Page 5 of The Secrets of Ashmore Castle

Alice said, ‘Can we see him?’

The question surprised a sharp answer out of Rose. ‘Of course not. The very idea!’ She regarded them, sitting, backs straight and hands in laps as they’d been taught, looking very forlorn. Her lips tightened. They were not her responsibility. She had enough to do without that. ‘I’ll get one of the girls to bring up some coal,’ she said. And went out.

Giles Tallant, Viscount Ayton, had stepped out of the tent for a moment to stretch his neck, and stood under the canopy, surveying the scene. Gold and blue was the palette, the gold of the sand and the blue of the sky. Like an heraldic achievement, he was thinking, azure and or with lesser dabs of white, grey and brown, when the message was brought to him.

It was misspelled as usual, written down by someone whose first language was not English – and who probably rarely wrote things down even in his own language – but the meaning was unequivocal. Your father is dead. Come home at once.

Shock rolled through him at the stark words. His mother, of course, would not waste money on a gentler phrasing – and, besides, as she never spared herself, why should she spare anyone else? Shock, followed by … He would not allow himself to feel anger, which would be inappropriate, but his anguish at this news was at least in part made up of frustration. He had known all his life, of course, that this day would come, and the awareness had been a brooding shadow in a corner of his mind. But his father had been a fit and healthy man, and Ayton had hoped to have many more years of freedom. It must have been an accident, he supposed: illness would have been longer foretold. Father, dead! Inwardly, he damned the Fates that had allowed it to happen. Outwardly, he turned his face up to the sky and closed his eyes, looking like a man struggling with sorrow.

He felt the dry heat of the sun beat on his eyelids, felt the prickle of sand on his skin, heard the background sounds of the workings – the susurrus of shovels in sand, the ring of metal on stone, the grumbling groan of a camel, the creak of wooden poles and canvas as the sunshades worked in the occasional breeze. This was his world, the clean dryness of the desert and the constant undercurrent of excitement about what might be discovered. He did not want to go home. He thought of the grey wetness of England, the sameness of day-to-day, the stultifying rules and immutable traditions, the confinement and responsibility that awaited him. He did not want to be earl. He did not want to go home!

He had never got on with his father. They were too different. The earl had quite liked his younger brother Richard, though he cost him money and embarrassment. Had Ayton been sacked from Eton for misconduct, had he spent his time at university drinking and girling, his father would have roared at him, but it would have been a roar that rose from a depth of understanding, even affection. Had Ayton been an idler, an expensive wastrel, running up debts, chased for unpaid bills by tailors and wine merchants, his father would have punished him and loved him.

But he had spent his time at Eton studying, then insisted on going to University College London, to study under Flinders Petrie, rather than to Oxford as a Tallant should. He had won that great Egyptologist’s approval for his application and his methodical habits, and had gone on his first expedition at only nineteen, when Petrie had recommended him to Percy Newberry, who took him to the excavation of el-Bersheh. The fever had entered his blood. It was all he wanted to do. He had taken his degree – which was, if not disreputable, at least odd – and afterwards hoped to apply his knowledge in the field for as long as his cadethood lasted.

Stainton could not understand it. It was not what his heir should do. It was not right. It was not done. He had raged and blustered, tried at first to forbid him, but Ayton was of age and could defy him. He could not even cut him off, because the cadet title came with an independent income – not large, but enough for a young man with modest tastes and no desire to gamble and carouse. Abroad, he spent little. And archaeological expeditions were, in any case, paid for by rich families like the Stanhopes and the Cecils, or by associations like the Egypt Exploration Society. Ayton mixed, both in England and on the Nile, with titled men of good family, which made the earl roar all the more, baffled, because he could not put his finger on why it was wrong. He just knew it would not do. So Ayton kept away as much as possible, and when he had to be in England, he stayed with friends, or in the cheap lodgings in London he kept up. He visited Ashmore Castle as little as possible.

I am not ready for this, Ayton thought. The Castle was not home to him: it was a prison. The cage door would clang behind him and he would never get out again, to breathe the air anonymously, to be just himself.

He felt a trickle of sweat run down his back, and realised that standing out in the sun with his face turned up for roasting must look mad.

A voice said, ‘Are you all right, Ayton?’

He lowered his head and turned. It was Howard Carter, chief inspector of the Egyptian Antiquities Service, who was supervising the excavation. He was looking at Ayton with mild concern, his big, handsome face bisected by the dark moustache that always somehow looked well groomed, no matter what the conditions.

In his hand he held a small figurine, in the shape of a large-eared, long-backed cat sitting very upright: the goddess Bast. Made of jade, it had been found just an hour ago. Carter had been drawing it for the record. Ayton did not blame him for his desire to keep holding it. It fitted beautifully in the hand, the smooth stone good to the touch.

‘Not getting a touch of sunstroke, I hope?’ Carter said jokingly.

‘I’ve had a telegraph,’ Ayton said bluntly. ‘My father’s dead. I have to go home.’

‘My dear fellow, I’m so sorry,’ Carter said, surveying his colleague’s face. ‘My deepest condolences.’ He saw the young man’s clenched fists, and suspected some other emotion than sorrow. He knew how keen Ayton was on archaeology, and the indications were that they were on the point of some interesting finds. He must be disappointed to be summoned away. ‘Of course you must go. But you can come back when everything’s settled?’ he said, making it a question. ‘We’ve so much more to do out here.’

‘I don’t think,’ Ayton said slowly, ‘that it will be in my power to return for a long time. If ever.’

‘Well,’ said Carter, awkwardly, ‘I’m very sorry for it. But if you have to go, you had better leave at once.’ He pulled out his watch and squinted at it. The sunlight bounced off the silver case in a glint of pure burning white. ‘If you leave now, with a bit of luck you should be able to make Alexandria by Sunday night, and catch the Imperator on Monday morning. She’s comfortable, and as quick as anything is out here.’

It was a mail service, and took four days from Alexandria to Trieste, where a train would be waiting, a de luxe express that took just two days to reach London.

‘You’ll be home in not much more than a week,’ Carter concluded.

‘I’d better send a cable,’ Ayton said, seeming almost dazed.

Carter had never seen him indecisive. ‘You can do that from the hotel. Go now, old chap, don’t delay. No time to waste. Family duty must come first.’ And as Ayton turned away, he added, ‘All this will still be here. Egypt has waited for you for three thousand years – it will wait a bit longer.’

The sun beat down, glinting blindingly off flecks of mica. The sand pulled at Ayton’s soft boots as he tried to walk quickly, like clutching hands anxious for him not to go.

CHAPTER TWO

Perhaps the person who most sincerely mourned the earl was his valet, Crooks. ‘Twenty years,’ the pudgy, watery-eyed manservant had been saying whenever two or three senior servants gathered together. Moss, the butler, only nodded sympathetically, but her ladyship’s woman, Miss Taylor – grey of hair and mauve of face – found his moist self-pity irritating. Years of biting her tongue in the presence of Lady Stainton had honed it to sharpness when talking to lesser mortals.

‘Twenty years or not, you’re superfluous to requirements now,’ she told him. ‘You’re like one of those Indian wives: when their husband dies they’re thrown on the funeral pyre.’

‘The settee,’ Moss murmured. He read encyclopaedias, and liked to appear omniscient.

‘Suttee,’ Mrs Webster corrected impatiently.

Moss caught up with what had been said. ‘But there’s no need to be talking so shocking, Miss Taylor,’ he said sternly. ‘There’ll be no emulation here.’