The Curse of the Pharaohs - Elizabeth Peters [3]
Emerson gasped. “What the devil is the matter with him?”
Hearing—how, I cannot imagine—a new voice, the infant stopped shrieking. The cessation of sound was so abrupt it left the ears ringing.
“Nothing,” Evelyn said calmly. “He is cutting teeth, and is sometimes a little cross.”
“Cross?” Emerson repeated incredulously.
I stepped into the room, followed by the others. The child stared at us. It sat foursquare on its bottom, its legs extended before it, and I was struck at once by its shape, which was virtually rectangular. Most babies, I had observed, tend to be spherical. This one had wide shoulders and a straight spine, no visible neck, and a face whose angularity not even baby fat could disguise. The eyes were not the pale ambiguous blue of a normal infant’s, but a dark, intense sapphire; they met mine with an almost adult calculation.
Emerson had begun circling cautiously to the left, rather as one approaches a growling dog. The child’s eyes swiveled suddenly in his direction. Emerson stopped. His face took on an imbecilic simper. He squatted. “Baby,” he crooned. “Wawa. Papa’s widdle Wawa. Come to nice papa.”
“For God’s sake, Emerson!” I exclaimed.
The baby’s intense blue eyes turned to me. “I am your mother, Walter,” I said, speaking slowly and distinctly. “Your mama. I don’t suppose you can say Mama.”
Without warning the child toppled forward. Emerson let out a cry of alarm, but his concern was unnecessary; the infant deftly got its four limbs under it and began crawling at an incredible speed, straight to me. It came to a stop at my feet, rocked back onto its haunches, and lifted its arms.
“Mama,” it said. Its ample mouth split into a smile that produced dimples in both cheeks and displayed three small white teeth. “Mama. Up. Up, up, up, UP!”
Its voice rose in volume; the final UP made the windows rattle. I stooped hastily and seized the creature. It was surprisingly heavy. It flung its arms around my neck and buried its face against my shoulder. “Mama,” it said, in a muffled voice.
For some reason, probably because the child’s grip was so tight, I was unable to speak for a few moments.
“He is very precocious,” Evelyn said, as proudly as if the child had been her own. “Most children don’t speak properly until they are a year old, but this young man already has quite a vocabulary. I have shown him your photographs every day and told him whom they represented.”
Emerson stood by me staring, with a singularly hangdog look. The infant released its stranglehold, glanced at its father, and—with what I can only regard, in the light of later experience, as cold-blooded calculation—tore itself from my arms and launched itself through the air toward my husband.
“Papa,” it said.
Emerson caught it. For a moment they regarded one another with virtually identical foolish grins. Then he flung it into the air. It shrieked with delight, so he tossed it up again. Evelyn remonstrated as, in the exuberance of its father’s greeting, the child’s head grazed the ceiling. I said nothing. I knew, with a strange sense of foreboding, that a war had begun—a lifelong battle, in which I was doomed to be the loser.
It was Emerson who gave the baby its nickname. He said that in its belligerent appearance and imperious disposition it strongly resembled the Egyptian pharaoh, the second of that name, who had scattered enormous statues of himself all along the Nile. I had to admit the resemblance. Certainly the child was not at all like its namesake, Emerson’s brother, who is a gentle, soft-spoken man.
Though Evelyn and Walter both pressed us to stay with them, we decided to take a house of our own for the summer. It was apparent that the younger Emersons’ children went in terror of their cousin. They were no match for the tempestuous temper and violent demonstrations of affection to which Ramses was prone. As we discovered, he was extremely intelligent. His physical abilities matched his mental powers. He could crawl at an astonishing speed at eight