“Mr. Carter,” I say, keeping my voice just above a whisper. Never mind her ostensible trip upstairs to her bedroom, Mama has been known to lurk.
“Ah, Lady Evelyn.” He glances up from a table. He sits with a sheaf of paper and several small artifacts set before him, a magnifying glass in one hand and a fountain pen in the other.
“I was wondering when you’d turn up,” he says, his eyes back down on the object he’s studying.
“It’s no small feat to escape the clutches of the weekend guests and my mother,” I answer with a grimace.
Mr. Carter knows well my mother’s expectations for me, and the ball only reinforced that understanding. But he would never speak ill of her. She and my father are his patrons, after all. And even if he primarily deals with Papa, it is Mama’s Rothschild money that keeps the excavations afloat.
“Well, I am delighted that you plotted your getaway. We have much to discuss.”
“Yes.” I settle in the chair across from him. “I’ve been desperate to hear more about what Mr. Budge said.”
With care, he places the cartouches and pottery fragments down on the desk, then says, “As I mentioned last night, he believes that the scarab may have been made for Hatshepsut, but interestingly—”
“Yes?” I interrupt him. I’m so eager to hear Mr. Budge’s insights about the purpose and time period of this particular scarab that I can’t help myself. Scarabs were usually worn or carried by common folks as protective amulets. But they could also be used by the elite and administrators as an official seal. Could this be one of those rarer sorts?
Anything to shed light on the life of the enigmatic Pharaoh Hatshepsut. She successfully ruled in the late 1400s BC and helped build a country that was unusually peaceful and economically prosperous. Since I was a lonely little girl with a penchant for the past, I’ve been entranced by stories about the singular reign of one of the only female pharaohs ever to rule over the land of the pyramids, especially the manner in which she climbed from princess to queen to regent, then finally becoming pharaoh herself. When Mr. Carter described to me all the various places Hatshepsut’s name has literally been scratched out—on monuments, stelae, temple walls, and statues—I became fixated on solving the conundrum of why attempts were made to eliminate her from the historical record.
“When Mr. Budge and I compared it to the other scarabs in the British Museum collection that are linked to Hatshepsut, they have asimilar look and the hieroglyphs do indeed name her. But the name on this scarab isn’t the exact one we typically associate with her as queen or pharaoh, which may be how we missed it at first. As you know, the Egyptians tended to shift titles and names as an individual’s role changed. The name inscribed on the scarab is that of Hatshepsut as a young woman, when she was the daughter of Pharaoh Thutmose the First. Most of her power at that time came from her role as a priest called the God’s Wife of Amun. The scarab is a rare find.”
At this pronouncement, I fall back onto the hard, hand-embroidered, gilt-legged chair. Not only is this scarab—previously ignored by my father and Mr. Carter—associated with Princess Hatshepsut, but it’s a relic of her early years, when she was also the most powerful female priest, thehemet-netjer.
“I’m stunned that Mr. Budge agrees with my theory. It was just a guess—” I stammer.
Mr. Carter interrupts me. “Your theory was no mere guess. You know the history, the hieroglyphics, and the way these objects were used. It was an educated proposal.”
I can scarcely move. Mr. Carter is a man of few words and fewer compliments. To be called a “colleague” and have my pet theory described as an “educated proposal” by one of the foremost Egyptologists—a man who served as Inspector of Monuments for Upper Egypt in the Egyptian Antiquities Service—has left me momentarily immobile and speechless. As has the nature of this discovery.
“Now, someone other than Hatshepsut could have owned this scarab,” he posits. “They were sometimes carried as lucky charms, as you know. But it’s not very likely that someone other than Hatshepsut would posses a scarab with this particular name. This title precedes her time as queen or pharaoh, so wouldn’t have been a popular choice as a good-luck talisman.”
“Could it have been in her tomb?” I suggest, thinking about how the pharaohs’ burials included a vast array of objects deemed necessary for the afterlife, including sentimental ones.
“Possibly. It would explain why we found such a unique item inthe burial area at the Valley of the Kings as opposed to her temple complex,” he says, referring to the sprawling mortuary temple she constructed for herself near the valley. Mortuary temples were not usually places where pharaohs were buried but rather where they were commemorated.
For nearly seven years, Papa and Mr. Carter had been assigned excavation sites at Hatshepsut’s temple, a huge, resplendent, terraced structure built into the hills on the west side of the Nile opposite the sacred, ancient city of Thebes, modern-day Luxor. Mr. Carter was, in fact, an expert in Hatshepsut’s temple, having helped reassemble it in the 1890s when it was still a pile of rubble and he was just a young man. But as the Valley of the Kings—a dry, rocky gorge just west of Hatshepsut’s temple—wastheplace where pharaohs and royals of the New Kingdom built rock-cut tombs, Papa and Mr. Carter lobbied for the concession there. They finally received it in 1914 when the American businessman Theodore Davis gave it up.
“Yes, you’d expect to discover Hatshepsut’s scarabs in her tomb.”
We give each other a long glance; we both know that Hatshepsut’s tomb has never been found. To my mind, Mr. Carter’s look contains an invitation. But will he extend it? One never knows with the reserved archaeologist.
I wait, and finally he says, “I think we need to reevaluate all the artifacts related to this scarab in storage here at Highclere. I suspect we might discover that others are tied to Hatshepsut. Would you be willing to examine them with me?”
“Of course,” I answer immediately. Never mind that it will require significant maneuvering to sidestep Mama and her summer schemes for me. For all the years that Mr. Carter has surreptitiously shared his expertise in ancient Egypt and archaeology with me, he’s never invited me to work on a project with him. I’d never believed I could be so fortunate.
“We have much to do if we’re going to pursue this path.” He pauses, then asks, “Do you know where following this trail of artifacts might lead us?”
I take a deep breath and speak aloud the words I never believed I’d be fortunate enough to say: “To the tomb of Hatshepsut.”
The Princess
Chapter Five
1486BC
THEBES,EGYPT
I feel my maid’s hand on my shoulder before I’m even fully awake. Her gentle shaking becomes part of my dream at first, the rhythmic rocking of my barge on the river Nile. But the rocking becomes stronger and quicker, more urgent, and I awaken, realizing that it is not a dream at all. I am being summoned for my duties to the gods.
