Page 35 of The Devil in Oxford
His fingers were still wrapped around mine, and I detected theslightest tremor in his touch. “No.” The word came out little over a whisper. “I rushed Laurent out when things went awry and flagged down a cabman to take him home.”
“And then you went back…”
He let out a low sound of agreement in his chest.Of course he did.This foolish man had gone back into the fray after nearly being caught up in the conflagration himself. My heart seized up. There were no thoughts. No outside world. Nothing but the warmth of his hand holding mine. The faint scent of lemon candy on the air between us, and the agonizing regret that I’d bungled everything spectacularly.
Icouldhave lost him tonight. He could have beenkilledand I’d have been down here in this stupid museum chasing after ghosts I had no business following. It was unthinkable, so I quit all thinking altogether. I stretched up on my toes and kissed him, bracing myself for the rejection that was bound to follow. He let out a pained sound, but instead of pushing me away he grabbed me by the elbows, tugging me hard against his body, and kissed me back with all the regret and longing that had been bottled up between us for too long. The evening stubble on his jaw scraped against the soft skin of my own as he hefted me up onto the rickety wooden table behind me.
The sound of pottery shattering upon brick filled the silence of the chamber, going off like a gunshot. We sprang apart. Ruan looked ruefully from me to the floor. I followed his gaze down to where a broken jar lay at his feet. Bile surged up my throat.
“Damn and blast.” I hopped off the table, scooping up the flashlight that somehow had fallen from my hand, and began inspecting the thousands-of-years-old antiquity. It was little more than shards and dust, thanks to my inability to control my baser instincts. I reached down, not certain whether to grab the mummified object that had fallen out or to—
“Ruby…”
I couldn’t breathe.
Think, Ruby, think.
“This is bad. This is catastrophic.… This is—”
“Give me the torch, Ruby,” Ruan grumbled, taking the flashlight from my hand and dropping down on the ground beside me, examining the small powder-coated object surrounded by the shards. He nudged it with the back of his finger.
Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t mummified. It wasn’t even remotely desiccated yet. “That’s not old…”
Ruan then carefully lifted the object with two fingers, tilting it into the light before growing pale. A bit of the white powder rubbed off onto Ruan’s fingers, revealing a fleshy gray object in the early stages of dehydration.
“That’s not mummified either,” I murmured half to myself.
Ruan set the object carefully back on the ground, amidst the powder that had spilled out of the shattered jar.
“That’s a…”
“Tongue,” Ruan supplied, pressing his lips together. “It does appear to be.”
It looked awfully…
“Fresh. Also, yes.” He added dryly, “Anyone you know missing one?”
Julius Harker.My mind raced. His body in a box, his tongue in a canopic jar in his very own museum. What was his killer trying to prove? Was this some sort of a ritual or was it something else entirely?
Ruan ran the light over the floor beneath us where the powdery white substance had spilled out of the shattered jar, and a new wave of guilt washed over me. Fresh tongue be damned, I dropped down to the ground, lifting the unbroken cat-shaped head.Bastet.I furrowed my brow. What was Bastet doing on a canopic jar? That was highly irregular. All the ones I’d seen bore the four sons of Horus upon them. I turned the carved head over in my hand. The objectwas strangely lighter and smoother than it ought to be for a piece of its age. I picked up another shard, holding it to the light, when I spied a French maker’s mark. “It’s a forgery,” I murmured in stark relief. “An empire piece perhaps? But I really don’t know.” I pocketed the shard and stood up, dusting my hands on my skirt, leaving white smudges on the fabric.
“The pot may be a fake, but the tongue is real enough.” Ruan cocked his head toward the powder surrounding the lid bearing the visage of the cat-headed goddess. “What do you suppose that is?”
I wrinkled my nose as I toed the powder carefully. “Cocaine, perhaps? That would certainly explain the movement of money in his ledger and the secrecy about it. But I’m not about to taste it to find out.”
“Probably for the best, as while I’m no chemist, I doubt cocaine would have preserved human flesh this well.”
My expression fell at the sudden realization in his words. “You’re right… the tongue doesn’t smell at all… and it certainly ought to by now.”If it belonged to Harker, a thought I did not want to countenance. Nor did I want to question how my country pellar was familiar with the chemical properties of cocaine.
He turned to me, his expression bleaker than I’d ever seen it. “They’d put cocaine in packages for us during the war. What better way to send a fellow to his death than to put him out of his mind in the process.” He dropped his West Country accent, putting on a more genteel tone.“Happy Christmas, Kivell, do try to take out a few Germans while you’re at it. That’s a lad.”
I knew the war had been hard on him. Knew Oxford had been too, but this side of Ruan—this hurt and aching one—was a new version. One with wounds I’d seen on other men, but never on him. He kept his pain all tucked deep inside the man himself, but tonight—tonight he had let me in.
I couldn’t think of it—couldn’t think of what it meant—so I turned away, raking my hands through my hair. Not cocaine. Thenwhat? I began to pace, racking my brain for what could be in the jar—what might slow the decomposition process—when I realized exactly what it must be. “The ancient Egyptians used natron in the mummification ritual. It’s a salt compound, that likely would delay decomposition. But I cannot fathom why Harker was experimenting with the stuff. What would a man do with natron in the twentieth century?” I gently lifted the lid of a second jar and glanced inside. It too was full of the powdery whitish substance. I placed my fingers in, rubbing them together.
“It’s possible,” Ruan admitted.
I frowned. There was no way to know for sure without a scientist and a laboratory. Neither of which I had. One by one I checked the contents of the jars that had surrounded the chariot. Each full to the brim of the same peculiar powder. “What was Harkerdoingwith all this?”
