Excerpt
Excerpt
The Stolen Queen
CHAPTER TWO
Charlotte
EGYPT, 1936
When Charlotte Cross signed up to study abroad in Egypt for four months, she did not expect her responsibilities to include administering antivenom to counteract cobra bites. As the only undergraduate among an international team of professional archaeologists and PhD candidates, she was there to observe, assist, and pretty much stay out of the way as the others excavated the ruins of a small walled village where ancient Egyptian artisans and craftsmen had
once resided. So far, the majority of the artifacts unearthed from the villagers’ brick homes were flakes of limestone covered with writing, called ostraca—the equivalent of ancient Egyptian notebooks. The team, under the leadership of a curator from the Met Museum named Grayson Zimmerman, had amassed bills, wills, wedding announcements, medical diagnoses, and prescriptions, dated as far back as 1500 BC, which all together told a detailed story of the average ancient Egyptian’s life. One of Charlotte’s duties was translating some of the items into English, a painstaking process that left her right hand sore but which she performed with great zeal. Just that morning, she’d spent two hours transcribing a contract between a scribe named Ankhsheshonq and a master craftsman that involved detailed instructions for altering existing reliefs, as commanded by the reigning pharaoh, before turning to a transcription of a shopping list written by some long‑lost servant girl.
That afternoon, though, a group of strangers approached the camp, led by a grim‑looking Bedouin with a bloody bite between his finger and thumb. One of his fellow tribesmen carried a limp six‑foot‑long serpent. The dig team’s leaders were off in Luxor, overseeing the transfer of artifacts onto a barge on the Nile, which meant there was no one else present who knew what to do, other than Charlotte.
Not that Charlotte was all that qualified. She’d grown up in New York City’s Greenwich Village, where snakes were only read about in books or viewed postmortem in dioramas at the Museum of Natural History. But her father was a doctor and her mother suffered from diabetes, requiring regular injections, which made Charlotte less queasy about grabbing the medical kit from the dispensary, located next to the kitchen tent where she’d been helping the cook prepare lunch (another one of her assigned duties that had nothing to do with digging, but which she gladly performed). Box in hand, she found the Bedouin sitting stiffly in one of the camp’s foldable chairs. His hand was already the size of a grapefruit and the color of a plum; Charlotte didn’t have much time.
Charlotte knelt beside the Bedouin and opened the emergency kit, withdrawing the prefilled syringe with care.
“I don’t see why we should waste our supplies on the natives,” murmured a voice a few feet behind her. She recognized it as that of Leon, an archaeology doctoral candidate from England who was never satisfied with his lot, always wanting to have the first go at a promising location and quick to move on if his desultory efforts weren’t rewarded.
She ignored him. By now, a large cohort of the team had gathered. One of the other archaeologists, Henry, who’d only recently joined them from England, knelt beside her. “What’s going on, can I help?” he asked brightly. But his demeanor changed when he caught sight of what was in Charlotte’s hands. He blinked a couple of times, then stared intently into her eyes. For a split second, she thought he was flirting with her. Even though she was the only woman in the group, the work was dirty and backbreaking, and at the end of the day, everyone simply wanted a bath in one of the two galvanized iron tubs, followed by bed. There was no time or energy left for such silliness as flirtation, a fact she appreciated.
But Henry wasn’t flirting. He was staring hard at her face because he couldn’t bear to look back at what she held in her hand. She stifled a smile. The poor man obviously had a deathly fear of needles.
“That’s fine, I can handle it,” said Charlotte. Henry, looking re‑ lieved, ducked away, and Charlotte turned her attention back to the Bedouin. “Roll up your sleeve, please.”
One of the Egyptians on their team translated, and the Bedouin did as he was told.
She cleaned off a spot near the top of his arm and quickly administered the shot. The man didn’t flinch. After, she brought him water and waited to see if the swelling went down, as the others headed to the long table where their group of twenty gathered every afternoon for lunch.
She brought a glass of water to Henry as well. “Oh, thanks.” He gulped it down. “I needed that.”
“Maybe more than he did,” said Charlotte, pointing her elbow in the direction of the Bedouin.
“Was it that obvious?” Henry wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.
“Just a little.”
“I swear, nothing else gets to me. I can stand heights, small spaces, spiders. But needles—” He shuddered.
“I’d recommend you stay far away from cobras, in that case.” “Let’s hope I do well here, then, so I don’t end up working at the Regent’s Park Zoo.” Henry had large ears that stuck out either side of his head and brown hair that had been flattened by the wide-brimmed pith helmets they both wore. His was hanging off his neck, and his Adam’s apple bobbed just above the strap.
Charlotte laughed. “I guess that means you’re from London?” “Correct, and you?”
“New York City.”
“You’ve come from quite far for the glory of being a notetaker and de facto medic. King Tut, I presume?”
Even though Henry was a little older, probably in his early twenties to Charlotte’s eighteen, their generation was united in their love for all things Egyptian thanks to the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb by the Englishman Howard Carter. The poor man had been digging for years in the Valley of the Kings, the royal burial ground for pharaohs, without finding much of note, and was close to having his funds cut off by his wealthy patron. Since most of the tombs had been plundered and stripped of their riches in ancient times, the chances of finding a tomb intact were slim to none, but Carter held out hope. At the eleventh hour, he came upon a step that eventually led to the burial chambers of a pharaoh named Tutankhamun, who’d reigned for around ten years and been entombed with a wondrous treasure trove of artifacts. His burial chambers were stacked to the ceiling with gleaming antiquities, including thrones, jewels, three golden coffins, and even a royal chariot. Charlotte had been four years old when the discovery captivated the world, and she decided then and there that finding buried treasure would be her life goal. In her teens, she spent copious amounts of time at the Metropolitan Museum and the New York Historical Society, reading everything she could on ancient Egypt, including Amelia Edwards’s marvelous account of her 1874 travels, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. By the time Charlotte enrolled in New York University at seventeen, she was already fairly proficient in translating hieroglyphics, which gave her an edge when she applied to be part of an excavation team funded by the Met for her study‑abroad program.
“You’re right, it was Carter’s discovery that pulled me in,” she admitted. “Although, being here now, I understand what a small part of history King Tut actually takes up. That there are thousands of other stories that are just as interesting, if not more so.”
“That’s certainly true.”
The Bedouin was beckoning Charlotte, so she excused herself to attend to him. He was already able to gently flex his thumb—a promising sign—and addressed her in a low, solemn voice. One of the Egyptian workers translated. “Mehedi says that you will always be sacred to his tribe, and you will always be safe.”
A lovely sentiment, thought Charlotte. She thanked Mehedi in Arabic and they nodded to each other, and then Charlotte invited him and his tribesmen to join them for tea before they headed back out into the desert. They politely declined, and eventually the robed men disappeared over the sandy ridge to the west.
Charlotte returned to the lunch table and began collecting the team’s dirty plates and glasses.
“You seem to have made an admirer out of our visitor,” said Leon as Charlotte reached past him to grab an errant spoon. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he comes back to make you his concubine.” He twisted the gold ring he always wore on his pinky, embedded with an osten‑ tatious yellow jasper stone.
“That’s enough, Leon,” said Henry sharply.
By the end of the working day, the team leaders had returned from the shores of the Nile, along with provisions carried on the backs of donkeys. Mr. Zimmerman was sorry to have missed the Bedouin and complimented Charlotte for a job well done. “I think you’ve earned a chance to do some real work, don’t you?” He regarded her with his pale blue eyes.
He was one of the best Egyptologists in the world, and Charlotte was lucky to land under his tutelage, even if it mostly consisted of observing. Until now.
“I’d welcome the opportunity,” she said.
Later that evening, she climbed the steep ramp to their living quarters, located in an empty tomb that branched off into a series of smaller chambers and offered neither running water nor electricity. At night before bed, she refilled the cups of water that sat under each leg of her cot to prevent scorpions from climbing up, a detail that she made sure to omit in her letters home. She had a small desk and chair, as well as a basin where she could wash her face and hands. The caverns were cool and quiet, and she’d never slept better.
As the sun set, she liked to sit outside and watch the sand drift across the desert’s edge and listen to the howl of hyenas. To the east, the Nile River lazed its way north to Cairo and then Alexandria before draining into the Mediterranean Sea. The majority of Egyptians lived along its shores, an area that took up a mere four percent of the entire country. But every spring, the Nile would flood, spreading silt far across the fields, a rich nourishment for the next planting. The ancient village they were currently excavating, as well as the Valley of the Kings, was located only a few miles away from the fertile plains of Luxor, but it might as well have been on the moon. Beyond the flood zones, the landscape changed dramatically into a barren desert, not a palm tree in sight. It was like working in an oven on days when the temperature climbed.
In high school, Charlotte had learned that the deserts to the west and south and the seas to the north and east of Egypt offered the country protection from the threat of invaders. That, together with the rich abundance of food from the fertile Nile valley, meant that most of the ancient Egyptians lived well, with time to study the sky and create an accurate solar calendar, build follies like the pyramids of Giza, form a written language, and make great strides in civil engineering and medicine, all long before Christ was even born.
And now here she was, in a place she’d only dreamed about. The orange sunset in a hazy sky full of dust particles as Henry joined her, bringing along his own wooden chair.
“How was your day?” he said as he planted himself next to her. “Translate anything of interest?”
“A shopping list that was eerily like ours of today. Oh, and a contract between a master craftsman and Ankhsheshonq about altering some images.”
“Ankhsheshonq?” repeated Henry. “He was a scribe to Saukemet II, I believe.”
“You would be correct.”
“Sounds like a camel’s sneeze.” He covered his nose with his hand. “Ankhsheshonq!”
“Gesundheit.”
He laughed. “Here’s a question for you: Why are we called ‘Egyptologists,’ yet no other country has a name as a job? ‘Greece‑ologist’? ‘Italiologist’? You can’t think of one, can you?”
“Now that you say it, I can’t. Although ‘Italiologist’ is fun to say.”
He sat back, looking quite pleased with himself; she liked the way his eyes twinkled in the dimming light.
“It’s probably because the ancient Egypt civilization lasted for three thousand years,” she said.
“Compared with Rome, which eked out one thousand, and Greece with fifteen hundred, I would say the Egyptians deserve their own ‘ology.’”
“Good point. And how has your experience as a budding Egyptologist been so far? Between treating snakebites and cleaning dishes, I imagine it has been a bit of seesaw between moments of high adventure and hours of painful monotony.”
“I don’t mind the dishwashing. I’ve learned so much from listening to the conversations between the rest of the team. It’s enough to write an entire book.”
“Is that what you’d like to do?”
“Maybe.” She could only imagine the face her mother would make when presented with the idea. Her parents had reluctantly allowed her to go on this trip after meeting with Grayson Zimmerman in person, when he assured them she’d be safe under his wing. They expected her to be back home by Christmas, and, after graduating, to become a history teacher. This trip was a lark, a once‑in‑a‑lifetime experience, in their minds. She was only a girl, after all.
Sometimes, as Charlotte translated the ostraca, she wished she’d been born in ancient Egypt, when women and men had many of the same rights under the law. If a woman divorced or her husband died, she retained a third of the property. Divorce and remarriage weren’t frowned upon, nor were children born out of wedlock, nor sexual relations between unmarried people. In fact, life in old Luxor sounded a lot more fun to Charlotte than life in the modern world, where women had limited rights and the idea of a dalliance was considered shocking and immoral.
“I understand Grayson is offering you a chance to get your hands dirty,” said Henry, cutting into her thoughts.
“He is. Do you think he’ll make good on his promise?”
“He’s a good man. I would bet on it. Just don’t get your hopes up. Not everyone can be a Howard Carter.”
The last of the sun faded into the horizon. Called Ra, the sun was the ultimate god to the ancient Egyptians, the king of the other deities and the father of all creation.
“Maybe so,” she answered. “But not everyone can be a Charlotte Cross, either.”
Excerpted from THE STOLEN QUEEN by Fiona Davis. Copyright © 2025 by Fiona Davis. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
The Stolen Queen
- Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Historical Mystery, Mystery
- hardcover: 352 pages
- Publisher: Dutton
- ISBN-10: 0593474279
- ISBN-13: 9780593474273