The Cottage - Sequel to Seduced

Author Clark James, Illustrated by Clark James, Edited by Clark James

The Cottage continues from where Seduced left off, with Leda intending to spend a few days on her own. Remnants of a tropical cyclone cast ashore an Asian fishing boat, carrying more than fish. Its crew are not all ordinary fishers, and include three purposely abducted women and a young deformed experimental green-hued couple. The owners are intent on recovering the couple and an object from the now sunken wreck, resulting in the first of several international skirmishes. In the midst of this, while visiting the cottage, Cyrene, Calypso’s now aged daughter-in-law, tells Julius of a secret World War II skirmish, when a Japanese submarine loitered off the coast, the landing of its crew being thwarted by Calypso and her son Luke. He also learns of Eve, a girl Luke met at the end of that war, whose life, after a stormy road journey to Kawhia, did a double somersault. Leda, Venus and Diana dig deeper into the 1870 shipwreck, discover two skeletons chained to the stump of a mast, and extract several boxes. These contain hieroglyphic scrolls taken from a Valley of the Kings tomb, and are meticulously deciphered by Diana, and 3000-year-old jewellery taken from the same tomb, all in a race against time due to Egyptologists now being aware of the lost horde. The scrolls tell of a previously unknown event of great historical significance. At the time of Pharaoh Amenhotep II (1425 BC) a Philippines eruption which the Egyptians did not know of, caused worldwide lowering of temperatures, and subsequently the Ethiopian highland winter snows not melting, resulting in the failure of the annual inundation of the Nile. In the face of famine and Amenhotep’s armies’ inability to secure food imported from India and the East, a flotilla crewed by women, led by a general’s wife Laret and her Syrian slave Azra, travel down the Nile (or The River as it was then known) to gather produce from the frozen and deserted Nile delta. They make two journeys: the first is raided by pirates, and the second overtaken by Mediterranean tidal waves of similar magnitude to those from the Santorini eruption 150 years earlier. The jewellery belonged to Laret and her promoted to daughter status, Azra.

Author Clark James, Illustrated by Clark James, Edited by Clark James

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