“Then, as suddenly as whim had brought him to Egypt, John Frederick Forsyte’s Egyptian engineering work ended and he followed whim back to England and a new life. He left his Mohammadan wife and mixed-breed child behind without so much as a letter of regret. They never heard from him again.
“Drood’s mother was now twice disgraced—firstly for marrying a Christian and secondly for being abandoned by him. Her friends, neighbours, and relatives blamed her for both tragedies. One day while with the other women bathing, Amisi was dragged away by several men whose faces were hidden behind scarves, made to stand trial before a court of other faceless men, sentenced to be paraded through the streets on a high-saddled ass surrounded by the local police and by howling mobs of men, and then stoned to death by yet another crowd of men while ululating women in their black robes and veils looked on with satisfaction from rooftops and doorways.
“But when the police arrived to seize the dead woman’s child at Forsyte’s former home in the Old Quarter near the river warehouses, the boy was gone. Servants, neighbours, and relatives denied sheltering him. Homes were searched, but no trace of the child was found. Even his clothes and toys had been left behind, as if the boy had simply stepped out into the courtyard and been carried into the sky or dragged into the river by animals. It was assumed that upon hearing of Amisi’s execution for the crime of immorality, some well-meaning neighbour or servant had told four-year-old Jasper to run and he had simply found his way to the desert and perished.
“But this was obviously not the case.
“You see, Wilkie, a wealthy and important uncle of Amisi’s, a rug merchant named Amun who lived in Alexandria—a man who had always doted on his niece and had been sad when her first marriage had taken her away to Cairo and even sadder when he had heard she had married an infidel—also had heard of the Englishman’s abandoning her and had made the trip to Cairo to urge Amisi to bring her child and to return to Alexandria with him. Amun, whose name meant “the hidden one,” was almost an old man, but he had young wives. Besides being a rug merchant by day, Amun was by night a priest from one of the secret temples celebrating the old religion—the ancient, pagan, pharaonic, pre-Mohammadan religion of Egyptians before they had all been converted under the scimitar to Mohammadanism—and had been determined to convince Amisi to join him.
“He was only an hour late. Arriving in the neighbourhood just in time to see the execution of his niece but with no chance to stop it, he rushed to Amisi’s house—the servants were sleeping in the heat of the day; the neighbours were off enjoying the stoning—and he stole young Jasper John Forsyte out of his bed and left Cairo immediately with the tiny boy clinging frantically around his waist on horseback. Young Jasper would not have known that Amun was his great-uncle or that his mother was dead, imagining in his four-year-old child’s mind that he was being kidnapped by a desert bandit. Together, old man and young boy, they galloped Uncle Amun’s white stallion out through the gates of Cairo and down the desert road to Alexandria.
“There in his home city, within the walls of his fortress of a compound guarded by his clan’s well-armed circle of guards, fellow priests, and loyal Alexandrian assassins, Uncle Amun took Jasper in as one of his own without ever revealing the boy’s identity to anyone. The morning after young Jasper John Forsyte awoke in his strange new surroundings, Uncle Amun took him out to a pen and told him to choose a goat. Young Drood took his time the way only a four-year-old boy can, Wilkie, and finally chose the largest and silkiest white goat, one with the Devil’s own vertically slitted eyes. Uncle Amun nodded and smiled, told the boy to take the goat from the pen, and led the bleating animal and the boy to a private courtyard deep within the sprawling compound. There Uncle Amun, no longer smiling, pulled a long, curved dagger from his belt, handed it to the boy, and said, ‘This goat is all that there remains of the boy once known as Jasper John Forsyte, son of the English infidel John Forsyte and the shamed woman called Amisi. Jasper John Forsyte dies here, now, this morning, and none of these names shall ever be mentioned again—not by you, upon pain of your death, not by anyone else, upon pain of death.’
“And then Uncle Amun put his powerful hand over little Jasper John’s hand on the hilt of the dagger and quickly slashed the goat’s throat. The still-thrashing animal bled to death in seconds. Droplets of blood spattered the four-year-old’s white trousers and shirt.
“ ‘From this moment forward, your name is Drood,’ said Uncle Amun.
“Drood was not Amun’s family name, Wilkie. It was not even a common Egyptian name. Its meaning was, in fact, lost in the mists of time and secret religious rites.
“In the years that followed, Uncle Amun introduced the boy to the secret world Amun and some of his acolytes inhabited. Mohammadans by day—little Drood learned to recite the Koran and say his prayers five times a day as any worthy believer in Islam must do—Amun and the other Alexandrians in Amun’s secret circle followed the Old Ways, the ancient religious ways and rites, at night. Drood followed his uncle and these other priests into Pyramids by torchlight, and into hidden rooms deep beneath other such sacred sites as the Sphinx. Before he reached his adolescent years, young Drood had travelled with his uncle and other secret priests to Cairo, to the isle called Philae and to ancient ruins of necropoli far up the Nile, including a valley where the long-dead Egyptian kings—pharaohs, I am sure you remember they were called, Wilkie—lay buried in elaborate tombs carved into cliffsides and hidden beneath the stone of the valley floors.
“In these hidden places the ancient Egyptian religion and its thousands of years of arcane knowledge flourished. There the boy Drood was initiated into the mysteries of that religion and taught the same secret rituals that Moses had mastered.
“Uncle Amun’s speciality turned out to be in sacred healing sciences. He was—and Drood was trained to be—a high priest in the Temples of Sleep dedicated to Isis, Osiris, and Serapis. This so-called healing sleep, my dear Wilkie, went back in Egyptian lore and practise for more than ten thousand years. The priests who had the power to induce such healing sleep also gained power and control over their patients. Today, of course, we call this practise by its scientific name of mesmerism and know its magical effects as the induction of magnetic sleep.
“You are aware that I have an ability of my own—some say a rare talent—in this art, Wilkie. I have told you of my training with Professor John Elliotson at the University College Hospital in London, of my own private investigations into the power, and of my own use of Magnetic power to help poor, phantom-afflicted Madame de la Rue—at her husband’s insistence—over a period of many months in Italy and Switzerland some years ago. I would have completely cured her, I am certain of this, if Catherine had not intervened because of her insane and baseless jealousy.
“Drood told me that he sensed my control of such Magnetic mesmeric power the moment he saw me on the hillside above the accident carnage at Staplehurst. Drood said that he recognised the gods-given ability in me instantly, the same way Uncle Amun had recognised the latent abilities in him when he was a boy of four so many decades earlier.