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child after child after child melting away from her? What could Constance’s weak arm accomplish against germs or murderers or the black men who, she read in the newspaper this evening, slaughtered fifty-six defenseless English women and children in their homes in a faraway land? The truth blazed brightly against this black London night: she could not protect Angelica from threats large or small, human or inhuman. To be a mother was to be sentenced simply to watch, never to prevent, only to wait for something horrible to happen to her child, and then to sit by, wailing and useless. To think now, as a grown woman with her own beloved child, what her mother must have felt: it was neither surprise nor sin that she had finally fled the heartbreaks of this world, left Constance alone.

She lit another candle and melted its base onto the head of its stumpy predecessor. Her hair had come loose. She meant to gather it, but the next moment Angelica was a bridge, her legs on her bed and her hands on her mother’s knees, the room gray and yellow throughout. “Mother, mother, mother, mother!” Angelica laughed at Constance’s difficulty waking, mimicked her rapid blinks, her confusion at the wick, black in a pool of grease. The girl shouted with morning joy, squeaking as much as speaking. “Hush, mouse,” said Constance. “I love your little face in morning light.”

“You slept here with me,” marveled the girl. “In a chair!”

“I did,” said Constance, crawling under the bedclothes next to Angelica.

“You were asleep, and I woke you.”

“I was, and you did.”

“Where’s Papa?”

“Still abed, I should think. Shall we rouse him?”

“No,” said Angelica. “Mamma and baby.”

Constance kissed her child’s hair. “Yes indeed and very nice.”

“Mamma and baby very nice.”

This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical figures and public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Arthur Phillips

Excerpt from The Tragedy of Arthur copyright © 2010 by Arthur Phillips

Excerpt from The Song Is You copyright © 2009 by Arthur Phillips

Excerpt from Prague copyright © 2002 by Arthur Phillips

Excerpt from Angelica copyright © 2007 by Arthur Phillips

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Phillips, Arthur

The Egyptologist: a novel / Arthur Phillips.—1st ed.

p. cm.

1. Egyptologists—Fiction. 2. Archaeologists—Fiction. 3. Antiquities—Collection and preservation—Fiction. 4. Americans—Egypt—Fiction. 5. Egypt—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3616.H45E46 2004

813'.6—dc22 2003065543

Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

ILLUSTRATIONS © BY JACKIE AHER

This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title The Tragedy of Arthur by Arthur Phillips. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-1-58836-414-2

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