Free Night of a Thousand Stars by Deanna Raybourn Page A

was a clever young gentleman, our Mr. Fox. His studies were naturally interrupted by the war, but now that peace has come, he has the chance to join an expedition in the Holy Land.”
    “Indeed?” I asked faintly, my hopes beginning to fade. I had traced him to Hampstead only to find I now had the whole of the Holy Land to search instead.
    Masterman asked quietly, “Whereabouts in the Holy Land?”
    Mrs. Webb spread her hands, her lips thinning a little with distaste. “Oh, bless you, dear, I couldn’t say. I don’t believe I know one of those foreign places from another! Geography was never my strong suit.”
    She folded her hands over her belly and gave me a piercing look. “Now, dear. About that room?”
    * * *
    Mrs. Webb was not at all pleased with our excuses for not taking the room. She expressed again her willingness to put in an extra bed and take something off the rent, but it wasn’t until I told her quite firmly that I could only live in an east-facing room on account of my morning devotionals to the Egyptian sun god Ra that we were hurried out onto the front steps and the door closed behind us with a bang.
    “Rather quick on your feet, aren’t you, miss? I thought you’d given away the game when you mentioned a nanny, but you turned up trumps. You even got your chin to tremble,” she said in admiration.
    “Contrived contrition,” I said with a brisk nod. “An entirely useful skill honed in far too many boarding schools.”
    “Still,” she went on, “you rather burnt that bridge, didn’t you?” Masterman asked mildly. “What on earth possessed you to tell such a whopping lie? Sun god Ra indeed.”
    I shrugged. “It got us out of there. Useful lies aren’t that great a sin.”
    “Well, if we’re on the subject of sins, I ought to confess I took this.” She reached into her handbag and took out the copy of
Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens
.
    “Masterman!”
    Her expression was impassive. “I’m sorry, miss. I ought not to have done it, but when I nipped back up to...” She paused delicately to allude to bodily functions. “Anyway,” she hurried on, “when I came out of that room, I thought I would just have another look around while you were busy getting along with Mrs. Webb like a house afire. And I thought we ought to take it. It’s a connection to him, do you see? It’s the one piece of proof we have of his real name. We haven’t even an idea of where he is except the Holy Land, and that’s a mighty big haystack for a single needle, if you ask me.”
    “Of course it is, but we can approach it logically,” I told her automatically.
    She stood on the pavement, regarding me with something between suspicion and admiration.
    “Are you always like this, miss?”
    I blinked at her. “Like what?”
    She sketched a gesture taking me in from head to toe. “This. You’re the original optimist, aren’t you?”
    I shrugged. “I suppose. I always think things will turn out for the best, and somehow they usually do. Besides, what if we are able to find out where he went? Do you realise what it means, Masterman? It’s the Near East—Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Crusades, it’s Lady Jane Digby riding off on a camel, and
djinns
on flying carpets, and Scheherezade spinning her tales, and Ali Baba with his thieves, and Lady Hester Stanhope perched on a mountaintop.”
    I had taken her arm in the course of my little speech, and she disengaged my fingers gently.
    “I’m quite certain some of those aren’t real people,” she said darkly.
    “Of course not. That isn’t the point. The point is that some of them
were
real. They lived there, and they were legends, larger than life because they gripped life with both hands and looked it right in the eye. That’s the sort of life I want.”
    I squared my shoulders as I gripped the book, feeling a rush of savage, untrammelled certainty. “This is it, Masterman. This is the adventure I’ve been looking for. The chance I’ve