Six
E llie watched the outskirts of Cairo blur past the windows of the train as she perched on the comfortable bench of the first-class compartment Constance had booked for their journey.
She had woken awkwardly that morning to Constance pounding at her bedroom door, exhorting her to hurry. The high angle of the sunlight streaming through the slender openings in the meshrabiyeh screen over her window had indicated how late she had slept—probably because she had not slept particularly well at all, her mind still racing over the bewildering conversation she’d had with Adam the night before.
I don’t want you to change your mind about marriage.
You’re not my obligation!
She still hadn’t the foggiest idea what he’d meant by it all—or by his fervent and obviously deeply felt apology after he had kissed her utterly senseless against the wall of the alcove.
They clearly needed to talk—again—but she was hardly going to manage that while sharing a train compartment with both Constance and Mr. Mahjoud, who had been given the duty of accompanying them to Neil’s dig site.
Adam sat across from her, his tan worsted trousers tucked into his work boots. He’d deigned to put on a jacket again but had skipped donning a waistcoat. His battered fedora rested on the seat beside him.
He was unusually quiet, his brow furrowed and stormy as he frowned down at the notebook he held in his big capable hands.
Hands that had slid up the fabric of her drawers last night as he had pressed her against the wall.
Ellie awkwardly smoothed folds of her gray poplin skirt over her knees as the carriage seemed to grow a little hotter. “Have we any lemonade, by any chance?” she asked a little desperately.
Mr. Mahjoud—dressed in a perfectly tailored suit with a natty red waistcoat and bow tie—plucked a flask from the hamper at his feet and poured some into a tin cup.
Ellie took a grateful gulp—and then nearly dropped the cup as the houses outside the window gave way to an open stretch of desert punctuated by a trio of enormous sun-gilded peaks.
“Pyramids!” she squeaked.
Constance glanced up from her magazine. “Oh! There they are,” she noted mildly before going back to reading.
With a sigh, Mr. Mahjoud reached out and plucked the cup from Ellie’s nerveless fingers. She hardly noticed. Instead, she pressed herself to the frame of the open window as though it could bring her closer to those noble four-thousand-year-old monuments to power and kingly divinity.
“Khufu,” she recited. Her gaze locked on the largest and nearest of the gilded peaks before sliding to the others. “Khafre. Menkaure.”
She looked back to her traveling companions, burning with the need to share her wonder and excitement at actually seeing the immortal Pyramids of Giza in the flesh.
Constance was lifting the lid of the hamper for a peek. Mr. Mahjoud cleared his throat, flashing her a quelling look, and she sat back with a dissatisfied huff.
Adam’s eyes were on Ellie.
His look flared with emotion—admiration, frustration, and a thundering heat that set Ellie’s pulse racing before he quickly glanced away again.
“Couldn’t I just—” Constance reached for the hamper again.
“Not until lunch,” Mr. Mahjoud cut in, turning the page of his newspaper.
?
Shortly afterward, as the last clustered outbuildings of Cairo’s sprawl fully gave way to farmland and desert, the train came to a sudden and unexpected halt. Ellie heard the screech of brakes and jolted against her seat.
“Wonderful,” Mr. Mahjoud commented dourly.
“I’m guessing this isn’t a regular stop,” Adam commented.
“It isn’t,” Constance confirmed. “There’s nothing here.”
Ellie pressed herself back as Constance lurched into her lap to stick her neatly coiffed head through the window. Her derriere shifted as she craned her neck for a better angle.
“It looks like the engineers are out, but I can’t see what they’re looking at,” she announced.
“Would you please refrain from throwing yourself out the window?” Mr. Mahjoud requested tiredly.
Ellie grasped Constance’s skirts and tugged her back into the carriage.
“At any rate, something has clearly disrupted the tracks.” Constance’s eyes glittered with excitement. “My money is on sabotage!”
“It’s sand,” Mr. Mahjoud countered flatly, turning another page of his paper.
“Sand!” Constance protested, flashing him a glare.
“The tracks run up against the desert here,” Mr. Mahjoud elaborated blithely. “And sand is prone to moving about.”
“It isn’t sand.” Constance gave him a quelling look. “It’s the nationalists! Sabotaging the railway is exactly the sort of strategy they would use. There have been quite a few suspicious incidents along the lines over the last several months. Herds of stray cattle, unexpected washouts…”
Ellie considered Constance’s theory. Egypt’s most well-known dalliance with a nationalist movement had ended over a decade ago when the revolutionary leader Urabi Pasha had been overcome at Tell El Kabir. That uprising had led Britain to impose its Consul General as the de facto head of the Egyptian government.
While there were plenty of Egyptians who continued to advocate—carefully—for a more representative government, she hadn’t heard of any major organized opposition to British rule.
Of course, that didn’t mean that one didn’t exist.
“There was even one breakdown that almost certainly involved the use of explosives,” Constance added significantly.
Ellie perked up. “Explosives, did you say?”
Mr. Mahjoud stilled, flashing her an alarmed look over the top of his paper.
“Not that any of us have any interest in that sort of thing,” Ellie assured him.
With a sigh, Mr. Mahjoud crisply folded the paper. He set it down on the bench and placed his fez onto his head. The color perfectly matched his waistcoat and bow tie, the hat nearly brushing the ceiling of the compartment thanks to the dragoman’s exceptional height.
“If you would all do me the extreme kindness of staying where I have put you?” he suggested—punctuating it with a pointed look at Constance.
“Wherever would we go?” Constance returned, batting her eyes at him innocently.
“Antarctica, perhaps?” Mr. Mahjoud suggested. “Or off with the nearest circus?”
Ellie was quietly impressed by the perspicacity of his suggestions.
“There aren’t any circuses about,” Constance pointed out.
With a skeptical glare, he stepped from the compartment.
Constance waited for a breath, then darted to the door herself—only to pull it open and find Mr. Mahjoud standing before it.
“ Please, ” he added with exaggerated patience.
Constance rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She flopped back against her seat with dissatisfaction. “Sand!”
“Perhaps the nationalists shoveled it all there overnight?” Ellie suggested helpfully.
“You needn’t patronize me,” Constance returned haughtily.
Ellie glanced over at Adam. He had been uncharacteristically quiet about the interruption—and her passing mention of combustible materials. He still held his notebook in his hands but wasn’t writing anything in it. Instead, he frowned down at the carpet as though contemplating how to wrestle it.
The compartment door slid back open, revealing Mr. Mahjoud’s long and impeccably dressed frame. “It would seem that there is a great deal of sand on the tracks,” he reported with only the slightest note of triumph.
“Hmph.” Constance crossed her arms over her chest.
“It will take the railway staff several hours to clear it sufficiently for us to pass.” The dragoman sat down, neatly picking up his paper and shaking it out. “I do hope everyone brought something to read, as I suggested?”
Adam stood, startling everyone with the sudden movement. “I’m going to help.”
He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it on the seat. Before Ellie could make any sort of comment, his shirt followed.
Her mind blanked as her perception was overwhelmed by an abundance of hard, tanned masculine flesh.
He tossed the shirt aside roughly. It landed half in her lap, Ellie’s hands automatically catching at the fabric.
Without another word, he stalked from the compartment.
Mr. Mahjoud made a single eloquent blink, then pointedly raised up his newspaper.
Constance’s frankly assessing gaze moved from the open door to Ellie, where it locked onto her helplessly dazed expression.
“Colleagues, is it?” Constance noted mercilessly.
?
The sand proved substantial. The afternoon was well progressed by the time the train started moving again, at which point Constance had worked her way through most of the contents of Mr. Mahjoud’s hamper.
Adam returned to their compartment a little later. His golden hair was still dusty from the work, though he’d clearly managed a light wash, perhaps in one of the sleeper cabins. He pulled his shirt back on, slipped his braces over his shoulders, and settled into his seat without another word.
They stopped at the small but modern railway station that sat a short walk from the rustic village of Badrashin. New telegraph wires soared overhead, following the tracks south along the river. The Nile’s flood plain was broad, flush with plantations of date palms and bright green fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals.
Behind Ellie lay the broad expanse of the great river itself, peppered with little single-sail feluccas and a slow, elegant dahabeeyah. On that larger boat, a cluster of pale Europeans played cards under a canopy in an open-air salon while an Egyptian crewman worked the rope for an overhead fan.
Mr. Mahjoud checked his pocket watch. “It is nearly four,” he announced, snapping it shut and slipping it back into his waistcoat. “The necropolis at Saqqara is an hour’s ride from here, and the return service to Cairo passes through at ten after five. We cannot make it there and back in time for the train. We will have to return home and try again tomorrow.”
Ellie felt a pinch of panic at Mr. Mahjoud’s announcement. They couldn’t afford a further delay—not when Dawson and Jacobs might turn up at any moment. “Could we find a place to stay locally for the evening?”
“In Badrashin? ” Mr. Mahjoud said with a look of horror, as though Ellie had just suggested they bed down in a nest of porcupines rather than a quaint mud-brick village shaded by tall palms.
“Don’t they let visitors overnight at Mariette’s House?” Constance offered brightly, using a long white scarf to tie her enormous and very fashionable straw hat into place. “That’s right next to the pyramids.”
Mr. Mahjoud straightened, making himself a bit taller—perhaps in order to sharpen the angle at which he looked down his nose at her. “Mariette’s House is not appropriate for ladies. It is entirely too rustic.”
“Are there any Bedouin about, then?” Constance pressed with an air of studied innocence. “I have heard they are most accommodating to guests.”
With some alarm, Ellie recalled Constance’s ambition to acquire a handsome sheikh as a lover. “Mariette’s House will do nicely,” she cut in quickly. “Both Mr. Bates and I are accustomed to ‘rustic,’ and I am sure Constance doesn’t mind.”
Constance flashed Ellie a narrow-eyed look as though perfectly aware of why Ellie had made her intervention. “Oh, very well,” she agreed a little crossly. “Mariette’s House it shall be.”
Mr. Mahjoud blinked—a simple motion that somehow still exuded disapproval. “I will see about arranging transportation,” he concluded, sounding as though he were accepting a prison sentence. He shifted a seemingly bland gaze to Constance. “And restocking the hamper.”
“Oh yes!” Constance agreed, brightening. “Do see if there are any kofta sellers about. And perhaps you can find a few of those lovely little semolina cakes.”
Mr. Mahjoud’s posture was an eloquent display of dignified resignation as he walked away.
?
He returned a quarter hour later with kofta, semolina cakes, and a slightly pudgy boy towing a line of donkeys.
“Are you quite sure we can’t walk?” Ellie asked, eyeing the animals skeptically. She still had vivid memories of her sore rear from spending all day on mule-back in the wilderness of British Honduras.
“What would we do that for?” Constance returned as she nimbly mounted her beast with a hand from the boy.
Ellie’s donkey snorted.
“Need a lift?” Adam offered.
She startled as she realized that he had come to stand beside her.
“That… would be lovely,” she replied awkwardly. “Thank you.”
The exchange felt oddly formal. Adam had been so distant and quietly stormy since their bizarre conversation the night before that Ellie found herself uncertain quite how to act around him.
He offered her his knee and a hand. The gesture had an unconsciously courtly air—for all that she was standing next to a bored-looking donkey and not a noble steed.
Ellie accepted his grip. The calloused texture of his palm sent a shiver through her skin as she awkwardly planted herself in the saddle.
The donkey shifted beneath her, and she nearly fell backwards.
“Tuck your knees up by his neck,” Adam instructed. “It’ll help you stay balanced. They get nervous when you wobble.”
He stroked a hand down the donkey’s flank, then gave it a scratch behind the ears. The donkey huffed with approval.
Then he turned and walked away without another word. Ellie stared after him, utterly at a loss.
“ Yalla! Yalla!” the donkey boy cried, jarring her out of the confused whirlwind of her thoughts. “Mashi!”
The beast beneath her lurched into motion. Ellie jolted back in the saddle and then clung on for dear life as they trotted down the road.
?
The flat, fertile fields were verdant with sprouts of new wheat, tended by fellahin who tucked their long galabeyas into their loose cotton breeches to keep them from the mud. The donkey boy continued to call out cheerful Masri imprecations at their mounts as they rode along the narrow packed-earth pathways. To Ellie’s ears, the boy’s words sounded like a mix of routine commands and more personal and affectionate compliments.
The fields gave way to tall, orderly rows of date palms interspersed here and there by the occasional tidy farmhouse—and then the fertile land abruptly turned to desert.
The change was like a line drawn across the earth, an immediate and dramatic shift from towering trees to arid, rock-strewn ground. As the date plantation fell away, Ellie finally saw the ragged, humped shapes of the less-well-known pyramids of Dahshur.
Though nowhere near the size of the famous monuments at Giza, they were significantly older, and therefore perhaps even more fascinating. Ellie picked the tiered form of the Pyramid of Djoser from the clustered structures. The tower of stone was nearly five thousand years old and was most likely the first pyramid ever built in Egypt.
The crumbling monuments represented only a fraction of the history that had accumulated at the necropolis of Saqqara, which had been in use for over three thousand years, from the third dynasty to the Ptolemaic period. The arid landscape was peppered with tumbles of ancient mud-brick and scattered debris. Ellie’s eyes immediately picked out the patterns in it—the straight line of a wall, the flat surface of an ancient road. The ground was littered with relics of Egypt’s ancient past.
Ellie had been furiously, painfully jealous when she had learned that Neil had been hired to oversee an excavation here—and at a very promising New Kingdom tomb site, no less. That ache had only deepened when Neil’s initial survey produced strong indications that the tomb had been built for Horemheb, the Eighteenth Dynasty general who had risen to become a pharaoh in his own right despite his lack of royal blood.
Horemheb was a fascinating figure, and the Eighteenth Dynasty was Ellie’s favorite period of Egyptian history. She would have given almost anything to have been able to join in uncovering a new chapter of it.
Not that she had been invited.
The impact of finally being in this storied landscape was somewhat compromised by the hawkers and would-be guides who clustered at the end of the lane.
“Tour guide!” one shouted. “Climb the pyramid of the great pharaoh!”
“Authentic Saqqara souvenirs!” another called out.
Ellie gave the wares on his blanket a careful glare as they rode past, looking out for any genuine artifacts he might be trying to sell.
Mr. Mahjoud dismissed all the would-be helpers with a disapproving glare as he led their party past the entrance and into the necropolis.
As they rode past the pitted openings to abandoned tomb shafts, Ellie thought uneasily of her upcoming reunion with her brother, who had been in Egypt for just over two years now.
When Ellie had still been a schoolgirl, Neil had happily indulged her curiosity about his books and studies. That comfortable intellectual banter had changed when he left for university. Neil had grown more distant. He had always been a bit over-serious, but it began to feel as though his mind was somewhere else when he returned home for holidays.
After Ellie managed to fight her way into university herself, there had been sparks of that old dynamic between them—moments where Ellie had lured Neil into a debate about the antecedents of Ancient Greek or the fall of the Byzantine Empire. But after a little while, Neil always pulled away again, pleading another paper he needed to write or books he had neglected.
There was nothing wrong with that, of course—not in any way that Ellie could point her finger at—and yet something about it had left her feeling oddly frustrated… and perhaps just a bit let down.
She was fairly certain Neil would not be excited to learn that she had come to Egypt—even without the added complication of Adam Bates. The thought made her hands clench a little tighter on the reins of her donkey as they followed the winding path deeper into the desert.
Adam rode just behind her. He was still oddly quiet as his blue eyes carefully scanned the desert.
Ellie let her donkey fall back a bit until she was bobbing uncomfortably beside him. “Is something wrong?”
“Hard to say till we get there,” Adam replied automatically, still not looking at her. “Might be a good idea to have Mr. M question the workers and see if anyone matching Dawson or Jacobs’ description has been sniffing about. It’d give us a better notion of how to approach your brother about the whole business. I can’t say I’m at all sure he’s going to be happy to learn that a bunch of artifact thieves have an interest in his dig.”
“No,” Ellie agreed. “But that wasn’t what I meant.”
Adam finally met her gaze—only to quickly look away again. “Oh?”
Ellie repressed a sigh of exasperation. “Maybe I was asking why you kissed me last night and then apologized as though you’d just run over my cat. And why you’ve been avoiding me for most of the day.”
“I haven’t been avoiding you,” Adam countered stubbornly. “I’m right here.”
“But you can barely bring yourself to look at me!” Ellie exclaimed.
Constance turned on her donkey where she rode ahead of them, glancing back with a concerned frown.
Ellie flashed her a reassuring smile and a wave.
Constance’s eyes narrowed, shifting from her to Adam, but she finally turned back around.
“I’m just trying to do the right thing,” Adam pushed back, keeping his voice low and his eyes on the road ahead of them.
“The right thing about what?” Ellie fought to keep the exasperation from her tone.
Adam turned his head to stare down at her. “You, Ellie.”
The intensity of his look—fierce with tumultuous but unnameable feeling—took her breath.
“But what does that mean?” Ellie pressed a little unevenly.
Mr. Mahjoud’s voice cut through the evening air before Adam could respond.
“We have arrived,” the dragoman announced, drawing his donkey up short at the edge of a sprawling pit.