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By Root 1059 0

did we eat there? What was it like to know we were of “the fortunate chosen nobility”? As God is my witness, Bev, he asked me this. What were my parents like, and what sorts of things pleased them when I was a boy, and what methods did I use to “determine when they were about to thrash” me? That was a difficult one, I must say. You know the governor: can you imagine wee, wordless Priapus “thrashing” anyone? And, for all his self-taught and Hugo-enriched knowledge of Egypt, he really hasn’t the faintest idea of how the twentieth-century world operates or who resides in it. I asked him why the War was on, why we were fighting the Germans and the Turks. Admittedly, I cannot say myself just why either, but he really had no idea, mumbled something about the international bankers and capitalists, but not with any conviction. Does he know how Parliament is elected or the name of the American president or what language they speak in Austria-Hungary or the rules of cricket? He does not.

I have now decided I am enjoying my blackmail, a pleasant pastime with this fawning dolt. I think you would rather enjoy it, too, Bev. “Until next time, then, sah,” he says with a merry wave, gathering up his notes and hypothetical reading lists, a last worshipful wink at his private Oxonian tutor. “I’ll learn all of this for next time, no question.” How lovely for you, ducks. That will come in handy when you return home to breed kangaroos.

Congratulations to you, too, BQ, on completing your studies. I wonder if you’ve given a thought to our postwar existence, which must become a reality someday. Finally the gentlemen in charge will run out of slaughterable young men and the Belligerent Powers will have to take a rest to breed up some more. And in that interval, I, of course, shall be back at my studies, with an eye to warming Clem Wexler’s chair someday. I shall need a housekeeper cum companion, and I shall insist on one with a high-level degree in Frog Letters, if you know anyone who might be interested in the post, keeping in mind, of course, my ferocious temper and Byzantine requirements.

Educating the masses,

Go-go

15 August, 1918

Cherished BQ,

Bit of a cock-up. Any wise counsel you care to offer would be most welcome.

You’ve heard these cockle-warming tales, I suppose, from up in Luxembourg or some such, where on Christmas Eve, there are little front-line truces and our men and the Boche stop shooting for the night and instead share drinks and exchange gifts and dance a bit before going back the next morning to the daily work of plunging bayonets into each other’s bellies? Fine, I say, and no crime there. Well, similarly, out in an otherwise unremarkable suburb of Cairo, there is an establishment for gentlemen of refined tastes, which civilised outpost I have visited from time to time when the interrogatees brought in for questioning have for too long tended to be old women and village elders. The management of this establishment, inspired no doubt by the admirable humanism displayed in those Yuletide trench respites, does not discriminate against clientele of any particular nationality or political belief. No one thinks this inappropriate, considering the dreadful wartime conditions to which we are all submitting ourselves. And, of course, now that I think of it, what an excellent location for potential counterintelligence work, a purpose to which I shall certainly now put the facility, and have probably put it already in my previous visits, now that I think about it.

“I don’t much feel like these little finishing school sessions anymore,” I told my cobber ward in a fit of honesty and spite at being at his beck and call when he turned up the other night, chirping questions about Akh-en-Aten and my childhood bedroom.

“You’re not enjoying them?” he asks and looks absolutely as if I have dashed his heart to splinters.

“I am not, darling Matilda.”

“I see. Well, I hardly think that’s your choice,” he replies, tart as you like.

“Really?” I say. “You think your position is as strong as that?”

And at that, with a calm smile,