he concocted without complaint, but nothing had slowed the wasting of her flesh, and very little eased the pain in her abdomen.
By the time she said farewell, she had turned into a flattened sketch of the gentle, loving mother he had known. It had hurt him to look at her, and, though he would not let himself think such thoughts, the smell of her sickness repulsed him. Her hand, as he clutched it before her last breath and the death rattle that followed, felt cool and frail, sticks wrapped in stretched hide. It hurt him that her luminous spirit had had to be housed in such a frail receptacle, and he felt a shameful relief when she was gone.
Abraham and his father stepped down into the street from the confines of the hansom cab. They had not been able to get close to the entrance of the Royal College; the approach was clogged with other cabs and carriages. Gas lamps lit the street. The London air was fetid with the odors of coal smoke and sewage and the Thames, that artery running through the heart of the city that received much of the city’s offal.
A crowd of well-dressed men and women out for an evening’s entertainment caused a crush in the doorway, where the ticket collector stood.
“What do you suppose he’ll uncover tonight?” one man asked another.
“I went to an unrolling last year, and there were several amulets, some of stone, with strange inscriptions on them. The mummy’s fingernails, toenails, and eyelids were gilded. The nails were fastened to the fingers and toes with wires. The corpse looked frightful, so dried and twisted. Is this truly their vision of immortality? Strange people, those Egyptians.”
“I went to an unrolling where there was a peculiar sort of varnish over the inner bandages, and Dr. Pettigrew could not break through it, though he employed all sorts of tools. All the mummy’s secrets were left undisclosed; he had to dismiss us without completing the task. The entire audience was disappointed.”
“Papa,” Abraham murmured.
“My son?” His father put a hand on his shoulder.
“My stomach.…” His stomach had been sour for some time — since before his mother’s death. His appetite had been poor: no food stirred his desires. When he ate, he ate only because he knew he must. Everything tasted of ashes.
“Have a peppermint.” His father fetched a peppermint drop from a small sack he kept in his waistcoat pocket for just such complaints, and handed it to Abraham, who put it in his mouth.
Abraham’s father handed the tickets to the collector, and they went inside to their reserved seats in the front row.
The linen-wrapped mummy lay on a table under hissing gas lamps. Abraham settled in his seat and stared at the crisscross of narrow, time-browned bandages that bound the body.
“Abraham.” Papa’s hand gripped his shoulder.
Abraham drew strength from that firm clasp. He swallowed bile and opened his eyes. They were here to watch science, to learn the secrets of an ancient civilization, to participate in one of the wonders of an enlightened age. He must be awake to opportunities.
“You would bring a child to such an event?” asked a low, pleasant woman’s voice from Papa’s other side. She sounded cultured and faintly amused.
“Madam?” said Papa. Abraham could tell he was shocked that a stranger and a woman would speak to him without an introduction.
“How old is the boy?”
“Eleven and a half.”
“Surely this is a spectacle for mature minds, not for children. Do you wish to give him nightmares?”
“My son is wise beyond his years.”
The woman leaned forward and peered past Papa into Abraham’s eyes. Her eyes were dark and bold, unpleasantly intrusive. “You are accustomed to such events?” she asked.
“I have never been to an unrolling before,” he said in careful English, “but Papa has me brought to other marvelous things. Always I look forward to a chance to expand my knowledge.”
She smiled, shook her head. “Ah, well.” She leaned back, and Abraham lost sight of her.
A bearded man in a speckled suit, attended by two younger men with shaven chins, high collars, and side whiskers, came into the room from a door on the other side of the mummy. The murmurs of the crowd quieted.
“Good evening,” said the bearded man. “I’m Dr. Pettigrew, professor of anatomy at Charing Cross Hospital. These are my associates, Mr. Willis, a clerk, and Mr. Cruikshank, an illustrator. They will make notes of everything we discover tonight. Welcome to another in my series of explorations into the funerary customs of the ancient Egyptians. They were a people who spent all their lives preparing for their afterlives. Their knowledge of anatomy and the science of embalming was in some ways superior to our own. We have much to learn from them.”
Abraham thought of his mother’s wasted face the last time he had seen her, at rest in her coffin. The terrible tension had eased from her cheeks, leaving her face empty, unfamiliar, without character. Clearly she had left her earthly body behind. Had her spirit gone on?
He had not been able to bear looking at what lay in the coffin. His soul was alive with the fierce longing to turn back the clock and rescue her before the disease could devour her.
“Tonight’s mummy is from a collection of Egyptian antiquities that just came on the market last week. It has been in private hands since the early days of exploration in Egypt. Its provenance is uncertain; hence, we will have to look to clues in the wrapping and mummification to determine in which dynasty this mummy was made, if such identification is even possible. From the style of the wrappings I would venture to guess that this is a middle or late period mummy, but we shall learn more as we proceed. Gentlemen. Let us commence with the unrolling.” Pettigrew turned to his two accomplices, who came forward and took up seats beside the mummy, took out portable desks with paper on them, set opened bottles of ink in their ink wells, and dipped their pens.
Pettigrew turned to a surgical tray of implements beside the table and lifted a scalpel. “We begin with the bandages of the head.” He carefully sliced through one of the strips of linen binding the head, and then, rolling the bandage as he unwrapped it from the corpse, he worked his way around the head, speaking all the while of how recent microscope studies had determined that all mummy bandages were indeed linen, not cotton as had previously been believed. He talked about the study of insects that had hatched within bandages after mummies had been interred, and then he discoursed on what people had surmised from studying texts on the insides and outsides of the nested mummiform coffins, often two or three deep, in which the mummies of rulers, priests, and the wealthy were buried.
“George, note this as Bandage One,” Dr. Pettigrew said to one of his assistants, who made a note on a small square of paper and pinned it to the first bandage. Dr. Pettigrew tugged at a different piece, removed another layer of linen from the figure’s head and neck.
Abraham listened with only half his mind. The other part of his brain was concerned with thoughts of his mother’s coffin, buried in consecrated ground in Holland, the service said over her before they had cast ritual handfuls of dirt into her grave, a visible and tactile farewell. Would unknown people hundreds of years hence dig up his mother’s grave, study her poor, decaying corpse? Display her for the idle rich, discuss her habits? Did she still cling to her remains?
“Ah,” said Dr. Pettigrew. “Here at the throat, three layers into the wrappings, we find our first amulet.”
A gasp came from everyone in the audience as Dr. Pettigrew held up a red object. “This shape is what we call a buckle. We believe this amulet is sacred to the Goddess Isis, a plea for her to protect the mummy with the powers of her magic and blood. I will set these objects on a table, here —” he turned and placed the amulet on a cloth-covered wheeled table behind him —“where Mr. Cruikshank can sketch them and make notes about their placement on the body. After I complete the unrolling, those interested may come up for a closer look. I will donate all these objects to the British Museum following the exercise,