The Ape Who Guards the Balance - Elizabeth Peters [7]
Compared to them, the third young person present had been a refreshing change. A casual observer might have taken him and Ramses for close kin; he had the same brown skin and waving black hair, the same long-lashed dark eyes. The resemblance was only coincidental; David was the grandson of our foreman, Abdullah, but he was Ramses’s closest friend and an important part of our family ever since he had gone to live with Emerson’s brother. He was not much of a talker, possibly because he found it difficult to get a word in when the rest of us were present. With an affectionate smile at me he drew up a hassock for my feet and placed a cup of tea and a plate of sandwiches on a table at my elbow.
“Your eyes look tired,” I said, inspecting him. “Have you been working on the drawings for the Luxor Temple volume by artificial light? I told you over and over you should not—”
“Leave off fussing, Peabody,” Emerson snapped. “You only want him to be ill so you can dose him with those noxious medicines of yours. Drink your tea.”
“I will do so at once, Emerson. But David should not—”
“He wanted to finish before we left for Egypt,” Nefret said. “Don’t worry about his eyesight, Aunt Amelia, the latest research indicates that reading by electric light is not harmful to one’s vision.”
She spoke with an authority which was, I had to admit, justified by her medical studies. Acquiring that training had been a struggle in itself. Over the violent objections of its (male) medical faculty, the University of London had, finally, opened its degrees to women, but the major universities continued to deny them, and the difficulty of obtaining clinical practice was almost as great as it had been a century earlier. Nefret had managed it, though, with the help of the dedicated ladies who had founded a woman’s medical college in London and forced some of the hospitals to admit women students to the wards and the dissecting rooms. She had spoken once or twice of continuing her studies in France or Switzerland, where (strange as it may seem to a Briton) the prejudice against female physicians was not so strong. I believe that she was loath to leave us, however; she adored Emerson, who was putty in her little hands, and she and Ramses really were like brother and sister. That is to say, they were on the best of terms except when they were being rude to one another.
“Why are you wearing those silly clothes?” she now inquired, studying Ramses’s elegantly garbed form with contemptuous amusement. “Don’t tell me, let me guess. Miss Christabel Pankhurst was there.”
“Not much of a guess,” said Ramses. “You knew she would be.”
“What does Miss Christabel have to do with Ramses’s attire?” I inquired suspiciously.
My son turned to me. “That was Nefret’s feeble attempt at a joke.”
“Ha!” said Nefret. “I assure you, dear boy, you won’t think it is a joke if you continue to encourage the girl. Men seem to find conquests of that sort amusing, but she is a very determined young woman, and you won’t get rid of her as easily as you do the others.”
“Good Gad!” I exclaimed. “What others?”
“Another joke,” said Ramses, rising in haste. “Come and keep me company while I change, David. We will talk.”
“About Christabel,” Nefret murmured in saccharine tones.
Ramses was already halfway to the door. This last “joke” was too much for him; he stopped and turned. “If you had been at the demonstration,” he said, biting off the words, “you would have been able to observe my behavior for yourself. I was