Page 111 of Tomb of the Sun King

Though Constance made no secret of her Indian blood, people around her seemed to find it easy to forget, especially when they began airing their personal opinions about the ignorance and rebelliousness of colonial peoples.

Normally, Constance would find a clever way to turn such a comment around on the speaker, subjecting them to a subtle but razor-edged verbal skewering that left people like Julian Forster-Mowbray feeling vaguely humiliated for reasons they couldn’t quite put a finger on.

That was another skill she had inherited from her remarkable Aai.

Refraining from pulling the intellectual rug out from under Julian now took a palpable effort—but then, Constance was committed to a bigger game.

The thought of how Julian would feel when she foiled all his plans made her smile in a way akin to that of the stuffed crocodile overhead.

“How very clever you are!” she assured him airily. “But aren’t you going to invite me to sit?”

?

It took roughly three courses for Julian to forget to be nervous around her. He spent most of the soup and the fish angling in a patently obvious manner to determine whether Constance had sensed anything suspicious about the fact that his thugs had ambushed her and her friends, threatening them at knife and gunpoint. Constance played along by complimenting the roast pigeon and sympathizing with his complaints about the wine until he had tossed back three or four glasses of it—which warmed him up nicely for interrogation.

She wasn’t sure whether Julian’s willingness to believe herthatoblivious to his nefarious purposes said more about his desperate ambitions for her dowry—or his low opinions of the intelligence of females in general.

Most likely, it was a bit of both.

Constance made her first parry as they retired to the couch to sip little glasses of pastis.

“How far downriver shall we be going, then?” she asked, taking a sip of the sweet, pungent liquor.

The sun had declined into evening, painting the sky with the startling hues of an Egyptian sunset. Pink and orange shifted to a richer violet in the east, just speckled with the first emerging stars. The landscape they sailed gracefully past was decidedly rural—just bands of green fields interspersed with small villages, giving way to the golden sprawl of the desert. TheIsiswas making quick progress, her big white sails taut with the river breeze.

Julian gave a guilty little start. “Oh! We have a spot of business a day or so north of here. Nothing you need to worry about.”

Constance’s attention sharpened. She had no doubt this ‘business’ to the north had to do with the tablet from Hatshepsut’s temple.

The time had come for her first gambit. Her blood hummed with excitement at the prospect of truly opening the game. She had long suspected that she had a natural gift for espionage, though she had rarely had an opportunity to put it to the test.

Well, she would test it here, applying all her feminine wiles and rhetorical weaponry to lure Julian Forster-Mowbray into revealing his secrets.

Constance scooted a little closer to him on the settee—and got to work.

“You know, Julian… you’ve been holding out on me,” she scolded playfully.

“Have I?” Julian returned, looking nervous.

“You most certainly have!” Constance wondered whether she was laying it on a bit thick with her blatantly flirtatious tones—but she was betting Julian was far too self-absorbed to consider that she might be selling him a pile of lemons. “Here you are dashing about Egypt with the most dastardly-looking characters. You can’t possibly expect me to believe it’s just imports-and-exports or something equally drab.” She let her face show a touch of disappointment. “Unless it really is that dull.”

Julian was obviously torn. After all, he clearly wanted to impress her, and brushing off his current activities as nothing worth talking about would only make him look boring.

As Constance had hoped, he couldn’t resist the chance to at leasthintat being involved in something that made him sound more mysterious and important.

“Perhaps it isn’tquiteso dull as that,” he confessed, leaning in closer and flashing her a conspiratorial smile.

Constance plucked a sporting magazine from the nearby coffee table and batted Julian on the arm with it. “Now you are teasing me!”

“It’s only that the business is terribly—well,sensitive.I’m not supposed to talk to anyone about it.”

“I must admit, Julian—I had no idea you could be involved in something so…intriguing.” Constance ended the word on a breathy note, leaning forward and blinking up at him.

Julian ate it up with a spoon—just as she had planned.

She really was rather good at this.

“There are many things you don’t know about me, Connie,” he assured her, slinging his arm over the back of the settee.

---