Children of the Storm - Elizabeth Peters [1]
“They’re over two years old,” Ramses went on, stroking the child’s black curls. “I was speaking plainly long before that, wasn’t I, Mother?”
“Dear me, yes,” I said, with a somewhat sickly smile. To be honest—which I always endeavor to be in the pages of my private journal—I dreaded the moment when the twins began to articulate. Once Ramses learned to talk plainly, he never stopped talking except to eat or sleep, for over fifteen years, and the prolixity and pedantry of his speech patterns were extremely trying to my nerves. The idea of not one but two children following in the paternal footsteps chilled my blood.
Ever the optimist, I told myself there was no reason to anticipate such a disaster. The little dears might take after their mother, or me.
“Children learn at different rates,” I explained to my son. “And twins, according to the best authorities, are sometimes slower to speak because they communicate readily with one another.”
“And because they get everything they want without having to ask for it,” Ramses muttered. The children obviously understood English, though they declined to speak it; his little daughter raised her head and fluttered her long lashes flirtatiously. He fluttered his lashes back at her. Charla giggled and gave him a hug.
The question of suitable names had occupied us for months. I say “us,” because I saw no reason why I should not offer a suggestion or two. (There is nothing wrong with making suggestions so long as the persons to whom they are offered are not obliged to accept them.) Not until the end of her pregnancy did I begin to suspect Nefret was carrying twins, but since we had already settled on names for a male or a female child, it worked out quite nicely. There was no debate about David John; no one quarreled with Ramses’s desire to name his son after his best friend and his cousin who had died in France in 1915.
A girl’s name was not so easy to find. Emerson declared (quite without malice, I am sure) that between our niece and myself there were already enough Amelias in the family. It was with some hesitation that I mentioned that my mother’s name had been Charlotte, and I was secretly pleased when Nefret approved.
“It is such a nice, ordinary name,” she said.
“Unlike Nefret,” said her husband.
“Or Ramses.” She chuckled and patted his cheek. “Not that you could ever be anything else.”
Charla, as we called her, had the same curly black hair and dark eyes as her father. Her brother Davy, now perched on his mother’s knee, was fair, with Nefret’s blue eyes and Ramses’s prominent nose and chin. They did not resemble each other except in height, and in their linguistic eccentricity. Davy was more easygoing than his sister, but he had a well-nigh supernatural ability to disappear from one spot and materialize in another some distance away. The bars had been installed in all the rooms they were wont to inhabit, including the veranda, where we now sat waiting for Fatima to serve tea, after one such incident: looking out through the open archway I had seen Davy—who had been quietly pilfering biscuits not ten seconds before—pursuing one of the fierce feral curs from the village, with cries that may or may not have meant “dog” in some obscure language. The dog was running as fast as it could go.
Our Luxor home was an unpretentious sprawling place, built of stone and mud brick and surrounded by the flora I had carefully cultivated. The plan was similar to that of most Egyptian houses, with rooms surrounding a series of courtyards, the only unusual feature being the veranda that ran along the front. Open (before the twins) arches provided a view across the desert to the green strip of cultivation bordering the river, and the eastern mountains beyond. A short distance away was the smaller house occupied by Ramses and Nefret and the twins. The arrangement had been somewhat haphazard, with wings and additional structures added as they were needed, but in my opinion the result—which I had designed—was both attractive