The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog - Elizabeth Peters [183]
“At the end he could bear it no longer. You ought to have realized that I had not the slightest suspicion of Vandergelt, or I would not have conspired with him to set up an ambush for Vincey. Even then—confound him!—he refrained from taking direct action against me. However, he did as much as he could to ensure my death without firing the actual shot. The two men he sent with me had been ordered not to interfere with Vincey; they also prevented Abdullah from coming to my assistance. Nor could I have defended myself. As you observed, the rifle he lent me had only one bullet. The significance of that little touch still eludes me. Perhaps I was meant to use it on myself rather than face capture! Or perhaps he expected me to test the weapon; if I had found it was unloaded I might have retreated from a position that was clearly untenable.
“I rather imagine that once Vincey had killed me, the two guards would have dispatched Vincey. A happy ending from Sethos’s point of view; with your enemy and your inconvenient husband dead, you would eventually find consolation in the arms of your devoted friend. Sooner or later—if I read his character aright—he would have confessed his true identity and restored Vandergelt to his own place. He could not have continued the masquerade indefinitely, nor would it have suited him to do so. He would have sworn to abandon his criminal activities—told you, as he did once before, that you and you alone could turn him from evil to good… Damn the fellow’s vanity!
“Thanks to your inveterate habit of meddling, my dearest Peabody, things did not work out quite as Sethos had planned. I had an inkling of the truth in that moment when we confronted one another, with the evidence of his betrayal of me unmistakable, and his devotion to you equally plain. He did not speak to me as Vandergelt in those last moments. I hope you don’t believe, Peabody, that I was making a noble gesture when I handed you over to him. I fully intended to get out of that ambush with a whole skin and beat Vandergelt—or whoever he was—to a pulp.
“At the end … I cannot assess his character fairly. Yet he attacked, barehanded, an assassin with a rifle, and took the bullet meant for us—for you. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.
“In fact,” Emerson concluded, “nothing else in his life became him in the slightest. I only hope, my dear Peabody, that you are not in danger of succumbing to that sloppy sentimentality I sometimes observe in you. If I find you have set up a little shrine with fresh flowers and candles, I will smash it to bits.”
“As if I would do anything so absurd! Yet he did have a code of honor, Emerson. And surely his last act must atone in some measure—”
Emerson put an end to the discussion in a particularly forceful manner.
Sometime later I lay watching the slow drift of moonlight across the floor and enjoying the most exquisite of sensations. I knew I risked breaking that heavenly mood if I spoke, and yet I felt I must say one more thing. “You must admit that Sethos was capable of inspiring considerable devotion in his subordinates, and that they carried out his last wishes as he would have done—freeing Cyrus and sending him to us in order that our grief might be assuaged at the earliest possible moment. I wonder where they took—”
Emerson’s shoulder was by now as rigid as a rock. “You might set up a cenotaph,” he suggested with ineffable sarcasm. “A coiled snake, I think, would make an appropriate adornment.”
“It is odd you should mention that, Emerson. You remember the little fairy tale