He held up his hands in surrender. ‘You have made that clear. Just know that I am not doing this in an effort to upset you, again. You have been warned.’
Would it disappoint him, she wondered, if the more horrible he made it sound the more tantalising it became? Sometimes it seemed that the most interesting experiences were things that gently bred ladies were not supposed to do. Like kissing, for instance. No matter what Charity thought she knew on such subjects, it could not have been as satisfying as practical experience.
The shops they visited today were a different sort of revelation. Who knew there was a store in London that had an entire cupboard full of stuffed owls and the largest spider she had ever seen, preserved under a bell jar? Or that there was another place specialising in music boxes and clocks that had complicated animations on the hourly chimes? At that place, there were some cases he flatly refused to allow her to look into, insisting that though the mechanisms were clever, they would shock her worse than her grandmother’s painting had.
But since the Comstock heirlooms tended neither to taxidermy nor automatons, they could not help her. None of the many fascinating things she saw were the Dowager’s oddment.
But at the third shop, she felt a familiar rush of excitement. There were Roman coins and lapis scarabs, and fragments of Greek statues. There were so many fingers and ears and arms and legs that she wondered if it might be possible to put them together like a life-sized puzzle.
And suddenly, she knew what they were looking for. ‘Excuse me.’ She stepped forward to interrupt the conversation of the shopkeeper and Mr Drake. ‘Excuse me, sir. But do you have any more Egyptian artefacts?’
‘In the box.’ He pointed towards the marble.
‘Those are mostly Greek. The thing I am looking for will be in a wooden box. Ebony, I think. With a gold ankh inlaid on the cover.’
At his blank response, she traced the symbol in the dust on the counter. ‘And it is held shut by leather bindings.’
The man grinned at her. ‘I did not take you for a connoisseur, miss.’ He reached behind the counter and brought out a thing she had never expected to see again.
She smiled and held her breath as she opened it, fearing that the contents might have disintegrated with age.
Mr Drake leaned over her shoulder to look as she raised the lid and recoiled in disgust. ‘What the devil is it? And why would anyone want the thing back?’
‘My great-grandfather did not stop at the Grand Tour. He went all the way to Cairo!’ she said with pride.
‘And dismembered a mummy?’ The look of revulsion on the handsome face at her shoulder was properly impressive.
‘Do not be such a ninny.’ She waved it in his face and watched him jump. ‘It is not a real toe. It is a false one. Made of ebony with a gold nail.’ She ran a finger along the bindings. ‘It fit around the foot just so and strapped on with these.’
‘There are still bones,’ he said. ‘I can hear them rattling.’ His face was bloodless white and he was still backing up.
‘I do not know how you could. You are almost out into the street. And those are not bones rattling, they are the metal tips of the laces. Now come back here and pay the man.’
‘Put it away, you ghoul.’ He shuddered. ‘Or you will never see me again.’
For the first time in what felt like ages, she laughed as she had when she was a child. Why had she ever stopped? Was there some rule that young ladies did not succumb to mirth? Or had she created one just for herself? No matter. She must remember to break it more often. She rolled her eyes at Mr Drake and put the prosthetic back in the box, closing the lid. ‘There. All better?’
‘Somewhat,’ he agreed, reaching for his purse. ‘We are taking that directly back to the town house, for Leggett is not paying me enough to ride around London with that abomination in the carriage with me.’
* * *
Once they’d returned home, she took the box to the library and left it beside the sofa that was Charity’s habitual place. ‘She will be so amused to see it again,’ she assured him with an evil grin. ‘I used to chase her around the house with it, when we were small. She retaliated by hiding it under my pillow one night. I did not sleep for a week.’
He stared at her, disgusted. ‘What sort of women are you?’
‘Ones that were moved suddenly as small girls to a house with few playthings,’ she said, patting the box with affection. ‘Until we settled in and Grandmama bought us proper toys, we had a most exciting time rummaging through the family heirlooms.’
‘Are there any others as ghastly as this?’ he asked.
‘None that you will be forced to retrieve. The last item on the list is a porcelain vase and it is really quite ordinary.’
‘That is a great relief,’ he said, with a half-smile.
‘And now I understand Grandmother’s cryptic description of it. She could not abide the thing. We agreed to have a funeral for it, if we could have a proper Egyptian one with a burning barge.’
‘Egyptians have pyramids,’ he supplied. ‘You are confusing them with Vikings.’
‘I know. But we wanted a fire,’ she said. ‘It was most disappointing. In the end, we settled for a hole in the ground and a tapered stack of stones on top.’
