The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [118]
“Now, what is this?” Emerson stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips, looking sternly at us. “What a roaring! Is there a lion here? Where is it? Where is it hiding?”
He began opening cupboard doors and throwing towels out onto the floor, while the child watched him in wide-eyed fascination.
It is absolutely unaccountable to me why small children respond to men like Emerson. One would suppose a voice as deep as his and a form as large as his would frighten them into fits. Before long she was giggling as he tore the bathroom apart looking for the imaginary lion, but it was to Ramses she turned when the actual moment of immersion arrived. With my assistance Emerson pursued the lion out of the room and closed the door to prevent it from returning.
“My darling girl,” he said, and took me in his arms.
“I am not going to cry, Emerson. You know I am not at all a sentimental person. It was just seeing how gentle he was with her, and how she clung to him. Oh, dear.”
Emerson reached into his pocket and pulled out his handkerchief. He looked so surprised and pleased at actually finding it where it was supposed to be that we both started to laugh, a bit damply in my case.
“Well, well,” said Emerson, “we’ll find room for the little thing, won’t we? She’ll be no trouble.”
I fancied she would be considerable trouble—all small children are—but I said, “Of course, Emerson. You know, don’t you, that the old fiend’s threats were right on the mark? No one will believe she is not Ramses’s child, no matter how we deny it.”
“Why the devil should we deny anything?” Emerson demanded. His chin jutted out. “We know the truth. They say—who says?—let them say!”
“That’s all very well, Emerson, but this is not going to do Ramses’s reputation any good. It has already suffered unfairly.”
“Some men might take pride in that kind of reputation.”
“That is unfortunately correct, but our son is not one of them. He won’t show it, he never does, but this suspicion will hurt him deeply. And Nefret will … Where is she? Did you look for her?”
“Not yet. Shall we do so now?”
Nefret was gone. We were in her sitting room reading the message she had left when Ramses joined us.
“She says she has gone to stay with friends for a few days,” I reported. “She must mean the Vandergelts. Ramses, don’t be angry with her; if she had had time to think she would have known better, but it came as such a shock. Won’t you go after her?”
Ramses stared at the note, which he was twisting in his fingers. “Go after her,” he repeated. “Good God!”
“What is it?” Emerson demanded.
“I ought to have realized … Go after her. Yes, I must. I hope it’s not already too late.”
FROM MANUSCRIPT H
The house to which he had moved Rashida and the child was in Maadi, some distance away from Rashida’s old haunts and, he hoped, from a convenient supplier of hashish. It had been one of the way stations he and David had used when they were prowling the suks in various exotic disguises, for various illegal purposes. (They had been very young at the time; but that was probably no excuse for some of their activities.)
The old woman who owned the place—thanks in part to his subsidies—was elderly and half-blind, and she had been profoundly disinterested in their comings and goings. She was kind, though, in her vague way, and he had been paying her an additional small sum to make sure the child was properly looked after. Rashida’s maternal instincts had been somewhat warped by her experiences; in her own way she was passionately attached to her daughter, but she couldn’t always be depended on to do the things he wanted her to do. He had known that sooner or later he would have to introduce