The Golden One - Elizabeth Peters [8]
Ramses misses very little, and this overture would have been difficult to overlook. His bland expression did not change, but Nefret let out a muffled swearword. She looked very beautiful in her favorite cornflower blue, with pearls and sapphires as her ornaments and her gold-red hair coiled into a coronet around her head; but her pretty face had assumed a scowl almost as forbidding as that of Emerson.
“What’s he doing here?” she demanded.
“One must suppose he is dining,” said Ramses coolly.
“Here?”
Nefret had a point. Shepheard’s was no longer the hotel favored by the smart set of Cairo. “Smith” was a member of that group of silly women and pompous officials, the majority of whom were probably unaware of his intelligence activities, believing him to be an official of the Department of Public Works. He was dining alone that evening.
It would not have been difficult for interested parties to learn the date of our arrival and the name of the hotel where we had booked rooms. Some of those interested parties were in London, and I did not doubt that their particular interest was in my son. At the behest of his superiors, Smith had tried once before to recruit Ramses for a dangerous mission. Would he try again? Or—the idea had just occurred to me—did his presence have something to do with the reappearance of Emerson’s brother? Sethos had been connected in some way with the group Smith directed, whatever it may have been. Secretiveness is second nature to such persons; they may and do claim it is necessary, but in my opinion they revel in being mysterious.
I did not mention this conjecture to Emerson, for that would have inflamed his temper even more.
“The devil with Smith,” he declared. “What I want to know is—confound it, young man, what are you doing?”
“Serving the next course,” I said, as the youth fumbled with the plates. “That is his job, Emerson. Stop terrorizing him.”
“Oh. Well. Sorry, my boy,” he added, addressing the waiter, who went pale with horror.
I groaned. “And don’t apologize to him!”
It has proved impossible to train Emerson in the proper ways of dealing with servants. He treats prince and peasant, basket carrier and archaeologist the same—that is, he shouts at them when he is out of temper and begs their pardon when he has been unjust. The waiter ought to have been trained in the proper way of dealing with Emerson, whose peculiarities are well known to the staff at Shepheard’s, but he was very young and apparently he had not taken the warnings to heart.
With the assistance of the headwaiter he managed to get the soup plates off the table and the fish course served, and Emerson, who was unaware of having done anything unusual, resumed where he had left off. “What’s Sethos doing in Cairo? What was the point of that impertinent encounter? Was it a challenge or a warning or—”
“Why should it have been either?” Nefret asked. “We haven’t heard from him for months, and he knows we have good reason to be concerned about him. Perhaps it was only his way of telling us he is alive and well.”
“Bah,” said Emerson.
Nefret laughed, and I said, “Now, Emerson, you mustn’t hold a grudge, my dear.”
“Grudge! It is petty-minded, no doubt, to resent a man because he tried to kill me and seduce my wife and steal my antiquities.”
“That was all in the past. The services he has rendered us and his country in the past few years attest to the sincerity of his reformation, and his recent—er—arrangement with another lady should be sufficient assurance of his abandonment of an attachment that was, I do not doubt, occasioned as much by his resentment of you as by his interest in me.”
I paused to draw a deep breath, and Emerson, who had been stabbing at his fish, placed his fork on the table. “Peabody,” he said mildly, “that was even more pompous and pedantic than your usual