Night Train to Memphis - Elizabeth Peters [15]
I inspected the other guests with unconcealed interest. They were doing the same. There were only thirty of us, and we would be in close company for several weeks.
I had been warned that this crowd would probably dress more formally than was usual on such cruises. People who are embarrassingly rich like to show off. My mail-order cocktail dress looked pretty insignificant next to the designer gowns many of the other women were sporting, and the dazzle of diamonds dimmed my faux gold locket. Many of the men wore tuxes or dinner jackets.
Jen and her new daughter-in-law were sitting at a table on the other side of the room, with two other people – a married couple, I cleverly deduced. The woman’s pink hair matched her dress and his bald head. When she caught my eye Jen waved and gave me a tight-lipped smile. John wasn’t with them, but as I returned Jen’s wave he came sauntering towards their table, as infuriatingly casual as always. He looked very much the bridegroom, with a flower in his buttonhole and a matching crimson cummerbund. Catching me in mid-wave he raised an eyebrow, nodded distantly, and sat down with his back to me.
Sweet returned with a glass of chablis and a man stepped up onto the podium in the centre of the floor. At the sight of him I forgot Bright, Sweet, and John. The tux set off his lean body and broad shoulders, but he ought to have been wearing flowing robes and a snowy bedouin headdress that would frame his walnut-brown skin, hawklike nose, and sharply cut features. His black eyes were fringed with lashes so thick they looked artificial.
A chorus of involuntary sighs came from every woman in the room. Some of them looked old enough to have seen the original Rudolph Valentino film. I wasn’t old enough, but I had read the book. I have read every soppy sentimental novel ever written. To look at her, you wouldn’t think my sharp-tongued, practical grandma had an ounce of romance in her soul, but she owned all the old novels. In her day, The Sheik had been pretty hot stuff. ‘‘‘Ahmed, mon bel Arabe,” she murmured yearningly,’ I murmured.
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Sweet.
‘Ssssh,’ I said.
His name wasn’t Ahmed it was Feisal. His accent suggested he had been educated in England. The underlying traces of his native tongue gave his velvety baritone a fascinating touch of the exotic.
‘I am your leader and your devoted servant, ladies and gentlemen. I will be with you on the boat and on shore, wherever you go. You will come to me with all your troubles, questions, and complaints, and I will pass them on to your crew, which I now have the honour to introduce.’
He presented the captain, the purser, the doctor, the chef, and a few others; I lost track of what he was saying as I studied the blonde at the next table. Her eyes were fixed in a glassy stare and she seemed to be having trouble breathing. It might have been her corset. She had to be wearing something formidable under the white, draped silk jersey; it moulded, not moving flesh, but a substance as rigid as concrete.
I caught a name and returned my attention to Feisal. ‘Dr Peregrine Foggington-Smythe, our expert on Pharaonic Egypt,’ he announced.
So there were parents cruel enough to saddle a kid with a name like Peregrine. If I had seen him from a distance I might have taken him for John – briefly. He was a stretched-out, washed-out version of the Great John Smythe – taller and skinnier, with ash-blond hair and pale blue eyes. He informed us with magnificent condescension that he would be lecturing on Sakkara, the site we would visit the following day, as soon as Feisal finished his introductions.
He stepped back and Feisal, whose face had frozen into a look of barely contained dislike, turned on the charm again as he presented Dr Alice Gordon, who would be delivering the lectures on Hellenistic Egypt. Dr Gordon rose and raised her hand but remained modestly in her place at a table near the back of the room. She was a plump little