Empire of shadows, p.5
Empire of Shadows, page 5
“Let’s nip over to Geraldine’s,” she declared and dashed down the stairs.
Ellie grabbed her fern and hurried after Constance. She snapped open her umbrella, and the two women huddled under it. They hurried across the street in the increasing downpour to duck into the entrance of a cozy little tea shop.
Geraldine’s was decorated with an explosion of potted plants, bold wallpaper, and mismatched chairs. The windows were steamed up against the lingering spring chill. Constance took Ellie by the arm before she’d quite managed to shake off her umbrella, tugging her over to a little nook pressed up against the window.
They settled in—coats, briefcases, umbrellas, and ferns piling up around them. Geraldine herself—a tall, broad-shouldered woman in her forties—strode over a moment later.
“Right, then,” Geraldine rumbled as she dropped a pair of cups onto the small, round table. “Earl Gray, hot, and an Assam with too much cream and sugar. Anything else today?”
“No, Geraldine. That’ll be lovely,” Constance said, tugging the milky Assam over to herself. “Wait—are those eclairs in the pastry case? I’ll take two.” Constance turned her wide brown eyes over to Ellie. “Do you want anything for yourself?”
“I think not. Thank you.” Ellie offered Geraldine a polite nod.
The proprietress answered with a dissatisfied huff, which was as near as Geraldine ever came to general courtesy.
“So!” Constance leaned in closer. “I heard about the demonstration—it’s all anyone has been talking about since yesterday evening. I am devastated to have missed it. How was I to know it would be an honest-to-goodness melee instead of another of those desperately boring standing-about sorts of affairs? You must tell me everything. Did they really have to use bolt cutters to remove you from the gates? What was jail like? Were there rats? Did anybody torture you? Were you interrogated by a dashing police inspector? Threatened with deportation?”
“No!” Ellie exclaimed, a bit alarmed by the idea. “None of those things. It was all rather pedestrian.”
“How dreadfully disappointing,” Constance replied with a sigh. “Perhaps one must be arrested in a less civilized locale in order to have a more interesting experience.”
Ellie halted in the process of stirring her Earl Gray.
“Please tell me you will not try to get yourself arrested when you go to Egypt,” she ordered flatly.
Constance leaned back in her chair, a devilish gleam brightening her pretty features. “I am sure Egyptian jails have rats. Maybe a little torture, too.”
“I am quite certain the Egyptians don’t go in for torture,” Ellie countered. “Nor do I imagine it would be nearly as fun as you think if they did. That is the whole point.”
“You have no imagination,” Constance retorted.
Geraldine dropped a pair of eclairs on the table and stalked away without any further niceties.
“I have plenty of imagination!” Ellie protested. “I am desperately imaginative. I simply use my prodigious imagination for more practical purposes.”
“I really wish you could come with me.” Constance said before taking down half of an eclair in a single dainty bite. Not a smudge of chocolate was left on her lips.
Constance would be leaving for Egypt in just under two weeks. Her father, Sir Robert Tyrrell, had recently been appointed to the post of Comptroller General of Egypt. That made him essentially the lead auditor of the country’s government, which was administered by the British Consul General, Lord Cromer.
She gave Constance the same answer she had been repeating since the question of accompanying the Tyrrells to Egypt had first been raised.
“It just isn’t feasible,” Ellie muttered automatically before taking another sip of her tea.
It hadn’t been feasible. She couldn’t have left her job at the PRO for so long without losing it, and she might never have found another opportunity for something so suited to her skills.
Of course, that wasn’t the entire truth. Ellie had also found herself viewing the prospect of joining Constance in Egypt with a terrible sense of sadness. Walking the same sands as the pharaohs while denied the chance to use her extensive education to uncover the secrets of the past would have been a sort of torture.
“I shall have to look up your brother while I am there,” Constance mused. “Saqqara is near enough to Cairo, and I haven’t seen Neil since we were schoolgirls.” She paused to thoughtfully devour the second half of her eclair. “I wonder if he’ll even recognize me, or whether he’s become any more interesting. He was a bit of a bore back then.”
Neil’s presence would only have added to the torment of accompanying Constance to Egypt. Even now, Neil was working on a very promising excavation in the Unas South Cemetery of the Saqqara necropolis. He had privately shared with Ellie that he hoped the eighteenth-dynasty ruin he was uncovering would turn out to be the lost, unfinished tomb of the general-turned-pharaoh Horemheb. If Neil’s theory turned out to be correct, the tomb could provide invaluable insight into the decline of the Amarna period.
Ellie was extremely interested in the Amarna period.
She was very fond of her stepbrother—despite his annoying habit of constantly trying to tell her what was best for her and his irritating insistence on referring to her as ‘Peanut.’ Still, the notion of watching him blithely live the life Ellie had always dreamed of was the sort of thing that kept her up in the small hours of the night.
Not that Ellie had told any of that to Constance. She couldn’t bear to taint her friend’s excitement about her upcoming adventure with her own inconvenient emotions.
“I doubt he’s changed much,” Ellie returned flatly.
Constance reached for her second eclair.
“But here I am nattering on when you are the one who said you had urgent news.” Constance paused with the eclair momentarily forgotten halfway to her lips. Her eyes glittered with excitement. “Is it about a man? Do tell me that it’s a man.”
Ellie stiffened with alarm.
“Gracious, no!” she exclaimed. “What on earth would I want to do with one of those? No. It’s… well, this.”
Ellie pulled the map and medallion from her pocket and set them down on the table next to the Earl Gray.
Constance frowned down at the black disk of stone. “Did you find this in one of the shops? It is wonderfully gruesome.” She reached out for the objects.
“From the shops?” Ellie echoed indignantly. “Hold on—have you any chocolate on your fingers?”
Constance eyed the digits in question and popped three of them in her mouth.
“I’ll unfold it for you,” Ellie cut in quickly. She pushed aside the eclair plate and the teacups, then carefully opened the parchment.
Constance studied the time-aged lines on the page, blithely reaching out for her eclair.
Ellie cleared her throat pointedly, and Constance retracted the offending hand.
“I know you can’t read Latin,” Ellie continued, feeling oddly nervous. “But I can assure you that the spelling and syntax are appropriate for this document having been authored by a seventeenth-century Spaniard with a Catholic ecclesiastical education—”
“Ellie,” Constance cut in, her eyes bright as she studied the page with her hands obediently tucked into her lap. “You found a treasure map.”
“I most certainly did not!” Ellie retorted.
“It has an X on it,” Constance countered, pointing a finger at the symbol in question.
“That could be a ten,” Ellie pushed back uncertainly. “A measure of distance. A temporary standin for an unknown place name.”
“It. Is. An. X.” Constance’s firm tone dared Ellie to disagree. “And what exactly is it that this X is meant to indicate?”
“The White City,” Ellie replied weakly, sinking down a bit in her chair.
“And what is the White City, Eleanora?” Constance pressed relentlessly.
Ellie felt as though Constance was glaring down at her, though Ellie topped her by a few solid inches even when sitting down.
“A-mythical-kingdom-of-untold-riches-and-splendor,” Ellie blurted quickly before clamping her mouth shut again.
“I see,” Constance returned archly. “And are you going to tell me where you came by this not-a-treasure-map to a mythical kingdom of untold riches and splendor?”
⸻
Two cups of tea and three eclairs later, Constance leaned across the table with conspiratorial glee.
“Are you telling me that you were outside the door while an actual criminal used physical violence to intimidate your incompetent supervisor?” she demanded.
Ellie’s friend spoke of eavesdropping on an assault as though it were more exciting than stumbling across a parade.
“I’m afraid so,” Ellie replied. She popped the last half of a pastry into her mouth and dusted off her fingers.
Constance let out a squeak of outrage. “The nerve of that man! Selling the possible find of the century for his own pecuniary gain! And I would bet my right foot that he didn’t even get a proper price for it. From everything you have told me about Mr. Henbury, he would be utterly ignorant of the true potential value of this document.” Constance tapped the parchment with a purposeful finger.
Ellie reached across the table and slowly snatched the map back. She slipped it into her pocket as she prayed that Constance’s finger had been entirely free of chocolate. The seventeenth-century relic’s proximity to so many eclair crumbs was making her distinctly nervous.
“Yes, well… It’s all moot now,” Ellie said. “Henbury couldn’t deliver the objects from the psalter because I’d already—er, borrowed them without asking… and now he has gone and given my name to the criminal in question in order to try and save his own skin.”
“The sheer cheek of it, really,” Constance noted disapprovingly.
“Quite,” Ellie agreed. “And so here I am. I’m afraid I might have panicked and bolted right out of the building. I just knew I needed to talk to someone so I could get my head straight about what to do.”
“And have you?” Constance asked.
Ellie’s shoulders sank a bit. “I have. It’s silly it took me so long to admit it to myself. I must bring the map to the Royal Geographical Society and… and leave it with them,” she finished stoutly.
Inside, part of her felt as though it were wilting.
Constance’s only answer was an eloquently raised eyebrow.
“Don’t do that,” Ellie protested. “Don’t give me that look.”
“What look?” Constance pushed back.
“That one,” Ellie replied. “The one that says you disapprove of the entirely sensible thing I am planning on doing.”
“Now why would I do that?” Constance returned blandly, taking another sip of her tea.
“Because you know the RGS is going to shut me out of it!” The words came out a bit louder than Ellie had intended. She took in a few alarmed looks from the other patrons and lowered her voice to a fervent hiss. “You know that they will take the map and the medallion, wave me off, and be done with me. In the worst case scenario, the objects will end up in some box gathering dust in their archives, and in the best case, they’ll dispatch one of their members to British Honduras to track down the site marked on the map and determine whether anything is there.”
“And if something is there?” Constance prompted.
“If we are lucky, the fellow assigned to lead the expedition will actually do a reasonable job instead of mucking up the sediment layers and using inconsistent forms of documentation,” Ellie replied. “If that is the case, then really, it will all have turned out perfectly fine.”
“Will it?” Constance gently pressed.
Something gave a little wrench inside of Ellie’s chest. She clutched her cup of Earl Gray a little more firmly as though it was a rope that might keep her from falling.
“It is only that I might have liked to…” Ellie paused, taking an uneven breath. “It would perhaps have meant a great deal to me to simply…”
Her throat tightened. Getting words out of it became difficult.
“I just want to see it, Connie,” Ellie finally managed.
The corners of her eyes had begun to feel ever-so-slightly damp.
Constance rose. She circled their little table, hopped neatly over Ellie’s briefcase, and dodged the precarious fern.
“Move over,” she ordered—then plopped herself on the edge of Ellie’s chair and pulled Ellie into her arms.
The gesture was not really the sort of thing one did in a tea shop. It spoke alarmingly of having feelings—feelings that were rather too wild and terrible to politely contain.
Ellie didn’t protest. She let her friend hold her, dropping her head onto Constance’s shoulder.
“Sometimes I am just so very tired of it,” she admitted quietly.
“I know, darling,” Constance replied, smoothing a hand over her hair. “It is dreadfully unfair.”
Ellie didn’t answer. Instead, she let herself soak up the warm comfort of Constance’s embrace until her soul felt a little steadier again.
“But look,” Constance said, pulling back to face her. “I have just had an absolutely marvelous idea!”
“Oh no,” Ellie said as her sense of alarm rose.
“You should go find the X!” Constance asserted happily.
“What?!” Ellie jolted with surprise and nearly fell off the chair.
“Whyever not?” Constance demanded. “You have the exact same education as those stuffed shirts in the Royal Geographical Society. You are just as well-qualified to pursue the matter as they are.”
“You are only forgetting the little matter of how I would manage to get through the uncharted wilderness to the location marked on the map,” Ellie pushed back nervously.
“That is what guides are for!” Constance retorted. “Do you think those posh punters at the RGS go jaunting off into the back country on their own? They hire locals to take them, and other locals to carry all of their tents and guns and canoes for them. You won’t need half of that—you won’t be combining your archaeological survey with a bit of big game hunting on the side and a glass of sherry in the evenings.”
“Hardly.” Ellie frowned at the very idea.
“So there you are!” Constance exclaimed and gave her a nudge. “What possible reason do you have for turning your map over to those men rather than going after this lost city yourself?”
Ellie fought against a tingling rise of excitement.
“You are forgetting the little matter of the criminal who is after this parchment,” she pointed out.
“Yes, that is something,” Constance mused thoughtfully. “If your Mr. Henbury were so quick to cough up your identity to that villain, I’m sure he would hardly balk at granting him access to the personnel records.”
Ellie straightened in her chair.
“Fiddlesticks!” she cursed. “You’re absolutely right! That Mr. Jacobs could very well have my address. He might be heading there as we speak! How are my father and Florence going to handle a violent thug turning up on their doorstep?”
“I expect your father would ignore the fellow and keep reading his newspaper, as he always does,” Constance offered. “And your stepmother will serve him tea and pepper him with questions about whether he is eligible to be married.”
Ellie rose from her chair, nearly dislodging Constance in the process. She set about quickly gathering her things.
“I must hurry,” she declared. “If I am there, then at least I might be able to find some means of putting him off.”
Constance plucked up her own hat and coat.
“Excellent plan,” she agreed. “We should proceed there immediately.”
“Connie, I can’t possibly expect you to put yourself at risk for this,” Ellie said.
Constance’s expression turned stormy.
“Don’t you dare try to leave me out of it,” she warned. “This is the most exciting thing that has happened to me in ages.”
“Oh, dash it!” Ellie burst out, grabbing her fern. “Come along, then!”
꩜
Four
The rain had let up by the time Ellie and Constance disembarked from the crowded omnibus. Ellie juggled her briefcase and fern as they hurried up the street.
Her home stood on a tidy little enclave in Canonbury lined with three-story semi-detached houses that were set comfortably back from the road. Most of Ellie’s neighbors were reasonably well-to-do clerks of some sort or another. Her father, David Mallory, was an insurance actuary. He earned a high enough salary for the family to employ both a housemaid and a cook, which gave Ellie’s stepmother, Florence, less things to be loudly overwhelmed about.
Everything looked quite ordinary as Ellie and Constance approached the house. Florence hadn’t yet drawn the curtains for the evening. The train Ellie’s father took home every day wouldn’t arrive for another twenty minutes.
Ellie slowed as she approached the front steps, regarding the door warily. With its tidy front hedge and white trim, the house did not look at all like a dangerous villain was already wreaking havoc inside of it.
“Well?” Constance prompted. “Are we going in or not?”
“I suppose we had better,” Ellie agreed.
Her front hallway was just as unremarkable as the steps. The brass hat stand and potted philodendron gave no indication that any criminals were lurking about.
“Is that you, Eleanora?” her stepmother called from the parlor.
“Yes, Florence,” Ellie called back as she divested herself of her hat and umbrella.
Florence popped into the doorway. She was a pretty woman with a generously curved figure, her brown hair accented by streaks of silver. Florence loudly bewailed the presence of those streaks, but Ellie thought they looked nice. They might even have appeared distinguished, if Florence wasn’t… well, Florence. It was hard for a person to appear distinguished when they were endlessly complaining about their nerves.
Not that Ellie had any real fears for her stepmother’s nerves. Despite all the hand-waving she did, Florence possessed an exceptionally robust constitution.
“I am glad to see you are back at a reasonable hour today,” Florence said loudly. “How that office of yours can think it appropriate to keep a young lady of good breeding working past eight on a Tuesday evening is utterly beyond my comprehension…”
