Page 2 of The Stolen Queen

“Scarves?” she repeated. “You must be confusing me with someone else. I don’t do the souvenirs.”

“Not my problem,” he snapped before breaking out in a wide smile. “That’s all, folks.” Frederick clapped his hands twice and trotted away, his mood obviously lighter now that he’d ruined at least one person’s day.

Charlotte approached Nancy, who was barely concealing an eye roll. “Reach out to Wendy Metcalf, she’s the merchandise planner in the Met Store who handles textiles and women’s apparel,” said Charlotte. “Tell her I sent you.”

“Will do. Frederick’s lucky to have you, Charlotte Cross. I was just about to tell him where he could stick his scarves.”

Charlotte had been working at the Met Museum her entire career, except for a brief stint in Egypt when she was a young woman. While her colleagues had climbed the ranks and been appointed head curators at other museums, she was still an associate, her career stalled out, and for the past fifteen years, her job had basically consisted of cleaning up after Frederick. He liked to consider himself a “concept guy,” which meant all the details fell to her. But it also gave her a chance to reconfigure his concepts so that they appealed to the museum’s visitors and could be smoothly executed by the staff. All the responsibility and none of the accolades. Sometimes she felt more like the protector of Frederick’s legacy than associate curator, but she adored the people she worked with and loved being surrounded by some of the most precious antiquities in the world.

Still, in recent months, Charlotte had been thinking more and more about her own legacy. A few years ago, without sharing her plans with anyone, she’d begun to investigate a bold theory about an ancient Egyptian ruler who modern historians had largely dismissed. And now, in the wake of hundreds of hours of painstaking research, Charlotte had something up her sleeve that she hoped would change everything. After a decade and a half of living in Frederick’s shadow, Charlotte might finally have a chance to shine.

The administrative offices of their department were located through an unmarked door down one of the gallery’s long hallways. After the grandeur of the collection, the offices were something of a letdown—Charlotte considered herself lucky that her particular cubicle looked out onto an air shaft. Her duties included answering letters from people asking if the object they’d found in their grandmother’s atticwas an ancient Egyptian relic or not (she could usually tell from the enclosed snapshot that it was not), handling requests for loans from other museums, spending a couple of hours in the storerooms checking on items that weren’t currently exhibited, and working on the infernal Egyptian Art collection catalog that eventually would list every artifact the department owned. It had been started in the 1950s, and Frederick hoped one day to have a third volume published that would include all the pieces from the Twentieth to Thirtieth Dynasties, a massive undertaking.

As soon as she sat down at her desk, Charlotte caught sight of a large envelope from Egypt that lay next to a well-worn accordion folder bursting with notes and research papers.

For the past three years, Charlotte had been studying the complicated life of an ancient Egyptian woman named Hathorkare, who married the pharaoh Saukemet I but was unable to bear him a son, which meant that, upon his death, the infant son of one of the lesser queens was chosen to be the next leader of Egypt. Hathorkare, seething with resentment of this child king, quickly named herself regent and stepped in to rule, ostensibly until Saukemet II came of age. Yet seven years into her regency, she namedherselfpharaoh, maintaining her hold over Egypt for the next twenty years. After her death, Saukemet II finally seized the throne and immediately ordered many of his stepmother’s images to be violently hacked out of the stone walls of temples and shrines.

Or at least that was the conventional wisdom among Egyptian scholars—including Frederick, who had published a seminal article on the early struggles and triumphant rise of Saukemet II.

But Charlotte had a different theory about Hathorkare.

After doing some meticulous research, she’d concluded that the vandalization of Hathorkare’s likenesses couldn’t have occurred right after her death, as historians believed. In fact, according toCharlotte’s calculations, the proscription had to have been undertaken twenty yearsafterher death—and not long before Saukemet II’s own demise—which seemed an awfully long time to hold a grudge. It made no sense that Saukemet II’s rage would suddenly erupt in his waning years. Perhaps there was another, less emotional reason for the erasures.

Charlotte also noticed that historians ignored all the good Hathorkare accomplished during her reign: building glorious temples, making savvy trades with neighboring countries, and providing a long stretch of economic and political stability for her countrymen. Instead, she was unilaterally disdained and dismissed. In fact, the Met’s own depiction of Hathorkare—written by a male archaeologist in the 1950s for the museum’s catalog—described the female pharaoh as a “vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous woman.”

If correct, Charlotte’s findings would completely transform the way Egyptologists—and the world—viewed Hathorkare. Finally, after three years of hard work and multiple dead ends, this envelope containing photos taken at the Temple of Karnak in Luxor, Egypt, was crucial to proving her theory. She spent an hour studying the photos with a magnifier, making notes, checking her timeline. By the time she was done, she knew for certain that her initial instincts about Hathorkare and the timing of the erasures were right.

Charlotte was about to turn a long-held assumption upside down, revive the name and reputation of Hathorkare, and make a major contribution to the study of ancient Egyptian history.

The ringing of her phone brought her out of her daydream.

“Frederick wants to see you down in the basement storeroom,” said Nancy. “There’s a new piece that just came in.”

That was odd. They weren’t expecting anything other than the Tut artifacts. “I’m on my way. Hey, does Frederick have time in his schedule for me today? I have something important I want to show him.”

“He’s not free until six tonight.”

“I’ll take it.”

“And thanks again for your help earlier,” added Nancy. “The King Tut scarves have been ordered.”

“Let the merchandising begin.”

Out in the galleries, Charlotte paused in front of one of her favorite depictions of Hathorkare in the collection, a fragment of a statue known as the Cerulean Queen. While many of the other figures from Egypt were made of limestone or red granite with a rough finish, the Cerulean Queen was made of finely polished lapis lazuli. The only remnant of the statue was a tantalizing fragment of the lower portion of its head, consisting of the cheeks, the chin, and a large portion of the lips. And what lips they were: beautifully curved and utterly sensuous. The lips of Hathorkare. If the rest of the statue came anywhere close to being as beautiful as the lips, it must have been a sight to behold. Charlotte wondered how it came to be smashed. Was it accidentally dropped while being moved from one location to another? Or did someone take a hammer to it on orders from Saukemet II? The thought was too awful to contemplate.

The fragment was small, only around five inches across. It had been found at the turn of the twentieth century, by a British earl who fancied himself something of an Egyptologist, in a trash heap containing destroyed statues of Hathorkare, just outside her temple. Nearby had lain a broken slab of limestone with a warning that translated to “Anyone who removes an object dear to Hathorkare outside of the boundaries of the kingdom will face the wrath of the gods.”

The earl was killed in a hunting accident two weeks after bringing the Cerulean Queen to his estate in Hampshire. His widow quickly sold it off to the Met, and died less than a month later choking on a gumdrop.

As she stood before the artifact now, Charlotte reflexively looked around for a young woman in a red coat before remembering it was a Monday, the Met closed to visitors. “Little Red Riding Hood,” the staff called her, because in cold weather she always wore a bright red coat with a large, floppy hood. Judging from how often Charlotte spotted her in front of the statue, Little Red Riding Hood was a big fan of the Cerulean Queen. She was always alone, probably a graduate student or an artist, and had the saddest eyes Charlotte had ever seen.

A voice drifted in from the hallway.

“Charlotte’s been around how long?”

“Way longer than Frederick.” Charlotte recognized Joseph’s voice. He was speaking with one of the younger technicians, a new hire. “Since the 1930s.”

Charlotte slid behind the statue, hoping they wouldn’t peer into the gallery as they walked by.

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