The Sacred River (10 page)

Louisa looked around her. She tilted back her head, the sun falling on her white face.

“Where is the roof?” she said. “A house must have a roof.”

In a large, airy bedroom with long wooden shutters at the window, Harriet undid her pocket from around her waist and slid her journal under the pillow on the bed. Kicking off her boots, she lay flat on her back on a mattress with a dip in the middle and breathed into her stomach.

She felt filled with an unexpected happiness. She’d feared she was coming to Egypt to die, but now that she was here, she had the peculiar sense that her true life, the one that had always awaited her, had at last begun.

FIFTEEN

Louisa entered the room to see Yael and Harriet sitting opposite each other at one end of a long table. She pulled up a chair next to Harriet’s.

“Did you hear the racket?” Yael said. “Late last night and again before dawn? I thought it was a funeral but Harriet says it’s the priest.”

“It’s the call to prayer,” Harriet said. “Mustapha explained it to me.”

“You must have heard it, Louisa. Such a queer-sounding dirge and we’re to be subjected to it five times a day.”

“I believe I did,” Louisa said, shaking out a napkin and spreading it on her lap. She smiled at Yael. “I can’t be sure, I slept so deeply.”

It wasn’t true. She had slept badly, then risen early and taken a shower, standing under the trickle of water and looking up at a small, high bathroom window through which bright light poured. It was peculiar to be naked in a foreign country. She felt more exposed than if she were in her own bathroom, clothed by the familiarity of her house and city and country.

Back in her bedroom, drying herself on a towel stiff as a board, she dusted talcum powder under her arms and put on her lightest dress. It was one of her favorites, a fitted jacket and skirt in emerald green with a darker, bottle-green train over the hips of the skirt, falling in a fishtail at the back, but once she’d fastened the jacket, draped the train over the bustle, it felt wrong. The fabric carried in its folds a whiff of fog, something sour and dirty, mixing with the smell of her soaped and powdered skin, the odors of salt and pine that drifted through the open window.

Louisa surveyed the table. The cloth bore pale stains of days gone by and the food was spread on unmatched china plates. The fare consisted not of the raw sheep’s eyeballs she’d feared but slices of white cheese, flat round loaves the size of saucers, piled high, and a tall jug of what smelled like coffee, strong and aromatic.

“Are these eggs?” she asked, reaching out and touching one.

“Hard-boiled,” Yael said. “And perfectly edible.”

Louisa sipped her coffee and listened to Harriet’s breathing. It was shallow but soft, neither badly impeded nor quite clear. It was foolish to hope that Harriet would be completely cured as soon as they reached Egypt, yet in some primitive part of herself Louisa had hoped exactly that. She had wished for a miracle, a means to silence the words Mr. Hamilton had conveyed from her mother and that she had continued to hear, as if they had planted themselves in her ears.
Death is near
.

Harriet rose from her chair, brushing crumbs from her lap.

“I’m going to look around the garden,” she said, standing between the long, open doors.

She was wearing a tea gown in a floral print and Louisa, seeing her slender waist, the curve of her long neck, had the sense that still afflicted her sometimes, of loss, because Harriet was taller by a head than she, a woman, not a child.

“Shouldn’t you rest for a few minutes?” she said. “Digest your breakfast.”

“I am perfectly all right, Mother.” Harriet turned to face back into the room and the sun lit up her hair from behind in a scarlet halo. “By the way, Mr. Soane said he would call on us. He asked me to tell you.”

Harriet walked into the garden. Louisa stared after her as the dog rose from under the table and trotted out, his claws tapping on the tiled floor.

“Dear Harriet is in better health already,” said Yael, spreading jam on a piece of bread.

“Sea air always agreed with her,” Louisa said, cracking the shell of the egg on the rim of her plate, peeling the sharp shards from the softly solid albumen. Her mind was racing. How could Eyre Soane call, when he did not have their address? It was impossible. He was taunting her.

“Perhaps some of our fellow passengers have lifted Harriet’s spirits. I believe she enjoyed making the acquaintance of Mrs. Cox, and Mr. Soane.” Yael chewed and swallowed, took a sip of coffee. “You seem troubled, Louisa.”

“Is that so?”

“You know that . . .” Yael regarded her with her earnest gray eyes. “That if I could aid you by any means, I would.”

Louisa put down a half-eaten slice of cheese, rolled up the napkin, and pulled it through its ivory ring, looking at the carved elephants condemned to walk forever in a circle.

“Thank you, Yael,” she said, more stiffly than she intended. “You mean well, I’m sure, but I am not troubled by anything. Please excuse me. I must finish unpacking.”

Back in the bedroom, surveying the peculiar contents of her trunk, wishing again she had thought to slip in a fourpenny card of pins, Louisa found that her hands were shaking. She had a feeling of time having turned inside out, of the present being flimsy and contingent, less real than the past.

Sitting on the bed, closing her eyes, she found herself again back in the flint house of her girlhood, hearing the cry of gulls. Louisa was home from her walk on the sands, her head spinning, unable to sit down as her mother urged and take a turn with shelling the glut of peas. Amelia Newlove looked up at her from her chair by the fireplace.

“Whatever is it, Louisa?”

“I met a man,” she said, “and his family. On the beach. An artist.” She avoided her mother’s eyes. “He wants to paint my picture.”

Louisa had never heard of a person famous enough to go by their first name alone. But her older sister, Hepzibah, staying with the family for a summer holiday following her marriage, informed her that all England knew about the painter Augustus, member of the Royal Academy, whose pictures of goddesses and muses sold for vast sums.

“
Diana the Huntress
fetched a thousand guineas. Imagine! Did he offer you money, Izzy?”

Louisa shook her head.

“How very proper. He is an honorable man. He will reward you afterward. He will make you celebrated.”

Next morning, Hepzibah woke her early with hot water and said she must bathe and brush her hair, couldn’t arrive looking like a gypsy. After her sister’s scrubbing of her, Louisa discovered she didn’t want to wear the red dress. She took her church dress, navy, with a ragged white collar that hung lower on one side than the other, out of the chest and stood with her hair lifted in her hands while Hepzibah did up the row of hooks and eyes at the back. Downstairs, perched on a stool in the scullery, she drank a cup of tea, refused Hepzibah’s pressing offer to accompany her to Augustus’s house, and set off along the cliff-top path, carrying a cloth bag containing a dozen new-laid eggs, sent from Louisa’s mother to Augustus’s wife.

Once she was out of sight of the upstairs windows of the flint house, Louisa dawdled, spinning flat disks of chalk along the path with short, violent kicks from the toe of her boot, looking in the springy turf for four-leaf clovers. Down at the beach, a group of village girls played hopscotch in the sand, their boots discarded, lined up in a row. Louisa stood watching, wishing she were one of them, not herself, alone on the cliff top and expected at a big house.

She didn’t lift the rusty ring of iron that hung from a lion’s mouth. She rapped on the wood with her bare knuckles. The door opened immediately and Augustus stepped out of the house, into the morning brightness. He looked older than he had the day before, the skin under his eyes falling in soft pleats, the beard around his lips flecked with white. He appeared rumpled, as if he had just risen from his bed.

“It’s fortunate that I was expecting you,” he said as he closed the door behind him. “No one would have heard that.”

He went ahead of her across the garden and into what looked from the outside like an old barn. On the inside, it was unlike any barn Louisa had ever seen. No straw or mountain of hay. No animals. It was a great, high-roofed place, almost empty. The top half of one wall was made of panes of clear glass through which light flooded down onto the wooden floor. She felt for a moment as if she’d walked into a church.

Two enormous easels on wheels stood next to each other along one wall, as well as a stuffed peacock perched on a stand. In the middle of the room was a large table bearing a collection of shells and feathers and carved stones. Something oily and sharp pervaded the air and Louisa sneezed three times in a row, light, quick sneezes that she couldn’t prevent.

“Pardon me,” she said, when she could get the words out.

Augustus sat on a stool looking at her, his face frank and curious.

“Your father agreed?” he said.

“My father is away.”

Something prevented her from telling this man that her father was dead, had been dead for three years. Augustus couldn’t have asked anybody about her, locally, or he would have known. Everyone knew about the drowning of Captain Newlove, within sight of land and home. Married to the mermaids, the village boys said he was. The man’s eyes shifted.

“Your mother, then?”

At the memory of the conversation that had taken place around the hearth, Louisa felt the burning begin inside. Hepzibah, altered since her wedding from the crosspatch she’d always been, now perpetually sunny-tempered, had spun the whole family into a tale of their altered fortunes, of what would occur once Louisa’s painting too was sold for a thousand guineas and eminent painters beat a path across the cliff to the door of the flint house. On the advice of her twenty-one-year-old newly married daughter, Louisa’s mother had agreed that she should go for her portrait.

“My mother saw no objection,” she said, looking at the toes of her summer shoes, which had been Lavinia’s, the white leather stained grass-green.

She did not know where, apart from the ground, to look. Around the walls of the studio, on the floor or balanced on chairs, there were pictures of women. Women as she had never seen women before. From the back, from the side, from the front. Standing, seated, or reclining. Draped with gauzy silks and chiffons, wisps of cloud or ribbons of mist that accentuated their nakedness rather than hid it.

“Don’t look so frightened, girl.”

He reached forward, gripped her arm, and squeezed it. Louisa dropped the eggs. They hit the ground with a soft, crumpling sound and she looked down to see the bag gaping, yolks and whites slithering out onto the floor.

“What do you want with them?” he said.

“They are for your wife.”

Her voice was shaking and she didn’t know whether it was from the loss of twelve good eggs. She felt that she ought not to be here, that between the flint house and the barn something had gone awry.

Augustus frowned.

“My wife doesn’t require eggs.”

He fetched a cloth and wiped up the mess himself, rubbing broken yolk into the floorboards, muttering about the patina.

Louisa had never seen a man on his knees, with a cloth in his hand. As she stared, her eye was caught by a movement outside the open barn door. A shadow passed over the beam of sunlight that fell in a column on the dark floor. She looked up and it had gone.

Augustus was on his feet again, his back turned to her, busying himself at the far end of the studio. He continued for so long that Louisa decided he’d forgotten she was there. Changed his mind. She felt relief and some disappointment.

“Shall I go now, sir?”

“Go?” He turned and flung out an arm. “There’s a screen over there, where you can disrobe. What did you say your name was?”

Disrobe. What could the word mean? She knew, although she had never heard it before in her life. It sounded different from “undress,” as if to be disrobed was worse, but she couldn’t think why or how that could be so. Her mouth was dry when she spoke and her tongue seemed twice its usual size. “My name is Louisa Ellen Newlove.”

“Let your hair down. Don’t comb it. Leave it as it is.”

“I’ve combed it already.”

“You can keep your shoes on, for now. We don’t want you catching your death, do we, Gypsy?”

Louisa didn’t know how to answer. It didn’t matter. Preparing his canvas, rubbing it with a dry brush, the man appeared to have forgotten her again.

Louisa was too ashamed when she got home to tell the others what had happened. That Augustus had expected her to pose, not with a half-smile on her closed lips, a prayer book in her hand, dressed in her demure lace collar, as they’d rehearsed in front of the old mirror in the hallway, but without any apparel.

Naked and with a certain expression in her eyes that he said was the reason he’d brought her there in the first place. He wanted her looking as she did on the beach when he first saw her, he said. Like a Gypsy. Sullen. Her lips not half-smiling or closed but parted.

That she hadn’t dared to refuse or explain the misunderstanding. That when she’d managed to extricate herself from her dress, her hands shaking like an old woman’s, her fingers fumbling as if they’d never before encountered hooks and eyes, when she’d come out from behind the screen that was painted with sprays of yellow flowers, he had arranged her body as if she were a dressmaker’s form, his fingers brushing her flesh. That she had agreed or at least not disagreed. That she stood on a drafty floor for three whole hours, naked as the day she was born, her nipples standing up like strawberries, with one hand holding a shell, the other resting on a great rock that somehow had been brought inside. Only her shoes to cover the part of her that could not be seen anyway, the soles of her feet. She’d felt she might die of shame.