The Medieval Murderers - The First Murder

‘Doll. I have some news for you.’

She grinned, patting the papyruses on the table. ‘And I for you. I think I have made a breakthrough with the hieroglyphs… ’

She stopped in her tracks when she saw the dark look that came over his face at her news. She realised she had made a mistake by telling him she had potentially solved in a few hours a problem that had had him stumped for weeks, if not months. She changed tack, rising from the chair, and crossing the room towards him.

‘But it’s probably all wrong. Tell me what your news is.’

Malinferno, crushed by what Doll had said, looked cautiously at her. ‘You’re sure you want to know?’

She hugged him close to her ample bosom, and squeaked in the most mindless way she could muster, ‘Ooooh, yes, kind sir. What treats do you have in store for me?’

He couldn’t help himself, and a smile cracked his downcast features.

‘I may have a part for you in a play.’

Doll Pocket gasped. Despite the distractions of her Egyptian studies, this was news indeed.

‘Really?’ Her voice, normally low and seductive, went up a pitch in genuinely uncontrolled excitement. She looked hard into Joe’s eyes, however. ‘You’re not teasing me, are you? Only I wouldn’t forgive you if you were.’

‘Would I do that? No, Bromhead has found an old copy of some Biblical plays, and fancies to put them on in the West End.’

Doll gasped. The matter of the plays didn’t sound alluring, but the idea of performing in the shadow of Drury Lane or Covent Garden certainly was.

‘When can we talk to him about it? Which theatre has he booked?’

Malinferno saw he had run a little ahead of himself in his desires to cheer up Doll. She had pulled away from his embrace, and had grabbed the empty ewer on the sideboard. She was all for fetching some fresh water, and reviving herself with a wash and some perfume preparatory to meeting Bromhead in his new guise of impresario. But before she could dash out the door to get some water from Mrs Stanhope, Malinferno put a restraining hand on her arm.

‘Hold on, Doll. He hasn’t quite got there yet. He has only just found this medieval manuscript of something called The Play of Adam . It’s all Adam and Eve, and Cain and Abel, and the Flood and such. But he hasn’t sold his idea to anyone yet.’

Doll’s shoulders slumped. ‘I knew it was too much to hope for. Damn it, Joe, I was looking forward to it already. I could be the first woman, Eve.’

It was of course the very thought that Malinferno had had over breakfast, and which he had mooted with Bromhead. And the idea of Doll Pocket as the naked seductress still aroused him in a familiar way.

‘It will happen, Doll. Only just not yet.’

His companion did not look convinced, and Malinferno wished he hadn’t mentioned Augustus’ idea. He rested his backside on the table edge, and the papyrus rustled beneath him. It gave him an idea of how to raise Doll from her sudden depression.

‘Now, how about we follow your suggestion, and go to the British Museum, and take a look at exhibit EA24.’

Doll smiled, and immediately reached for her favourite headgear, an oriental turban in lavish brocaded material of the sort also favoured by Queen Caroline.

Montagu House was quite crowded, especially in the Egyptian Gallery, where everyone was hurrying to the far end of the room. As Malinferno and Doll Pocket approached the back of the tightly packed mob, they could see what all the fuss was about. Set between two tall windows in order to give it the best light stood the massive bust that was known as Young Memnon . One of Malinferno’s countrymen, Giovanni Belzoni, had engineered its shipment from Egypt to London. There the Royal Corps of Sappers and Miners had used a huge block-and-tackle system set in an A-frame to hoist the head onto the plinth on which it now stood. It had been a Herculean task, and the bust was only recently cleared of its encumbrances of thick ropes and struts. It was now a glorious sight, despite the hole drilled in its right shoulder by the Frenchman Drovetti for the insertion of dynamite. It had been his idea to blast the colossus to pieces in order to reduce its mass for shipment. Belzoni, a hydraulic engineer and circus strongman, had managed the task without such drastic action being taken. It was now the latest wonder for the Egyptian-obsessed gentry to marvel at.

Doll and Joe, however, gave it only a cursory glance. There were no hieroglyphs on the bust, and so it was not a curiosity to hold their attention for long. They carried on down the gallery, lingering only to cast their eyes over the obsidian monolith that was Nectanebo’s sarcophagus. It too was covered in hieroglyphs, and so merited passing attention. But EA24 was their goal.

The battered block of stone was almost black in colour. However, Malinferno had been told by his friend Thomas Elder, who worked at the BM, that it was so because someone had covered it with boot polish in order to make the whitened inscriptions stand out better. At the bottom of the stone, with only the right corner lost, was a text in Greek. Above it was a band of writing in an unknown script. Then above that stood the fragmentary section of Egyptian hieroglyphs. And in the midst of the puzzling symbols, there was the cartouche Malinferno and Doll had been trying to decipher. They were alone before the mysterious object, and stood in silence, examining its surface. Malinferno felt as if he were communing directly with the ancient scholar who had carved the stone. The man’s lips were making the shape of words, but no sound was issuing forth. So he simply could not understand what the scribe was attempting to say to him. Meanwhile, Doll had leaned closer to the stone and her eyes moved from side to side along the Greek text. Malinferno could see that her lips, too, were moving silently. Puzzled by his companion’s actions, he went to speak. But Doll held up her hand to stop him, and she carried on scanning the lines of Greek text.

After a while, she still ignored Malinferno’s obvious signs of boredom, and turned her attention to the hieroglyphs at the top. So he ambled away to look at some more of the artefacts that had been taken from the French at the turn of the century. When the French in Egypt had surrendered to the English in 1801, one of the spoils of war had been a large collection of items gathered by French savants. The stone EA24 had been one, and Nectanebo’s sarcophagus another. Malinferno drifted over to further spoils in the form of a row of lion-headed statues of the goddess Sekhmet. Then he heard a bitter voice ringing out down the long gallery.

‘Look, Étienne. Yet more of the English plunder like that taken from us twenty years ago.’

Surprised by the familiar voice, Malinferno looked towards its source. Standing at the back of the mêlée that still clung around Young Memnon , he saw a figure he recognised. It was of an old man dressed in an antiquated form of court garb that had gone out of fashion years ago. And atop the fellow’s head was a powdered, white wig only affected by footmen these days. He was leaning heavily on a cane, and favouring his left leg which, though sporting a well-shaped calf, Malinferno knew to be wooden. Thomas Chippendale the Younger would have been proud of its shape. Indeed, he may well have turned it in his workshop.

Jean-Claude Casteix was one of those savants who had collected Egyptian artefacts for Napoleon Bonaparte, only to see them stolen by the British. Swallowing his pride, Casteix and some of his colleagues had followed them to London. The French general Menou had been scornful of the scientists’ behaviour, suggesting they could be ‘stuffed for the purpose’ of the voyage, along with their trinkets. Casteix reviled the English, and hated his exile, but had preferred to stay with the goods he had accumulated in Egypt. Now he stood sneering at the latest English outrage: the huge statue of Young Memnon stolen by Belzoni from under the very nose of the French Consul-General, Bernadino Drovetti.