The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [42]
Ramses no longer found the situation amusing. She was so angry she was shaking, and Percy had gone a very ugly color, and people were edging closer, staring. A nasty public scene wouldn’t serve any useful purpose.
“On duty, are you, old chap?” he suggested helpfully and with only a slight touch of sarcasm.
“Yes.” A hint was all Percy needed. Ramses almost admired him for being so quick to recover. “Sometimes the men come here. We do all we can to discourage them, of course.”
Ramses nodded encouragingly. “Well done. Shall we leave him to it, Nefret? Father and Mother will be waiting for us at Shepheard’s.”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry, Percy, if I misjudged you.” She smiled at him.
That was the trouble with Nefret—one of the troubles with Nefret, Ramses amended. She was as changeable as a spring day in England, blowing a gale one moment, sunny and bright the next. Some people made the mistake of assuming that because her emotions were so volatile they were not sincere and wholehearted. He knew better. Nefret was perfectly capable of knocking a fellow flat on his back one minute and bandaging his broken head the next.
“You misjudged Ramses too,” she went on. “It was my own idea to come here. I thought you knew I had opened a clinic for the prostitutes. They have no other medical services available, and they are in great need of them.”
“Oh. Oh, yes. I had heard, but—but I never supposed you would come here yourself!” The storm clouds gathered again on Nefret’s brow, and Percy said earnestly, “I cannot begin to express my admiration for your courage and compassion. But my dear Miss Nefret, I find it hard to forgive you for believing I would be capable of such contemptible behavior. You can only make it up to me by allowing me to escort you safely to the hotel.”
“I think I can manage,” Ramses said meekly. “We don’t want to interfere with you in the pursuit of your duty.”
Leaving Percy smirking and fondling his mustache, they headed back along the lane. “Stand up straight,” Nefret muttered. “Why are you slouching?”
“Am I?”
“You sounded like a perfect fool.”
“Did I?”
Nefret laughed and gave his arm a squeeze.
They were within easy walking distance of Shepheard’s. One of the ironies visitors often commented upon was the proximity of the “Red Blind” district to the most elegant hotels in the city.
“It is good to have you back,” Nefret said shyly.
Shyly? Nefret? Ramses glanced down at her in surprise. “I haven’t really been away,” he pointed out.
“Not this past summer, but you haven’t spent the entire season with us for several years.”
He recognized the implicit reproach and tried to think of a way of responding to it without admitting it. “The truth is I was finding Mother’s dear dahabeeyah, as she will call it, rather too confining.”
Nefret laughed. “I know what you mean. It wasn’t so much the cramped quarters as the feeling that Aunt Amelia knew every move one made and overheard every word one said.”
“The new house will be a great improvement. Mother has actually proposed giving us an entire wing to ourselves. I suspect that was Father’s idea.”
“They really are sweet,” Nefret said with fond condescension. “She still blushes like a prim Victorian maiden when he looks at her in a certain way, and he keeps inventing feeble excuses to get us out of the way when he wants to be alone with her. Do they really believe we don’t know how they feel about one another?”
“They enjoy the game, perhaps. I wonder if we could persuade Mother to let us have keys to our own rooms.”
“I shall insist upon it,” Nefret said firmly. “Confess, Ramses; she anticipated I would want to visit the clinic and ordered you to go with me.”
“No. Honestly.” It had been his father who gave the order. Not that he had needed it.
In