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The Museum of Antiquities wasn't what it once had been, though if Rick understood Evy correctly it had never been (from an archaeologist's point of view) much to write home about. Confused, cramped, disorganised and understaffed, its treasures poorly inventoried and often not well studied. And four years of war had done it roughly as much good as might have been expected. Rick eyed an ominous-looking crack in the plaster of an outside wall, shook his head, and made his way up the low steps into the Museum. Dilapidated or not, Evy Carnahan was still here, trying her best to bring order to the Museum and its collections. She had been a fixture since she was a little girl, according to the guards, who remembered the wealthy Mr Carnahan and his clever wife Aisha very well. Visiting Egypt with her brother Jonathan, who was significantly older and had then been a junior archaeologist considered sensible enough to take temporary charge of an impetuous fifteen-year-old sister, she had been trapped by the escalation of hostilities over the winter of 1914. The elder Carnahans had sailed to retrieve their children, but their passenger liner had been sunk, with the loss of all hands onboard. At the time Rick had been a seventeen-year-old orphan of dubious parentage and probable British nationality, stuck to his books at the nuns' behest and gaining a thorough education in street fighting and Cairene Arabic when their backs were turned, but Jonathan and Evy had told him the story often enough that he felt like he'd been there, watching Jonathan's squinting face turn to stone, and Evy's brown eyes fill with tears. "Well, that's torn it," Jonathan had apparently announced. "We're staying put, old mum." Sometimes when Evy told the story, and when she was tired or not paying attention, she rendered Jonathan's words in their mother's educated Classical Arabic. Rick wondered which was the translation, and which Jonathan had actually said aloud. Jonathan was so careful to sound English most of the time. Rick acknowledged the museum guard's greeting, and made his way through the galleries, deep in thought. He knew them well now: he'd had to drag Evy out of just about every cobwebbed nook and cranny, at one time or another. Jonathan did not talk about what he'd done during the war. Rick had encountered him as an archaeologist, allegedly too unpredictable and undisciplined to make a competent officer, but he thought it more likely that Jonathan's inventive nature, excellent aim, detailed knowledge of Egypt and flawless demotic Arabic had been repurposed by military intelligence. Evy, meanwhile, had wangled her way into a sort of volunteer post at the Museum of Antiquities. She'd initially been relegated to the library, where she was clumsy if methodical, and where Rick thought she had probably spent the first two years of the war reading everything she could before she catalogued it. She was certainly far more capable with the objects and far better informed than the few remaining curators attached to the Museum. And like her brother, she read French and German fluently - skills that made them of considerable interest to Cairo officialdom during the war years. Rick hadn't expected to be put onto smuggling and the illegal antiquities trade, which was how he'd encountered the unpredictable Carnahans. He still suspected that it was a way of putting a difficult customer to one side. The British establishment might think him white enough for an officer and British enough for the Egyptian Army - Rick had signed up with no passport and a dodgy American accent learned at a mission school, but the nuns who'd raised him were British and swore blind he was too - but they hadn't exactly taken him to their hearts. It was not Rick's fault he was sharper and better at fighting dirty than most of the men dressed in the gold braid and melodrama of the Egyptian Army. Or that his Egyptian soldiers respected him for being able to swear right back at them. It was also not Rick's fault that his entanglement with the Carnahans, which had persisted long after his original task had been completed because - Well, because the Carnahans were persistent, and because Jonathan was so horrifyingly good at getting into trouble, and because Evy had such very bright eyes - had led him to several major successes. The commendations and promotions had come in handy, even if Rick wasn't sure it was in his best interests to have caught the eye of Marshal Allenby's staff, and even if the jealousy he now had to deal with was a pain in his ass. Rick had made it all the way through the Museum of Antiquities to Miss Carnahan's office without realising as he mused over these thoughts, and had in fact knocked repeatedly on her door and said her name interrogatively several times before focussing for long enough to read the note stuck to it.
In the ceramics stores, back after lunch - EC.
Rick turned around and made for the ceramics stores. Life would probably be simpler if he'd just joined the French Foreign Legion, as had been his original inclination, but if he'd done that he probably wouldn't have met Evy, and he'd still be here, post-war, staring at demob coming down the line and trying to work out what the hell to do with his life. Something that didn’t involve catching the Spanish Flu, he supposed, but he wasn't at all sure what that might be. He had not made any progress on this thorny question when he found Evy, absorbed in cataloguing some kind of broken pot - no different to any other kind of broken pot, as far as Rick was aware, although he had grudgingly come to realise that some broken pots were more informative and valuable than others. She had an enormous ledger, a sketchbook, and a rough notebook in front of her, and a large smudge of ink on her nose. Rick coughed. Evy almost but didn't quite drop the pot. "Major O'Connell!" Interruptions to her work notwithstanding, her smile was very welcoming. "I wasn't expecting you." "I was in the area and thought I'd see how you were getting on," Rick said. It was not a total lie. The fact that he was in the area because he was looking for Evy was irrelevant. "And then I nearly fell over your brother and he invited us both to lunch at Shepheard's." Evy looked around, as if expecting to see Jonathan. "He's not here," Rick said. "He had a meeting. At the Turf Club." Evy rolled her eyes. "If I have to drag him out of there again -" "I thought women weren't allowed in the Turf Club?" Rick said, amused. He knew perfectly well they weren’t. He also knew perfectly well that the doormen and barmen were much too frightened of Evy to stop her doing exactly as she pleased. Evy gave him a narrow look. "They are not." She set aside her pot and scribbled a note on a leaf from the back of her sketchbook. Gone to lunch - back soon. EC.
"Do you know why your brother's suddenly going in for lunch invitations?" Rick asked, escorting her politely towards Shepheard's. It was a long enough walk that most people would have insisted on a carriage, but Evy was a brisk walker with a fearless disregard for Cairo traffic, so they walked. Or rather, Evy route-marched and Rick fended off the carts, beggars, bad drivers and passers-by. "He probably wants to tell me he's booked passage for us. Back to England." Rick fell over a beggar, received a volley of complaints regarding his treatment of the aged, and slipped the man baksheesh to make him go away. "You're going back to England?" Of course; he should have expected it. The Carnahans were, after all, English. A lot more solidly so than he was. "Eventually. Not till next spring, when the season ends." Evy hesitated. "I... I would like to go to university. There's talk that Oxford will start awarding women degrees, soon. And if I'm in England by the spring then perhaps I can arrange to start studies in... in the autumn." "I don't see how anyone could stop you," Rick said, truthfully. He had, over the last couple of years, found himself in the position of Rescuer-In-Chief to both Carnahans, but Evy had a quality to her that reminded him of a tank on good ground. All she needed was momentum. "Jonathan was wondering... if you might perhaps want to come with us." "Me?" Rick stopped dead, and was almost run over by an idiot in a dilapidated car. Evy shrieked a little and pulled him out of the way. "Well, what are you going to do with your life here?" Evy folded her arms. "You're English and you've never even seen England. It's worth a try, surely." "We've only got Mother Maria's word for it that I am English, and the old lady gets muddled, you know that," Rick reminded her, head spinning. "Oh, nonsense, you have a British passport now -" "Only because Marshal Allenby thought I was too useful to be shot as a spy. What would I do in England?" Evy unfolded her arms for the express purpose of waving them. "I don't know! Study? Get a job? Work with us? See the world?" "I," Rick said helplessly, running a hand through his hair and then remembering that he ought to be wearing a hat. He had probably left it in the Museum again. "Evy, I would love to. But it's an expensive kind of thing to do, and I..." He wasn't broke. He had his salary still and it was a lot more than he might once have hoped for. But he certainly wasn’t wealthy enough to travel to Europe on a whim. "You'll come with us. We owe you, Rick, you've kept us alive so many times, especially Jonathan." Evy grabbed his hand and looked pleadingly up into his eyes. "Please, Rick, I don't - I don't want to go back to Mother and Father's house alone." "You'd be with Jonathan," Rick pointed out, feeling himself melt as thoroughly and inevitably as ice-cream in the sun. "Exactly." "Well... yeah," Rick admitted, and then tried again. "Evy, I can't sponge off you and your brother." "You wouldn’t be," Evy said. "Even if you don't get another job." She resettled her straw boater on her head, driving the hatpin more deeply into her dark hair. "You know what Jonathan is like. How am I to keep him out of trouble if I'm all the way away in Oxford?" "Good point," Rick conceded. "So it's a matter of national security, then. You need someone to babysit your menace of a brother before one of you accidentally raises the dead. Again." "Oh, Rick." Evy took his arm, and they started to walk again. "Don't exaggerate. I did not raise the dead. He was only leprous." "Oh, well, that's all right then." Rick drew his elbow a little closer to his side, guiding Evy out of a chattering group's path. "Mind you, I haven't said I'll do it." "But you will," Evy said, with a confidence belied by the nervous way she looked up at him. "Won't you?" "Since you ask so nicely," Rick said gravely. "But only for Jonathan's sake. To make sure he doesn’t burn down the Tower of London or something by accident. Or for a bet." "You are dreadful, Major O'Connell," Evy said, visibly refraining from shoving him into oncoming traffic. "Yeah," Rick admitted, and then added, daringly: "But you like it." Evy blushed to the roots of her hair.