The Last Camel Died at Noon - Elizabeth Peters [144]
“Not necessarily in that order,” said Emerson, with one of his irrepressible smiles. “Keep a stiff upper lip, Peabody; we may be able to send her a message when Mentarit returns to us.”
“If she returns. Thank goodness she didn’t come back with us last night; it is possible that her part in this is unsuspected. Emerson, I do think it likely that Nastasen doesn’t know we saw Nefret. He would have thrown that in our faces too.”
“A good point, Peabody. How long are the handmaidens’ tours of duty?”
“Five days. I kept careful count. And tonight is Amenit’s second day. I don’t think I can stand the suspense, but I suppose I must. Unless…”
Emerson came to a stop. “Unless,” he repeated.
A little bird burst into song on a branch above. We gazed at each other—two great minds with but a single thought.
“Can you manage it, Peabody?” Emerson asked.
“Insofar as the means are concerned—yes, certainly. I have an ample supply of laudanum, but we don’t want to put her to sleep, we want to render her unfit to carry out her duties. Ipecacuanha, perhaps,” I said musingly. “Doan’s pills—tincture of arsenic.…”
Emerson looked at me uneasily. “Upon my word, Peabody, there are times when you give me the cold shivers. I am afraid to ask why you are carrying around several deadly poisons.”
“Arsenic clears the skin and makes the hair smooth and shining, my dear—in small doses, of course. I don’t use it as a cosmetic, but it is very useful for getting rid of rats and other vermin such as often infest our expedition quarters. Fear not, I will be careful. Her illness must appear to be natural. Otherwise suspicion would fall on us.”
Emerson did not appear to be wholly convinced. He urged me not only to be careful with the dosage but to wait for a suitable opportunity—“instead of bunging the stuff into her wine this afternoon,” as he put it. I assured him I had no intention of acting precipitately. It would take a while to overcome Amenit’s ill-concealed dislike of me and find a suitable vehicle for the medicine.
This last question—that of opportunity, as criminal experts would say—presented some difficulty. Amenit did not dine with us, nor had she partaken of food or drink in our presence. Still, she had to eat sometime, someplace.
My task was made easier by the fact that Amenit was as eager to converse with me as I was with her. I knew, as certainly as if I had been present at their meeting, that she had gone off to confer with Nastasen and the High Priest of Aminreh. Perhaps she had also pleaded for Reggie (I had not yet made up my mind about the sincerity of her feelings for him), but her primary purpose must have been to ask how she should proceed now that the situation had changed so drastically. Before Tarek’s exposure and capture, his influence had assured us of kindly treatment. Now the velvet glove was removed, and the iron hand of Nastasen held us in a cruel grip. So long as Tarek remained at liberty, those deadly fingers would not crush us, but I felt certain that if he were taken we would soon join him in his brother’s dank, dark cells, to endure heaven only knew what hideous torments before an equally hideous death released us.
My efforts to get Amenit alone, and hers to speak with me, were frustrated by an unexpectedly comic situation. The soldiers searching the house refused to leave. I could hardly blame them, for I knew as well as they the alternative that awaited them, but they became more and more frantic as the afternoon wore on and got in everyone’s way, searching places they had already searched a dozen times, and investigating such ridiculous hiding places as Reggie’s knapsack and the lotus pond, which they swept from end to end with their spears. When one of them turned over a chest of linens the servants had repacked three times, Amenit lost her temper and began shouting at them. They refused to heed her orders, so she stormed out and was gone for some little time. It was while she was gone that one of the men made a sudden dash for the