The Falcon at the Portal - Elizabeth Peters [58]
A temporary truce was reached, but a year later the sportsmen returned to Denshawai. They were only a few hundred yards from the village when they began firing, and the infuriated villagers attacked them—not with guns, for they had none, but with rocks and wooden staves. In the ensuing struggle four Egyptians were shot, and an officer who had been beaten died while hastening to bring help to the others. Medically speaking, his demise was due to sunstroke and overexertion, but the authorities decided to make an example of the case. Twenty-one villagers were sentenced, four of them to death, some to penal servitude, and the rest to fifty lashes. The sentences of hanging and flogging were carried out at the place where the incident had occurred, and the villagers, including the relatives of the condemned, were made to watch.
Emerson had been one of those who protested the dreadful business, in impassioned letters to the English newspapers and in personal interviews with Lord Cromer. Even now his face flushed darkly with indignation when he remembered.
“Cursed if it doesn’t make me want to join Wardani myself,” he muttered.
Ramses had regained his customary composure. “Quite. Mother would say two wrongs don’t make a right, and the end does not justify the means, and so on; more to the point, retaliation in kind only makes matters worse. The Denshawai affair provoked the assassination of Boutros Ghali, which led in turn to harsher treatment of the nationalists. To all intents and purposes the movement is dead. So may Wardani be if they track him down and he resists arrest.”
“Hmmm, yes.” Emerson tapped the ashes from his pipe. “Perhaps I might have a word with David.”
“It would be better coming from you than from me,” Ramses admitted.
“We’ll keep him too busy to get into mischief,” Nefret said. “I’m sure Lia will cooperate.”
By concentrating all my considerable efforts and forcing my assistants to do the same, I got the house ready in record time. Fatima whirled through the rooms like a small black tornado directing the activities of the workers Selim had delivered. They were all friends and relations of his and Fatima’s, and they worked diligently and intelligently. Selim did not want to be there; aided and abetted by Emerson, who did not want to be there either, he kept inventing excuses to absent himself. I got a little help from Nefret, none at all from Ramses, a great deal from Daoud and his wife Kadija, and a considerable amount of interference from Maude Reynolds, who turned up every morning offering her assistance. As soon as she found out Ramses was not there (he usually was not), she disappeared and I saw her no more.
One wing of the villa was soon ready for occupancy. The tiled floors gleamed, the walls shone with whitewash, the insect and rodent populations had been persuaded to find other lodgings, and Fatima was busily hemming curtains. We moved our possessions on the Thursday, and on the Friday, which was the day of rest for our Moslem friends, I decided I was entitled to a little holiday of my own. The others had been at Zawaiet el ’Aryan almost every day, for at least part of the day (whenever they could get away from me, to be precise); almost every evening I had to listen to Emerson’s enthusiastic description of his activities.
I went to Emerson’s new study to tell him I would join him that day, anticipating the pleasure the news would give him. I had left him shelving books. The books were still in the boxes, the shelves were empty, and Emerson was nowhere to be seen.
After searching the house and discovering that the rest of them had got away from me too, I went to the stable. Part of the building was already occupied by what Ramses called Nefret’s menagerie. She collected