The Golden One

9

We arrived in Cairo on a misty gray morning. The city was swathed in fog and there was not a breath of air stirring. The feeling of oppression was not solely physical. We had had to leave our friends to cope with Jumana’s grief and Cyrus’s frustration – for that enigmatic clue of Jamil’s was driving him to distraction. I had made him promise on his solemn oath that he would not go wandering round the wilderness looking for Jamil’s tomb. He had given his word; but his hands were behind his back and I suspected he had his fingers crossed. Although Katherine did not reproach me, I knew she wondered how we could abandon her at such a time.

Emerson had pointed out that I need not abandon her. Not only was there no need for me to go to Cairo, my presence there would add unnecessary difficulties to an already difficult situation. The summons had been for -

“For Ramses,” I said, cutting into his tirade with the skill of long experience. “You weren’t asked either.”

“If you think,” Emerson announced loudly, “that I am going to let the boy go off alone to face that pack of wolves from the War Office -”

“My sentiments exactly,” I said.

Upon which, Emerson burst out laughing and pulled me into a close embrace. “ Peabody, when you put your chin out and give me that steely stare, I know I’ve lost the argument.”

“You wanted me to come. Admit it.”

“Mmmf,” said Emerson, his lips against mine.

We caught the evening train and went straight to Shepheard’s. The sufragi on duty greeted us like the old acquaintances we were, and asked what he could do for us.

“Breakfast,” I said, while Emerson divested himself of various articles of clothing and tossed them around the room. Emerson had not been in favor of staying over, but even he admitted that we could not dismiss this request as brusquely as we had done with the War Office’s other attempts to bring Ramses back into the service, and catch the first train back to Luxor.

“Emphatically not,” said Ramses. “Smith told us virtually nothing, but they wouldn’t have sent for me unless they have some idea as to how to locate him. We must try to find him, Father. If he is a prisoner -”

“If?” Emerson exclaimed. “Do you believe he is a turncoat and a traitor?”

Once upon a time Emerson’s intimidating scowl would have reduced Ramses to silence. Now he met those narrowed blue orbs squarely and smiled a little. “It’s odd to hear you defend him, Father. Good God, I don’t want to believe it either! But the man is an enigma – embittered, cynical, and unpredictable.”

“Hmph,” said Emerson. “Well. The sooner we find out what Murray has to say, the better. Shall we go?”

“General Murray?” I repeated. “What has he to do with this? You haven’t even made an appointment.”

“You know my policy, Peabody – go straight to the top and avoid underlings. He will see me whenever I damn well decide to see him,” said Emerson. “Are you ready, Ramses?”

I would have insisted upon accompanying them if I had believed there was the slightest chance the general would allow me or Nefret to take part in the discussion. Men are singularly limited in their views about women, and military men are even worse.

I handed Emerson his coat – he would have walked out of the room in his shirtsleeves if I had not – and helped him into it. “Come straight back here,” I ordered.

“Mph,” said Emerson.

“Yes, of course,” said Ramses, smiling at Nefret.

FROM MANUSCRIPT H

Murray kept them waiting for half an hour. It wasn’t long, considering his busy schedule and the fact that he had not expected them, but Emerson took it as a personal affront. He was in an extreme state of annoyance by the time they were ushered into the General’s office, and he expressed his feelings with his usual candor.

“What the devil do you mean by letting us cool our heels all that time? It was damned inconvenient for us to come just now. You had better have a good reason for interrupting my work.”

Murray was losing his hair. The high forehead added to the length of his face, which was set in stern lines, but the mouth under the neatly trimmed graying mustache twitched as Emerson spoke. Ramses had heard that Murray had had a nervous breakdown in 1915, after serving as chief of staff to the British Expeditionary Force. An encounter with Emerson wasn’t going to do his nerves much good.

“I did not ask you here, Professor Emerson,” he said stiffly.

The office was comfortably, almost luxuriously, furnished, with deep leather chairs and Oriental rugs. The wide windows behind the desk offered a view of palm trees and gardens. The fog had cleared; it was going to be a fine day.

“No?” Emerson sat down and took out his pipe. “Well, if it wasn’t you, it was one of your flunkies, and you ought to know about it. What sort of administrator are you?”

Murray began fumbling through the papers on his desk. Emerson’s tactics were brutal but effective; the general’s hands were shaking with rage. He couldn’t bully a civilian, especially one of Emerson’s eminence, as he would have done a military subordinate – but how he wanted to! After a moment of hard breathing, he selected one paper from among the rest, stared at it, and rang for an aide. A whispered conversation took place. Ramses, whose hearing was excellent, caught only a few words: “… devil he thinks he’s doing…”

“Didn’t your mother teach you that it is rude to whisper when other persons are present?” Emerson inquired, tossing a burned match onto the floor.

Murray ’s complexion was that of a man who spends most of his time indoors. His pale cheeks reddened. “Professor Emerson, I did not ask to speak with you, but so long as you are here I can spare you a few minutes, in order to emphasize the seriousness of the situation. From now on you will be taking orders from someone else.”

Oh, Lord, Ramses thought, is the man a natural idiot, or hasn’t he heard about Father? The last sentence had the effect he had known it would. Emerson’s eyes narrowed, and when he spoke it was in the quiet purring voice his acquaintances had learned to dread.

“The only person from whom my son takes orders is me, General. I don’t take them from anyone – except him.”

Ramses’s jaw dropped. His father had deferred to him on a few occasions – to his utter astonishment – but this was the first time he had paid him such a compliment.

“When the situation demands it,” Emerson added. “We may as well leave, Ramses.”

The door opened. Murray transferred his bulging stare to the newcomer. Not Smith. Cartright. “Why didn’t you tell me they were coming?” the general demanded.

“I didn’t know, sir. The last I heard from them was a curt telegram denying my request for their assistance. I had planned to go to Luxor in person within the next few days.”

Ramses caught his father’s questioning eye. Evidently the same doubt had entered Emerson’s mind. If this lot didn’t know of Smith’s visit, he wasn’t going to bring it up. He shook his head slightly, and Emerson settled back into his chair. “So,” he purred, “is this the person from whom my son is to take orders?”

“You misunderstood, Professor,” Cartright said quickly. “We are asking for his help, not demanding it.”

“He did say ‘please,’ ” Ramses reminded his father. “Perhaps we ought to listen to what he has to say.”

Emerson stamped into the room, flung himself into a chair, and took out his pipe. Nefret had left his thumb and fingers free of the cast, and by now he was using both hands, against her advice and my orders. The weight of the cast did not seem to bother him in the slightest. He proceeded to tamp tobacco into the pipe, making an even greater mess than usual. Ramses followed, his face unreadable. That withdrawn, “stone pharaoh” look was his reaction to bad news, just as poorly repressed fury was his father’s.

“Well?” I demanded. “What happened?”

Ramses’s features relaxed into a smile. “Father threatened to punch General Murray on the jaw.”

“Ah,” I said. “Well, that was only to be expected if the general accused your – er – Sethos of treachery.”

“Bastard,” said Emerson, round the stem of his pipe. I knew he was not referring to his brother.

“Stop swearing and tell me what transpired.”

“I will swear if I like,” Emerson said sullenly. “ Murray would drive a nun to profanity.”

Nefret held out her hand to Ramses. He went at once to her and took her hand in his.

“You had better let me tell it, Father. It appears there was a problem of miscommunication. Murray wasn’t expecting us, and he was not at all pleased to have us turn up. He knew about the matter, but if we had asked for an appointment, in the usual way, the request would have been passed on to his chief of staff, who would have passed it on to the head of military intelligence in Cairo, who is -”

“Boisdragon-Bracegirdle,” I exclaimed.

“No, Mother. My old acquaintance, Captain, now Major, Cartright.”

“How extraordinary. It was on this business he telegraphed you in that brusque fashion? Then what does Brace – curse it, Smith – have to do with this?”

“I don’t know, and I didn’t ask,” Ramses said. “There is something odd about this business, and until we can make sense of it, the less we say the better. It may be only a question of interservice jealousy. That has caused more trouble than the enemy.”

“How much does Murray know?” I asked.

Emerson was still muttering curses, so Ramses answered the question. “He made no reference to our relationship with Sethos. Smith may have been telling the truth there. They know I’ve met him, though, and that I have had ample opportunity to observe him. It was Cartright who convinced Murray that I was the best man to track Sethos down. They’ve had trouble getting agents into and out of Turkish territory. None of their own people can pass as an Arab, and the locals they’ve recruited are unreliable and untrained.”

Emerson had got himself under control. “They’re a bunch of bumbling incompetents,” he declared. “Sometimes it takes weeks for information about Turkish movements to reach them, via the indirect channels they employ. They got the news about Sethos fast enough, though. I suggested to Murray that he might be a prisoner instead of a traitor, and that swine Murray -”

“That was when Father tried to hit him,” said Ramses, with a grin. “Cartright got us out of Murray ’s office in a hurry.”

“I cannot believe Sethos passed on vital information willingly,” I exclaimed.

From behind a cloud of vile-smelling smoke, Emerson said, “The alternatives are almost as unpleasant, my dear.”

“Alternatives? I can only think of one.” I got up and moved to the window, where the air was not so thick. “Emerson, that pipe -”

“It calms my nerves, Peabody. However, anything to please you.” He knocked the thing out into a receptacle, sending sparks flying. “Torture is one possibility, certainly, though I don’t see how they could make a public spectacle of him if he was injured and under duress. There are other ways of forcing an individual to speak. Are you certain Margaret Minton is in France?”

“What a horrible idea!” I cried. “That the villains would use the threat of harm to the woman he loves!”

“It is a well-established technique, not only in the service but in popular fiction,” said Ramses.

“I beg, Ramses, that you will refrain from inappropriate attempts to be humorous. I will set about ascertaining Margaret’s present whereabouts as soon as is possible.”

“I beg your pardon, Mother,” Ramses said. He was still holding Nefret’s hand, running his fingers lightly over her wrist. “Such inquiries would take too long and would probably be inconclusive. There is one sure way of learning the truth. Ismail Pasha is now in Gaza. I’m going there to try and find him.”

I was conscious of a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. “I thoroughly disapprove, Ramses. You are too well known to the enemy. Let them find someone else.”

“I must go, Mother. I can’t leave it to someone else. You don’t understand.” He looked from me to Nefret; and on her face I saw the same dawning horror that I felt on my own.

“They ordered you to kill him,” she whispered. “Is that it?”

“That is how the Great Game is played.” Ramses’s voice was hard, his expression withdrawn. “Assassination, deception, corruption – nothing is too vile if it can be labeled patriotism. Whether he is guilty or under duress, he can give away vital information. Cartright wouldn’t tell me what that information is, but it is obviously enough to make him extremely dangerous.”

I cleared my throat. “You agreed, of course.”

Ramses came to me with his long strides and bent to kiss my cheek. It was a rare gesture for him, and I took it as the compliment he intended. “I would have done, Mother, if I had supposed they’d believe me. Murray would have; he hasn’t imagination enough to suppose anyone would dare disregard his orders, and he doesn’t know the man he wants me to assassinate is my uncle. Not that that little matter would bother him.”

“ ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off,’ ” I murmured.

I ought to have known better than to quote Scripture when Emerson was already in a vile humor. His heavy brows drew together, but before he could bellow, Ramses spoke again. “Cartright knows me well enough to suspect I would balk at assassination, so we arrived at a compromise. I will get a look at Ismail Pasha and ascertain whether he is Sethos, and whether he is being used by the Turks against his will.”

“Rather a tall order, that,” I remarked.

“The first part shouldn’t be difficult. He’ll be showing himself in public, as he did in Constantinople. I only hope he hasn’t altered his appearance so much I can’t recognize him.”

“And then what?” Nefret demanded.

Ramses shrugged. “One can’t plan very far ahead when there are so many unknowns in the equation. I’m not counting on anything except making a preliminary reconnaissance. Depending on what I learn, if anything, we’ll decide what to do next.”

“Can you get in and out of the city undetected?” I asked, endeavoring to conceal my concern.

“Oh, I think so. The trouble is, Cartright insisted I take someone else with me.”

“It’s safer for two than for one,” Nefret said hopefully.

“Not when one of the two is fresh out of the nursery,” Emerson growled. “Fair, young, speaks Arabic like a textbook, stammering with excitement at the prospect of playing spy…” Emerson summed it up with an emphatic “Damnation!” and went back to filling his pipe.

“He can’t be that bad,” Nefret protested.

“Ha! D’you remember Lieutenant Chetwode?”

“Oh dear,” I said. “Not that ingenuous baby-faced young man who came to Deir el Medina with Cartright?”

“Cartright claims he is his best man,” Ramses said. “He must be older and less ingenuous than he looks, since he has been in intelligence for over two years.”

“Doing what?” Nefret demanded. “Sitting behind a desk filing reports?”

“What does it matter?” Emerson said. “His assignment is not to assist Ramses but to make sure he does what he has said he will do. That bastard Cartright doesn’t trust him.”

Nefret let out an indignant expletive. I said judiciously, “He does have a nasty suspicious mind. To be sure, a sensible individual, which Ramses is not, would go into hiding for a few days and then report that he had determined that Ismail Pasha was not the man they are after. Perhaps if I were to have a little chat with General Murray -”

“No, Mother,” Ramses said, politely but emphatically. “He wouldn’t have approved the scheme if I had not agreed to take Chetwode with me. He’s a likable boy, and not as hopeless as Father makes him sound. It’ll be all right.”

“Every time you say that, something disastrous occurs,” I exclaimed.

“Now, Mother, don’t exaggerate. It doesn’t always.” He was back to normal, his smile broad and carefree, but the concern of a mother informed me he was holding something back.

“What other orders do you have?” I asked.

Emerson, who had been deep in thought, looked up. “Oh, nothing much,” he said sarcastically. “Scout the Turkish defenses, look for weak points, and while you’re at it, sound out the governor to see if he would accept a bribe.”

“Hold your fire, Mother, I’ve no intention of doing anything of the sort,” Ramses said quickly. “The chaps in charge still labor under the delusion that ‘Johnny Turk’ is a white-livered coward. You’d think they’d have learned better after Rafah and Gallipoli.”

“But the military mind is slow to accept new ideas,” I agreed. “Are they planning a direct assault on Gaza?”

“I have not been taken into their confidence,” Ramses said dryly. “I’d bribe the damned governor if I could. It would save countless lives.”

“You can’t,” Emerson said positively. “Anyhow, von Kressenstein is the one in command of the Gaza defenses. He’d have you shot if you offered him a bribe. Stick to your primary aim, my boy, and get the hell out of Gaza as soon as you can.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramses said.

“When do you leave?” Nefret asked steadily.

“It will take a while to make the necessary arrangements,” Ramses said. She gave him a reproachful look, and he went on, “I’m not being deliberately evasive, dear. I need to learn all I can about our present dispositions in south Palestine before I decide on the best way of getting into the city. Then there’s the little matter of transport. They’ve pushed the rail lines as far as Rafah, but most of the traffic is military, and if I tried to pass as a British officer, it would mean being subject to orders from people who didn’t know who I was, or letting too many military types in on the secret. I don’t want even Cartright to know my plans: I politely refused several of his suggestions.”

“You don’t trust him?” I asked.

Ramses began pacing restlessly up and down the room. “I don’t trust any of the bas – - any of them. I still don’t know how Bracegirdle-Boisdragon fits into this; he’s made no further attempt to communicate with us, and when I posed a carefully phrased question to Cartright, he stiffly informed me that I was taking orders from him and no one else.”

“It’s the usual interservice rivalry, as I said,” remarked Emerson, with a curling lip. “They keep more secrets from one another than from the enemy.”

Ramses shrugged. He had said all he was going to say on the subject.

“What makes them suppose Sethos – if it is he – will stay in Gaza?” I asked. “Ramses, you won’t go haring off to Constantinople or Jerusalem after him?”

“Even if he’s left by the time I arrive, there will be news of him. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

He was being deliberately evasive now, and we all knew it. He was right, though; it was impossible to plan ahead.

For the next several days we were all busy about our different affairs. At my insistence, we kept up the pretense that we were in Cairo for personal reasons – a little holiday away from the family, the need to do a little research at the Museum. We dined out every evening, at one of the hotels, with as carefree a mien as we could manage, and if Emerson shouted at the waiters more often than usual, no one thought anything of it.

I remember one of those evenings with a particular poignancy. We were lingering over coffee after an excellent dinner at Shepheard’s and listening to the orchestra render a selection from The Merry Widow. Emerson came out of his fog of frowning introspection when he heard the familiar strains of the waltz, and asked if I would like to dance. I pointed out to him that the dancing had not yet begun. It did soon thereafter, and several couples took the floor. Emerson asked me again, and I pointed out to him that the tune was not a waltz. It was another of the ballads that had become popular in the past few years – the kind of song Ramses had once described as tools of the warmonger, with their sentimental references to love and duty and sacrifice. I knew this one very well. Nefret had played it the night we got the news of the death in battle of our beloved nephew Johnny.

Ramses rose and offered Nefret his hand. I don’t know what had moved him to want to dance to that song; perhaps the memory of Johnny, who had loved music and gaiety and laughter, perhaps a sudden need to take her in his arms. In my opinion the new dances were not nearly so pretty as the waltz, but they certainly offered the opportunity for close embraces.

It was always a pleasure to watch them dance together, they moved with such matching grace, even in the clumsy (in my opinion) two-step. She was wearing a gown of pale blue voile printed with little flowers, a copy of a favorite garment of Ramses’s that had been worn to shreds and discarded. Her skirts floated out as he turned her.

My sentimental husband cleared his throat and reached for my hand. There was no need for speech; we were both thinking the same thoughts: of Johnny, only one of the millions of gallant young men who were lost forever; and of another young man, even dearer, who was about to disappear into the dark underworld of war. Would we ever see our children dance together again?

“Yes,” I said emphatically.

So closely attuned are my dear Emerson and I (some of the time) that he required no explanation. He squeezed my hand. “Yes,” he repeated. “How are your arrangements coming along, Peabody?”

“Very well. And yours?”

“I will be ready when the time comes.”

Ramses was in and out at odd hours; all he would say, when I questioned him, was that he was exploring various sources of information. He spent a good deal of time alone with Nefret. I did not begrudge them this, but I could not help asking her, one morning when we were alone, whether he had told her anything I wasn’t supposed to know.

“If I had promised not to tell you, I wouldn’t,” she said with a smile that took any possible sting out of the words. “But there’s nothing.”

“Are you all right, Nefret?”

“Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

“You are too calm. More than calm – serene. Misty-eyed.”

“Good Gad, Mother!” She burst out laughing. “You do have a way with words. Perhaps I’ve become a fatalist. If I could go with him I would, but I’m beginning to realize – finally! – that my whining and my clinging only make it harder for him. There are some dangers one must face alone.”

“True,” I said thoughtfully. “However, there is nothing wrong with attempting to minimize the danger if one can.”

“You’ve got something in mind, haven’t you?” She looked alarmed. “Mother, don’t tell me unless you want Ramses to know. We keep nothing from one another.”

“And quite right, too. Perhaps I had better not, then. He would only fuss. Fear not, my dear, I won’t do anything that might endanger him.”

I had not expected Ramses would give us much notice of his departure, so I went ahead with my own schemes as quickly as was possible. Sure enough, my son turned up one afternoon in time for tea, with the news that he would be leaving immediately.

“There’s a new batch of Labour Corps ‘volunteers’ going off tomorrow. I’ll stay with them as far as Rafah, where I am to meet Chetwode.”

At the beginning of the war, Britain had promised the Egyptians they would not be asked to take part in the conflict. That promise, like so many others, had been broken. Some of the poor fellows who made up the Labour Corps had volunteered, but most had been conscripted by local magistrates to fill their quotas. I didn’t doubt Ramses could blend in perfectly; for a man who had played the parts of beggars, camel drivers, and mad dervishes, a peasant from Upper Egypt presented no difficulty. It sounded like a very uncomfortable method of getting where he wanted to go, but there was no use asking Ramses to explain.

“Ah,” I said. “In that case, we had better start packing.”

Ramses must have known there wasn’t a hope of persuading us to remain in Cairo, but he tried.

“Mother, too many people already know about this supposedly secret expedition. The three of you marching purposefully on Gaza will be a dead giveaway. You’re too well known, especially Father.”

“Ah, but we will be in disguise,” Emerson said.

Emerson loves disguises, and is not allowed to indulge in them as often as he would like; he looked so pleased, his lips parted in a broad smile, his blue eyes shining, that Ramses hadn’t the heart to object. Instead he gave me a critical look. “You’ve worked it all out, haven’t you, Mother? Nefret, why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“She knew nothing of it,” I said quickly. “I couldn’t ask her to keep secrets from you, now could I?”

“Oh, God.” Indignation and reluctant amusement mingled on his face, to be replaced by remorse. He went to Nefret and took her hands in his. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

“Your apology is, for once, appropriate.” She looked up at him with a smile. “I accept it. Mother only told me she had the situation well in hand. I didn’t ask for details. I trusted her, and I suggest you do the same.”

“Don’t worry, my dear,” I said cheerfully. “Your father and I have it worked out. He has a dear old friend in Khan Yunus -”

“Of course,” Ramses said resignedly. “Mahmud ibn Rafid. Is there any place in the Middle East where Father doesn’t have a ‘dear old friend’?”

“Not many,” said Emerson, smoking. “Khan Yunus is only ten miles south of Gaza, and Mahmud owns a villa there.” He chuckled. “When he told me ‘My house is your house,’ he may not have meant it literally, but he cannot object if I take him up on the offer. He’s scampered off to Damascus, so that will be all right. It is quite a comfortable house. Even your mother will be pleased with it.”

I doubted that very much, but at such a time I would have settled into a cave or a tent in order to be nearby when Ramses carried out his hazardous mission. “Quite,” I murmured. “Emerson, I presume you have made the other arrangements we discussed? I cannot think of anything I dislike more than a long journey by camel, but there seems to be no alternative.”

“Ah, but there is,” Emerson said. Self-satisfaction is too weak a word for the emotion that illumined his countenance and swelled his broad chest. “I will give you three guesses, Peabody.”

A hideous sense of foreboding came over me. “Oh, no, Emerson. Please. Don’t tell me -”

“Yes, my dear. I have acquired a new motorcar.” Avoiding my stricken expression, he turned to Ramses and explained. “It’s a splendid vehicle, my boy, one of the T Model Ford Light cars the military has been using. It has -”

“How did you – uh – acquire it?” Ramses asked.

“Ah, well, you know my methods,” said Emerson with a grin.

“You stole it!”

“No. Well. Not exactly. It has -”

“You can’t drive it yourself, you know,” I interrupted. This obvious fact had occurred to me once I got over my initial consternation, and it cheered me quite a lot. “Think how absurd you would look at the wheel, in turban and caftan.”

“I have considered that,” said Emerson, with great dignity. “You said you would leave the problem of transport to me.”

“Hmmmm. Frankly, I do not see how we can drive all that distance without getting bogged down in sand dunes and blowing up tires; but if all goes well -”

“It won’t,” Ramses muttered.

“If it does, we should arrive within a few days of one another. Mind this, Ramses; you are to report yourself to us before you go to Gaza. You know where we will be. For our own peace of mind and for safety’s sake, we want to be made cognizant of your plans. Have I your word?”

“Yes.” He hesitated for a moment, and then shrugged. “You’ll have to follow the road, so I suppose the worst that can happen is that you’ll break down and be forced to accept help from the military. Speaking of peace of mind, I would like to be made cognizant of your plans. Is Father to be a wealthy aristocrat – a wealthy, bearded aristocrat – and Mother his favorite wife?”

“No, that is Nefret,” I explained. “I am the older wife.”

Ramses exchanged bemused glances with Nefret. Her open-mouthed astonishment convinced him, had he doubted it, that she had known nothing of my scheme. He laughed a little, and shook his head.

“Mother, you never cease to amaze me. I hope you enjoy yourself. As the older wife you will be in a position to bully Nefret – and Father.”

“Ha,” said Emerson meaningfully.

Ramses was gone next morning. When Nefret joined us for breakfast she was a trifle hollow-eyed and pale, but that might have been a normal reaction to such a hard parting. I did not feel I had the right to ask what they had said to one another – my sympathetic imagination supplied a good deal of the dialogue – but I did venture to inquire whether Ramses had been angry about our following him.

“Resigned, rather,” Nefret said, toying with her toast.

“Eat something,” I ordered. “We are leaving in an hour and it will be a long, hard day. The first of many, I fear.”

“Not at all,” said Emerson. “The T Model Ford Light car -”

“I don’t want to hear about it, Emerson. Eat your breakfast.”

“I have,” said Emerson indignantly. “You are the one who is delaying us.”

To have left the hotel in disguise or in the vehicle Emerson had acquired would have aroused speculation. We went by cab to Atiyeh, the village where the northern branch of Abdullah’s family lived, and there we found no other than Selim awaiting our arrival. He was disappointed when I failed to register surprise at seeing him.

“It was logical,” I explained. “Once I learned of the motorcar. I am pleased, Emerson, that you didn’t insist on driving it yourself.”

“I had a number of reasons for bringing Selim along, all of them excellent, and all of them, you will claim, obvious to you. Let us not waste time discussing the subject. Is the car ready, Selim?”

“Yes, Father of Curses. It is,” Selim said enthusiastically, “a wonderful motorcar. It has -”

“What about supplies?” I asked.

“Everything is in order, Sitt Hakim,” Selim said. He looked doubtfully at the piles of personal luggage I had brought. “I think there will be room.”

There was, but just barely. Nefret and I would have to sit on some of the parcels and put our feet on others. There was not even space on top of the vehicle, where Selim had fastened several long planks.

The whole village gathered to wave good-bye and shout blessings. It would have been impossible to conceal our expedition, whose ostensible purpose was to examine certain ruins in the Sinai. Selim had asked them not to speak of it, and since they all knew about Emerson’s frequent disputes with the Antiquities Department, they assumed we were planning to excavate without official permission. Sooner or later someone would tell the story, as a good joke on the authorities, but as Emerson philosophically remarked, it didn’t matter much; by the time the gossip reached General Murray, it would be too late to stop us.

As an additional precaution we waited until we were well away from the village before we assumed our disguises. Emerson’s consisted of shirt and trousers, an elegant long vest and flowing robe, and, of course, a beard. Instead of a tarboosh or turban, he covered his head with a khafiyeh – the flattering headdress worn by the desert people that frames the face in folds of cloth and is held in place by a twisted cord. It shadowed those distinctive features more effectively than a turban and protected the back of his neck from the sun.

Nefret and I bundled ourselves up in the inconvenient and uncomfortable ensembles worn by Moslem ladies when they travel abroad. Ramses always said that if a disguise is to be successful, it must be accurate in every detail, so Nefret and I were dressed from the skin out in appropriate garments: a shirt and a pair of very full trousers, with a long vest, called a yelek, over them; and over the yelek a gibbeh; and over the gibbeh the additional layers of the traveling costume – a large loose gown called a tob, a face veil that reaches nearly to the feet – and on top of it all a voluminous habarah of black silk which conceals the head and the hands as well as everything else.

Emerson and Selim both stared when Nefret removed the scarf that had covered her head; I had dyed her hair before we left the hotel, and it made quite a difference in her appearance.

“What did you do that for?” Emerson demanded. “Her hair will be covered.”

“Not from other women in the household,” I replied, applying brown coloring to Nefret’s smooth cheeks. “And one must always be prepared for accidents. That red-gold hair is too distinctive.”

Selim nodded and grinned. He was in a state of boyish exuberance, flattered by Emerson’s confidence and looking forward to the adventure. He had not been told of Ramses’s mission, nor of our real purpose. That did not matter. He had complete faith in Emerson – and, I believe I may say, in me – and rather fancied himself as a conspirator.

I can best sum up that journey by saying that camels might have been worse. Without Selim’s expertise and Emerson’s strength we could never have got through. The first part of the trip was not too bad, for the Corps of Engineers had improved the roads from Cairo to the Canal. We crossed it at Kantara, on one of the pontoon bridges, and it was here we met our first and only check by the military. Huddled in the tonneau amid piles of parcels, enveloped in muffling garments that concealed everything except our eyes, Nefret and I waited in suspense while Emerson produced a set of papers and handed them to Selim, who passed them over to the officer. Staring straight ahead, arms folded and brow dark, Emerson was a model of arrogant indignation. He did not move an inch, even when the officer handed the papers back and saluted.

“How did you get those?” I asked, sotto voce.

“I will explain later,” Emerson grunted, as Selim sent the car bumping over the bridge.

We camped that night in a little oasis not far from the road, and a great relief it was to stretch our cramped limbs and remove several layers of clothing.

“We are making excellent time,” Emerson announced, as Selim got a fire started and Nefret and I sat by the little tent he had set up. So far I could not fault Emerson’s arrangements, though I was inclined to attribute some of them to Selim. Emerson would never have thought of the tent. Concealed in its shadow, away from the flickering firelight, we allowed ourselves the luxury of removing not only the face veil and habarah but the tob and gibbeh. The air had cooled rapidly after the sun set, as it always does in the desert.

Selim insisted upon doing the cooking, and while he arranged his pots and pans, Emerson produced the set of papers he had shown the officer. I studied them with a surprise I was unable to conceal. They bore the signature of none other than the high commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate, and testified to the moral character and loyalty of Sheikh Ahmed Mohammed ibn Aziz.

“Where did you get these?” I demanded. “Not from Wingate?”

“Good Gad, no.” Emerson began digging around in the luggage. “What did you do with my pipe?”

“I didn’t do anything with it since I didn’t know you had brought it,” I retorted. “Isn’t a meerschaum out of character?”

“The devil with that,” said Emerson, extracting pipe and tobacco pouch. “As for the papers, you will never guess how I got them.”

“A forger?” inquired Nefret, scanning the papers I had handed her by the light of the flickering flames. “A very skilled forger. You know a good many of them, I expect.”

Emerson went about filling his pipe. “The ones with whom I am acquainted specialize in antiquities,” he replied. “I required a different sort of expertise. So I paid a visit to Ibrahim el-Gharbi.”

“The procurer?” I gasped. “But, Emerson, you called him -”

“A vile trafficker in human flesh. A good phrase, that,” said Emerson, puffing. “According to Ramses, el-Gharbi can be useful if one takes everything he says with a strong seasoning of skepticism, and he has connections with every illegal business in Cairo. At the moment he is open to reason. He wants to get out of that prison camp.”

“I hope you didn’t promise you would arrange his release in exchange for these papers,” I said severely. “The end does not justify the means.”

“I made no promises” was the evasive reply. “But we owe the rascal, Peabody. It was through el-Gharbi, or rather one of his sources, that I was able to – er – acquire the motorcar. He also gave me the name of the man who forges official papers for him, and a chit telling him to comply with my request. Good, aren’t they?”

“Let us hope all our difficulties will be so easily solved,” I said.

“Don’t be such a pessimist, Peabody,” said Emerson. “Aren’t you the one who keeps telling me to enjoy the moment, without worrying about what the future may bring? What could be more enjoyable than this?”

I could have mentioned quite a number of things, but it was pleasant to sit round the fire with the fresh breeze of the desert cooling our faces and the blazing stars of the desert shining down. The infinite eyes of God – and nowhere in that vast wasteland to hide from them.

Fortunately my conscience was perfectly clear.

It was to be our last peaceful hour for several days. From Romani on, the road surface worsened, and we encountered a great deal of traffic. Heavy lorries lumbered past, loaded with supplies; troops of soldiers plodded through the sand. They gave us curious glances, but no one ventured to address us. The magnificent presence of Emerson, his nose jutting out from the spreading blackness of his beard, was imposing enough to win respect, and the presence of two veiled females forbade interference. The men had been warned to leave Moslem women strictly alone. Squeezed uncomfortably in our nest of baggage, Nefret and I looked enviously at the troops of cavalry that occasionally contested our right of way. Most of them were Australians or New Zealanders, and a splendid-looking lot of men they were.

It was after we passed el-Arish, the farthest advance of the railroad, that the real trouble began. Men were working on the tracks and our unusual group had begun to attract undesirable attention. Emerson, who thinks he knows everything – and usually does – declared he knew of another path that would lead us through the Wadi el-Arish and into Palestine from the southwest.

There had been fighting at Maghdaba, some twenty miles west of el-Arish, and the ground was strewn with the debris of battle, including the pathetic remains of horses and camels. After the second tire blew I began to worry about supplies. We were down to our last three cans of petrol, and the water was running low. The bed of the wadi was rough but not impassable; Selim kept turning and swerving, trying, as I supposed, to avoid the worst bumps. He could not avoid all of them; holding Nefret in a firm embrace, I began to wonder how the devil we were to get out of the cursed canyon. It was one of the longest wadis in the region, stretching all the way down into the desert. Suddenly there was a shout from Emerson.

“There!” he cried, pointing. “Left, Selim.”

I took one appalled look at the slope, littered with boulders, and shrieked, “Stop!”

Selim did, of course. When faced with conflicting orders from Emerson and me, he knew whose command to obey. Emerson turned and shot me an outraged glare. “What’s the matter with you, Peabody? There is no easier way out of the wadi for another five miles, and -”

“Easier? Well, Emerson, I will take your word for it, but I am not going to be bounced up that incline. Nefret and I will ascend on foot. Get out of those clothes, Nefret.”

I began stripping off my own garments as I spoke. Flushed with heat but perfectly composed, Nefret said meekly, “Yes, Mother,” and followed my example.

The men raised all sorts of objections. Emerson declared, “You can’t climb in those clothes!” and Selim, deeply offended, assured us that he was perfectly capable of getting the confounded motorcar up the slope without difficulty. Naturally I ignored these complaints. After fumbling about, I located one of the bundles I had brought and took out two pairs of boots.

“What the devil,” Emerson began.

“I believe in being prepared for all possible contingencies,” I replied. “And as you see, it is as well I was! Hoist up your trousers, Nefret, and tuck the ends into your boots. Now then, I think we can manage; are you ready, my dear?”

Nefret grinned. “As Ramses has often said, you never cease to amaze me, Mother. Yes, I’m ready.”

It was not a difficult climb – there was even a path of sorts, winding back and forth across the slope. We were able to remain upright most of the time, without having to resort to four-limbed progress. When we reached the top we saw before us a baked, barren landscape that shimmered with sunlight; but the hot air dried the perspiration that had coated our bodies, and it was wonderful to be out of those layers of clothing.

Nefret peered down into the wadi. “Selim has backed the car up,” she said. “They see us – the Professor is waving us to get out of the way – they’re coming… Oh dear. I don’t think I can watch.”

It was impossible not to, though. Amid crashes and thumps and the groans of various bits of the machinery, the vehicle thundered up the slope. Even louder than the other noises were the enthusiastic whoops of Emerson, bouncing up and down and grinning from ear to ear. When Selim stopped, on a fairly level stretch of ground, Nefret and I ran toward the car.

“There, you see?” Emerson demanded. “I told you it would be all right.”

“One of the tires is flat,” I remarked.

Emerson waved this aside. “We’ll have it mended in a jiffy.”

Selim managed to mend the tire, despite Emerson’s attempts at advice and assistance. We passed round the water bottle, resumed our costumes, and started again.

I will draw a veil over the succeeding hours. I lost count of the number of times we got stuck in a sand dune. On several occasions Selim was able to back up and go at it again; at other times he had to lay the planks down and Emerson had to push from behind. He had removed all his extraneous garments, and shouted encouragement to Selim as the wheels spun and sent sand spraying over him. His head was bare, his fine linen shirt was torn and smeared with oil; in short, he was having a wonderful time.

As the sun sank westward, it became apparent that we were not going to make it back to the coastal road that day. Bathed in perspiration, muffled in fabric, I was considering methods of murdering Emerson, and perhaps Selim as well, when I saw ahead a few spindly palm trees.

“There it is,” Emerson said happily. “I thought I remembered the location.”

“You thought?” I repeated.

It was not much of an oasis, but there was water, brackish and muddy, but enough to allow us to sponge our faces and limbs. “Your little shortcut has only cost a day,” I remarked, as we sat round the small fire. “So far.”

“We’ll be back on the main road tomorrow,” Emerson said. “And in Khan Yunus by nightfall.”

“So you say.” I looked at Nefret, who was sitting cross-legged on the ground eating sardines out of a tin. “I will have to dye your skin again, Nefret. What with sand and perspiration, most of it is gone. And you, Emerson -”

“What’s wrong with my appearance?” Emerson demanded, running his hand through his beard and sprinkling his sardines with sand.

“Shall I have a disguise, Sitt Hakim?” Selim asked hopefully.

“You might shave your beard,” I said.

Selim went pale and clutched at his treasured beard. I repented my cruelty almost at once. “I was joking, Selim. You are not known in this region; I do not believe a disguise is necessary.”

One can easily comprehend how the Israelites felt when, after toiling through the arid wilderness, they beheld before them the green pastures and fertile fields of the Promised Land. (I did not mention this charming idea to Emerson, since he does not believe in the Exodus and would have given me a long boring lecture about it.)

All was fresh and emerald green, with the brilliant scarlet spots of poppies dotting the landscape. Winter was passing and summer was yet to come; the air was fresh and cool, the sky a cerulean cloudless vault; wildflowers grew in profusion: anemones and lilies, wild purple iris and sweet peas of all shades, from golden yellow to rosy mauve.

Yet the signs of war were everywhere. Every now and again an aircraft would drone overhead, and sometimes its passage was followed by an explosion and a cloud of dust. None of the bombs came close to us, but I was glad of the veil that covered my face. Since that air raid in London I had a tendency to flinch at explosions.

We did not want to spend another night on the road, so we started early and went on with scarcely a pause until late afternoon. As the sun blazoned the western sky with flaming color we came to the outskirts of Khan Yunus. An old city of the Philistines, like Gaza, it was a garden spot indeed, with flowers everywhere and fig and orange trees heavy with fruit. Selim propelled the motorcar skillfully through the narrow streets, and I realized that our arrival would not go unnoticed by the military. Since the enemy had withdrawn without a battle, the town had been spared destruction, and our brave fellows were enjoying the amenities of the suk and the picturesque winding lanes. In the center of the main square, a group of field engineers was at work improving the old well. According to Emerson, Mahmud’s house was on one side of this square.

Unlike the city mansions with which I was acquainted, this one did not face directly onto the street. Instead we saw a high, featureless wall of stone covered with crumbling plaster and a double-leaved door wide enough to be called a gate. Heavy and banded with iron, it stood ajar, and from the litter that had blown up against it I had the impression it had not been closed for quite a while.

Selim got out and shoved at it. Emerson maintained his stately persona, looking neither to right nor left. I leaned forward and spoke softly. “It is an unusual arrangement, Emerson. More like a khan or caravansary. And the gate is wide enough for -”

“Camels,” said Emerson, sotto voce and without turning his head. “Some of the old villain’s caravans carry merchandise that cannot be unloaded in the open street. Be quiet, Peabody, you have not been given permission to speak.”

After shoving with all his strength, Selim got the rusted hinges to move. When the gates creaked open we saw an unpaved courtyard and a group of men, women, naked babies, chickens, goats, and a sheep gathered in the courtyard. All, except for the chickens, stared in stupefaction. Obviously we had not been expected.

They were members of a family that had been charged by Mahmud to look after the place; they had taken advantage of his absence to move in and make themselves at home. Our appearance threw them into a total panic. Emerson’s curses soon sorted them out, and they scattered in all directions to carry out his orders. Once the babies, goats, and sheep had been removed, Selim drove the car into the courtyard and closed the gates. I did not doubt the military authorities would soon be informed of our arrival, and could only hope that Emerson’s forged papers would convince them of our bona fides. There was no use worrying about it. We would deal with unexpected setbacks in our usual efficient fashion.

Straight ahead, forming one side of the courtyard, was the house itself. The living quarters were on the first floor, with storage and work areas underneath. The barred and closely screened windows on one side of the facade must be those of the haremlik; on the other side, stone steps led up to the carved arches of the mak’ad, a reception room that was open to the court so that the owner of the house could see approaching visitors – male visitors. The mak’ad was not used by the women of the household.

Obeying a brusque gesture from Emerson, who was reveling in his role, Nefret and I gathered up our voluminous skirts and went through a side door and up a flight of narrow stairs to the haremlik.

We were followed by several women, squawking like the chickens as they made excuses and offered assistance. I could see I had a long job ahead of me getting the place in proper order. The basic plan was comfortable if somewhat old-fashioned, with a bath chamber and a number of small cubicles surrounding a handsome saloon, or ka’ah, a lofty chamber with an arched ceiling and tiled floor. One end was raised, with rugs covering the floor, and two divans. I cannot describe to persons of fastidious tastes (as my Readers certainly are) the condition of the place. It was all I could do to refrain from rolling up my sleeves and seizing a broom. Since this was impossible, I threw myself into my role as elderly harridan and began shouting out directions. I doubt the flustered females had ever moved so fast. The rugs and cushions were removed to be beaten and fumigated, the floor was swept and scrubbed, the dust and cobwebs covering all the flat surfaces were removed. When the room was habitable, and we had been supplied with a jug of warm water, I sent the whole lot of them off to the bath chamber, assuring them I would come soon to make certain they had cleaned it thoroughly.

Nefret had remained modestly silent; her Arabic was less fluent than mine. I wondered what Ramses would think of the transformation in her appearance. She had darkened her skin a shade or two, and her hair was now a pretty shade of russet brown. The cornflower-blue eyes could not be concealed, but they could be explained by the assumption that she was of light-skinned Circassian or Berber ancestry. There were a good many girls of that complexion in Turkish harems.

“You certainly look like an old man’s darling,” I remarked in French. We had decided it was safer to use that language, even in private conversation, in case we were overheard.

Nefret made a face and plucked at the embroidered gibbeh that covered several other layers of garments. “I don’t smell like one. I’d give anything for a bath and a change of clothing.”

“So would I. It will have to wait. But you may as well remove the gibbeh and freshen up a bit. Curse it, here are some of the women come back.”

They had brought our luggage, including the mats on which I intended we should sit and sleep. Emerson had howled at the amount of baggage I had considered necessary – he would have gone off to Timbuktu with only the clothes on his back – but I absolutely refused to share my bed with the interesting variety of insect life that I had good reason to expect. The women spread the mats over the divans and unpacked a few more things, including my traveling tea set, which included a silver kettle and a spirit lamp. (This had produced a particularly sarcastic string of remarks from Emerson.)

I was preparing an emphatic speech of dismissal for the ladies when the appearance of Emerson spared me that effort. The women at once fled, drawing folds of their garments over their faces, and closed the doors.

Hands on hips, feet apart, Emerson inspected the room and us with a lordly sneer. He looked magnificent! I repressed the thrill of admiration that ran through my limbs, since it was unlikely I could do anything about it for some time. Regret was mitigated by the presence of the beard. It looked splendid, but I knew how it would feel – like a bramble bush.

“Well, this is very pleasant,” he remarked.

“French, Emerson,” I said.

“Merde,” said Emerson, whose command of that language is limited. He does know most of the swearwords, though.

“I have ordered dinner to be brought here,” he went on. “It is a condescension on my part, but I am an uxorious, indulgent husband. You will serve me kneeling, of course.”

“Don’t get carried away, Emerson,” I warned.

“En français, ma chérie, s’il vous plaît,” said Emerson, grinning broadly. He went on in his version of that language, with occasional lapses into English when his vocabulary failed him. “Selim is in a condition because of the motorcar. He injured the – er – bonnet when he passed it between the gate.”

Through the window I could hear Selim’s voice, raised in vehement commentary, and understood enough to comprehend that he was trying to sort out the servant situation. I deduced that dinner would be late.

“Well, we are here,” I remarked, “and although some of our habits will undoubtedly strike the servants as peculiar, they won’t think much about it. But how is Ramses to reach us? He can’t come here as himself.”

“He knows that,” Emerson said. “Give the boy credit.”

“We must do something about the mashrabiya screens, Emerson. I cannot see an infernal thing out the window.”

“Vous êtes en la harem, ma chérie,” said Emerson, smirking. “Les dames non pouvait – pourraint – (curse it!) voir dans le aperture.”

I understood his meaning, despite his atrocious grammar. Some of our windows opened onto the courtyard; it would not have been proper for strangers to see a woman looking out.

After his little exercise of wit, Emerson admitted we would be well advised to get the screens loose, so that we would have warning of unexpected visitors. It took all three of us to do the job, since we did not want to remove them entirely. With the aid of strips of fabric cut from the hangings, we managed to secure them so they would not flap but could be opened without difficulty.

Dinner finally arrived. It was very bad, so I assumed Selim had not been able to find a skilled cook. We ate sitting cross-legged round the platter of rice and mutton. Though mats had been placed in the adjoining cubicles, we decided to spend the night in the ka’ah. What the servants thought of this I cannot imagine (or rather, I prefer not to imagine). Emerson considered it best that we should not separate, however.

Next morning Selim, now in undisputed charge of the household, relegated the extraneous members of the family to the house they had originally occupied, and went off to hire several more servants, including a cook. The patriarch of the small clan we retained in the post of doorkeeper.

After breakfast (warmed-up rice and mutton) Emerson went out to visit the coffeeshops and listen to the local gossip. I saw no reason why we could not have visited the suk, properly veiled and escorted, but Emerson declared it would be an unnecessary risk, and Nefret produced an even more conclusive argument.

“What if he should come while we were out?”

She was right, but the morning dragged on, with nothing to do except bully the servants and familiarize ourselves with the rooms of the harem. We were able to bathe for the first time since we had left Cairo, and a great relief it was.

In the course of my exploration, I discovered several secret passages with peepholes in the walls, used by the master to spy on his women. Many of the older mansions in the region had such devices, as well as escape tunnels and hidden rooms. There were three of the latter in the haremlik, two mere cubbyholes in the wall and the third a large hiding place under the floor. The trapdoor covering it was concealed by matting. It had been designed for hiding objects, not people, since it was less than four feet high and there was no means of ventilation, and it was, as I had expected, empty. Mahmud would not have left anything of value.

Emerson returned with nothing to report, except that the town was full of soldiers, which we already knew. We were lingering over luncheon when there were sounds of a disturbance without. Emerson hurried to the door; when it opened I heard someone say in Arabic, “There is a person here, lord – I could not keep him away -”

Emerson let out a strangled cough, and a voice I knew well murmured deprecatingly, “Lord, your slave begs your mercy, it is not his fault he did not come before this, he was detained by the cursed British and made to dig holes – see, see how his hands are bleeding!”

A thump followed, as if of knees hitting the floor.

My curiosity could not be contained. Nefret was already at the door, peeping out.

Emerson stood staring down openmouthed at the form crouching at his feet. Ramses’s curly black head was bare and what I could see of his skin was almost as dark as his hair. I could see quite a lot of it.

His voice rose in a wail. “They took my clothes, lord, the fine clothing you gave me, my gibbeh and my sudarayee and my tarboosh and my shoes, and my -”

“God curse them,” said Emerson, recovering himself. “Come in, then, and tell me.”

Ramses straightened, smirking like a favored servant who has talked his way out of a beating; but the old man who had escorted him there croaked, “Into the harem, Effendi?”

Emerson drew himself up and skewered the presumptuous fellow with a fierce stare. “Did not the Prophet say, when he brought to his daughter the gift of a male slave, that she need not veil herself, for there was none present save her father and a slave?”

This interesting theological reference may have been too abstruse for the servant, but Emerson’s stare got the point across. “Come,” he added to Ramses.

Nefret and I quickly retreated from the door and Emerson propelled Ramses through it with a hard shove. “Now,” he said loudly, in Arabic, “make your excuses to your mistress.”

He slammed the door and Ramses looked quizzically from me to Nefret. “Which?”

“Me,” Nefret said breathlessly. “I’m the new favorite, aren’t I?”

“Speak French,” I said warningly.

Neither of them heard me, I believe. Nefret was staring at him as if she had never seen him before – which, in a way, she had not, for to the best of my knowledge this was a new role for Ramses, and when Ramses played a part he did it thoroughly. He was wearing only a pair of dirty cotton drawers and he had stained his body a rich dark brown. I observed several raw marks across his bare back, and remembered that I had heard one of the officers explain that “a few cuts of the whip” were advisable when dealing with recalcitrant members of the Labour Corps.

Nefret had seen them too. She let out a little cry and threw herself into his arms.

They made a picturesque tableau as they clung to one another, framed by the pointed arch of the alcove – his dark, muscular body and her slender, yielding form in its gold-embroidered blue velvet gibbeh. “Story pictures” were popular with a certain school of painting, and it was not difficult to think of a title for this one. “The Slave and the Sultan’s Favorite,” or “A Tryst with Death,” or -

Emerson let out a sound rather like one the sultan might have made if he had come upon such a scene, and the two drew apart.

“Careless,” I said softly. “I stopped up several peepholes in the walls, but I doubt I found them all.”

Ramses dropped to his knees in front of me and clasped his hands. “Your forgiveness, honored lady.”

“Yes, all right, just don’t do it again.” I added, just as softly, “I, too, am relieved to see you, my dear. What next?”

“I can’t stay. You had better send me on an errand – and find me some clothes,” he added, looking up at me with a smile. His thin dark face and cheerful grin and the curls clustering untidily round his forehead filled me with a strong desire to shake him. Men actually enjoy this sort of thing! So do I, if truth be told, but only when I am allowed to take an active part. It is the waiting I find so difficult, particularly when one waits for news of a loved one.

“When will we see you again?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I am to rendezvous with Chetwode this evening and go on to Gaza with him. Two days, perhaps three. I’ll come here as soon as we’ve finished the job, I promise.”

He kissed my hands and my feet and rose. “Is there a bab-sirr?” he asked Emerson. “I may want to use it next time.”

“A secret door? Oh, yes. Mahmud has too many enemies to do without that little convenience. I’ll show you, and get you some clothes.”

Ramses nodded. He turned to his wife. She stood as still as a prettily dressed doll, lips parted and braceleted arms folded over her breast. Ramses knelt and bowed his head.

“Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It will be all right.”

She put out her hand, as if to touch his hair, but stopped herself in time. “Come straight here after…”

“As soon as I can.” He took her hands and raised them to his lips.

FROM MANUSCRIPT H

Ramses hadn’t told her the part that worried him most. He shared that information with his father, as they tried to find him something to wear.

“I met Chetwode in Rafah, as we had arranged. He’s not awfully good at this sort of thing; his jaw dropped down to his chest when a filthy ‘Gyppie’ edged up to him and gave him the word we’d agreed upon.”

“Curse it,” said Emerson. “Can’t you go off on your own – leave him behind?”

“They’d stop me before I got out of Khan Yunus. You haven’t heard the worst of it. General Chetwode, the commander of the Desert Column, is our lad’s uncle. I was dragged off to his office, where I was required to report to him and his chief of field intelligence.”

“Hell and damnation! Who else knows about your ‘secret’ mission?”

“God knows.” Ramses picked up a shirt, grinned, and put it aside. “Mother would say He does. If the word has come down the chain of command, Chetwode’s superior Dobell must also have been informed. There’s nothing here I can use, Father.”

“What about that parcel you asked me to bring along?”

“I’ll take it with me, but I don’t want to wear those things in Khan Yunus. Selim must have a change of clothing he’ll lend me.”

“You mean to let him in on this?” Emerson asked.

“How much does he know?”

“Only that we are obviously bent on mischief of some sort. Selim doesn’t ask questions.”

“He deserves to be told – some of it, at any rate. It’s a poor return for his friendship and loyalty to be treated as if he were not completely trustworthy. Especially,” Ramses added bitterly, “when every idiot and his bloody uncle knows. I think Selim may have spotted me when I arrived; he gave me a very fishy look when I was arguing with the doorman.”

Selim had spotted him, but not, as he was careful to explain, because of any inadequacy in Ramses’s disguise. “Who else could it be, though?” he demanded. “I do not ask questions of the Father of Curses, but I expected you would join the others sooner or later.”

“You must have wondered what this is all about, though.” The clothes Selim had given him would suit well enough; Arab garments were not designed to be form-fitting.

Selim folded his arms and said stiffly, “It is not my place to wonder.”

Ramses grinned and slapped him on the back. “You sound exactly like your father. I and another man are going into Gaza, Selim. There have been rumors about a certain Ismail Pasha – that he’s a British agent who has gone over to the enemy. Since I am, er, acquainted with the gentleman in question, they are sending me to get a look at Ismail and find out whether the rumors are true.”

“Acquainted,” Selim repeated. “Ah. Is it possible, Ramses, that I am also, er, acquainted with him?”

“You can’t go with me,” Ramses said. He hadn’t answered the question. Selim accepted this with a shrug and a nod, and Ramses went on, “Thank you for the clothes. I’ll try to return them in good condition.”

“Tonight’s the night, then,” Emerson said.

“Yes. Chetwode – our Chetwode – and I are meeting after nightfall in an abandoned house in Dir el Balah, just north of here. I hope to God he can find it. It will take me a while to get there by roundabout ways, since I don’t want to be recruited by some lad looking for laborers. I had better go. Do you want to send me on my way with a few curses and kicks, Selim?”

Selim did not return his smile. “If you say I should. Be careful. Do not take foolish chances.”

“As your father would have said. I’ll try not to. Watch over them, Selim.”

Chetwode was late. He stood squinting into the darkness of the half-ruined building, his form outlined against the starry sky. Ramses waited only long enough to make sure the other man was alone before he moved out of the shadows.

“Didn’t they teach you not to make a target of yourself in an open doorway?” he asked caustically.

“Since it was you -”

“You hoped it was me. Get out of that uniform and put these on.”

He made certain he had covered Chetwode’s face, neck, hands, and forearms with the dark dye, and got all his hair concealed under the turban. There wasn’t anything he could do about the blue eyes that looked trustingly into his, but when the boy grinned, cheerful as a hound pup, the expanse of healthy white teeth was another reason to remind him to keep his mouth shut. Patiently Ramses went over it again.

“If anybody speaks to you, drool and babble and bob your head. Idiots are under the protection of God. Stick close to me…” He hesitated, gripped by one of those illogical premonitions – or maybe it wasn’t so illogical, under the circumstances. “Stick close unless I tell you otherwise. If I tell you to run, do it, without arguing and without looking back. That’s an order. If you disobey I’ll see that you face a court-martial.”

“But if we’re separated -”

“I’ll find you if I can. If I can’t, you’ll have to make your own way back to our lines. Don’t wait for me or go looking for me.”

Chetwode’s face was as easy to read as a page of print. Some of the sentences read: “One doesn’t abandon a comrade.” “You can count on me, old chap, to the death.” Or something equally trite. Ramses sighed and offered another cliché. “One of us has to get back with the information we’ve collected. We know we’re laying our lives on the line; that is part of the job.”

Chetwode’s tight lips parted. “Oh. Yes, that’s right. You can count on me, old chap -”

“Good. One more thing. Hand over that pistol.”

Ramses had every intention of searching him if he denied carrying a weapon, but the young fool didn’t even try to bluster it out. His hand flew to his waist.

“What if we have to shoot it out?” he demanded.

“If it comes to that, we’ll have a hundred men shooting back at us. Hand it over, or I’ll leave you behind.”

Chetwode looked from his stern face to his clenched fist and got the point. Slowly and reluctantly he unbuckled the belt fastened round his waist under his shirt and gave it and the holster to Ramses.

Ramses removed the shells and added the empty gun to the pile of abandoned clothing, which he covered with a few loose stones. “Now shut up and watch where you’re going.”

The boy wouldn’t shut up. He’d memorized the directions that Ramses had ignored, since he didn’t need them, and kept up a breathless, whispered monologue: “Keep to the north until the mosque bears 132; bearing 266 till we come to the edge of a bog… is this… Oh, hell.”

Ramses hauled him out. “One more word and I’ll sink you back into the muck. We’re within a hundred feet of the Turkish trenches. Don’t open your mouth again until I tell you you may.”

“Sorry.” He closed his mouth and nodded vigorously. The starlight reflected in his eyes.

Ramses turned and led them along the edge of the bog. The boy followed so close he kept treading on Ramses’s heels. I shouldn’t have allowed this, Ramses thought in silent fury. Goddamn Murray and Cartright and the rest of them; the kid’s doing his best, but I would spot him a mile away, even if he were standing still with his face hidden. It was that “Lords of Creation” look, shoulders stiff and jaw squared – drilled into them from childhood, and almost impossible to eradicate.

The Turks had ringed the city round with trenches and breastworks. An intricate network of cactus hedges provided an additional defense. The series of ridges that ran from Gaza eastward to Beersheba were also fortified, but they had no trouble getting through. The defenders knew no attack was imminent; reconnaissance planes would have warned them of such preparations, even if they had not had busy little spies reporting back to Turkish HQ. The area between Gaza and Khan Yunus was peaceful. People came and went, tilling the fields, carrying produce to the British encampments, engaging in all the mercantile activities that spring up when new customers are available. It would have been impossible to keep tabs on all of them.

Once over the ridge, Ramses led his companion in a wide circle that brought them to a guard post just as the sun was rising. Chetwode had protested; he wanted to crawl romantically through the barbed wire and the cactus hedges.

“It’s too hard on one’s clothes,” Ramses said shortly. He had learned from experience – and from that master thief, his uncle – that the best way of getting into a place where you weren’t supposed to be was to walk boldly up and demand entrance. He had supplied himself with a convincing story – a sick, aged mother awaiting him, enough money to arouse cupidity without arousing suspicion, and a few bags of a substance he expected would serve better than money. Hashish wasn’t hard to come by in Turkish areas, but the best varieties were expensive.

The noncommissioned officer in charge of the post didn’t believe the pathetic story about the dying mother. Ramses had not expected he would; they then proceeded to the next stage of negotiation, which left him without a certain percentage of his money and his merchandise. It wasn’t an outrageously high percentage; the NCO knew that if his victim started howling protests, it would have brought an officer to investigate – and demand his share.

Ramses had been in Gaza only once, in the summer of 1912, but he knew the place fairly well; he’d spent several days wandering around, enjoying the amenities of the suk and admiring the fine old mosques and making a brief, informal survey of the ancient remains, since he knew his father would expect one. There weren’t many. For almost four thousand years the area between the Sinai and the Euphrates had been fought over, conquered and reconquered, destroyed and rebuilt. Egyptians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Saracens, and Crusaders had occupied Gaza in turn. It had been one of the five cities of the Philistines, the site of the great temple of Dagon, pulled down by Samson in his last and mightiest feat. (He’d got that information from his mother; his father didn’t give much credence to anything in Scripture unless it could be confirmed by archaeological sources.) The most recent conquest had been by the Ottoman Sultan, Selim the First, in the sixteenth century; in revenge for the city’s stubborn resistance he had let his troops sack and destroy a large part of it. However, by 1912 Gaza had become a prosperous town with almost forty thousand inhabitants. The population had spilled out beyond the walls, to north and south and east; the central city, raised on the accumulated debris of various levels of destruction, contained the administrative and commercial buildings, as well as the homes of wealthier citizens.

On the hill that rose from the center of the upper town stood the Great Mosque, formerly a Christian church built in the twelfth century. He had spent an enjoyable afternoon admiring the carvings and the magnificent gray marble columns. It was now being used as a powder magazine.

So much for the Great Mosque, Ramses thought. So much for the other architectural treasures of Gaza – the little church of St. Porphyry, an exquisite example of early Christian architecture, the beautiful ancient mosque of Hashim, even the remains of the old walls and their seven gates. Modern weapons were much more efficient than the older variety. One well-placed shell and the Great Mosque, with its delicate octagonal minaret, would be gone.

And so would hundreds, maybe thousands, of people.

The suk appeared to be as prosperous as ever, with stalls selling everything from handmade lace and the fine black pottery of the region to a variety of mouthwatering fruits and nuts and vegetables, whose discarded rinds and husks littered the ground. Ramses found a popular café, squatted genteelly, and ordered mint tea. The habitués were an inquisitive lot; they put him through a merciless but friendly interrogation, not leaving off until they had determined his name, place of origin, business, and ancestry, and had commiserated with him on the condition of his poor young brother. “He has blue eyes,” said one observant man.

“His mother was Circassian,” Ramses explained. “My father’s favorite, until she died giving birth to him. My mother…”

It did not take long for Ramses to establish his bona fides as a seller of desirable merchandise. The town was full of men in uniform, strutting through the street with the arrogance of Europeans among natives. The most loquacious of their newfound friends, a middle-aged man with only one eye and a stump where his right hand had been, had a few pungent epithets for the Germans. “But,” he added, “they are no worse than the Turks. God curse this war! Whoever wins we will be the losers. If Gaza is defended, our homes and livelihoods will be destroyed.”

It was a good opening, and Ramses took advantage of it. His questions and comments brought out a spate of information, much of it highly inaccurate, and some more accurate descriptions of various public figures. Von Kressenstein, the German commander, was feared but respected; the governor was feared and loathed; the Turkish general was a fat pig who did nothing but sit in his fine house and eat. And so it went, until dusk grayed the sky and the party dispersed.

Ramses and Chetwode spent the night in the picturesque ruins of what was locally known as Samson’s tomb – actually a structure dating from the Middle Ages. Moonlight filtering through the broken walls and roof made baroque patterns on the ground, and the leaves of the ancient olive trees rustled in the night wind. As they ate the food purchased in the bazaar, Chetwode enlivened the meal with questions. He hadn’t had a chance to talk all day, and it must be wearing on him.

“You didn’t ask about Ismail Pasha,” he said accusingly.

“One tries to avoid asking direct questions.” Ramses tossed away a handful of orange peel and stretched out on the ground. “In this case it wasn’t necessary. You were there; didn’t you hear what they said about him?”

“Everybody was talking too fast,” Chetwode said sullenly. “Anyhow, it’s your job to locate the fellow.”

The hero worship was wearing thin. Ramses couldn’t have said why he was reluctant to share this bit of news; old habit, perhaps, or one of the Secret Service’s basic rules: Don’t tell anyone more than he needs to know. Maybe Chetwode did need to know this, if only to keep him from doing something impulsive.

“The holy infidel, as they call him, is going to pray at the mosque of Hashim tomorrow at midday,” Ramses explained. “There will be quite a crowd, I expect. We’ll go early and find a place where we can get a good long look at him.”

“And then?”

“Then we make a quick and, let us hope, unobtrusive exit from Gaza.”

“After only two days? Without – without doing anything?”

Ramses tried to hold on to his temper. Being responsible for this ingenuous youth was nerve-racking enough without having to deliver lectures on espionage. “You hadn’t planned on an indefinite stay, had you? We have to assume that there are certain people here who keep tabs on newcomers. One of our amiable acquaintances at the coffeeshop could be an agent of the governor or the military.”

“Really?”

“That’s how the Turks operate. They don’t trust anyone, and with good reason. They aren’t well liked in these parts. Sooner or later our presence will be known, and some bright soul may decide it would be a good idea to question us. Then there are the press gangs. They’re always looking for recruits. One more day is all we can risk.” He yawned and wondered why he was bothering. “Get some rest.”

“As soon as I finish this.”

Ramses sat up with a start. Chetwode squatted by the ruined arch of the entrance, scribbling busily by moonlight on what appeared to be a folded piece of paper. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Making notes. I didn’t recognize all the insignia of the men we saw, but if I describe them, our people can get a good idea which units -”

“Eat it.”

“What?”

“Get rid of the goddamn paper!” Chetwode stared blankly at him. He got to his feet. “If you were caught and they found that on you, you’d be dead. Or wish you were. What other incriminating objects are you carrying?”

He snatched the paper from Chetwode. Hastily, eyes wide, the boy took a pouch from the breast of his robe. It contained sheets of paper, several pencils, a small pocket torch, and a tiny bottle containing two white pills.

“Christ, I should have searched you before we left,” Ramses muttered, as he shredded the papers and stamped on the neatly sharpened pencils. “What’s in the bottle? Cyanide, no doubt. The Secret Service loves cyanide.”

“But if we’re caught -”

“We had better be able to talk our way out of it, which we could not do if we were carrying British-made writing materials. As for these…” He ground the innocent-looking pills under his heel. “Were you planning to ask the governor’s head torturer to hang on a minute while you fished round in your pouch for the bottle, opened it, and popped the pills into your mouth?”

Chetwode’s head drooped. “It does sound ridiculous, when you put it that way. They told me -”

“Yes, all right. Look here, there are a number of ways we could have gone about this, including your uncle’s idiotic suggestion that we wear captured Turkish uniforms and march into their headquarters demanding information.”

“I don’t see why -”

“Then I’ll tell you why.” Ramses lost the remains of his temper. “It’s a miracle you haven’t already been spotted. If I were picked up and questioned, they would probably do nothing worse than send me to the trenches, from which I would soon remove myself. If they caught you, it wouldn’t take a trained officer more than ten seconds to identify you as an Englishman. It’s not just your accent, it’s the way you stand, and sit, and move and… everything about you!”

Chetwode bowed his head. “I didn’t know I was that bad.”

“All of you are. It’s not your fault,” he added, more kindly. “To pass convincingly as a native of the area, you have to live there and think in the language for years. This is the safest way, and I’m trying to minimize the risks. You’ve done fine so far, but you’ll have to follow my orders and keep your notes in your head.”

“Like you? All that” – he gestured at the scattered bits of paper – “was a waste of time, wasn’t it? You’ve got it memorized.”

He was back to the hero worship. It was almost worse than his brief attempts at independent thinking. But not as dangerous. Ramses shrugged. “It’s a matter of practice.”

“A little late for me to start now, I guess.” He looked up with a rueful smile. “Sorry. I’ll do everything you say from now on.”

“Then get some sleep.”

Chetwode couldn’t keep quiet even when he slept. He snored. Lying awake, his hands under his head, Ramses was tempted to kick him, but his better nature prevailed. Let the fellow sleep. He wished he could. The night noises here weren’t the same as the ones at home; his nerves twitched at every rustle in the weeds. Since sleep was impossible, he went over and over the conversations he had held that day, picking them apart, looking for hints he might have missed.

He got a little sleep, but not much, what with Chetwode’s snores and the need to listen for suspicious sounds. At daybreak he roused his companion. Chetwode was uncharacteristically silent – sulking or brooding, or maybe fighting an attack of cold feet, for which Ramses wouldn’t have blamed him.

Suddenly Chetwode said, “What if something goes wrong?”

“I told you. Run.”

“That’s not much of a plan,” Chetwode said. His mouth twitched. Perhaps he was trying to smile.

Ramses came to a decision. One of the many worries that had prevented him from sleeping was the thought of his anxious family, waiting in Khan Yunus.

“If you make it out and I’m caught or killed,” he said, “go to the house of Ibn Rafid in Khan Yunus. It’s on the main square, the largest house in town – anyone can show you which it is. Leave a written message for…” He realized he didn’t know the name Emerson was currently using. “For the present master of the house, telling him what happened to me.”

“Is he one of us?” Chetwode asked.

“No.” The boy’s curiosity made him wonder if he’d done the right thing. The alternative would have been worse, though – leaving them in ignorance of his fate, possibly for days. They might even decide to invade Gaza looking for him. None of them was noted for patience; and if the worst happened, certain knowledge was better than false hope.

Chetwode asked no further questions.

After they had finished the bread and fruit left over from the previous night, Ramses led the other man on a circuitous route back toward the center of town. The mosque was near the Askalon Gate. Ramses found a coffeeshop – not the one they had visited the previous day – and they settled down to wait.

As the morning wore on, the cafés filled and people began to gather. It lacked half an hour till midday when the procession appeared. It was small but impressive, headed by half a dozen mounted men wearing baggy trousers and jackets heavy with tarnished gilt, and silken sashes wound round their waists. They were armed with long swords and pistols. The horses were splendid animals, their bridles and stirrups of silver. Not Turkish regulars; the personal guard of some important official. They cleared the way brutally but effectively, using the flats of their swords. Since he was a head taller than most of the spectators, Ramses could see reasonably well; there seemed to be another group of guards at the end of the procession. Between the guards were several horsemen: the governor, flashing with gold, his fleshy face set in a look of conscious piety; and, next to him, flanked by two officers in Turkish uniform…

Ramses got only a glimpse of a bearded profile and prominent, hawklike nose, before a gun went off, so close to his ear, it momentarily deafened him. He spun round and struck the weapon out of Chetwode’s hand. The second shot went wild.

“You goddamned fool!”

Chetwode’s lips moved. Ramses couldn’t hear what he said; the people around them were screaming and shoving, some of them trying to reach the would-be assassin, others – the wiser majority – scampering for safety. There was no such thing as an innocent bystander in the eyes of Ottoman officials.

“Run!” Ramses yelled, and emphasized the order with a shove. Chetwode gave him a wild-eyed stare and dashed off. Ramses tripped one of the avengers who were closing in, knocked another one down, ducked under the outstretched arms of a third, and set out at a run toward the mosque.

“That’s the man! Stop him!” someone shouted in Turkish. He heard the pound of hoofbeats behind him and threw himself aside in time to avoid being ridden down, but the brief delay was fatal. When he got to his feet he was surrounded by the gaudily uniformed guard, all heroically brandishing their swords.

“No weapons,” the officer ordered. “Take him alive.”

Ramses considered his options. He could only think of two, and neither held much appeal. He could cringe and whine and deny guilt, or he could take on six men. It would end the same in either case, so he decided to give himself the satisfaction of hitting someone.

He had two of them on the ground and a third on his knees, when a missile skimmed the side of his head, hard enough to throw him off balance for a vital moment. Flat on his back, with four of them pinning his arms and legs, he reconsidered his options. There didn’t seem to be any.

The officer raked his men with a scornful eye. “Six against one, and it took a lucky throw from a safe distance to bring him down. Tie his hands, my brave fellows, or he may yet escape you.”

Not much chance of that, Ramses knew. The blow on the head had left him slightly giddy and there was blood trickling down his face. After they had bound his hands behind him, one of them looped a rope round his neck and fastened it to the leader’s saddle. Wonderful. One slip, on any of the scraps of rotting fruit that littered the street, and he’d be dragged, choking, until the officer decided to stop. The only positive feature in an otherwise gloomy situation was that Chetwode was nowhere in sight.

Hot sunlight beat down on the deserted square. No – not quite deserted. The onlookers had fled and the guard must have escorted the dignitaries to safety, but from the opposite side of the square a rider was coming slowly toward them. Ramses stared, hoping his eyes had deceived him, knowing they hadn’t. He’d believed his situation couldn’t be any worse. He had been wrong.

The rider had only a single escort, a servant who followed at a respectful distance. His mount was superb – a roan stallion, his tail and mane braided with bright ribbons. He was an impressive specimen, too, a tall, heavily built man with finely cut features and a neat gray beard. His robes were of silk and on the front of his turban was a jewel of rubies and emeralds, surmounted by a white egret feather. Even the whip he held had a jeweled, enameled handle. He pulled up next to Ramses and acknowledged the officer’s respectful salute with a casual movement of his hand.

“What is this?” he asked in Turkish.

“As you see, Sahin Pasha. We have captured the assassin.”

So now he’s a pasha, Ramses thought. What was the head of the Turkish secret service doing in Gaza? His first and – he had hoped – last encounter with this formidable individual had ended in the failure of Sahin’s mission; it wouldn’t be surprising if he bore a grudge against the man who had been partially responsible. Ramses could only pray the Turk wouldn’t recognize him. He was bareheaded, having lost his khafiyeh during the fight, but in his filthy torn robes, bearded and disheveled, he bore little resemblance to the man Sahin had last seen – disheveled, admittedly, but clean-shaven and in European clothing. He cringed and ducked his head.

“We are taking him to His Excellency the Kaimakam,” the officer went on.

“The governor? Why?”

“Because – because – why, because he is an assassin! One of those fanatics who would rebel against our benevolent rule, who -”

“No,” Sahin said. The handle of the whip caught Ramses under the chin and forced his head up. The Turk studied him thoughtfully for a few seconds. Then he leaned down and with a powerful jerk pulled the beard off, taking several square inches of skin with it. Ramses straightened and met the Turk’s inquiring gaze. He was in for it now.

“Ah,” Sahin Pasha said, and smiled. “I relieve you of your prisoner, Bimbashi.”

“But, Your Excellency -

“He is an English spy. Espionage is my department, Bimbashi. Do you question my authority?” He beckoned his servant, who dismounted and untied the rope from the officer’s saddle.

The officer didn’t like what was happening. A direct refusal was more than he dared risk, but he ventured to protest. “You will need an escort, Excellency. He fights like a demon. It took six of my men -”

“No need for that,” Sahin said affably. He raised his arm and brought the whip handle down.

10

FROM MANUSCRIPT H (CONTINUED)

It was a very pleasant dream. The surface on which he lay was soft and faintly perfumed. Above him arched a golden canopy – yellow silk, gilded by sunlight streaming through the gathered folds. He could hear birdsong and the crystalline tinkle of water.

The only discordant note was a headache of stupendous proportions. He raised his hand to his temple, and a familiar voice said, “Try this. I do not indulge, of course, but I keep it for certain of my guests.”

It wasn’t a dream. Ramses sat up. A few feet away, cross-legged on a pile of tasseled cushions, Sahin held out a glass half-filled with an amber liquid.

Ramses started to shake his head and thought better of it. “No, thank you,” he mumbled in Turkish – the same language the other man had used.

“It is not drugged. But, as you like.” His host placed the glass on a brass tray and reached for the mouthpiece of his water pipe. He smoked contentedly for a time, for all the world like a courteous host waiting for his guest to get his wits back.

It took a while. When the Turk’s blow had landed, sinking him into unconsciousness, Ramses expected he would wake up in a dark, verminous cell, with various people holding various sharp, heavy, or red-hot implements. This room was airy and bright, probably the mandarah, the principal chamber where guests were received. The central part of the room was several inches lower than the rest, tiled in tasteful patterns of red and black and white, with a small fountain at one end. The alcove in which he was now sitting was draped with silk and floored with cushions. He was wearing only a shirt and drawers; they had removed his stained robe and dirty sandals, and cleaned the worst of the muck off his body. One wouldn’t want those satin cushions smeared with rotten fruit and donkey dung.

“I regret the necessity of that,” Sahin said, as Ramses explored the lump on his head with cautious fingers. “I knew you would not come willingly, and resistance might have caused you serious injury.”

“How can I ever thank you?” Ramses inquired, slipping into English. The Turk laughed aloud.

“It is a pleasure to match wits with you again, my young friend. I was delighted to hear that against all my expectations you had survived that interesting affair outside Cairo, but I am uncertain as to the details. How did you manage it?”

Ramses considered the question. It was loaded with potential pitfalls, and the genial conversational tone, the comfortable surroundings, were designed to lower his guard. A new interrogation technique? He preferred it to the methods the Turks usually employed, but he would have to be careful.

“My affectionate family came to the rescue,” he said, feeling certain that this information must have reached Sahin’s ears. “You know my father.”

“By reputation only. It is a formidable reputation. I hope one day to have the honor of meeting him. So he heard of your – er – dilemma – from your friend, whom I did not succeed in killing after all? I might have done, had you not spoiled my aim.”

“Possibly.”

Sahin drew the smoke deep into his lungs. “You also spoiled a pretty little scheme which had been long in the making. What are you after now? Why are you here?”

“Just having a look round.”

“I do admire the imprecision of the English language,” Sahin said. “So useful when one wishes to avoid answering a question.”

“Would you prefer to speak Turkish? I don’t find it as easy to equivocate in that language.”

Sahin’s beard parted, showing his teeth. “I think you could equivocate in any language, my boy. In this case, it is a waste of time. You were caught in the act. A particularly futile act, I might add. In that jostling crowd you had little chance of killing him.”

“I didn’t succeed, did I?”

“You hit the governor,” Sahin said, his smile broadening. “A flesh wound in a particularly awkward place. He’s very annoyed with you.”

No mention of anyone else. Did that mean Chetwode had got away? Good luck to the young fool, Ramses thought sourly. He had only been obeying orders. He put his head in his hands. Thinking about Chetwode worsened his headache.

“What can I offer you?” Sahin asked solicitously. “If you don’t want brandy, what about coffee or mint tea?”

He clapped his hands. The servant who entered was so anxious to show the proper deference, he was bent over at the waist, his face only a few inches from the tray he carried. Obeying a brusque gesture from Sahin, he deposited it on a low table beside Ramses and backed out, still at a right angle. The heavy curtains closed after him. “Please help yourself,” Sahin said. “They have not been drugged.”

Ramses’s throat was painfully dry, and he concluded it would be expedient to accept something. To refuse hospitality was an affront, and it was unlikely Sahin had ordered the drinks to be drugged. And what difference would it make if he had?

So he picked up the glass of tea and sipped it gratefully, holding the hot glass by the rim, while the Turk smoked in pensive silence. Then he said suddenly, “I have a daughter.”

“My felicitations,” Ramses said, wondering what the devil this had to do with anything. “When did the happy event occur?”

“Eighteen years ago.”

“Eighteen -”

“Yes, she should have been married long before this. It is not for lack of offers. She is beautiful, well born, and educated. She speaks and writes English. She is somewhat headstrong, but I believe you prefer women of that sort.” He looked hopefully at Ramses, who had begun to feel like Alice. What sort of rabbit hole had he fallen into? Surely Sahin Pasha didn’t mean… Silence seemed the safest course.

“The war cannot last forever,” the Turk went on. “We will not always be enemies. You have the qualities I would like in a son.”

“But…” Ramses tried to think of a tactful way of refusing this flattering and appalling suggestion. He blurted out, “I’m already married!”

“I know that. But if you were to embrace Islam, you could take another wife. I don’t recommend more. It requires a brave man to manage two women, but three are six times as much trouble as two, and four -”

“You’re joking.”

Sahin’s mouth stretched wider. “Am I? It is in the best tradition of our people and yours – forging an alliance through marriage. Think it over. The alternative is far less attractive.”

“What is the alternative?”

“Surely you need not ask. Imprisonment, a considerable degree of discomfort, and eventually a trip to Constantinople, where you will have to face several persons who know you as one of our most dangerous opponents.” He leaned forward, his face lengthening. “They will execute you, my young friend, publicly and painfully, as an English spy, but before they kill you they will try to find out everything you know. I consider torture an unreliable means of extracting information, but I fear my enlightened views are not shared by the others in my service. I am offering you a chance to escape that fate. You are no assassin. You came here for another reason. I can protect you from a death that will cause your wife and your parents much grief if you confide in me and prove your sincerity by the alliance I have offered. I assure you, the girl is quite presentable.”

Increasingly bewildered, but reminded of his manners, Ramses said, “I am sure she is a pearl of rare beauty and a worthy child of her father. You would think less of me, however, if I betrayed my beliefs and my country for a woman, however desirable.”

“You would not be the first Englishman to do so.”

He fixed Ramses with a steady stare and Ramses considered how to respond. He wasn’t feeling very clever; insane questions kept popping into his head and it was all he could do to keep from blurting them out. “Anybody I know?” or “You wouldn’t be referring to my uncle, would you?” He wondered if there had been some drug in the tea after all, or if it was only the blow on the head that was clouding his thinking. Sahin couldn’t be serious. He was playing some sort of game and Ramses hadn’t the foggiest notion what he was really after.

“There have been several,” Ramses began. His voice echoed oddly inside his head. He tried to put the glass down. It tipped, spilling the rest of the tea across the floor. “Was that really necessary?” he asked thickly.

“A lesson, which you have not yet learned, it seems,” Sahin replied equably. “Never trust anyone’s word. Now come along like a good lad. I don’t want to hurt you.”

He clapped his hands. Two men entered. “Gently, gently,” Sahin crooned, as they pulled Ramses to his feet and half led, half dragged him out of the room, up a few steps and down a few, through the mazelike series of rooms and corridors that were typical of such houses. He was vaguely aware of staring faces, as indistinct as ghosts, and of soft exclamations. Eventually they escorted him down a long flight of stairs. The smell came up to meet him – wet stone, and mold, and the sickly sweetness of something rotten.

There were three doors along the short passage, heavy wood banded with iron. Two were closed. They took him into the third room, a stone-walled box barely six feet square and six high. Rodent bones and a thin layer of straw, liquescent with decay, littered the floor. The cell contained a rough wooden bench along one wall, a few crude earthenware vessels, and several sets of chains held by staples driven deep into floor and wall. Working with silent efficiency, as if they had gone through the procedure many times, the two guards deposited Ramses on the bench. Too dizzy to sit upright, he toppled forward; one of them had to hold him while the other raised his arms and locked the fetters round his wrists. They chained his feet, too, and then left.

“Faugh,” said Sahin Pasha, wrinkling his nose. “It’s even worse than I remembered. This house is a temporary loan, from a colleague of mine; my own prisons are more civilized. I will return in the morning to see if you have changed your mind.”

He drew his elegant robes tightly about him so they wouldn’t touch the filthy wall and backed away. The door slammed shut. The hinges creaked horribly. They would, of course.

Ramses sat with his head bowed, breathing steadily and slowly, hoping he wasn’t going to be sick. Gradually he got his stomach under control and strength began to return to his limbs. Cautiously he tested the fetters. The iron cuffs had simply snapped into place, they could probably be opened without a key, but his hands were a yard apart and each chain was less than six inches long. He entertained himself for a while banging and rubbing the cuffs against the stone wall but succeeded only in scraping his knuckles.

He leaned back, overcoming an instinctive reluctance to touch the slimy stone of the wall. His mother would have added several other adjectives – hard, cold, wet, dank, crawling with curious insects that were gathering to investigate a new source of nourishment. A few of them had already found his feet. He smiled wryly. His mother would also inform him, in that brisk way of hers, that he’d got himself into a pretty mess this time. No weapons, no useful tools concealed in his boots or clothing. They had even found the needle-thin knife he’d hidden under a dirty bandage wrapped round his forearm. And all for nothing. He was no wiser about the identity of “the holy infidel.”

He closed his eyes and summoned up the image of that bearded face and arrogant nose. He had a good visual memory, but he hadn’t seen enough for a positive identification. Remembering the innumerable times he had failed to recognize his exasperating uncle, he had known a single glance wouldn’t be enough. He had counted on being able to observe Ismail longer, watching for a familiar gesture or movement, hearing his voice. The man had been closely guarded, but it might have been a guard of honor. Sahin hadn’t actually confirmed or denied anything, he had only made a few ambiguous references to turncoats.

It had been a restless night and a tiring day. He fell into a waking doze, jerked upright by the pressure of the shackles against his scraped hands whenever deeper sleep loosened his muscles. Dream images floated through his mind: Nefret, first and last and always, her blue eyes tender with concern or blazing with fury – at him, for being stupid enough to fall into this trap. It had been a trap; he had been lied to, used, cold-bloodedly, for the sole purpose of getting that innocent-looking assassin into Gaza. Cartright and his superiors must have known there was a good chance both of them would be caught or killed if Chetwode carried out his orders… The trap, a cage as big as a drawing room, swathed in folds of golden silk that didn’t quite conceal the rusty bars; soft cushions under him, and a girl in his arms, a girl with long black hair that snaked round his hands, and tightened and hardened into fetters.

When he opened his eyes, he thought for a moment he must still be dreaming. The face close to his was a disconcerting blend of Sahin’s strong features and the round-cheeked houri who had nestled in his embrace. But the pain in his hands was real, and so was the pocket torch whose beam wavered wildly before she put it down on the bench beside him. He sat up straighter and started to speak. She put her hand over his lips.

“Don’t speak, don’t cry out,” she whispered in English. “I will help you escape.”

Her hand was soft and plump and perfumed. Her hair was black; it had been twisted into a knot, but long strands had escaped to hang limply over her forehead. Her nose was her father’s, large and curved, and her mouth was the same shape, though it was now tremulous and, he noticed, carefully painted. There could be no doubt of her identity. Was this another trick of Sahin’s – a version of cat and mouse, raising hopes of escape before dashing them, with his daughter as the very visible alternative to re-imprisonment?

Her palm and fingers slid slowly across his mouth. “Why?” he asked softly.

“Don’t ask questions!” Her voice was thin with nervousness. She straightened, and he saw she was wearing the enveloping black tob over a rather frivolous pink frock of European style.

It took her a while to open the manacles. Under the perfume that wafted round her, Ramses could sense the fear that made her hands shake and soaked her with sweat.

The iron circles finally parted. He had lost all track of time in the eternal darkness, but he must have been there for hours. Slowly he lowered his aching arms and flexed his hands. She was kneeling, working at the chain around his feet. He bent over and pushed her hands away. “I’ll do it. Hold the torch. How do they work?”

“You have to push… here…” A shaking finger indicated the spot. “And pull this at the same time. They’re rusty, stiff…”

The chains clinked and he swore under his breath. They were making too much noise and taking too much time. It was too damned quiet. Hadn’t Sahin left a guard? Maybe it wasn’t a trick after all. If her father had set it up, she was putting on a very convincing show of fear. As soon as he stood, she thrust a bundle at him.

“Put it on. Hurry!”

The caftan was probably one of Sahin’s. It was of fine wool and far too costly for someone who wanted to be inconspicuous, but since he had no choice in the matter, he put it on, and wound the woolen scarf over his head and face. The last item in the bundle was a knife. She’d thought of everything – except a belt. He slashed a strip off the bottom of the caftan, tied it round his waist, and slipped the knife through the makeshift sash.

She let him precede her to the door but stayed so close behind him he could hear her agitated breathing. She’d left the door ajar. Ramses swept the torch in a hasty circuit, half expecting to see Sahin’s grin and a heavily armed guard; but the corridor was empty.

“That way.” She extended a shaking arm over his shoulder.

“I know. Is there anyone in the other cells?”

“What does it matter? Hurry!”

She pushed at him, but he stood firm. “Is there?”

“No!”

The light of the torch showed that the doors were not barred or bolted, but he couldn’t leave without making certain. He eased them open, one after the other, just far enough to look inside. Despite his care, the hinges gave off a series of groans, echoed, on a higher note, by the girl. She tugged at his arm.

Ramses let himself be drawn away. The cells had been unoccupied except by a family of rats that had set up housekeeping in a pile of moldy straw. She led the way now, tiptoeing, her black skirts raised. Ramses followed her up the stone steps and through a mazelike series of narrow passages and small storerooms. She certainly knew her way around the cellars. He doubted very much that she had explored them herself.

But they had met no one and seen no one when she finally stopped by a wooden door and tugged at the handle. Somehow Ramses was not surprised when the portal swung silently open. Stars shone bright overhead, illumining a walled courtyard. It was strictly utilitarian; no fountain, no flowers, only weeds and piles of trash. They were at the back of the villa, near the kitchens. He looked up, scanning the night sky, and found the Dipper and the North Star. It would be light in a few hours. Time was definitely of the essence, but there was one question he had to ask.

He turned to the girl. “Who helped you?”

“No one helped me! I did it myself, all of it. I saw you today when they brought you in, and I… There is no time for this. You must hurry.”

“But how did you know -”

“No questions! It won’t be easy to find your way out of the city. I must show you where -”

“No, go back to your rooms before you are missed. I know where I am now.”

She put her hands on his arms. “A horse. I will get one for you.”

“Why don’t you just paint a target on my back?” Ramses inquired, and immediately felt guilty when her mouth quivered pathetically. Her face was so close he could see the kohl lining her eyes. She’d made herself up as if for an assignation, and that absurd pink frock was probably one of her best.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and although every moment counted now, he racked his brain to remember a few pleasing platitudes. “You have saved my life. I will never forget -”

His breath came out in a grunt as she threw herself against him. “We will meet again one day,” she gasped. “You can never be mine, but your image will be enshrined in my heart!”

“I forgot that one,” Ramses muttered. She was a well-rounded armful, soft and warm and heavy, and there seemed to be only one way of getting her to stop talking.

So he kissed her, thoroughly but somewhat absentmindedly, and then detached the clinging arms and propelled her through the open door.

“Through that gate,” she panted. “Turn to the left -”

“Yes, right. Uh – God bless you.”

He pulled the door shut and headed, not for the gate, but for the wall to his right. How long would it be before they discovered he was gone, and warned the defenders that an English spy was on the loose? Maybe not for hours. Maybe a lot sooner. He couldn’t take the chance of waiting until morning and strolling out the way he had come.

Once over the wall, he found himself in a typical Middle Eastern street, narrow, dusty, and extremely dark. His suspicions had been incorrect; there was no one lurking outside the gate.

He had exaggerated a trifle when he told the girl he knew where he was, but it didn’t take long to orient himself. The lacy, domed minaret of the Great Mosque pricked the moonlit sky to the southwest. He was near the Serai, then, the governor’s palace, and the quickest way out of town was westward.

It took him longer than he had hoped. He had to avoid the main east-west street, which was well lighted, with men standing guard at the entrances to official buildings. The lanes wound in illogical curves, and twice he had to climb a wall to avoid patrols. Luckily the marching men made enough noise to warn him of their approach.

Three miles of sand dunes separated Gaza from the Mediterranean. There was plenty of cover – the ruins of the ancient seaport of Gaza – and the picket lines were widely spaced, since their primary purpose was to guard against agents who might be landed from the sea. The first pallid light of dawn was showing in the east before Ramses waded out into the water. He had hoped to “borrow” a fishing boat under cover of darkness, but it was too late now; a boat would be seen and fired upon. With a heartfelt groan, he shed Sahin’s caftan and began to swim.

“He’s all right,” Nefret said. “Believe me. I always know when he isn’t.”

I wanted to believe her. The bond between them was so strong that she had always been able to sense, not so much danger – Ramses was in trouble a good deal of the time – but an imminent threat to his life. She didn’t look as if she had slept well, though. None of us had. It had been almost twenty-four hours since we got the word that Ramses had been captured and we had spent most of that time discussing what we should do about it. Emerson does not bear waiting well. By late afternoon he had walked a good ten miles, pacing back and forth across the tiled floor of the saloon.

“We cannot act yet,” I insisted, for the tenth time. “Give him a little more time. He’s got himself out of worse situations, and at least we know he was alive when he was last seen. Emerson, for pity’s sake, stop pacing. What you need is a nice hot cup of tea. Help me, Nefret.”

Emerson said he did not need the confounded tea, but I needed something to do and so, in my considered opinion, did Nefret. The confidence she had expressed to us had not rendered her indifferent to the fate of one dearer to her than life itself; her breath came quick and fast, and her hands shook so badly I had to prepare the tea myself.

Suddenly she sprang up. It was anticipation, not fear, that had made her tremble – the unbearable, final moments of waiting for an event greatly desired. As she turned toward the door, it opened, and there he stood. There was no mistaking him, though he was wearing a British uniform, and the brim of his pith helmet shadowed his face.

I had not really been worried. Nefret’s instincts had never been wrong. All the same, I felt as if a set of stiff rods had been removed from my back and limbs.

“Ah,” said Emerson, trying to appear unconcerned. “I had begun to believe I might have to go looking for you.”

“I had begun to think so too.” Ramses removed his hat and unbuckled the belt with its attached holster. “You’ll never believe… Nefret!”

Her face had gone dead-white. Ramses sprang to catch her as she crumpled. He held her to him in a close embrace, with her head resting on his shoulder. “Nefret – sweetheart – darling, say something!”

“There is no need for such a fuss,” I assured him. “It’s only a swoon. Put her down.”

“She’s never swooned in her life!” Ignoring my sensible suggestion, he dropped onto the divan, holding her tightly. Uttering incoherent ejaculations, Emerson snatched one of her limp hands and began slapping it. I selected a clean cup, poured tea, and added several heaping spoonfuls of sugar.

A moment or two later Nefret stirred. “What happened?” she asked weakly.

“You swooned,” Emerson said in a hoarse voice.

“I’ve never swooned in my life!” Her color was back to normal and indignation brightened her blue eyes. “Put me down.”

“It was my fault,” Ramses said wretchedly. “I shouldn’t have burst in like that. I suppose you thought… Are you sure you’re all right?”

She smiled up into his anxious face. “I can think of something that would complete the cure.”

I have no objection to public displays of affection between married persons or those about to be wed, but I did not want Ramses distracted. I said firmly, “A nice hot cup of tea,” and took it to her.

Nefret pushed it away. “Give it to Ramses. He looks as if he needs it more than I do.”

“I’m all right. Just a little tired. I haven’t had much sleep in the past forty-eight hours.”

“Did you come in through the secret door?” Emerson asked.

Ramses shook his head. He had acquired a few more scrapes and bruises, including a sizable lump on his temple. “There’s no need for secrecy now. The job is blown, Father. A complete disaster from start to finish.”

Nefret studied him critically. “It would be nice if just once you could come back from one of your expeditions unbruised and unbloodied.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Ramses said defensively.

“According to Chetwode, you heroically took on ten men so that he could get away,” Emerson said.

“So he’s been here. It was only six,” Ramses added.

“Hmph,” said Emerson. “Yes, he’s been here, and our cover is also blown. He insisted on delivering his message in person, and if he didn’t know my identity when he came, he does now. I – er – I forgot myself when he broke the news that you had been captured and were in ‘the merciless grip of the most dangerous man in the Ottoman Empire,’ as he put it. The fellow has something of a melodramatic streak.”

“Hmmm,” said Ramses. “So he lingered long enough to see that, did he?”

“He claimed he had hoped to come to your assistance, but the odds were too great, and he was obliged to follow your orders. It was at this point that your mother and Nefret came rushing in -”

“We were in one of the secret passages,” I explained. “Very useful devices. The news that a British officer had come here with a message naturally aroused our interest, so we -”

“Also forgot yourselves,” said Emerson.

“My dear, the damage was already done. Lieutenant Chetwode did not seem at all surprised when we popped out of that cupboard.”

“He’s going to put you in for a DSO,” Nefret said.

“How nice,” said Ramses, with sardonic amusement. “So you sat here drinking tea while, for all you knew, I was undergoing hideous tortures?”

“We were discussing what steps to take in order to rescue you,” I explained. “And how to go about them in the most efficient manner.”

“I know, Mother. I was joking.”

“I would be the last to deny that a touch of humor is seldom amiss,” I said. “However… Lieutenant Chetwode told us what transpired up till the time he ran away. So you need not repeat that part.”

“Did he happen to mention that we would have made it out without running or any other inconvenience if he hadn’t tried to shoot Ismail Pasha?”

Nefret gasped and Emerson swore, and I said evenly, “I take it he did not succeed?”

“No. He hadn’t a chance of killing him. The governor’s considerable bulk was in the way and there was a good deal of commotion. It was my fault, really,” Ramses went on wearily. “I suspected he was armed and took one pistol away from him before we left. I should have had the sense to realize Cartright would anticipate that and provide him with a second weapon. I didn’t search him. I ought to have done.”

“Stop berating yourself and tell us what happened,” I said. “From the beginning, please, and in proper order.”

His narrative agreed for the most part with the one Chetwode had given us, up to the point where Chetwode had fired at the suspect. He had then fled – obeying Ramses’s order, as he had claimed.

“I did tell him to run,” Ramses admitted. “The damage was done, and in the confusion no one could tell which of us had fired. The governor’s guards went after me and matters went as one might have expected. I got on reasonably well until someone threw a stone. They were about to escort me to the governor when who should appear but… This is the part you’ll find hard to believe.”

In his youth Ramses had been appallingly verbose and given to an excessive use of adverbs, adjectives, and other descriptive flourishes. I had found this extremely exasperating, but the sparse, uninformative narrative style that was now his habit sometimes vexed me even more. Admittedly, the events themselves were enough to hold us spellbound; no one uttered a word until he had finished.

“So,” I said. “He attempted at first to win you over with kind treatment and flattering words. When you refused to tell him what he wanted to know, he chained you to the wall of a cell and left you. You managed to free yourself, found the guard had left his post, and escaped. As simple as that.”

“You have often told me,” said Ramses, “to stick to the facts, avoiding rhetorical flourishes and -”

“Curse it,” I exclaimed.

“Er, hmph,” said Emerson loudly, while Nefret laughed and Ramses gave me one of his most charming smiles. “What about another nice cup of tea, Peabody? And you, my boy. Perhaps just a few words of additional explanation -”

“There was a woman involved,” I said. “Wasn’t there? Who?”

Ramses’s smile died a quick death. “You’d have been burned at the stake in the seventeenth century.”

“Quite possibly,” I agreed, taking the cup Emerson handed me. “Again, Ramses, from the beginning.”

So we were treated to a description of Sahin Pasha’s beautiful, desirable daughter, and the pasha’s remarkable offer. Once he had been forced to speak, Ramses made an entertaining story of it, and even Emerson grinned reluctantly when Ramses quoted the Turk’s comments about multiple wives.

“Excellent advice, my boy. It’s cursed strange, though. He couldn’t have been serious.”

“You think not?” Nefret asked. It was the first time she had spoken since Ramses began his story. He gave her a quick look and shook his head.

“He couldn’t have supposed I would agree – or keep my word if I did.”

“Oh, you’d have kept your word,” Nefret murmured.

“I didn’t give it. It does seem to me,” Ramses said emphatically, “that I am entitled to some credit for preferring torture and death to infidelity. She was a damned attractive girl, too.”

“Now, now, don’t quarrel,” I said. “It was the girl who helped you escape?”

Ramses nodded. “There was no way I could get those chains off by myself. She’s an efficient little creature,” he added thoughtfully. “She’d brought me a caftan and headcloth, and even a knife. She also offered to steal a horse for me, but I pointed out – somewhat rudely, now that I think about it – that it would only have made me more conspicuous.”

Nefret looked as if she wanted to say something – I knew what it was – but she restrained herself. It was Emerson who voiced the same thought that had, of course, occurred to me.

“He let you go. The girl was acting under his orders or with his cooperation.”

“That idea had, of course, occurred to me,” I said. “But it doesn’t make sense. He might have intervened to take you from the governor’s men, but why would he connive in your escape so soon thereafter?”

“Damned if I know,” Ramses said. “No doubt you are prepared to speculate, Mother. It is a useful process that clears away the underbrush in the thickets of deduction.”

I did not at all mind his teasing me. It was such a relief to have him back with us, alive and relatively undamaged. “Certainly,” I said. “Let us begin with the assumption that he intended to save your life. If he had not taken you from the governor’s guards you would have been treated far less courteously.”

“I would be extremely surprised to discover that Sahin Bey – Pasha, I should say – acted out of kindness,” Ramses said. “He had an ulterior motive, and I doubt it was finding a husband for his daughter.”

“Why, then?” Emerson grunted. “If he wants to turn his coat and come over to us – unlikely on the face of it – he wouldn’t need a good word from you. The War Office would sell their souls and those of all their mothers and grandmothers to get the head of the Turkish secret service on our side.”

Ramses scratched absently at the scraped flesh on his jaw. “I agree, Father.”

“All the same, HQ must be notified.”

“I’ve already done so. Why do you suppose I’m wearing this bloody damned uniform? I was in the water long enough to wash the dye off my skin, but I hadn’t any clothes except the bare necessities, and I’d never have got to General Chetwode looking the way I did.” Ramses added, “I expect the officer I waylaid holds a bit of a grudge; I had to borrow his uniform without his consent. He oughtn’t wander so far from camp.”

Emerson knew his son too well to misinterpret his lighthearted manner. “What did General Chetwode say?”

Ramses shrugged. “What could he say but ‘Bad luck, old boy, glad you made it back after all’? Our Chetwode had already left for Cairo to make his report.”

“He was in something of a hurry to get out of town, wasn’t he?” Emerson mused. “How much did you tell the general?”

“I am not telling anyone any more than I have to,” Ramses said tightly. “Nobody is telling me anything. I’ll be damned if I can understand who is actually running this stunt. Apparently General Chetwode didn’t know what his nephew intended to do, he was only told we were going to investigate and reconnoiter. I didn’t mention the girl, or Sahin’s proposition. The general is under the impression that I cleverly escaped all by my little self. I’m sorry, I ought to have come here straightaway, but -”

“Bah,” said Emerson gruffly. “You did what you had to do. I still say the girl couldn’t have managed it on her own. The young, spoiled daughter of an aristocrat, raised in the harem -”

“She’d been exposed to Western ideas and Western schooling,” Ramses interrupted. “Your basic point is well taken, however. Someone helped her, but it need not have been her father.”

“Ah,” said Emerson.

“I’m sorry, Father. I ought to have made a greater effort to find him.”

“Don’t be absurd,” I said forcibly. “You could not have eluded recapture for long, and if you had not turned up, your father would have gone into Gaza looking for you.”

“Perhaps I ought to have let him go in my place.” Ramses leaned back against the cushions and closed his eyes. The dark stains of exhaustion under his eyes were very visible. “I made a thorough muckup of the whole business. I’m sorry…”

Nefret was sitting cross-legged on the divan next to him. She stood up, the bracelets on her ankles and wrists jingling musically. “Stop saying you’re sorry!”

“Quite right,” Emerson exclaimed. “I am the one who should apologize, my boy, for badgering you. Go and get some rest.”

Ramses sat up, propping his heavy head with his hands. “It might have been him. There wasn’t time to get a good look. I couldn’t determine whether the soldiers were guarding a prisoner or protecting a holy man. But the mere fact that I am here, and not in Sahin’s cell, is a strong indication that Sethos is in Gaza. Unless that is what we are meant to believe… Sorry. I seem to be adding to the deadwood instead of clearing it away.”

“You didn’t have time to question the girl, I suppose,” I said. “And don’t say you’re sorry again!”

Ramses summoned up a feeble grin. “Yes, Mother. I did ask who had helped her. She claimed no one had, that it was all her doing.”

“She lied,” I said. “Quite understandable; she wanted the credit and your – er – gratitude.”

Ramses shook his head. “I don’t think so. Her fear was genuine. You know how Sethos operates. If it was he who arranged my escape, he’d have found a way of supplying her with everything she needed while leaving her with the impression that the whole thing had been her idea.”

“But how did he manage it?” I demanded. “He had less than twelve hours to come up with a plan and carry it out. He must have known the identity of Sahin’s prisoner, for surely he would not have taken such a risk for a stranger. How did he find out it was you?”

“That question hadn’t occurred to me.” Ramses sat up straighter. “And it may be significant. Could that have been why Sahin didn’t pop me into his little cell straightaway? Damn it, yes! He put me on display – beardless and bareheaded, easily recognizable – and when they did take me downstairs they paraded me through most of the house first. If Sethos was staying in the same house…” His brief animation faded. “It still doesn’t answer the most important questions.”

“Yes, yes,” Emerson said gruffly. “We’ll talk about it later. Take him away, Nefret.”

Ramses got slowly to his feet. “Take me where?”

“To my little private cubicle,” Nefret said, drawing his arm over her shoulders.

“Are there any peepholes in the walls?”

“Probably. Does it matter?”

“That depends.” He smiled down into her upturned face and brushed her cheek with his fingertips.

“I don’t suppose it does matter,” I admitted. “By this time everyone in town will know we have dealings with British officers, and that we may not be what we seem. I do strongly urge, however, that you rest instead of – er -”

“Of course, Mother.” Nefret turned her head and gave me a bewitching smile.

“That was an extremely impertinent and unsolicited bit of advice,” Emerson said, after they had left the room. “She’ll look after him. And – er – cheer him up. The boy is too hard on himself.”

“He always has been,” I said, taking no notice of the criticism. “It wasn’t his fault, it was the fault of the confounded War Office. Shall I begin packing?”

“No, my dear. What’s your hurry?”

“I would have supposed,” I said, with a certain amount of sarcasm, “that you would want to go in pursuit of the conscienceless villain who sent your son to risk torture and death.”

“All in due course, Peabody. We went to considerable trouble to get this close to Gaza, and I’m damned if I am going to leave before I’ve learned what we came here to learn.”

“And how do you propose to do that?”

“We could wait for him to come to us. That is your favorite method of investigation, I believe.”

“You mean Sethos, I suppose.”

“Sethos or anyone else who decides we are a threat to his plans.” He settled himself on the divan and beckoned to me. “Come and sit by me, my love. We’ve had little enough privacy these past few days.”

I acceded at once, but as his strong arm wrapped round me and drew me close to his side, I felt obliged to remind him of the peepholes. Emerson only chuckled. “It is time I paid a few attentions to my elder wife. Give me a kiss.”

“In English?” I exclaimed.

“Kisses are a universal language,” said Emerson.

I was so touched by this poetic sentiment, I suffered the prickles of the beard without objection. When I had got my breath back, I said suspiciously, “You are in a very cheerful mood, I must say. What are you concealing from me?”

“I have no intention of concealing anything from you, my dear. I didn’t want to keep Ramses from his bed – er – his rest any longer; but he made an interesting point. If Sethos was staying in the same house… He must have been, mustn’t he? Not only did he know Ramses’s identity, but he had access to the girl. Now listen closely, Peabody…”

“Yes, my dear.” I rubbed my stinging cheek.

“He wouldn’t have approached her as Ismail Pasha. It would have been an unnecessary risk. He disguised himself as someone else… and I know who.”

“Well, so do I.”

“Confound it,” Emerson shouted, removing his arm and fixing me with an evil glare. “You’re doing it again! You always claim you -”

“But, my dear, it is obvious.”

“Oh? Then you tell me. Or shall we play our old game, each of us writing the answer and sealing it in an envelope?”

We had played this little game often, and I will admit, in the pages of my private journal, that I had maneuvered Emerson into committing himself first on certain occasions when I was not entirely certain of my conclusions. On this occasion I did not hesitate.

“Why, my dear, I think we are past that childish sort of competition. I will be happy to tell you. He disguised himself as Sahin Pasha.”

Emerson let out a whoop of laughter. He sobered almost at once, however, and began stroking his beard. “Really, Peabody, that is deuced ingenious. But… No, it is impossible. What led you to that remarkable deduction?”

“Your turn next,” I said playfully. “Whom did you suspect?”

“I need my pipe,” Emerson muttered. “What did you do with it?”

I hadn’t done anything with it. Muttering to himself, Emerson rummaged through his voluminous garments until he located the thing and his tobacco pouch. I helped him to light the pipe, keeping a wary eye out for sparks in his beard.

“Well,” said Emerson, settling back onto the divan and puffing away with enjoyment. “Where were we?”

“You were about to tell me whom you suspected of being Sethos.”

The comfort of his beloved pipe had given Emerson new courage. “The servant,” he said decidedly.

“The fellow who brought the tea? It was drugged, Emerson.”

“Well, of course. It would have been a dead giveaway for him to ignore his master’s orders. People don’t look at servants,” Emerson went on. “And Sahin had borrowed the house and, one must suppose, the staff from someone else.”

“It isn’t like Sethos to choose such an inconspicuous role.”

“No, he much prefers to make a spectacle of himself. It would be a coup much to his taste to take over the role of someone as well known as Sahin.”

He looked so chagrined that I felt obliged to offer his vanity a little encouragement. Husbands appreciate these gestures.

“There are some things I don’t understand, though,” I said. “How could Sethos deceive Sahin’s men and his household and even his daughter?”

“Oh, that,” said Emerson, with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Sethos has fooled more observant individuals than a handful of dull-witted guards. The girl may have seen very little of her father; I don’t suppose Sahin was the sort of papa who plays games with his children.”

“Well, perhaps I am wrong,” I said handsomely. “Without knowing more about the household than we do, it is impossible to know for certain how he managed it.”

“I don’t know how he managed it,” Emerson admitted. “Or what is behind all this maneuvering. But I have a feeling – yes, my dear, call it a premonition if you like – I have a feeling we will hear from my eccentric – er – acquaintance before too long. And since it appears that far too many people know our identities already, we may as well leave off pretending to be respectable Moslems. What do you say I borrow a bottle of whiskey from one of our chaps?”

“I have considered the advantages and disadvantages of abandoning our masquerade, and in my opinion the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. The people we were trying to keep in the dark already know the truth, and the presence of the famous Father of Curses can only inspire respect from others. However, there is no need for you to borrow anything.” I reached behind the cushions and drew out the parcel I had kept in my personal charge during that long, wearisome journey. It was a large and rather lumpy parcel, as I knew to my sorrow, since I had sat on it most of the way.

“Good Gad!” said Emerson, as I extracted the bottle, which I had wrapped in certain articles of clothing.

“We will have to use plain water or drink it neat, like Cyrus. The gasogene was too large, and fragile besides.”

Emerson’s smile faded. “What else have you got in there?” he asked suspiciously.

“Trousers, shirts, and boots for me and Nefret – you saw them the other day – my knife, and hers – my belt of tools – and -”

“No!” Emerson exclaimed, his eyes bulging.

“You cannot suppose I would venture into danger without it.” I had spread the articles out on the divan. I added my parasol.

Emerson’s lips writhed, but the light of forlorn hope lingered in his eyes. “Please. Tell me it isn’t…”

I took hold of the handle and gave it a twist and a pull. “My sword parasol, yes. The one you were kind enough to give me.”

Emerson reached for the bottle.

We did not see the children again that evening. When they joined us for breakfast, I was pleased to observe that Ramses looked more rested. He was wearing the uniform shirt and trousers, but with the shirt open and his feet bare, the hated military look was diminished. He was in full agreement with my decision that we might as well abandon our disguises.

“I didn’t suppose Mother would stand being confined to the harem for long,” he remarked, selecting a piece of fruit from the tray.

“It is too inconvenient,” I explained. “We were running out of excuses for admitting strange men to our quarters. I haven’t spoken with Selim for days, and in my opinion a council of war is imperative. We must plan our next move.”

“Next move?” Ramses’s eyebrows tilted up at the corners. “Surely that’s obvious. There’s no point in your staying on here.”

The pronoun did not escape me, but I said only, “That is one of the things we must discuss. Let us ask Selim to join us. Perhaps he can find you something else to wear, Ramses. I brought a change of clothing for us, but not for you.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Nefret drawled. “I like those short trousers. You ought to wear them all the time. Father, too.”

Emerson does have well-shaped lower limbs, but he is rather shy about it. He coughed and looked away. Ramses, less self-conscious than his father, laughed and said, “I ought to return them to their owner, along with the rest of his things. Never mind that now; let’s have Selim up.”

Selim was delighted to accept the invitation. Settling himself comfortably on a cushion, he looked round with an air of approval. “This is good. We have not been able to talk. Now tell me everything. What happened in Gaza, Ramses?”

He had known of Ramses’s safe return – had, in fact, been the first to know, for he had recognized him at once. Ramses had not lingered to chat, being anxious to reassure us, so he had to go over the whole business again for Selim.

“Ah,” said that young man interestedly. “Is she beautiful?”

Everyone laughed, and Ramses repeated what Sahin had said about multiple wives.

“I have not found it so,” said Selim, looking a trifle smug. “She is a brave girl, to take the risk of freeing you. I hope she does not suffer for it.”

“So do I,” Ramses said briefly.

I knew then what I had only suspected before. He meant to go back to Gaza. His mission had not been accomplished, and the fate of that girl would haunt him until he made sure she was safe.

Selim was unable to add anything to our own deductions, such as they were, but he was of the opinion that Ismail Pasha must be Sethos. “So what shall we do now?” he inquired.

“We will wait a day or two for the news of our presence to spread,” replied Emerson. “If Sethos has not communicated with us by then, we’ll go in after him.”

“Father!” Ramses exclaimed.

“Now, my boy, don’t waste your breath. You mean to go; don’t deny it. If my – er – if he is being held against his will, he must be freed. If he has turned traitor – which,” Emerson said grimly, “is seeming more and more likely – he must be taken prisoner by us.”

“Why do you consider it more likely?” I demanded hotly. “You said before -”

“He couldn’t have managed Ramses’s escape if he were a closely guarded prisoner,” Emerson replied, with equal heat. “Don’t try to defend him, Peabody, or I will begin to wonder whether you have got over your -”

“Please, Emerson!”

“Father has the right idea.” Nefret’s quiet voice reminded both of us that we were in danger of getting off the subject. “Traitor or captive, we must get him out of Gaza.”

Ramses turned appalled eyes on her. “What do you mean, we? I admit I didn’t succeed, but that was because Chetwode mucked things up. One person has a better chance than three… four… five… Good God, Father, you can’t -”

“I believe I can,” said Emerson. “More safely than you, Ramses. Do you suppose Sahin won’t have everyone in Gaza looking for a man of your description?”

“But how -”

Emerson held up one hand, demanding silence, and reached with the other into his pocket. “I have another set of papers,” he announced proudly.

They were a good deal more impressive than the first set – spattered with blobs of crimson sealing wax, framed in ornate curlicues, and with quite a lot of gilt. The script was equally ornamental; it looked like Arabic, but I could make nothing of it. I handed the papers to Ramses.

“Turkish,” he muttered. “Father, do you have any idea what this says?”

“No,” said Emerson placidly. “Is there more coffee?”

“But – but -” Ramses ran one hand through his tumbled curls and brandished the papers in front of Emerson’s nose. “Were you planning to use these to get into Gaza? For all you knew, it might be a denunciation of you, or – or somebody’s laundry list!”

“Is it?” Emerson inquired.

Nefret served him and Ramses with fresh cups of the Turkish coffee she brewed so expertly, and Ramses inspected the papers again.

“No,” he admitted. “They appear to be in order – so far as I can tell. I’ve never been privileged to see a direct order from the Sublime Porte, signed by the sultan himself.”

“Few have,” said Emerson, and sipped his coffee. “Ah – excellent. Thank you, Nefret. I didn’t suppose el-Gharbi would play me false, but the very look of those documents is enough to overawe most people, especially since literacy is -”

“El-Gharbi,” Ramses broke in. “I might have known. What did you promise him in return?”

“My goodwill,” said Emerson, with an evil smile.

Ramses was not quite himself, and the effect of the stunning surprises his father had administered showed on his face, together with evidence of another, equally strong emotion. “So,” he said, trying without complete success to control his voice, “if I had not come back you would have marched up to the Turkish lines with a set of papers you couldn’t read and a broken arm and -”

“And your mother,” said Emerson.

He was, I believe, attempting to lighten the emotional atmosphere with a touch of humor. His comment did not have that effect. Ramses went pale, and I said firmly, “Quite right. All for one and one for all – that is our motto, is it not? You would have taken equal or greater risks for any of us, Ramses. Now that that is settled, let us get back to business. Are those papers adequate for the purpose your father had in mind?”

“Is my name on them?” Selim demanded.

“No one else’s name is on them,” Emerson replied. “If an honorable sheikh, a friend of the sultan’s, decides to take his servants -”

“And wives,” I said.

“Bah,” said Emerson. “He can take anyone he likes, I suppose. Do be quiet, all of you. I haven’t decided yet how to go about this. It might be better to make my way through the lines under cover of darkness.”

“With one arm in a cast,” said Ramses under his breath.

Emerson inspected the cast irritably. “I don’t see why I need it. My arm itches like fury. Nefret -”

“No, Father. Absolutely not.” She moved closer to Ramses, her shoulder against his. “We don’t have to come to a decision immediately. In fact, it would be the height of folly to go rushing into action until we know more. It’s all very well to say that Sethos must be in Gaza because only he could have got Ramses away, but we can’t be certain of that, can we? The most sensible course is to give him a chance to communicate with us, as Father suggested.”

And keep Ramses with her a few days longer. “I agree,” I said. “It behooves us, then, to make our presence known. Shall we pay a little visit to the suk, Nefret? Gracious, it will be good to get out of this house.”

Ramses’s limited wardrobe, and the fact that he had, as he remarked, seen enough of bloody Khan Yunus, made him agreeable to my suggestion that he remain in the house. Selim stayed with him. We left them deep in conversation, some of which had to do with Sahin’s interesting daughter.

Squashed into the tonneau of the motorcar and half-buried in bundles, I had not seen much of the town when we arrived. It had only one structure of artistic interest, a fine thirteenth-century mosque. With a few exceptions the houses were small and mean, and the suk had not much to offer. However, the gardens made up for the general squalor. Some of them were enclosed by the same thick cactus hedges that surrounded the town, very curious in appearance and more effective than any fence or wall. It was a veritable garden spot, where every variety of fruit and vegetable was grown. Fig and almond trees, orange and pomegranate waved leafy branches.

We strolled for an hour or so, admiring the luxuriant vegetation, and purchased a few articles of clothing for Ramses in the bazaar. By the time we returned to the house I felt certain our presence had been noted by the entire population of Khan Yunus. Nefret and I were wearing our European garments. Emerson was bareheaded, but he had declined to abandon his comfortable caftan, or his beard. (I meant to attend to the beard in due course.) Our presence occasioned considerable curiosity but less surprise than I had anticipated; and as we crossed the square, Emerson was accosted by a ragged individual who addressed him by name and demanded baksheesh.

The fellow was tall for an Arab and well built; I thought for a moment Emerson was going to grab hold of his beard. But then he saw, as did I, that one of the extended arms had no hand, and that the sleeve hung empty from the elbow.

“It is too soon to hear from him, Emerson,” I said as we walked away, followed by the loud blessings of the beggar.

“No, it isn’t. We might have spared ourselves this little stroll; the word of our presence had already spread. Otherwise,” Emerson added, stroking his beard fondly, “that chap wouldn’t have recognized me.”

“But how did it get about?” Nefret demanded, quickening her pace.

“Any one, or all, of a number of ways,” I replied. “The servants have been gossiping and speculating about us ever since we arrived. There are undoubtedly informers in Khan Yunus who report to the Turks or the British; some probably sell the same information to both. Lieutenant Chetwode… Don’t be in such a rush, my dear; Selim is with Ramses, he won’t let anyone get near him.”

Ramses was asleep, curled up like a cat on the cushions of the divan. Squatting by the door, his knife in his hand, Selim was obviously disappointed to see us instead of the assassin he had hoped for.

“No one came,” he said regretfully.

“But someone might have.” I patted his shoulder. “Thank you, Selim, for guarding him.”

“It is my duty and my pleasure,” said Selim. “Now I will go and see what that fool of a cook is doing to our lunch.”

We had several callers that afternoon. All of them wanted to sell us something.

Our visit to the suk had aroused the mercenary instincts of every entrepreneur within a twenty-mile radius. It was customary for sellers of choice merchandise to bring it to the house of wealthy individuals, especially to the ladies of the harem. Female brokers are employed for this latter errand, but since we were known to be infidel English persons, we were attended by the merchants themselves, who spread out their silks and jewels, carpets and brassware, for our inspection. One of them, more canny than the rest, had several antiquities for sale, including a fine scarab of Seti I. The area had been in Egyptian hands for a long period of time, Gaza being one of the cities mentioned in documents of the fourteenth century b.c. Arms folded and lips set in a sneer, Emerson refused to violate his rule of never buying from dealers, but I saw the acquisitive gleam in his eyes and bought the scarab and a remarkably well preserved Phoenician vessel.

After that I told Selim we would receive no more callers for a while, and Emerson got out the whiskey. We were using the ka’ah of the harem as our sitting room; I had got it in a state of relative cleanliness, which could not be said of other apartments in the house. Ramses had just opened the whiskey when Selim came hurrying into the room.

“There is a man,” he panted. “An officer. He asks -”

“I’ll do my own asking. Stand out of the way.” The officer had followed him. I recognized the voice and the square, flushed face that peered over Selim’s shoulder. Selim didn’t budge.

Emerson took the pipe from his mouth. “Ah. Major Cartright, as I live and breathe. May I remind you that you don’t give the orders here? Ask politely.”

Cartright got the word out, though it almost choked him. “Please!”

Selim stepped aside, folding his arms. Cartright marched in. Emerson pointed out, in the same mild voice, that there were ladies present and Cartright removed his hat with a muttered apology.

“That’s more like it,” said Emerson. He sipped appreciatively at his whiskey. “Well? Don’t stand there gaping, you must have something to say.”

Emerson was doing his best to be annoying, and no one can do it better than Emerson. Cartright swallowed several words he knew better than to pronounce, and took a long breath. “Send – that is, will you please send that man away?”

“No,” said Emerson. “But I will do my best to prevent him from using his knife on you. You are either very complacent or very courageous to show your face after the filthy trick you played.”

Still standing – for no one had invited him to sit – Cartright took out a handkerchief and wiped his perspiring brow. “Mrs. Emerson – I appeal to you. May I be allowed to speak?”

He was looking at me, not at Nefret, whose tight lips and crimson cheeks must have told him he could not expect any consideration from her. I nodded. “Are you going to claim you knew nothing about Chetwode’s plan?”

“Chetwode is a bloo – - is a young idiot!” his superior exclaimed heatedly. “I didn’t know, Mrs. Emerson, and that is the truth.”

Ramses spoke for the first time. “On your word as an officer and a gentleman?”

The irony went unnoticed by Cartright. “Yes! I was appalled when I learned what Chetwode had done. He has been relieved of duty and will be punished appropriately. Do you believe me?”

“Since you have given your word, we have no choice but to do so,” said Ramses, eyebrows raised and tilted. “Was that the only reason you came, to express your regrets?”

“Regrets!” Nefret exclaimed. “That is somewhat inadequate, Major. Do you know what happened to my husband after -”

“He doesn’t,” Ramses said, giving her a warning look. “I expect that is why he is here, to find out. I did make my report, Cartright, to General Chetwode.”

“I know, he forwarded it immediately, and I…” He cast a longing glance at the bottle of whiskey. “My relief, believe me, was inexpressible. But he gave me few details – which was quite in order, quite right of you to tell him no more than was necessary.”

“A basic rule of the Service,” said Ramses, in his even, pleasant voice. “You are, I suppose, entitled to know more. In a nutshell, then, I don’t know whether Ismail Pasha is the man you want or not. Chetwode didn’t give me time enough to make a determination. I was taken prisoner, as Chetwode was good enough to inform my family, but I managed to free myself later that night.” Forestalling further questions, he added, “That’s all I can tell you. Chetwode’s futile attack has made it virtually impossible for anyone to get near Ismail Pasha. They will guard him even more closely from now on.”

Cartright nodded grudgingly. “We certainly can’t try the same stunt again. Not for a while. I suppose you’ll be returning to Cairo at once, then. I will make the necessary arrangements.”

“We will make our own arrangements,” said Emerson. “When we are ready.”

The finality of his tone, and the inimical looks Cartright was getting from everyone in the room, should have convinced him that there was nothing more to be said. No one had offered him a whiskey or even a seat. Yet he lingered, shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other.

“Look here, old boy,” he exclaimed. “This is off the record, you know – but by Gad, that was well done! Chetwode was man enough to admit that you risked yourself to help him escape – and then to break yourself loose from a Turkish prison, and get through their lines… It was – confound it, it was deuced well done.”

“Oh, you know the Turks,” Ramses said. “Careless beggars.”

“All the same, I – er -” Military discipline or an inadequate vocabulary brought him to a stuttering stop. He straightened and snapped off a crisp salute. Ramses did not return it, but he nodded in acknowledgment, the corners of his mouth compressed.

“How absurd military persons are,” I remarked, after Cartright had marched stiffly out and Selim had slammed the door.

“Don’t underestimate him,” Ramses said softly.

“I don’t,” said Emerson. “He was trying to find out how long we mean to remain here. Perhaps I ought to have come up with an excuse for staying on, but I couldn’t think of one offhand; this isn’t the place one would choose for a holiday, and there are no archaeological remains of any interest.”

“Good Gad,” I exclaimed indignantly. “Do you think he is still suspicious of us? How insulting!”

Ramses laughed and rose, taking my empty glass from my hand. “You ought to consider it a compliment, Mother. ‘Suspicious’ is perhaps too strong a word, but a good intelligence officer doesn’t take chances with people whose behavior is, shall we say, unpredictable. It poses a bit of a problem. If we don’t start making arrangements to leave within the next day or two, he will assume we’re planning something underhanded and place us under surveillance. That’s what I would do.”

“Quite,” Emerson agreed. “Damnation! It doesn’t give us much time. Let us hope my – er – Sethos makes his move soon. Since you are on your feet, Ramses, another whiskey here, if you please. How long till dinner, Selim? That refreshing little episode has given me quite an appetite.”

“I do not know, Emerson. I have been at the door all afternoon, and the cook -”

“Yes, yes, my boy, that is quite all right. See what you can do to hurry him up, eh? You need not stand guard, we won’t have any more visitors tonight.”

In that he was mistaken. Not long after Selim had taken himself off, the aged doorman shuffled in to announce that another merchant had called. He had a carpet for sale, a very fine carpet, a silk carpet, a -

“Tell him to go away,” said Emerson. “We don’t want any carpets.”

The man bowed and wandered out. He was too late and too ineffectual to intercept the seller of carpets, however. The fellow had followed him.

He was a tall man with a grizzled beard and a squint. The roll of carpet was slung over his shoulder. Taking hold of the door, he shut it in the doorkeeper’s face, lowered the rug to the floor, seized one end, and heaved.

A rich tapestry of crimson and azure and gold unrolled, and from the end rolled a human form – a female form, wearing a rather tasteless and very crumpled frock of bright pink silk. Coughing and choking, it raised dirty hands to its eyes and rubbed them.

“Christ Almighty,” said my son in a strangled voice.

I was too thunderstruck to object to this expletive, and the others were equally stupefied. Naturally I was the first to recover. I looked from the girl, who seemed to be suffering nothing worse than the effects of being bundled up in a rug smelling of camel, to the merchant, who stood with hands on hips staring at me.

“Back again, are you?” I inquired unnecessarily.

“Not from the dead this time,” said Sethos. “I have brought you a little gift.”

“In a rug?”

“It worked for Cleopatra,” said my brother-in-law. The unfortunate female sneezed violently. Automatically I handed her a handkerchief.

“I’m leaving her in your care for a few days,” Sethos went on. “Make certain no one gets to her.”

Without further ado, he turned and strode toward the door. Emerson made a leap for him, caught him by the arm and spun him round, so vigorously that he staggered.

“Not so fast. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

Instead of trying to free himself from the hand that gripped his shoulder, Sethos stared at Emerson’s left sleeve, which had fallen back, exposing the cast.

“How did that happen?” he asked.

“An encounter with a tomb robber in Luxor,” Emerson replied. “One of yours?”

“At present I have no business arrangements in Luxor. It’s like you,” he added in exasperation, “to go dashing into a war zone with a broken arm. Just sit tight for a few days, all of you. I can’t explain now; lowly merchants do not linger to chat with customers.”

“Then we will meet you elsewhere,” I said firmly. “Later this evening. Where and when?”

“For God’s sake, Amelia, be reasonable! There’s a noose round my neck and it’s getting tighter by the minute. If my absence is discovered… Oh, very well. I’ll try to meet you tomorrow night. Midnight – romantic, isn’t it? – at the ruined house in Dir el Balah. Ramses knows it.”

“What?” Ramses tore his horrified gaze from the “gift.” “Yes, I know it. What the devil -”

“Later. You shouldn’t have any trouble for another day or two. Oh – I almost forgot. You owe me four hundred and twenty piastres. That’s four and a half Turkish pounds,” he added helpfully. “Quite a bargain.”

After he had bowed himself out, I was at leisure to turn my attention to the young woman. Nefret had led her to the divan and was helping her smooth the tangled strands of her long hair.

“Would you like to freshen up a bit before we chat?” I inquired.

“For God’s sake, Mother, this isn’t a social encounter!” Ramses burst out. “You let him get away without answering any questions, let’s hear what she has to say.”

She raised reproachful black eyes to his face. “Are you angry? I thought you would be happy to see me.”

“He is,” said Nefret. A dimple appeared at the corner of her mouth. “He just has an odd way of showing it. Mother, get her something to drink.”

“Thank you, I would like that. And something to clean my face and hands.”

She had the instincts of a lady, at any rate. The requested objects having been supplied, she wiped her face, and drank deeply of the cold tea. I had to keep telling Ramses to be quiet; he was fairly hopping with annoyance, but we owed the girl a little time to recover from her unusual and uncomfortable trip.

“Now,” I said, after she had refreshed herself, “perhaps you can tell us, Miss… What is your name? Ramses didn’t mention it.”

“We were never properly introduced,” Ramses said through his teeth.

“Esin.”

“How do you do.”

“How do you do,” she repeated. “Are you his mother?”

Another one, I thought. Ramses has that effect on susceptible young women. I had suspected as much, even from Ramses’s expurgated version of their encounter; the way she pronounced the masculine pronoun was a dead giveaway.

“Yes,” I said. “And this is his father, Professor Emerson. And his wife.”

“How do you do,” the girl said, with only the barest nod for Emerson. She examined Nefret carefully, and her dirty face fell.

“Anyhow, I am glad to be here,” she said with a sigh. “My father has been very angry since you escaped.”

“Did he blame you?” Ramses asked.

“No, he thinks I am too stupid and too afraid of him.” She took another sip of tea. “He wanted to blame Ismail Pasha, but he could not, since they were together all that evening, and when Ismail Pasha went to his rooms, my father put guards at the door. To protect him from assassins, he said.”

“Then how did he -”

Nefret motioned Ramses to be silent. “How well do you know Ismail Pasha?” she asked.

“I talked often with him. He is an Englishman, you know. I liked talking to him; he treated me like a person, not a woman, and let me practice my English and told me I was a clever girl.” She finished her tea and leaned back against the cushions.

“I’m surprised your father let you talk freely with other men,” Nefret prodded.

“He could not stop me.” Her dark eyes flashed. “In Constantinople many women are working now because of the war. I helped with the Red Crescent, rolling bandages. It was wonderful! We talked about sensible things, books and what was in the newspapers, and many new ideas. And we wore corsets and short skirts!”

“I heard about that,” Nefret said. “Didn’t the government issue an order demanding that Moslem women lengthen their skirts, discard corsets, and wear thicker veils?”

“They had to take back the order,” said this young advocate of women’s rights complacently. “We made them do it. The girls at the telephone company and the post office threatened to strike, and the ladies said they would not work for the Red Crescent anymore. But my father said I was keeping bad company, and made me come to Gaza with him, and it was so dull there. He tried to make me stay in the harem, but I got out whenever I could; it was fun, hiding from the men and exploring places where I was not supposed to be.”

“The cellars,” Ramses murmured, visibly chagrined. He had underestimated her, and so had the rest of us. I had a sudden image of Esin face-to-face with Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.

Emerson had been listening in silence, his mouth ajar. Now he cleared his throat and said, “What about your father, child? He will be worried about you. Did you leave a message for him?”

“No, why should I? He doesn’t care about me, I am only a piece of property to him. I have lived in England; I won’t go back to the veil and the harem and the selling of women. When Ismail Pasha told me my father had captured an English spy, I wanted to see him, so I hid myself in the mandarah, hoping they would bring you there – and they did! My father told them to take off your filthy clothing so they would not stain his cushions, and when they did, I saw that you were very beautiful.”

Nefret choked. “I’m glad you find this amusing,” Ramses said sourly.

“It is not amusing,” the girl insisted. “It is sad and very romantic. I did not know who you were, and when my father said he would give me to you I was happy, because you were so beautiful and so brave, and then – then you said you were already married and my heart cracked in two, because I knew an English gentleman would never be unfaithful -”

“That’s quite enough of that,” said Ramses to his wife, who had covered her mouth with her hands in an attempt to muffle her laughter.

“Quite,” I said, getting a grip on myself. The conversation had been extraordinary. “Nefret, take the – er – young lady off to the bath chamber and get her some clean clothing. That rug is absolutely filthy.”

“Don’t say anything important until I get back,” Nefret ordered.

The girl got to her feet. “Are you still angry with me?” she asked Ramses.

“Good Lord, no. I – er – I owe you a great deal. More than I realized.” He smiled at her, and a blissful answering smile spread across her face.

“You owe me nothing. I will treasure the memory of that kiss forever, even if you can never be mine.”

After Nefret had removed the girl, the rest of us sat in silence, reflecting upon what we had learned. We were, in my opinion, becoming somewhat overburdened with strong-minded young women. I fixed a critical gaze upon my son.

“The kiss was, perhaps, a mistake.”

“It seemed the least I could do, Mother.”

I think he was teasing me. One cannot always be sure with Ramses. I trusted he would find Nefret’s comments equally entertaining.

“A kindly error, however,” I conceded. “We will not speak of it again.”

“Extraordinary young woman,” said Emerson. He added gloomily, “I suppose we’re stuck with her.”

“For the time being,” I agreed. “And we certainly cannot complain, considering what we owe her. We were dead wrong about her. She managed the whole business by herself.”

“With a few hints from Ismail Pasha,” said Ramses. “Don’t give me that steely stare, Mother. I am not denying her intelligence and her courage, but I would be willing to wager that she went rushing off to her sympathetic English friend as soon as they removed my – er – beautiful self to the cells, and opened her heart to him. That gave him his opening, and no one is better at putting ideas into people’s heads. I can almost hear him, can’t you? ‘The cruelties of war… too young to die… your father forced against his will to destroy a gallant enemy… in his heart he’d be grateful to be relieved of that grim duty… ’ ”

“She does seem to be a romantic young person,” I said. “And clever enough to work out the details, with, perhaps, a suggestion or two from Sethos. He had probably explored the house, including the cells – ‘just in case.’ Like myself, he believes in anticipating potential dangers. Nor would he have had any difficulty in persuading her to run away with him, to join the individual who had made such an impression on her susceptible heart.”

“Now, Mother,” Ramses protested. “She was bored and restless, and annoyed with her father for dragging her off to Gaza, and fascinated by Sethos. It wouldn’t have required more than that.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Admittedly her motives are less important than his. Why did he do it? Surely not to rescue a damsel in distress.”

“Not Sethos,” said Emerson – who might have been fool enough to do just that. “He means to use her against her father, somehow or other. It would be confounded embarrassing for Sahin Bey – oh, very well, Pasha – to admit he had lost his daughter to the enemy. What would he be willing to give to get her back?”

“We cannot be party to any such scheme,” I declared. “I will not force a young woman against her will, no matter what is offered in exchange.”

“Not even Sethos?” Ramses’s eyes were on the unlit cigarette he was rolling between his long fingers.

“Oh, good Gad,” I said.

11

The night passed without incident, but in some discomfort. I felt it incumbent upon myself to keep the girl with me. She had been removed suddenly from her home and was in the company of strangers; a motherly presence would comfort her – and prevent her from leaving us, in case she changed her mind. Emerson attempted to convince me to change my mind, declaring that my habit of foreseeing difficulties that never arose had become, as he put it, deuced inconvenient. Unable to prevail, he went off to one of the small sleeping chambers in a considerable state of aggravation.

Esin proved to be a noisy companion, breathing heavily through her nose and changing position every few minutes. However, there is a silver lining to every cloud; wakefulness gave me ample time for reflection. The situation had become even more confusing than before, and the possible permutations were manifold. If we did not make preparations to depart, Cartright might decide to place us under house arrest or remove us by force – for our own good, as he would explain. I did not trust him one inch, or believe in his protestations. Heaven only knew what Sethos would do next. I had never believed he was a traitor; I did not believe it now, though his real purpose was still a mystery. He had not exaggerated, however, when he spoke of a noose round his neck; a turncoat is automatically under suspicion, and Sahin, an old hand at the Game, was probably watching his every move. Ramses’s suggestion that Sethos had taken the girl as a possible bargaining counter, in case he was arrested, made a horribly convincing theory; in fact, it was the only reason I could think of why he might have taken that risk. Sahin Pasha was another unpredictable factor. What would he do when he discovered his daughter was missing?

By morning I had formulated my plans. I explained them to the others over breakfast.

“I am having serious doubts as to the advisability of our remaining here. Let us at least behave as if our departure were imminent.”

“Start packing, you mean?” Nefret asked, her brow furrowed.

“It would certainly do no harm if each of us made up a little bundle of basic necessities. What I meant, however, was that we should shop for items we would need on a journey and inspect the motorcar to make certain it is in good order.”

“It is in good order,” Selim declared, in some indignation.

“I am sure it is, Selim. But you could pretend it was not, couldn’t you – that some repairs were needed? That would give us a reasonable excuse to stay on for another day.”

“Yes, I could do that,” Selim agreed. His eyes shone in anticipation of an interesting vehicular challenge. “These people know nothing of motorcars. I could take off the -”

“No, no, you mustn’t take anything off! I want to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, if we have to.”

“Not having one of your famous premonitions, are you?” Emerson inquired, his eyes narrowing. “Because if you are -”

“You don’t want me to tell you about it. I am only trying to anticipate every contingency, Emerson. That is not superstition, it is simply good sense. We must stay here until tomorrow at the earliest, so that we can confer with Sethos, and we don’t want some helpful military person dropping by to inquire into our plans.”

“How far do you want to go?” Selim asked. “If it is more than five miles, we will need more petrol.”

“What else will we need?”

I made a little list. Our guest, who had not spoken except to bid us good morning, said, “Am I to go with you?”

I leaned back and gave her my full attention. A bath and a change of clothing, into one of “the favorite’s” silk robes, had improved her appearance considerably, and I had braided her hair myself. One could not have called her pretty, her features were too strong, but she was a handsome girl, in her way. Selim kept sneaking sidelong glances at her.

“We aren’t going anywhere just yet,” I replied. “As for taking you back to Cairo with us, that depends on a number of factors that are as yet unknown.”

“We can’t do anything else,” said Emerson. “She has placed herself in our hands and we owe her our protection.”

Esin’s admiring gaze indicated her appreciation of this noble sentiment, which was, I should add, entirely sincere. It wasn’t that simple, of course; men fix on words like honor and decency and noblesse oblige, and lose sight of the important issues. My chivalrous husband would never consent to an exchange, even if the life at stake was that of his own brother. I had not decided what I would do if the situation arose. We would not be selling the girl into slavery, only returning her to a father who had always treated her indulgently…

Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, I reminded myself. We must hope that the hard decision did not arise. The likelihood of Sahin’s agreeing to an exchange of any kind was slight, I thought. Pride and duty – two more of those masculine catchwords – would forbid it, and he would not fear for her safety if we were looking after her.

“Speaking of that – I refer to my husband’s statement that you placed yourself in our hands,” I said. “Did you? Were you aware that you were being brought to us?”

“Oh, yes.” She transferred her admiring gaze to Ramses. “Did you not say you were in my debt – that you would protect me from my father’s wrath?”

“Did you?” Nefret inquired sweetly.

Ramses’s beleaguered gaze moved from the girl to Nefret and back. “I – uh – to be honest, I don’t remember what the hell I said!”

“If you did not say it, you meant it,” Esin declared. “No Englishman would leave a woman to suffer for a service she had done him.”

“But you said your father didn’t suspect you,” Ramses protested.

“He was beginning to. That is what Ismail Pasha told me.”

“Ah,” I said. “So he offered to help you.”

Her forehead wrinkled. “I think that is how it was. But I did most of it myself. I had to find my own way out of the house. That was not so hard, I know all the secret passages and cellars, but then I had to go to the place he told me about, the tomb of a saint that is outside the wall of the Serai. It is not far, but I was very frightened, and I had to wait a long time before the rug merchant came with his cart, and then he was stopped at the guard post and I could hear them talking and laughing and I was afraid they would search the cart. But they did not. It was a long bumpy ride and I could not breathe very well, and -”

“You were very courageous,” I interrupted, for I had heard enough. The essentials of the story had been told. It sounded as if Ramses had been correct about Sethos’s devious methods.

The various schemes I had proposed kept us busy all day. Selim spent a good deal of the time underneath the motorcar, surrounded by a fascinated audience, including the babies and the goats. From time to time he emerged, sweating and oil-stained, to report progress and bask in the admiration of the beholders. We could have got the petrol from an independent businessman – there was a thriving black market on all military items – but Emerson decided that we might just as well ask the authorities for it. It required only four hours for his request to be approved. Clearly, they were anxious to be rid of us.

By evening our plans had been completed. I had whiled away the hours exploring the rest of the house. It was like many others I had visited, with nothing of particular interest except for even more secret passages and hidden chambers than usual. Mahmud or one of his ancestors appeared to have had little faith in his government, his associates, and his wives.

According to Ramses, we should allow at least an hour to reach the spot Sethos had indicated. When we gathered in the ka’ah for a light evening repast, we discussed who should go. Naturally I intended to make one of the party, and Emerson was set on confronting his infuriating brother. Someone had to stay with the girl, we all agreed to that – Nefret with a caustic “I’m always the one” – but Selim and Ramses could not decide which of them should go and which should remain with the two young women. It lacked half an hour till the time we were to leave, and we were still discussing the matter, when a horrible, ululating howl broke the silence of the quiet night. The mashrabiya screen was ajar and I heard the words quite clearly:

“O unbelievers, prepare for death! O ye unrighteous, who walk in darkness pursued by afrits and…” The speech ended in an anticlimactic squawk.

In a body we rushed to the window and flung the screen open. In the moonlight I saw a dark mass huddled outside the gate, and Selim, his shoulder braced against it. Realizing they had been discovered, the invaders began battering at the gate.

I tried, too late, to catch hold of Ramses, who had climbed over the sill. He dropped to the ground and reached Selim as the gate gave way. Selim’s knife flashed. Ramses had snatched up a lever or spanner as he ran past the motorcar; he swung his arm, and a scream from one of the attackers wavered into silence.

“Quick!” Emerson exclaimed. “Out the bab-sirr, all of you.”

“Be damned to that!” I shrieked, for my blood was up. “ ‘Now who will stand on either hand, And keep the bridge with – ’ ”

“Me,” said Emerson. “Curse it, Peabody, get the girls out of here. You know what to do.”

He was already halfway out the window, lowering himself by one hand.

The fighting instincts of the Peabodys were not easily controlled; but the confidence he had placed in me enabled me to master them. I expected some objection from Nefret, but she made none. Pausing only long enough to collect the bundles we had packed earlier, we fled down the stairs and through the rooms of the ground floor toward the small chamber that contained the secret door. Esin had spoken only once: “Is it my father?”

“I don’t know. Be quiet and hurry.”

The house was deserted. The servants who lived in had run away or were in hiding. One could hardly blame them for refusing to become involved in the affairs of strangers. No doubt the local authorities, such as they were, felt the same. I hoped the uproar at the gate would attract the attention of the military police, but by the time they arrived it might be too late.

Nefret had not spoken at all. We both had our torches; she held the light steady while I searched for the catch Emerson had shown me. It was stiff with disuse, but finally it yielded. The panel swung open, and we all crowded into the space beyond. The passage went through the thick wall of the house. It was ten feet long and less than two feet wide; we had to go single-file, our bundles bumping against the walls. At the end was a wooden door. It was not bolted or locked; one simply pressed a handle to release the latch, which was presumably less visible from the other side.

I did not know what lay beyond that door. This was as far as I had gone with Emerson.

“Go ahead,” Nefret whispered. “What are you waiting for?”

Her face gleamed with perspiration. Esin’s eyes were wide with terror and her breath came in short gasps. I was as anxious as they to get out of that cramped place; it was like standing in an upright coffin, with dust clogging the nostrils and a strange, sour smell. Many generations of rodents must have lived and died in that passage; their bones had crunched under our feet as we walked.

“I am waiting for the men to join us,” I replied. “We cannot take the risk of being separated. Since I do not know whether they will follow us through the bab-sirr or come round to the back, we had better remain where we are. Put out the torch, Nefret. I expect they will be along shortly.”

My confidence was not assumed. With the aid of Emerson’s strength, they should be able to close and barricade the gate and beat a strategic retreat. However, it is difficult to estimate time in the dark; we waited, breathing with difficulty, for what seemed like hours, before hinges creaked and a square of paler darkness opened before me.

“Don’t shoot,” said a familiar voice.

I tucked my pistol back into my pocket. “I couldn’t be sure it was you,” I explained. “Are Ramses and Selim -”

“All present and accounted for,” said Ramses breathlessly. “We can’t stay here, they’ll be looking for us. Let’s go.”

“Where?” I demanded, squeezing through a narrow aperture and a curtain of thorny vines.

“We have an appointment at midnight, I believe. I am all the more anxious now to hear what the… fellow has to say. Damn these cactuses,” Emerson added.

They formed a hedge a few feet away. The wall of the house rose sheer and windowless behind us. Nefret and Esin followed me out and Emerson closed the panel, which was of wood painted to resemble the plastered surface of which it formed a part.

“Lead on,” I said.

The narrow lane into which we had emerged led back to the square, but it was obvious we could not go that way; from the sounds of it, a full-scale riot was in progress. A tongue of fire shot up. Someone usually sets fire to something during these affairs, which, once started, go on of their own momentum – especially when there are interested parties fanning the flames. As we retreated in the opposite direction, I heard the same high-pitched shriek of “unbelievers.”

It was fortunate that we had explored the town earlier. Cactus hedges and high walls formed barricades that had to be got round, and twice the sight of men waving torches forced us to retreat in haste. It was quite exciting. However, we found ourselves at last in the open countryside. The moon shone brightly down on fields of waving grain and groves of orange and fig trees.

Moonlight is good for lovers but it is cursed inconvenient for fugitives. We kept to the shadows whenever we could, and once the sound of approaching hoofbeats made us dive for cover in a ditch. After the small troop had galloped past, I said to Emerson, “They were our fellows, Australians and New Zealanders. Perhaps we ought to have stopped them.”

“Do you want to explain this evening’s events – and her – to General Chetwode?” Emerson demanded.

It was a rhetorical question, and he did not wait for an answer.

The distance was less than two miles, but I would never have found the place without a guide. The small hamlet had long been abandoned and the majority of the houses had collapsed into shapeless piles of stone. One or two of them still retained their walls and parts of the roof. There was no sign of life in the half-ruined structure to which Ramses led us.

“We are a trifle late,” I whispered. “Perhaps he has left.”

“If he isn’t there, I will go to Gaza and drag him out by his collar,” Emerson muttered.

He wasn’t there. Ramses, who had insisted on searching the place before we entered, returned to report this fact. “It’s not that late,” he added. “Give him time.”

“I suppose we can’t expect punctuality under these circumstances,” Emerson admitted. “This is as good a place as any to rest; we may as well make ourselves comfortable. What have you got in that bundle, Peabody?”

“Only the bare necessities, I fear. Water, of course, and my first-aid kit. Did any of you incur injuries that require attention?”

“Nothing to speak of,” Emerson said. He let out a soft laugh. “Your quotation was apropos. The damned fools tried to crowd in all at once. ‘In yon straight path a thousand may well be stopped by three,’ as the Lays of Ancient Rome so poetically expresses it. We pushed them back, got the gate closed, and shoved a cart up against it. Then, unlike Horatius and his comrades, we retreated in good order. Selim wanted to stay and fight on, but I dragged him away.”

“It was a good fight,” Selim said reminiscently.

He reached for the water bottle, which was passing round, and I said with a sigh of exasperation, “All right, Selim, let me see your hand. Why didn’t you tell me you had been wounded?”

“It is nothing,” said Selim. “It will heal. I do not need anything on it.”

He meant antiseptics. Men are strange creatures; he had taken a cut on the side of his wrist which had bled copiously and must have hurt quite a lot, but I had to speak sternly to him before he let me swab it with alcohol.

It was a relief to rest our weary limbs. Esin was half asleep already, stretched out on a patch of ground Selim had gallantly swept clean of pebbles, with her head on one of the bundles. “Biscuit, anyone?” I inquired, extracting the packet from my parcel.

Emerson chuckled. “What, no whiskey? My dear girl, packing those bundles was a brilliant thought, but I have come to expect no less of you.” We were sitting side by side in a darkish corner, so he gave me a quick demonstration of approval.

“How long can we stay here without being discovered?” I asked.

“It’s safe enough,” Ramses replied. “The locals think the place is haunted.”

“By you?” Nefret asked.

“I encouraged the idea. I wonder…” He went to the darkest corner of the place and shifted a few stones. After a moment he said, “No, it’s not here – the pistol I took from Chetwode. He must have collected it on his way back.”

“Pity,” said Emerson. “We may want a weapon before the night is over. Ah, well, we usually manage without one.”

“Yes, sir,” Ramses agreed. He went back to Nefret and sat down. She leaned her head against his shoulder and he put his arm round her. “Darling, why don’t you stretch out and sleep for a while? It’s beginning to look as if he -”

He broke off with a hiss of breath, his head turning alertly, and raised a finger to his lips. Ramses’s acute hearing had prompted one of Daoud’s more memorable sayings: “He can hear a whisper across the Nile.” We froze, holding our breaths. Ramses rose and drifted toward the door, silent as a shadow in his dark galabeeyah.

Someone was coming. He walked quietly but not noiselessly. I heard a twig snap and then a form appeared in the ragged moonlit aperture of the door. The silhouette was that of a tall man wearing a turban and a long robe. He leaned forward, peering into the darkness, his arms raised in greeting or defense. One sleeve hung limp from the elbow.

Ramses seized the fellow in a tight grip and clapped a hand over his mouth. “Hell and damnation,” Emerson exclaimed, surging to his feet. “Bring him in. Keep him quiet. He must be the bastard who was howling out anathemas against the unbelievers; I thought that voice was familiar! If he’s led that pack of jackals here… We need a gag, Peabody. Tear up some extraneous garment or other.”

“I do not possess any extraneous garments, Emerson. Hit him over the head.”

The prisoner, who had been quiescent until then, was galvanized into frantic movement. He managed to wrench Ramses’s hand from his face.

“For God’s sake, don’t be hasty!”

The words were English. The accent was refined. The voice was not that of Sethos.

Ramses lowered his hand but did not release his hold. “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

“A friend. That is the conventional reply, I believe. I really am, though.”

It had been a long time, but the well-bred drawl, with its undercurrent of amusement, struck a chord of memory.

“Let him go, Ramses,” I said. “You remember Sir Edward Washington, Sethos’s aide and co-conspirator?”

“I am flattered, Mrs. Emerson.” Sir Edward removed himself from Ramses’s loosened grasp and made me an elegant bow. “How very good it is to see you again. And the Professor…” Another bow. “Nefret – do forgive the liberty – beautiful as ever… Selim, my friend… And I see you have the young lady safe. Well done.”

Ramses switched on his torch and stared incredulously at the tatterdemalion figure. Sir Edward bowed again, with the mocking grace that was peculiarly his.

“By God, it is,” Ramses muttered. “How the devil -”

“Never mind that now, Ramses,” I interrupted. “Sir Edward, are you here in lieu of your chief?”

“Straight to the point as always, Mrs. Emerson. You are right to remind me we ought not waste time. The answer to your question is no. I have been waiting for him.”

“Good Gad,” Emerson exclaimed, recovering from his understandable surprise. “I never expected to see you again, Sir Edward; the last I heard, you were in…” He broke off, staring at the empty sleeve.

“France,” said Sir Edward coolly. “As you see, I have returned to private life.”

“Did you follow us?” I asked.

“Only until you were safely out of the metropolis. Didn’t you hear me encouraging the riot? Kept everybody busy and happy and out of your way.”

“Oh,” said Emerson.

“I came straight on after that,” Sir Edward continued blithely. “It was a safe assumption that you would keep the appointment.”

“But he didn’t,” Emerson said. “Why not?”

Sir Edward scratched his side, murmured a genteel apology, and said, “He may have been unable to get away. Sahin’s been watching him closely, especially since Ramses escaped. There’s no use staying here any longer.”

“Where shall we go, then?” I inquired. “In my opinion it would be inadvisable for us to return to Khan Yunus until we are apprised of conditions there. Some of Sahin’s men may be lurking. Or were those assertive individuals not his men?”

“I assumed they were. Don’t tell me you have another set of enemies after you!”

“There would be nothing new in that,” said Ramses. “Have you anyplace in mind, Sir Edward?”

Sir Edward hesitated. Under the skillful makeup and the ingrained dirt and the wisps of beard I could see the lines of worry and indecision that marked his face. Then he shrugged, with all his old insouciance. “I know a place, yes. It’s a good ten miles away, too far for the ladies to walk. We’ll need transportation.”

“I will go back and get the motorcar,” Selim offered.

“Too risky,” Emerson said at once.

“And too conspicuous,” Sir Edward added. “We’ll have to borrow a few quadrupeds. Ramses, my lad, have you ever stolen a horse?”

“As a matter of fact, he has,” I replied.

“I don’t know why I bothered to ask,” Sir Edward muttered. “There’s a picket line a mile south of here. Ramses and Selim – no, Professor, not you. Someone must stay with the ladies.”

“This lady is going with you,” Nefret said.

FROM MANUSCRIPT H

There was only one sentry. The enemy wasn’t in the habit of sending out raiding parties, and local horse thieves had learned not to tangle with the men of the Desert Column. Trees and growing crops gave plenty of cover, and the moon was down. They crawled close enough to hear the snores of the men who lay rolled in their blankets beyond the line of horses. Sir Edward brought his mouth against Ramses’s ear.

“I’m beginning to think this was a bad idea.”

Ramses had been of that opinion from the start. Some of the straitlaced British officers considered the ANZACs an unruly lot, impatient of discipline, who didn’t even know how to ride properly. Personally he would have preferred to have a whole troop of fox-hunting Englishmen after him than a few of these hard-bitten colonials.

Bad idea or not, it had to be done. The girl couldn’t manage a ten-mile hike, and he was concerned about his mother, who would drop in her tracks rather than admit the task was beyond her. Anyhow, they had to get under cover before morning. It would take too long for the slower members of the party to walk that distance.

They had planned what they had to do, and he thought they could manage it, with a little luck – and Nefret’s help. He had had to overrule Sir Edward, and his own instincts, when she announced she was coming with them; common sense told him that her help would be invaluable. She was an excellent rider, and she had an uncanny knack with animals.

Dealing with the sentry was his job. It wasn’t difficult; the poor devil was tired and not expecting trouble. Ramses took him from behind with an arm across his throat, hit him hard in the pit of the stomach, and chopped him across the back of the neck as he toppled forward. By the time he had dragged the limp body under a tree, Nefret was moving down the string of horses, whispering in their ears and stroking their necks. When she reached the last in line, she untied the rope that passed through their bridles.

So far there had been no sound except a few soft, interested whickers from the intrigued equines. Now they had to move fast and noisily. Nefret scrambled onto one of the horses while Selim gave Sir Edward a hand up and mounted another. Except for Nefret’s mount, the animals were stirring uneasily. One of the sleeping men sat up. Ramses tossed the dangling reins over the lead horse’s neck and vaulted onto its back. It turned its head to give him an astonished stare.

“Wrong man, I know,” Ramses said in a conversational voice. “Think of it as a temporary inconvenience.”

There wasn’t time to adjust the stirrups. He dug his bare heels into the animal’s flanks and urged it into a trot. It responded to the touch or the English voice, or both. The entire camp was now awake; shouts and curses echoed through the night, and someone fired a rifle. Someone else let out a stream of oaths directed at the idiot who had fired it. By that time the entire group of horses was in motion, following their leader and urged on by Nefret, who brought up the rear yelling and smacking assorted equine rumps with a leafy branch. Her hair had come loose from its scarf; it streamed out behind her, silvered by starlight. Sir Edward was hanging on, though he didn’t look happy. Selim looked very happy. This was the sort of adventure he had had in mind all along, a wild ride with the enemy in hot pursuit.

The pursuit consisted of one trooper, running as fast as his long legs would carry him, waving his arms and calling out. The horses broke into a gallop and the plaintive cries of “Mary! Mary, love, come back!” faded into the night.

A real and vindictive pursuit would not be long delayed, however. They did not slacken speed until they were near the ruins where the others were ready and waiting. None of them wasted time in conversation, though Ramses saw the look of resignation on his mother’s face. She was not an enthusiastic horsewoman, and was accustomed to the smooth gait of their Arabians.

“Sorry, Mother,” he said, offering his hands to help her mount. “Will you be all right?”

“Certainly.” It was the answer he had expected.

Esin couldn’t manage it, though. She had ridden only in England, with a proper lady’s saddle. Declining Selim’s eager offer of assistance, Nefret mounted the girl in front of her.

“We’re leaving a trail a blind man could follow,” Sir Edward said, as they started off two by two. “And now we’ve got the Australians after us.”

“This was your idea,” Ramses pointed out.

“So it was. I hope I’ll live long enough to regret it.”

The clipped accent sounded odd from that vagabond figure. There hadn’t been time for Ramses to assimilate Sir Edward’s sudden reappearance, and there were a hundred questions he wanted to ask.

“What are you doing here? I was under the impression that you had given up a life of crime.”

“I can’t imagine what gave you that impression” was Sir Edward’s bland reply. “But my present job isn’t criminal in nature. People give other people medals for doing it.”

“Usually after the ‘other people’ are dead.”

Sir Edward let that one pass. Ramses tried another tack.

“Why is Sethos in Gaza? He’s no traitor, I’m certain of that now, but what the hell is he after?”

“You’ll have to ask him that.”

They reached their destination just before dawn. Ramses had expected a tumbledown ruin or a mean little house; instead he saw high walls rising up against the paling sky like those of a castle or a fortress. The heavy gates were closed. Sir Edward called out and after an interval one of the leaves of the gate opened and a man peered out. He let out an exclamation when he saw the group.

“They are friends,” Sir Edward said. “Friends of the Master.”

He led the way into an open courtyard with a well in the center and a roofed arcade on the right side. It was a fortress, and a strong one. The walls were twelve feet high and eight feet thick. A small two-storied structure within the enclosure must be the living quarters.

“Go ahead into the house,” their host said, indicating this building. “Straight through and up the stairs to the saloon. I’m afraid you’ll find us ill-prepared for guests, but Mustafa and I will see what can be done in the way of food and drink.”

He drew the other man aside. Leaving his father to assist his mother, and Selim the girl, Ramses edged toward the pair. He caught only two words: “No message?” and saw Mustafa shake his head.

Mustafa looked like the sort of man who would be employed by Sethos – burly, black-bearded as a pirate, and wary. He shot a suspicious look at Ramses, and Sir Edward turned.

“This is the notorious – er – famous Brother of Demons, Mustafa,” he said in Arabic. “You have heard of him.”

“Ah!” Mustafa held out a hand. “We will shake hands as the English do, eh? It is an honor to meet you. And so the others are…?”

“The even more notorious Father of Curses and his family,” Ramses said. “If you will forgive me for failing in courtesy, may I suggest that there are important matters to be dealt with before we exchange additional compliments? The horses, for instance. Their owners will want them back.”

Mustafa threw his head back and let out a bellow of laughter. “You stole them? Well done. They will fetch a good price.”

“Control your mercantile instincts, Mustafa,” said Sir Edward. “They must be returned eventually. We – er – borrowed them from the Australians.”

“Hmmm.” Mustafa stroked his beard. “A pity. But you are right, the Australians are fierce fighters and they love their horses.”

Ramses stroked the friendly muzzle that had come to rest on his shoulder. “Take care of them, will you, Mustafa? Rub them down and water them.”

“If you have handled that to your satisfaction,” said Sir Edward, “shall we go in? Your mother will be waiting in the saloon for us.”

“No, she won’t,” Ramses said.

The saloon was an elegantly appointed apartment at the front of the house. I recognized Sethos’s refined tastes in the furnishings – cushioned divans, carved screens, and low tables of brass and copper – but it was clear at a glance that this was a bachelor establishment. There was a bird’s nest in one of the window embrasures, and dust covered every flat surface.

“Dear me,” I said. “This won’t do. Let us see what the rest of the house is like.”

“He told us to wait here,” Nefret said. She was supporting Esin, who looked as if she was at the limit of her strength.

“I have no intention of waiting for a man to make the necessary arrangements,” I replied. “That girl should be in bed. Let us find one.”

Two of the small rooms behind the saloon had obviously been used as sleeping chambers. Various articles of masculine attire hung over chairs and chests. The beds were brass, in the European style, rather at odds with the rest of the furnishings, but with comfortable mattresses and sheets and pillows. Selim and I straightened the crumpled bedding and put Esin on the bed. I did not bother removing her clothing, since it did not appear that the sheets had been changed for several weeks.

Sir Edward and Ramses were in the saloon when we returned to that room.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the former inquired politely.

“I found a bed – yours, I believe – and got Miss Sahin tucked in. The poor child was worn out. Now, where is the kitchen? A nice hot cup of tea would be just the thing.”

“Mustafa is making tea,” Sir Edward said.

“Does he know about boiling the water long enough? Perhaps I had better go and -”

Sir Edward took the liberty of seizing me by the arm. “He knows. He knows! Mrs. Emerson, please sit down. I can’t until you do, and I am dead on my feet.”

“Oh, very well.” I selected one of the divans that did not have evidence of avian activity. Sir Edward collapsed onto another with a long sigh and Ramses took his place next to Nefret.

Emerson was still prowling about the room. “Ha!” he exclaimed, opening a cabinet. “My – er – old acquaintance does himself well. Claret, ’pon my word, and an excellent vintage too. It isn’t whiskey, Peabody, but would you care for a drop?”

“Not at this time of day,” I replied. “Ah – here is Mustafa with the tea tray. Just put it here, if you please. I will pour.”

He had slopped it all over the tray, of course. As he stood back, fixing me with a bold, curious stare, I had one of those moments of utter disorientation: the tea tray, set out in proper English style – that would be Sir Edward’s influence – the black-bearded ruffian who had served it; the filthy, ragged beggar who was Sir Edward; and the rest of us in a motley array of garments, from Nefret’s neat but crumpled trousers and coat to Emerson’s torn silken robes.

However, the situation was no more bizarre than many in which we had found ourselves.

Mustafa said suddenly, “You are the Sitt Hakim? I have a little sore, here on my -”

“Later, my friend,” I said graciously. Nefret hid her face against Ramses’s shoulder and Emerson shouted, “Good Gad! Even here! Curse it, Peabody!”

Mustafa retreated, visibly impressed by the volume of Emerson’s voice. I persuaded Emerson to sit down and take out his pipe. It soothed him; it usually did.

“I don’t know where you are all going to sleep,” Sir Edward muttered.

“At the moment my brain is too active to let me rest, Sir Edward,” I informed him. “We need to know where we stand. First and most important, where is Sethos? Did you expect him to be here?”

“I hoped for a message, at least. He usually finds a way to let me know if there is any change in his plans. When I saw him yesterday morning -”

“You were in Gaza? Goodness gracious, you all seem to walk in and out of the place as you please.”

Whether he would have confided in us under different circumstances I cannot say. It may have been exhaustion that loosened his tongue.

“The fortifications are like a sieve for a single man, if he knows where the holes are. Once inside I – and our other couriers – form part of the adoring mob that presses round the holy man asking for his blessing.”

“So he can pass messages to you, and you to him,” I prompted.

“Something like that,” Sir Edward said evasively. “I knew he planned to get Sahin’s daughter away. I’d have talked him out of it if I could, or at least tried to persuade him not to go back to Gaza. Sahin was bound to suspect he’d had a hand in the business and clamp down on him even more closely. I think that is what has happened.”

“Can you send someone to find out?” I asked.

Emerson cleared his throat. “My papers -”

“No,” Ramses and I said in the same breath.

“What papers?” Sir Edward demanded, his eyes widening.

Proudly Emerson drew them forth and handed them to Sir Edward. The sun was well up now; the gilt sparkled impressively in the light.

“I can’t read Turkish,” Sir Edward said blankly.

“Ramses can.” Emerson’s pipe had gone out. He struck a match. “He says they are perfectly in order.”

“Yes, very well, but you can’t – you can’t just walk up to the trenches and -”

“No, it will take some preparation,” Emerson admitted.

“That is quite right,” I said, seeing in my mind’s eye the preparations Emerson was planning. Camels, servants, gold-trimmed robes, and a huge scimitar… He would so enjoy it, and sheer effrontery might allow him to carry it off. For a while.

“Admirable,” Sir Edward murmured. He sounded more horrified than admiring. “Sir, give me a chance to use our regular channels first.”

“An excellent idea,” I said, before Emerson could object. “Sir Edward, I am curious to know how -”

“I beg you will excuse the interruption, Mrs. Emerson, but could we postpone the interrogation for a few hours?” Sir Edward rubbed his eyes. “I need to rest, even if you don’t, and there are a few domestic matters I must attend to.”

“Certainly. Just show me where you keep the clean sheets.”

It was the final straw for poor Sir Edward. “I – Oh, Lord. I don’t know that there are any, Mrs. Emerson.”

“If there were, where would they be? Come,” I said in a kindly manner, “let’s just have a look. It won’t take long.”

The others declared they would stretch out on the divans, and Sir Edward and I went off on what he clearly believed was a hopeless quest. Eventually we found a cupboard that contained linens of various kinds. I selected a few. Sir Edward, always the gentleman, took the pile from me. I allowed him to do so, though he had a little difficulty getting hold of it.

“I was sorry to see that,” I said, with the lightest possible touch of his arm. “It was in France that it happened, I suppose.”

“Ypres.” He spoke curtly, avoiding my eyes. Pity he would not accept; acknowledgment of his sacrifice was owed him, and I felt obliged to make it.

“It must have been dreadful. I am so sorry.”

“What, womanly sympathy from you, Mrs. Emerson? A touch out of character, isn’t it?”

“It is sincere.”

“I know.” His rigid features relaxed. “I am sorry too, for speaking rudely. It’s not so bad, you know. It got me out of the army, which was all to the good. I had become somewhat disenchanted.”

“Can nothing be done about an artificial limb?”

“Oh, yes. I’ve got quite a good one. It broadens my repertoire of disguises to a remarkable extent. I’m thinking of attaching a bayonet, or perhaps a hook.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “Splendid,” I said heartily.

“Or a parasol,” said Sir Edward. His smile was that of the charming debonair gentleman I had known.

I was to remember that smile for a long time. When I woke from a brief but refreshing nap, he was gone – from the house and from the grounds and, I feared, back into the powder keg that was Gaza.

It took me a while to discover this. I had decided to sleep on one of the divans rather than go to the trouble of making up a bed which, if events continued to unfold, I might never occupy. When I went to look in at Esin, I almost fell over Selim, who was stretched out across her threshold. I left him there, since that was where he had chosen to be, and went back to the saloon. Ramses and Nefret lay side by side, his arm round her and her head on his shoulder. I stood for a moment watching them. One of Ramses’s eyes opened and regarded me quizzically.

“All’s well,” I reported, and tiptoed toward the divan where Emerson lay.

I did not mean to sleep for more than an hour, but even as I reclined the skies were darkening, and the gentle murmur of rain must have lulled me. It was the sound of heavy footsteps that woke me – the running steps of a person in haste. I sat up with a start and reached into my nearest pocket. It was the wrong pocket. I was fumbling in another, trying to locate my little pistol, when a man burst into the room and came to a stop. He was breathing heavily and water poured from his soaked garments.

Emerson was thrashing around and muttering, as he always does when he is suddenly aroused, but Ramses was on his feet, alert and ready. The newcomer, too breathless to speak, held out empty hands in the universal gesture of conciliation. I could not see him clearly, the room was rather dark. I knew him, though.

“Ah,” I said. “So here you are at last. It is all right, Ramses.”

“No – it – isn’t.” Sethos got it out one word at a time. “Where’s – Edward?”

“He isn’t here?” I asked.

“No.”

Emerson had finally got his wits together. “It’s you, is it?” he demanded, squinting through the gloom. “High bloody time.”

“Bloody too late,” said Sethos, beginning to control his breath. “Did Edward tell you where -”

“We were not even aware of his departure,” I replied. “Please compose yourself so that we can converse rationally.”

“And get out of those wet clothes,” Nefret said.

“What, here and now?”

Ramses had lighted several of the lamps. Sethos threw his shoulders back and tried to look as if he were in command of the situation, but he was a wretched figure, every garment saturated and even his beard dripping.

“A chill can bring on malaria,” Nefret said calmly. “Get them off at once. I’ll ask Mustafa to make tea.”

“And something to eat,” I called after her, as she hastened from the room.

“And something to wear,” said my brother-in-law resignedly. He pulled off the sodden lump of his turban and the fez round which it had been wrapped. “This is as far as I am prepared to go, Amelia, while you remain in the room.”

Anxious as I was to hold the long-delayed discussion – urgent as were the questions to be asked and answered – physical needs took precedence. Sethos had had malaria before. It would be extremely inconvenient if he came down with it again.

“Come with me,” I ordered, and led the way out of the room.

Selim, still lying romantically across the girl’s threshold, woke instantly when we approached – and no wonder, on that hard floor. He sprang up, reaching for his knife.

“He is a friend, Selim,” I said. “Perhaps you would be good enough to help him change his wet clothing.”

“I do not require a damned valet,” Sethos snarled.

“Selim isn’t a valet. You require assistance, and that is what you are about to get. Follow me, both of you.”

A large cupboard in the other bedroom contained an extensive wardrobe, ranging from abas and galabeeyahs to a nice tweed suit that Sethos had borrowed from Ramses the year before. I left them to it, and returned to the saloon. Mustafa had scraped together a rather extraordinary meal – tinned tongue and bread and fruit, and, of course, tea. Before long, Selim and Sethos joined us, the latter in dry garments, his unruly hair still damp.

“Well, this is cozy,” said Sethos, with a decidedly sardonic inflection. “A jolly little family gathering. I’ve been chasing you across the countryside all night.”

“Were you at the rendezvous?” I asked.

“Not until after you’d left. Would you like to know what happened?”

“Very much so,” said Emerson, with a snap of his teeth.

“I had to make a run for it,” Sethos explained. “I – er – miscalculated a trifle, you see. I didn’t expect Sahin would move so quickly or so decisively. He’s a very efficient man, with a well-organized network of supporters hereabouts. It didn’t take him long to find out you were in Khan Yunus. You weren’t exactly discreet, were you?”

“The disclosure of our true identities was unavoidable,” I said. “And if I may say so, criticism from you is unwarranted, under the circumstances.”

“Possibly,” Sethos admitted. “If I may continue my narrative?”

“Pray do,” I said.

“As I was about to say, the disappearance of his daughter hit him hard and he acted instantly. He sent orders to attack your house. There was a chance the girl was with you. If she wasn’t, he hoped to acquire a hostage – one or all of you.”

“How do you know all that?” I asked.

“He told me.” Sethos had been eating ravenously, between sentences. He swallowed a bite of fruit and went on, “We had one of those friendly little chats – you know what they’re like, Ramses. He explained in detail what he meant to do, and added, more in sorrow than in anger, that he was going to lock me up, since he had been forced to the conclusion that my conversion was not sincere.”

He bit into a piece of bread. The pause was for effect, as I knew; the man could not resist making a dramatic story of it.

“So you hit him?” Ramses was as intrigued as the rest of us. “What with?”

“Not my fist, I assure you. He was waiting for that. I was nibbling daintily on a nectarine. I shoved it in his face. He was trying to claw the pulp out of his eyes and spit it out of his mouth when I broke his water pipe over his head. It made a frightful mess and rather a loud noise, so I didn’t wait to tie him up. I calculated I had about sixty seconds before a servant got nerve enough to investigate, so I started running – straight out of the house and past the guards. If you don’t have time to be cautious, speed and effrontery are your only hope. It was a spectacle dreadful enough to throw most people into a panic,” he added with a grin. “The holy infidel, waving his arms and screaming broken phrases from the Koran. Nobody tried to stop me. Religious frenzy is dangerous. I kept running, divesting myself of my elegant ornaments as I went and scattering them about the streets, to the additional confusion of those I encountered. I presented the last – a very handsome emerald brooch, which I hated to give up – to the officer in command of one of the guard posts. With my blessing. May I have more tea?”

Ramses was the first to break the fascinated silence. “I’m a bloody amateur,” he murmured. “Excuse me, Mother.”

“You haven’t done so badly,” his uncle conceded. “This last escapade wasn’t well thought out, though. You ought to have had a means of escape arranged before you shot at me.”

“You don’t suppose Ramses would do such a thing!” Nefret said indignantly.

“Now, now, keep calm. I did not suppose my affectionate nephew really intended to kill me. I credited him with realizing that an attack on me, presumably by my erstwhile employers, would establish me as a bona fide traitor. I didn’t expect he would go so far as to let himself be caught. That was a complication I did not need.”

“Accept my apologies,” said Ramses, scowling at his uncle. Sethos did have a gift for turning people against him.

“Who was it, then, if it wasn’t you?”

“A fellow named Chetwode. He’s the general’s nephew. His superior is a man named Cartright.”

“Oh, that lot. How did you -”

“Never mind that now,” I interrupted. “If we keep getting off onto side issues we will never make sense of this business. What happened after you left Gaza?”

“I decided I had better go to Khan Yunus and warn you.”

“You might have thought of that earlier,” Emerson grumbled.

“I told you, I didn’t know what Sahim intended to do until he informed me. I barely made it out of the city before his men came boiling out in hot pursuit; I had to lie low in the hills until they tired of looking for me.” He took a cigarette from the tin Ramses offered him and lit it before he went on. “By the time I got to Khan Yunus, all hell had broken loose. The army was on the scene, trying to suppress the riot, without the vaguest idea of who had started it or why. Your place had been broken into, and some of the locals were taking advantage of the confusion to carry off anything they could lay their hands on.”

“The motorcar!” Selim exclaimed. “Did they damage it?”

“I wasn’t given the opportunity to examine it,” Sethos said dryly. “I hung about trying to look harmless until the military got things more or less under control. You hadn’t shown yourselves, so I could only hope Edward had warned you in time for you to escape. It was after midnight by then. I had the devil of a time getting out of town, since I had to avoid not only soldiers looking for rioters but rioters who might be Sahin’s lads. The whole bloody countryside was aroused – looking for a pack of horse thieves, as the sergeant who collared me explained. I was not in possession of a horse, so he let me go. You people really excel at stirring up trouble! I pushed on and, of course, found the ruined house deserted. You’d been there – you left an empty biscuit tin – and so had several horses. So I came on here. I couldn’t think where else you might have gone. It took a while, since I was on foot.”

I observed the faintest tremor in the hand that extinguished his cigarette. It was not the only sign of fatigue; his voice was flat and his face was drawn.

“You had better get some sleep,” I said. “We will talk again later.”

“As you command, Sitt Hakim.” He got slowly to his feet. “Is someone sleeping in my bed?”

“Miss Sahin is in one of the beds. I will make up the other one for you.”

“There is no need for that.”

“Clearly it is not an amenity to which you are accustomed. I will do it anyhow. Come along.”

What I wanted, as the Reader must have surmised, was a private chat. Even Emerson realized the reasonableness of this, though he did not much like it. He had never completely conquered his jealousy of his brother, baseless though it was – on my side, at any rate.

“Allow me to give you a little laudanum,” I said. “You won’t sleep without it, you are too tired and too on edge.”

“Are you afraid I’ll sneak out of the house?” He watched me unfold one of the sheets and then took hold of the other end. “I have better sense than that. If Edward isn’t back by nightfall, I will have to take steps, but I cannot function efficiently without sleep.”

He had tucked the sheet in any which way. I remade that end of the bed. Our eyes met, and he smiled a little; he was thinking, as was I, what an oddly domestic scene this was. “I don’t need your laudanum,” he went on, removing a container from one of the shelves.

“How long have you been taking that?” I asked, as he swallowed a small white pill.

“Weeks. Months.” He stretched out on the bed. “It works quickly, so if you have any questions – which you undoubtedly do – talk fast.”

“I only wanted to ask about Margaret. Have you heard from her?”

He hadn’t expected such a harmless subject. “Margaret? No, not for months. I couldn’t very well carry on a frequent correspondence, could I?”

“Does she know what you are doing?”

“She knows everything about me.” He closed his eyes.

“Including -”

“Everything.”

“You have complete confidence in her, then. Are you going to marry her?”

Sethos opened his eyes and clasped his hands behind his head. “You aren’t going to leave me in peace until I invite you into my innermost heart, are you? The question is not whether I am going to marry her, but whether she will consent to marry me. I asked her. I hadn’t intended to, it – er – came into my head at a particularly – er – personal moment. She said no.”

“A flat, unconditional no?”

“There were conditions. You can guess what they were. She was in the right. I told her – I promised her – this would be my last assignment. As it well may be.”

“Not in the way you mean,” I said firmly. “We are here, and on the job! We could be more useful, however, if you would tell me the purpose of your mission. What are you after?”

“Sahin.” His eyelids drooped. The sedative had loosened his tongue. “He’s their best man. Their only good man. Once he’s out of the way, we can proceed with… He loves the girl. I didn’t know that. I thought he’d go to some lengths to get her back, but I didn’t realize… Paternal affection isn’t one of my strong points. I told you about Maryam, didn’t I?”

“Who?” I had to repeat the question. He was half asleep, wandering a little in his mind.

“Maryam. Molly. That’s the name you knew… She’s gone.”

“Dead?” I gasped. “Your daughter?”

“No. Gone. Left. Ran away. Hates me. Because of her mother. She’s living proof of heredity. Got the worst of both parents. Poor little devil… She is, you know. Amelia…”

“It’s all right,” I said softly, taking the hand that groped for mine. “Everything will be all right. Sleep now.”

I sat by him until his hand relaxed and the lines on his face smoothed out. I had intended – oh, I admit it – to take advantage of his drowsy state to wring information out of him, but I had not expected revelations so intimate, so personal, so painful.

His daughter had been fourteen years of age when I knew her. She must be sixteen now. Her mother had been Sethos’s lover and partner in crime; but her tigerish affection had turned to jealous hatred when she realized his heart belonged to another. (Me, in fact, or so he claimed.) She tried several times to kill me and succeeded in assassinating one of my dearest friends before she met her end at the hands of those who had been an instant too late to save him.

How much of that terrible story did the child know? If she blamed her father for her mother’s death, she could not know the whole truth. He had not even been present when she died, and she had led a life of crime and depravity before she met Sethos. A moralist might hold him guilty of failing to redeem her, but in my opinion even a saint, which Sethos was not, would have found Bertha hard going.

I do not believe that the dead hand of heredity is the sole determinant of character. Remembering Molly as I had last seen her, looking even younger than her actual age, the picture of freckled, childish innocence… But she hadn’t looked so innocent the day I found her in Ramses’s room with her dress half off – by her own act, I should add. If I had not happened to be passing by – if Ramses had not had the good sense to summon me at once – or if he had been another kind of man, the kind of man she hoped he was – he might have found himself in an extremely interesting situation.

That proved nothing. She had not deliberately set out to seduce or shame him; she had been young and foolish and infatuated. My heart swelled with pity, for her and for the man who lay sleeping on the bed, his face pale and drawn with fatigue. He had not known how much he loved her until he lost her, and he blamed himself. How wonderful it would be if I could bring father and child together again!

It was a happy thought, but not practical – for the present, at any rate. We had to get through the current difficulty first. With a sigh I slipped my hand from his and tiptoed out of the room.

“Well?” Emerson demanded. “You’ve been the devil of a long time. How much were you able to get out of him?”

“We were right about him, of course,” I replied, seating myself next to him as his gesture invited. “He is no traitor. His mission was to remove Sahin Bey – Pasha.”

“Kill him, you mean?” Ramses asked.

“He didn’t say. But surely Sethos would not -”

“Sahin is a dangerous enemy and this is wartime. However,” Ramses said thoughtfully, “the same purpose would be served if Sahin Pasha were to be disgraced and removed from his position. In the last week he’s lost me, his daughter, and now Ismail Pasha, whose flight will prove to their satisfaction that he was a British spy. Careless, to say the least!”

“More than careless,” Emerson exclaimed. “Highly suspicious, to say the least! With that lot, you are guilty until proven innocent. By Gad, my boy, I believe you are right. It’s like Sethos to concoct such a devious scheme. If the Turks believe, as they well may, that Sahin Pasha has been a double agent all along, they will have to reorganize their entire intelligence network. It could take months.”

“And in the meantime they would be without their best and cleverest man,” I added. “Sethos said that once Sahin was out of the way, they could proceed with… something.”

“What?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And who is ‘they’?” Nefret asked. “Who is he working for? Not Cartright and ‘that lot’?”

“He – er – didn’t say.”

Emerson brought his fist down on the table, rattling the crockery. “What did he say? Good Gad, you were with him for almost three quarters of an hour.”

“How do you know that?” I demanded. “You haven’t a watch.”

This time my attempt to distract him and put him on the defensive did not succeed. “Just answer the question, Peabody. What were you talking about all that while?”

“Personal matters. Oh, Emerson, for pity’s sake, don’t grind your teeth. I wanted to make certain he was asleep before I left him. The man is on the edge of nervous collapse. He has been living for months under conditions of intolerable strain. He must not be allowed to return to Gaza.”

“He wouldn’t be such a fool,” Emerson muttered.

“He would if he believed Sir Edward had gone there to look for him.”

“He wouldn’t be such a fool,” Emerson declared.

“He would if he believed his leader was in danger. They have been friends for a long time. I am going to talk to Mustafa; perhaps Sir Edward said something to him. And I promised to treat his sore… Ah, there you are, Esin. You had a good long rest.”

“Yes.” Rubbing sleepy eyes, she took a seat on the divan next to Ramses. “What has happened? Has my father -”

“Nothing has happened. You are perfectly safe. Are you hungry? There must be something left on that tray. Excuse me. I won’t be long.”

Ramses accompanied me. I had expected he or his father would do so, and on the whole I preferred Ramses to Emerson. His questions were not likely to be so provocative.

“I thought I’d better come along in case Mustafa’s sore is located in a place Father would prefer you didn’t examine,” he explained.

“That is highly unlikely.”

“I was joking, Mother.”

“I know, my dear.”

The skies were still overcast but the rain had stopped. It dripped in mournful cadence from the eaves of the arcades around the courtyard. I allowed Ramses to take my arm.

“I am of the opinion that you are right about Sethos’s intentions,” I said. “It was clever of you to reason it out.”

“Too clever, perhaps? I’d hate to think my mind works along the same lines as his.”

“Whatever his original intentions, they have almost certainly had the effect you described. Goodness, but this is a dreary place. There doesn’t seem to be a soul about. Mustafa?”

“He’s probably with the horses,” Ramses said.

Mustafa heard our voices and emerged from the shed. “I was talking to the horses,” he said. “They are fine animals. Is there something you lack, Sitt Hakim?”

“Not at the moment. I want to talk to you, Mustafa. And treat your sore… Where is it?”

Mustafa sat down on a bench and held out his foot. It was bare and callused and very dirty.

“You will have to wash it first,” I said.

“Wash?” Mustafa repeated in astonishment.

Ramses, who appeared to be enjoying himself very much, fetched a bucket of water and we persuaded Mustafa to put his foot into it. I had brought a bar of Pear’s soap with me, since I knew that commodity is not common in houses of the region. After a vigorous scrubbing the sore was apparent – an infected big toe, which he must have stubbed and then neglected. The alcohol made Mustafa’s eyes pop.

“I am going to bandage your foot,” I said, applying gauze and sticking plaster liberally. “But you must keep it clean. Change the bandage every day and wash it.”

“Is that all?” Mustafa asked.

“That should -”

Ramses coughed loudly. “Will you say the proper words, Mother, or shall I?”

“Incantations are more in your line than mine,” I replied in English. “Proceed.”

Once that essential part of the treatment was completed, Mustafa was satisfied, and I got down to business.

“Did Sir Edward tell you where he was going?”

“No.” Mustafa held up his foot and studied the bandage. “He took the mule.”

“You have a mule?”

“Two. He took one.”

“Did he say when he would be back?”

“No.” Mustafa cogitated, his brow furrowing. “He said… what was it? Something about whiskey. That he would bring it to the Father of Curses.”

“He’s gone to Khan Yunus,” Ramses said, as we left Mustafa admiring his bandaged foot.

“Not to Gaza?”

“Father is right, he wouldn’t be such a fool. Not unless he had proof that Sethos was still there.” He took hold of my arm and stopped me. “I don’t believe we want to discuss Sahin Pasha in front of the girl, do we?”

“It would be wiser not to, I believe. The feelings of young persons are notoriously changeable. She is angry with him now, but if she believed he was in danger -”

“Yes, Mother, that is precisely what I had in mind.”

When we returned to the saloon Nefret looked up from the paper on which she was drawing. “Esin wanted to know about the latest fashions,” she explained. “How is Mustafa’s sore… whatever?”

“His toe,” I replied. “A slight infection. Where is Emerson?”

“He said he was going to sit with Sethos.” She chuckled. “I think he’s looking for tobacco. He’s run out.”

Emerson did not find any tobacco. He came back looking even more perturbed than deprivation of that unhealthy substance could explain.

“Is he still sleeping?” I asked.

“Yes. He – er – doesn’t look well.”

“He isn’t well.”

“Is someone sick?” Esin asked.

I realized she was unaware of the latest arrival. “A – er – friend of ours. You know him as Ismail Pasha.”

“He is here?” She jumped up and clapped her hands to her cheeks. “Why? Did my father send him? Has he come to take me back?”

“Goodness, but you have a one-track mind,” I said. “He is a fugitive too. Your father became suspicious of him and he ran away.”

“Oh.” She thought it over and her face brightened. “Then I must thank him. He risked himself for me!”

“He is, after all, a gallant Englishman,” Ramses drawled. “Much braver and more chivalrous than I.”

“But you are younger and more beautiful,” said Esin.

That took care of Ramses. He said no more.

The rest of us kept up a desultory conversation and the minutes dragged slowly by. There was much we could not say in Esin’s presence, and I couldn’t think of a reasonable excuse for getting rid of her. Sending her off to bed wouldn’t work; she had slept most of the day.

Except for Selim, the rest of us had not. I persuaded Nefret to lie down and took Esin off into a corner so our voices would not disturb her. We found a common interest in women’s rights, and I told her all about the suffrage movement and how I had marched with the suffragists and been seized by a large constable. She declared that she would have done the same, and kicked the constable as well.

Emerson sat in brooding silence, smoking Ramses’s cigarettes and slipping out of the room periodically to look in on his brother. Ramses brooded too, over Nefret, sitting quietly beside her with his eyes fixed on her face. After a while I took Esin with me to the kitchen and showed her how to make tea. It was the first time she had ever performed such a menial chore, I believe. She was certainly clumsy enough. However, we got the tray upstairs without disaster.

Late in the afternoon the sun made its appearance, and shortly afterward Sethos made his. He was in a vile mood, which I had expected, and he had shaved his beard, which I had not expected. The strange gray-green eyes swept the room in a contemptuous and comprehensive survey. “Everybody here?” he inquired in his most offensive tone. “How nice.”

I knew what concerned him most and I hastened to give him the news that would relieve his mind. “We believe Sir Edward has not gone to Gaza but to Khan Yunus.”

“Oh?” He rubbed his chin. “Let us hope you are right.”

“I am certain of it,” I said. “Tea?”

“No.” He flung himself down on the divan.

“You had better have some. Take it to him, Esin.” I handed her the cup. “Lemon, no sugar, isn’t that right?”

His eyes met mine and his tight mouth turned up at this reminder of the last time we had taken tea together. Unfortunately it reminded Emerson too. He knew what had happened at that meeting, for of course I had confided fully in him. However, he confined his comments to a wordless grumble.

“Are you really Ismail Pasha?” the girl asked doubtfully. She stood beside him, the cup held carefully in both hands.

Sethos rose and took it from her. A smile transformed his haggard face, and the cultivated charm slipped onto him like a cloak. “Is it the absence of the beard that confused you? I am indeed the same man, and I am relieved to find you well and safe. My friends have looked after you?”

The charm was a little tattered, but it was good enough for Esin. “Oh, yes, but I was frightened for a while; there was fighting and we had to run away.”

“Tell me about it,” Sethos murmured.

Her account was accurate, on the whole, though she made a thrilling tale of it. Sethos listened attentively, his mobile countenance expressing admiration, astonishment, and distress at appropriate intervals, but I could tell she had not his complete attention. He was listening and waiting – as were we all.

The sunlight deepened to amber and then faded into gray, and there was still no sign of Sir Edward. Ramses lighted the lamps. I was about to suggest we do something about supper when the long-awaited sound of footsteps was heard and Sir Edward came into the room. In that first moment he had eyes only for his chief. Had I doubted the warmth of their friendship, the looks of relief on both faces would have proved it. Being English, they did not express their feelings.

“It’s good to see you, sir,” Sir Edward said coolly. “Mustafa told me you were here.”

“You ought to have been here” was the equally cool reply. “Sit down and have a cup of tea.”

“It’s cold,” I said, inspecting the sad dregs.

“I’ll take it anyhow.” Sir Edward dropped heavily onto the divan next to Emerson. “Sorry, Professor, I wasn’t able to get your whiskey. The house -”

“Then we will have to settle for claret,” said Sethos, going to the wine cabinet. “My supplies have become somewhat depleted. Amelia?”

“Yes,” I said, answering both the spoken question and the unspoken order. “Esin, I suggest you – er – go to your room and rest.”

“I don’t need to rest,” said the young person. “I am not tired.”

“Then help Selim find us something to eat.”

I gave Selim a wink and a nod. As a rule this was all Selim needed, but this time I had to give him a little poke, for he was not looking at me. His intent black eyes were fixed on Sethos.

“Your pardon, Sitt Hakim,” he said, starting.

I repeated the suggestion. He nodded obediently, and got Esin to go with him by requesting the details of her daring escape from her father’s house. “Such courage,” I heard him say, as they left the room. “Such cleverness!”

Sethos turned from the cabinet, the bottle in one hand and the corkscrew in the other. “Report,” he said curtly.

“The town’s quiet,” Sir Edward said. “Less damage than I had expected. The house is guarded by several soldiers and they’re scouring the countryside looking for you people. According to the worthy citizens of Khan Yunus, you simply vanished into thin air, like the djinn you are reputed to be. The military hasn’t accepted that, though.” He took the glass Sethos handed him and went on, “They haven’t made up their minds whether you were abducted by force or went off on your own, for purposes of your own. Either way, they want you.”

Ramses took the bottle from Sethos, who had neglected the rest of us in his concern for his aide, and poured wine for Nefret and me.

“What about Gaza?” Sethos asked.

“The place is shut up tighter than a prison.” Sir Edward sipped his wine appreciatively. “I made contact with one of our lads – Hassan. He’d just got back from an attempt to enter the city by his usual route, but what he saw made him veer off. They’re stopping everyone.”

“Shutting the barn door after the horse is stolen,” I said with a smile.

“Ha,” said Emerson, motioning Ramses to fill his glass. “Any news of Sahin Pasha?”

Sir Edward shook his head, and Sethos said, “It will take them a while to decide how to deal with him. The most sensible course of action would be to execute him and announce he’d been assassinated by the vile British.”

“That was your plan, then,” I said. “To make him appear guilty of treason.”

“I didn’t have a plan when I started out,” Sethos said snappishly. “My orders were to remove him – pleasant little euphemism, isn’t it? One learns to take advantage of unexpected events. We were damned lucky. All of us.”

“It took more than luck,” Ramses said grudgingly. His uncle gave him a mocking bow.

“Selim can’t keep the girl away for long,” I said. “And I certainly don’t want her to know her father may be under arrest and facing death. We must decide what we are going to do with her.”

“Quite right, Amelia,” said my brother-in-law. “You’ll have to take her back to Cairo, and the sooner, the better. The sooner you are all back in Cairo, the better.”

“What about you?” I asked. “And Sir Edward?”

“Don’t concern yourself about us. As soon as it’s light I want you all to return to Khan Yunus. That will stop them searching the whole damned neighborhood and finding this place, which wouldn’t be convenient for me. Make your preparations to leave Khan Yunus and get the hell away. You’ll have to come up with some story to explain the girl. The military mustn’t know who she is, or take her from you.”

“As if I would leave a girl of eighteen with a troop of soldiers,” I said with a sniff. “What do we do with her when we reach Cairo?”

“Take her to an address I will give you.” He glanced at Ramses. “Memorize it; don’t write it down.”

“That’s it, then,” said Emerson, hearing Selim and Esin returning. “You have nothing more to tell us?”

Sethos made sure we had no chance to ask for more. After a scratch meal he went off with Sir Edward, instructing us to get our gear together and be ready for an early departure. We did not see him again until morning.

It was still dark when we gathered in the courtyard, with only the light of our torches to guide our steps. The horses were waiting.

“Good-bye,” said Sethos. “A safe journey.”

He shook Emerson’s hand and mine. “When will we see you again?” I asked.

“When you least expect me, Amelia dear. That’s my trademark.” He smiled at me. “You’ll hear from me soon, I promise. Good-bye, Nefret. Try and keep Ramses out of mischief.”

“I always do.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the cheek. “Take care of yourself. Sir Edward, try and keep him out of mischief.”

“Don’t I get a kiss?” that gentleman inquired.

She laughed at him, and gave him her hand. “Good luck. And thank you.”

We reached Khan Yunus by midmorning and went at once to the house, followed by a throng of idlers. The gate was closed, and there were two soldiers guarding it. They snapped to attention, rifles raised, when they saw us, and then one of them exclaimed, “It’s them!”

“Grammar, young man,” I said. “It is indeed we. Let us pass, if you please.”

Selim went at once to his beloved motorcar. “They have stolen two of the tires!” he cried in anguished tones.

“That’s easily remedied,” said Emerson, helping me to dismount. “Come along, Selim, you can play with the motorcar later.”

A quick inspection assured us that the house was deserted and that a good many items were missing, including the best part of “the favorite’s” elegant wardrobe. “Can’t be helped,” said Emerson. “Lucky we had everything we needed with us. Let us go to the mak’ad. I expect we will be receiving a visit soon.”

“Yes, our arrival will have been reported,” I agreed. “Esin, I want you to stay here in the harem.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“You are an enemy alien,” Nefret said. “If the soldiers find out you are here, they will take you away.”

I hadn’t intended to be quite so blunt about it, but the warning had the desired effect. Esin’s rounded cheeks paled.

“We won’t let them take you,” Ramses said quickly. “Just stay out of sight and keep quiet.”

“I would very much like a bath,” I said. “But that will have to wait until we round up a few of the servants. In the meantime, what about a nice hot cup of tea?”

The inefficiency of the military was disappointing. It took them an hour to react to the news that we had returned. The open arches of the mak’ad constituted an excellent observation post; we were sipping a second cup of tea when he burst into the courtyard, kicked an unfortunate chicken out of his path, and came to a stop, staring. Emerson leaned over the rail and called to him.

“Up here, Cartright. Join us.”

“We ought to have expected it would be he,” I remarked. “He appears to be in quite an unhappy frame of mind.”

Cartright took the stairs two at a time. His face was flushed and his mustache looked as if he had been chewing on it.

“You’re here,” he gasped. “All of you.”

“Obviously,” I replied. “Nefret, is there more hot water? I believe Major Cartright could do with a cup of tea. Do sit down, Major.”

The young man collapsed onto a chair and passed a handkerchief over his face. “Where have you been? We’ve been searching for days.”

“Not that long, surely,” I said. “Drink your tea. We have decided to take advantage of your kind offer to facilitate our return to Cairo. We will need petrol, water, food, and two new tires. Is there anything else, Emerson?”

Leaning against the wall, arms folded and lips twitching, Emerson shook his head. “Not that I know of. Continue, Peabody, you seem to have the situation well in hand.”

“We would like to leave tomorrow morning,” I explained. “You seem to have frightened our servants away. Persuade – persuade, I said – them to return. We have clothing to be washed and meals to be prepared.”

“Mrs. Emerson… please.” Cartright waved away the cup I had offered. “Just stop talking, will you? Professor, I want to know where the devil -”

“Language, language,” said Emerson. “There are ladies present. As for answering your questions, sir, I am not subject to your orders.”

“General Chetwode -”

“Nor his. I will report to whom I see fit and when I see fit. In Cairo, to be precise. Are you going to get us the supplies we need or must I go over your head?”

“I… yes. That is, I will get them. And go with you.”

“There won’t be room in the motorcar,” said Emerson with finality. “Oh – I almost forgot. The horses. Fine animals. They are in the stable.”

Cartright sat bolt upright. “Then it was you who… One of the troopers swore there was a woman in the party, but -”

“Me,” said Nefret with a smile. “The poor boy wants his Mary back, I expect. Tell him she has been well cared for and that I thank him for the loan.”

“That is all you have to say?” His frowning visage turned from Nefret to Emerson.

“It is all any of us have to say,” Emerson assured him. “When may we expect those supplies?”

Major Cartright’s countenance underwent a series of contortions. He had been sorely tried, but knew perfectly well that any attempt to detain Emerson against his will would result in an uproar that would reverberate through every level of British officialdom.

“I’m not certain I can obtain everything you need today,” he muttered.

“Oh, I think you can,” said Emerson, showing his teeth.

“Yes, sir. Then… I will see you in Cairo?” He looked at Ramses, who had remained silent.

“No doubt,” said Ramses.

“You are the one he would like to question,” I said, after Cartright had taken his departure. “I expect he will go haring off to General Chetwode and demand we be held here.”

“Chetwode has no authority to detain us,” said Emerson. He rubbed irritably at the cast, which was looking somewhat the worse for wear. “Nefret, can’t I have this cursed thing off?”

“Not yet, Father. As soon as we get to Cairo I’ll have a look at it.”

Selim returned from his inspection of the motorcar to report that everything seemed to be in order, and went off to commandeer some household assistance, since I did not suppose Major Cartright would consider that matter worthy of his attention. It had begun to rain, so we retreated into the room behind the open mak’ad, where we had left our baggage.

“We may as well unpack our bundles,” I said. “What with all our comings and goings, I have lost track of precisely what we still have. I gave my bar of soap to Mustafa, but here is my medical kit and my parasol -”

“You won’t need that, Mrs. Emerson. You will not be leaving the house just yet.”

I had missed one of the secret rooms. Unlike the makhba under the floor of the harem, this was a small hidden chamber whose door resembled that of a wall cupboard. He looked much the same as he had when I had seen him before, a big man with a grizzled beard and shoulders almost as impressive as those of Emerson. He had a pistol in one hand and a knife in the other.

“Sahin Pasha, I presume,” I said, after a slight catch of breath. “We ought to have anticipated that a clever man would comprehend the gravity of his predicament and escape before he could be apprehended. On the run, are you?”

“One might call it that. Now, if you don’t mind -”

“Coming here was also a clever move,” I mused. “There is a saying that the safest place for a criminal is in the police station.”

“Is there? No, my young friend, don’t take another step. I want all of you close together.”

Ramses stopped. “You daren’t use that gun,” he said. “The sound of a shot will bring the servants and a dozen soldiers.”

“If I am forced to fire, there will be more than one shot and by the time your assistants arrive it will be too late for some of you. There is no need for that. All I want is my daughter.”

“Let us discuss this calmly,” I said. “How do you propose to get her away from here, against her will, without killing all of us, which is, as you must see, impractical?”

A rather jolly rumble of laughter emerged from his parted lips. “Mrs. Emerson, it is a pleasure to meet you at last. I know you are hoping that your fascinating conversation will distract me. It won’t. But since you ask, I have already dealt with Esin. She is lying bound and gagged on the divan in the ka’ah. I found this hiding place last night. As soon as I have persuaded you to enter it, I will take her and go.”

“Go where?” I demanded. “Back into the lion’s den? You are being unrealistic if you believe you can convince your erstwhile friends that you are still to be trusted.”

The man’s strong jaw hardened. “I will prove my good faith by returning, with my daughter.”

It would require more than that. He knew it, and so did I. But if he could recapture the prisoner he had let escape… If he could herd us one by one into the secret room, leaving Ramses till last…

“Go on,” Sahin said, gesturing with the pistol. “You first, Mrs. Emerson.”

“No,” I exclaimed. “Emerson, do you see what -”

“It’s all right, Mother,” Ramses said quietly. “I think he’s bluffing. I wonder how many bullets are left in that pistol? Enough to stop all of us?”

“A good point.” Emerson nodded. “I call your bluff, sir. We are not sheep, to be herded into a pen. The girl stays with us, but we will give you… oh, let us say an hour… to get away.”

They measured one another, two men of commanding presence and stature. The Turk said slowly, “You would do that?”

“As the lesser of two evils. Your usefulness to your government has been destroyed. This way no one will be injured. You can trust us to look after the child, and when the war is over you may be reunited with her.”

“The word of an Englishman?” Sahin Pasha murmured.

“Don’t be foolish,” Ramses said urgently. “There are two – four, I mean – of us. Hand over the gun.”

Sahin smiled wryly. “Four? Ah well, it seems I have no choice. You were correct. The gun isn’t loaded. I had to fight my way out of Gaza.”

“Drop it, then,” Ramses said. He took a step forward and held out his hand. “Or give it to me.”

His eyes were fixed on the pistol. It might be a double bluff; we could not be certain, with a man so crafty. Sahin held it out – and then the knife flashed and Ramses stumbled back and fell, blood spurting from his side. Nefret flung herself down beside him.

“You never learn, do you?” Sahin shook his head regretfully. “You really ought to give up this line of work, my boy.”

Emerson had not stirred. “Nefret?” he asked softly.

Her quick surgeon’s hands had slowed the flow of blood. “It’s… not too bad,” she said.

“But now, you see, there are only three of you,” Sahin said. “And I lied when I said the gun was not loaded. Do I take the ladies on next?”

“Yes,” I said, and swung my parasol. It was one of my better efforts, if I do say so. The gun flew out of Sahin’s hand and fell with a clatter onto the tiled floor.

“Ah,” Emerson breathed. “Well done, Peabody. Get the gun.”

“Take my parasol, then.” I pulled out the little sword and forced the weapon into Emerson’s hand. Sahin Pasha let out a guffaw. Emerson swore, but he got the blade up just in time to parry a wicked cut at his good arm.

“I lied again,” said the Turk, grinning. “The gun is empty.”

“We will see about that,” I replied. I pointed the weapon out the window and squeezed the trigger. There was no explosion, only a click. “Curse it,” I remarked.

“This is so entertaining I hate to end it,” said Sahin Pasha. “Professor, I admire you, I respect you, and I do not want to injure you. Anyhow, my reputation would never be the same if I overcame a man armed with a parasol who has only one serviceable arm. I accept your offer. Put down the…” A gurgle of amusement escaped him. “The umbrella.”

“Oh, come, don’t insult my intelligence,” said Emerson in exasperation. “You have no intention of giving yourself up, and I have no intention of allowing you to take my son prisoner again. I cannot imagine how you could accomplish it, but I do not underestimate you. En garde.”

Ramses pulled himself to a sitting position. “Be careful, Father. He doesn’t -”

“Fight like a gentleman? Well, well. Neither do I.”

He bent his knee and lunged. A cry of alarm escaped me. It was almost certainly the most ineffective move he could have made. The blade of the sword was only three inches longer than that of Sahin’s knife. The Turk didn’t even bother to parry it. One quick step backward took him out of range, and as Emerson straightened, staggering a little, the Turk’s knife drove at his side.

It sank with a crunch into the plaster encasing Emerson’s raised forearm and stuck, just long enough. Emerson dropped the parasol and hit the other man in the stomach. Rather below the stomach, to be accurate.

“Oh, Emerson,” I gasped. “Oh, my dear! That was magnificent!”

“Most ungentlemanly,” said my husband, contemplating the writhing, wheezing form of his foe. “But I was never much good with a parasol.”

The capture of the chief of the Turkish secret service ended any doubts the military might have entertained about letting us leave. General Chetwode himself called to congratulate us, accompanied by several of his staff. We had quite a time getting rid of them.

“Medals again,” Emerson grumbled. “They seem to think we intended this all along.”

“You encouraged them to think so,” Ramses said. At Nefret’s insistence he was reclining on one of the divans. She had had to put a few stitches into the cut, which had bled copiously. “It was inspired lying, Father.”

“At least we got a bottle of whiskey out of them,” Emerson said complacently. “Much more useful than medals. Here, my boy, this will put a little color into your face.”

“I would like some too,” said Esin.

“Spirits are not suitable for young ladies,” I said, sipping my own whiskey appreciatively. It had been quite a busy day, what with one thing and another, and I was not in a good humor with the girl. After we freed her she carried on quite extravagantly, and she had accepted the news of her father’s capture with unbecoming equanimity.

“Aren’t you at all concerned about your father?” I asked.

“What will happen to him?”

“He is a prisoner of war,” Emerson said. “Do you want to see him before we leave? I can probably arrange that.”

“No.” She shivered. “He tried to take me away. He says he loves me, but he will not allow me to do what I want. Is that love?”

“Sometimes,” Nefret said.

The silence that followed was broken by a penetrating shriek from outside the house. I could not make out all the words, but there were references to the will of Allah and the blessings of various prophets, up to and including the greatest, that is, Mohammed. When Sir Edward had arrived on the scene, I did not know, but he must have seen the military go off with their prisoner. This was his farewell to us, and none of us doubted that his chief would soon be informed of the news.

Emerson smiled. “Clever beggar, isn’t he?”

Selim, who had missed all the excitement and was still brooding about it, said under his breath, “Beggar. Yes. He is a clever man. And so is -” He broke off, with a glance at me.

“We will talk about it later, Selim,” I said, as softly as he had done.

“As you say, Sitt. So – it is over?”

“Yes. It is over.”