Eberhardt walked into the large salon that was study and drawing room, and picked up the framed photograph balanced on the Bösendorfer. Kati’s mouth was open as if to speak. Her eyes watched him, with a wry understanding he hadn’t been aware of during their life together. Sometimes he felt that it was he who had abandoned her, he who had disappeared out of their shared life, while she had remained faithful to a moment, her lace shawl draped around her sloping shoulders, her expression steadfast, as unchanging as the cameo at her neck. He had absconded into alteration, who and what he had been dying more with every day that passed.
The basket was full, the oranges nestled on the top, the last of the plum cake Mutti insisted he bring from Heidelberg neatly slid down the side. He lifted the bag by its leather handles, felt its weight. It was an offering to take into the tomb. Not for the dead but for the living. For Harriet Heron, the white woman with the red hair, who had walked into the catacomb with him and stayed there, in the darkness. He wanted to share something with her. He was not sure what.
Picking up the basket, he walked toward the door, then turned back and looked again at the photograph.
“Is it wrong, Kati? Ich muss nun Abschied nehmen. The time has come to say farewell.”
FORTY-ONE
The British consul’s agent inhabited one of the few two-story houses in Luxor; it was narrow, built of mud bricks, with curled iron grilles over the ground-floor windows. A pot of marigolds stood to one side of a faded red door, which opened to a dark hallway scented with a musky incense. The smell transported Louisa, as she stepped inside, to Mr. Hamilton’s house in Greenwich.
She glanced around her, half expecting to see Mr. Hamilton’s plump, leaking wife, to breathe in the scent of cats and cabbage, be invited to make her own way to the back parlor. She found herself instead looking at a neat, dark-haired woman with an olive complexion, gold hoops dangling from the lobes of her ears. Louisa removed her glasses.
“Good morning. Is Ahmed Bey present?”
The woman shook her head and showed Louisa into a cool, square study. She brought in a pile of letters on a salver. Looking through the envelopes, Louisa found three addressed to her. One was in Blundell’s strong, methodical hand, the second in Yael’s forward-leaping script that made her think of a horse taking a fence. The third was in handwriting she didn’t recognize.
The housekeeper left the room and Louisa sat down on the visitor’s chair by the side of the agent’s desk. The silence in the room was broken by the light, scurrying tick of a carriage clock on the top of a bookcase. Its urgency seemed redundant in this place of stillness, this place where time had dwarfed itself.
Blundell’s letter was addressed to her in Alexandria, care of the Anglo Ottoman Bank, and had been forwarded by Yael. Louisa opened it with the jeweled paper knife that lay on the desk, shearing through the crease on the top of the envelope. She got out the letter and for a minute held it without unfolding it. It was communication enough, that what had been in Blundell’s hand was now in hers. How long had she been away from her husband? She hardly knew anymore and no counting of days or miles could quantify how far she’d traveled from their life together.
Opening out the sheet of paper, she read the contents. He’d received the letter she had written on the journey upriver, was glad to hear they had enjoyed the trip, and hoped the climate in Luxor was proving beneficial to Harriet. Their sons were in good health, although he himself had suffered a minor bout of Russian influenza, which was no cause for concern. The weather was wet for May and hardly seemed like spring, although the cherry blossom in the garden was splendid. He was sorry she was missing it, since she appreciated beauty better than he. On a more serious note, the news from Egypt concerned him. He suspected that it might be a good idea for them all to return home soon and would sign off now in the hope of being reunited with his beloved wife.
The housekeeper returned and set down a tray on which was a small glass of spirits, a saucer of Turkish delight. Louisa raised her eyes from the letter, blinking away a tear. She waited until the woman had left the room before opening the next letter. Yael trusted that dear Harriet’s health was improving and Louisa was keeping well. She was busy with her charity work. The weather in Alexandria was surprisingly comfortable, not unlike Boscombe in July, and the evenings cool. Louisa scanned the lines, barely absorbing their contents, folding the sheet back into the envelope.
She contemplated the script on the front of the third letter. The initial L was embellished at both ends with curling loops. The envelope was coarse, with a dirty-looking thumbprint on one corner. Her surname had been misspelled. Mrs. L. Herron. Whenever she received a note in an unfamiliar hand, Louisa knew its provenance. Malachi Sethe Hamilton had so little time and so many calls on it that he always sent missives written by one scribe or another. She tore open the envelope, impatient suddenly to know what message it contained.
Glancing at the letter, taking in its brevity, Louisa first thought that Mr. Hamilton had no news to communicate to her. It wasn’t more than a line. Then she read it.
Antigua Street, SE
Mrs. Herron,
Yr mam came through again. Death is coming for sure.
M. S. Hamilton (Mr.)
Picking up the glass from the tray, Louisa downed the brandy in one burning swallow.
As she walked back by the river, Louisa’s feet hurt. She stopped to rest, sat down on a great gray boulder, lifting one foot and then the other out of the thin summer shoes that she had purchased for the trip and that had proved quite hopeless for the terrain, watching the coruscant water, its smooth eternal flow. The Nile appeared wider than it had when they arrived in Luxor. Everything changed. Even the oldest river in history, on which Moses had floated in a cradle sealed with pitch, was altering with every moment that passed.
As she sat, the meaning of her mother’s message at last became clear to her. Harriet was in better health than she had been for years. She was blooming in the dry heat, breathing freely, had never looked or been stronger. If it wasn’t Harriet who was in danger, it must be herself. It was her own death that was near. Amelia Newlove—Louisa never thought of her as Mam, that was Mr. Hamilton’s term—had tried to warn her. Was trying still. Warn her or welcome her. She didn’t know why she hadn’t seen it before.
She stopped under one of the trees that grew by the edge of the river. Leaning on it, she felt steadied. A tree was a tree, in whatever soil it grew. The dry rustle of leaves over her head sounded for a moment like the sea, and she felt a sudden longing for the sensation of rain on her face and the sight of a cloudy sky. Walking on, she found herself thinking again of Dover, the place she still called home if taken unawares. The place that Augustus had robbed her of because the flint house where they’d lived, the turf-covered cliff, the night music of the sea as it murmured and roared to itself in the darkness, had come to seem the same as innocence.
“I am homesick,” she said aloud.
On the far side of the river, the pink hills stared back, impassive. A noise cut through the air, sounding like a wounded animal. Louisa walked a few more steps and, beyond the line of bushes at the edge of the field, saw a woman. She was on her knees by a short, low mound of earth, scooping handfuls of dust from the ground and raining them down over her head, rubbing them into her grief-ravaged face and her exposed breast, her wails rending the air. She lowered her face to the ground, rubbing her forehead on the earth as if she would crawl into it. At the end of the grave was a bowl of water with a small brown bird perched on the rim. Louisa bowed her head. She felt a pain in her own breast, for all the agony that lived in the world like wind or sun, moving about, falling at random on its human subjects. If she was to die, she must first get Harriet safely back to Blundell. At the thought that she might never see her husband again, she began to weep.
FORTY-TWO
Strips of wicker had uncurled from the bentwood frame: the chair b
ack was scratchy against Harriet’s palm. Shards of light fell through a roof made of dried grasses, striping her shoulders, the tops of her bare feet. She was dressed in a loose blue robe, the Egyptian djellaba that Suraya had made for her; newly released from its nighttime plaits, her hair fell in crimped waves to her waist and her feet were bare on the dried mud floor. Every muscle in her body was begging to be allowed to move.
At the other end of the gazebo, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, Eyre Soane mixed pigments on his palette. The paint, or the oil he used to thin it, was irritating her lungs. For the first time in weeks, Harriet could hear her own breathing.
He glanced up.
“You are beautiful, Miss Heron.”
Harriet felt embarrassed. She looked at him, her eyes shifting down from the point where he had instructed her to fasten her gaze.
“I’m not beautiful, and I have always known it. You need not flatter me.”
“But you are,” he said. “The shape of your head. The delicacy of your gestures. I knew from the very first time I set eyes on you that I had to paint you.”
“That morning on the weather deck? You barely noticed me, Mr. Soane.”
Harriet thought she saw annoyance in his face. She pictured him as he had been on that day, remembered how handsome and unreachable he had appeared. Harriet felt she knew him barely any better now. It was the fourth day of the sitting and Eyre Soane had once again taken a long time to arrange her in the pose, moving her head right and left, her chin up and down until it was just so, adjusting her arm. Harriet’s face had colored at the touch of his hand through the thin fabric of her sleeve.
His treatment of her was making her uneasy. He approached too close, looked too long, rested his hand on her waist in a manner that Harriet sensed was improper. Even worse were the compliments he paid her. She wanted to believe them but something inside, some insistent voice, told her that they were insincere.
“I meant at the villa,” he said, “in Alexandria. I didn’t have a chance to see you on the steamer, amid all those frightful tourists.”
She felt the blush begin again. It would not be deterred. Had he forgotten the way their eyes had met across the ship’s dining saloon, after he had joined them at dinner?
The shelter was open on two sides to the breeze, and from where she stood, out of the corner of her eye, she got a glimpse of the aviary. Inside it, the trapped birds swooped and perched, clung to the netting, dipped their heads to the shallow bowl of water.
Outside, the free birds came as if to visit them, landing on the ground, heads cocked to one side, letting out streams of sound.
As she looked, Harriet thought she saw a flash of green, glimpsed the train of Louisa’s skirts passing behind a clump of palm trees outside. She waited for Louisa to enter the gazebo and comment on the canvas or announce that she had changed her mind about allowing, or at any rate not disallowing, the portrait. But the minutes ticked on and Louisa did not come. Harriet decided she must have been mistaken.
Louisa had taken it into her head that they must return to London. Harriet had no wish to leave Luxor. She’d agreed to begin the sitting immediately, from a sense of obligation to Mr. Soane and to gain time in which to try to change Louisa’s mind.
Standing in the pose, her gaze unfocused, as Eyre Soane had instructed, her mind turned to the west bank. She saw the white valley, the dark entrance to the tomb, and imagined herself walking into it, sitting in front of the panel and puzzling over the signs to the music of Dr. Woolfe’s trowel. She’d wanted every day to see him, if only to explain her absence, but Mr. Soane had made it impossible. He arrived at the hotel each morning even before it was properly light and was waiting for her in the lobby by the time she and Louisa came down for breakfast. He worked on the portrait for hours, releasing Harriet at mid-afternoon, too late to cross the river.
Harriet pictured the cartouche, the circle enclosing the hieroglyphs, by the queen in her white dress. She could see each of the symbols individually—the image of the goddess, seated, with her wig long on her back. Aast. Isis. The sign of a windpipe and lungs, which meant beautiful, the face, which was in her own name, that made the sound hr—but she couldn’t read anything coherent from them.
Lifting one foot in the air, she moved her toes, trying to rid herself of pins and needles.
“I must go back to the dig tomorrow. I’ve been away for days.”
“Don’t tease me.”
“I am not teasing you, Mr. Soane. It matters to me, the work I do there. And Dr. Woolfe expects me. I cannot pose for you tomorrow.”
“You will not escape me that easily, Miss Heron,” he said, standing back from the canvas, his right arm outstretched, making marks on the rectangle that was clamped on the easel.
Harriet said no more until Eyre Soane walked over to where she stood and took hold of her hand, turned it upward and kissed the palm, pressing his mouth to her hand. She could feel the moistness of his lips. She pulled away her hand. Harriet had a guilty feeling that far from being in love with Mr. Soane, she was beginning to dislike him. Perhaps that was normal. She knew nothing of love, she reminded herself.
• • •
The sitting over for the day, Eyre Soane insisted on accompanying Harriet to the dining room of the hotel, where she was meeting Louisa for luncheon. As they walked into the room, Louisa rose to her feet from her place at the table. She looked like a ghost, her eyes huge and haunted, one hand patting her chignon.
“Mrs. Heron,” Eyre Soane said. “Please don’t disturb yourself.”
“What do you want?” Louisa said.
He raised his eyebrows, pulling out a chair for Harriet. “I want to invite you and your charming daughter to dinner. I’m organizing a soirée here on Friday evening, for the Europeans. It is to be a celebration of art.”
“When will your portrait be finished, Mr. Soane?” said Louisa.
“Soon, Mrs. Heron. Soon.”
He smiled at her and Louisa stared back at him without the smallest pretense of politeness. Harriet felt puzzled. In all her life, she had never known her mother to behave badly.
FORTY-THREE
Harriet applied her pencil to the paper on the drawing board. Things had changed since her last visit. Dr. Woolfe was close to being able to enter the tomb. The whole of the lintel of the doorway had emerged under his patient tapping, and the rubble beneath it was steadily being reduced, carried away for sieving by the Egyptian workers. He had greeted her without commenting on her absence, simply saying that he had thought she would return. Then he made a little bow and apologized for his English. He had not thought she would return. He had hoped that she would.
The pool of lamplight where she worked was still and steady; not a breath of the thick air moved.
“Have you made any more finds, Dr. Woolfe?” she called to him.
“Ach, just shards mainly, Romans. I came across the feet of a shabti, in faience. And a promising-looking amulet that I haven’t had a chance yet to examine. Another scarab.”
“I like scarabs,” Harriet said.
“I also like scarabs,” came Dr. Woolfe’s voice. He cleared his throat. “We have missed you here, Miss Heron.”
“I wanted to come before but I’ve been sitting for a portrait. Eyre Soane, the artist, is here with his friends.”
“I have heard about the arrival of the dashing Mr. Soane. In fact, I met the man on the ship.”
“He would like to visit the dig,” Harriet said, “if you had no objection.”
“If I had no objection,” Dr. Woolfe said, “then he could.”
His voice, traveling through the darkness, sounded farther away than it was.
Harriet held up the paper to compare her drawing with the original. She was copying the second column of hieroglyphs, below the oval ring of symbols that spelled out the name of the queen, that she hadn’t yet been a
ble to read. At the top of the column was the depiction of a house, which—combined with two walking legs and an empty eye shape—meant to go forth. Harriet wondered again whether the queen still lay on the other side of the doorway, whether the magic had worked and the Lady of the Two Lands went forth by day to savor the muddy scent of the rising Nile, feel the sun on her shoulders. The queens wore surprisingly revealing gowns.
Harriet had risen before dawn and walked through the hotel garden in the darkness, the warmth cloaking her despite the early hour. Mornings in Luxor were unlike any Harriet had ever experienced in England. The minutes before dawn seemed to hold some great tension, as if the curtain was about to be raised on an epic drama and the earth hushed itself in readiness, with only the cockerels unable to contain themselves, shrieking their excitement at the coming day.
She’d told Fouad of her intention and he was waiting for her by the gate the servants used. Hurrying behind the mud-brick wall at the back of the hotel, they walked quickly south along the shore to the spot from which the boats departed for the west bank. Soft splashes broke the silence as the boatman pushed the little craft out into the water, waded through the shallows, and scrambled on board in his bare feet, pulling round the sail to catch the breeze.
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