Ghosts by Gaslight - Jack Dann [33]
“You can’t be serious,” I said, those words again, then as now, largely because Akhmet wanted me to, and once again fancying our own late great Queen Victoria, or even the recently crowned King, giving their all like this, blazing away to help complete the run south from Saqqara.
“Very common now, Mr. Salteri. The moumia burn like sticks. It’s the pitch.”
“Akhmet, Mr. Minchin is aboard, you say?”
“Of course, effendi. Even now he will be making his way here. The carriages are crowded. A few moments more.”
And as if the words were indeed a cue, the door opened and Charles Minchin eased into the compartment, short and florid, grandly moustachioed, looking impossibly crisp in his suntans and solar topee.
In the dream I stood, now as then, allowing that any archaeologist this well turned out might be a stickler for the niceties. “Mr. Minchin, it’s a pleasure.” We shook hands.
“Lucas Salteri, the pleasure is mine. I’ve long admired your work.”
I had to control my smile. To what did he refer? My most recent work had been looting Etruscan tombs outside Veii and Norschia in western Italy. Before that ten years as a West End stage magician, and eight as an engineer before that. My career echoed the great Giovanni Belzoni’s in so many ways. “Our arrangement stands?”
“Of course. We have camels waiting. We will be at the site by early afternoon.”
“But between stations—?”
He consulted his timepiece. “The train will stop in a few minutes. It has been arranged.”
And indeed the train did begin slowing.
Ten minutes later we stood by the Nile amidst a cluster of date palms, watching swifts and martins darting over the fields of maize and sorghum as the train disappeared into the south. Ten more and we were mounted, and Minchin’s three fellahin assistants—accomplices they would soon prove to be, Akhmet, Moussa, and Sayeed, nondescript then but made vivid by subsequent events and the dream’s repetition—had finished loading the pack camels and we were heading off into the western desert.
And that was where the dream ended, always ended, even in the earliest hours of this new momentous day, not at the tomb itself, not when Minchin played his hand, not at the betrayal.
HERBERT KRAY ARRIVED almost precisely at three o’clock. The bells of St. Paul’s across the Thames had just finished sounding when he knocked at the door, and I heard Mrs. Danvers, my only human servant, hurrying to answer.
I sat waiting in the large, elegant drawing room, secretly pleased that the day had turned chill and overcast again beyond the heavy drapes, and watched Ramose. There were fourteen things that he could do really well and tending the fire was one of them. He propped and stilted in his best penny-dreadful/Boys’ Own Paper mummy fashion over to the grate, poked it several times, then set down the poker and moved to the side, waiting for his next task.
Mrs. Danvers ushered in my guest and left us without saying a word, just as I had instructed. Dr. Kray was very well presented, a tall handsome man in his early to middle forties, with a neatly trimmed beard and wearing a suit of the finest tweed. The golden watch-chain in his waistcoat pocket had a fob in the shape of a Horus falcon, proclaiming something of his trade in antiquities. I had no doubt that the Horus was genuine.
I stood, crossed to him, and shook his hand. But before we could exchange more than a few of the usual pleasantries, I had the distinct if modest pleasure (modest given what was to follow) of seeing his eyes go large at the sight of my favorite manikin.
“Good Lord, Trenton!” Kray said. “Bendeck mentioned that he’d heard one or two odd stories about you, but I would never have thought this! Tell me that you haven’t revived one of them!”
“Hardly, Dr. Kray. It’s a construct, nothing more, made to resemble