Frankenstein had an opinion on which was more likely. He launched himself from his repose against the sarcophagus of a Ptolemaic high priest.
His repose-to-launch speed wasn’t fast enough. By the time he’d flung the door open the messenger had rounded the corner and was gone. The only other person visible was the girl who collected the chamber-pots—and she was a simpleton.
‘You girl!’
She’d had her back to him. The lumpy child jumped and spilled liquid from her burdened tray onto the carpet.
‘Who was just here?’ said Julius. ‘Did you see them?’
The girl had just enough courage to face the frightening man but insufficient to answer him. She chewed on her lip. The tray wobbled ominously.
As a doctor Frankenstein had previous experience of these ‘innocents.’ Her oriental eyes were wide and when he looked within there were all the indicators. So, definitely not her…
Also, he hated to distress her—and there was the carpet to think about too.
‘It doesn’t matter, my dear. Carry on.’
He retired back into the lumber room and shut the door.
If she weren’t so self-controlled, the chamber-pot girl-would have smirked.
Frankenstein had high hopes. Whoever it was had gone to great effort. It should be good.
He cracked the thin sliver of a seal, unfolded the luxurious paper, and read. It didn’t take long.
Julius flipped the letter to check he was reading the right side, but the choice was still between the two words of his name and, overleaf, two more words comprising a message. Sort of.
‘Probe deeper.’
it said. And then, doubling the word count.
‘PS: (and higher)’
As a suggestion for what to do with the balance of his life it lacked detail. It was also light of a signature, compounding what Frankenstein saw as borderline bad manners.
Repaying it in kind, Julius rolled his correspondence into a cylinder and stuffed it into a crack in the coffin of Seti Nefihotep, a twentieth dynasty middle-ranking scribe. Not that the identification was known to Frankenstein, but it just seemed a suitable repository. Nothing so dramatic had happened in that container for over three thousand years.
Inadvertently, the useless, enigmatic, letter helped Julius come to a decision. This dead Egyptian, who must have had his own troubles in his day, would be his role model in accepting whatever transpired with quiet dignity. Every man came to the same place in due course anyway.
Frankenstein left the inhabitants of the lumber room to their peaceful slumber and strode out into the sunlight and days to come.
Chapter 10: LUST-CRAZED NURSES
For all his boldness in certain fields, Julius’s ‘days to come’ might still have been wasted in wool-gathering till the much-mentioned sword poised above his head dropped. Although a man who might rob a bank (for a third-party!) on impulse, or shoot a officer of the law likewise, he was relaxed to a fault when it came to his own interests. There are penalties as well as comforts in a profound belief in Fate.
‘Know Thyself’ said the Ancients; a precept they considered the summit of wisdom. Well, Julius knew himself all right. With his little collecting project (of which more later) almost ‘done and dusted’ there was insufficient to sedate the sleeping beast of his brain. If should it awake, famished, and find no meat nearby, it might start to feed on itself again, as at Heathrow. Frankenstein couldn’t face that. Not great chunks of his personality self-digesting. There was need of alternative focus.
Like the letter he’d received, for instance. That might do. He deliberately let it prey on his mind. The almost insulting brevity, as much as its anonymity, helped. Like Chinese water torture, the drip drip drip repetition of its minimalist message came to demand even more attention than a fulsome screed might. Finally, its repetitious whispered suggestion started to sound like good advice. Then a day of pretend-resisting that gave it the weight of a command. The nest step up from there was crusade…
Which was precisely the intention of its wickedly clever creator.
Seti Nefihotep’s stoic example was forgotten. Though still the hapless victim of ever changing moods, though still a devout disciple of Destiny, it became obvious to Frankenstein that his only alternative was standing still, awaiting the inevitable—and precious little good that had done him so far. Fate operated to its own timetable, which wasn’t always ideal for those who tried to travel by it. You couldn’t rely on a Lady Lovelace or Old Guard kidnapping detail to arrive when you wanted one…
Therefore…
‘Probe higher,’ the letter said—and so Julius did.
As a man who often perused the Holy Koran (looking for loopholes), the Egyptian (dec’d) might have enlightened Frankenstein from day one.
‘There are signs for those who look…’
is a frequent refrain: with the emphasis on the volitionary ‘would.’
It transpired that the advice of both letter and Holy book was sound. When Julius at long last looked he saw. And once he saw he investigated.
Whereupon one thing led to another, like links in a chain: a stout chain either leading him on—or dragging him in. What he found then chimed with all the other little things he’d noticed but not noted until now: images stored away in the ‘something wrong with this picture’ section of Julius’ brain. Like, for instance, the successive servings at luncheon, the excess chefs and crockery for the visible number of staff, the extraneous servant bells: all things he’s put down, insofar as he thought of them at all, to the French failing of obsessing about food. Belatedly, they now elbowed their way to the front of the picture and shouted ‘Hey you! Look here! Significant!’
It started in this way. Being a man with escape on his mind, Julius was prone to register doors, and in a palace the size of Versailles there was no shortage of them, of every kind, to collect. Julius specifically spotted those in frequent use and soon got to see what lay behind them, if only in glimpses.
Others, the more intriguing, seemed under-unemployed and remained mysteries to him, to greater or lesser degree. ‘Lesser’ applied to those plainly leading to the little kingdoms of Versailles’ servile staff: the refuges where they stored their mops and buckets and hid from onerous duties. ‘Greater’ referred to those barriers as grand as the rest but which stayed strangely shut. Julius put a mental mark against those and, one by one, when no one was looking, tried them out.
That meant discreetly kissing a large number of frogs in hope of finding a prince. Most had good reason for disuse: such as mothballed ballrooms and banqueting halls awaiting a monarch who danced or ate in company. Either that or the doors led the long way to somewhere and so were shunned by Palace staff with a world to conquer and always moving at maximum speed.
But there was one in particular that had Julius intrigued. He never observed it in use but detected the carpet before it was worn. Therefore, that one he saved up till last, reserving it for when his confidence in the mystery letter’s instruction was as threadbare as that square of carpet.
Thus it was only later on in his new nosiness, when momentarily alone in the corridor, that he grasped the nettle. He also grasped the door handle and swung it open.
‘Bingo!’—the English would say.
A sentinel stood right behind. Behind that member of the Old Guard stairs ascended into the heights. Up those stairs there was a fleeting glimpse of structure and the movement of many limbs.