The Sacred River (17 page)

Blotting the paper, she handed it to Harriet. The handwriting was neat and even, the address in a part of London Harriet did not know. Below, Mrs. Cox had written:
Mr. S. spoke of you most kindly. Wanted to get a letter to you before he travels to Luxor with his friends.

Harriet folded the note and slid it into her pocket next to her journal.

“I’d like to give you our address,” she said to Mrs. Cox, glancing over her shoulder.

Louisa stood a few feet away with Mr. Cox under a grinning crocodile mounted on the wall. Harriet took another sheet of hotel paper. Below the post office box number, the line drawing of the Oasis Palace Hotel, she wrote the Canonbury address.
Tell him I long to see him again
, she added underneath. Folding the paper, she held it out to Mrs. Cox.

TWENTY-SIX

Louisa sat at a breakfast table on the deck of a dahabeah. Amid the clatter of china, the hum of conversation, the screech of birds from the banks, Harriet was quiet.

“Some more coffee, Harriet?”

Harriet shook her head.

Fouad had found a cabin for them, sharing the boat with a party of eight French people on their way to Abu Simbel. Louisa and Harriet had boarded the previous evening, hours after seeing the Coxes. They’d sailed through the night, by moonlight, the captain saying they would take advantage of the wind
.
Harriet had been wakeful, troubled by fits of coughing, but had announced in the morning that she felt well enough to breakfast on deck.

In the bright sunshine, she looked almost gaunt, her hair thickened with red dust, its color dulled. She’d taken only a few mouthfuls of an omelette.

“Is there anything I can fetch you?” Louisa said. “Do for you?”

Harriet laid down her fork.

“No, thank you. I’m going back to the cabin, Mother, to rest.”

Louisa felt sure she was thinking of Eyre Soane. Her heart ached for her daughter. It was natural, that Harriet should want a suitor, should have hopes of a family of her own, a future. It was cruel, that the first man to present himself should be Soane, trying to use Harriet in a game of cat-and-mouse.

Louisa followed her down the wooden steps, wishing she could bestow happiness in the way she’d been able to when Harriet was a child, with a story or a sugar mouse. Louisa didn’t know, now, what made Harriet happy. At Christmas, she’d given her a bottle of scent in a pretty cut-glass bottle but she’d never noticed Harriet smelling of lily of the valley. Blundell had given her another great tome on the pharaohs, which she’d insisted on bringing.

“Do you need a lozenge?” she said, feeling helpless. “I could burn a paper?”

The traveling medicine chest was to hand in the cabin, restocked with the prescriptions of the doctor in Alexandria, new supplies of Espic cigarettes, Legras and Escouflaire powders, from France. She’d bought pastilles of ipecacuanha and a salve he’d recommended.

“No, thank you. Leave me now, Mother, if you would.”

Harriet was grown up, Louisa thought as she climbed the steps back to the deck. She didn’t know why it should have taken so long for this self-evident truth to come home to her. Her daughter was an adult and her life, the preservation of it, was not in Louisa’s hands as it had been when she was a baby, an infant, or even a little girl. Harriet’s life belonged to Harriet and to God. Her death, when it came, belonged equally to her and the Almighty.

Resuming her seat at the table, Louisa sent up an urgent, silent prayer that they were doing the right thing and that the climate in the south would benefit Harriet, the journey not exhaust her further. She added one for herself, that the voyage to save her daughter’s life would not mean the end of her own.

Eyre Soane was bent on creating scandal. Blundell would feel it dreadfully. Blundell cared above all for propriety, for doing the correct things, at the correct time, in the correct way. His sense of what those things, times, ways were, never failed him.

Thinking about her husband, from so far away, Louisa wondered why he adhered so rigidly to what he called good form. Why he found it necessary. She asked herself, not for the first time in her married life, what secrets he might have from her. Where his mind wandered in sleep, in the shared silences of their life together. When she returned to London, to the substantial house, the tree-lined crescent, she had an instinct that they could never go back to how they had been. She felt a yearning sadness that he was not near and might never again be near.

Moving to the little writing desk in the open-air saloon, she wrote to him describing the landscape, the crew, the French fellow travelers. The letter was humorous and even-toned, could not have been more different from how she was feeling.

The
Amon-Ra
plied its way up the great gray-green river, past emerald patches of clover, fields of waving new grain, and flocks of stick-legged egrets. While Harriet rested in the cabin, occupied with her books, her journal, her inks, Louisa reclined in a deck chair, hypnotized by the changing panorama of ruined monuments and tumbledown hovels, farmers astride donkeys in the palm groves. They passed what appeared to be a large and ramshackle factory, from which came the unmistakable smell of boiling sugar, transporting Louisa to her own house, to a dozen pots of strawberry jam cooling on the marble slab.

Accompanying it all was the ghostly creak and groan of water wheels. The archaic-looking contraptions were everywhere, pulled by blinkered asses that trudged in circles, dipping empty vessels on a wheel down into the water, raising them up brimming, for spilling over the fields.

Louisa tried to conjure home again. She strained her ears for the sound of hot water splashing into an enameled bath, Rosina singing in the kitchen, the strike of the several clocks in the drawing room that at midday and midnight made a symphony of the passing of the hours. She could not. Only a high female voice made itself heard, still insisting that death was near. It seemed Amelia Newlove wasn’t aware that Louisa had heeded her words, taken her advice.

At sunset, Louisa rose from the chair and wrote another letter, this time to Mr. Hamilton. Did her mother have any more to say to her? Anything at all? Please would he be so kind as to send Louisa a note, care of the British consul at Luxor in Egypt, passing on any message that might come through.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Yael followed Mustapha through a gate and into a mud-walled and mud-floored enclosure, filled with men. A silent crowd was packed into the little yard and most looked impoverished, their robes ragged, bodies and faces lean. They waited in silence, some sitting on roughly turned wooden chairs and stools, some squatting in the shade cast by one wall, elbows resting on their knees. A few turned their heads to glance at her but Yael had the impression that the men were less surprised by her presence there than she was herself.

One, silver-haired, missing a leg, hauled himself up from his chair and, leaning on a wooden crutch under his arm, pulled the chair away from the rest, so it stood alone. He returned to the others, leaning on the wall.

“For you, Sitti Yael,” said Mustapha, nodding his head at it.

“Thank you.”

Yael sat down, feeling uncomfortable. She didn’t like to deny the man his seat but to refuse his chivalry was worse. A minute later, with no audible command having been issued, a boy with his head swathed in a white cloth brought a drink and set it in front of her on a table.

“Thank you,” she said again, the words discordant in the gathered intensity of the silence. Yael settled herself on the rickety chair, preparing for a long wait. She would not take the drink. Lord only knew what it might be. Not anything normal, such as elderflower cordial or ginger beer, she was certain. Not iced tea or pear juice. Lemonade. Licorice tonic. Her favorite seltzer water. She swallowed. Her throat was parched. It was hotter every day and the wind had continued intermittently in the weeks since the girls had gone.

She sat very still, thinking about them and praying for them at the same time. Louisa had written that the Khamseen afflicted Cairo as badly as Alexandria, that they were traveling farther south. They would be on a boat by now, traveling up the River Nile.

Yael had left it to Louisa to communicate this further change of circumstances to Blundell. She had a feeling that he would be displeased, downright angry, that she had not accompanied them even to Cairo. She had preferred not to dwell on that, was instead following another instinct that
sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,
and she would face the reckoning with Blundell when she was back in London.
The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.

Her mouth was so dry she was unable to swallow. She reached for the tumbler, took a sip of something cold and sour. Its taste was unpleasant and appealing at the same time but surprisingly thirst-quenching. It was curious how in Egypt things could be not one thing or the other but both simultaneously. Egypt, she repeated silently, to herself. She’d grown attached to the word. The awkward sound of it, the unknowable thought of it, gave her pleasure. Egypt. She picked up the glass again, took another sip, then drank it to the end.

Mustapha had asked about and found a room for her for the clinic. It was in a Mohammedan quarter, in an alley so narrow that the wooden galleries protruding from the first floors of the houses nearly touched overhead, blocking out the sky, creating a perpetual twilight; the sandy path was dampened by water thrown out of the doorways by Egyptian women, their veils tied over their faces, dusty infants clinging to their necks or backs.

Yael had to duck under the door frame, but once inside the house she could stand freely. The dirt floor was clean and swept, the air scented with some lingering odor that Mustapha informed her was incense, to banish evil spirits. The frames of the small windows were crooked and the wood unpainted; the only furniture was a couple of wooden tables and a bed strung with woven strips of animal skin.

Mustapha had arranged for her to rent the house from a cousin of his, for what seemed to Yael a small amount. Privately, she thought it barely worthy of the name
house,
consisting as it did of just one room on the ground floor and above it another, from which a steep open stairway led up out of one corner and onto a flat roof. Yael had climbed up there behind Mustapha the first time she went to see the house; each step was a different height, all unfeasibly steep.

Emerging into the sunlight, she’d found herself standing inside a low mud parapet, looking out at a world whose existence she had not until now suspected. All around her, in rectangles of flat mud, gaggles of ducks and chickens strutted and pecked, sheets and fruits were spread out to dry, women squatted by bowls picking chaff and stones from beans, or washing clothes. Not a chimney pot to be seen.

She’d gotten the supplies she needed from an apothecary in the Frank quarter, acquired cotton cloths and tin bowls, and set up the little room as best she could. Then she had to contemplate the aspect she’d been postponing. How to reach the children. In London, without barriers of language, it was easy enough to recruit people for any service, on the grounds of entertainment, the likelihood of a little warmth or some food offered for free. Here, she was not certain of how to begin. It occurred to her that she needed a translator. Perhaps Mustapha would agree to assist.

She stood in the open doorway and waited for likely-looking women to pass by. Young mothers seemed suddenly to have absented themselves entirely from the alley, although they thronged every other quarter.

“Good morning, ladies,” she said to a pair shuffling past in what looked like black shrouds, every part of them but their eyes hidden. Even so thoroughly camouflaged, they appeared by their gait and outlines beyond the likelihood of having young children but they might, Yael supposed, be grandmothers.
Habobat
. She made a dabbing motion at her eyes.

“Eye clinic,” she called after their departing backs. “For children.” Neither looked around.

She retreated inside, sat alone in the room, listening to the sounds from outside. A quarrel broke out between two men and Yael got to her feet in alarm, wondering if she would find herself providing first aid to adults. Within minutes, the row had given way to sounds of laughter. Yael had felt confused. She’d heard more laughter since she arrived in Egypt than she believed she’d heard in her entire life.