Tomb of the Golden Bird - Elizabeth Peters [22]
He took a spoonful of soup and made a face. “I must apologize for my cook. He has not the skill of your Maaman.”
The meal was in fact rather bad—the soup overseasoned, the beef tough, the vegetables stewed to mush. Naturally I did not say so.
After dinner Howard showed us his acquisitions. One was rather charming—a cosmetic pot consisting of seven joined cylinders, each of which had contained a different variety of paint for face and hands. Howard shrugged my admiration aside. “It isn’t the sort of thing that will excite his lordship. Do you happen to know of any artifacts at the Luxor dealers? Anything Vandergelt hasn’t already got his hands on,” he added somewhat sourly.
“Mr. Vandergelt only arrived this morning, so you may be able to get in ahead of him,” Ramses replied with a smile. “However, we haven’t heard of anything unusual.”
“I’ll go round to Mohassib’s first thing in the morning,” Howard said.
“So you don’t mean to start work immediately?” Emerson asked.
Howard didn’t miss the implicit criticism. “I see no reason for haste. His lordship will not be out for several more weeks, and it won’t take us long to clear that small section.”
“And then what?” Emerson asked.
Howard motioned to the hovering attendant to refill his wineglass. “That will be up to his lordship.”
Some persons might have accepted this evasion and not pursued the subject. Not Emerson. “Do you hope to persuade him into continuing in the East Valley?”
“If Tutankhamon isn’t in my little triangle, he must be somewhere,” Howard declared.
“Not necessarily,” Emerson said. “That is—not necessarily in the East Valley.” He immediately looked as if he regretted having said so much, adding, “His is not the only royal tomb we haven’t located.”
“But his is the one I’m after,” Howard said. He leaned forward, planting his elbows on the table—a vulgar habit which, I am sorry to say, was shared by my husband, who did the same. “You know that, Emerson, old chap,” Howard went on. “You told me last year—didn’t you?—that I ought to keep on looking. ’Preciate your advice. Your help.”
Emerson, who had done his best to send Howard to another part of the Valley, had the decency to look embarrassed.
“It’ll be empty, like all the rest,” Howard said sadly. “If it’s there.”
From the bird in the adjoining room came a ripple of song.
FROM MANUSCRIPT H
Ramses was not surprised that his father should dismiss the search for Sethos, to quote his mother. (She had a penchant for colorful phrases.) Emerson was obsessed. Why he believed that Carter would find a tomb in the unpromising little triangle of ground Ramses did not know. Perhaps he had no real evidence, only a feeling, a hunch; but as Ramses knew, the greatest excavators develop an instinct for discovery. It had happened over and over again, especially to the untrained but phenomenally successful tomb robbers of Luxor. Emerson’s instincts were as great as theirs.
He had to control himself, fuming, while Howard Carter made the rounds of the Luxor dealers. At Cyrus’s urging he agreed to open their own excavation in the West Valley, but his heart wasn’t in it. Instead of badgering the men who were finishing the clearance of the tomb of Ay, where they had worked the year before, he wandered around the far end of the West Valley with Bertie and Jumana in tow. He was looking for new tomb entrances. He didn’t find any.
They heard nothing more from the men who had lured them to the shop. The more Ramses thought about it, the more he was inclined to agree with his father. It had been a singularly inept and pointless ambush. The men must have been strangers, since no local man would believe the Father of Curses could be so easily intimidated. Selim had been unable to find any trace of them, and his contacts were extensive. The gatekeeper reported no inquisitive strangers, the dog didn’t bark in the nighttime.