The Lost Sisterhood Read Free Page B

likelihood I would never have met him again, had it not been for Katherine Kent. Just before Christmas the following year, she invited me along to a reception at the Ashmolean Museum—a reception, as it turned out, in honor of a recent donation of ancient artifacts from the Moselane Manor Collection.
    “Come!” she said, pulling me away from an exquisite statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis and spearheading our path through the exclusive crowd. “I want to introduce you. The Moselanes are very useful.” Being a woman of little patience, Katherine had perfected the art of swooping right into a conversation and stealing away her prey of choice. “James! This is Diana. Extremely talented. She wants to know who bleached your Isis.”
    After nearly choking on his champagne, James turned toward us, looking so tantalizingly handsome in his suit and tie that my fantasies of yore came galloping back in a heartbeat.
    “I was merely admiring her,” I hastened to say. “Whoever found her and brought her to England must have incurred quite the Pharaonic curse—”
    “My ancestor. The first Lord Moselane.” Astonishingly enough, James looked as if he had completely forgotten our previous encounter. In fact, his smile suggested I was precisely the sort of woman he had hoped to meet that evening. “Died peacefully in his sleep at ninety-two. At least we like to think so.” He shook my hand and was in no hurry to let it go. “Delighted.”
    “Actually”—I reluctantly withdrew my hand—”we met last year. In front of Blackwell’s.” Before the words were even out of my mouth, I winced at my own treacherous honesty. It took only a few seconds for the cogwheels to click into place in James’s head, and it was not a pretty process to behold.
    “Right,” he said, slowly. “Right, right, right …”
    But the word written in his hazel eyes was quite the opposite.
    Indeed, in the months to come, whenever we would dutifully meet for coffee—always prompted by Katherine Kent—James’s opening question, “How is your mother?” would set the tone for our conversation and remind me why our coffees never turned into lunch. He was attentive, certainly, and would occasionally give me a look that sent hope fluttering through my body. But by and large he kept treating me with unfaltering chivalry, as if I were an untouchable maiden he was sworn to protect.
    Perhaps it was all because of my mother. Or perhaps it was partly due to James’s being born—as my father had once so very aptly phrased it—with a silver spoon up his arse. Keeping the blue blood pure and all that. In which case I could groom my plume as much as I liked; it would never occur to Lord Moselane’s son that we were the same species.
    I was stirred from my High Table reverie by a hand taking away the plate with my untouched starter. Next to me, James sat with his head bent as if in prayer, checking his phone underneath the starched dinnernapkin. Reaching discreetly into my handbag, I pulled out Mr. Ludwig’s photograph and held it toward him. “What do you make of this?”
    James leaned over to look. “Approximate dating?”
    “I’d say about ten days,” I joked, “judging from the bent corner and frayed edges. As for the inscription … your guess is as good as mine.”
    He squinted, clearly intrigued. “Who gave you this?”
    “A mysterious man,” I said, with deliberate drama, “who told me this picture is proof the Amazons
did
exist—”
    “What is that?” Katherine Kent reached over to pluck the photograph from my fingers and study it in the light of a candle. “Where was this taken?”
    “No idea.” Happily surprised at their interest, I quickly drew up the high points of my bizarre encounter that afternoon. When I circled back to Mr. Ludwig’s claim about the undeciphered Amazon alphabet, however, James sat back in his chair and groaned.
    “How vexing!” Katherine gave me back the photo with a puzzled frown. “This could be