The Murder of King Tut Read Free Page A

waited for her husband to bend to her strong will.
    “Tuthmosis would have been a great pharaoh,” he said mournfully.
    “That son now wanders the afterworld,” Tiye replied.
    Amenhotep nodded sadly. Their oldest boy, his beloved, his favorite, was dead. Soon he would join him. Egypt would need a
     new pharaoh. The only way to control the selection was to do it himself.
    “Bring the accident to me,” Amenhotep roared. “Of course he will be pharaoh. But shame on me for leaving Egypt to him. Shame
     on both of us.”

Chapter 4
Didlington Hall
Near Swaffham, England
    1887
    “HOWARD, IS THAT YOU? What do you think you’re doing in here?” asked Lord Amherst, swinging open the library doors. “These
     artifacts are
irreplaceable.
I’ve told you that before. You are a stubborn boy.”
    Thirteen-year-old Howard Carter quickly turned his head toward His Lordship. He was caught! He had been warned repeatedly
     about this room. He was definitely a stubborn boy.
    It was the middle of the day. Young Carter was supposed to be helping his father, who was painting a new commission for His
     Lordship. In a moment of boredom, the boy had slipped away to the most forbidden and imposing room at Didlington Hall:
the library.
    He couldn’t help himself. The room was utterly fascinating, its silence augmented by the startling, massive stone statues
     situated about the room, imported straight from the sands of Egypt. To gaze at them allowed Carter to see into the history
     of the known world. These pieces truly
were
irreplaceable.
    Didlington Hall was a palatial fortress eight miles south of Swaffham. It was the county seat of Lord Amherst, a member of
     Parliament with a penchant for styling his hair in the foppish manner of Oscar Wilde. Seven thousand acres and sixteen leased
     farms surrounded the great home. There was a large, pristine lake, a paddock, a falconer’s lodge, a boathouse, and a ballroom
     that had been host to grand and important parties for more than a hundred years.
    But it was the library that Howard Carter loved most, and he couldn’t stay out of the room.
    Fortunately, Lord Amherst was a nice man with five daughters; Carter was the closest thing to a son he’d ever had. He recognized
     the slender, strong-jawed young man’s innate, sometimes fierce curiosity and saw in him something of himself.
    He and young Carter both wanted—no, that would be too soft a description—
demanded
answers about what had come before them. They were obsessed with the ancient past.
    So rather than kicking Carter out of the library, Lord Amherst proceeded to walk him through the wood-paneled room, patiently
     explaining the significance of the more notable books.
    There was a priceless collection of Bibles, for example, many printed centuries earlier. There was a section devoted to
incunabula,
books printed shortly after the invention of the printing press. There were books with fancy bindings, first editions by
     famous authors, and so forth and so on.
    And then there was the
Egyptian
collection.
    In addition to owning tome after tome detailing the known history of ancient Egypt, Lord Amherst had rather obsessively decorated
     the library with Egyptian relics. The taller statues were bigger than a man and loomed like sentinels among the overstuffed
     wingback chairs and oil reading lamps. There were dozens of smaller statues too, and rare texts printed on papyrus that had
     been sealed behind glass so human hands like Howard’s couldn’t damage them. Amherst had bought the collection from a German
     priest two decades earlier and had added to it every year since.
    “Not only is it one of the largest and most important collections of Egyptology in all of Great Britain,” he told Carter,
     “it is the joy of my life.”
    “And mine as well,” Carter chimed in.
    The tour concluded with a history-changing announcement: Lord Amherst was hereby offering the young man unlimited access to
     his collection. Never mind that