Free Jane by Robin Maxwell

for cigars and an after-dinner drinks, my mother, in her most authoritative voice, put her hand on Mr. Conrath’s arm.
    “You must spend the night with us,” she said.
    He began to object.
    “I won’t hear of you riding back to Cambridge in the dark. Besides, you and Archie haven’t even begun to discuss your business. I’ll have Maggie make up the Blue Room for you. I insist.”
    “Well, how can I resist a direct order from She Who Must Be Obeyed?” Ral said with a winning smile.
    The men disappeared and I was left with Mother, who seemed—if I’d had to describe the expression—a bit dreamy eyed.
    “What a nice young man he is,” she said.
    “Yes he is,” I agreed, but in my heart I knew that “nice” was not precisely the word I would have chosen to describe Ral Conrath.
    *   *   *
    That night my dreams were startlingly real. They involved, as they did so many times, the jungle, but there amid the greenery was a hotel all of giant bamboo, and lounging in its soaring, thatch-roofed lobby was Mr. Conrath in a damp white linen shirt and trousers that clung to the strong lines of his body. He reclined on my mother’s rose silk chaise longue, and without invitation, I went to him and sat down next to him. I saw that the thin lips were unsmiling, yet his hands came up and cupped both my breasts. I moaned with pleasure and awoke in a sweat.
    The rest of the night sleep evaded me, and I was glad to see first light. I dressed and went down to our laboratory, hoping to finish my sketches of two specimens side by side—the craniums of a mountain gorilla and a human.
    “Your father’s determined to find his bones in Africa.”
    I startled at Mr. Conrath’s voice, just behind me.
    “Most people call him obsessed.” I turned and eyed Ral directly. “Don’t you?”
    “Maybe he is. But who’s to say obsession’s a bad thing? Bill Petrie had one of his own.”
    “And what was that?”
    “Well, he was quite the Greek scholar and had taken something written by Herodotus to heart.”
    “Herodotus. The Father of History.”
    “That’s him. The thing was a passage written five hundred years before the time of Christ. Herodotus said that on one of his travels to Egypt, he’d had a walk through an ‘ancient labyrinth’— three thousand rooms, half above-, half belowground. The officials only let him see the ones above because the kings who built the place, and some crocodile gods, were buried on the lower level. The old man said this ancient Egyptian labyrinth was bigger than the Great Pyramid. It was the most amazing thing he’d ever seen in his life, and he’d seen a lot. One of the ‘Wonders of the World,’ he called it. It was apparently a maze of interlocking courts and chambers and crypts and pillared corridors made out of white stone, ‘exactly fitted,’ engraved with spectacular figures and painted with frescoes that told the whole history of the world. Herodotus said that a person who didn’t know his way through the ancient maze could get lost in it and never see the light of day again.
    “So Petrie decided that come hell or high water he was going to find the damn thing. He’d already done his triangulation survey at the Giza pyramid and his explorations at Tanis, but all that time he had his eyes peeled to find this place. He drove everybody crazy with it—‘his obsession.’ Then after that big find at the Fayum Oasis—a good-sized pyramid and sixty well-preserved coffin portraits from Roman times; you were probably still a little girl when that happened—he stumbled onto a huge heap of rubble, stone chips six feet deep. The location was right, the dimensions—bigger than Karnak and Luxor combined—were grand enough. He’d also found parts of columns and statues, and a giant plaster foundation he reckoned was the floor of the complex. Putting it all together, he concluded that this was all that was left of his great Egyptian labyrinth.”
    “Not even proper ruins?”
    “A