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“I am quite certain the Egyptians don’t go in for torture,” Ellie countered. “Nor do I imagine it would be nearly as fun as you think if they did. That is the whole point.”

“You have no imagination,” Constance retorted.

Geraldine dropped a pair of eclairs on the table and stalked away without any further niceties.

“I have plenty of imagination!” Ellie protested. “I am desperately imaginative. I simply use my prodigious imagination for more practical purposes.”

“I really wish you could come with me.” Constance said before taking down half of an eclair in a single dainty bite. Not a smudge of chocolate was left on her lips.

Constance would be leaving for Egypt in just under two weeks. Her father, Sir Robert Tyrrell, had recently been appointed to the post of Comptroller General of Egypt. That made him essentially the lead auditor of the country’s government, which was administered by the British Consul General, Lord Cromer.

She gave Constance the same answer she had been repeating since the question of accompanying the Tyrrells to Egypt had first been raised.

“It just isn’t feasible,” Ellie muttered automatically before taking another sip of her tea.

Ithadn’tbeen feasible. She couldn’t have left her job at the PRO for so long without losing it, and she might never have found another opportunity for something so suited to her skills.

Of course, that wasn’t the entire truth. Ellie had also found herself viewing the prospect of joining Constance in Egypt with a terrible sense of sadness. Walking the same sands as the pharaohs while denied the chance to use her extensive education to uncover the secrets of the past would have been a sort of torture.

“I shall have to look up your brother while I am there,” Constance mused. “Saqqara is near enough to Cairo, and I haven’t seen Neil since we were schoolgirls.” She paused to thoughtfully devour the second half of her eclair. “I wonder if he’ll even recognize me, or whether he’s become any more interesting. He was a bit of a bore back then.”

Neil’s presence would only have added to the torment of accompanying Constance to Egypt. Even now, Neil was working on a very promising excavation in the Unas South Cemetery of the Saqqara necropolis. He had privately shared with Ellie that he hoped the eighteenth-dynasty ruin he was uncovering would turn out to be the lost, unfinished tomb of the general-turned-pharaoh Horemheb. If Neil’s theory turned out to be correct, the tomb could provide invaluable insight into the decline of the Amarna period.

Ellie was extremely interested in the Amarna period.

She was very fond of her stepbrother—despite his annoying habit of constantly trying to tell her what was best for her and his irritating insistence on referring to her as ‘Peanut.’ Still, the notion of watching him blithely live the life Ellie had always dreamed of was the sort of thing that kept her up in the small hours of the night.

Not that Ellie had told any of that to Constance. She couldn’t bear to taint her friend’s excitement about her upcoming adventure with her own inconvenient emotions.

“I doubt he’s changed much,” Ellie returned flatly.

Constance reached for her second eclair.

“But here I am nattering on when you are the one who said you had urgent news.” Constance paused with the eclair momentarily forgotten halfway to her lips. Her eyes glittered with excitement. “Is it about a man? Do tell me that it’s a man.”

Ellie stiffened with alarm.

“Gracious, no!” she exclaimed. “What on earth would I want to do with one of those? No. It’s… well, this.”

Ellie pulled the map and medallion from her pocket and set them down on the table next to the Earl Gray.

Constance frowned down at the black disk of stone. “Did you find this in one of the shops? It is wonderfully gruesome.” She reached out for the objects.

“From theshops?” Ellie echoed indignantly. “Hold on—have you any chocolate on your fingers?”

Constance eyed the digits in question and popped three of them in her mouth.

“I’ll unfold it for you,” Ellie cut in quickly. She pushed aside the eclair plate and the teacups, then carefully opened the parchment.

Constance studied the time-aged lines on the page, blithely reaching out for her eclair.

Ellie cleared her throat pointedly, and Constance retracted the offending hand.

“I know you can’t read Latin,” Ellie continued, feeling oddly nervous. “But I can assure you that the spelling and syntax are appropriate for this document having been authored by a seventeenth-century Spaniard with a Catholic ecclesiastical education—”

“Ellie,” Constance cut in, her eyes bright as she studied the page with her hands obediently tucked into her lap. “You found a treasure map.”

“I most certainly did not!” Ellie retorted.