The Serpent on the Crown - Elizabeth Peters [40]
“Well, that’s too bad,” said Cyrus. “But it seems to me that’s another point against him. Does Ayyid suspect him of abducting his stepmother too?”
“Or of murdering her?” I breathed, remembering Abdullah’s “every year another dead body.”
Ramses gave me a hard look. “Don’t let your imagination run away with you, Mother. There was no blood, no sign of a struggle in her rooms. She arranged her own disappearance, she must have done. She’ll turn up in a few days with some cock-and-bull story, and get the headlines she wants—and the statue.”
“Emerson didn’t take it with him, did he?” Cyrus asked.
“No,” I said. “It is here, in the house.”
Cyrus looked expectantly at me. I laughed and shook my head. “It is better for you, Cyrus, if you don’t know its exact location. I am the only one who does, and I assure you it is well hidden.”
“You don’t suppose I’d tell anyone, do you?” Cyrus demanded indignantly.
“Not willingly.”
Cyrus’s jaw dropped. “Come on, now, Amelia, that’s a little farfetched. You don’t really think someone is going to capture and torture me, do you?”
“No,” said my son, giving me an even harder look. “She’s saving that little treat for herself.”
FROM MANUSCRIPT H
* * *
Ramses wondered how many other people had been informed that his mother was the only one who knew the statuette’s hiding place. It would be just like her to put the story about as a means of protecting the rest of them from what could only be one of her melodramatic fantasies. What’s more, the story wasn’t true. He knew where Emerson had hidden the statuette, and he’d be willing to wager that every servant in the house also knew. All the same, he decided he had better spread a rumor of his own.
After Cyrus had taken his departure and his mother had gone off to her study, he took Nefret aside.
“I’m going out for a while.”
“Where?”
“Around and about,” Ramses said. “I’ll be back in time for tea. Keep an eye on Mother. She mustn’t leave the house. Hit her over the head if you have to.”
“I can see myself doing that,” his wife said wryly. “All right, I’ll try. But tell me where you’re going.”
She didn’t add “just in case.” She didn’t have to. It was a family rule, one learned from painful experience.
“Deir el Bahri,” Ramses said. “I want to have a chat with Winlock and Lansing and Barton, see if they know anything we don’t.”
“Be careful.”
“I always am.” He gave her a quick kiss, and then a longer one.
He went round the back way to the stables, saddled Risha, and headed across the desert toward the place where the Metropolitan Museum crew were working. After finishing their excavations in the small bay south of Hatshepsut’s beautiful temple, they had just moved to the remains of the Eleventh Dynasty temple next to her later monument.
The object of excavation was, in principle, the furtherance of knowledge. However, the brutal truth was that museums wanted objects they could display. Funding for excavation depended to some extent on how many such objects turned up; they were, as a rule, divided between the Cairo Museum and the excavator. As Cyrus had said, the Met concession had been lucky at finding “good stuff”—several queens’ tombs, the unrobbed tomb of a high official, and a group of charming little models that preserved for all eternity the workshops and outbuildings of an official’s estate.
The great natural amphitheater, enclosed by the tawny cliffs of the high desert, had a natural grandeur of its own when it wasn’t infested with tourists and archaeologists. That morning, dust rose from the area where the Metropolitan group was working, and the chanting of the workmen vied with the chatter of tourists and dragomen approaching Hatshepsut’s temple.
Ramses was greeted with flattering enthusiasm, first by George Barton, with whom he had shared a somewhat unusual experience a few years earlier, and then by others of the staff. He had a feeling he knew why they were so glad to see him. Barton, a cheerfully ingenuous man, went straight