Page 25 of The Stolen Queen

Henry kissed her and let out a laugh, his boyishness reappearing. “You are a dream come true. I promise I’ll take care of you, my love. I know right now it’s my turn, but one day it will be yours.”

She laid her head on his chest. One day was a long time from now,she was certain. Maybe this was madness, and she was just avoiding confrontation with her parents. But no, she loved Henry and wanted him to be happy, and she had faith all would be well.

This was the right decision for both of them, and made for the right reasons.

She’d tear up the letter to her parents and write a new one, telling of her husband, her baby, and her plans to remain in Egypt.

As Charlotte’s belly turned from flat to convex, she craved honey more than anything else. She would tear off a chunk of pita bread and dip it into a jar, savoring the way it tickled her throat on the way down. The Polish team had settled in Edfu, just upriver from Luxor, working on a recently discovered tomb of a chief government minister’s wife. Most days Charlotte stayed indoors feasting on whatever honey cakes or halva threads Henry brought back from the market.

Henry had been right; the dig houses where they lived were a far cry from the refined, cool rooms of the Metropolitan House. Instead, they crammed their belongings into what was basically a tar-paper-roofed shack consisting of a bedroom with two uncomfortable cots squeezed together and a small living area with a kitchenette, a table, and a rock-hard settee that smelled of rust. In another week they’d all head to Cairo to wait out the summer—and for Charlotte to wait out the baby—and she looked forward to being back in civilization once again, although she was content with their decision to stay in Egypt.

The baby was no longer a theoretical creature, as he or she had been for the first three or four months, when Charlotte had been fired up with surges of energy and lust that Henry enjoyed to no end. Now, her body was simply a vessel for this creature who bumped around inher belly like a fish in a bucket, poking and kicking and making itself known, waking her up in the middle of the night as it stretched its limbs. Mrs. Jankowski had been incredibly helpful, answering Charlotte’s questions and calming her fears, patiently reassuring Charlotte that all would be well.

Even though their living conditions were miserable, Charlotte and Henry were not. When a swarm of pink locusts landed in their small garden, chewing up everything she’d planted, Henry jokingly suggested she fry them and slather them with honey. Even when the intense heat caused the tar paper roof to melt, dripping black specks onto the tablecloth, Charlotte insisted that polka dots were all the rage back in the States.

The only time her spirits flagged was when she received a letter from her parents. They were livid that she’d made such a rash decision without consulting them, and assumed she’d been seduced and ruined. They begged, pleaded, and finally demanded that she return home. In response, she’d penned flowery letters about her exciting, exotic life in the desert, with no mention of pink locusts or melting roofs.

Meanwhile, in the greater world, Japanese and Chinese troops were clashing, and the new prime minister of England, Neville Chamberlain, had inexplicably congratulated Hitler on his military restraint. Mrs. Jankowski was worried that Hitler would violate the nonaggression pact between Poland and Germany, while Mr. Jankowski assured them all he would not. Charlotte avoided reading the papers, preferring to lose herself rereading Amelia Edwards’s memoir of Egypt, comparing the descriptions of the temples and landmarks from sixty years ago to Charlotte’s real-life encounters with them. She missed being out in the field, but Henry enjoyed his role as overseer of the group, sharing stories of their finds eachevening over dinner. Even surly Leon flourished under Henry’s leadership, softening and becoming friendlier. One evening he’d surprised her with a toy dragon that he’d carved out of acacia for the baby.

Once in Cairo, Henry and Charlotte rented an apartment with delicate Italianate balconies not far from the Egyptian Museum, where both Leon and Henry took jobs to tide them over during the offseason. Their duties included helping the overwhelmed curators and staff organize the flood of incoming antiquities, documenting each one, and designating accession numbers, using the same methods as the Met. It was monotonous but provided a steady income.

Finally, in August, the baby arrived. The delivery was even more terrifying than Charlotte had expected. When her labor pains began in the middle of the night, she and Henry raced to the Anglo-American Hospital in the Zamalek district of Cairo, a tony part of town located on an island on the Nile. There, she was spirited away to the maternity ward while Henry waited with the men in the reception area. The next morning, with no baby in sight, Henry was told to go to work, which meant he wasn’t present when the doctor decided to puncture the amniotic sac in an effort to advance the delivery. By then, several other pregnant women had come in and successfully delivered, and Charlotte was weak with exhaustion, still waiting, unsure where she was or what she was doing anymore, feeling completely alone. The doctor dismissed her cries during the procedure and told her to stop being so emotional, which made her want to take the amnihook and perform a similar procedure on him. When she finally delivered, Henry was still at work and had to be summoned to return. The worst moment, though, came right before he arrived, when she’d been propped up in bed and presented with her new baby girl, and Charlotte discovered she was too weak to even hold up her arms. The nurse gave her a look like she was an utterfailure as a mother and placed the child in the bassinet, where Charlotte stared at her helplessly until Henry finally arrived to take charge. After harshly reprimanding the nurse for her lack of empathy, Henry lifted the child and carried her over to Charlotte with tears in his eyes.

Layla, they called her.

A beautiful name, in both Arabic and English, for a beautiful child.

Chapter Nine

Annie

New York City, 1978

The day after her late-night visit to the Costume Institute, Annie was still thinking about Mrs. Vreeland’s hazy directive as she cleaned Mrs. Hollingsworth’s bedroom. When she’d returned with the boa, she’d told Mrs. H that Mrs. Vreeland said it wasn’t exactly right and left it at that, and luckily Mrs. H had just shrugged and put it aside. Now, staring into the woman’s vast closet, Annie couldn’t help but wonder what would work instead. The scarves were all predictably Hermès and would look silly over the costume on the mannequin. She let out a small sigh.

“What is it, Annie? Are you done straightening out the shelves in there?”

She’d completely forgotten Mrs. H’s presence on the divan by the window. “Yes. They’re all set.” She shut the closet doors. “How do you know Diana Vreeland? Were you a docent?”

“I was, for a good ten years. Enjoyed every minute.” Mrs. H took a sip of her tea. “It’s the best decision I ever made, other thanmarrying Mr. Hollingsworth. You’re with other people who possess a love for the art world, a dedication to passing on knowledge. I came into my own as a docent, after years of playing second fiddle. Suddenly I was thrust in front of strangers, sharing my passion for my favorite painters and sculptors. I had studied art history in college, but this was as if I were part of history, carrying on the legacy.”

“I’d love to work for the Costume Institute,” Annie shyly admitted.

“You’ll have to marry rich, then. Or hope your mother does. There’s no pay. All those women toil away for the sheer glory of it.”

So that was out. Disappointed, Annie did what she always did when life grew dark: She pulled on her cowboy boots and headed straight for the Met. The Great Hall was crowded with visitors, babies in their mothers’ arms and old folks in wheelchairs, a medley of different languages drifting up to the mezzanine balcony.

She wandered through the Arms and Armor section, wondering how on earth anyone could fight wearing so much gear, followed by the Western European Arts section, which took up two floors and included her favorite painting, Bastien-Lepage’sJoan of Arc, which depicted the saint as a poor, disheveled girl standing in an unkempt garden. Annie recognized herself in the jut of the girl’s chin and the wondering eyes.

In the Greek and Roman Art section, she came upon a Greek bronze chest plate from the fourth century BC, which had been forged to fit perfectly against the body it protected, replete with rippling muscles and a belly button. When she’d visited with her father as a young girl, they’d speculated about the soldier who’d worn it, whether he lived to old age or died in battle. That was the fun of exploring the Met: stumbling upon surprises that made you realize how small your problems were in the grand scheme of things, how many centuries the human race had been in existence. She found it reassuring.

Just beyond that section was a restaurant where sculptures rose out of a huge pool of water in the center of the room and the walls were painted the color of blackberries. It was fancy, not the sort of place Annie would ever feel comfortable in.

The layout of the museum had changed only slightly since she was a little girl. A big glass room had recently been added to the north side of the building for the Temple of Dendur. Annie had dragged Joyce to see it two months ago: an Egyptian temple that had been granted to the Met as a gift, in order to protect it from flooding from the construction of the Aswan Dam on the Nile. The Nubian sandstone building had been disassembled, shipped to New York, and reassembled, and, at eight hundred tons, weighed three times more than the Statue of Liberty. When Annie first saw it, she couldn’t help but wonder if the temple was a little disappointed at its new home. Instead of gazing out over the Nile and the Egyptian desert, as it had for almost two millennia, it was tucked away in a kind of oversized greenhouse, its only view this time of year a line of leafless trees. Joyce had looked at Annie like she was mad when she’d voiced this concern out loud.

Over in the other galleries of the Egyptian Art collection, the Cerulean Queen beckoned. Annie’s father had loved this strange half face, so she loved it as well. She drew close, puffing up her lips so they resembled that of the queen, just as an older woman with a close-cropped hairstyle and cool blue eyes walked by. Annie stepped back, blushing, but the woman didn’t seem fazed by the fact that a patron was making faces at an inanimate object. Instead, she offered a brief nod and a smile before disappearing behind an unmarked door.

Part of the collection was cordoned off, as the museum prepared for the King Tut exhibition due to open next month. But Annie was still able to visit her other favorites, like the blue hippo that had become the unofficial mascot of the Met. It was a tiny thing, and hadbeen buried in the tomb of some Egyptian steward. The description next to it said that hippos were feared for their ferocity, and that three of the figurine’s legs had been broken before it was placed into the tomb, so that in the afterlife it couldn’t harm the steward. She liked to imagine that at night the creature escaped from its vitrine and limped around the Met roaring its displeasure.

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