Mr Impossible Read Online Free PDF Page A

with a
flogging.

    Rupert was on no
account to enlighten Mrs. Pembroke. He was to humor her.

    “ You might
inquire at the guardhouses and that sort of thing,” Beechey had
said. “I’d advise you to question the servant privately.
If you do run Archdale to ground, or he turns up on his own, as is
more likely, give her whatever version of events he prefers. I cannot
stress enough the importance of remaining on cordial terms with them.
They are in a position to contribute a great deal to our efforts
here, in both the scholarly and financial senses. Mr. Salt relies
upon you to exercise the utmost discretion, tact, and delicacy.”

    Rupert had nodded
wisely while privately wondering if Beechey, like Archdale’s
servant, had been smoking too much hashish lately.

    Any sober person
would have understood that Rupert Carsington was exactly the wrong
man for any assignment requiring discretion, tact, and delicacy.
Rupert himself could have said so, and normally would. But he liked
the way Mrs. Pembroke twitched her skirts when she was vexed, and he
wanted to see what she looked like. And so for once he held his
tongue and tried to look tactful and discreet.

    It wasn’t a
pose he could maintain for long, he knew.

    He followed the
maidservant up the stairs and into the house, through a zigzagging
series of halls and rooms— each a step up or a step down from
the previous one—and finally into a lofty room.

    At one end was a
raised area, its floor covered withTurkeycarpets. Along its three
sides ran a low banquette covered with cushions. A wide, squat table,
heaped with books and papers, occupied most of the space in the
center of the raised area. A narrow shelf on one side of the room
held a great lot of small wooden figures.

    The widow looked at
the table, then sank to her knees and started shuffling through the
heaps.

    “ Mistress?”
said Leena.

    “ This isn’t
the way I left it,” Mrs. Pembroke said.

    “ How can you
tell?” Rupert said.

    “ I was
working on the new papyrus,” she said. “I always arrange
the materials in a certain way. The papyrus to the right for
reference. The copy in the center. The table of signs below. The
Rosetta inscription here. The Coptic lexi-con alongside. The grammar
notes here. There is an order. There must be. One must work
systematically, or it is hopeless.” The pitch of her voice
climbed. ‘The papyrus and the copy are gone. All that work…
all those days un-rolling it… all my care in making a precise
copy…“

    She rose
unsteadily. “Where are the servants? And Akmed . Is he all
right?”

    “ Check on the
servants,” Rupert told Leena. To Mrs. Pemroke he said, “Calm
down. Count to ten.”

    She looked at
him—or appeared to have her head turned in his general
direction.

    “ Do you never
take that thing off?” he said impatiently.

    “ He must have
been remarkable, the late lamented, to war-rant so much grief.”
He made a sweeping gesture encom-passing the heavy veil and the black
silk. “It must be as hot as Hades under all that. No wonder
you’re addled.”

    She went on looking
in his direction for a moment, then abruptly threw the veil back from
her face.

    And Rupert felt as
though someone had given him a sharp thump in the head with a heavy
Turkish staff.

    “ Well,”
he said, when he’d mustered the wind to speak again. “Well.”
And he thought that maybe they should have worked up to it more
gradually.

    He saw green,
green, deeply shadowed eyes set above high cheekbones in a creamy
heart-shaped face framed with silky, dark red hair. She wasn’t
pretty at all. Pretty was ordinary. She wasn’t beautiful,
either, not by any English standard. She was something altogether out
of the common run of beauty.

    Tryphena owned
numerous volumes dealing withEgypt, including all of the
French Description de I’Egypte that had been published
thus far. Rupert had seen this face in somebody’s color
illustration of a tomb or temple. He remembered it