The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [170]
He had tucked the sheet in any which way. I remade that end of the bed. Our eyes met, and he smiled a little; he was thinking, as was I, what an oddly domestic scene this was. “I don’t need your laudanum,” he went on, removing a container from one of the shelves.
“How long have you been taking that?” I asked, as he swallowed a small white pill.
“Weeks. Months.” He stretched out on the bed. “It works quickly, so if you have any questions—which you undoubtedly do—talk fast.”
“I only wanted to ask about Margaret. Have you heard from her?”
He hadn’t expected such a harmless subject. “Margaret? No, not for months. I couldn’t very well carry on a frequent correspondence, could I?”
“Does she know what you are doing?”
“She knows everything about me.” He closed his eyes.
“Including—”
“Everything.”
“You have complete confidence in her, then. Are you going to marry her?”
Sethos opened his eyes and clasped his hands behind his head. “You aren’t going to leave me in peace until I invite you into my innermost heart, are you? The question is not whether I am going to marry her, but whether she will consent to marry me. I asked her. I hadn’t intended to, it—er—came into my head at a particularly—er—personal moment. She said no.”
“A flat, unconditional no?”
“There were conditions. You can guess what they were. She was in the right. I told her—I promised her—this would be my last assignment. As it well may be.”
“Not in the way you mean,” I said firmly. “We are here, and on the job! We could be more useful, however, if you would tell me the purpose of your mission. What are you after?”
“Sahin.” His eyelids drooped. The sedative had loosened his tongue. “He’s their best man. Their only good man. Once he’s out of the way, we can proceed with . . . He loves the girl. I didn’t know that. I thought he’d go to some lengths to get her back, but I didn’t realize . . . Paternal affection isn’t one of my strong points. I told you about Maryam, didn’t I?”
“Who?” I had to repeat the question. He was half asleep, wandering a little in his mind.
“Maryam. Molly. That’s the name you knew . . . She’s gone.”
“Dead?” I gasped. “Your daughter?”
“No. Gone. Left. Ran away. Hates me. Because of her mother. She’s living proof of heredity. Got the worst of both parents. Poor little devil . . . She is, you know. Amelia . . .”
“It’s all right,” I said softly, taking the hand that groped for mine. “Everything will be all right. Sleep now.”
I sat by him until his hand relaxed and the lines on his face smoothed out. I had intended—oh, I admit it—to take advantage of his drowsy state to wring information out of him, but I had not expected revelations so intimate, so personal, so painful.
His daughter had been fourteen years of age when I knew her. She must be sixteen now. Her mother had been Sethos’s lover and partner in crime; but her tigerish affection had turned to jealous hatred when she realized his heart belonged to another. (Me, in fact, or so he claimed.) She tried several times to kill me and succeeded in assassinating one of my dearest friends before she met her end at the hands of those who had been an instant too late to save him.
How much of that terrible story did the child know? If she blamed her father for her mother’s death, she could not know the whole truth. He had not even been present when she died, and she had led a life of crime and depravity before she met Sethos. A moralist might hold him guilty of failing to redeem her, but in my opinion even a saint, which Sethos was not, would have found Bertha hard going.
I do not believe that the dead hand of heredity is the sole determinant of character. Remembering Molly as I had last seen her, looking even younger than her actual age, the picture of freckled, childish innocence . . . But she hadn’t looked so innocent the day I found her in Ramses’s room with her dress half off—by her own act, I should add. If I had not happened to be passing by—if Ramses had not had the good sense to