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An omen from the Roman gods, he’d said.
What good was treasure if it meant losing everything she loved? What if she never saw his teasing grin again?
Tomorrow she’d take the coins back to the field and bury them.
Maybe if she buried them deeply enough everything would go back to the way it had been this morning.
Daniel’s father would still be alive.
Summer would begin over again.
The birds would sing and the sun would shine and they would have so many treasures to find.
“You can’t keep us apart,” she yelled, hoping the gods might hear.
No one answered.
She was all alone.
Chapter 1
London, fifteen years later
The trouble with fake moustaches, Lady India Rochester was discovering, was that they had an alarming propensity to come unstuck.
Especially when the lady wearing the clever disguise happened to be perspiring.
And most definitely when the lady was perspiring because she was currently committing at least four crimes in a daring attempt to infiltrate the all-male Society of Antiquaries.
The porter scrutinized her card, his ponderous jowls drooping as he frowned. “Mr. Pomeroy?”
“That’s right.” Indy cleared her throat, dropping her voice a half octave for good measure. She smoothed down her moustache, praying that the adhesive paste held. “My uncle, Lord Pomeroy, is excavating near Rome and sent me in his stead.”
“Highly irregular.”
“Is it really?” Indy shrugged, feigning a nonchalance she was far from feeling. “WellIdon’t want to attend the meeting—bound to be a yawning bore, what?—But I did promise the old boy I’d send him notes. Do let me in, there’s a good fellow, and I’ll promise not to snore too loudly from the back bench.”
The man wasn’t budging. Apparently he’d been hired by the Antiquaries because of an abundance of caution and an utter lack of humor.
Frustration pulsed through her mind. She must pass through this door.
They’d left her no choice but subterfuge.
She had as much right as any to study the Rosetta Stone at close quarters before it was moved back to the British Museum for public display, always to be surrounded by onlookers and guards.
The stone was the key to unlocking the mysteries and secrets of hieroglyphics—the difficult-to-decipher written language of the ancient Egyptians. It bore three columns of the same inscription, each in a different language: Greek, Egyptian script, and hieroglyphics.
She’d spent much of the last two years on archaeological expeditions and needed to view the script on the stone to corroborate her translation of a text that she believed could lead her to one of archaeology’s greatest prizes—the burial place of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.
Even thinking about it quickened her pulse.
If she located Cleopatra’s tomb, the men couldn’t laugh at her anymore, they couldn’t exclude her from their societies and dismiss her work. Even the famous antiquarian the Duke of Ravenwood—her former best friend and current enemy—wouldn’t be able to ignore her achievements.
Indy had made it her life’s work to study the powerful, influential women who had helped shape history.
Her shoulders tensed thinking of the way Ravenwood had publicly challenged her theories on the female gender of the ancient Pharaoh Hatshepsut.
Shrug it off. Don’t let thoughts of Ravenwood destroy your dilettante disguise.
