Crocodile on the Sandbank - Elizabeth Peters [118]
But then the laughter fled from his face and his eyes took on an expression that made me feel very odd—as if my interior organs had dissolved into a shapeless, sticky mass.
“Peabody, you may as well hear the truth. I am mad about you! Since the day you walked into my tomb and started ordering us all about, I have known you were the only woman for me. Why do you suppose I have sulked and avoided you since we left Amarna? I was contemplating a life without you—a bleak, gray existence, without your voice scolding me and your big bright eyes scowling at me, and your magnificent figure—has no one told you about your figure, Peabody?—striding up and down prying into all sorts of places where you had no business to be…. I knew I couldn’t endure it! If you hadn’t spoken tonight, I should have borrowed Alberto’s mummy costume and carried you off into the desert! There, I have said it. You have stripped away my defenses. Are you satisfied with your victory?”
I did not reply in words, but I think my answer was satisfactory. When Emerson had regained his breath he let out a great hearty laugh.
“Archaeology is a fascinating pursuit, but, after all, one cannot work day and night…. Peabody, my darling Peabody—what a perfectly splendid time we are going to have!”
Emerson was right—as he usually is. We have had a splendid time. We mean to work at Gizeh next year. There is a good deal to be done here yet, but for certain practical reasons we prefer to be nearer Cairo. I understand that Petrie wants to work here, and he is one of the few excavators to whom Emerson would consider yielding. Not that the two of them get along; when we met Mr. Petrie in London last year, he and Emerson started out mutually abusing the Antiquities Department and ended up abusing one another over pottery fragments. Petrie is a nice-looking young fellow, but he really has no idea of what to do with pottery.
The practical reasons that demand we work near Cairo are the same reasons that keep me here, in my chair, instead of being down below supervising the workers as I usually do. Emerson is being overly cautious; I feel perfectly well. They say that for a woman of my age to have her first child is not always easy, and Emerson is in a perfect jitter of apprehension about the whole thing, but I have no qualms whatever. I do not intend that anything shall go amiss. I planned it carefully, not wanting to interrupt the winter excavation season. I can fit the child in quite nicely between seasons, and be back in Cairo ready for work in November.
We are now awaiting news from Evelyn of the birth of her second child, which is due at any moment. She is already the mother of a fair-haired male child, quite a charming infant, with a propensity for rooting in mud puddles which I am sure he inherited from his archaeological relatives. I am his godmother, so perhaps I am biased about his beauty, intelligence, and charm. But I think I am not.
Walter is not with us this season; he is studying hieroglyphics in England, and promises to be one of the finest scholars of our time. His library at Ellesmere Castle is filled with books and manuscripts, and when we join the younger Emersons there for the summer and early fall each year, he and Emerson spend hours arguing over translations.
Lucas? His present whereabouts are unknown to us. Without the money to support his title he could not live respectably in England. I wanted to prosecute the rascal as he deserved; but Baring dissuaded me. He was very helpful to us when we reached Cairo with our boatload of criminals; and he was present on the momentous occasion when Evelyn opened her boxes and found, among the diaries and books, an envelope containing her grandfather’s last, holograph will. This was the final proof of Lucas’s villainy; but, as Baring pointed out, a trial would bring unwished-for notoriety on all of us, particularly Evelyn, and Lucas was no longer a danger. He lives precariously, I believe, somewhere on the Continent, and if he does not soon drink himself to death, some outraged