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.