He approached Nubnofret that evening, going to her apartment and allowing himself to be announced by Wernuro. Nubnofret came to him equably enough, offered him a stool, then returned to her place by the couch where her servants were stripping her. One stood by, a pleated blue froth of linen over her arm. Nubnofret stepped out of the green-beaded sheath she had worn at dinner, and without a trace of self-consciousness, snapped her fingers. Her body is all soft rounds and curves, Khaemwaset thought as he watched the blue cloak being wrapped around her and tied with a wide ribbon. She is still beautiful, but not to me. How I wish it were not so! I grieve for her, my proud, unhappy Nubnofret, but there is nothing I can do.
“How can I help you, Khaemwaset?” she asked, arms extended for the blue lapis bracelets being pushed over her hands. “Is something on your mind?”
“Not really,” he lied. “We have not talked much lately, and today I have missed you.”
She cast him a shrewd look. “Is it Sheritra’s infatuation with that boy?”
Khaemwaset sighed inwardly. “No, although I suppose that soon we must decide what we are going to do about her. Have you received any word from your farm stewards, Nubnofret? Has the harvest begun yet in your Delta holdings?”
She crossed to her cosmetic table and sat, picking up a mirror. “My lips are dry,” she said to her cosmetician. “Do not henna them again. Anoint them with a little castor oil. I received a scroll yesterday with regard to my few grapevines,” she said in answer to his question. “I think this year I will have the grapes dried and stored. We ran out of raisins last year and we certainly need no more wine put down.”
He agreed and they talked idly for a while. Some of the stiffness went out of her, and she began to grin at him with something of her old cheerfulness when he complained that the birds were attempting to steal the food for the fish in their pond. But she quickly withdrew into herself when he at last dared to say, “I think Tbubui is missing her servants, my dear. She has not said so directly, but it must be hard for her, not only trying to adjust to a strange household but attempting to adapt to strange staff as well. Why don’t you suggest to her that she dismiss those she has and send for some familiar faces?”
Nubnofret went very still, then she waved her cosmetician away with one savage, imperious gesture and rose. “I hate what you have become, Prince,” she said coldly and deliberately. “So meekly pliant, so anxious to please, so deceitful in a petty, altogether reprehensible way. At one time you would have come to me full of a royal confidence and you would have said, ‘Tbubui wants to know why you refused her request and I want to know too.’ You are fast earning my contempt, husband.”
Khaemwaset left the stool. “I did not know that she had approached you,” he lied hotly, desperately, and she laughed with derision.
“Did you not? Well now you do. She wants her own staff. My servants are not good enough for her. I turned her down.”
“But why?” he asked, coming to a halt before her fiery eyes, her white, dilated nostrils. “The request was reasonable, Nubnofret. It would have cost you nothing to grant it. Is your jealousy so cruel?”
“No,” she snapped. “You may not believe me, Khaemwaset, but I am not jealous of Tbubui. I dislike her intensely because she is a crude, common woman without a shred of the morality that has made Egypt a great nation and kept its rulers and nobility safe from the excesses and disastrous weaknesses of foreign kingdoms. She is a sham. The children sense it, I think, but you are blind. I do not blame you for that.” She smiled without warmth. “I blame you for slowly allowing her to gain ascendency over you.”
The tide of rage rose in Khaemwaset so fast that his face was burning and his throat acrid before she was even halfway through her speech. He clasped his hands tightly behind his back to keep from shaking her. “The matter of the servants,” he reminded her from between clenched teeth. She swung away and threw herself back onto the chair. The cosmetician began to braid her hair. “I do not like them,” she said in a low voice. “They unnerve me, and I cannot bear the thought of them permanently in my house. The captain of her barge, the personal maid who is always with her, the ones who have escorted her and Sisenet from our house in the past—there is something menacing in their movements and their utter silence and the way they never seem to have eyes.” Suddenly she tugged her head away from the girl’s ministrations. “They never seem to look at you, Khaemwaset! And when they are in a room with you it is as though they are not only invisible but not there at all.” She grasped the blue linen frothing over her knees and began to pull at it unconsciously. Astounded, Khaemwaset saw that she was near to tears. “Servants are always with you. You are doing something, thinking something, and you have a need, and you are aware that Ib is standing by the door and Kasa is sitting in that corner, you are aware, Khaemwaset. But with Tbubui’s servants you not only forget that they are there, it is as though they really aren’t there. I feel the same strange not-being in Sisenet. I will not have them here, Khaemwaset! It is my prerogative to refuse Tbubui’s request, and for my own peace of mind I do so. I will not have them here!”