Theodosia and the Staff of Osiris

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Reunions

RESIGNED TO DESCENDING into the catacombs alone once again, I turned on the lights, gripped my amulets in my hand, and proceeded down the stairs, nearly tripping over Isis, who sat at the foot. she was staring at the stone statue of Anubis, her tail twitching back and forth.

The jackal himself sat proudly on top of his shrine, the staff and orb settled carefully between his front paws.

"Thank you," I said. "I couldn't have done it without you." Then, even though I knew he couldn't really feel it, I reached out and scratched the top of his ears, hoping he would somehow be able to sense how pleased I was with him. There was a whisper of movement near his backside, but when I turned to get a better look, all was still. Even so, I would have sworn his tail had wagged, just for an instant.

I left the jackal and went to the shelving to look for an old Canopic jar. Unfortunately, I'd left the execration figure in the hansom cab, and the atropaic wand was undoubtedly on the floor of the Dreadnought's wardroom. I was quite sorry about that, as I hated to misuse museum property.

I did have one item to return, however. Gingerly, I pulled the cursed rope from my pinafore pocket and plunked it into a jar. Then I carefully put the top back on. I'd have to come back down the next day with my curse-removal kit so I could seal the jar, but this would do till then.

As I placed the jar on the shelf, I heard a small cough at the top of the stairway. I hastened over to find Will staring down at me.

"Wigmere's come to see you," he said. "'E's waiting in the reading room."

"Oh, excellent! I have so many questions for him." I took the stairs two at a time and followed Will to the reading room. "How's Snuffles?" I asked.

Will's face brightened. "'E's sitting right pretty, 'e is. 'E proved 'imself today. Might be a future for 'im yet."

Before I had too much time to dwell on Snuffles's dubious future as a pickpocket, Will motioned me inside the room. I found Wigmere in my carrel, holding his hat in one hand and his cane in the other. He was studying something on my desk.

I must have made a sound of some sort, because Wigmere looked up just then. "Ah, good afternoon, my dear."

"Good afternoon, sir."

Wigmere gestured at my desk. "Someone is doing some very interesting work here on the Egyptian calendar."

"Oh, thank you, sir. It keeps me out of trouble. Or so Father says."

His large white mustache twitched. "Indeed. Well, it's very fine work, my girl. And speaking of fathers," he said, "yours should be home very soon."

"Yes, Mum's gone to fetch him home." It was hard to keep from dancing on my toes, but that seemed too undignified to do in front of Wigmere.

He looked me straight in the eye. "He's very lucky to have such a clever, brave daughter."

My chest felt full, as if my heart were too big to fit inside me any longer. "Thank you, sir."

"I won't keep you too long—we just have a couple of loose ends to tie up."

"Did you catch them? Sopcoate and the others?"

"No, I'm afraid they had too great a head start. We got the four that you and Will disabled. How'd you manage to give Bollingsworth such a nasty curse?"

I explained about the mut I'd trapped in the rope.

"Ah. Quick thinking, that. Once the curse has been removed, Bollingsworth will be imprisoned in a high-security facility along with Jacques LeBlanc, Franz Stankovich, and Yuri Popov."

I wrinkled my nose. "But sir, I thought the French and Russians were our allies?"

"And so they are. You have to remember that these men don't represent their governments any more than Nigel Bollingsworth represents ours."

I brightened. "Then that should help to take some of the pressure from the Germans, won't it?"

"Some, yes. But members of government often see only what they want to see."

"It's quite disappointing, you know. I was so hoping we'd get them this time."

"You and me both. But we'll have to settle for having thrown a wrench in their works once again." He was silent for a moment. "That was a close call." He shook his head. "A poisonous fog that can kill? We'd always thought the Fog of War to be metaphorical."

"I would have made the same assumption, sir."

"It's a perfect weapon, really. Quite hard to defend against. We'll have to hope it remains firmly in the past."

I put my hands on my hips. "Speaking of the past, sir, why didn't you tell me Fagenbush was working for you? Wouldn't that have been much simpler than letting me go on suspecting him?"

Wigmere shook his head. "We never identify our agents to outsiders, Theo. That's standard policy."

"But I'm practically working for you!"

He smiled. "True enough. But you've now had occasion to run into each other on assignment, so all is made clear. And speaking of assignment, is the staff secure?"

"Yes. Am I to keep it or should I give it to you now?"

"We've decided it would be safest for all concerned if the Orb of Ra and the staff itself were separated. That way no one will be able to access all that power."

"That sounds like an excellent idea."

"At some point, we would like to return one of the components to Egyptian soil. I'd feel safer with a continent or two between them, myself. But for now, we'll settle for separating them. We'll take one piece and hide it, then you take the second piece and hide it, and we'll not reveal the hiding places to each other. That way, no single living person will know how to find the two pieces."

"Very well, sir. Which piece would you like?"

"Whichever piece you don't. It makes no difference to me."

I left the room and returned to the catacombs, where I approached the jackal cautiously. He'd been friendly enough when we had both had the same goal of retrieving the staff from Chaos, but I wasn't certain how he'd feel about the idea of separating the orb and staff. When he made no move for my outstretched arm, I snatched the staff and stepped back out of his reach. "Thank you again for all your help," I said. "We're just going to take this for safekeeping now."

I tugged the orb from the jaws on the head of the staff, then looked around the catacombs for a good hiding place. My eyes landed on the jackal's shrine. Really, I might as well continue to use him as a guardian. I opened one of the doors on the side of the shrine and carefully placed the orb inside, then closed the door.

Wigmere was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. I handed him the staff.

He carefully examined it, taking in the crooked jointed sections and the jackal head. "So this is what caused all that trouble?" He grasped the top section and straightened it.

"How do you think something this powerful ended up here, of all places?"

"Ah. We found an answer to that. Remember how I told you about the small, dedicated group who had vowed to protect the pharaohs and their treasures until the end of time? How they managed to smuggle a cache of Egyptian treasures out of the Alexandrian library before it burned?"

I nodded, my heart beating faster as I saw where he was going with this.

"If you follow that trail, something went awry and the group lost possession of the treasures. Their worst fears were confirmed when rumors of the artifacts circulated among the French in Egypt during Napoleon's occupation. Napoleon was said to have had all his agents searching for these artifacts of power in order to help him with his wars.

"But in a very tricky bit of patriotism, Reginald Mayhew, a British explorer masquerading as a Frenchman, got a hold of the artifacts and sent them to England. Only, the man was killed under mysterious circumstances before he could return to his native shore, and his crates lingered unclaimed in warehouses by the docks until the whole lot of them was auctioned off. The crates were purchased by one Augustus Munk, the original owner and founder of the Museum of Legends and Antiquities, who apparently didn't recognize their value or their power."

A forceful knock resounded through the building. A moment later, Will poked his head around the corner and made a face. "It's that gran of yours."

"Oh, dear," I said, turning to Wigmere. "What should I tell her about Admiral Sopcoate?"

"I talked briefly with Captain Bacon and the prime minister before I came here. It would be too disastrous for the country's morale to know the truth—that one of our highest-placed officials has betrayed us."

"But why? Why do you think he betrayed his country?"

Wigmere's eyes were heavy with sorrow. "Why does any man turn bad? Greed, sorrow, bitterness. A combination of all three? We will likely never know. However, the official story is that a secret unidentified group of rebels managed to trick Admiral Sopcoate into taking them aboard the Dreadnought, where he quickly realized his mistake and tried to overpower them. In the struggle, they took flight from the ship to a boat they had waiting. He followed and is presumed dead or missing.

"That story isn't going out to the general public. Only to those who need to know. I trust you to use your best judgment." He'd straightened the staff out by now and, tucking his cane under his left arm, placed the end of the staff on the ground. "I think that should work nicely." He looked back at me, his face solemn again. "I only wish I could sort out what to do with you as easily. It is unacceptable to have you in so much danger, yet for some reason, you seem to find yourself in the thick of things." He sighed. "Well, with Chaos scattered to the four winds, things should calm down now."

Grandmother knocked again.

"I'd best let you go." Wigmere handed Will his cane, then motioned for him to lead. As Will darted back down the corridor, Wigmere followed at a more sedate pace, leaning heavily on the staff.

I headed for the front door. Hopefully Chaos really had been dealt a debilitating blow this time. One could always hope—

"Stilton! What are you doing here in the corner?"

"Hello, Miss Theo." His gaze slid from my face to where Wigmere had just disappeared down the hallway, then back again. "I wanted to make sure you were all right. Trouble does seem to follow you about."

What rot! He'd been eavesdropping. How much had he heard? "Yes, well, you can see that I'm fine. And thank you so much for fetching Inspector Turnbull! He came at just the right moment. But I must run. My grandmother's here."

"So I heard."

"Well, thank you again. You were a lovely help. And thank the other scorpions for me, would you?"

As I continued on my way, I couldn't help but think of Aloysius Trawley and wonder what the Arcane Order of the Black Sun would do when they learned I no longer had the power to raise the dead.

I made it to the front door before Grandmother beat it down and opened it to let her in. "Hello, Grandmother."

She swept past me into the foyer. "Is Admiral Sopcoate here?"

"No, ma'am. He's not."

"What about your mother and father?" she asked as she looked around the room.

"I'm afraid Mother's left to go get Father out of jail."

She looked relieved. "Oh, good, then. Sopcoate's with them."

"Um, I'm afraid not. Mother left alone."

Grandmother's face paled. "But I haven't been able to get a hold of the admiral. I expected to hear back from him by two o'clock at the latest, and I still haven't heard a word. I even sent a footman round to the admiralty to see if he'd gotten tied up there, but no one has seen him all day." She thumped her cane. "He promised me he'd help Alistair."

I stared at poor Grandmother. She'd fallen in love with a traitor, someone who had sold his soul to Chaos and was the worst sort of enemy Britain could have. Talk about errors in judgment! But of course, I could never point that out. I took a step toward her. "Grandmother—"

"What?" Her face was pinched, but I could tell she wasn't scowling at me. She was just ... scowling in general.

"I'm afraid there's been an incident."

"An incident? Where? And how do you know?"

This was the tricky part, wasn't it? "I overheard Inspector Turnbull talking."

I waited for her to say something about the wickedness of eavesdropping, but all she said was, "Well, get on with it! What did he say?"

"He said there was a dustup at the Dreadnought today. It turned out that who Admiral Sopcoate was escorting wasn't a delegation of Abyssinians, but a group of unidentified rebels who were posing as Abyssinians in order to spy on the Royal Navy's newest technological advances."

Grandmother gasped, and then her hand flew to her mouth, as if she was surprised such a noise could have escaped from her.

"Admiral Sopcoate discovered their disguise and tried to apprehend them. Single-handedly," I added for good measure. "But he was greatly outnumbered."

"Why didn't the others onboard try to help him?"

"Because none of them knew what was going on. Until it was too late."

"Too late?" she repeated.

I nodded. "They presume the admiral died or was taken prisoner while protecting his ship," I said as gently as I could.

Grandmother grew even more pale, and she suddenly looked very old and very frail, not like a curmudgeon at all. It was then that I remembered she'd already lost one man, my grandfather, and now she was losing a second.

Hating the look on Grandmother's face, I couldn't help but embellish a bit. "They say he was quite brave. And fearless." It wasn't exactly a lie. He had been all those things, but for the wrong cause.

The front door burst open just then, and Mother and Father waltzed in. Father was tired and rumpled, while Mother appeared jubilant and relieved.

"Look, Grandmother, Father's home! Isn't that lovely?" Surely this would cheer her up.

And it did. For a moment her face softened.

Father held his arms open for me. I longed to run and throw myself into them, but something held me back.

I glanced back at Grandmother, who seemed old, angry, and a little lost.

Not quite sure what I thought I was doing—or why—I reached out and grabbed her hand, half afraid she'd bean me with her cane for taking the liberty. Instead, she stared in puzzlement at my hand holding hers.

Honestly! Did I have to do everything around here? "Come on," I said gently. "Let's welcome Father home."

And then Father was upon us, capturing me in a vast, uncharacteristic hug, which I savored. Even Grandmother standing next to me couldn't ruin that hug.

After a long moment we pulled apart. Beside us, Grandmother took a handkerchief from her reticule. "Really, Alistair, you must speak with your employees. This place has far too much dust floating around. It's quite unhealthy."

We politely looked away as she dabbed at her eyes. "And you," she said, spearing me with her now dry gimlet eye. "What on earth were you thinking, eavesdropping on policemen? Hasn't this family had enough scandal?"

"Yes, Grandmother." I bowed my head meekly, but the truth was, I much preferred this Grandmother, the one made of iron and starch, to the frail old woman she'd been moments ago. In fact, I had an almost overwhelming desire to hug her, even though she would never have allowed such a messy display of emotion.

Even so, I did have the urge. Surely that counted for something!