Free The Visitors by Sally Beauman Page A

trying not to see the prospect that lay in wait beyond those marvels – my return to England, and the uncertainties that awaited me there. I clung to one sure comforting fact: we had an open invitation to visit the Winlocks and their fellow archaeologists at the American House. They promised that, when we went to the Valley of the Kings, they would accompany us and Frances would be my personal guide. If Mr Carter was in the right receptive frame of mind – and who could tell if he would be? – we might also visit him at Lord Carnarvon’s dig.
    ‘Carter has a plan ,’ Herbert Winlock explained to us one day, when he joined us in the cool marble halls of Groppi’s café for ices and mint tea. ‘For decades now, everyone’s been saying the Valley’s exhausted and there are no more royal tombs to be found. Carter won’t accept that. He hasn’t just dug in the Valley, he’s spent years analysing the known tomb locations, the water courses, the rock formations – and he believes there is at least one last tomb to be found. He’s narrowed his search down to a triangular area – Carter’s golden triangle, we call it. The plan is to work through that, section by section, removing all the old spoil from previous digs, and going right back to the bedrock.’
    ‘Heavens!’ Miss Mack cried. ‘How arduous, Mr Winlock.’
    ‘Arduous, expensive – and so far unrewarding,’ Winlock said. ‘He and Carnarvon have been working their way through that darn triangle of his ever since the end of the war. This will be their fifth year in the Valley, and they’ve virtually exhausted it. So far, they’ve found a cache of thirteen calcite jars – interesting but not very… They were dug out of the ground by Lady Carnarvon herself two years ago. An act that was more surprising than the find. Almina Carnarvon is a remarkable woman, but––’
    ‘She certainly is,’ Helen put in. ‘Whether she’s staying somewhere two days or a month, she never travels with fewer than seventy-two pairs of shoes. If that isn’t remarkable, I don’t know what is.’
    ‘But her interest in archaeology is less warm than her interest in footwear, certainly these days. It’s lost its charm for her, I hear – though people say that it’s her money that funds the Carnarvon digs. And it’s Rothschild money, of course, so I guess it’s pretty inexhaustible.’
    Winlock exchanged a narrow glance with his wife, who then gave Miss Mack a similar glance, equally veiled. ‘ Alfred de Rothschild’s natural daughter ,’ she said, leaning towards Miss Mack and lowering her voice to a whisper, though both Frances and I caught the words. Miss Mack blushed and dropped her spoon. A peculiar reaction, as Frances and I later agreed: surely all daughters were natural? Was there such a thing as an unnatural daughter? Such episodes – and they were frequent – made understanding anything very difficult, as Frances often complained.
    ‘They’re hiding something,’ she’d say to me, ‘and I intend to find out what it is. I shall dig and dig until I get to the bottom of it.’ I was recruited to assist with this task, which by its very nature seemed to me archaeological. Frances disagreed: no, she said – it was espionage.
    On that occasion, Miss Mack jumped in fast. Consigning Lady Carnarvon to the region of the unmentionable, she reverted to the safer subject of the Valley of the Kings. ‘How fascinating, Mr Winlock!’ she cried. ‘Poor Mr Carter, poor Lord Carnarvon – all that hard work. Those piles of spoil are mountainous. Five years of toil! Down to the bedrock! And have they found nothing beyond those vases?’
    ‘Virtually nothing,’ Winlock replied. ‘And don’t forget partage , Miss Mackenzie. By rule of the Antiquities Service, administered, as we all know, by our great friends, the French, any finds are divided fifty-fifty between the permit holder and Egypt. So seven of those calcite vases went straight to the Egyptian Museum