“Please excuse me,” she said, picking up the dog. “I must go back to my cabin.”
SIX
“In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life . . .”
Aunt Yael perched at the tiny table, her knees twisted round to one side, reading aloud from Revelation. She’d announced on the train her intention to use the time on board ship to persevere with her reading of the Bible. Since the death of her mother, she’d read it through five times and was close to completing the sixth cycle.
“And what will you do then?” Louisa had asked. “When you reach the end?”
“Start again, dear,” Yael had answered. “What else.”
It was the third day of the voyage and all three women were feeling queasy from the movement of the steamer. Louisa reclined on the bottom bunk, leafing through the pages of a magazine, and Harriet lay on the top one, holding her journal. The journal had arrived in the post a month before Christmas, sent from Penang. Aunt Anna, her mother’s youngest sister, traveled the world with her husband, Dr. Lucas St. Clair, establishing missions to sailors in foreign ports. She sent Harriet notebooks from whichever country she found herself in and this one was the most beautiful yet, bound in soft leather in a brilliant red, its pages bearing within their weave flattened shapes of petals and leaves. It had a red-ribbon place marker and could be closed up by a pair of fine leather ties of the same color.
At first, Harriet hadn’t written in the book. Feeling that no words could match its thick, expectant pages, she left it blank and new, occasionally turning it over in her hands, opening it to breathe in the sour, woody scent of the paper, returning again and again to an idea she had that excited her and frightened her at the same time.
The fifth volume of Bunsen’s great work on Egypt’s place in universal history contained Samuel Birch’s translation of a funeral ritual that he called the Book of the Dead. The ritual consisted of a set of spells and instructions that the ancient Egyptians had used for defeating death. If successfully followed, they believed, the magic ensured that the ka, or spirit, of the departed would be able to emerge from the tomb each day to hunt once more in the fields of reeds, dance again to the music of harps, train monkeys to pluck figs.
Harriet had been forced to contemplate her own death since she first became ill, when she was seven years old. If she had to die, that was the kind of eternal life she wanted. The English heaven had never appealed to her. Sometimes, comparing it to the one the ancient Egyptians had lived, she wondered if even the English life appealed to her.
The Egyptian spells were written on papyrus, by scribes with reed pens and palettes of red and black ink. The dead kept their instructions close; the scrolls were buried with the bodies, on the breast or at the side, between the legs or feet. Some people were buried with the texts unfurled, pressed against their chests under the bandages used to preserve their bodies.
Harriet had persuaded Rosina to buy her a bottle of red ink. She wanted to write her own spells, not for when she was dead, but to help her in her life. In the new book, she had her papyrus. The idea kept pressing at the edges of her mind, occurring to her at odd moments, demanding to be heard, but she put off carrying it out, fearing that it might be blasphemous, that the spells might succeed or that they might not succeed, she hardly knew which. Late one December night, with the London fog lying low and heavy outside, she got out her pens and inks.
The Egyptians had written their magic for the dead, to help them past tests of knowledge and judgments, into the state in which they were considered worthy of eternal life, their hearts weighed against the feather of Maat and found true. Harriet wanted to live before she died. It was life she longed for and it was life that her illness was denying her. Listening to the deep slumber of the household, the soft, interrupting rasp of her own breath, she opened the journal. Across the middle of the first pristine page, using red ink like the scribes of ancient Egypt, to give the words extra power, she wrote the title.
Harriet didn’t want what most young women wished for from life. Her dream was to see for herself the tombs of the ancient Egyptians and study the hieroglyphs carved and painted by their hands. And if, one day or night, she was no longer able to continue the fight for breath, she wanted to die there, in Luxor. Above all, she did not wish to end her days in the room in which she’d spent almost all her life.
Wiping the nib, dipping the pen into the black ink, she turned to the next page and began a column of pictures. The first was of the house at Cloudesley Crescent; its five stories stood for home. The next was of an open book, her symbol of escape, followed by a pair of legs walking, the hieroglyph for movement. Below that, she shaped the rounded lines of a steamship, its chimney smoking, and next, she drew herself, a head taller than others, her hair in crinkled locks down her shoulders, her feet flat and pointing forward, like ancient Egyptian feet, certain of their direction. Then her name, enclosed in a cartouche or circle, like the ancient Egyptian royals’. Harriet was written in sounds, followed by the heron hieroglyph.
In the second column, she drew the coastline of Egypt, flat, dotted with windmills as she had read that it was. For health and life, she drew Hathor, daughter of the sun god, Ra, and goddess of pleasure and enjoyment, associated with life and laughter. Hathor stood too for that love between men and women of which Harriet knew nothing, feared that she might never experience. Hathor was straight-spined and almond-eyed, the sun disk balanced on her head between two long cow’s horns.
For death, if she were to die, Harriet drew herself again, lying on the ground in an Egyptian rock tomb, with her hair fanned out around her, holding her book to her chest with her left hand, lines of lotus flowers painted on the wall behind her and above them the protective eye of the god Horus.
Finally, she drew a hand holding out an ankh, the symbol of breath. She laid down the pen and looked at the spell. Her magic was to ensure that she would reach Luxor. That she would live there and if she could not live, then she would die there. It was complete. Blotting the ink, she closed the book and secured its red leather ties.
She’d kept the journal close ever since. Slept with it under her pillow and carried it by day in a cotton pocket tied around her waist. Louisa said that it made her look like a bluestocking. Lying on her bunk in the cabin, Harriet undid the ties around its covers and for the first time looked again at her magic. She’d hardly dared to believe, when she wrote it, that it might be effective. And yet she was here, on her way. Closing the book again, shutting her eyes, she let the ever-present slosh and roar of the sea, the cries of a child in the next cabin, the murmur of her aunt’s voice, wash over her.
And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.
SEVEN
“What’re you going to Egypt for?” Mrs. Cox asked. “If you didn’t have to?”
“My doctor believes the climate will benefit me. And I have always wanted to go there.”
“Why?”
Harriet felt for her journal, gripped the top of it between her fingertips. She paused before she answered, steadying herself by breathing into her stomach.
“I was a sickly child, Mrs. Cox. From a young age, I read books. The ancient Egyptians, their writings and pictures, have been my consolation. They were for me what fairy tales were for other girls.”
Mrs. Cox raised her elegant eyebrows. Since their first meeting, Harriet had seen Mrs. Cox every day. In the afternoons, while Louisa rested in the cabin, Yael joined the Bible-study group in a corner of the dining saloon, and Mrs. Cox’s husband occupied himself with reports of the stock exchange in old newspapers, Harriet and Mrs. Cox strolled on the top deck, weaving between the thick cobwebs of rigging, stopping sometimes to rest on the curved back-to-back wooden benches or to watch other passengers play a game of quoits.
If Harriet was short of breath, or too fatigued for walking, as today, she and Mrs. Cox remained in the grand saloon, at a table they’d made their own.
Mrs. Cox wore a different outfit every day. She was dressed in a raspberry-colored gown; a panel of ruched pink satin stretched from the high neck of the dress under her chin, down to the floor, and gave her the look of a curvaceous and elegant mermaid, her stomach rounded under the glove-like fit of the gown.
“I suppose you will look for a husband at the same time?” she said.
“I’m not looking for a husband.”
“Why ever not?”
Harriet couldn’t immediately answer. It was Louisa’s oft-repeated belief that Harriet was unlikely to marry. That with her delicate health, her ill fortune in the matter of her looks, the best place for her was by her mother’s side. Often, as she said it, Louisa reached out and touched Harriet, a gesture upward to her shoulder which Harriet experienced as some form of arrest. She felt sorry more on Louisa’s behalf than her own that she’d inherited her father’s red-gold hair, his blush-prone complexion, and his pale gray eyes, in place of her mother’s dark, dramatic beauty, still evident even now. It was a disappointment to Louisa that her daughter didn’t resemble her.
Harriet shrugged.
“I suppose it’s because I’m not well. Why are you going to Egypt, Mrs. Cox?”
“My husband has business interests in Cairo. He decided we should take our honeymoon there. He said we could kill two birds with one stone.”
“How delightful.”
“I wanted to go to Italy,” Mrs. Cox said, turning her head in a sudden movement that caused her earrings to swing. “But they are already well supplied with parts for flour mills.”
Harriet felt uncomfortable. Mrs. Cox surely couldn’t be being disloyal to her new husband. Looking around for Zebedee Cox, Harriet spotted Yael, sitting on the far side of the saloon, her feet in their polished brown boots braced on the floor, her hands gripping the seat on either side of her. Yael nodded in their direction and Harriet waved at her.
“She looks like a fish out of water,” Mrs. Cox said.
“My aunt wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. She’d be at home in St. John’s Wood, pouring a whisky for Grandfather on the dot of six, or going off to her refuge for fallen women. My father made her come with us. She’s a spinster, so she couldn’t refuse.”
The floor below them rolled and they both leaned sideways in order to stay upright. Mrs. Cox looked queasy. Harriet enjoyed the sudden shifts to the perpendicular, the capriciousness of the horizon. It seemed to say that change was possible, that it could occur at any time, unexpectedly.
Mrs. Cox took a sip of her chamomile tea and picked a round yellow flower from between her teeth.
“You don’t want to live like your aunt, do you? I’ll tell your fortune, Harriet,” she said.
Producing a leather pouch from a bag that matched her dress, she began laying out a spread of cards in rows, face upward, with some placed sideways, others with their pictures upside down. Harriet sat in silence, watching. She hoped Yael couldn’t see. Aunt disapproved of what she called soothsayers and was more than capable of arriving at the table to say so, delivering her views on the inadvisability of trying to peer into the future, which she considered God’s business.
“You will marry,” Mrs. Cox said, as if in answer to a question Harriet had asked. “And have children. I see three, but only two births.” She looked up at Harriet with shining eyes. “Perhaps you are going to have twins. Do they run in your family?”
“Really, Mrs. . . .”
“Oh, call me Sarah.”
“Sarah, I . . .”
“You’ll recognize the man when you meet him. You will know him immediately. His occupation is something quite out of the ordinary. He won’t be a banker or a businessman or work in any kind of office. He’ll work with his brain and his hands together.”
Mrs. Cox peered at the spread.
“You won’t believe this.” Her voice was incredulous. She reached out and touched Harriet’s wrist with small fingers that were unusually even in length and with a row of three diamonds glittering on one of them. “You’ll encounter him on a voyage. A nautical one.”
Harriet felt herself blushing, but whether with embarrassment or annoyance, she wasn’t sure.
“I doubt that.”
Mrs. Cox looked around the crowded saloon and Harriet’s eyes followed, roaming over elderly Mrs. Treadwell, a suet-pudding-like couple with four round, pale children, two spinster sisters who conversed solely with each other. The only unmarried man present was Reverend Griffinshawe, a widower, who explained to everyone from under bushy white eyebrows that he was taking copies of the Bible in Arabic to his parish in Egypt and would appreciate most kindly any support they could offer for this worthwhile venture.
“He’s here somewhere,” Mrs. Cox said. “He must be.”
“I hardly think so.”
Harriet picked up one of the cards and examined a man hanging upside down, his ankles suspended from the branch of a tree. It was humiliating to have one’s fortune told and even worse to experience the rush of unaccustomed hope she’d felt on hearing the prediction.
“Do you really believe I could marry?”
“Of course. Why ever not?”
“There’s my poor health. And some people think red hair is unlucky.”
“It’s clear as day, Hattie. You will join with a man whom you meet on the water.” Mrs. Cox gathered up the cards and slipped them back into a worn wallet of morocco. “I have seen one eligible gentleman,” she said, raising her finely shaped brows. “You must have seen him too, that day we first—”
Harriet rose from the table, accidentally stepping on Dash’s tail as she emerged from the bench seat, making him whimper.
“Excuse me, Mrs. Cox. I must return to my mother.”
Bidding her friend goodbye, she picked up the dog and left the saloon, made her way down the spiral of iron steps to the second-class cabins. At the bottom, she stopped by a porthole, resting her elbows on its inside rim.
On the other side of the glass, the sea was agitated and unsettled, rearing up around the ship as if it were trying to communicate something from the deep. The sea was becoming a companion, true and constant; Harriet felt a new pleasure every time she looked at it. Perhaps that was the union that Mrs. Cox foresaw.
With Dash at her heels, she continued along the narrow passageway, bracing herself to meet Louisa’s anxious solicitude.
EIGHT
Three times a day, all passengers sat down to meals in the dining saloon. They took up the same places, on the same turning chairs, at breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. Harriet’s was at the end farthest from the captain’s table, an isolated spot but with the advantage that she could see the whole saloon.
The painter sat a few tables away. More than once, Harriet had seen him staring in their direction with a brooding look, his sketch pad open on the white cloth, chin resting on his knuckles. At first, Harriet believed that the man looked at her. He regretted having tried to kick her dog on the weather deck, she told herself, and was wondering how to make amends. Quickly, though, and reluctantly, she formed the impression that it was not herself who attracted his attention. It was Louisa.
On the evening of Mrs. Cox’s soothsaying, the painter entered the dining saloon late. He stood in the doorway as his eyes roamed the room and came to rest on their table. Louisa was in a good mood. As they’d sat down, Captain Ablewhite had complimented her on keeping her sea legs, then sent two glasses of sherry to the table. Aunt Yael took only a small glass of wine once a year, on Christmas Day. Louisa had finished her own and begun on the other.
In her dark satin evening dress, with the necklace of marcasite around her throat sparkling by the light of scores of candles in the crystal chandeliers, reflecting off t
he mirrors, she looked elegant and assured, like the subject of one of the paintings she admired. Louisa loved to walk to the National Gallery on a Sunday afternoon and stand in front of the great portraits in oil, identifying the fabric of the women’s costumes, speculating as to the meaning of the look in their eyes, the significance of the items in the background. Sometimes she ventured to recognize the tints and pigments used in the paintings, murmuring their names to herself in a private incantation that, when she was a child, Harriet had mistaken for prayer.
Louisa chinked her schooner against Yael’s water glass and Harriet’s tumbler of Indian tonic.
“I do believe you’re looking brighter already, Harriet,” she said.
Aunt Yael put down her soup spoon.
“Louisa, dear,” she said. “Do you know that man?”
Louisa glanced up and Harriet followed her eyes. The painter was heading toward them with an air of purpose. Harriet felt the start of a blush.
“I can’t say that I do,” Louisa said.
Before Yael could continue, the man arrived at the table. He bowed.
“Good evening, ladies. May I join you?”
“Why not?” Louisa said, smiling at him as he eased himself into the chair next to Harriet’s. “We are all travelers together.”
“Indeed.”
He picked up the menu and began reading the courses aloud. “ ‘Barley broth. Steak pie. Mutton chops. Spaghetti in cream. Cabbage. Apple tart with sauce anglaise.’ ” The usual muck,” he said, putting down the card, looking around for the steward.
The Sacred River Page 4
