The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [188]
“Are you sure?”
After a brief, breathless pause, Ramses said, “How much do you know? And how do you know?”
“About your cousin? It doesn’t require great intelligence to deduce it was he who produced Sennia and her mother at a particularly strategic moment. He was trying to humiliate and hurt you, and he succeeded, didn’t he?”
“Beyond his wildest dreams.”
“You may as well tell me the rest of it. You have no idea,” David added, “how much I enjoy saying that instead of hearing Aunt Amelia say it to me.”
“If you saw it too, then it’s not just my imagination. I began to wonder if I was going crazy. David, you cannot know how much I … I don’t have to say it, do I?”
“No. You are too English,” David said, smiling.
Ramses was silent for a time, trying to get his thoughts in order. There was a certain irony in the fact that his conclusions were based almost entirely on what his mother would have called intuition. In this case it was knowledge of a man’s character, the way his mind worked. It left a track through the world. In Percy’s case the track was like that of a snail, slimy and sticky.
“I don’t know how Percy found out about Sennia, but he’d have gone back to the brothels as soon as he returned to Cairo. They are his natural habitat. The sight of her probably amused him a great deal—a little image of Mother, growing up in the slums of Cairo and destined for the same life as Rashida—”
An inarticulate murmur of revulsion from David interrupted him. His lips twisted. “He hates Mother almost as much as he does me. It was she who saw through his childish schemes all those years ago, and told him precisely what she thought of him. Percy arranged that meeting in the suk, I’ve no doubt of it. What happened after that was my own fault. I should have gone straight to Mother and Father. But I thought it would be better—”
“I would have done the same.”
“No, you wouldn’t. You aren’t as stubborn and accustomed to going your own way. As it happened, I played straight into Percy’s hands. At that time, of course, I hadn’t the faintest inkling that he knew about Sennia, or any reason to anticipate what he would do with that knowledge. It was only hindsight that enabled me to put the pieces together. No one else knows, David; even Mother doesn’t suspect, and I see no reason to tell her. There’s no danger of his taking her in again, she despises him enough as it is.”
David nodded gravely. “How did Kalaan come into it?”
“He owns those girls as a herder owns his cattle. If Rashida didn’t tell him, one of the others did—about the Inglizi who had been coming round rather more often than usual. Kalaan would assume there was profit to be made from that; but if he tried to blackmail Percy he was sadly disappointed. They were brothers under the skin, the Cairo procurer and the fine English gentleman, and they struck up an alliance. Rashida would never have had the courage to approach Mother and Father on her own; Percy needed Kalaan for that, and Kalaan, of course, assumed he could get money from us.”
“That was a serious miscalculation on his part.”
“And perhaps on Percy’s. Not that it mattered to him; he didn’t care what happened to Sennia, his aim was to shame me in front of Mother and Father, and Nefret. He knew what she thought of men who use women like Rashida; the morning we ran into him in el Was’a she … You know about that, don’t you? Nefret must have written Lia.”
David nodded. He avoided his friend’s eyes, though, and Ramses said, “What else did she tell Lia?”
“Well—uh—quite a number of things. Go on, Ramses, I’ll stop you if you—uh—cover ground that is already familiar to me.”
“Did Nefret mention to Lia that Percy had been after her? Yes, of course, she would. She never admitted it to me—she always thinks she can deal with everything single-handedly—but there must have been several encounters.”
“She may not have told you about them because she was afraid of what