Виктория Холт: Curse of the Kings

Once I saw Sir Ralph there. He came over to speak to me.

"Interested, eh?" he said.

I replied that I was.

"Found any more bronze shields?"

"No. I haven't found anything."

He gave me a little push. "Finds don't come often. You started off with yours." His jaw wagged in the amused way, and I had a notion that he was rather pleased to see me there.

One of the workers who had come down with the party showed me how to piece a broken pot together. "First aid," he called it, until it could be treated properly and perhaps find its way into a museum. He showed me how to pack a piece of pottery which had been put together in this "first-aid" manner and which was to be sent away to the experts who would restore it and place it in its period where it might or might not betray some little detail of how life was lived four thousand years before.

I had dreamed of finding something in Carter's Meadow; golden ornaments, things that I had heard had been found in tombs. This was very different. I was disappointed for a while and then I began to develop a burning enthusiasm for the task itself. I could think of little else than the wonder of uncovering the record of the rocks.

Our lessons with Evan Callum were taken in the afternoons, because the mornings were spent with Miss Graham or Oliver Shrimpton learning what were called the three Rs. Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. In addition, Theodosia, Sabina, and I had to do needlework with Miss Graham and three mornings a week we worked for an hour on our samplers. The alphabet had to be worked, a proverb, our names, and the date. Naturally we chose the shortest proverb we could find but even so the task was laborious. Horrible little cross stitches on a piece of cotton and if one stitch was too large or too small it had to be unpicked and put right. I was in revolt against such time wasting and I was so frustrated that my sampler suffered through it. There was music and we strummed on the piano under

Miss Graham's supervision, but now we had Grey Tabby it was decided that she should give the music lessons. So with our periodic lessons in archaeology our education was running on quite unconventional lines. We had our teachers from three sources—Miss Graham from Keverall Court, Grey Tabby and Evan Callum through Giza House, and from the rectory Oliver Shrimpton. Dorcas was delighted. It was an excellent way, she said, of three families pooling their educational resources and providing an excellent education for the young people involved. She doubted that anywhere in the country a girl was getting such a well-grounded training. She hoped, she added, that I was making full use of it.

What did intrigue me were the sessions with Evan Callum. I told him that when I was grown up I should go with expeditions to the far places of the world. He replied that he thought that as a female I might find this difficult unless I married an archaeologist; but all the same he encouraged me. It was gratifying to have such an apt pupil. We were all interested but my natural enthusiasm was perhaps more intense and more obvious.

I became particularly fascinated by the Egyptian scene. There was so much to be discovered there. I loved hearing about that old civilization; the gods that were worshiped, the dynasties, the temples that had been discovered; I caught my enthusiasm from Evan. "There's a treasure store in the hills of the desert, Judith," he used to say.

Of course I pictured myself there, making fantastic discoveries, receiving the congratulations of people like Sir Edward Travers.

I had imagined myself having long conversations with him but he, I must say, was a disappointment. He never seemed to see any of us. He had a strange far-away look in his eyes as though he were looking far back into the past.

"I expect that awful old Tybalt is just like him," I said to Hadrian.

Tybalt had become a new word which I had introduced into our vocabulary. It meant "mean, despicable." Hadrian and I used to tease Sabina with it.

"I don't care," she said, "nothing you say can change Tybalt."

I was fascinated by Giza House though and although I was a hopeless musician I used to look forward to going there. As soon as I entered the house I would become excited. There was something peculiar about it. "Sinister," I told Hadrian who agreed as he usually did with me.

In the first place it was dark. The bushes which surrounded the house might have been responsible for that, but in the house there were so many" rich velvet curtains— not only at windows but over doors and alcoves in which were often strange images. It was so thickly carpeted that you rarely heard people come and go and I always had the sensation in that house that I was being watched.

There was a strange old woman who lived at the top of this house in what appeared to be an apartment of her own. Sabina referred to her as Old Nanny Tester.

"Who is she?" I demanded.

"She was my mother's Nanny and Tybalt's and mine."

"What's she doing up there?"

"She just lives up there."

"But you don't want a nanny now surely."

"We don't turn old servants out when they have served us many years," said Sabina haughtily.

"I believe she's a witch."

"Believe what you like, Judith Osmond. She's old Nanny Tester."

"She spies on us. She's always peering out of the window and dodging back when we look up."

"Oh don't take any notice of her," said Sabina.

Every time I went to the place I looked up to the top window for Nanny Tester. I had convinced myself that it was a strange house in which anything could happen.

The drawing room was the most normal room, but even that had an Oriental look. There were several Chinese vases and images which Sir Edward had picked up in China. There were some beautiful pictures on the walls—delicate and in pastel shades; there was a big cabinet in which were Chinese figures—there were dragons and fat Buddhas with sly sleepy looks and thin ones sitting with apparent comfort in a position which I had tried unsuccessfully to copy; there were ladies with inscrutable faces and mandarins with cruel ones. But the grand piano gave the place an air of normality and it was on this that we strummed out our lessons under the tuition of Grey Tabby who was as enigmatical as one of the Chinese ladies in the cabinet.

Whenever I had an opportunity I would peep into other rooms forcing Hadrian to look with me. He was reluctant but he was afraid not to do as I wished because he knew that I would call him a coward if he refused.

We had been studying with Evan Callum some of the lore of old Egypt and I was greatly fascinated. He gave us an account of some recent discoveries there in which Sir Edward Travers had been involved; and then he went on to give us a little insight into the history of that country.

When I listened to Evan Callum I would be transported out of the schoolroom into the temples of the gods. I listened avidly to the story of the self-begotten god Ra—often known as Amen Ra; and his son Osiris who with Isis begot the great god Horus. He showed us pictures of the masks which priests wore during religious ceremonies and told us that each god was represented by one of the masks.

"The idea being," he explained, "that the great gods of the Egyptians possessed all the strengths and virtues of men, but in addition they had one attribute of an animal; and this animal was their particular sign. Horus was the hawk because his eyes saw all and quickly." I pored over the pictures he showed us. I was an apt pupil.

But I think what interested me most were the accounts of burials when the bodies of the important dead were embalmed and put in their tombs and there left to rest for thousands of years. With them would often be buried their servants who might have been killed merely that they might accompany them and remain their servants in the new life as in the old. Treasure was stored in their tombs that they might not suffer poverty in the future.