The Serpent on the Crown - Elizabeth Peters [13]
“That is unfair,” she said. “Howard had a serious operation last month and is still recuperating. Why did you promise him that?”
“It is the least a fellow can do for a friend,” said Emerson.
“Bah,” said his wife. “No one could possibly carry out an illegal excavation in the Valley, there are too many tourists and guards—even if there were any tombs yet to be found. Howard has been excavating there off and on for years, without success. What are you up to now, Emerson?”
“Are you impugning my motives?” Emerson demanded, with a fair show of righteous indignation. “I resent that, Peabody. Come, Ramses.”
“What about Mrs. Petherick?” his wife asked.
Emerson, already halfway to the door, came to a stop. “It is up to her to make the next move.”
He didn’t sound as decisive as usual, though, and his wife took immediate advantage. “Nonsense. When you accepted that object you had no idea of its value. Your motives will be impugned if you don’t return it at once, or at least offer to do so.”
“Curse it,” said Emerson.
“Mrs. Petherick ought to be informed of her stepchildren’s bizarre performance last night,” his wife went on. “You said you were uncertain as to who the legal owner of the statue may be. Well, isn’t she in the best position to answer that question? She may also know the name of the dealer from whom her husband purchased it. That is surely the most practical way of discovering its origins, by tracing it back from one purchaser to the—”
“Yes, yes.” Emerson turned to face his wife. “You have made your point, Peabody, you needn’t hammer it into my liver. We’ll pay the cursed woman a visit. As soon as possible. I want to get it over with.”
“I am glad you agree, Emerson. I dispatched a little note to Mrs. Petherick this morning, inviting her to take luncheon with us at the Winter Palace.”
“Hmph.” Emerson took out his watch. “What time?”
“Two o’clock.”
“Then Ramses and I have plenty of time for a visit to the Valley. We will drive the motorcar.”
“Not unless it can be driven with only three wheels,” his wife said. “I don’t believe you and Selim ever got round to putting the fourth one back on.”
“Oh.” Emerson fingered the cleft in his chin. He had bought the motorcar over his wife’s strenuous objections. She had pointed out, correctly, that its use was limited by the lack of good roads, but her chief objection was the way Emerson drove—at full speed, with complete disregard for objects in his way. However, the car spent most of the time in the stable annex, since Emerson and Selim kept taking it apart.
“We will ride the horses, then,” Emerson said. “You needn’t come, Peabody.”
“I wouldn’t miss it for the world, Emerson.”
Ramses hadn’t been in the Valley for months. The firman was held by Lord Carnarvon, whose excavations, under the direction of Howard Carter, had been going on intermittently since 1913. He had found nothing except a few workmen’s huts and a cache of calcite jars. It was generally agreed that Carter was wasting his time. There were no more royal tombs in the Valley.
As they walked along the dusty path from the donkey park, where they had left their horses, Ramses was conscious of a certain nostalgia. Excavation wasn’t his primary interest, but there was no site on earth more evocative than the burial place of the great pharaohs of the Empire. The family had been allowed to work on the more obscure and uninteresting tombs until 1907, with the grudging consent of the American dilettante Theodore Davis, who then had the sole right to search for new tombs. He’d found a lot of them, too, or rather, his archaeological assistants had. It was Davis’s mishandling of the enigmatic burial in KV55 that had driven Emerson into a particularly outrageous explosion, and M. Maspero, then head of the Service des Antiquités, had been forced by Davis to ban them from the Valley altogether.
What a season it had been, though! As they passed the entrance to KV55, now blocked and sealed, Ramses felt a remembered