AllFreeNovel
Share Us
He spoke and his voice vibrated against her. “We need to stop and rest the camel.”
They’d been riding for more than three hours and hadn’t encountered another boat on the canal for the last thirty minutes. If Professor Tyndale had turned back for her, by boat or by mount, he’d not come this way.
Helen swallowed her anxiety. She wished to continue on, to push the camel to a gallop no matter how jarring the ride might be, but she saw the wisdom of allowing her to rest. But doing so would not help them reach theTamariskany faster.
Mr. Evelyn guided them to a stand of palms some feet from the edge of the canal. His hand tightened at her waist as, with one flick of the reins, he urged Fiona to her knees once more. The motion was fluid, the camel’s legs folding like an articulated wooden toy, and Helen marveled that she’d not sailed over the camel’s neck like Mr. Evelyn’s rag doll.
Together they removed the heavy bags and wooden saddle to give the camel some relief. A wooden tethering bar had been conveniently positioned near the water, and Mr. Evelyn looped Fiona’s reins about it so she might drink her fill.
After arranging the saddle and blankets beneath the palms, he lit a small oil lantern from Malik’s bag and steadied it in the sand near their feet. Once all was settled, he handed Helen a water flask, and her eyes widened.
“Your hand!” she exclaimed. It wasn’t fear that tightened the corners of his eyes. It waspain. His fingers holding the flask were swollen, his bruised skin the color of ink.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rhys narrowed his eyes at Miss Corbyn’s exclamation and looked down. He allowed her to lift his hand, her fingers gentle as she inspected him carefully. “You’ve injured it. Is it broken, do you think?”
Concern etched her features, and he swallowed, the movement catching in his throat. He thought to retrieve his hand, but the soothing touch of her cool fingers stayed him, and he said, “I don’t believe so.” Her frown grew, and he hurried to add, “It’s naught but bruised knuckles, I think. A minor fracture, at worst.”
Her eyes flicked up to his. “My brother Edmund broke his hand when we were children,” she said. She pushed Rhys onto the saddle and then, without ceremony, shoved his sleeve up. She gently turned and pressed on the bones of his hand, and he held his grimace. “The color of your arm is good, so I don’t believe there’s any impediment to the flow of blood.”
“Are you a physician as well as a language scholar?” he asked. She tossed him an annoyed frown, and he was surprised by how much he liked it. He stifled his grin to ask, “Did you observe the treatment of your brother’s injury?”
Her annoyance was quickly forgotten, and she chuckled as she rummaged in the saddle bags. “Oh, no. Edmund blamed me for his misfortune and wouldn’t allow me near him. There was no chance of my observing Dr. Grey’s technique.”
“How were you responsible for his injury?”
She straightened, one hand on her hip. “Not that I’m wholly to blame, mind you, but I might havechallenged him to fly from my grandfather’s rooftop,” she said airily. “At any rate, our nursery bed linens were wholly inadequate to the task. To be fair, Aster and Edmund predicted as much, but I can be rather convincing when I set my mind to it.”
“A fact I’ll do well to remember,” he said. He couldn’t help his smile as he thought of this petite bundle—as she surely must have been even then—persuading her brother to fly. It sounded precisely like the sort of mischief he and Fiona might have gotten up to.
“I know I have some powders for the pain in here,” she said as she continued to dig. “And I’m sure we can fashion a splint for you. Wilkinson’s guide is silent on the subject—I don’t think he could have possibly addressed every circumstance for the Egyptian traveler—but I’ve another book that should assist us.” She removed her wooden medicine box with a low, “Aha!”
Rhys tried to flex his hand, but it had stiffened in the past hours with the swelling. “I can’t help but notice you’re rather well-prepared,” he said.
“I should hate not to be. Why suffer any inconvenience when it can be prevented with a reasonable amount of preparation?”
An unexpected flash of irritation tightened Rhys’s jaw. He and Fiona had been prepared when they’d set out for Africa, but none of their efforts had mattered. His tone was sharper than he intended when he said, “And how are your efforts serving you now? Is this”—he waved his good hand expansively—“where you imagined all your preparation would lead? I can’t help but think your efforts were wasted.”
“Of course not,” she said, eyes wide. “None of us can predict the future or alter our Creator’s plan for us. But just as your preparation has given us light”—she indicated Malik’s lantern at his feet—“mine has given us powders for your pain.” She lowered her voice to a near whisper. “You’ll see. All will come out as it’s meant to.”
Rhys couldn’t help his frown, although he regretted his earlier sharpness. “Are you so certain of that?”
She stared at him as if trying to see his thoughts, and he shifted on the saddle. “I am,” she said softly.
He didn’t know if she referred to his hand or finding the Tyndales or life in general, but he envied her certainty. “You believe there’s a greater hand at work here?”
“Do you not?”
He shrugged. It was much easier to believe their lives were nothing but random bits of chance, and poorly timed bits at that. It would require a cruel Creator indeed to have taken his sister from him. To inflict such terror and misery on them both.
Miss Corbyn turned back to her medicine box, her features hidden by the edge of her scarf as she continued. “No matter your beliefs—in God, the fates, Egyptian myths—it stretches the imagination to think our lives are nothing but happenstance, without connection to a larger plan. Why else would you have forgotten your bag at the precise moment I left theTamariskto retrieve my own? And how could you have forgotten your bag anyway? It wasn’t as if you carried more than one.”
He pushed the heel of his boot into the silt at his feet. While he wouldn’t share that he hadn’tforgottenhis bag precisely, neither could he deny there’d been an elegant timing to the whole debacle. Everything—from Miss Corbyn’s retrieval of his bag to the attack in the bazaar to the departure of theTamarisk—everything had gone wrong at precisely the right moment to bring them to this point.
Perhaps there was something to her argument after all. The notion twisted his gut; it had beensome time since he’d believed in, much less reliedupon, a power greater than himself. But if their meeting in Alexandria hadn’t been mere happenstance—if there was a greater purpose to it—the devil take him if he knew what it was.
He recalled then Miss Corbyn’s earlier claim to persuasiveness and shook off his thoughts with a slow roll of his shoulders.
