The Snake, the Crocodile, and the Dog - Elizabeth Peters [4]
In the year preceding the present narrative, Ramses had shown signs of improvement. He no longer rushed headlong into danger, and his atrocious loquacity had diminished somewhat. A certain resemblance to his handsome sire was beginning to emerge, though his coloring more resembled that of an ancient Egyptian than a young English lad. (I cannot account for this any more than I can account for our constant encounters with the criminal element. Some things are beyond the comprehension of our limited senses, and probably that is just as well.)
A recent development had had a profound though as yet undetermined effect on my son. Our latest and perhaps most remarkable adventure had occurred the previous winter, when an appeal for help from an old friend of Emerson’s had led us into the western deserts of Nubia to a remote oasis where the dying remnants of the ancient Meroitic civilization yet lingered. * We encountered the usual catastrophes—near death by thirst after the demise of our last camel, attempted kidnapping and violent assaults—nothing out of the ordinary; and when we reached our destination we found that those whom we had come to save were no more. The unfortunate couple had left a child, however—a young girl whom, with the aid of her chivalrous and princely foster brother, we were able to save from the hideous fate that threatened her. Her deceased father had called her “Nefret,” most appropriately, for the ancient Egyptian word means “beautiful.” The first sight of her struck Ramses dumb—a condition I never expected to see—and he had remained in that condition ever since.
I could only regard this with the direst of forebodings. Ramses was ten years old, Nefret was thirteen; but the difference in their ages would be inconsequential when they reached adulthood, and I knew my son too well to dismiss his sentiments as juvenile romanticism. His emotions were intense, his character (to put it mildly) determined. Once he got an idea into his head, it was fixed in cement. He had been raised among Egyptians, who mature earlier, physically and emotionally, than the cold English; some of his friends had fathered children by the time they reached their teens. Add to this the dramatic circumstances under which he first set eyes on the girl…
We had not even known such an individual existed until we entered the barren, lamplit chamber where she awaited us. To see her there in all her radiant youth, with her red-gold hair streaming down over her filmy white robes; to behold the brave smile that defied the dangers that surrounded her… Well. Even I had been deeply affected.
We had brought the girl back to England with us and taken her into our home. This was Emerson’s idea. I must admit we had very little choice; her grandfather, her only surviving relative, was a man so steeped in vice as to be an unfit guardian for a cat, much less an innocent young girl. How Emerson persuaded Lord Blacktower to relinquish her I did not inquire. I doubt that “persuaded” is an appropriate word. Blacktower was dying (indeed, he completed the process a few months later), or even Emerson’s considerable powers of eloquence might not have prevailed. Nefret clung to us—figuratively speaking, for she was not a demonstrative child— as the only familiar objects in a world as alien to her as Martian society (assuming such exists) would be to me. All she knew of the modern world she had learned from us and from her father’s books, and in that world she was not High Priestess of Isis, the incarnation of the goddess, but something less—not even a woman, which Heaven knows was low enough, but a girl-child, a little higher than a pet and considerably lower