The Hippopotamus Pool - Elizabeth Peters [100]
When we returned to the dinghy with our few purchases, the sun hung low over the western cliffs and sunset colours spread across the rippling water. I looked forwards to the moment when I could dismiss Walter – for a bath, a rest, anything – and converse privately with Evelyn, but it was not to be. The others arrived from the dig at the same time we reached the Amelia.
Hat in hand, Sir Edward drew me aside. He had got in the habit of dining with us; now he announced his intention of returning at once to the hotel. ‘You will want to be en famille this evening, Mrs Emerson. Don’t go to the trouble of sending the dinghy for me tomorrow, I will just take the ferry and go straight to the excavation.’
It was a graceful, gentlemanly gesture, and I said as much. ‘Perhaps you would not mind bringing Miss Marmaduke with you tomorrow, Sir Edward.’
‘Not at all. I might – with your permission, of course – ask her to have dinner with me this evening. She seems very shy and timid; perhaps I can reassure her.’
I was about to reply when Emerson emerged from the corridor leading to the cabins. ‘Amelia! What the devil are you doing? I am waiting for you.’
Sir Edward removed himself and I attempted to calm Emerson by reporting the conversation.
‘Hmph,’ said Emerson, leading me to our room. ‘So he has turned his attentions to Miss Marmaduke, has he?’
‘Would that were the case, Emerson.’
‘Why, Peabody, you shock me!’ His good humour restored, Emerson knelt and began to unlace my boots. (He is given to such boyishly sentimental gestures in private.) ‘Surely you wouldn’t turn a worldly libertine like Sir Edward loose on a timid spinster.’
‘If she were a timid spinster, such an experience would do her a world of good.’ Emerson chuckled, and I went on, ‘But Miss Marmaduke is not what she seems, Emerson. I am not certain whether that dinner will be a conference between co-conspirators or a fencing match between rivals, but it was clever of him to make the suggestion openly, for most people would take it as you just did.’
‘He is a clever fellow,’ Emerson agreed. ‘But not, perhaps, as diabolically clever as you believe. We may be imagining enemies where none exist, Peabody. And now that we have found the tomb, even Riccetti may have given up.’
‘Are you suggesting that we refrain from telling Evelyn and Walter about the earlier attacks, the mysterious circumstances, the –’
‘Yes, curse it, I am. Why alarm them unnecessarily?’
He took my bare feet into his big brown hands and looked up at me with a smile.
‘Had I believed concern was unnecessary I would not have told Evelyn,’ I said.
Emerson unceremoniously let go of my feet and rose. ‘I might have known. All right, Peabody, you got in ahead of me, as usual, and I suppose Ramses has been talking too. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be the respected patriarch of an ordinary English family.’
‘Very boring, Emerson.’
Emerson’s scowl turned to a reluctant grin. ‘Right again, Peabody. Come up to the saloon when you have changed, I will have the whiskey ready.’
We had our whiskey, Walter and Emerson and I. Ramses demanded his share – ‘By the laws of Islam, Judaism and several Nubian tribes, I will soon be a man, Father’ – but it was a rather mechanical performance, since he did not expect the speech would have any more effect on this occasion than it had had previously. Night had fallen; stars glimmered in the dark depths of heaven, the breeze carried the soft sounds of lapping water and the mystical aroma of Egypt.
I was beginning to regret having been so quick to take Evelyn into my confidence. She looked very frail and ridiculously youthful that evening, her fair hair falling loose over her shoulders, held only by a scarf. Walter was in worse case, his face scorched by the sun and his movements as stiff as those of a rheumaticky old gentleman.