The merchant’s mattress was elevated as high as my waist on an ornately carved bed, with drawers underneath and a canopy overhead.
She crawled up first and lay back, so I could see her in the pale light.
There’s no sight lovelier than a welcoming woman. The sweetness of her swallows you, like the embrace of a warm sea. The topography of her body was a snowy mountain range, mysterious and unexplored.
Did I even remember what to do? It felt like a thousand years. An odd, sudden memory of Astiza intruded—a knife to the heart—but then Miriam spoke.
t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
1 6 1
“This is one of those moments I told you about, Ethan.” So I took her, slowly and gently. She wept the first time, and then clung fiercely, crying out, the second. I clung too, shaking and gasping at the end, my eyes wetting when I thought first of Astiza, then of Napoleon, then of Miriam, and how long it would be before the French came again, as furious now as they’d been at Jaffa. If they got inside, they’d kill us all.
I turned my head so she couldn’t see any tear or worry, and we slept.
Near midnight, I was jostled awake. I clutched a pistol, but then saw it was Mohammad.
“What the devil?” I hissed. “Can’t we have some privacy?” He put his finger to his lips and beckoned with his head. Come.
“Now?”
He nodded emphatically. Sighing, I climbed out, the floor cold, and followed him out to the main room.
“What are you doing here?” I grumbled, holding a blanket around myself like a toga. The city seemed quiet, the guns taking a rest.
“I’m sorry, effendi, but Sir Sidney and Phelipeaux said this shouldn’t wait. The French used an arrow to fire this over the wall. It has your name on it.”
“An arrow? By Isaac Newton, what century are we in?” A small piece of burlap was tied to the arrow. Sure enough, a tag, with fine pen, read, “Ethan Gage.” Franklin would have admired the postal efficiency.
“How do they know I’m here?”
“Your electric chain is like a banner announcing your presence.
The whole province is talking about it, I would guess.” True enough. So what could our enemies be sending me that was so small?
I unwrapped the burlap and rolled its content onto the palm of my hand.
It was a ruby ring, its jewel the size of a cherry, with a tag attached that read, simply, “She needs the angels. Monge.” My world reeled.
The last time I’d seen the jewel, it had been on Astiza’s finger.
c h a p t e r
1 5
Mohammad was watching me closely. “This ring means something to you, my friend?”
“This is it? No other message?” Monge undoubtedly was Gaspard Monge, the French mathematician I’d seen at Jaffa.
“And it is not just the size of the jewel, is it?” Mohammad pressed.
I sat down heavily. “I knew the woman who wore it.” Astiza was alive!
“And the French army would catapult her ring for what reason, exactly?”
What reason indeed? I turned the ring over, remembering its origin. I’d insisted Astiza take it from the subterranean treasure trove we’d found under the Great Pyramid, despite her protestations that such loot was cursed. Then we’d briefly forgotten it until she was trying to climb the tether of Conte’s runaway balloon into my wicker basket, a desperate Count Silano clinging to her ankles. She remembered the curse and pleaded with me to get the ring off, but I couldn’t.
So, rather than drag me down within range of French soldiers, she cut the tether and fell with Silano, screaming, into the Nile. The balloon shot up so tumultuously that I didn’t see their landing, there t h e
r o s e t t a k e y
1 6 3
was a volley from the French troops, and by the time I peered into the sun-dazzled waters . . . nothing. It was as if she’d vanished from the earth. Until now.
And the angels? The seraphim we’d found. I’d have to take them back from Miriam. “They want me to come looking.”
“So it is a trap!” my companion said. “They fear you and your electrical magic.”
“No, not a trap, I think.” I didn’t flatter myself that they considered me such a formidable enemy that they had to lure me outside the walls simply to shoot me. What I did suspect is that they hadn’t given up our mutual quest for the Book of Thoth. If there was one way to enlist me again, it was the promise of Astiza. “They simply know I’m alive, because of the electricity, and they’ve learned something I can add to. It’s about what I was searching for in Jerusalem, I’m guessing.
And they know that the one thing that would make me come back to them is news of this woman.”
“Effendi, you cannot mean to leave these walls!” I glanced back to where Miriam was sleeping. “I have to.” He was baffled. “Because of a woman? You have one, right here.”
