Sherlock Holmes and the Mummy's Curse by Stephanie Osborn Read Free Book Online Page A

me under his wing.”
    “Really! I should like to meet the son, too, then!” Watson declared. “Perhaps even the father, if he lives nearby. My Arabic could use a little honing,” he added sheepishly.
    “I’d be delighted, both of you,” Whitesell beamed. “Razin is very much a chip off the old block, as it were. I think you’ll like him.”
    Just then, Beaumont looked up and declared, “Ah, this is indeed most delicious, Professor! I had forgotten how much I enjoyed a good lentil stew. The cuisine in the Americas, while excellent, is very different. I have not had a proper lentil stew since… oh! Since that conference, Parker, when you could not find your trousers, mon ami !” 24 he addressed Nichols-Woodall with a smirk, then turned to the others. “He evidently had to borrow a pair from a colleague… who had considerably shorter legs. And they were brown, and he had no brown suit; he wore a grey one… for the keynote paper. It was… quite the sight.”
    “I should have had my own trousers, thank you, were not SOMEONE at this table less of an atrocious prankster,” Nichols-Woodall pointed out with some heat. Beside him, Lord Trenthume blinked in discomfited bemusement. “I should very much like to know how WHOEVER did it managed to break into my rooms at the hotel in the first place.”
    “Well, mon ami , perhaps you should ask Mr. Holmes,” Beaumont offered, a mock-innocent smile on his face, but with a disparaging, almost calumnious, look in his eyes. “What a pity there are no longer any clews, after all this time.”
    “Someone… broke into your room, and stole… your trousers,” Lord Trenthume murmured, a perplexed expression on his face. “What an outré thing to happen…”
    “You know,” Nichols-Woodall remarked, thoughtful, but with a vaguely malicious light in his own eyes, “I recall that colloquium quite clearly, myself. Wasn’t that the one where you gave a talk on one of those esoteric theories of yours, and everyone attending the talk was laughing at it? Something about a connexion between alchemy, the Aztecs, and the Amazons, or the like?”
    Poor Lord Trenthume began to fidget nervously. He opened his mouth as if to speak again, but seemed to have no idea what to say, and shut it again without having made a remark.
    “Ah, yes, I remember,” Beaumont agreed placidly. “And it was the Maya, not the Aztecs. Although it is less alliterative, I suppose. Well, radical revolutions in science are often scorned by lesser minds. As I recollect, you attended my talk…”
    “Yes.”
    “…Because no one was there to attend yours.”
    “Hardly!” Nichols-Woodall bristled. “I had a full—”
    “Sherry!” Leighton Whitesell suddenly sang out, in what appeared to Watson to be a desperate effort to either interrupt, or drown out, the caustic conversation at the other end of the table. Lord Trenthume sat up straight in what appeared to be relief at the diversion. “DO you remember the first archaeological outing I ever attended with you? The one just outside London, where you fell into the pit?”
    “Fell into the pit?!” Phillips goggled. “How on earth did THAT happen?”
    Holmes flushed, but Watson noted her statements had served the purpose of at least temporarily silencing the rancour between Beaumont and Nichols-Woodall; the attention—and curiosity—of both men, as well as that of Phillips and Lord Trenthume, was now fastened upon the conversation between Holmes and Leighton Whitesell.
    “The particular dig Leigh is referencing was in Stonehenge,” Holmes said stiffly to the rest of the table, and Watson wondered at the intense expressions which appeared on all the faces at the other end of the table. “Leigh was quite small at the time; the Professor had given her supervision partly over into my hands. I had just finished explaining to her how archaeology ‘worked,’ as she put it, and showing her how to extract a relic without damaging it, when one of the, ah,