The Serpent on the Crown - Elizabeth Peters [9]
“Amelia,” said Emerson forcibly. “We know that.”
“Katherine was looking a trifle confused,” I explained.
“Thank you,” Katherine said with a smile.
“The term Amarna,” I continued, before Emerson could stop me, “refers to the site in Middle Egypt where Akhenaton founded a city dedicated to the worship of his sole god, Aton.”
“Can it be Akhenaton himself?” Cyrus asked. “There’s no name on it, I looked.”
Ramses turned the statuette upside down and inspected the soles of the little golden feet. “I think it stood on a pedestal, with perhaps a back column, which would have been inscribed with the name of the king.”
“Maybe,” Cyrus said doubtfully. “But that doesn’t tell us where this came from, does it?”
“There are only a few possibilities,” Ramses said. “Amarna itself is the most obvious. Mother and Father excavated there in the 1880s, and there have been archaeologists at work off and on ever since—not to mention local diggers. The site is huge. This might have come from a shrine in a courtier’s house, or from a sculptor’s workshop like the one the Germans found before the war.”
Emerson shook his head. “Unlikely, my boy. Borchardt found plaster models, intrinsically valueless. Everything that could be reused was taken away when the city was abandoned. A statuette of solid gold certainly wouldn’t have been overlooked.”
“You can’t be sure of that,” Cyrus objected. “Maybe the owner buried it to keep it safe, and died before he could retrieve it.”
“Anything is possible,” Emerson retorted. “But don’t pack up and head for Amarna just yet, Vandergelt. We know that Akhenaton’s successors returned to Thebes. One of them was buried in KV55, the tomb Theodore Davis ripped apart back in ’07.”
“Unless the mummy in that tomb was Akhenaton himself,” Cyrus said. “Weigall believes—”
“Weigall is wrong,” Emerson said flatly. “The remains have to be those of Smenkhkare, Akhenaton’s son-in-law. That’s beside the point. This statue is precisely the sort of thing that might have been part of the tomb furnishings, which, as you recall, were a hodgepodge of objects belonging to different royals. You may also recall that Davis’s workmen made off with some of them. And so did another individual. Isn’t that right, Amelia?”
All heads turned, all eyes focused on me. Emerson’s bright blue orbs were as hard as sapphires.
Bertie, chivalrous chap that he was, broke the silence with an indignant question. “Surely you aren’t accusing your wife, Professor?”
“No,” I said. “He is accusing his brother.”
There was no need to explain which one I meant. Walter, Emerson’s younger brother, was a reputable scholar and a man of integrity. Seth, their illegitimate half brother, was…not. Even Katherine knew his strange history; before I reformed him, Sethos (to give him his nom de crime) had been the most successful dealer in illegal antiquities ever to operate in Egypt. His keen intelligence, his skill at the art of disguise, and his charismatic personality had placed him at the head of an organization that had wreaked havoc with the Service des Antiquités and caused us no little personal inconvenience. All that was in the past. Sethos had served his country honorably during the war and had sworn to me that he had given up his criminal activities.
However, it was the past to which Emerson referred, and I had to admit that Sethos was the most logical suspect. I knew for a fact that he had looted Davis’s tomb.
So did Emerson. I keep nothing from my husband (unless it is unlikely to accomplish anything except to arouse his formidable temper). A violent explosion had, in fact, ensued, when I described my somewhat unusual and (in Emerson’s opinion) unnecessarily intimate conversation with Sethos following the excavation of Tomb 55; but once