The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [146]
We were unable to find any trace of Kalaan. Emerson believed he had left Cairo and was lying low. Ramses appeared to have lost interest in him. “There are too many others like him,” he said with a shrug.
The next few weeks were without incident. I found this very alarming. Emerson scoffed at me when I expressed my forebodings (he always scoffs at my forebodings) but as I pointed out to him, an enemy who has already perpetrated several violent attacks, and a murder, is not likely to change his skin. This prompted another rude remark from Emerson on the subject of mixed metaphors, but I knew what I meant, and so did he.
When I say all was quiet I do not mean that a great many things were not going on. We dined with the Vandergelts and they dined with us; I gave a series of quiet but elegant dinner parties to welcome David and Lia and to honor the other young couple. All four of them, not to mention Emerson, had argued against my original idea of a large reception at one of the hotels, so I had been forced to give in. I do not enjoy such large social events, but I had wanted to outface the gossips. All in all, we had provided the narrow little world of Cairo society with a good deal of gossip that season, and I felt sure “they” were now engaged in malicious speculation on the suddenness of Nefret’s marriage. When I mentioned this to Emerson he gave me one of the coldest looks I had ever received from that quarter.
“What sort of speculation?” he demanded. “You know, Emerson. They will be counting the days.”
“Until what?”
“Don’t glower at me that way and don’t pretend you don’t understand.”
“I do understand,” Emerson snarled. “Confound it, Peabody, are all women so prurient and judgmental?”
“Yes, I think so. They were happy to believe ’the worst,’ as the saying has it, of poor Maude Reynolds, and in their narrow little minds there is only one reason why a young woman would give up an elaborate church wedding with all the attendant fuss and ceremony. You know I don’t believe it, Emerson, I only wanted …”
“I know.” His stern face softened. “You wanted to indicate your love and support for Nefret and tell the gossips to go to the devil. Never mind, Peabody. She doesn’t give a curse about the opinions of such people and neither should we.”
So I sent out my invitations and in succeeding days we entertained practically every archaeologist in the Cairo area, and some from farther away. The Petries were not among them. The fact is, I did not get on with Mrs. Petrie any better than Emerson got on with her husband. Since women are more courteous than men (or greater hypocrites, according to a source I need not name), Hilda Petrie and I expressed our antipathy by being frigidly polite when we were forced to meet and by offering specious excuses for meeting as seldom as possible. I invited her, she wrote back to say she had a touch of catarrh or a slight sprain or nothing suitable to wear. Thus the civilities were maintained to the benefit of all.
M. Maspero also declined my invitation. I knew why he avoided us. It was shame, pure and simple! To see Emerson’s superb talents wasted on a site as dreary as Zawaiet, while selfishly retaining the pyramids and cemeteries of Dahshur for lesser men, might have shaken even Maspero’s superb French sangfroid.
To make matters worse, the disposition of the vast cemetery field of Giza was still in debate. Originally it had been broken up into three sections which were allotted to the Germans, the Italians, and Mr. Reisner, but a few years later Signor Schiaparelli of the Turin Museum had abandoned the Italian concession. In theory this was divided between the other two, but they were still arguing about precisely who got what. The obvious solution—to hand over at least part of the Italian area to the most distinguished excavator of this or any other century—I believe I need not name names—was ignored by