Page 4 of The Stolen Queen

Besides, she had other ways to figure out who the donor was. Charlotte took the elevator up to the fifth floor of the building, where the director of the Met, Mr. Lavigne, had his office. The last time they’d interacted, he’d expressed his thanks to Charlotte for providing a reference for a friend’s daughter who was applying to a PhD program in art history. Charlotte had insisted on interviewing the woman before she wrote the reference and was relieved to find her smart and ambitious, so it hadn’t been a difficult request to honor. But Mr. Lavigne didn’t need to know that. As far as he was concerned, he owed her a favor.

Unfortunately, his secretary informed Charlotte that he was away in Europe, back on Thursday. She made an appointment for the afternoon of his return; she wasn’t giving up so easily.

She had to know where the broad collar came from, how it got to the Met.

And why it was haunting her from the grave.

Chapter Two

Charlotte

Egypt, 1936

When Charlotte Cross signed up to study abroad in Egypt for four months, she did not expect her responsibilities to include administering antivenom to counteract cobra bites. As the only undergraduate among an international team of professional archaeologists and PhD candidates, she was there to observe, assist, and pretty much stay out of the way as the others excavated the ruins of a small walled village where ancient Egyptian artisans and craftsmen had once resided.

So far, the majority of the artifacts unearthed from the villagers’ brick homes were flakes of limestone covered with writing, called ostraca—the equivalent of ancient Egyptian notebooks. The team, under the leadership of a curator from the Met Museum named Grayson Zimmerman, had amassed bills, wills, wedding announcements, medical diagnoses, and prescriptions, dated as far back as 1500 BC, which all together told a detailed story of the average ancient Egyptian’s life. One of Charlotte’s duties was translating someof the items into English, a painstaking process that left her right hand sore but which she performed with great zeal. Just that morning, she’d spent two hours transcribing a contract between a scribe named Ankhsheshonq and a master craftsman that involved detailed instructions for altering existing reliefs, as commanded by the reigning pharaoh, before turning to a transcription of a shopping list written by some long-lost servant girl.

That afternoon, though, a group of strangers approached the camp, led by a grim-looking Bedouin with a bloody bite between his finger and thumb. One of his fellow tribesmen carried a limp six-foot-long serpent. The dig team’s leaders were off in Luxor, overseeing the transfer of artifacts onto a barge on the Nile, which meant there was no one else present who knew what to do, other than Charlotte.

Not that Charlotte was all that qualified. She’d grown up in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where snakes were only read about in books or viewed postmortem in dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. But her father was a doctor and her mother suffered from diabetes, requiring regular injections, which made Charlotte less queasy about grabbing the medical kit from the dispensary, located next to the kitchen tent where she’d been helping the cook prepare lunch (another one of her assigned duties that had nothing to do with digging, but which she gladly performed). Box in hand, she found the Bedouin sitting stiffly in one of the camp’s foldable chairs. His hand was already the size of a grapefruit and the color of a plum; Charlotte didn’t have much time.

Charlotte knelt beside the Bedouin and opened the emergency kit, withdrawing the prefilled syringe with care.

“I don’t see why we should waste our supplies on the natives,” murmured a voice a few feet behind her. She recognized it as that of Leon, an archaeology doctoral candidate from England who wasnever satisfied with his lot, always wanting to have the first go at a promising location and quick to move on if his desultory efforts weren’t rewarded.

She ignored him. By now, a large cohort of the team had gathered. One of the other archaeologists, Henry, who’d only recently joined them from England, knelt beside her. “What’s going on, can I help?” he asked brightly. But his demeanor changed when he caught sight of what was in Charlotte’s hands. He blinked a couple of times, then stared intently into her eyes. For a split second, she thought he was flirting with her. Even though she was the only woman in the group, the work was dirty and backbreaking, and at the end of the day, everyone simply wanted a bath in one of the two galvanized iron tubs, followed by bed. There was no time or energy left for such silliness as flirtation, a fact she appreciated.

But Henry wasn’t flirting. He was staring hard at her face because he couldn’t bear to look back at what she held in her hand. She stifled a smile. The poor man obviously had a deathly fear of needles.

“That’s fine, I can handle it,” said Charlotte. Henry, looking relieved, ducked away, and Charlotte turned her attention back to the Bedouin. “Roll up your sleeve, please.”

One of the Egyptians on their team translated, and the Bedouin did as he was told.

She cleaned off a spot near the top of his arm and quickly administered the shot. The man didn’t flinch. After, she brought him water and waited to see if the swelling went down, as the others headed to the long table where their group of twenty gathered every afternoon for lunch.

She brought a glass of water to Henry as well.

“Oh, thanks.” He gulped it down. “I needed that.”

“Maybe more thanhedid,” said Charlotte, pointing her elbow in the direction of the Bedouin.

“Was it that obvious?” Henry wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

“Just a little.”

“I swear, nothing else gets to me. I can stand heights, small spaces, spiders. But needles—” He shuddered.

“I’d recommend you stay far away from cobras, in that case.”

“Let’s hope I do well here, then, so I don’t end up working at the Regent’s Park Zoo.” Henry had large ears that stuck out either side of his head and brown hair that had been flattened by the wide-brimmed pith helmets they both wore. His was hanging off his neck, and his Adam’s apple bobbed just above the strap.

Charlotte laughed. “I guess that means you’re from London?”

“Correct, and you?”

“New York City.”

“You’ve come from quite far for the glory of being a notetaker and de facto medic. King Tut, I presume?”

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