The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  “There are plenty who would be glad of such fare,” said Yael, pleasantly.

  The captain rose to his feet, ringing on his glass with a knife, and the dining saloon quieted to a churchlike hush as the passengers turned their faces toward him.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. A few announcements. The Reverend . . .” The captain consulted a piece of paper. “Ernest Griffinshawe conducts divine service at eight each morning in the grand saloon. He would appreciate the attendance of a greater number of fellow worshippers.

  “We have in our midst a pair of honeymooners. I extend my congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Zebedee Cox.”

  A murmur of approval went up and there was a general lifting of glasses. Zebedee Cox got to his feet, looking flustered.

  “On behalf of my wife and myself, thank you, Captain Ablewhite,” he said.

  The male passengers banged their tankards on the tables and the women looked at each other, resettling themselves on their chairs like a twittering flock of jeweled, powdered birds. Harriet caught a drift of recent cigar smoke, mixed with a sweet, woody scent, and took a sideways glance at the painter. Even dressed in a black tie and tailcoat, his dark hair greased, he looked different from the other men. The clothes failed to tame him and in place of a starched handkerchief a small sketchbook protruded from his breast pocket. He’d turned his eyes back to Louisa and was watching her, his expression intent.

  Captain Ablewhite cleared his throat.

  “Enjoy your dinner, ladies and gentlemen. The Star of the East makes good speed. We traversed the Bay of Biscay without encountering any storms but we anticipate strong winds in the Mediterranean.”

  He sat down and the voices rose quickly to their previous pitch. The painter summoned the steward and ordered a bottle of red wine.

  “I suppose you are traveling to Egypt?” he said, addressing Louisa.

  “Yes. Alexandria.” Louisa’s face was flushed and her eyes bright. “We are so looking forward to seeing the River Nile.”

  “Alex isn’t the place to see the river.”

  “Where should one see it?” Yael said, raising her head from her soup bowl.

  “It is at its best at Aswan in Upper Egypt, where it flows over the cataracts. But that is a thousand miles away.”

  “Upper Egypt?” said Yael. “I would have thought it was Lower Egypt, farther down.”

  “Yes. But it isn’t.”

  “Imagine seeing where Moses was put in his basket among the bulrushes,” Louisa said.

  She took the last of the second glass of sherry, tipping back her head, her white throat exposed and swanlike under the delicate necklace. Yael’s napkin was tucked under her double chin like a baby’s bib; she began sawing into a bread roll with a great, blunt knife.

  The man leaned forward and seized his soup spoon. He ate silently, tipping the dish away from him. Harriet pushed away her own empty bowl. Printed around the rim, in a loopy flourish, was the name of a ship, but it was the wrong ship. SS Tanjore.

  Putting down his spoon, the painter wiped his mouth and turned to Harriet.

  “You’re the girl with the dog, aren’t you?”

  Under the table, Harriet felt Dash’s back with her toe.

  “I have a dog, yes. The one you feared would kill your rag.”

  She dropped the remains of her roll off her lap and pushed it in the dog’s direction as the steward returned with a large, high-sided tray, the floor rolling under his feet. He pulled the cork from a bottle and splashed red wine into a glass.

  “Good health,” the painter said, raising it.

  “We haven’t been introduced,” Louisa said. “I am Mrs. Heron, this is my sister-in-law, Miss Heron, and my daughter, Miss Harriet Heron.”

  “Heron.” He rolled his wine around the inside of his glass. “I don’t know the name.”

  “Why should you?” Louisa said gaily.

  He turned to Harriet again. “Would you like a glass of wine?”

  Harriet pulled strands of meat from a chop with the large knife and fork. She’d never tasted wine. Throughout her childhood, Louisa had said she was too young. Later, when other girls her age were marrying, giving birth, running households, Louisa had insisted that wine might bring on an attack.

  “I believe I would,” Harriet said. “Yes.”

  “She doesn’t take it,” Louisa said. “My daughter is an invalid.”

  “Mother, I—”

  “I see. And Miss Heron, being the mainstay of the Reverend’s congregation, will most likely be a teetotaler. But Mrs. Heron”— he carried on looking at Louisa—“will join me.”

  He reached out and poured another glass. Putting down the bottle with a bump, he held out the wine to Louisa. There were streaks of oil paint on the back of his hand, bronze and sage and dark mustard, raised spots of it on his nails thrown into relief by the light from the chandelier. Louisa’s eyes were fixed on the man’s hand. She hesitated as she took the glass.

  “You must be a painter,” she said.

  “I am. Why, Mrs. Heron? Are you interested in painting?”

  Louisa shook her head. “Not especially.”

  Her voice was flat. Harriet shifted on her chair and glanced at her aunt.

  “Do you intend staying long in Egypt?” Yael asked, peering at the man through the spectacles that magnified her eyes and made her appear as if she were capable of clairvoyance.

  “Until it becomes tedious,” he said. “Which I expect will be soon. I’ve been a half-dozen times before.”

  Louisa interrupted the silence that followed.

  “I don’t believe you told us your name, Mr. . . .?”

  The air of giddiness and elation had leached away from her and her voice was clipped.

  The man leaned back in the revolving chair. “I don’t believe I did. It’s Soane. Eyre Soane.”

  It seemed to Harriet that Louisa flinched. “You have an unusual name,” she said.

  “You are not familiar with it, Mrs. Heron?”

  “There are so many names, these days,” said Yael.

  Louisa had barely touched the slice of steak pie, the mound of tinned peas, before she laid down her knife and fork, declared herself unable to eat another morsel, and asked Mr. Soane to excuse her. Picking up her fan, she began ushering her skirts out from under the table.

  “Will you take some water, Mother?” Harriet said. “Oh . . .”

  Louisa, half out of her seat, had knocked over her wineglass. A ruby sea was seeping over the white damask.

  “Come, Harriet. It’s time we retired,” she said. “If you would excuse us, Mr. . . .”

  “Soane.” He raised his glass to her again. “Not an easy name to forget.”

  “Come, Harriet,” Louisa repeated.

  Calling the dog out from under the table, concealing her chop bone in her napkin, Harriet had no choice but to follow Louisa out of the saloon.

  As she reached the sliding doors, Harriet glanced back at their table. The steward who had poured the wine now dabbed at the spilled wine with a napkin. Yael was eating pudding as if she were alone, her head bent over her dish. Eyre Soane sat upright in his chair, an unlit cigar between his lips, one ankle crossed over his knee. Mrs. Cox’s prediction made its way unbidden into Harriet’s mind and, as if he could read her thoughts, the painter turned and looked straight at her, his dark eyes fixing on her own gray ones. There was no doubt this time that it was she who attracted his attention.

  Feeling her face begin to burn, Harriet hurried after her mother.

  NINE

  The wind blew a shower of spray against the porthole and the ship pitched. Under the pressure of Eyre Soane’s hand, the point of the pencil broke, a fragment of lead skidding across the page to the floor. He felt in his trouser pocket and found his penknife. Testing the sharpness of the blade across the pad
of his thumb, he began to shave wood from lead with swift downward strokes.

  The page where he’d been working lay open on the table. It was filled with the same portrait, repeated a dozen or more times. Each picture was different but the woman was recognizably the same, multiplied as if in a hall of mirrors. Her face was oval, pleasing in its regularity, and framed by curling hair. She was young in several sketches, in the middle years in some, and ageless in others. Here, her eyes were lowered, and here, raised as if in challenge or looking into the distance.

  In every drawing, exaggerated to the point of caricature, one thing distinguished the woman. Her hairline was strikingly irregular. On the left side of the parting, the hair at the top of her forehead grew in a straight line. On the right side, it grew back in a pronounced widow’s peak.

  In the final drawing, the woman’s head appeared shaven. Her face was reduced to its features—a straight nose, a well-shaped mouth—and above the large eyes the curiously asymmetrical line ran starkly across the top of her forehead.

  Eyre had seen her at dinner on the first day of the voyage. He’d begun to feel a sense of sick unease familiar from his childhood, had wondered what prompted it as he pushed mutton around the plate. The curious hairline had caught his eye and as he returned to studying the woman, examined it further, he knew whose it was. She had aged, of course, was altered in every particular except that one and a way of carrying her head that was birdlike, inquisitive, and as if poised for flight.

  With the sharpened pencil held in his fist like a dagger, Eyre began to score out the faces. By the time he’d finished, the paper was pitted and torn, the lead broken again, and all but one of the sketches obliterated. Only the picture that looked like a living skull remained.

  Throwing aside his sketchbook, Eyre dropped the pencil and rose from his chair, rubbing condensation from the inside of a porthole. No moon or stars were visible outside and he couldn’t distinguish sea from sky. Lighting a cigar, walking up and down the cabin, he remembered the way the younger Miss Heron had looked at him across the dining saloon and he smiled.

  Louisa, once she’d understood who he was, had been guarded; even her spinster sister-in-law had appeared to regard him with suspicion. But the girl was open, her eagerness for life transparent.

  What he would do with her willingness, he didn’t yet know. Only that he would make full use of it.

  The ship rolled in a great lurching movement that made him feel as if his stomach rose in his body. Opening the cabin door, he poked out his head and shouted for the steward. The passageway was empty; his call went unanswered. Eyre absorbed these facts with equanimity. Other than escaping the English winter, making some desultory additions to his Oriental portfolio, he’d had no particular purpose in setting out for Egypt. Now he had found one. By sheer good fortune, he had the opportunity to wreak a revenge he’d awaited all his life.

  TEN

  Seawater ran over the wooden boards of the weather deck like a tide flooding a beach. The pair of rattan chairs in which Harriet and Mrs. Cox sometimes sat had been overturned, their curved rockers upended. Sailors were lowering the remaining sails, hurrying and grim-faced, some with ropes around their waists that secured them to the masts.

  Harriet stared as a crate of live chickens floated toward her. She’d woken from a dream of falling, found Louisa sitting down below on her bunk, gripping its sides, her head hung over a bowl on her lap. Yael’s bed was empty, the pillow straightened and blankets folded. Dash slid to and fro across the floor of the cabin with the movement of the ship, whimpering as he went.

  “Can you find Yael, Harriet? I’d go myself but—” Louisa began to retch.

  With Dash under one arm, Harriet had made her way up the iron steps, clinging to the rail with her free hand. There was no sign of the prayer group through the window of the saloon. She’d come up to the weather deck on impulse, to see if Yael was here and to see the storm for herself.

  “Get below, miss,” a sailor called to her over the roar of the wind. “You’ll fetch up in the briny.”

  Gripping the banister, she made her way back down the stairs. At the bottom was Zebedee Cox, his collar askew and his hair uncombed.

  “Rough, ain’t it?” he shouted. “Damned queasy-making.”

  “Yes,” she shouted back. “How is Mrs. Cox?”

  “Indisposed. As a matter of fact, I was looking for you. She asked if you’d be kind enough to—” Water streamed down the polished stairs, soaking Harriet’s boots, filling Mr. Cox’s trouser cuffs. “To call in on her, Miss Heron.”

  Harriet’s chest felt tight and she was shivering. She had to get back to Louisa and she still hadn’t found Yael.

  “I cannot, Mr. Cox, I’m looking for my aunt.”

  “I saw her just a minute ago, on her way back to the cabin,” he said. “My wife begged you to come to her.”

  Harriet pictured Mrs. Cox. She knew what it was to be ill and to need someone by you.

  “All right,” she said. “Take me to her.”

  The Coxes were traveling first class; their cabin was on the port side of the middle deck, off a small, private sitting area shared with two other cabins. Mr. Cox opened the door and ushered Harriet inside. The cabin was bigger than their own, longer and wider, with a padded seat along the inner wall. Brushes and combs and clothes lay on the floor in disarray and a pair of satin shoes tumbled in a corner with the movement of the ship. In the gloom, Harriet didn’t immediately see Sarah Cox.

  When she did, she cried out in surprise. Mrs. Cox was sitting on a chair wedged up against the curved wall at the end of one of the beds, bent double, her arms clutched over her stomach. Her hair was undressed, tied in a ribbon on the nape of her neck, and her face looked gray.

  “You’re ill.” Harriet crossed the cabin, kneeled beside her. “Whatever is the matter?”

  Mrs. Cox wiped her forehead on her sleeve and sat up in the chair. “I’m sorry, Harriet. I didn’t know who else to ask for.”

  She raised the salts clutched in her hand to her nose. “I’m in trouble,” she said. “Awful trouble.”

  Without warning, she began to shriek, making a series of staccato cries as if she were being murdered. Harriet felt terrified.

  “Mrs. Cox? What is it?”

  The cries subsided and she sat up again, her eyes wide; perspiration was running down her face and neck, soaking her delicate nightdress. The ship pitched violently and Harriet grabbed the back of the chair.

  “You must fetch help, Mr. Cox,” she said, raising her voice over the thumps and cries that were going up from nearby cabins. “Your wife needs a doctor.”

  Zebedee Cox was still by the door, braced against the frame. “I’m not calling any doctor,” he said. “Keep your voice down.” There was a knock on the door and Mr. Cox opened it partway.

  Harriet caught a glimpse of one of the crew, outside, saluting. “Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Got to fit the deadlight. Over the porthole. Won’t take a jiffy and it’ll keep Mrs. Cox safe.”

  “There’s no need,” Mr. Cox said. “We shall be quite all right.”

  “But, sir—”

  “I’ll leave you two ladies for the time being,” Mr. Cox called. And he left, shutting the door behind him.

  Harriet stared at the closed door, then turned back to Mrs. Cox. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Cox. I’ll go for the ship’s surgeon. I’ll bring him straight to you.”

  Mrs. Cox covered her face with both hands and moaned. “You mustn’t.”

  “Why not? I don’t understand.”

  Mrs. Cox began to keen again, the cry piercing, her head thrown back and her mouth open. The moment passed and she pulled herself up to standing.

  “Look,” she said, gesturing behind her with one hand. The pretty nightgown was soaked at the back and stained with blood, the seat of the chair slicked with a sticky wetness. “I don’t know what to
do,” she wailed. “It’s too early.”

  “I’ll fetch the surgeon,” Harriet repeated.

  Mrs. Cox shook her head.

  “Everyone knows that we’re on our honeymoon. Zebedee won’t have me shamed in front of the captain.”

  The ship tipped again and threw Mrs. Cox forward so she almost fell. Helping her back onto the chair, Harriet cast her eyes around the disordered cabin, struggling to take in this new view of Mrs. Cox. The motion and the noise made it hard to think, but she knew how babies came to the world; she’d persuaded Rosina to tell her how it could be that she always said she saw Harriet’s red hair first, before she saw any other part of her. Rosina had helped her own mother attend her older sisters in childbirth, from when she was a girl. She’d answered every one of Harriet’s horrified questions, then lain down on her back on the kitchen floor and demonstrated, shrieking and wailing in a way that had made Harriet hysterical with laughter and fear. Babies came when they wanted, Rosina said. They pleased themselves and there wasn’t a lot anyone could do about it.

  With her hair hanging in rats’ tails around her face and her eyes swollen, Mrs. Cox looked like a different woman.

  “I’m frightened,” she said, her voice soft and broken.

  Harriet put her arm around her and squeezed her shoulders. “Lie down on the bed. If it will come, you cannot prevent it.” The certainty in her own voice surprised her. There was a newspaper on the floor under a table. Harriet opened out its pages and spread them on the bunk, helped Mrs. Cox to lie down. She held her hand as the woman’s body arched in the air with the next pain. Harriet was afraid that Mrs. Cox might die. It could happen, Rosina said. Did happen.

  The pains started coming more frequently. Sarah Cox gasped and cried, gripping Harriet’s arm, her face contorted, her body racked with effort. She pulled herself up into a kneeling position. Seeing her sitting on her calves, her knees wide, Harriet remembered the hieroglyph for giving birth. She wondered if she would ever get to Egypt or whether they would all be lost before they made land.