Chapter Fourteen
The British Antiquities Service squatted at the end of Qasr al-Nil with its brass-plated signage and windows stained with a century of Cairo dust. Eden and Max arrived just past eight, boots muddy from the alleyway shortcut Max insisted would save them time.
Thanks to a team of donkeys creating a bottleneck, it had not.
“Let’s hope this goes well,” Eden said, allowing herself one deep breath to steel herself before stepping inside.
“Just stick to the plan,” Max replied quietly. He’d coached her on all the things to say, and not say, on the way over.
The antechamber was paneled in dark wood and cooled by a ceiling fan that clicked as if counting the seconds until everyone in the room died of boredom or heatstroke.
Gilt-framed maps of the Nile looped the walls, the river’s blue curve repeated in obsessive detail from the Delta to Nubia; someone had stabbed pins at every major archaeological site.
A clerk sat hunched at a mahogany desk, gold pince-nez perched on the tip of his nose. He looked up as they entered, the movement of his hands never pausing—he tapped the edge of each paper in his stack precisely against the desk, aligning them into perfect blocks of order.
“I have an appointment for Lady Eden Pemberley,” Eden announced, and the clerk’s eyes flicked first to her face, then to her red hair, then to the battered dossier she produced from her satchel.
He reached for it. His hands were soft, his fingernails immaculate. “We were expecting you at eight.”
She glanced at the clock above his head. She was precisely four minutes late, but Max had drilled into her the importance of not arguing or making excuses, so she held her tongue.
He thumbed through her dossier, pausing at the letters of recommendation and the translation certificates. “Interesting endorsements. But a rather ambitious undertaking, my lady.”
“That is rather the point.” She folded her gloves, willing herself not to fidget.
She knew that someone higher up had already made the decision.
Her permits were either going to get approved, or they weren’t.
This little man was just trying to rattle her.
“If Egypt were a solved riddle, there would be no need for half this office.”
The clerk exhaled through his teeth, as if sighing for all the lost time women had cost him. “Your permit application is complete, but there is a question of guarantees for your diggers’ conduct. The local authorities are, shall we say, insistent.”
Eden had expected this. She leaned in, lowering her voice. “What guarantee is standard, in your experience?”
“A local foreman with a proven record,” he said, then looked over her shoulder at Max. “Or a guide of repute. There are regulations—”
Max placed his own folder—the Royal Geographical Society insignia front and center—on the desk. “My credentials.”
The clerk’s gaze flicked between the two of them, eyes narrowing. “Mr. Thorne. You are to be the guide of record, then?”
“That’s right,” Max replied coolly. “Her survey is under my direct supervision. You’ll find my record spotless. More so than the office windows, at any rate.”
Eden nearly snorted but kept her face composed. The clerk looked at Max’s card as if it were a snake. “Very well,” he said, producing a fountain pen with a flourish. “I shall have the permit stamped at once.”
There was an interval of theatrical paper-shuffling and stamping—three sheets, each with the wax seal of the Crown, then a pink duplicate for local authorities. At last, the clerk slid the signed permit across the desk to Eden.
“Mind the rules,” he said. “And the labor code. The Inspectorate has grown quite vigilant.”
“I’m well aware,” she said, tucking the permit into her journal. “Thank you for your time.”
They left the office together, Max holding the door. The corridor was empty but for a row of black umbrellas and the hiss of a distant samovar. Eden glanced sideways at him, measuring his mood.
“Was I overbearing?” she asked, when they were out of earshot.
“You were a queen,” Max said with a laugh. “They hate that.”
They stepped into the sunlight, and Eden paused at the edge of the courtyard, feeling the permit heavy in her satchel. She could officially look for the labyrinth.
She took one last look at the Antiquities office, then at Max, who stood a pace behind her, shadow and sun intermingling on his face.
“Well?” he said, when she lingered.
“We have it,” she replied. “At last.”
“Then we’d best not waste it.” He grinned, a wolfish flash that turned her insides to jelly.
“Now that the permits are in order, we’re nearly ready to leave the city.
We’ll meet our crew and foreman tomorrow to see if they have everything ready.
If you’re up for it, we should go to the bazaar and pick up a few more items.”
She nodded, still shocked by how smoothly her appointment had gone. She’d been terrified they’d refuse to issue them the permits because she was a woman.
Not that she’d have let that stop her. She’d had several backup plans.
By the time they reached Khan el-Khalili, the sun was a white-hot coin in the sky, and every inch of the bazaar seemed to shimmer.
Donkey carts crowded the alleys, hawkers cried out over mounds of fruit or coils of rope, and the air was filled with the competing perfumes of rosewater, frying mutton, and a faint, omnipresent whiff of camel dung.
For a moment, she simply stood at the threshold, letting the chaos wash over her. The market was everything she loved about Cairo, so overwhelming and alive.
Max was already half a stall ahead, moving with the grace of someone used to making himself invisible among crowds. He waited for her only at the broad intersections, glancing back with a ghost of a smile to make sure she was not lost or run down by a handcart.
Eden trailed him but at a bit of a distance, her attention snagged by a spice merchant plunging his bare arms into baskets of yellow cumin, then by a carpet seller holding up a blood-red runner woven with the Eye of Horus.
Vendors called out to her in every language she’d ever learned—and some she had not.
She nearly missed Max’s stop at the tent maker.
He had already set out five rolls of canvas on a makeshift table, one end weighed down by a copper scale, the other by an iron kettle.
The vendor, a man with arms like ancient cedar and a curling gray beard, was holding forth with a gravity that bordered on biblical.
“I require five,” Max said, his voice low and direct. “Double seams, oiled canvas, and none of your imported rubbish.”
“These are the best in Egypt,” the man replied, with the flat assurance of someone who’d said it a thousand times that day alone.
“Prove it,” Max said, and began to unroll a sample, flicking the canvas between his fingers to test the grain. “This is half the weight of what you sold me last winter.”
The vendor’s eyebrow twitched, but he kept his smile. “New supplier. English, as you prefer.”
“I prefer what won’t rot in the sun,” Max shot back.
Eden let them volley for a minute, more interested in the market’s people than in canvas.
She observed the women in their indigo hijabs, the way they moved in packs, laughing and bartering for tin teapots.
She noted how the beggar children clustered in the shade, eyes always on the foreigners, and how the cats—dozens of them—wove among the stalls like smoke.
She would never grow tired of seeing how these people lived, so foreign from everything she’d ever known.
“Forty pounds, no less,” the tent maker declared, snapping Eden back to the present.
Max rolled his eyes. “Thirty. And only because I admire your beard.”
The vendor hesitated, his gaze darting from Max to Eden and back. “You drive a hard bargain.” The man barked a laugh and shook his hand. The deal was struck.
They moved on, Max apparently carrying the tally in his head, Eden running through her own list. Next was the glassware stall: shelves crowded with jars and bottles, some filled with blue liquid, others empty and etched with flowers or stars.
Eden scanned for a crate of photographic plates, and at the back of the stall, she found them—each plate nested in straw, glimmering faintly in the shaded light.
She lifted one, angling it toward the vendor. “Are these suitable for use in the desert?”
The seller, a youth no older than sixteen, nodded with solemnity. “Made for the desert. English. Very good.”
Eden rotated the plate, inspecting the silver edge for flaws. “They’d better be. I need to be able to document my work.”
The youth held up three fingers, swearing by Allah and all his ancestors, and wrapped the crate with a flourish. Max appeared at her side with a roll of twine and a length of linen, and for a moment, they stood together in the crush of bodies, neither speaking.
Eden felt an unexpected urge to touch his arm, to thank him for the way he’d handled the tent vendor, but she resisted.
Things had gotten far too personal last night, and she was still reeling from it a bit.
Who knew what would have happened if Felicity hadn’t been waiting up when they returned to their suite?
It was easier to keep their partnership professional, at least for now.
She was so out of her depth with him. She had no idea whether to throw herself into his arms or run away as fast as she could. But at the moment, the expedition was the most important thing. They could figure all the rest out later.
She gave him a sidelong glance. “I admire your efficiency.”
He shrugged, his blue eyes sparkling in the sunlight. “Years in the military. I buy, I supply, I keep people alive.”
She wondered what it had cost him always to be tasked with taking care of others.
They made their way to the edge of the bazaar, their arms laden with parcels, the sun already beginning its long descent.
A boy with a donkey cart was waiting, as pre-arranged, and after some shouting and arm-waving, the supplies were loaded for delivery to the Shepheard.
Eden brushed a strand of hair from her damp forehead and exhaled, feeling a release of the pressure roiling inside her for the first time since morning.
As the muezzin’s call unfurled over the rooftops, Max paused. “Well done,” he said. “All the tedious preparations are complete. Soon, the real work begins.”
She smiled, feeling the old energy return. The challenges ahead would be legion: heat, bureaucracy, rivals like Thaddeus, even her own doubts and fears. But ever since she’d first read Lucas’s letter, since she’d gone to The Smuggler’s Lantern and seen Max again, she’d felt genuinely alive.
“Soon,” she agreed. They needed to leave in the next few days, because they needed to be at the Bahariya Oasis before the new moon, as their path from there depended on what she saw that night.
And as they set off down the street, past the coffee-sellers and the slow swirl of dust, Eden realized that what lay ahead was not just history to be unearthed, but her own life waiting to be written.