Death Sets Sail Read online

  ‘I missed you, Father,’ I said, slightly muffled.

  ‘I missed you too, my good girl,’ said my father – and for several reasons I felt terribly guilty at that. ‘Now tell me, how is school? Are you getting the best marks possible? I remember you did not win a prize in the summer, and I wanted to know why that was.’

  And, as May dragged us all off to the cars waiting to take us to dinner at the El Maghrabis’, I glanced back at the Breath of Life, assuming I would never see them again.

  Of course, I was quite wrong.

  6

  The next day, we set off for the Nile.

  We were driven in two of Amina’s parents’ smooth black cars to Bab al-Hadid station, emerging into noise and dust and smarting sun. Porters in turbans and galabeyas rushed back and forth, our cases piled up alarmingly high (my father and sisters had not travelled light), and Pik An and Miss Beauvais begged them to be careful. I looked at the enormous stone statue that stood in the square in front of the station. It was a creature with a lion’s paws and a human head framed with a ferocious headdress, crouched next to a woman who stood gazing proudly into space, one arm raised to lift the shawl from her face. I thought it was beautiful, though very strange.

  ‘Nahdat Misr,’ said Mr El Maghrabi, nodding at it. ‘Egypt’s past – the Sphinx – and her future, her women. Amoona, habibti, remember to tell the girls about your history. Be proud of it!’

  ‘Yes, Baba,’ said Amina, her face serious for once. ‘I will.’

  From Bab al-Hadid, we took the overnight express to Luxor. As the sun went down, I looked out of the train window to see rectangles of bright green grass and tall, spiky sugar cane, bordered by dark-fronded palms and thin strips of water that reflected the sky. Cows and donkeys stood beside mud-brick houses, and people sat in front of them, knees up and arms dangling as they laughed and talked together. The sky was rose and lemon and orange cream, smooth with only a few licks of darkening cloud.

  The train was almost empty. As we waited for dinner, and for our sleeping berths to be ready, we had a carriage all to ourselves. May built a fort under the seats and burst out at us from time to time, being an ancient sea creature (Pik An had to pretend to be surprised), Rose read Millie of the Fourth Form, my father did the crossword, Miss Beauvais snored and Daisy paced back and forth restlessly. I knew she was remembering the last time we rode on a train together, and the things that had happened on that journey.

  ‘Are you excited?’ Amina said quietly, looking at me sideways. In Egypt her hair was even glossier and more glorious than ever, and she was wearing an impossibly lovely travelling suit and a little hat and veil of the sort that all the Egyptian women seemed to wear.

  ‘Yes!’ I said, and I truly was. Everything was so strange and wonderful. Although I kept on seeing flashes of the real Egypt through Amina’s eyes, a country where people still had to bother about dull, ordinary things like prep and train tickets, I could not help feeling as though I had stepped into a story, as if I had dropped through space and time. I felt oddly convinced (perhaps I was thinking about the Breath of Life again here) that I might turn my head to see the boy king Tutankhamun, sickly but regal, sitting next to me in the train carriage, or as if the woman I could hear shouting in the next carriage along might turn out to be the pharaoh Hatshepsut, her eyes (as fierce and clever as Amina’s eyes in my imagination) painted dark and thick with kohl, and a little wooden beard tied to her chin with a strap.

  ‘I can’t wait,’ said Amina. ‘I’ve never been before, not on a proper cruise. I know all the stories, though. That’s what Baba meant when he said goodbye – he wants me to make sure you hear the real stories. Sometimes they don’t tell them properly to westerners.’

  I breathed in the bare, hot smell of the carriage around me, and the smell of sweat and Amina’s perfume, something as light and pretty as she was.

  ‘Why did your parents send you to Deepdean?’ I asked. ‘Wasn’t Miss Beauvais enough?’

  ‘Miss Beauvais is quite useless, really,’ said Amina with a glance over at her sleeping form. ‘We only keep her about because French things are fashionable. I told Baba I couldn’t learn from her, and so I had to go to school. And then there wasn’t much choice, once I’d gone through all of the schools in Cairo. King Farouk was at school in England before the old king died – they had to fly him back to Cairo to take the throne, you know. So it’s the done thing at the moment. The aunties and my older sisters bullied Baba into it too. Mama was cross, but she knew I wanted to go. I like adventure, you know.’

  ‘My mother didn’t want me to go to school in England, either,’ I said quietly, so that Rose and May would not hear me mentioning Ah Mah. ‘She – she doesn’t like Western things.’

  ‘Why is your mother not here?’ said Amina, looking at me more searchingly than ever.

  I shrugged. I could not bear to explain it, not to Amina, whose mother was so proud of her.

  ‘I asked to go, though,’ I went on quickly. ‘I wanted to see England for myself.’

  ‘Hazel Wong!’ said Amina, grinning at me. ‘I think we’re a little alike, you and me.’

  ‘But I’m not – I’m not adventurous, not like you and Daisy,’ I said.

  ‘You’re one of the most adventurous people I’ve ever met!’ said Amina. ‘You travelled halfway round the world on your own when you were only a shrimp, you’ve done all kinds of wild things – you’re friends with boys. Baba would kill me if I even looked at one—’

  ‘Shh!’ I said urgently, as my father stretched and turned the page of his crossword book. That reminder had made me come out in an uncomfortable sweat.

  ‘All I’m saying is, don’t let Daisy make you think you’re dull,’ said Amina. ‘Perhaps you were once, I don’t know. But the Hazel Wong I know is quite the opposite. I’m glad I’m friends with you.’

  ‘We’re glad we’re friends with you too,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm,’ said Amina. ‘Are you sure that’s how Daisy feels?’

  I looked up at Daisy. She had come to a stop in her pacing and was standing like a marble statue in a museum, staring out of the window at the high hills as they were lit pink by the sunset. I knew, though, that she was listening in on what we were saying.

  ‘You ought to ask her,’ I said, blushing a bit.

  ‘Well,’ said Amina, tossing her head and raising her voice so Daisy was certain to hear, ‘she ought to like me – I’m brilliant.’

  It was such a Daisyish thing to say that I laughed out loud, and Amina laughed too.

  We had dinner in the candlelit dining carriage that made me feel as though I was inside a star. But we had barely sat down when we were startled to see some very familiar faces – the men and women of the Breath of Life Society. There was plump Theodora Miller, berating one of the waiters, and I realized that her voice was the one I had heard in the other carriage. That gave me a strange feeling. I had been comparing her to Hatshepsut, and that was how she saw herself.

  As I watched, the waiter stepped back from Theodora’s fury and bumped into her bony companion, who shouted at him. The waiter looked quite horrified.

  ‘They’re following us!’ hissed Daisy, prodding me with her salad fork.

  ‘I hope not!’ I said. ‘They’re awful!’

  ‘Awfully fascinating!’ said Daisy, and she listened in so frantically to the Breath of Life table next to us that she only half replied to all of my father’s questions.

  I had to admit that I agreed with her. I kept hearing snippets of conversation that made me want to lean in further – reincarnation, followers, money, pharaohs, and then—

  ‘Now, Ida, really, you can’t mean that.’

  ‘But I do!’ said the bony woman sharply. ‘It came to me in a dream last week. I have been mulling it over and really the only answer is this: I am the reincarnation of Hatshepsut.’

  ‘Ida, you can’t be Hatshepsut!’ said a fluffy-looking little old lady, very short and almost circular, her hands clasped in fron
t of her in distress. ‘There is only one Hatshepsut at one time and—’

  ‘And it is ME,’ said Theodora Miller, drawing herself up. The other Breath of Life members – a tall, gangly young woman with curly hair, a dark-haired young man and an old, wrinkly man with a surprisingly yellow head of hair and a cane – all sucked in their breath and stared at Theodora and bony Ida. ‘I am Hatshepsut,’ Mrs Miller repeated. ‘You are Cleopatra, Ida. We’ve discussed this before.’

  ‘Cleopatra was a poisoner,’ snapped Ida. ‘A poisoner and a coward. I have felt for a long time that I have no connection to her, but, on the other hand, I have the most intimate connection with Hatshepsut. I understand her. I feel her. She is ME.’

  ‘SHE IS ME!’ said Theodora Miller furiously.

  ‘Oh, please don’t argue!’ said the fluffy little old lady, at the same time that the gangly young woman cried, ‘Mother, don’t, please!’

  ‘Heppy, do NOT call me by that name!’ gasped Theodora, swinging her head towards the woman. ‘That’s another black mark in your Book – the fourth today! You will never discover your reincarnation with that attitude. And Rhiannon, do be quiet or I shall reconsider your being Nefertiti.’

  ‘Sorry, Theodora dear,’ said the fluffy lady, Rhiannon.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ said gangly Heppy, tears in her eyes. ‘I am trying!’

  ‘You are certainly trying my PATIENCE!’ said Theodora – and then May knocked over her glass of lemonade onto my skirt, and I lost the rest of their words.

  But the group stayed with me, swirling about in my head all night, so that my dreams were full of old ladies wearing crowns and false beards and sentencing people to death. I was quite glad to wake up the next morning and find the train almost at Luxor.

  7

  The sun rises sharp and hot in Egypt, and so it was already up as we stepped off the train in Luxor, warming our shoulders and making the hairs on the back of my neck prickle. There was dust in the air, a stampede of porters and a bewildering press of men all trying to make us buy things. Woven scarves in bright colours, cups of water, fly whisks, clattering strings of beads, carved stone statuettes and smooth round things like tokens that I realized after I had one pushed into my hand were, in fact, carved scarab beetles, just like the ones Daisy and I had seen in the British Museum all those months ago. I remembered that case, and suddenly thought of Alexander.

  ‘No thank you,’ I stammered to the man who had given it to me. ‘Shukran.’ But that was obviously not the right thing to do, for he held out his hands to me with a wounded look. ‘Lady!’ he cried. ‘Only fifty piastres – for you a good price. Please, lady!’

  Fifty piastres seemed expensive to me, but he was so insistent that I felt I had to scrabble for my purse, only to have Amina push me aside. ‘Hazel, you have to haggle!’ she hissed. ‘He’s told you a dreadfully wicked price – that thing’s not worth five. Here, let me!’ She began to speak very loudly and dramatically in Arabic, and the man shouted back, looking mortally offended.

  I had never felt more miserably like a tourist in all my life. ‘It’s all right!’ I whispered to Amina. ‘Please, I can pay him.’

  Amina ignored me. At last she turned, holding two scarab beetles and looking extremely pleased with herself. ‘Two for thirty,’ she said. ‘Of course, they’re not worth it, but that’s not the point.’

  ‘What is the point?’ I asked.

  ‘The argument mostly,’ said Amina. ‘And thirty piastres is nothing to us, but quite a lot to him. So we both got a good deal, if you think about it. The other beetle is for Daisy.’

  ‘Oh, I suppose,’ said Daisy, looking uninterested – but I saw her tuck her beetle securely into her pocket.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said to Amina. I held up my new scarab beetle, which shone as blue-green as the sea, and put my arm through Daisy’s.

  Then my gaze was drawn along the platform to where the pack of sellers had re-formed round the Breath of Life Society. Without someone like Amina to help them, they were not faring well. Fluffy little old Rhiannon cowered, and bony Ida – today wearing a magnificent pale green dress – glared and brandished her parasol. ‘Go away!’ she shouted. ‘We don’t want anything! Get out of it!’

  ‘Really!’ said Amina. ‘There’s no need to be rude. The thing is to ignore them if you don’t want to buy.’

  I saw the old man waving his shiny gold-tipped cane threateningly, his matching, shiny golden hair glinting in the sun. I was worried that he might hit someone. And then a furious voice cut through the noise and made the sellers freeze.

  It was Theodora Miller – and again I saw exactly why she was in charge. She might be built like an overstuffed sofa or like Miss Lappet, our Latin mistress back at Deepdean, but she carried herself like a ruler, her eyes boring into the sellers she was glaring at.

  ‘MOVE ON!’ she bellowed at them, and they staggered backwards, looking quite horrified. Her voice was clearly not what they had expected from someone her size and shape. ‘GO ON, GET OUT! You horrid people! Get away from us! We don’t want to buy and we shan’t be tricked by you!’

  ‘But, madam!’ tried one. ‘The lady, your friend – she still has my scarf, and she has not paid for it.’

  ‘Then that is YOUR FAULT!’ shouted Theodora Miller. ‘You should have thought of that before you gave it to her! Go on, go away!’

  I was shocked. That was simply not fair. If you take a thing, you ought to pay for it. I saw my father shake his head, and Amina purse her lips.

  ‘Excellent work, Theodora,’ said the old man in a cheerful voice, waving his cane. ‘Well said. Can I have that scarf if you aren’t using it, Ida?’

  ‘Certainly not, Narcissus!’ snapped Ida. ‘It’s mine. It goes with my dress.’

  ‘Do stop squabbling, you two,’ said Theodora Miller. ‘Ida, hire us some appropriate carriages. NOT the ones with silly ornaments all over them – I can’t bear the jingling noise. And make sure the horses aren’t white. White horses are too restless in temperament; they will cause a bumpy ride.’ Ida nodded and started forward. The young woman, Heppy, made to go after her, but was stopped with another almighty bellow from Theodora.

  ‘No, Heppy, NOT you!’ she roared. ‘You stay here with me where I can keep an eye on you. I don’t TRUST you!’

  Heppy flinched and trembled, tugging at her curly hair where it was wriggling out from her long plait. This seemed to enrage Theodora further.

  ‘HEPPY! STOP trying to chew your HAIR! How many times MUST it be entered in your Book of Life before it gets into your head? That’s two black marks today, and it isn’t even lunch time!’

  At that, Heppy twitched all over and pulled her hands down to her sides. I could see her chest rising and falling as she stuttered, ‘I’m sorry, M— Theodora, I really am. I didn’t even notice—’

  ‘I notice!’ roared Theodora. ‘I notice, Heppy – how many times must I tell you? Now be a good girl and go and look after Miss Bartleby, won’t you?’

  With that, Theodora Miller’s demeanour changed so quickly that it startled me – and made me realize how closely I was watching this scene play out. The rage in her eyes died away and she suddenly looked like nothing more than a plump little old lady again. I might have thought I had imagined her fury if it were not for Heppy, who went stumbling over to fluffy little Rhiannon – Miss Bartleby – vibrating with nerves like a plucked harp, and held out a slightly shaking arm to her.

  Miss Bartleby patted her comfortingly. ‘There, there, dear,’ she said. ‘You know you bring this on yourself. You mustn’t be such a trial to Theodora.’

  I was shocked. Heppy, as far as I could see, had done nothing at all. But, all the same, Ida and Narcissus made a hum of agreement.

  Off Theodora went towards the station entrance, and everyone else followed in a procession after her. Then they were lost in the press of the crowd.

  ‘They’re awful!’ said Amina. ‘I think I hate them even more than I did before. What horrid people, behaving as though ever
ything is Heppy’s fault when it’s not!’

  Out through the columns of the train station we went, under the outspread wings of the painted vulture above our heads, and into a stamping, sweating, yelling group of taxi drivers, all leaning out of their carriages to shout at us.

  ‘They’re dreadful people. They’re also going quite the wrong way to be on our boat, thank goodness,’ said my father. He was clearly as against the Breath of Life as we were. ‘Pik An, hurry up, and bring Rose and May. Let’s go and take the perfectly nice white horses and carriages that those foolish ladies left behind.’

  My father handed me into the nearest one, its cracked leather rough under my hands and its canopy curving over me like the wings of a scarab beetle. Daisy, Amina and Miss Beauvais squeezed in beside me and, with a jingle and a jolt, we were off, the wheels spinning, the poor thin horse’s shoes clicking and the driver’s whip cracking.

  We rattled down a long, wide, dusty street, past square, light-coloured, box-on-box houses, fruit sellers and children who ran along beside our carriage, cars and carts and blond, skinny dogs, rubber trees and pink, papery flowers, then turned past a mosque and – Amina gasped – an enormous ruined temple, rising high on our right, its stone glowing in the sun.

  ‘That’s Luxor Temple,’ said Amina excitedly. ‘Those statues are of Rameses the Second – he was an awfully important pharaoh. Oh, I’ve always wanted to see it!’

  She dangled out of the carriage as we turned again onto a wide front, lined with lovely hotels on our left, and on our right – and now it was my turn to gasp – the Nile river, shimmering the softest, palest blue, the far shore only a line, and behind it mountains so distant and vague that I thought at first they were clouds.

  And floating on the Nile like a swan was our boat.

  8