Children of the Storm - Elizabeth Peters [26]
Curled up on the seat next to Ramses, with her head on his shoulder, Nefret said sleepily, “Then she should be relieved to learn that the greatest criminal of them all is no longer an enemy but a friend and kinsman.”
“That is the approach we must take,” I agreed. “Very good, my dear. David already knows of Sethos’s involvement with intelligence and I expect he has told Lia—he tells her everything.”
“No doubt,” Nefret said. “Neither of them has referred to it in their letters, but then they wouldn’t take the risk, would they?” She raised her hand to her face to hide a yawn. “Sorry.”
“Not at all,” I said. “Ramses, take your wife off to—er—your compartment, she is half asleep.”
After they had gone, Emerson indicated that he was ready to follow suit, so I rang for the porter to make up our berths. We stood in the corridor while this was being done. Emerson chuckled.
“I rather look forward to informing Walter he has an unknown brother who was not only born outside the blanket—”
“A vulgar phrase, Emerson.”
“Not as vulgar as certain others that come to mind. As I was saying: but who has broken at least five of the Ten Commandments.”
“It will be a shock,” I agreed.
“It will do him good,” said Emerson heartlessly. “He has led a very sheltered life and is in danger of becoming narrow and intolerant.”
That thought, and another that he acted upon immediately following the departure of the porter, distracted him from further discussion, and soon after he returned to his own berth I heard the deep respirations that betokened slumber. It did not come so easily to me.
Our failure to hear from Sethos was frustrating but not fatal. He might be away—temporarily, one could only hope. I considered it possible that the dastardly Italian had sought refuge with his former acquaintances in Sethos’s criminal network—supposing any of them were still in Cairo. Curse it, I thought, turning over with difficulty in the narrow bunk, how can we take action when we are ignorant of so many things? I ought to have cornered Sethos years ago and demanded a full accounting of the present status of the organization and the whereabouts of his confederates. Well, but his visits had been brief and infrequent, and there had been too many other things to talk about—his stormy relationship with the journalist Margaret Minton, the tomb and its amazing contents, the twins, the house in Cornwall—which was legally Ramses’s property but which he had willingly lent to his uncle—and Sethos’s daughter Molly.
Despite—or perhaps because!—of the fact that women found Sethos attractive, his relationships with the female sex had been far from satisfactory. For years he had professed an attachment to my humble self—a lost cause if ever there was one, since Emerson would never have allowed it even if I had faltered in my devotion to my spouse. In recent years he had transferred his affections to Margaret, who returned them with (at least) equal intensity. But Margaret had her own hard-won career, as a writer and newspaper correspondent specializing in Middle Eastern affairs, and she was unwilling to commit herself to a man who put his hazardous occupation ahead of her. Patriotism is all very well, but a woman likes to know where a man is and what he is up to, particularly when there is a possibility he may walk out of the house one day and never come back.
Then there was Bertha, Sethos’s mistress and accomplice during his criminal years. Passionately devoted to him at the beginning of their relationship, her tigerish affections had turned to rage when she learned of his purported love for me. She had met a violent death at the hands of my friends after several attempts to kill me, but not before giving birth to Sethos’s daughter.
We had encountered Molly—or Maryam, to use her proper name—only once, when she was fourteen years of age, before we were aware of Sethos’s real identity and hers. Soon after that she