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‘Watch your language!’
‘And you stop wasting time!’
That did it. Faced with the truth of the terrible accusation of wasting even one precious moment that was equal to power and money, Mr Ambrose whirled and ran towards the tunnel opening. Just a foot or two away from the wall, he jumped. The man up in the tunnel grunted as he grabbed hold of his hands and pulled. Mr Ambrose wasn’t nearly as bulky as Karim, but as I knew first hand, he had quite a lot of muscle hidden under that tight black tailcoat of his. It took several moments
for him to be pulled high enough so he could grab hold of the stone edge and swing himself into the tunnel.
All the while, I stood, transfixed, listening to the approaching sound of marching feet. They were much closer now. It sounded as if they were just around the bend.
The man who had helped Mr Ambrose scrambled off up the tunnel. Mr Ambrose himself turned and held out his arm.
‘Move! Take my hand!’
I was already running, when suddenly, there was burst of sound behind me: the stomping of feet, the scrape of metal on metal, the squeak of hard leather - the soldiers had entered the cave!
‘Hey, you there!’ I heard a shout from behind me. ‘You there, in the burnous! Stop!’
I didn’t stop. I sped up, focusing all my energy on reaching Mr Ambrose’s outstretched hand.
Just a few more seconds, I prayed. A few more seconds, that’s all…
‘Stop or we’ll shoot!’
I froze.
‘Put your hands over your head and turn around!’
Slowly, I lifted my hands until they rested on top of my head. Looking up at Mr Ambrose, I hissed: ‘Go! They might not have seen you yet!’
He said nothing. But his hard, hungry gaze yelled no for him so loud it almost hurt my ears.
‘Go! If they catch you, they’ll kill you! I’ll be all right. I’m…’ I swallowed back bile before saying it out loud: ‘I’m a lady. They won’t harm a lady.’
‘Turn around, I said!’ bellowed the voice behind me, much closer now.
I threw one last, desperate, pleading look at Mr Ambrose. ‘Please! Leave! For me!’ Then, without waiting to see what he would do, I turned to face the British Army officer who was pointing his gun at me. He was a young man, tall and muscular, with shoulder-long mahogany hair and a roguish speck of a beard on his chin. Besides being quite handsome, he also happened to be quite familiar.
I smiled, and curtsied as best I could while dressed in a burnous and holding my hands over my head.
‘Hello, Captain Carter. So nice to see you again.’
His mouth fell open. Taking that as a sign that he wasn’t going to shoot me on the spot, I lowered my hands, surveying the ranks of troops flooding into the cave behind Captain Carter. Then my gaze dropped, sweeping around the empty cave, strewn with wreckage, broken blades, and hundreds of dead, blood-soaked bodies.
I cleared my throat. ‘I think I might have lost my way a bit again. Tell me, do you by any chance know how to get to my hotel from here?’
Communication Problems
Captain Carter was a real gentleman. Yes, a real, true-born English gentleman. And I don’t just mean that he helped me into the saddle of his own camel when we left the cave, or that he gave me a drink from his water bottle. No, those were just trivialities. A girl can only tell that a man is a real gentleman if he does something very special for her - such as not ask her how she happened to get ‘lost’ several hundred miles away from her hotel in the middle of a desert cave full of bloody, mutilated corpses.
Now, that’s what I call a real gentleman.
I could tell from the way they screamed at Captain Carter, that the captains of the French and Egyptian detachments would have been only too happy to question me on the subject, and maybe encourage me a little if I didn’t answer right away. But Captain Carter barked a few clipped words at them in French and Arabic, and they went away, grumbling.
I was burning to know what had happened to Mr Ambrose and the others. But I kept my mouth shut. Captain Carter might, for some unfathomable reason, want to protect me, but I very much doubted he would extend the same courtesy to Mr Ambrose and a few hundred mercenaries. So I mounted Captain Carter’s camel and let myself be led back towards Alexandria like a good little girl, all the while nearly bursting with the need to run and find him.
Finally, weeks after we had set out from the mountain cave on the Sinai Peninsula, we saw the houses of Alexandria rising out of the mist.
‘What are you going to do now, Miss Linton?’ Captain Carter asked from beside me. He had been marching beside my mount nearly all the way, repeatedly gazing up at me with a mixture of puzzlement and fascination. ‘Continue your, um… holiday?’ One of his eyebrows went up, silently adding: And maybe finding a few more blood-spattered caves to get lost in?
