The gratitude Yael felt continued as she carried on toward the villa. It was not for the offer of food but for the acknowledgment of a common humanity. The Mohammedans treated her better than her own countrymen did.
Continuing on her way, she had an idea. Ernest Griffinshawe’s refusal to help was a blessing in disguise. When she felt ready, she would request a meeting with the sheikh. Tell him of her intention to find a room in the old town, where she could teach the mothers simple hygiene, and inquire whether he would support the venture, whether he knew an Egyptian doctor who might volunteer his services. It wasn’t inconceivable that Sheikh Hamada would help her. The idea of bypassing the Reverend Griffinshawe, of appealing to a local leader, and a Mohammedan one, pleased her. It was right.
Thinking again about her plan, Yael felt a surge of excitement. For all of her adult years, she had involved herself in charity work in London, trying to improve the lot of her fellow man or—more often—woman. Although the schemes had been varied, worthwhile, all had been established by other people. The prospect of following her own vision, offering assistance according to her own most dearly held principles, was entirely new.
She reached the Frank quarter and walked slowly across the Place des Consuls, the jacaranda trees making the square look as if it were aflame with violet fire. Stepping over fallen blossoms on the flagstones, walking past the wooden cabin where a man and his son sold long-handled pots of Turkish coffee and hard, twice-baked biscuits, Yael thanked God for bringing her to this far land. She’d agreed to it with the greatest reluctance, had boarded the Star of the East with gritted teeth, anticipating nothing more than a test of endurance. Yet she was experiencing a peace in Alexandria that eluded her in London. Searching her mind for its source, Yael found the answer.
By the white wall that ran along the front of the villa, she stopped, looking at the motionless, perpendicular form of a lizard, defying laws of gravity and reason. She could do things here. It was this, not language and sunlight, the complexion of the people, their religion and food and mighty river, that made Egypt a foreign country.
TWENTY-FIVE
Standing on the landing of a wide staircase, leaning her elbows on the ebonized banister, Harriet looked down at the lobby of the Oasis Palace Hotel. The hotel was for invalids. Mr. Moore, whose wife had been treated here for her nerves, had recommended it to Louisa, and they were spending a few days there before traveling on to Luxor.
It was a place of hushed conversations and little laughter, elderly women with hair like dandelion seed and wizened men with female nurses hovering close by. Harriet found it depressing. She was in the state familiar to her of being neither well nor ill, not in crisis but not able to breathe freely. Even here in Egypt, that condition felt like a half-life. More than anything, it made her feel lonely. However sympathetic, no one else could really understand what it was like. No doctors seemed able to help.
The floor down below was of smooth, polished marble with Oriental rugs laid on top. A green glass chandelier hung in the center over a vase of flowers, and around the edges of the large hall, pairs of chesterfields, dark leather twins, faced each other across tables made from engraved brass trays.
The revolving doors turned, disgorging a man in a safari jacket and pith helmet. Something about his gait was familiar. A moment later, from the next quarter, a second figure emerged, straight-backed, clad in a broad-brimmed hat swathed with a veil that covered her face. Harriet gasped.
“Mrs. Cox!”
The woman threw back the veil. “Harriet!”
Mrs. Cox began to cross the lobby, a lace-trimmed parasol swinging from her wrist, the train of her skirt swishing on the tiles. Ignoring Louisa’s protests, Harriet almost ran down the stairs.
“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Cox said, gripping Harriet’s elbows.
“We’re staying here until we travel to Luxor. And you?”
“I have an appointment with the doctor.”
Mrs. Cox glanced at her husband. Zebedee Cox’s hands were clasped behind his back, his head tipped back in close examination of the chandelier.
“Afternoon, Miss Heron,” he said.
Harriet nodded at him and returned her eyes to her friend. She pictured her in her nightdress, soaked, lying curled up on the bunk in the same shape that the tiny form had been. She hadn’t seen her since that awful night.
“I am so happy to meet you again, Mrs. Cox,” she said. “How are you?”
“I hardly know,” she said softly, looking up at Louisa, who was still standing on the stairs. “The lemonade here is delicious, Mrs. Heron,” she called, her voice bright and social. “Have you sampled it?”
The four of them arranged themselves around one of the low tables.
“We’ve come this minute from a tour of the Pyramids,” Mrs. Cox said. “Do tell Mrs. Heron about it, Zeb. It was the most marvelous thing.”
Mr. Cox turned to Louisa.
“They used to bury the slaves with the pharaohs, you know,” his voice boomed out. “Still alive. Absolute barbarism.”
Sarah Cox turned to Harriet. She looked drawn, her eyelashes and the fine hairs on her cheeks and top lip thickened with dust.
“Are you any better?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m much . . .”
Harriet was overcome by coughing. It hurt Harriet to admit that she was still ill; an invalid, like the other residents of the hotel, the old people who belonged there. She was ashamed of her illness, she understood suddenly. She’d never allowed herself to realize it before. She felt responsible for it, as if it were a personal failing.
“This awful wind lays everyone low,” said Mrs. Cox. “Zebedee’s had bronchitis.”
“I was improving until the Khamseen came.” Harriet breathed in toward the pit of her stomach, as deeply as she was able. “And you? Are you recovered, Mrs. Cox?”
Mrs. Cox’s eyes glistened. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, squeezing the fine lawn into a ball in her hand.
“I see him everywhere, Harriet, dream about him at night. I can’t stop thinking about the way he—”
“Here we are,” announced Zebedee Cox, as the waiter set down four glasses, their rims frosted with sugar, bright sprigs of mint floating on the drink.
Mrs. Cox blew her nose and smiled at her husband.
“I was just telling Miss Heron that we are traveling to Suez shortly. To meet the shipment.”
“What are you shipping, Mr. Cox?” Louisa asked.
“Parts for a flour mill,” said Zebedee Cox. “But since the natives cannot afford to buy bread, I don’t know what earthly use it’ll be.”
“What a coincidence it is,” Louisa said to Mrs. Cox, “to see you both again.”
“Small world,” said Mr. Cox. “We ran into another chap from the steamer earlier, out at the Pyramids. What was his name, Sarah? Had his easel set up there under an umbrella thingy.”
“I don’t recall,” said Mrs. Cox. “Have you been yet? Really, Harriet, you simply must see them.”
“Soane. That’s it. His father was a well-known painter, you know. Julius or Octavius. Name escapes me now.”
Louisa had taken her fan from her handbag and was waving it in small, agitated movements. Harriet lowered her face to her glass, swallowed another mouthful of the cool, sweet liquid. Mr. Soane was here, in the same city. He must have followed her. She had misjudged him.
Zebedee Cox got to his feet. He slid his hand into the pocket of his jacket and drew out a watch.
“Ready, Sarah?”
“Yes, Zebedee,” said Mrs. Cox. “Do write to me, Harriet, as soon as you’re back at home. Come.” Linking her arm through Harriet’s, leading her to the reception desk, she picked up the old-fashioned quill pen and wrote a few lines. “Here is our address. I insist on your coming to tea.”
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.
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