Lady Bertram blinked. She, somewhat offended to be deemed ignorant, was about to voice it, then prudently thought better of such a faux pas. She noted that he was indeed changing before her very eyes, and now looked less a desiccated skeleton draped in skin and rags than a very tanned old sailor with a bad case of scurvy. Indeed, at this rate he would look no worse than Wilcox in a day or two.

The Mummy improved, the more he fed, knew Lady Bertram. What she did not know, however, was that the large crates filled with ancient Egyptians littering her house were undergoing a metamorphosis of their own, by proxy. That is, the contents were.

Mummies were reviving all over Mansfield Park.

They shuffled about, at first rather horrendous in their ragged and desiccated state, and made more than one chambermaid scream at the sight, as she might come upon such in the living room or pantry. But for the moment, they were rather harmless—having been commanded by the Spirit and Mind of their great Pharaoh not to take more life force than he did himself. Indeed, controlled and regulated thus, they were no worse than large horseflies or summer mosquitoes in their minute feedings upon the living.

“What manner of rampant incompetence and dense buffoonery is happening in this house?” the cook bewailed throughout the day, as she would send out one servant after another to do a task and they would not return for hours, or else come back with total amnesia of the event, having to be told again and again. Elsewhere in Mansfield, the lawns would not get watered, linen was not folded, or dusting and cleaning was done three times more than it ought to have been done, by dazed scullery maids.

“Oh, if only Sir Thomas were home!” some of the staff complained amongst themselves. “Her Ladyship is simply not up to overseeing such a large household—” But they did not finish such a disloyal line of thought, and continued about their menial tasks, occasionally stubbing their toes upon a shifted box or crate in the hallway, and crying out in frustration—did it not sit in a different place just moments earlier? Why was this or that crate unlocked, and why was there apparently nothing inside but packing hay and other some such materials, and all that ungodly sand? Who opened these blasted crates anyway, and left them underfoot, in the way of good hardworking folk?

No wonder Sir Thomas was expected by all with a fever pitch. By all the staff, that is—his own family was quite a different matter. . . .