Twenty-Four
C onstance greeted the movement of the dahabeeyah with a burst of excitement. For the last hour, she had been lying on her bed in the stateroom Julian had ordered hurriedly made over for her, tapping her fingers restlessly. She had tried the door as soon as they left her, of course, and had found it unlocked—but another Al-Saboor had been lingering outside of it, obviously posted there to trail her should she decide to go exploring. Constance could have overcome him easily enough—even if he hadn’t sported a black eye and had his arm in a sling—but doing so would blow her cover.
She resigned herself to waiting, albeit impatiently and with frequent requests for more lemonade.
At least she was feeling less worried about Ellie, Adam, and Sayyid. She had caught a glimpse of the launch when it had returned to the Isis carrying Jacobs and the rest of Julian’s hired thugs. The remaining Al-Saboors had looked fairly shamefaced, and there’d been an air of simmering frustration in Jacobs’ quick pace. Just that would have been enough to tell Constance that Ellie must have managed to escape, but Julian’s quite audible outburst a few minutes later had put a pin in it.
“What do you mean, you were overcome by a batch of women?!”
Constance was admittedly a little miffed. It was hardly fair that Ellie had kept something as deliciously exciting as a secret getaway strategy involving a cadre of mysterious accomplices to herself!
But at least now, she need only concern herself with accomplishing her own mission—interrogate Julian, steal the tablet, and rescue the idiot who had given their position away to the enemy in a desperate ploy to reclaim his old life.
Constance would have a thing or two to say about that once she had safely whisked Stuffy off the boat.
They were tasks sure to require all her skills of deception, espionage, and—one might hope—a dash of physical violence.
?
Unfortunately, she had to wait another three hours before she could do it. Constance was seething with impatience when a crewman finally turned up to show her to dinner.
She trailed behind her escort down the hall, tuning her senses to the row of cabins to either side of her. In front of the third one down, she heard the scrape of a chair on the floor and a rustle of papers that sounded distinctly scholarly.
It had to be Neil. Constance certainly couldn’t imagine any of the Al-Saboors reading a book. Satisfied, she filed the information away and hurried after the sailor.
He led her to where Julian waited in the open-air salon at the top of the boat. It ran the full length of the cabins and had been loosely organized into a dining area with a fine mahogany table, a bar, and a parlor furnished with couches and overstuffed armchairs. The deck was bordered only by a low rail, offering a stunning view of the Nile to every side.
Constance glanced up at the canopy, which offered a more sinister sort of scenery. “Goodness! Is that a crocodile?”
The ten-foot-long reptile was suspended within the rafters over the bar, its dark green leather offset by rows of yellowing teeth. As taxidermy went, it was not the finest specimen Constance had ever seen.
“Oh, that!” Julian strolled over to join her. “Relic of a past rental, I gather. Do you want me to have it removed?”
“To where?” Constance pictured the stuffed creature bobbing on the Nile like raft.
“Ha ha ha!” Julian chuckled forcefully. “Well, you know how things are in these godforsaken outposts. One can’t be too choosy, can they?”
Constance bristled a bit.
Her complexion was a soft hue of light brown, which had led older ladies to scold her about spending too much time in the sun. Her hair was a rich, glossy black that curled into charming little waves if left to dry properly, and her lashes were much longer and thicker than those of most English ladies. Constance liked that she could see these little hints of India in her mirror. How could she feel anything but proud of that part of her heritage when it was shared by someone as regal and brilliant as her Aai—a royal princess of the ancient kingdom of Nandapur, educated like a scholar in the family palace?
She was fairly certain Julian would categorize Nandapur as one of those ‘godforsaken places’ as well.
Though Constance made no secret of her Indian blood, people around her seemed to find it easy to forget, especially when they began airing their personal opinions about the ignorance and rebelliousness of colonial peoples.
Normally, Constance would find a clever way to turn such a comment around on the speaker, subjecting them to a subtle but razor-edged verbal skewering that left people like Julian Forster-Mowbray feeling vaguely humiliated for reasons they couldn’t quite put a finger on.
That was another skill she had inherited from her remarkable Aai.
Refraining from pulling the intellectual rug out from under Julian now took a palpable effort—but then, Constance was committed to a bigger game.
The thought of how Julian would feel when she foiled all his plans made her smile in a way akin to that of the stuffed crocodile overhead.
“How very clever you are!” she assured him airily. “But aren’t you going to invite me to sit?”
?
It took roughly three courses for Julian to forget to be nervous around her. He spent most of the soup and the fish angling in a patently obvious manner to determine whether Constance had sensed anything suspicious about the fact that his thugs had ambushed her and her friends, threatening them at knife and gunpoint. Constance played along by complimenting the roast pigeon and sympathizing with his complaints about the wine until he had tossed back three or four glasses of it—which warmed him up nicely for interrogation.
She wasn’t sure whether Julian’s willingness to believe her that oblivious to his nefarious purposes said more about his desperate ambitions for her dowry—or his low opinions of the intelligence of females in general.
Most likely, it was a bit of both.
Constance made her first parry as they retired to the couch to sip little glasses of pastis.
“How far downriver shall we be going, then?” she asked, taking a sip of the sweet, pungent liquor.
The sun had declined into evening, painting the sky with the startling hues of an Egyptian sunset. Pink and orange shifted to a richer violet in the east, just speckled with the first emerging stars. The landscape they sailed gracefully past was decidedly rural—just bands of green fields interspersed with small villages, giving way to the golden sprawl of the desert. The Isis was making quick progress, her big white sails taut with the river breeze.
Julian gave a guilty little start. “Oh! We have a spot of business a day or so north of here. Nothing you need to worry about.”
Constance’s attention sharpened. She had no doubt this ‘business’ to the north had to do with the tablet from Hatshepsut’s temple.
The time had come for her first gambit. Her blood hummed with excitement at the prospect of truly opening the game. She had long suspected that she had a natural gift for espionage, though she had rarely had an opportunity to put it to the test.
Well, she would test it here, applying all her feminine wiles and rhetorical weaponry to lure Julian Forster-Mowbray into revealing his secrets.
Constance scooted a little closer to him on the settee—and got to work.
“You know, Julian… you’ve been holding out on me,” she scolded playfully.
“Have I?” Julian returned, looking nervous.
“You most certainly have!” Constance wondered whether she was laying it on a bit thick with her blatantly flirtatious tones—but she was betting Julian was far too self-absorbed to consider that she might be selling him a pile of lemons. “Here you are dashing about Egypt with the most dastardly-looking characters. You can’t possibly expect me to believe it’s just imports-and-exports or something equally drab.” She let her face show a touch of disappointment. “Unless it really is that dull.”
Julian was obviously torn. After all, he clearly wanted to impress her, and brushing off his current activities as nothing worth talking about would only make him look boring.
As Constance had hoped, he couldn’t resist the chance to at least hint at being involved in something that made him sound more mysterious and important.
“Perhaps it isn’t quite so dull as that,” he confessed, leaning in closer and flashing her a conspiratorial smile.
Constance plucked a sporting magazine from the nearby coffee table and batted Julian on the arm with it. “Now you are teasing me!”
“It’s only that the business is terribly—well, sensitive. I’m not supposed to talk to anyone about it.”
“I must admit, Julian—I had no idea you could be involved in something so… intriguing .” Constance ended the word on a breathy note, leaning forward and blinking up at him.
Julian ate it up with a spoon—just as she had planned.
She really was rather good at this.
“There are many things you don’t know about me, Connie,” he assured her, slinging his arm over the back of the settee.
“But surely you could give me just the tiniest little hint,” Constance pressed. “Seeing that we’re…”
She pretended to catch herself and pushed a becoming little blush into her cheeks. It was a trick she had practiced at some length in her vanity mirror, in case she should ever need to put her charms to work to foil an enemy.
“Connie!” Julian exclaimed. “Dare I hope that you have developed a tendre for me?”
“Oh, you will embarrass me utterly!” Constance hid her face behind the sporting magazine.
That way he couldn’t see her grin.
“By no means!” Julian assured her. “I should be the last one to blame you for such a thing. How could you help it?”
Constance dropped her carefully assumed persona, her eyebrow cocking at the sheer self-absorption of his response. Thankfully, Julian had turned to gaze off into the distance as he said it, which gave her a vital moment to fix an expression of brainless admiration on her face before he noticed anything.
She certainly had her fish on the hook, at any rate… Now to reel in her catch.
“Though I did wonder about our compatibility when you presented yourself at the house back in Cairo,” she mused thoughtfully.
“You did?” Julian echoed, clearly bewildered. “But my grandfather is a duke!”
Constance fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Not because of that!” She batted him again with the magazine—perhaps just a hair harder than she needed to. “I only mean that… Well, discovering that you are involved in something so important—and perhaps just a little dangerous?—makes me see you… differently .” She trailed the magazine down his sleeve, dropping her voice a husky octave.
“I see!” Julian burst out.
“I am afraid I am quite drawn to men of action ,” Constance emphasized.
She gave his arm a little squeeze—and had to hide a dart of surprise. His triceps were more solid than she had suspected for someone who presumably spent most of his time lounging about reminding people of his prestigious family tree.
Julian puffed up a bit. “It’s not something I can share openly, of course,” he told her confidently. “I must allow the rest of the world to think me a mere sportsman.”
“That must be hard for you.” Constance leaned her cheek against her hand and blinked up at him admiringly.
With another target, it might have been a bit much—but Constance didn’t put much stock in Julian Forster-Mowbray’s powers of discernment.
“Not really,” Julian declared regally, casually studying his manicured nails. “One grows used to living a double life when it is required of you.”
Constance wanted to snort. Really, she deserved an accolade for this performance. It was a pity her only audience was a stuffed crocodile.
“Have you been doing that for very long?” she pressed.
“Well, I would say that this is my first truly critical mission,” Julian admitted a little uncomfortably. “Such things don’t exactly come up all the time. One must simply be ready for them.”
Constance leaned closer. The shift took her in range of a heady nose of Julian’s cologne, which he must have applied liberally before dinner. It nearly made her sneeze.
“Is it so great a matter as all that?” she prompted breathlessly.
Julian was briefly torn by indecision—and then crumbled like a wall made of biscuit. “I suppose I can show you just a little something.”
He popped up from the couch and crossed to a trunk beside the bar, where he opened the lid and pulled out a slender bundle wrapped in dusty velvet. Returning to the settee, he laid it on the coffee table and pushed the fabric aside.
The sun had set as they talked, dropping the world around them into the gloom of dusk. One of the crew had come through a few minutes beforehand to light the lamps that were liberally suspended from the posts and rafters of the canopy. They cast a warm illumination over the salon—and the object that Julian had just revealed.
Nestled amid the velvet was a leather scabbard, cracked with age. The hilt of a sword protruded from the top of it, wrought from yellowed bone inlaid with gold filigree.
This was not what Constance had been angling for, of course. She had been hoping to prompt Julian into a further confession about the nature of his business in Egypt—but perhaps the sword could still lead her there. To her admittedly inexpert eye, it looked like the sort of crusty old thing that Ellie would go mad for.
“Goodness!” she exclaimed, a bit at a loss. “It’s very… large?”
She winced at the word, which she might not have chosen had she had a bit more time to think about it.
“Ha ha,” Julian laughed nervously. “And excessively old, of course. In fact, I’m told it likely dates back to the sixth century.”
“The sixth century!” she echoed—as though very impressed by this.
“Go ahead and pull it out,” Julian told her.
Constance started a bit at his instruction. “You want me to… er, remove it from the scabbard?” she prompted carefully.
“I’m afraid odd things happen when I touch it,” Julian replied with a chuckle.
Constance gave him a hard look to see if he had intended to make a double entendre. He clearly hadn’t the foggiest idea.
“Fair enough,” she concluded with a shrug, and then tugged at the hilt of the sword. It slid easily from the scabbard.
“The metal looks… different,” she noted with a frown of genuine interest.
The oiled surface was twisted through with rippling lines of lighter and darker metal.
“That’s because it’s iron,” Julian replied. “They didn’t exactly have steel in the sixth century!”
Constance bit her tongue, as she was fairly sure she’d heard Ellie rambling on about the long and storied history of steel manufacture in places like China and the Middle East, which went back at least so far as that. She doubted educating Julian on the subject would aid her cause.
“But where did you get it?” she asked instead.
“It’s been in the family for centuries,” he replied. “One of my noble ancestors acquired it in Cumbria when he was granted land there by Henry I. Found it tucked into a pile of hay in a byre after he’d subdued some local laird up there, as the story goes. It’s Dyrnwyn.”
“What’s a Dyrnwyn?” Constance demanded.
“The sword. That’s its name,” Julian elaborated. “It’s one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain. Or was it twelve?” he questioned, frowning. “Well, I hardly suppose it matters, anyway.”
Constance knew very little about the Twelve—or Thirteen—Treasures of Britain, but she was fairly certain Ellie would have been horrified to learn that one of them was stashed in Julian Forster-Mowbray’s travel trunk rather than an institution of learning.
“It’s very… er, impressive,” Constance hedged. “But what does it have to do with your dangerous and exciting double life?”
Julian’s expression went over a bit canny. “Legend has it that when a worthy or well-born man wields Dyrnwyn, the sword bursts into holy flames.”
Constance’s mind went blank. She hadn’t the foggiest notion how to respond to that.
“You think I’m having you on,” Julian filled in for her, lounging comfortably on the settee, “but it’s entirely true. I would show you right now, only I’m afraid it would throw the crew into a panic. They’re very particular about fire.”
Probably because the Isis was a floating tinderbox, Constance thought exasperatedly.
More surprisingly, she found that she believed him—perhaps because she had recently watched Ellie light up a rooftop with a wing bone and had spent the last few days chasing down the Staff of Moses.
“But why do you have it?”
The words spilled out of her before she could think better of them. Julian’s face flashed with irritation as he jolted the sword back into the scabbard. “My older brother Heathcliffe isn’t interested, so I’ve the loan of it for now,” he retorted a bit crossly.
Constance sensed her misstep. She had obviously stumbled into a sore spot. She worked quickly to correct it. “Oh no—I mean, of course you have it. You are the expert swordsman, after all,” she said soothingly, quickly pulling up that useful tidbit from Julian’s droning over dinner back in Cairo. “What I meant was—why did you bring it here to Egypt?”
“Oh, that,” he said, relieved. “I convinced my father that it might be useful, given what I’d been sent here to do.”
“But what has Lord Aldbury to do with it?” Constance pressed eagerly, sensing she was getting closer to the nub of things.
Julian didn’t immediately answer. Clearly, she had reached a point at which he began to wonder whether he was giving away too much.
She needed to push him over that edge before he wised up and closed his mouth.
“I mean,” she modified a little shyly, tracing the magazine along his knee in a tantalizing manner. “You must have been given a very big responsibility for your father to have trusted you to take such a dangerous and important treasure along with you.”
Julian had sharpened with an avid interest, his eyes on the place where the bundled pages brushed along his trousers.
Constance decided to throw it all in.
“I only wish I could appreciate the full extent of your burden.” She gazed up at him with a look of abject admiration.
A further bat of her black lashes apparently did the trick.
Julian puffed out his chest. “Well, someone needs to step up and take care of things,” he asserted self-importantly. “And the rest of that lot are hardly clamoring to get out into the field. They’d all rather sit around back in London and let a dressed-up gutter rat like Jacobs do the work for them.”
That lot , Constance noted carefully. She was getting closer now—and she knew just how to lure Julian into giving away the rest.
“Why, they sound like a bunch of old fuddy-duddies!” she commented with a careless laugh.
“They really are!” Julian exclaimed, chuckling with her. “Prendergast can barely lift a box of papers, never mind a flaming sword. Yardborough’s just a stuffed shirt who loves the sound of his own voice. Northcote might stab a bloke in the back, but he wouldn’t do it himself—he’d hire someone else while he sipped sherry in his club over the papers. The only one who truly intimidates me is Lady Hastings—but as she’s older than my grandmother, she’s hardly about to go gallivanting about the globe.”
Constance absorbed the spill of information with a blink, her mind whirling. Julian had revealed so much more than she had hoped. He had given her names!
Prendergast sounded familiar, though she couldn’t place it. Lord Yardborough was a senior Conservative who sat on the Privy Council. The Northcotes were a wealthy family of bankers with ties to the East India Company before it was subsumed into the Raj.
Lady Hastings was a countess suo jure. Now in her early seventies, she was a perfect terror of the ton, making men or destroying lives at a whim by pulling on the strings of her extensive network of noble relations and the political figures who owed their careers to her influence.
So far as Constance knew, the only thing all of them had in common was wealth and power—but clearly the connection went deeper.
The beginnings of a theory tickled at the back of her mind. She thought she might even be able to lure Julian into confirming it—but it would require a leap. If she was wrong, her next words might throw him off the game entirely.
She decided to take the chance. She couldn’t know when she might get another one—not when she still had a daring escape to accomplish.
“What an utterly pretentious bunch!” she said happily. “Don’t tell me, but they must have some dreadfully pompous name for themselves.”
“Oh, they do!” Julian was laughing hard enough now that he had to wipe a tear from the corner of his eye. He paused, clearly torn between the secrecy he had been sworn to maintain and the opportunity to laugh at his betters with a pretty and admiring woman.
Constance could not be too surprised at which side ended up winning.
“The Order of Albion!” he blurted out helplessly, pitching his tones to a parody of stuffy self-importance.
Got you , Constance thought with a burst of exultation. There was some sort of secret organization.
Now she only wanted a motive.
“Goodness, but that is ponderous!” she agreed with a giggle. “What, then—are they all looking to bulk up their curio cabinets?”
“Oh, no,” Julian assured her, going over more serious. “It’s not like that. They’ve a good reason for it, even if they are rather full of themselves. After all, we really can’t just leave all these magical what-nots lying around the globe for any heathen revolutionary to get his hands on, can we? It wouldn’t do! It really is best that we set about collecting them and putting them somewhere safe.”
“Like where?” Constance asked with a bat of her eyelashes, deciding to press her advantage one step further.
“Oh, no!” Julian wagged an admonishing finger at her. “I’ve already said far too much. You’re going to have to pretend you haven’t heard any of that!”
Then Julian dropped to his knees in front of her, and Constance felt a snap of alarm.
“You know I’ve only shared as much as I have because we have—well—a certain understanding between the two of us,” Julian insisted ardently. “Don’t we, my dear girl?”
He leaned in, and with a jolt, Constance realized he was about to kiss her.
Her position on the settee didn’t amend itself to any of her jiu jitsu maneuvers. She briefly considered going for one of her daggers, but stabbing Julian Forster-Mowbray—even in a spot that wasn’t particularly deadly—hadn’t been part of her plan.
She fumbled for a less lethal weapon she might use. She settled on the sporting magazine and whacked him with it.
The blow landed on his upper arm. Julian’s eyes widened with surprise and a shock of pain.
Constance forced out an airy laugh as she slid out from beneath him, escaping the confines of the settee.
Julian’s expression had gone dark and angry, leading Constance to wonder if she had just set a trap for herself. If she refused to allow her nose to be tickled by Julian’s mustache—and who knew what else beyond that—he might think better of all the beans he had just spilled to her, which could put her in a tight spot indeed.
She had no interest at all in making Julian Foster-Mowbray her lover, even for the purpose of espionage. She scrambled for a way out.
The only one that presented itself to her was admittedly a bit of a stretch—but if one must bluff, one might as well do it wildly.
“Julian!” she exclaimed. “You know I don’t believe in doing such things until one is properly and legally wed!”
Julian stared at her with shock. “You… what?”
“Reverend Spencer has been quite clear about it,” Constance lied authoritatively. “A woman’s lips are for prayer alone until she is in a state of legal and holy matrimony.”
Julian opened his mouth to reply but was clearly at a loss. “I… had no idea that you were so… er, spiritual,” he offered awkwardly.
“Oh yes.” Constance widened her eyes in a manner she hoped looked suitably devout. “I really am.”
Julian’s gaze had turned distinctly skeptical, and Constance began to feel just a little bit nervous.
She was saved by the sound of a voice from the stairwell.
“Amir?”
“What is it?” Julian shot back irritably at the thin crewman who hovered at the edge of the salon.
“Reis Hassan wished me to inform you that we will stop for the evening in one hour, after the bridge at Nagga Hammadi,” he replied.
“What do we need to stop for?” Julian complained. “I told you that we needed to reach our destination as quickly as possible.”
He cast an awkward look over at Constance, who tried to appear as though she was contemplating something holy.
“But it is not safe to run the ship in the dark, Amir,” the crewman returned a little desperately.
“Why not?” Julian retorted petulantly. “The river’s enormous and we’re just going along with the current. Surely we can keep that up by moonlight. Put some lamps in the bow.”
The crewman cast a nervous look down the stairwell. Constance suspected that the reis himself likely hovered there, having wisely preferred not to subject himself directly to Julian’s whining.
“We would certainly need to slow beyond the bridge for the cliffs at Gebel Tukh,” the crewman pressed. “The river narrows there and it would be foolish to attempt the passage in the dark at full speed.”
“Fine,” Julian said with an impatient wave of his hand.
The crewman made a hurried bow, obviously eager to get away. Constance more or less agreed. She had best extricate herself from the situation before Julian questioned her spiritual awakening. She really would prefer not to have to stab him.
“Goodness, would you look at the time?” She put on a yawn. “All of this traveling is so very exhausting! I’m off to bed. Brunch al fresco in the morning?”
Julian stared at her, not quite managing to keep up. “Brunch? I mean—certainly, darling. Whatever you like.”
“Aren’t you a dear?” Constance assured him—and bolted for the stairs.
She had come dangerously close to endangering her virtue—which, to be fair, she had been eager to throw to the wind regardless. But not to Julian Forster-Mowbray!
Her lips-are-for-prayer excuse wouldn’t stand for long—but it didn’t have to.
Constance had no intention of sticking around for brunch.