On July 2, 1921, Eve attends race day at Newbury Racecourse with her family and guests, including Lieutenant Beauchamp, who is visiting Highclere Castle for the first time. Beauchamp is nervous about impressing Eve’s parents, which she finds endearing, and she reassures him. Her brother, Porchey, arrives and introduces Miss Catherine Wendell of New York, whom he met in Paris; their held hands signal the relationship is serious. Catherine and Beauchamp discover shared American connections. Eve jokes to Porchey about their mother’s dislike of Americans, but Porchey turns grave: Catherine has little money, and Carnarvon has been preoccupied with finances. Eve is stunned, having assumed their mother’s inherited fortune was sufficient, and promises a worried Porchey to support his relationship with their parents.

That same evening at Highclere, Eve can barely eat. Connecting overlooked signs—art auctions, the sale of the London town house, staff reductions—she concludes the family is on the edge of financial ruin. Carnarvon asks her to share the Egypt escape story for the guests; she obliges but feels hollow, especially when the guests take no notice of Ahmed’s role. After dinner, Beauchamp quietly asks if she is all right, for he is the only person to see past her composed manner. Touched, she leads him through a secret door in the Library into the Music Room to view the Egyptian collection, recently returned from the Burlington exhibit. She shows him a magnificent necklace, and when he asks to put it on her, she agrees; she shivers as his fingers touch her neck. He tells her she is beautiful and kisses her; she returns the kiss. A noise forces them apart, and as they move toward the door they overhear Carnarvon and Porchey arguing in the Library. When Carnarvon rejects Miss Wendell, Porchey declares his love for her. Eve shuts the door. When she begins to apologize, Beauchamp stops her and asks her to call him Brograve when they are alone.

By September 30, 1921, Porchey’s determination wins out. Lady Carnarvon unexpectedly champions Catherine and, absorbed in organizing events in her honor, leaves Eve largely to her own devices. Eve spends mornings riding and afternoons working with Carter, mapping the Valley of the Kings and studying past excavation records to find Tutankhamun’s tomb, while secretly pursuing their true goal of finding Hatshepsut’s tomb. When Brograve arrives for a hunt weekend and takes genuine interest in the work, he asks whether any evidence of Hatshepsut exists near a site where American archaeologist Theodore Davis previously found objects bearing Tutankhamun’s name. Carter snaps that Hatshepsut’s tomb has no bearing on their site selection and Brograve excuses himself. Once he leaves, Carter confronts Eve: She should not have disclosed their secret pursuit, since Carnarvon does not know it has been their true objective. Carter also hints that the excavation is financially precarious. Eve catches up with Brograve in the corridor; he tells her never to apologize for her family or her work, says he will miss her when she goes to Egypt in January, and hopes to dig alongside her one day.

On March 1, 1922, Eve, Carnarvon, and Carter sit in the Winter Palace bar in Luxor after another failed excavation season. Carnarvon has been selling inherited properties, paintings, and Egyptian artifacts to cover Highclere’s mounting costs, and it is still not enough. Carter tentatively offers to sell some of his own artifacts to fund the dig—an indirect admission of his trade in questionable antiquities—which Carnarvon brushes off, his reaction suggesting he is at least partly aware of Carter’s dealings. To lift morale, Eve proposes a trip to Cairo, citing Egypt’s newly declared independence and an invitation from the Allenbys. Once Carnarvon agrees and leaves, Eve quietly tells Carter their real reason for going: approaching underground dealers for any information connected to Hatshepsut.

On March 2 in Cairo, while Carnarvon meets with Allenby, Eve and Carter work through the Khan el-Khalili souk, visiting several dealers so that word of their visit will precede them to Mamouk, a more reputable shopkeeper. At each stop, Carter produces small artifacts from his bag to build goodwill and prompt frank discussion. In Mamouk’s back room, they find nothing linked to Hatshepsut. When Eve asks directly, Mamouk reports that the Metropolitan Museum’s team at Hatshepsut’s temple may have found relevant objects but keeps everything to themselves, and concludes that if they want a Hatshepsut artifact, they will simply have to excavate it.

That evening, Eve accompanies Carnarvon to a dinner party at the High Commission Residency, determined to project optimism so Carnarvon will not abandon the excavation. A forthright American woman introduces herself as Mrs. Ernest Thompson Seton, a travel writer who encourages women to explore the world, currently researching Egypt. When Eve mentions she works on archaeological digs, Mrs. Seton is astonished, then offers to bring Eve—disguised as her assistant—to an interview she has arranged with Saad Zaghloul’s wife, widely known as the Mother of the Egyptians, the following morning. She frames the invitation as an act of solidarity for women who step outside societal expectations, and Eve agrees.

On March 3, Eve lies to Carnarvon and accompanies Mrs. Seton to the Zaghloul residence, the guarded nationalist headquarters. Inside, Madame Zaghloul sits surrounded by Egyptian women from every social class. Mrs. Seton interviews her about emerging from purdah in 1919 after her husband’s exile, organizing boycotts and public marches that created genuine economic pressure. Moved, Eve half-whispers that the story reminds her of Hatshepsut. Madame Zaghloul responds thoughtfully, noting that Hatshepsut created a better land for her people. She then identifies Eve as English and observes that she is unlike most English women, who never attempt to understand Egyptians. Eve says she hopes to be as brave as Madame Zaghloul and Hatshepsut; Madame Zaghloul replies that ancient Egyptian history is not past but alive within Egyptian women, capable of rising into a powerful force when needed.

Back in Luxor on March 6, Eve acts on an idea prompted by Madame Zaghloul’s words. Since Hatshepsut justified her authority through her father Thutmose I and the gods, Eve wonders whether she planned a hidden burial chamber extending from KV20, which already contains both their sarcophagi, which were found empty. Carter agrees to reopen the site. Eve, Carter, and Ahmed spend two hours systematically examining the burial chamber walls and find no hidden opening. As Eve sits on the floor in defeat, her fingernail catches a buried fragment: a piece of an ushabti, a type of figurine often found in burial chambers, bearing what appears to be part of Hatshepsut’s cartouche. It is possibly the first such object ever found. Eve recognizes that this is not enough to secure another season, and leaving the tomb she reflects that failing to fully uncover Hatshepsut means disappointing “[h]er family. [Herself]. Madame Zaghloul. Women everywhere” (245).

In 1472 BCE in Thebes, Hatshepsut prepares for her formal coronation with Senenmut, her advisor and lover, who reminds her she has already governed for seven years, and the ceremony is a formality. The high priest, Hapuseneb, crowns her and invests her with the crook and flail before a large crowd. Hatshepsut announces her pharaonic name—Maatkare Khenemet-Amun Hatshepsut—using a feminine structure of the name to make her gender permanently plain. She shares the throne with the eight-year-old Co-Pharaoh Thutmose III, who asks her not to leave him to rule alone; she takes his hand and promises they will govern together.

In 1470 BCE, a nobleman publicly challenges the cost of Hatshepsut’s expedition to the kingdom of Punt; to assert her authority, she has him removed from the throne room. Shortly after, the expedition’s leader, Nehsi, returns after two years of silence with trade established and a cargo of incense, living incense trees, animal hides, ebony, gold, and three Punt dignitaries ready to negotiate ongoing relations. Hatshepsut descends from her throne to receive Nehsi personally and orders a festival in his honor, framing the expedition’s success as divine confirmation of her reign.

In 1467 BCE during the Thoth festival, Hatshepsut learns that Thutmose III resents her dominance. When they are carried through the crowds on litters, he confronts her, saying he is of age and must rule alongside rather than behind her. Rather than resist, Hatshepsut responds with apparent enthusiasm, claiming she has long awaited this moment, and defuses the challenge by offering him command of the Egyptian military, channeling his ambition into a role that preserves her own authority while giving him genuine power.

In 1465 BCE, Thutmose III and Neferure, Hatshepsut and Senenmut’s daughter, are formally wed in a temple ceremony. Hatshepsut watches from her throne, unable to celebrate alongside the guests. She and Senenmut share quiet grief over Neferure’s transition from daughter to queen. Hatshepsut presents the couple with a newly constructed palace as a wedding gift, having concealed its purpose as a mortuary project. The chapter closes with Hatshepsut wishing, for once, to only be Neferure’s mother rather than her pharaoh.

In 1464 BCE, Hatshepsut uses the culminating ceremony of a month-long Sed festival to silence ongoing doubts about her rule. For the first time, she appears before the public in full masculine pharaoh dress, declaring this will now be her permanent public presentation. She delivers a speech presenting a new account of her divine conception, claiming the god Amun appeared to her mother and was her true father. Then, she opens the newly built Red Chapel, its walls depicting her legitimacy and Neferure’s role as God’s Wife of Amun, to ordinary citizens. She closes with a warning that opposing any member of the Thutmoside line means opposing all of them.