Yunus. You weren’t exactly discreet, were you?”
“The disclosure of our true identities was unavoidable,” I said. “And if I may say so, criticism from you is unwarranted, under the circumstances.”
“Possibly,” Sethos admitted. “If I may continue my narrative?”
“Pray do,” I said.
“As I was about to say, the disappearance of his daughter hit him hard and he acted instantly. He sent orders to attack your house. There was a chance the girl was with you. If she wasn’t, he hoped to acquire a hostage – one or all of you.”
“How do you know all that?” I asked.
“He told me.” Sethos had been eating ravenously, between sentences. He swallowed a bite of fruit and went on, “We had one of those friendly little chats – you know what they’re like, Ramses. He explained in detail what he meant to do, and added, more in sorrow than in anger, that he was going to lock me up, since he had been forced to the conclusion that my conversion was not sincere.”
He bit into a piece of bread. The pause was for effect, as I knew; the man could not resist making a dramatic story of it.
“So you hit him?” Ramses was as intrigued as the rest of us. “What with?”
“Not my fist, I assure you. He was waiting for that. I was nibbling daintily on a nectarine. I shoved it in his face. He was trying to claw the pulp out of his eyes and spit it out of his mouth when I broke his water pipe over his head. It made a frightful mess and rather a loud noise, so I didn’t wait to tie him up. I calculated I had about sixty seconds before a servant got nerve enough to investigate, so I started running – straight out of the house and past the guards. If you don’t have time to be cautious, speed and effrontery are your only hope. It was a spectacle dreadful enough to throw most people into a panic,” he added with a grin. “The holy infidel, waving his arms and screaming broken phrases from the Koran. Nobody tried to stop me. Religious frenzy is dangerous. I kept running, divesting myself of my elegant ornaments as I went and scattering them about the streets, to the additional confusion of those I encountered. I presented the last – a very handsome emerald brooch, which I hated to give up – to the officer in command of one of the guard posts. With my blessing. May I have more tea?”
Ramses was the first to break the fascinated silence. “I’m a bloody amateur,” he murmured. “Excuse me, Mother.”
“You haven’t done so badly,” his uncle conceded. “This last escapade wasn’t well thought out, though. You ought to have had a means of escape arranged before you shot at me.”
“You don’t suppose Ramses would do such a thing!” Nefret said indignantly.
“Now, now, keep calm. I did not suppose my affectionate nephew really intended to kill me. I credited him with realizing that an attack on me, presumably by my erstwhile employers, would establish me as a bona fide traitor. I didn’t expect he would go so far as to let himself be caught. That was a complication I did not need.”
“Accept my apologies,” said Ramses, scowling at his uncle. Sethos did have a gift for turning people against him.
“Who was it, then, if it wasn’t you?”
“A fellow named Chetwode. He’s the general’s nephew. His superior is a man named Cartright.”
“Oh, that lot. How did you -”
“Never mind that now,” I interrupted. “If we keep getting off onto side issues we will never make sense of this business. What happened after you left Gaza?”
“I decided I had better go to Khan Yunus and warn you.”
“You might have thought of that earlier,” Emerson grumbled.
“I told you, I didn’t know what Sahim intended to do until he informed me. I barely made it out of the city before his men came boiling out in hot pursuit; I had to lie low in the hills until they tired of looking for me.” He took a cigarette from the tin Ramses offered him and lit it before he went on. “By the time I got to Khan Yunus, all hell had b
roken loose. The army was on the scene, trying to suppress the riot, without the vaguest idea of who had started it or why. Your place had been broken into, and some of the locals were taking advantage of the confusion to carry off anything they could lay their hands on.”
“The motorcar!” Selim exclaimed. “Did they damage it?”
“I wasn’t given the opportunity to examine it,” Sethos said dryly. “I hung about trying to look harmless until the military got things more or less under control. You hadn’t shown yourselves, so I could only hope Edward had warned you in time for you to escape. It was after midnight by then. I had the devil of a time getting out of town, since I had to avoid not only soldiers looking for rioters but rioters who might be Sahin’s lads. The whole bloody countryside was aroused – looking for a pack of horse thieves, as the sergeant who collared me explained. I was not in possession of a horse, so he let me go. You people really excel at stirring up trouble! I pushed on and, of course, found the ruined house deserted. You’d been there – you left an empty biscuit tin – and so had several horses. So I came on here. I couldn’t think where else you might have gone. It took a while, since I was on foot.”
I observed the faintest tremor in the hand that extinguished his cigarette. It was not the only sign of fatigue; his voice was flat and his face was drawn.
“You had better get some sleep,” I said. “We will talk again later.”
“As you command, Sitt Hakim.” He got slowly to his feet. “Is someone sleeping in my bed?”
“Miss Sahin is in one of the beds. I will make up the other one for you.”
“There is no need for that.”
“Clearly it is not an amenity to which you are accustomed. I will do it anyhow. Come along.”
What I wanted, as the Reader must have surmised, was a private chat. Even Emerson realized the reasonableness of this, though he did not much like it. He had never completely conquered his jealousy of his brother, baseless though it was – on my side, at any rate.
“Allow me to give you a little laudanum,” I said. “You won’t sleep without it, you are too tired and too on edge.”
“Are you afraid I’ll sneak out of the house?” He watched me unfold one of the sheets and then took hold of the other end. “I have better sense than that. If Edward isn’t back by nightfall, I will have to take steps, but I cannot function efficiently without sleep.”
He had tucked the sheet in any which way. I remade that end of the bed. Our eyes met, and he smiled a little; he was thinking, as was I, what an oddly domestic scene this was. “I don’t need your laudanum,” he went on, removing a container from one of the shelves.
“How long have you been taking that?” I asked, as he swallowed a small white pill.
“Weeks. Months.” He stretched out on the bed. “It works quickly, so if you have any questions – which you undoubtedly do – talk fast.”
“I only wanted to ask about Margaret. Have you heard from her?”
He hadn’t expected such a harmless subject. “Margaret? No, not for months. I couldn’t very well carry on a frequent correspondence, could I?”
“Does she know what you are doing?”
“She knows everything about me.” He closed his eyes.
“Including -”
“Everything.”
“You have complete confidence in her, then. Are you going to marry her?”
Sethos opened his eyes and clasped his hands behind his head. “You aren’t going to leave me in peace until I invite you into my innermost heart, are you? The question is not whether I am going to marry her, but whether she will consent to marry me. I asked her. I hadn’t intended to, it – er – came into my head at a particularly – er – personal moment. She said no.”
“A flat, unconditional no?”
“There were conditions. You can guess what they were. She was in the right. I told her – I promised her – this would be my last assignment. As it well may be.”
“Not in the way you mean,” I said firmly. “We are here, and on the job! We could be more useful, however, if you would tell me the purpose of your mission. What are you after?”
“Sahin.” His eyelids drooped. The sedative had loosened his tongue. “He’s their best man. Their only good man. Once he’s out of the way, we can proceed with… He loves the girl. I didn’t know that. I thought he’d go to some lengths to get her back, but I didn’t realize… Paternal affection isn’t one of my strong points. I told you about Maryam, didn’t I?”
“Who?” I had to repeat the question. He was half asleep, wandering a little in his mind.
“Maryam. Molly. That’s the name you knew… She’s gone.”
“Dead?” I gasped. “Your daughter?”
“No. Gone. Left. Ran away. Hates me. Because of her mother. She’s living proof of heredity. Got the worst of both parents. Poor little devil… She is, you know. Amelia…”
“It’s all right,” I said softly, taking the hand that groped for mine. “Everything will be all right. Sleep now.”
I sat by him until his hand relaxed and the lines on his face smoothed out. I had intended – oh, I admit it – to take advantage of his drowsy state to wring information out of him, but I had not expected revelations so intimate, so personal, so painful.
His daughter had been fourteen years of age when I knew her. She must be sixteen now. Her mother had been Sethos’s lover and partner in crime; but her tigerish affection had turned to jealous hatred when she realized his heart belonged to another. (Me, in fact, or so he claimed.) She tried several times to kill me and succeeded in assassinating one of my dearest friends before she met her end at the hands of those who had been an instant too late to save him.
How much of that terrible story did the child know? If she blamed her father for her mother’s death, she could not know the whole truth. He had not even been present when she died, and she had led a life of crime and depravity before she met Sethos. A moralist might hold him guilty of failing to redeem her, but in my opinion even a saint, which Sethos was not, would have found Bertha hard going.
I do not believe that the dead hand of heredity is the sole determinant of character. Remembering Molly as I had last seen her, looking even younger than her actual age, the picture of freckled, childish innocence… But she hadn’t looked so innocent the day I found her in Ramses’s room with her dress half off – by her own act, I should add. If I had not happened to be passing by – if Ramses had not had the good sense to summon me at once – or if he had been another kind of man, the kind of man she hoped he was – he might have found himself in an extremely interesting situation.
That proved nothing. She had not deliberately set out to seduce or shame him; she had been young and foolish and infatuated. My heart swelled with pity, for her and for the man who lay sleeping on the bed, his face pale and drawn with fatigue. He had not known how much he loved her until he lost her, and he blamed himself. How wonderful it would be if I could bring father and child together again!
It was a happy thought, but not practical – for the present, at any rate. We had to get through the current difficulty first. With a sigh I slipped my hand from his and tiptoed out of the room.
“Well?” Emerson demanded. “You’ve been the devil of a long time. How much were you able to get out of him?”
“We were right about him, of course,” I replied, seating myself next to him as his gesture invited. “He is no traitor. His mission was to remove Sahin Bey – Pasha.”
“Kill him, you mean?” Ramses asked.
“He didn’t say. But surely Sethos would not -”
“Sahin is a dangerous enemy and this is wartime. However,” Ramses said thoughtfully, “the same purpose would be served if Sahin Pasha were to be disgraced and removed from his position. In the last week he’s lost me, his daughter, and now Ismail Pasha, whose flight will prove to their satisfaction that he was a British spy. Careless, to say the least!”
“More than careless,” Emerson exclaimed. �
�Highly suspicious, to say the least! With that lot, you are guilty until proven innocent. By Gad, my boy, I believe you are right. It’s like Sethos to concoct such a devious scheme. If the Turks believe, as they well may, that Sahin Pasha has been a double agent all along, they will have to reorganize their entire intelligence network. It could take months.”
“And in the meantime they would be without their best and cleverest man,” I added. “Sethos said that once Sahin was out of the way, they could proceed with… something.”
“What?”
“He didn’t say.”
“And who is ‘they’?” Nefret asked. “Who is he working for? Not Cartright and ‘that lot’?”
“He – er – didn’t say.”
Emerson brought his fist down on the table, rattling the crockery. “What did he say? Good Gad, you were with him for almost three quarters of an hour.”
“How do you know that?” I demanded. “You haven’t a watch.”
This time my attempt to distract him and put him on the defensive did not succeed. “Just answer the question, Peabody. What were you talking about all that while?”
“Personal matters. Oh, Emerson, for pity’s sake, don’t grind your teeth. I wanted to make certain he was asleep before I left him. The man is on the edge of nervous collapse. He has been living for months under conditions of intolerable strain. He must not be allowed to return to Gaza.”
“He wouldn’t be such a fool,” Emerson muttered.
“He would if he believed Sir Edward had gone there to look for him.”
“He wouldn’t be such a fool,” Emerson declared.
“He would if he believed his leader was in danger. They have been friends for a long time. I am going to talk to Mustafa; perhaps Sir Edward said something to him. And I promised to treat his sore… Ah, there you are, Esin. You had a good long rest.”
The Golden One Page 39
