The Ape Who Guards the Balance - Elizabeth Peters [51]
“Perhaps,” I had remarked, following the event, “you need not have pushed him quite so hard, Emerson.”
Emerson gave me a look of hurt reproach. “There was no time to calculate, Peabody. Do you suppose I would deliberately set out to injure an official of the Antiquities Service?”
No one could possibly have proved that he had, but I feared relations between ourselves and the Weigalls had not become any warmer. However, the presence of older and better friends made their absence unimportant. Cyrus and Katherine Vandergelt were there, of course; Cyrus was one of our dearest friends, and we had become very fond of the lady he had espoused a few years earlier, despite her somewhat questionable past.
When we first met her, Katherine was busily bilking a gullible acquaintance of ours in her then-capacity as a spiritualist medium. She had come round to a right way of thinking and had been on the verge of honorably refusing Cyrus’s offer of marriage when I persuaded her to reconsider. I had never regretted my intervention (I seldom do), for they were very happy together, and Katherine’s caustic wit and cynical view of humanity made her a most entertaining companion.
Prices had gone up shockingly since my early days in Egypt; despite Fatima’s skills in bargaining, the turkey cost almost sixty piastres, four times what it would have cost twenty years ago. After dinner—including a splendid plum pudding in a blaze of brandy, borne in by Fatima—we retired to the verandah to watch the sunset. As Katherine sank gratefully into a chair she cast an envious eye upon Nefret, who was wearing one of her loose, elaborately embroidered robes, and declared her intention of acquiring a similar garment herself.
“I ate far too much,” she declared. “And my corsets are killing me. I ought to have followed your advice, Amelia, and left them off, but I am a good deal stouter than you.”
“You are just right as you are,” Cyrus declared, looking fondly at her.
The others hastened to express their agreement. We had only two other guests—Howard Carter and Edward Ayrton, with whom Ramses had struck up a friendship the previous year. Ned, as he had invited me to call him, was the archaeologist in charge of Mr. Davis’s excavations. He got little credit from Davis, who referred to his discoveries in the first person singular, but since the American was completely ignorant of excavation procedures and disinclined to follow them anyhow, Maspero had required him to employ a qualified person. Ned was a slight young fellow, pleasant-looking rather than handsome. I thought he seemed a little shy with us, so I put myself out to include him in the conversation.
“Your official season begins, I believe, on January the first. You have had remarkable good fortune thus far in finding interesting tombs for Mr. Davis. Not that I mean to disparage the archaeological skills which have contributed to your success.”
“You are too kind, Mrs. Emerson,” the young man replied in a soft, well-bred voice. “In fact, we didn’t find anything last year that measured up to Yuya and Thuya.”
“Good Gad, how many unrobbed tombs does the bas—er—man expect to find in one lifetime?” Emerson demanded.
“He has rather got into the habit of expecting at least one a year.” The comment came from Howard, who had taken a seat a little distance from the rest of us. “I don’t envy you your job, Ayrton.”
There was a brief, embarrassed silence. Howard had once supervised Davis’s excavations, in addition to holding down the post of Inspector for Upper Egypt. Now he had lost both positions, and the bitterness in his voice belied his claim of indifference.
In the spring of 1905 Howard had been transferred to Lower Egypt in place of Mr. Quibell, who had taken over Howard’s position as Inspector for Upper Egypt. Not long after Howard moved to Sakkara, a group of drunken French tourists had tried to enter the Serapeum without the necessary tickets. When they were refused entry, they attacked the guards with