They Came to Baghdad

Crosbie at the other end of the passage, silhouetted against the sunlight, that Carmichael had turned so suddenly and made for the street instead of attempting to reach the Consul General’s office?

She had been thinking this out in some absorption. She started rather guiltily when she looked up to find Richard Baker watching her with close attention.

‘Why do you want to know all this?’ he asked.

‘I’m just interested.’

‘Any more questions?’

Victoria asked:

‘Do you know anybody called Lefarge?’

‘No – I can’t say I do. Man or woman?’

‘I don’t know.’

She was wondering about Crosbie. Crosbie? Lucifer?

Did Lucifer equal Crosbie? 

III

That evening, when Victoria had said good night to the two men and gone to bed, Richard said to Dr Pauncefoot Jones:

‘I wonder if I might have a look at that letter from Emerson. I’d like to see just exactly what he said about this girl.’

‘Of course, my dear fellow, of course. It’s somewhere lying around. I made some notes on the back of it, I remember. He spoke very highly of Veronica, if I remember rightly – said she was terrifically keen. She seems to me a charming girl – quite charming. Very plucky the way she’s made so little fuss about the loss of her luggage. Most girls would have insisted on being motored into Baghdad the very next day to buy a new outfit. She’s what I call a sporting girl. By the way, how was it that she came to lose her luggage?’

‘She was chloroformed, kidnapped, and imprisoned in a native house,’ said Richard impassively.

‘Dear, dear, yes so you told me. I remember now. All most improbable. Reminds me – now what does it remind me of? – ah! yes, Elizabeth Canning, of course. You remember she turned up with a most impossible story after being missing a fortnight. Very interesting conflict of evidence – about some gypsies, if it’s the right case I’m thinking of. And she was such a plain girl, it didn’t seem likely there could be a man in the case. Now little Victoria – Veronica – I never can get her name right – she’s a remarkably pretty little thing. Quite likely there is a man in her case.’

‘She’d be better looking if she didn’t dye her hair,’ said Richard drily.

‘Does she dye it? Indeed. How knowledgeable you are in these matters.’

‘About Emerson’s letter, sir –’

‘Of course – of course – I’ve no idea where I put it. But look anywhere you choose – I’m anxious to find it anyway because of those notes I made on the back – and a sketch of that coiled wire bead.’

Chapter 20

On the following afternoon Dr Pauncefoot Jones uttered a disgusted exclamation as the sound of a car came faintly to his ears. Presently he located it, winding across the desert towards the Tell.

‘Visitors,’ he said with venom. ‘At the worst possible moment, too. I want to superintend the cellulosing of that painted rosette on the north-east corner. Sure to be some idiots come out from Baghdad with a lot of social chatter and expecting to get shown all over the excavations.’

‘This is where Victoria comes in useful,’ said Richard. ‘You hear, Victoria? It’s up to you to do a personally conducted tour.’

‘I shall probably say all the wrong things,’ said Victoria. ‘I’m really very inexperienced, you know.’

‘I think you’re doing very well indeed,’ said Richard pleasantly. ‘Those remarks you made this morning about plano convex bricks might have come straight out of Delongaz’s book.’

Victoria changed colour slightly, and resolved to paraphrase her erudition more carefully. Sometimes the quizzical glance through the thick lenses made her uncomfortable.

‘I’ll do my best,’ she said meekly.

‘We push all the odd jobs on to you,’ said Richard.

Victoria smiled.

Indeed her activities during the last five days surprised her not a little. She had developed plates with water filtered through cotton wool and by the light of a primitive dark lantern containing a candle which always went out at the most crucial moment. The dark-room table was a packing case and to work she had to crouch or kneel – the dark-room itself being as Richard remarked, a modern model of the famous medieval Little East. There would be more amenities in the season to come, Dr Pauncefoot Jones assured her – but at the moment every penny was needed to pay workmen and get results.

The baskets of broken potsherds had at first excited her astonished derision (though this she had been careful not to display). All these broken bits of coarse stuff – what was the good of them?

Then as she found joins, stuck them and propped them up in boxes of sand, she began to take an interest. She learned to recognize shapes and types. And she came finally to try and reconstruct in her own mind just how and for what these vessels had been used some three thousand odd years ago. In the small area where some poor quality private houses had been dug, she pictured the houses as they had orginally stood and the people who had lived in them with their wants and possessions and occupations, their hopes and their fears. Since Victoria had a lively imagination, a picture rose up easily enough in her mind. On a day when a small clay pot was found encased in a wall with a half-dozen gold earrings in it, she was enthralled. Probably the dowry of a daughter, Richard had said smiling.

Dishes filled with grain, gold earrings saved up for a dowry, bone needles, querns and mortars, little figurines and amulets. All the everyday life and fears and hopes of a community of unimportant simple people.

‘That’s what I find so fascinating,’ said Victoria to Richard. ‘You see, I always used to think that archaeology was just Royal graves and palaces.

‘Kings of Babylon,’ she added, with a strange little smile. ‘But what I like so much about all this is that it’s the ordinary everyday people – people like me. My St Anthony who finds things for me when I lose them – and a lucky china pig I’ve got – and an awfully nice mixing bowl, blue inside and white out, that I used to make cakes in. It got broken and the new one I bought wasn’t a bit the same. I can understand why these people mended up their favourite bowls or dishes so carefully with bitumen. Life’s all the same really, isn’t it – then or now?’

She was thinking of these things as she watched the visitors ascending the side of the Tell. Richard went to greet them, Victoria following behind him.

They were two Frenchmen, interested in archaeology, who were making a tour through Syria and Iraq. After civil greetings, Victoria took them round the excavations, reciting parrot wise what was going on, but being unable to resist, being Victoria, adding sundry embellishments of her own, just, as she put it to herself, to make it more exciting.

She noticed that the second man was a very bad colour, and that he dragged himself along without much interest. Presently he said, if Mademoiselle would excuse him, he would retire to the house. He had not felt well since early that morning – and the sun was making him worse.

He departed in the direction of the Expedition House, and the other, in suitably lowered tones explained that, unfortunately, it was his estomac. The Baghdad tummy they called it, did they not? He should not really have come out today.

The tour was completed, the Frenchman remained talking to Victoria, finally Fidos was called and Dr Pauncefoot Jones, with a determined air of hospitality suggested the guests should have tea before departing.