I observed the faintest tremor in the hand that extinguished his cigarette. It was not the only sign of fatigue; his voice was flat and his face was drawn.

“You had better get some sleep,” I said. “We will talk again later.”

“As you command, Sitt Hakim.” He got slowly to his feet. “Is someone sleeping in my bed?”

“Miss Sahin is in one of the beds. I will make up the other one for you.”

“There is no need for that.”

“Clearly it is not an amenity to which you are accustomed. I will do it anyhow. Come along.”

What I wanted, as the Reader must have surmised, was a private chat. Even Emerson realized the reasonableness of this, though he did not much like it. He had never completely conquered his jealousy of his brother, baseless though it was – on my side, at any rate.

“Allow me to give you a little laudanum,” I said. “You won’t sleep without it, you are too tired and too on edge.”

“Are you afraid I’ll sneak out of the house?” He watched me unfold one of the sheets and then took hold of the other end. “I have better sense than that. If Edward isn’t back by nightfall, I will have to take steps, but I cannot function efficiently without sleep.”

He had tucked the sheet in any which way. I remade that end of the bed. Our eyes met, and he smiled a little; he was thinking, as was I, what an oddly domestic scene this was. “I don’t need your laudanum,” he went on, removing a container from one of the shelves.

“How long have you been taking that?” I asked, as he swallowed a small white pill.

“Weeks. Months.” He stretched out on the bed. “It works quickly, so if you have any questions – which you undoubtedly do – talk fast.”

“I only wanted to ask about Margaret. Have you heard from her?”

He hadn’t expected such a harmless subject. “Margaret? No, not for months. I couldn’t very well carry on a frequent correspondence, could I?”

“Does she know what you are doing?”

“She knows everything about me.” He closed his eyes.

“Including -”

“Everything.”

“You have complete confidence in her, then. Are you going to marry her?”

Sethos opened his eyes and clasped his hands behind his head. “You aren’t going to leave me in peace until I invite you into my innermost heart, are you? The question is not whether I am going to marry her, but whether she will consent to marry me. I asked her. I hadn’t intended to, it – er – came into my head at a particularly – er – personal moment. She said no.”

“A flat, unconditional no?”

“There were conditions. You can guess what they were. She was in the right. I told her – I promised her – this would be my last assignment. As it well may be.”

“Not in the way you mean,” I said firmly. “We are here, and on the job! We could be more useful, however, if you would tell me the purpose of your mission. What are you after?”

“Sahin.” His eyelids drooped. The sedative had loosened his tongue. “He’s their best man. Their only good man. Once he’s out of the way, we can proceed with… He loves the girl. I didn’t know that. I thought he’d go to some lengths to get her back, but I didn’t realize… Paternal affection isn’t one of my strong points. I told you about Maryam, didn’t I?”

“Who?” I had to repeat the question. He was half asleep, wandering a little in his mind.

“Maryam. Molly. That’s the name you knew… She’s gone.”

“Dead?” I gasped. “Your daughter?”

“No. Gone. Left. Ran away. Hates me. Because of her mother. She’s living proof of heredity. Got the worst of both parents. Poor little devil… She is, you know. Amelia…”

“It’s all right,” I said softly, taking the hand that groped for mine. “Everything will be all right. Sleep now.”

I sat by him until his hand relaxed and the lines on his face smoothed out. I had intended – oh, I admit it – to take advantage of his drowsy state to wring information out of him, but I had not expected revelations so intimate, so personal, so painful.

His daughter had been fourteen years of age when I knew her. She must be sixteen now. Her mother had been Sethos’s lover and partner in crime; but her tigerish affection had turned to jealous hatred when she realized his heart belonged to another. (Me, in fact, or so he claimed.) She tried several times to kill me and succeeded in assassinating one of my dearest friends before she met her end at the hands of those who had been an instant too late to save him.

How much of that terrible story did the child know? If she blamed her father for her mother’s death, she could not know the whole truth. He had not even been present when she died, and she had led a life of crime and depravity before she met Sethos. A moralist might hold him guilty of failing to redeem her, but in my opinion even a saint, which Sethos was not, would have found Bertha hard going.

I do not believe that the dead hand of heredity is the sole determinant of character. Remembering Molly as I had last seen her, looking even younger than her actual age, the picture of freckled, childish innocence… But she hadn’t looked so innocent the day I found her in Ramses’s room with her dress half off – by her own act, I should add. If I had not happened to be passing by – if Ramses had not had the good sense to summon me at once – or if he had been another kind of man, the kind of man she hoped he was – he might have found himself in an extremely interesting situation.

That proved nothing. She had not deliberately set out to seduce or shame him; she had been young and foolish and infatuated. My heart swelled with pity, for her and for the man who lay sleeping on the bed, his face pale and drawn with fatigue. He had not known how much he loved her until he lost her, and he blamed himself. How wonderful it would be if I could bring father and child together again!

It was a happy thought, but not practical – for the present, at any rate. We had to get through the current difficulty first. With a sigh I slipped my hand from his and tiptoed out of the room.

“Well?” Emerson demanded. “You’ve been the devil of a long time. How much were you able to get out of him?”

“We were right about him, of course,” I replied, seating myself next to him as his gesture invited. “He is no traitor. His mission was to remove Sahin Bey – Pasha.”

“Kill him, you mean?” Ramses asked.

“He didn’t say. But surely Sethos would not -”

“Sahin is a dangerous enemy and this is wartime. However,” Ramses said thoughtfully, “the same purpose would be served if Sahin Pasha were to be disgraced and removed from his position. In the last week he’s lost me, his daughter, and now Ismail Pasha, whose flight will prove to their satisfaction that he was a British spy. Careless, to say the least!”

“More than careless,” Emerson exclaimed. “Highly suspicious, to say the least! With that lot, you are guilty until proven innocent. By Gad, my boy, I believe you are right. It’s like Sethos to concoct such a devious scheme. If the Turks believe, as they well may, that Sahin Pasha has been a double agent all along, they will have to reorganize their entire intelligence network. It could take months.”

“And in the meantime they would be without their best and cleverest man,” I added. “Sethos said that once Sahin was out of the way, they could proceed with… something.”

“What?”

“He didn’t say.”

“And who is ‘they’?” Nefret asked. “Who is he working for? Not Cartright and ‘that lot’?”

“He – er – didn’t say.”

Emerson brought his fist down on the table, rattling the crockery. “What did he say? Good Gad, you were with him for almost three quarters of an hour.”

“How do you know that?” I demanded. “You haven’t a watch.”

This time my attempt to distract him and put him on the defensive did not succeed. “Just answer the question, Peabody. What were you talking about all that while?”

“Personal matters. Oh, Emerson, for pity’s sake, don’t grind your teeth. I wanted to make certain he was asleep before I left him. The man is on the edge of nervous collapse. He has been living for months under conditions of intolerable strain. He must not be allowed to return to Gaza.”