Tomb of the sun king, p.7
Tomb of the Sun King, page 7
part #2 of Raiders of the Arcana Series
Her shoulders drew in on themselves as her eyes swam with hurt. “I see,” she said softly.
Adam felt a crack as though a piece of something vital inside of him threatened to break loose and fall away. Fear roared up in response, along with a sudden rush of determination.
“No, you don’t, dammit,” he shot back—and grabbed her.
He tugged her to his body until he could feel every firm, shapely line of her pressed against his skin. Then he kissed her.
The embrace was fierce—claiming, devouring. She stilled for only a heartbeat with surprise before her hands rose to his hair, tangling in the wet locks of it as she pushed up on her toes to meet him.
She tasted like black tea and honey. Smelled of rustling old paper in the silence of a library, woven through with something wilder—ancient forests and the promise of lightening before a storm.
Adam dropped his hands to her thighs, gripping them through the layers of practical twill. He lifted, then pivoted to press her up against the wall.
Ellie let out a gasp at the impact, her head tilting back. He took it as an invitation to set his mouth to her throat, gliding up to catch her sensitive earlobe between his teeth.
She groaned, clutching him more tightly between her thighs. Somehow his shirt had come loose from his belt, and Ellie’s hands were inside of it, gliding up the muscular ridges of his flanks.
Adam cursed into her mouth as his desire rose, sweeping in like a tide—fierce, implacable, insatiable. He wanted her closer. He wanted her bare. His hands slid beneath the fabric of her skirt, and the notions of what he was going to do with her burst through his mind like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.
“You’ll make it up to me, will you?” Lady Sabita chirped brightly from below.
Adam froze. He lifted his head from the opened front of Ellie’s blouse to see Constance’s mother dart playfully out of one of the doorways to the courtyard, turning back to smile at her husband.
Reality crashed in like a falling boulder. Ellie’s hair was undone, pins scattered on the paving stones. Her shirt was open to expose the pale curves at the top of her practical corset. Adam’s hands gripped the round curve of her rear beneath her skirt, holding her flush to the unmistakable evidence of his arousal.
Lady Sabita’s giggle drifted up to their shadowy perch.
“Maybe I should be late more often,” Sir Robert quipped playfully, giving a darting chase to his wife around the fountain.
Adam looked down into Ellie’s eyes. Her pupils were dilated to black, her cheeks flushed. Lips red and bitten.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed out desperately.
She blinked back at him, bewildered and pleasure-fogged. “You’re sorry?”
He drew his hands away, letting her legs slip back down to the ground—where they belonged, he reminded himself furiously. He stepped back—one idiot stumble, just far enough to put a breath of space between them.
The distance only let him see that much more clearly how her chest heaved with her wild breath, her clothes in obvious disarray as her hair tumbled down over her shoulders.
He could knot his fingers in it, tug it back as she gasped…
“I have to go,” he blurted out in a harsh whisper.
As Ellie gaped at him, he whirled on his heel and ran away.
𓇶
Six
Ellie watched the outskirts of Cairo blur past the windows of the train as she perched on the comfortable bench of the first-class compartment Constance had booked for their journey.
She had woken awkwardly that morning to Constance pounding at her bedroom door, exhorting her to hurry. The high angle of the sunlight streaming through the slender openings in the meshrabiyeh screen over her window had indicated how late she had slept—probably because she had not slept particularly well at all, her mind still racing over the bewildering conversation she’d had with Adam the night before.
I don’t want you to change your mind about marriage.
You’re not my obligation!
She still hadn’t the foggiest idea what he’d meant by it all—or by his fervent and obviously deeply felt apology after he had kissed her utterly senseless against the wall of the alcove.
They clearly needed to talk—again—but she was hardly going to manage that while sharing a train compartment with both Constance and Mr. Mahjoud, who had been given the duty of accompanying them to Neil’s dig site.
Adam sat across from her, his tan worsted trousers tucked into his work boots. He’d deigned to put on a jacket again but had skipped donning a waistcoat. His battered fedora rested on the seat beside him.
He was unusually quiet, his brow furrowed and stormy as he frowned down at the notebook he held in his big capable hands.
Hands that had slid up the fabric of her drawers last night as he had pressed her against the wall.
Ellie awkwardly smoothed folds of her gray poplin skirt over her knees as the carriage seemed to grow a little hotter. “Have we any lemonade, by any chance?” she asked a little desperately.
Mr. Mahjoud—dressed in a perfectly tailored suit with a natty red waistcoat and bow tie—plucked a flask from the hamper at his feet and poured some into a tin cup.
Ellie took a grateful gulp—and then nearly dropped the cup as the houses outside the window gave way to an open stretch of desert punctuated by a trio of enormous sun-gilded peaks.
“Pyramids!” she squeaked.
Constance glanced up from her magazine. “Oh! There they are,” she noted mildly before going back to reading.
With a sigh, Mr. Mahjoud reached out and plucked the cup from Ellie’s nerveless fingers. She hardly noticed. Instead, she pressed herself to the frame of the open window as though it could bring her closer to those noble four-thousand-year-old monuments to power and kingly divinity.
“Khufu,” she recited. Her gaze locked on the largest and nearest of the gilded peaks before sliding to the others. “Khafre. Menkaure.”
She looked back to her traveling companions, burning with the need to share her wonder and excitement at actually seeing the immortal Pyramids of Giza in the flesh.
Constance was lifting the lid of the hamper for a peek. Mr. Mahjoud cleared his throat, flashing her a quelling look, and she sat back with a dissatisfied huff.
Adam’s eyes were on Ellie.
His look flared with emotion—admiration, frustration, and a thundering heat that set Ellie’s pulse racing before he quickly glanced away again.
“Couldn’t I just—” Constance reached for the hamper again.
“Not until lunch,” Mr. Mahjoud cut in, turning the page of his newspaper.
⸻
Shortly afterward, as the last clustered outbuildings of Cairo’s sprawl fully gave way to farmland and desert, the train came to a sudden and unexpected halt. Ellie heard the screech of brakes and jolted against her seat.
“Wonderful,” Mr. Mahjoud commented dourly.
“I’m guessing this isn’t a regular stop,” Adam commented.
“It isn’t,” Constance confirmed. “There’s nothing here.”
Ellie pressed herself back as Constance lurched into her lap to stick her neatly coiffed head through the window. Her derriere shifted as she craned her neck for a better angle.
“It looks like the engineers are out, but I can’t see what they’re looking at,” she announced.
“Would you please refrain from throwing yourself out the window?” Mr. Mahjoud requested tiredly.
Ellie grasped Constance’s skirts and tugged her back into the carriage.
“At any rate, something has clearly disrupted the tracks.” Constance’s eyes glittered with excitement. “My money is on sabotage!”
“It’s sand,” Mr. Mahjoud countered flatly, turning another page of his paper.
“Sand!” Constance protested, flashing him a glare.
“The tracks run up against the desert here,” Mr. Mahjoud elaborated blithely. “And sand is prone to moving about.”
“It isn’t sand.” Constance gave him a quelling look. “It’s the nationalists! Sabotaging the railway is exactly the sort of strategy they would use. There have been quite a few suspicious incidents along the lines over the last several months. Herds of stray cattle, unexpected washouts…”
Ellie considered Constance’s theory. Egypt’s most well-known dalliance with a nationalist movement had ended over a decade ago when the revolutionary leader Urabi Pasha had been overcome at Tell El Kabir. That uprising had led Britain to impose its Consul General as the de facto head of the Egyptian government.
While there were plenty of Egyptians who continued to advocate—carefully—for a more representative government, she hadn’t heard of any major organized opposition to British rule.
Of course, that didn’t mean that one didn’t exist.
“There was even one breakdown that almost certainly involved the use of explosives,” Constance added significantly.
Ellie perked up. “Explosives, did you say?”
Mr. Mahjoud stilled, flashing her an alarmed look over the top of his paper.
“Not that any of us have any interest in that sort of thing,” Ellie assured him.
With a sigh, Mr. Mahjoud crisply folded the paper. He set it down on the bench and placed his fez onto his head. The color perfectly matched his waistcoat and bow tie, the hat nearly brushing the ceiling of the compartment thanks to the dragoman’s exceptional height.
“If you would all do me the extreme kindness of staying where I have put you?” he suggested—punctuating it with a pointed look at Constance.
“Wherever would we go?” Constance returned, batting her eyes at him innocently.
“Antarctica, perhaps?” Mr. Mahjoud suggested. “Or off with the nearest circus?”
Ellie was quietly impressed by the perspicacity of his suggestions.
“There aren’t any circuses about,” Constance pointed out.
With a skeptical glare, he stepped from the compartment.
Constance waited for a breath, then darted to the door herself—only to pull it open and find Mr. Mahjoud standing before it.
“Please,” he added with exaggerated patience.
Constance rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She flopped back against her seat with dissatisfaction. “Sand!”
“Perhaps the nationalists shoveled it all there overnight?” Ellie suggested helpfully.
“You needn’t patronize me,” Constance returned haughtily.
Ellie glanced over at Adam. He had been uncharacteristically quiet about the interruption—and her passing mention of combustible materials. He still held his notebook in his hands but wasn’t writing anything in it. Instead, he frowned down at the carpet as though contemplating how to wrestle it.
The compartment door slid back open, revealing Mr. Mahjoud’s long and impeccably dressed frame. “It would seem that there is a great deal of sand on the tracks,” he reported with only the slightest note of triumph.
“Hmph.” Constance crossed her arms over her chest.
“It will take the railway staff several hours to clear it sufficiently for us to pass.” The dragoman sat down, neatly picking up his paper and shaking it out. “I do hope everyone brought something to read, as I suggested?”
Adam stood, startling everyone with the sudden movement. “I’m going to help.”
He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it on the seat. Before Ellie could make any sort of comment, his shirt followed.
Her mind blanked as her perception was overwhelmed by an abundance of hard, tanned masculine flesh.
He tossed the shirt aside roughly. It landed half in her lap, Ellie’s hands automatically catching at the fabric.
Without another word, he stalked from the compartment.
Mr. Mahjoud made a single eloquent blink, then pointedly raised up his newspaper.
Constance’s frankly assessing gaze moved from the open door to Ellie, where it locked onto her helplessly dazed expression.
“Colleagues, is it?” Constance noted mercilessly.
⸻
The sand proved substantial. The afternoon was well progressed by the time the train started moving again, at which point Constance had worked her way through most of the contents of Mr. Mahjoud’s hamper.
Adam returned to their compartment a little later. His golden hair was still dusty from the work, though he’d clearly managed a light wash, perhaps in one of the sleeper cabins. He pulled his shirt back on, slipped his braces over his shoulders, and settled into his seat without another word.
They stopped at the small but modern railway station that sat a short walk from the rustic village of Badrashin. New telegraph wires soared overhead, following the tracks south along the river. The Nile’s flood plain was broad, flush with plantations of date palms and bright green fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals.
Behind Ellie lay the broad expanse of the great river itself, peppered with little single-sail feluccas and a slow, elegant dahabeeyah. On that larger boat, a cluster of pale Europeans played cards under a canopy in an open-air salon while an Egyptian crewman worked the rope for an overhead fan.
Mr. Mahjoud checked his pocket watch. “It is nearly four,” he announced, snapping it shut and slipping it back into his waistcoat. “The necropolis at Saqqara is an hour’s ride from here, and the return service to Cairo passes through at ten after five. We cannot make it there and back in time for the train. We will have to return home and try again tomorrow.”
Ellie felt a pinch of panic at Mr. Mahjoud’s announcement. They couldn’t afford a further delay—not when Dawson and Jacobs might turn up at any moment. “Could we find a place to stay locally for the evening?”
“In Badrashin?” Mr. Mahjoud said with a look of horror, as though Ellie had just suggested they bed down in a nest of porcupines rather than a quaint mud-brick village shaded by tall palms.
“Don’t they let visitors overnight at Mariette’s House?” Constance offered brightly, using a long white scarf to tie her enormous and very fashionable straw hat into place. “That’s right next to the pyramids.”
Mr. Mahjoud straightened, making himself a bit taller—perhaps in order to sharpen the angle at which he looked down his nose at her. “Mariette’s House is not appropriate for ladies. It is entirely too rustic.”
“Are there any Bedouin about, then?” Constance pressed with an air of studied innocence. “I have heard they are most accommodating to guests.”
With some alarm, Ellie recalled Constance’s ambition to acquire a handsome sheikh as a lover. “Mariette’s House will do nicely,” she cut in quickly. “Both Mr. Bates and I are accustomed to ‘rustic,’ and I am sure Constance doesn’t mind.”
Constance flashed Ellie a narrow-eyed look as though perfectly aware of why Ellie had made her intervention. “Oh, very well,” she agreed a little crossly. “Mariette’s House it shall be.”
Mr. Mahjoud blinked—a simple motion that somehow still exuded disapproval. “I will see about arranging transportation,” he concluded, sounding as though he were accepting a prison sentence. He shifted a seemingly bland gaze to Constance. “And restocking the hamper.”
“Oh yes!” Constance agreed, brightening. “Do see if there are any kofta sellers about. And perhaps you can find a few of those lovely little semolina cakes.”
Mr. Mahjoud’s posture was an eloquent display of dignified resignation as he walked away.
⸻
He returned a quarter hour later with kofta, semolina cakes, and a slightly pudgy boy towing a line of donkeys.
“Are you quite sure we can’t walk?” Ellie asked, eyeing the animals skeptically. She still had vivid memories of her sore rear from spending all day on mule-back in the wilderness of British Honduras.
“What would we do that for?” Constance returned as she nimbly mounted her beast with a hand from the boy.
Ellie’s donkey snorted.
“Need a lift?” Adam offered.
She startled as she realized that he had come to stand beside her.
“That… would be lovely,” she replied awkwardly. “Thank you.”
The exchange felt oddly formal. Adam had been so distant and quietly stormy since their bizarre conversation the night before that Ellie found herself uncertain quite how to act around him.
He offered her his knee and a hand. The gesture had an unconsciously courtly air—for all that she was standing next to a bored-looking donkey and not a noble steed.
Ellie accepted his grip. The calloused texture of his palm sent a shiver through her skin as she awkwardly planted herself in the saddle.
The donkey shifted beneath her, and she nearly fell backwards.
“Tuck your knees up by his neck,” Adam instructed. “It’ll help you stay balanced. They get nervous when you wobble.”
He stroked a hand down the donkey’s flank, then gave it a scratch behind the ears. The donkey huffed with approval.
Then he turned and walked away without another word. Ellie stared after him, utterly at a loss.
“Yalla! Yalla!” the donkey boy cried, jarring her out of the confused whirlwind of her thoughts. “Mâshi!”
The beast beneath her lurched into motion. Ellie jolted back in the saddle and then clung on for dear life as they trotted down the road.
⸻
The flat, fertile fields were verdant with sprouts of new wheat, tended by fellahin who tucked their long galabeyas into their loose cotton breeches to keep them from the mud. The donkey boy continued to call out cheerful Masri imprecations at their mounts as they rode along the narrow packed-earth pathways. To Ellie’s ears, the boy’s words sounded like a mix of routine commands and more personal and affectionate compliments.
The fields gave way to tall, orderly rows of date palms interspersed here and there by the occasional tidy farmhouse—and then the fertile land abruptly turned to desert.
The change was like a line drawn across the earth, an immediate and dramatic shift from towering trees to arid, rock-strewn ground. As the date plantation fell away, Ellie finally saw the ragged, humped shapes of the less-well-known pyramids of Dahshur.
Though nowhere near the size of the famous monuments at Giza, they were significantly older, and therefore perhaps even more fascinating. Ellie picked the tiered form of the Pyramid of Djoser from the clustered structures. The tower of stone was nearly five thousand years old and was most likely the first pyramid ever built in Egypt.
Adam felt a crack as though a piece of something vital inside of him threatened to break loose and fall away. Fear roared up in response, along with a sudden rush of determination.
“No, you don’t, dammit,” he shot back—and grabbed her.
He tugged her to his body until he could feel every firm, shapely line of her pressed against his skin. Then he kissed her.
The embrace was fierce—claiming, devouring. She stilled for only a heartbeat with surprise before her hands rose to his hair, tangling in the wet locks of it as she pushed up on her toes to meet him.
She tasted like black tea and honey. Smelled of rustling old paper in the silence of a library, woven through with something wilder—ancient forests and the promise of lightening before a storm.
Adam dropped his hands to her thighs, gripping them through the layers of practical twill. He lifted, then pivoted to press her up against the wall.
Ellie let out a gasp at the impact, her head tilting back. He took it as an invitation to set his mouth to her throat, gliding up to catch her sensitive earlobe between his teeth.
She groaned, clutching him more tightly between her thighs. Somehow his shirt had come loose from his belt, and Ellie’s hands were inside of it, gliding up the muscular ridges of his flanks.
Adam cursed into her mouth as his desire rose, sweeping in like a tide—fierce, implacable, insatiable. He wanted her closer. He wanted her bare. His hands slid beneath the fabric of her skirt, and the notions of what he was going to do with her burst through his mind like a fireworks display on the Fourth of July.
“You’ll make it up to me, will you?” Lady Sabita chirped brightly from below.
Adam froze. He lifted his head from the opened front of Ellie’s blouse to see Constance’s mother dart playfully out of one of the doorways to the courtyard, turning back to smile at her husband.
Reality crashed in like a falling boulder. Ellie’s hair was undone, pins scattered on the paving stones. Her shirt was open to expose the pale curves at the top of her practical corset. Adam’s hands gripped the round curve of her rear beneath her skirt, holding her flush to the unmistakable evidence of his arousal.
Lady Sabita’s giggle drifted up to their shadowy perch.
“Maybe I should be late more often,” Sir Robert quipped playfully, giving a darting chase to his wife around the fountain.
Adam looked down into Ellie’s eyes. Her pupils were dilated to black, her cheeks flushed. Lips red and bitten.
“I’m sorry,” he breathed out desperately.
She blinked back at him, bewildered and pleasure-fogged. “You’re sorry?”
He drew his hands away, letting her legs slip back down to the ground—where they belonged, he reminded himself furiously. He stepped back—one idiot stumble, just far enough to put a breath of space between them.
The distance only let him see that much more clearly how her chest heaved with her wild breath, her clothes in obvious disarray as her hair tumbled down over her shoulders.
He could knot his fingers in it, tug it back as she gasped…
“I have to go,” he blurted out in a harsh whisper.
As Ellie gaped at him, he whirled on his heel and ran away.
𓇶
Six
Ellie watched the outskirts of Cairo blur past the windows of the train as she perched on the comfortable bench of the first-class compartment Constance had booked for their journey.
She had woken awkwardly that morning to Constance pounding at her bedroom door, exhorting her to hurry. The high angle of the sunlight streaming through the slender openings in the meshrabiyeh screen over her window had indicated how late she had slept—probably because she had not slept particularly well at all, her mind still racing over the bewildering conversation she’d had with Adam the night before.
I don’t want you to change your mind about marriage.
You’re not my obligation!
She still hadn’t the foggiest idea what he’d meant by it all—or by his fervent and obviously deeply felt apology after he had kissed her utterly senseless against the wall of the alcove.
They clearly needed to talk—again—but she was hardly going to manage that while sharing a train compartment with both Constance and Mr. Mahjoud, who had been given the duty of accompanying them to Neil’s dig site.
Adam sat across from her, his tan worsted trousers tucked into his work boots. He’d deigned to put on a jacket again but had skipped donning a waistcoat. His battered fedora rested on the seat beside him.
He was unusually quiet, his brow furrowed and stormy as he frowned down at the notebook he held in his big capable hands.
Hands that had slid up the fabric of her drawers last night as he had pressed her against the wall.
Ellie awkwardly smoothed folds of her gray poplin skirt over her knees as the carriage seemed to grow a little hotter. “Have we any lemonade, by any chance?” she asked a little desperately.
Mr. Mahjoud—dressed in a perfectly tailored suit with a natty red waistcoat and bow tie—plucked a flask from the hamper at his feet and poured some into a tin cup.
Ellie took a grateful gulp—and then nearly dropped the cup as the houses outside the window gave way to an open stretch of desert punctuated by a trio of enormous sun-gilded peaks.
“Pyramids!” she squeaked.
Constance glanced up from her magazine. “Oh! There they are,” she noted mildly before going back to reading.
With a sigh, Mr. Mahjoud reached out and plucked the cup from Ellie’s nerveless fingers. She hardly noticed. Instead, she pressed herself to the frame of the open window as though it could bring her closer to those noble four-thousand-year-old monuments to power and kingly divinity.
“Khufu,” she recited. Her gaze locked on the largest and nearest of the gilded peaks before sliding to the others. “Khafre. Menkaure.”
She looked back to her traveling companions, burning with the need to share her wonder and excitement at actually seeing the immortal Pyramids of Giza in the flesh.
Constance was lifting the lid of the hamper for a peek. Mr. Mahjoud cleared his throat, flashing her a quelling look, and she sat back with a dissatisfied huff.
Adam’s eyes were on Ellie.
His look flared with emotion—admiration, frustration, and a thundering heat that set Ellie’s pulse racing before he quickly glanced away again.
“Couldn’t I just—” Constance reached for the hamper again.
“Not until lunch,” Mr. Mahjoud cut in, turning the page of his newspaper.
⸻
Shortly afterward, as the last clustered outbuildings of Cairo’s sprawl fully gave way to farmland and desert, the train came to a sudden and unexpected halt. Ellie heard the screech of brakes and jolted against her seat.
“Wonderful,” Mr. Mahjoud commented dourly.
“I’m guessing this isn’t a regular stop,” Adam commented.
“It isn’t,” Constance confirmed. “There’s nothing here.”
Ellie pressed herself back as Constance lurched into her lap to stick her neatly coiffed head through the window. Her derriere shifted as she craned her neck for a better angle.
“It looks like the engineers are out, but I can’t see what they’re looking at,” she announced.
“Would you please refrain from throwing yourself out the window?” Mr. Mahjoud requested tiredly.
Ellie grasped Constance’s skirts and tugged her back into the carriage.
“At any rate, something has clearly disrupted the tracks.” Constance’s eyes glittered with excitement. “My money is on sabotage!”
“It’s sand,” Mr. Mahjoud countered flatly, turning another page of his paper.
“Sand!” Constance protested, flashing him a glare.
“The tracks run up against the desert here,” Mr. Mahjoud elaborated blithely. “And sand is prone to moving about.”
“It isn’t sand.” Constance gave him a quelling look. “It’s the nationalists! Sabotaging the railway is exactly the sort of strategy they would use. There have been quite a few suspicious incidents along the lines over the last several months. Herds of stray cattle, unexpected washouts…”
Ellie considered Constance’s theory. Egypt’s most well-known dalliance with a nationalist movement had ended over a decade ago when the revolutionary leader Urabi Pasha had been overcome at Tell El Kabir. That uprising had led Britain to impose its Consul General as the de facto head of the Egyptian government.
While there were plenty of Egyptians who continued to advocate—carefully—for a more representative government, she hadn’t heard of any major organized opposition to British rule.
Of course, that didn’t mean that one didn’t exist.
“There was even one breakdown that almost certainly involved the use of explosives,” Constance added significantly.
Ellie perked up. “Explosives, did you say?”
Mr. Mahjoud stilled, flashing her an alarmed look over the top of his paper.
“Not that any of us have any interest in that sort of thing,” Ellie assured him.
With a sigh, Mr. Mahjoud crisply folded the paper. He set it down on the bench and placed his fez onto his head. The color perfectly matched his waistcoat and bow tie, the hat nearly brushing the ceiling of the compartment thanks to the dragoman’s exceptional height.
“If you would all do me the extreme kindness of staying where I have put you?” he suggested—punctuating it with a pointed look at Constance.
“Wherever would we go?” Constance returned, batting her eyes at him innocently.
“Antarctica, perhaps?” Mr. Mahjoud suggested. “Or off with the nearest circus?”
Ellie was quietly impressed by the perspicacity of his suggestions.
“There aren’t any circuses about,” Constance pointed out.
With a skeptical glare, he stepped from the compartment.
Constance waited for a breath, then darted to the door herself—only to pull it open and find Mr. Mahjoud standing before it.
“Please,” he added with exaggerated patience.
Constance rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She flopped back against her seat with dissatisfaction. “Sand!”
“Perhaps the nationalists shoveled it all there overnight?” Ellie suggested helpfully.
“You needn’t patronize me,” Constance returned haughtily.
Ellie glanced over at Adam. He had been uncharacteristically quiet about the interruption—and her passing mention of combustible materials. He still held his notebook in his hands but wasn’t writing anything in it. Instead, he frowned down at the carpet as though contemplating how to wrestle it.
The compartment door slid back open, revealing Mr. Mahjoud’s long and impeccably dressed frame. “It would seem that there is a great deal of sand on the tracks,” he reported with only the slightest note of triumph.
“Hmph.” Constance crossed her arms over her chest.
“It will take the railway staff several hours to clear it sufficiently for us to pass.” The dragoman sat down, neatly picking up his paper and shaking it out. “I do hope everyone brought something to read, as I suggested?”
Adam stood, startling everyone with the sudden movement. “I’m going to help.”
He shrugged out of his jacket, tossing it on the seat. Before Ellie could make any sort of comment, his shirt followed.
Her mind blanked as her perception was overwhelmed by an abundance of hard, tanned masculine flesh.
He tossed the shirt aside roughly. It landed half in her lap, Ellie’s hands automatically catching at the fabric.
Without another word, he stalked from the compartment.
Mr. Mahjoud made a single eloquent blink, then pointedly raised up his newspaper.
Constance’s frankly assessing gaze moved from the open door to Ellie, where it locked onto her helplessly dazed expression.
“Colleagues, is it?” Constance noted mercilessly.
⸻
The sand proved substantial. The afternoon was well progressed by the time the train started moving again, at which point Constance had worked her way through most of the contents of Mr. Mahjoud’s hamper.
Adam returned to their compartment a little later. His golden hair was still dusty from the work, though he’d clearly managed a light wash, perhaps in one of the sleeper cabins. He pulled his shirt back on, slipped his braces over his shoulders, and settled into his seat without another word.
They stopped at the small but modern railway station that sat a short walk from the rustic village of Badrashin. New telegraph wires soared overhead, following the tracks south along the river. The Nile’s flood plain was broad, flush with plantations of date palms and bright green fields crisscrossed by irrigation canals.
Behind Ellie lay the broad expanse of the great river itself, peppered with little single-sail feluccas and a slow, elegant dahabeeyah. On that larger boat, a cluster of pale Europeans played cards under a canopy in an open-air salon while an Egyptian crewman worked the rope for an overhead fan.
Mr. Mahjoud checked his pocket watch. “It is nearly four,” he announced, snapping it shut and slipping it back into his waistcoat. “The necropolis at Saqqara is an hour’s ride from here, and the return service to Cairo passes through at ten after five. We cannot make it there and back in time for the train. We will have to return home and try again tomorrow.”
Ellie felt a pinch of panic at Mr. Mahjoud’s announcement. They couldn’t afford a further delay—not when Dawson and Jacobs might turn up at any moment. “Could we find a place to stay locally for the evening?”
“In Badrashin?” Mr. Mahjoud said with a look of horror, as though Ellie had just suggested they bed down in a nest of porcupines rather than a quaint mud-brick village shaded by tall palms.
“Don’t they let visitors overnight at Mariette’s House?” Constance offered brightly, using a long white scarf to tie her enormous and very fashionable straw hat into place. “That’s right next to the pyramids.”
Mr. Mahjoud straightened, making himself a bit taller—perhaps in order to sharpen the angle at which he looked down his nose at her. “Mariette’s House is not appropriate for ladies. It is entirely too rustic.”
“Are there any Bedouin about, then?” Constance pressed with an air of studied innocence. “I have heard they are most accommodating to guests.”
With some alarm, Ellie recalled Constance’s ambition to acquire a handsome sheikh as a lover. “Mariette’s House will do nicely,” she cut in quickly. “Both Mr. Bates and I are accustomed to ‘rustic,’ and I am sure Constance doesn’t mind.”
Constance flashed Ellie a narrow-eyed look as though perfectly aware of why Ellie had made her intervention. “Oh, very well,” she agreed a little crossly. “Mariette’s House it shall be.”
Mr. Mahjoud blinked—a simple motion that somehow still exuded disapproval. “I will see about arranging transportation,” he concluded, sounding as though he were accepting a prison sentence. He shifted a seemingly bland gaze to Constance. “And restocking the hamper.”
“Oh yes!” Constance agreed, brightening. “Do see if there are any kofta sellers about. And perhaps you can find a few of those lovely little semolina cakes.”
Mr. Mahjoud’s posture was an eloquent display of dignified resignation as he walked away.
⸻
He returned a quarter hour later with kofta, semolina cakes, and a slightly pudgy boy towing a line of donkeys.
“Are you quite sure we can’t walk?” Ellie asked, eyeing the animals skeptically. She still had vivid memories of her sore rear from spending all day on mule-back in the wilderness of British Honduras.
“What would we do that for?” Constance returned as she nimbly mounted her beast with a hand from the boy.
Ellie’s donkey snorted.
“Need a lift?” Adam offered.
She startled as she realized that he had come to stand beside her.
“That… would be lovely,” she replied awkwardly. “Thank you.”
The exchange felt oddly formal. Adam had been so distant and quietly stormy since their bizarre conversation the night before that Ellie found herself uncertain quite how to act around him.
He offered her his knee and a hand. The gesture had an unconsciously courtly air—for all that she was standing next to a bored-looking donkey and not a noble steed.
Ellie accepted his grip. The calloused texture of his palm sent a shiver through her skin as she awkwardly planted herself in the saddle.
The donkey shifted beneath her, and she nearly fell backwards.
“Tuck your knees up by his neck,” Adam instructed. “It’ll help you stay balanced. They get nervous when you wobble.”
He stroked a hand down the donkey’s flank, then gave it a scratch behind the ears. The donkey huffed with approval.
Then he turned and walked away without another word. Ellie stared after him, utterly at a loss.
“Yalla! Yalla!” the donkey boy cried, jarring her out of the confused whirlwind of her thoughts. “Mâshi!”
The beast beneath her lurched into motion. Ellie jolted back in the saddle and then clung on for dear life as they trotted down the road.
⸻
The flat, fertile fields were verdant with sprouts of new wheat, tended by fellahin who tucked their long galabeyas into their loose cotton breeches to keep them from the mud. The donkey boy continued to call out cheerful Masri imprecations at their mounts as they rode along the narrow packed-earth pathways. To Ellie’s ears, the boy’s words sounded like a mix of routine commands and more personal and affectionate compliments.
The fields gave way to tall, orderly rows of date palms interspersed here and there by the occasional tidy farmhouse—and then the fertile land abruptly turned to desert.
The change was like a line drawn across the earth, an immediate and dramatic shift from towering trees to arid, rock-strewn ground. As the date plantation fell away, Ellie finally saw the ragged, humped shapes of the less-well-known pyramids of Dahshur.
Though nowhere near the size of the famous monuments at Giza, they were significantly older, and therefore perhaps even more fascinating. Ellie picked the tiered form of the Pyramid of Djoser from the clustered structures. The tower of stone was nearly five thousand years old and was most likely the first pyramid ever built in Egypt.
