The Sacred River (30 page)

Blundell’s letter lay on a tray on the table. Yael looked at it for a moment longer, then went up the steps to the bathroom and removed her dusty clothes. The tap in the shower was dry but a large, filled jug stood next to a tin bowl. After washing herself all over with a soapy flannel, Yael stood in the bowl, trickling what remained of the clean water over her face and shoulders. It was pleasant to stand naked, with her feet in the cool water.

Wrapping herself in a robing gown, she returned to her own room, where she lay down on the bed in a shaft of sunlight and opened the gown. She could not recall a time when her breasts, her stomach, had ever been exposed to the sun’s rays. She was a lizard, she told herself as she bathed in the soft, intense warmth and light that flooded through the window, basking in God’s sun, and it was neither injurious nor immoral.

In the soporific warmth, Yael fell asleep. She dreamed of a place that, when she woke, she was unable to describe to herself, except through the sense she’d had there of ease, a contentment that in her waking life she had never experienced. Happiness, she thought as she pulled on the dress she’d had made at a little tailor’s in the rue des Soeurs, a road with the distinction of having a convent at one end and a brothel at the other. Yael fastened the buttons at her cuffs. The dress was a pale gingham check, the color of the dust at noon. Happiness of the kind she had imagined heaven to offer. That was what it was.

She finished dressing, put on her shoes, and went down the steps. The fountain in the little courtyard in the middle of the house was running again and a drab sparrow perched on the edge of the pool, dipping its beak down to the water and then throwing back its head, allowing the water to run down its throat. It watched her pass, seemingly unconcerned.

Sitting down at the table, she poured herself a glass of water. When she had drunk it, she opened Blundell’s letter. Yael had been expecting it. She had continued to postpone writing to her brother. He had put her in charge of his wife and daughter when he forced her to accompany them, she reasoned. He could have no quarrel with the decisions she then made, since he had put her in a position where she alone must make them. Since improving Harriet’s health was the purpose of the journey, it had been best for her to travel farther south. Agreed, Blundell might have preferred that Yael accompany them. He might even have expected it. But, having started the clinic, she was resolved to continue it for the length of time she had promised herself and God that she would.

Sister,

I trust all are well and Harriet’s health improved. You will be glad to know that Father carries on all right.

News from Egypt is worrying and there may be trouble ahead. I regret that I cannot allow you and Louisa and Harriet to remain any longer. Get back the others from wherever they may be, book your return journey, and inform me by telegraph of your likely arrival date at Southampton.

Yr affectionate brother,

Blundell

Yael sat on at the table, half listening to Suraya and her children, to the beat of the wings of the birds in the garden, giving themselves dust baths. She folded the sheet in half, replaced it in the envelope, and in one gesture tore it through the middle, from top to bottom.

Mustapha appeared with a tray.

“Dinner, ma’am,” he said. “No fish in the market today.”

“Thank you, Mustapha. Why no fish?”

He made a noncommittal movement of his head. “The boats did not leave.”

“I see. Well, never mind. It is not important.”

Yael pulled her chair in to the table and began to eat. The omelette was the same temperature as the air, as the fried potatoes and slices of pickled turnips and radishes that surrounded it in a ring. Somehow, she wasn’t sure when or how, Yael had adopted the native way of taking food. She found a curious pleasure in eating with her fingers. She ate the omelette slowly, using torn-off pieces of flat bread to soak up the oil and vinegar and juices left behind on the plate, the scraps of slightly burnt potato, the floating shreds of green herbs. Eggs seemed to her the very best type of food, digestible, nourishing, pleasing in shape and appearance, and involving no active methods of slaughter. For pudding there was a fruit salad of irregular geometry, apples and some kind of melon, further sweetened by dates.

When she had finished, she washed her hands and poured a glass of tea, watching as the leaves unfurled, floating and waving from the prison of the thick little glass. The agony of the leaves, tea planters called it.

She dated a sheet of paper
May
and gave as the address
Alexandria
.

Dear Blundell,

I expected to have heard again from you but have received no word. I shall not worry unduly, the post in this part of the world is not altogether reliable.

Alexandria is pleasant, and certainly quieter and safer than London. We are not troubled by drunkenness here or thieving, due to the strong beliefs of the Mussulmans.

Louisa and Harriet have taken a short trip farther south in search of better air. I occupy myself with a little charity work.

Please give my love to Father and remind Mrs. Darke that he likes his whisky at 6 p.m. sharp.

Yr affectionate sister,

Yael

Was there affection between them, she wondered as she put down the pen. There had been. Was there still? Her brother had changed since he was a boy. His eyes had grown grave and distant, his expression harder. That much was obvious and right. But the best parts of him, his sense of fair play, the concern he once showed for the most vulnerable living creatures, when he would rescue every spider and bedraggled fly from the ewer, release them onto a sunny leaf in the garden, those parts had been hidden away when he became a man. Either that or they were lost, left behind as surely as the rocking horse with the balding mane, the skiff on the lake in the grounds of their childhood home.

Theirs had been a happy childhood. They wanted for nothing, had never in their lives gone to bed hungry or walked barefoot except for the joy of it. Nonetheless, to remember it filled Yael with a sadness as deep and sweet and dark as the water in the lake.

FORTY-EIGHT

Louisa stepped carefully, avoiding the goats’ pellets flattened into the ends of straw, the rotting skins of mangoes and bananas, picking her way around the ashy circles of fires, stinking fish heads with their attendant bat-eared cats.

The light was pink; the water, the boats, even her own hands, were fire-touched. In the hour before sunset, all living creatures seemed to wait, in anticipation of the sinking of the sun. The birds grew frantic, searching for a place to roost, and the people were arrested, poised between day and night, between life and death.

She had not intended to kill Eyre Soane. She had pulled the trigger intentionally but as she did so, it was not him she aimed at but Augustus. For those few months of her girlhood, she had loved Augustus with all her heart. For thirty years, she had hated him with the same intensity. Louisa had meant to shoot him through the heart. It would have been just, to have wounded Augustus where he had wounded her. She supposed she was glad that she had missed.

The departure of the dahabeah had been delayed while Mr. Soane rested, Mr. Simpson had informed them at breakfast. The bullet had passed through the outer side of his right arm, his painting arm. Mrs. Simpson had dressed it, flooding it with iodine, packing the wound with lint and bandaging it with one of Eyre Soane’s own shirts, torn into strips. Her father was a surgeon, Mr. Simpson had informed Harriet, rolling his eyes to the ceiling, avoiding looking at Louisa; he had taught her first aid.

Mr. Soane had not wished to involve the British consul. He’d insisted, when Monsieur Andreas arrived at a run, calling for Madame and brandishing an antique firearm of his own, that it was an accident. His own fault. Louisa hadn’t disputed it. It was his own fault.

She looked about for one of the crew to fetch her in the small rowing boat and, seeing no one, walked into the shallows of the river. Wading toward the boat, she felt the pressure of the current running against her legs, her overskirt rising behind her on the water. The cold was a relief. She felt cleansed by it, as if the immersion was overdue.

She had resolved to tell Eyre Soane the truth. She wouldn’t waste another minute in informing him of what he had to know. It would prevent him from threatening them, pursuing Harriet any further. Reaching the set of wooden steps on the side, Louisa pulled herself up and boarded the boat.

A pile of drying antelope hides occupied one end of the deck. The stench was sickening. Mrs. Simpson sat in a deck chair under the patched canvas awning, reading a book. She looked as if she had been weeping; her eyes were red-rimmed. She stared out from under her sun hat as Louisa stood in front of her, wringing out the hem of her skirts, twisting the silk like a rope between her hands. “You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “Coming here.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Simpson. Where is Mr. Soane?”

“In his cabin. He doesn’t want to see you.”

“I don’t wish to see him either,” Louisa said. “But I must.”

Mrs. Simpson burst into tears, covering her mouth with her hand.

“I hate it,” she said. “All these guns. Shooting everything that moves. I hate guns more than anything in the world. I wish I’d never agreed to come to Egypt.”

Louisa felt a wave of dizziness pass over her; the sense kept afflicting her that she couldn’t stay upright any longer. That a collapse was coming, whether she liked it or not. She slid down into the chair next to Mrs. Simpson’s, her shoes leaking water.

“Why did you?” she said.

“Jim. He’d set his heart on a crocodile.”

“I didn’t want to come here either,” said Louisa.

“Why did you, then?”

“My mother spoke to me from the other side, of a death. At first, I thought it was my daughter’s. That we could get away from it here. Then, for a moment, I believed it was Aug . . . Mr. Soane’s. Now, I am certain that it must be my own.”

Mrs. Simpson reached a small hand over to Louisa’s, patted her. Her nails were pink, small as shells on an English beach, shaped, and buffed to a shine.

“There, there,” she said. “Don’t upset yourself. We’re a long way from home, that’s the trouble. It was an accident, anyway. Soanie said so himself.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

Mrs. Simpson got out of the deck chair and returned with a glass in her hand.

“Have a drop of wine,” she said, passing it to Louisa. “And calm yourself, Mrs. Heron. Of course it was an accident. What else could it have been?”

The cabin door was ajar and Eyre Soane lay in bed, propped on a heap of cushions with an unlit cigar between his lips. His right arm lay across his bare chest in a sling made from a red silk scarf; the upper part of the arm was bandaged, a dark stain blooming through the thick wad of dressing. The lamp was lit, suspended from a hook on the ceiling over his bed, and the air smelled of iodine and damp wood mixed with sandalwood pomade.

Louisa gripped the door frame. “May I come in?”

“Louisa,” he said, shifting his position slightly. “Are you armed?”

She smiled. “How are you?”

“In pain. You missed the bone.”

“It was your father I wanted to kill. Augustus. He deserved it.”

Eyre Soane turned away his head, lowering his eyelids as if the pain assailed him again.

“Augustus was a great man,” he said. “A great, great man, with immoral and unscrupulous women throwing themselves at him all his life. It broke my mother’s heart.”

He began trying to light the cigar one-handed.

Louisa took the matchbox from him and struck a flame.

“He was a scoundrel,” she said without rancor. “A scoundrel and a cad.”

“My mother loved him, and my sister. They thought the world of him. Still do.”

Louisa crossed the small cabin to the window and gazed out at the sinuous, amnesiac water.

“Your sister?”

Eyre Soane tipped back his head as if to blow a smoke ring, then seemed to think better of it. He breathed out the stream of smoke in a sigh, reached with his uninjured arm for a telegraph on the locker by the bed, and held it up.

“She’s arrived. I’m going back to Cairo to show her the sights. We’ll return to London together. I believe when I get there I shall make a bequest to the National Gallery. Unless I can find a private buyer for
Thetis
. What do you think, Louisa? Would your husband care to purchase the picture? Hang it in the drawing room?”

A rusted cargo boat chugged past, heading north, and the dahabeah began to rock in its wake, rippling waves hitting the craft in long, sloshing tides of brown water. Louisa returned to the door frame, holding to its upright support, feeling the floor rise and fall under her feet. She could not utter the words she’d come to say.