Guardian of the Horizon - Elizabeth Peters [19]
Emerson’s fingers twitched. He had only agreed with me so that I would go away and let him get back to work. “Confound it, Peabody, your suggestion about excavating in the Sudan makes perfectly good sense, and I am willing to accept it. There is no reason why anyone should doubt the story. Why are you anticipating difficulties that don’t exist?”
“Better safe than sorry, Emerson.”
“I might have known you would answer with an aphorism,” Emerson grumbled. “Oh, the devil, do as you like. I leave it to you to cover our tracks, as you put it.”
I had thought he would.
“I have made one of my little lists,” I explained, removing the paper from my pocket.
Emerson grinned reluctantly. “I thought you would.”
“The first thing is to get Merasen away from here as soon as possible. That we have had such a visitor is known to the servants, but even Gargery, with all his poking and prying, has only the vaguest notion of where he came from or why. Gargery has not enough experience to realize how unusual he is, in appearance, language, and manner, but I assure you, it would not take David long to begin wondering about him.”
“That’s sensible, I suppose,” Emerson admitted. “What do you propose to do with him?”
“Send him on ahead of us to Egypt and to Wadi Halfa.”
“On his own?”
“He got here all the way from the Sudan, on his own.” Emerson frowned, and I said impatiently, “We will supply him with ample funds and specific directions. The longer he remains, the greater the danger that someone will become curious about his antecedents. What if Kevin O’Connell should drop in without warning, as he is inclined to do? What if Evelyn and Walter should decide to pay us a visit? One word from Merasen in the language of the Holy Mountain, and Walter’s linguistic antennae would be quivering.”
“Hmph. I must admit,” Emerson admitted, “that you have made a point. Very well, I will take the boy to London and make arrangements. What else?”
“You will announce your intentions to the Department of Antiquities—Yes, Emerson, you must. It might be a good idea for you to write to Mr. Breasted—he is back in Chicago, I suppose—and ask him about his survey in Nubia last winter. It must all be open and aboveboard. I propose that we announce we are going directly to Meroe. It is three hundred miles south of Napata, where we were working in ’97, and from which we disappeared into the desert, as the journalists so poetically put it. That should put people off the track.”
“It will put us off the track, too, by a long distance,” Emerson protested.
“We needn’t actually go to Meroe,” I said impatiently. “So long as people believe we are not going to Napata.”
Merasen was rather pleased than otherwise to leave us. We were not very entertaining company for a lively lad whose ideas of amusement were quite different from ours. (I had not seen fit to mention to Emerson that one of the reasons why I wanted him out of the way had to do with the housemaids.) After all, what was there for him to do? We had forbidden him to leave the grounds, and the library was of no interest to him. The men of the Holy Mountain were noted archers, but he had haughtily refused to display his skill, claiming we had no bow worthy of his strength. From time to time Ramses resignedly consented to wrestle with him, but those sessions did not last long, since Ramses was uncommonly rough with him. After one such encounter, which ended (after approximately thirty seconds) with Merasen doubled up like a worm, whooping for breath, Nefret remonstrated. Ramses’s only response was a curt “He asked for it.” This did not improve relations between Ramses and Nefret, but even she did not object when Emerson took the boy up to London in order to put him on a boat to Port Said. His necessarily extended journey from the Sudan to Cairo, and thence to England, had familiarized him with the country and the language, and he assured us that he had made friends along the way. (I suspected, from his complacent smile, that most of