The Deeds of the Disturber - Elizabeth Peters [6]
Going to his post in the Egyptian Room one morning, a guard had discovered the body of one Albert Gore, a night watchman, sprawled on the floor in front of one of the exhibits. The poor fellow had apparently suffered a stroke or heart attack, and if he had collapsed by a black-figured vase or a medieval manuscript, his passing would have attracted no interest – except, one presumes, to his friends and family. However, the exhibit happened to be a mummy case, complete with mummy, and that had aroused O’Connell’s journalistic instincts. He could be regarded, I suppose, as something of an authority on ancient Egyptian curses.
‘Brain seizure – but why?’ was his first headline. Emerson’s reply: ‘Curse it, the chap was sixty-four years of age!’
‘What caused the look of frozen horror on the dead man’s face?’ O’Connell demanded. Emerson: ‘The lunatic imagination of Mr Kevin O’Connell.’
‘Can fear kill?’ Kevin inquired, and Emerson replied, to me: ‘Balderdash!’
The mummy had been presented to the museum the preceding year, by an anonymous donor. Kevin had displayed the enterprise I would have expected of him in tracking down the name of this individual, and his discovery only served to intensify interest in what was otherwise a fragile tissue of imaginative fiction. Nothing fascinates the British public so much as royalty, and a hint of royal scandal is even better.
I deem it advisable to conceal the true names and titles of the individuals concerned, even in the pages of this private journal, for if at some future time the archaeological notes contained herein should be deemed worthy of publication (which they unquestionably will), I would be the last one to wish to recall a long-forgotten stain upon the Monarchy which, despite its failings, must command the loyalty of any true Englishwoman. Suffice it to say that the donor – whom I shall henceforth designate as the Earl of Liverpool – was related by blood to a most distinguished Lady. As Emerson would say – and in fact did say fairly often – she had altogether too many descendants, direct and collateral, bumbling around the world and getting into trouble.
If the Earl hoped to save himself from the malignant influence of his Egyptian souvenir, he delayed too long. Shortly after giving it up, he met with a fatal hunting accident.
‘Served the villain right,’ commented Emerson, who shared my aversion to blood sports. ‘Sensible mummy; intelligent cadaver. His son did not get off scot-free either. He seems to be a thoroughly disgusting young reprobate, who suffers from a thoroughly disgusting degenerative disease. Perfect case of poetic justice. Excellent mummy!’
‘What disease is that, Emerson?’
Emerson had turned to another issue of the newspaper. He rattled it loudly. ‘A modest woman would not ask such a question, Peabody.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That thoroughly disgusting disease. But surely even a newspaper like the Yell would not name it.’
‘There are euphemisms, Peabody, there are euphemisms,’ Emerson replied austerely. ‘And anyone who knows the young man and his set could conjecture correctly.’
‘So that is the extent of the mummy’s baneful influence? A hunting accident, a case of – er – disease, and a natural death from heart failure?’
‘The usual number of weak-minded ladies have felt faint in its presence,’ Emerson replied caustically. ‘And the usual psychic investigators have received messages from the Beyond. Humph. I suppose one can hardly blame the gullible public, when our distinguished Keeper of Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities feeds their folly.’
‘Wallis Budge? Oh, come, Emerson, not even Budge would –’
‘He would. He has. That fellow will stop at nothing to get his name in print. How such a ranting imbecile could attain that position . . . DAMNATION!’
No device of the printer’s art, not even capital letters, can indicate the intensity of that shriek of rage. Emerson is known to his Egyptian workers by the admiring soubriquet of Father of Curses. The volume as well as the content of his remarks earned him the title; but this shout was extraordinary even by Emerson