A time to seek, p.1
A Time to Seek, page 1
A TIME TO SEEK
THE TIME TRAVEL JOURNALS OF SAHARA ALDRIDGE, JOURNAL ONE
TRACY HIGLEY
STONEWATER BOOKS
Copyright © 2021 by Tracy Higley and Stonewater Books.
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Cover Design by Josephine Baker.
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CONTENTS
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
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A Note for Readers
How to Help the Author
Books by Tracy Higley
PROLOGUE
The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
~L.P. Hartley
April, 2021
The first time I watched the television series Downton Abbey, I wept.
Not for the characters. Not for the story set in that magnificent place, in that far-off time.
No, I wept for my story. For my time. The story of my life, in which Highclere Castle was the place I sometimes called home.
Long before the Downton Abbey creators set up cameras at the real-life family estate of Highclere, home to eight successive generations of Earls, the scenes of my own story were unfolding there at that estate, amidst those who had taken me in and called me family.
What a decade. The Roaring Twenties, they call it now. In hindsight, part of that slip of time between two great wars. But we were heedless of the horrors that were coming and only felt relief for what was past. Relief that spilled out into a throaty roar of freedom, into glittering decadence and gluttony, into smoky jazz clubs and mobsters dealing Prohibition-outlawed alcohol in American speakeasies tucked into alleys.
Some of this wildness touched us in the English countryside of Highclere, of course, but it was a frivolity restrained into house parties lasting a week, into fox hunts and duck-shooting excursions and dancing into the night. My heart was never in any of it. My heart longed for only one place — the parched and sand-blown stretch of Egypt known as the Valley of the Kings.
In the early months of 1922, my fourth winter season digging in Egypt was finally getting underway after a late start. It was to be the last season before the discovery that would change Egyptology forever, but again, only hindsight tells me that. On that first day of digging in February, I had no idea that I was about to make my own life-changing discovery. Not a discovery in the sand. Rather in a bit of old paper, brought in the hands of a friend…
CHAPTER ONE
February 8, 1922
Valley of the Kings, Egypt
Three hours into the season, and already tightness gripped my lower back. I straightened, jammed my pick into the ground, then my thumbs into the muscles weakened by a year of suffering through dinner parties and garden walks.
Before me, a desert jumble of bleached tunics and dark skin climbed over miniature peaks and valleys. The swarm of hired Egyptian men sang and dug as though their lives depended on how much sand they moved.
I grabbed the pick again. No one would have reason to think me less capable than any Egyptian laborer. Or than the dig’s director, Howard Carter, himself.
“Alsahra’, here!”
I shaded my eyes against the morning sun and followed the chirp of the youthful voice, calling out my Arabic name.
Across the digsite, young Nadeem was jumping and waving. “Here, Alsahra’, come!”
A thrill bloomed in my chest. So soon?
I glanced across the sand for Howard, past scattered ivory canvas tents glowing under the blinding sun. Past sagging canopies stretching shade over worktables. Where was he? Nadeem must have found something of interest. But it was too good to be true, this early into the season.
The boy’s enthusiasm slowed the line of men hauling baskets of rubble on their shoulders out to the growing pile at the edge of our grid.
I strode across the site, pulse pounding, to the grinning boy.
“What is it, Nadeem?”
“It is good, Sayida!” He tugged me toward a trench. A rickety ladder disappeared into its depth.
I peered over the edge. Four meters below, several laborers stood around what appeared to be the lip of a jug poking from the orange sand. It bore the characteristic blue-green of Egyptian faience.
“Good, yes?” Nadeem’s head bobbed.
His gap-toothed grin was contagious.
I wrapped one arm around his shoulder. “Na’am jayid.”
“English, my lady! English!”
I ruffled his wavy hair. He’d grown at least ten centimeters since last season, as his too-short tunic attested, and was hungry to learn.
“Yes, it’s good, Nadeem. But we must wait for Mr. Carter.”
He puffed his chest, then yelled down to the men, as authoritative as a foreman. “Yjb 'an nantazir!” We must wait.
Yes, we must wait. And probably far too long.
The dig director must have sensed the interest spreading across the sand. He was at our side a moment later.
“What is it?” The question was more of a grunt, aimed at no one. Though nearly fifty, Howard’s full hair and trimmed mustache were still dark, his physique still lean from years of digging his life’s work out of the Egyptian desert. And his manner hadn’t softened since my childhood.
“Sayidi!” Nadeem took Howard’s hand in his own and pointed it toward the jug. “We have found!”
“I told Nadeem we should wait for you. But perhaps—”
“Yes, we’ll let Porchy dig it out. He’ll love that. And a find on the first day. Lucky omen, and all that.”
“Indeed. But incentive enough for Porchy to keep the money flowing?”
He huffed. “Don’t count on it. But they’ll be here soon enough.”
I dragged myself to the shade of a tent to wait out the frustrating interval, and sketched a few scenes in the smooth leather-bound sketchbook Porchy had given me last Christmas. I needed to finish the drawings soon.
Lord Carnarvon, formerly styled Lord Porchester, had gained the nickname Porchy in childhood. He soon arrived, roaring into the digsite in a hired dust-raising, clankety Model T with its top pulled back, a shabby imitation of one of his sleek roadsters back in England.
Howard stood beside me at the worktable strewn with small finds, under the dirty canopy propped up by poles. He scanned each of my sketches with half-lidded eyes, shrugged, and said nothing.
I rose from my chair, but remained with fingertips braced on the table, avoiding the automobile’s sandstorm. “The man does love to move fast. It’s a mystery to me how he tolerates the snail’s pace of this work.”
Howard responded to my comment with silence. Howard was a man of few words, and had made it clear he resented Porchy’s insistence I be allowed to dig. Too young, too female. After four dig seasons, I was still an outsider, still trying to prove myself worthy. Still trying to find my place and purpose in this inhospitable world.
“He’s brought the Countess.” My spine straightened.
The Lady Almina Carnarvon sat beside her husband, furiously batting at the kicked-up desert that threatened to descend on her head. Porchy’s wife typically preferred the opulence and service of the Winter Palace Hotel, on the other side of the Nile in Luxor, to the sandy grit of the digsite.
Their daughter, Lady Evelyn, sat upright in the seat behind her parents, but bounded out of the car nearly before it stopped. She wore a lemon-yellow beaded dress with a low-waisted sash and fashionable matching cap, and looked like a golden-petaled Narcissus blooming in a hostile wasteland.
“Oh, Sahara, I am so glad to see you!” Her embrace nearly knocked me flat, despite her feeling as petite as a child, next to me.
I pulled away. “Eve, I only left England three weeks ago!” She smelled of perfume and I was conscious of what the heat had already done to my morning bath, and of the ri ding breeches and men’s shirt I wore.
“I know, but, my dear—” her voice lowered to a whisper and she clutched my arm—”I have so much to tell you! It’s about your—”
“It’ll have to wait.” I inclined my head toward this morning’s excitement. “We have something to show you.”
Her eyes widened, and she covered a tiny gasp with gloved fingertips. “You’ve found something!”
“Come and see.”
“I’ll come, but Sahara—it’s about your parents.”
We were already walking, and I nodded a greeting to Lord and Lady Carnarvon, who were slower to remove themselves from the automobile. The Earl still leaned heavily on a cane for support.
But Eve’s words ricocheted off the inside of my skull. What could she possibly have to tell me about my parents?
At our approach to the trench, the laborers on the surface parted like the Red Sea.
They enjoyed calling me Alsahra’—the Arabic name of the Great Desert. Probably believed I didn’t catch the elbow jabs and smirks and whispers. Barren as the desert, eh? Apparently it was their only explanation for why a single woman of my age would be dressed as a man and digging in a trench. Yes, women got the vote in England four years ago, but I had yet to earn the respect of a dig crew.
Behind us, Howard hailed Lord Carnarvon with a shrug. “A bit of a find, nothing more.”
Porchy grunted. “Hoping for more than a bit this season, old man.”
Eve and I crossed the digsite to the sound of the men singing as their trowels scraped and dug. The mournful chant always sounded funerary—appropriate for our grim work, searching for tombs. Above us, the wide blue sky went on forever, and the orange sand under our feet stretched out to meet it.
Eve ran ahead, one hand holding her cap against the hot wind.
“Darling, do be careful!” Lady Almina cupped a red-and-white-striped parasol above her head. “Your English-winter skin will freckle terribly under this Egyptian sun!”
But careful was not something the young Lady Evelyn thought much about. At the edge of the site, the sand crumbled under her heeled leather boots, and in one fluid motion she sank into the trench as though it were quicksand.
“Eve!” I was at the trench in a moment, heart thudding in my chest and half-expecting to see her lying dead at the bottom.
Instead, she had one arm hooked around the rung of the ladder, tiny leather boots flying free, and three Egyptian men staring up in terror at the underside of her flounced dress.
CHAPTER TWO
Eve was screaming. Well, to be fair, it was more of a squeal.
It took only a moment for the men below to scatter like ants to the end of the trench, far from the immodesty of an English woman’s undergarments.
I lurched at the wobbly top rungs of the ladder and braced it against the side of the trench before Eve’s leg-kicking pulled it backward.
Her cap had fallen to the sand, and her hair, newly bobbed short but still possessing all its curls, fanned out around her head like a dark cloud.
My first wave of protectiveness fled, and my jaw tightened. “Eve! What were you thinking?”
Sometimes it became clear she was only twenty. Nearly twelve years my junior.
She was too far down to clasp my outstretched hand, and with her right arm hooked on the ladder, her left arm was out of reach.
“Grab the ladder and pull yourself up.”
She blinked away tears. “I can’t!”
“Get her out of there!” Howard’s command in my ear.
An unnecessary command. I was already stepping aside to give him access to the ladder. “Hold it steady.”
He took my place and tightened his hands against the two rails.
I spun and scrambled down, careful to avoid Eve’s arm.
At the bottom, I positioned myself under the girl, her kicking boots just above my head.
“Let go, Eve. I’ll catch you!”
“What? No! I couldn’t—”
“Let go, Eve!”
Despite my being technically American, our friendship began when she was a toddler and I was conscripted as her babysitter, while our parents dined and smoked and chatted. Perhaps she felt a remnant of that long-ago obedience. She released her hold on the ladder and tumbled downward into my arms.
The force of her weight pushed me backward and down, but I had broken her fall.
And the faience jug, I suspected, had broken mine.
“Oh, Sahara!” Eve hugged my neck. “You saved my life!”
Not exactly. But no need to correct her.
“Evelyn Herbert, you come out of that trench at once!” Lady Almina, still holding her parasol, glared down at us, in all her elegant and horrified glory.
Behind her, in a line of white tunics, were more than a dozen Egyptian laborers, equally horrified yet curious.
Eve regained her feet, and her cap. She smashed the cap over her curls and scurried up the ladder, perhaps a bit rebuked. Perhaps not.
I shifted my position in the sand and felt the displaced artifact shift with me. There was a bite of pain in my left palm.
As I feared, the jug was in pieces.
“Sahara, your hand!” Lord Carnarvon pointed his silver-tipped cane at the blood.
I glanced at the wound, jagged but not deep. I’d seen far worse during the war.
“It’s nothing. Toss me a rag to wrap it, and I’ll be right up.” I scooted sideways, revealing the find in the sand. “I’m afraid our treasure did not fare so well.”
My hand throbbed. The stupid injury had better not get in the way of my work this season.
While waiting for the rag, I bent to examine the jug and brush the sand away with careful fingertips. The clay bore symbols. Untranslated hieroglyphs were a perplexing question dangled like bait. “And bring a tray and a brush,” I called upward. “I’ll get this piece out, too.” Porchy would have to wait for another treasure to dig up. This one was mine.
By the time I reached the surface, tray braced against my hip, Eve had been whisked away to Howard’s tent with her mother, to sip lemonade and recover from her ordeal.
And the laborers had already begun a rant about women being allowed on the digsite.
It was a familiar grudge, and a fair one. In previous seasons, there’d been a parade of women in candyfloss-pink or royal blue dresses, parasols twirling and laced ankleboots punching little holes in the sand, coming to watch the work. In the hundred-plus years since Napoleon invaded Egypt, sparking “Egyptomania” in both scholarly and popular culture, the fever hadn’t waned.
And it wasn’t only the public. Egyptologists were coming and going all the time, and often had wives in tow. There were even swanky dinner parties held in the recesses of empty tombs, complete with fine linens and bone china. For a professional like Howard, whose very identity was bound up in the work, the popularity served only to annoy.
Howard’s raised hands staved off the flood of Arabic.
I joined him, waiting to be castigated with the rest of the world’s women.
But Ahmed Gerigar, the foreman, was shaking his head toward me. “Alsahra’ — she is not like the others.” He turned to the workers. “She works like man. She is married only to her work, yes?”
Grudging assent from a few of them.
I shrugged. “Rudhkar, alsahra' ymkn 'an tuqtal rajul fi yawmayn.” Remember, the Sahara can kill a man in two days.
The angry rant turned to uproarious laughter at my joke. Or perhaps at my pronunciation. It was always hard to tell.
