The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  After an hour—perhaps more, Harriet had lost her sense of ordinary time—something emerged from between Mrs. Cox’s white thighs. It came easily in the end, a clotted mass, not large, slithering out as if in a hurry, in a sea of purplish blood. As it lay on the newspaper, a feeble movement came from it. Mrs. Cox cried out again.

  “Look. Oh, look.”

  She reached forward and lifted up a tiny, curved form. The head appeared translucent and the back was curved, the fingers spread like a starfish. It was a boy.

  “He’s alive,” Mrs. Cox said. “It’s a miracle. Zebedee, come and see him.”

  Mr. Cox had returned and was standing by the door, sucking on his pipe, the smell of smoke mingling with the strong scent of blood. Throwing down the pipe, he reached the bed in three strides. Harriet scrambled to her feet.

  “What are you—”

  He dashed the little thing out of Mrs. Cox’s hands, onto the newspaper, bundled it up, forced open the porthole, and stuffed it through. Closed up the brass catch.

  Harriet opened her mouth to speak and a tide of nausea overwhelmed her. She lurched to the basin and was sick, then sick again, spitting up a thin white liquid that burned her throat, until her entire body seemed emptied.

  “That was wrong,” she said, as soon as she was able, turning around to face him, clinging to the washstand to keep herself upright. “What you did was wrong, Mr. Cox.”

  Mrs. Cox had rolled over to face the curved side of the ship, the sheet drawn up over her face. Harriet felt suddenly weak. Her chest was tightening and she had an urgent need to lie down and rest, could think of nothing but reaching her own bunk, trying to breathe to her stomach. As she groped her way toward the door, a wall of water hit the side of the ship. The floor shot up at an angle and the porthole burst open again, water rushing in over the bed.

  The sheet clung in wet folds to Mrs. Cox’s body; she looked like a marble statue.

  “It’s God’s punishment,” she wept. “We’re going to drown.”

  “Hush, Sarah.” Mr. Cox got the porthole closed and knelt down beside his wife. He took hold of her hand and kissed it, glanced over his shoulder at Harriet.

  “Leave us now. Please go.”

  Harriet made her way out of the first-class cabins and back the quickest way she knew to the lower deck, past the galley. A line of copper pans swung from their hooks over the stoves, crashing against each other like cymbals. Amid the pieces of smashed china that littered the floor, the cooks were down on their knees, holding hands and praying.

  At the foot of the iron steps, water was running backward and forward in the corridor. The passage was deserted, but behind closed cabin doors, women screamed and children cried; trunks banged and crashed against the flimsy partitions.

  Bumping from one side to the other along the corridor, her feet squelching inside her boots, her strength exhausted, Harriet neared their cabin. Through the portholes, she caught glimpses of the sea. It didn’t look like water any longer but like molten lead, gray and menacing, forming in mountainous waves. It could swallow anything, it seemed to say. Lives. Secrets. It could even swallow time.

  She felt dazed, fielding Louisa’s urgent inquiries about where she’d been, Yael’s entreaties, alternated with appeals to the Lord to save their souls, that she get out of her wet clothes before she caught her death. During the long hours that followed, as she lay in her bunk, her legs braced against its sides, her mind pitched and turned as if it too were buffeted by the storm. Harriet had wanted to embrace life. Death, if that was to be her fate. She hadn’t imagined that life could include those small, stretched fingers or understood that they might all perish at sea. She remembered Dash and groaned aloud. She’d last seen him in the Coxes’ cabin.

  ELEVEN

  The morning dawned still and bright, the sky cloudless. Dash made his own way back to the cabin, his coat still plastered to his body. At ten o’clock, leaving Louisa to rest in her bunk as she insisted, Harriet and Yael went to the dining saloon. The passengers were ashen-faced and few in number, their voices subdued as they ordered dry toast and black tea, refused offers from the stewards of kedgeree, deviled kidneys, tinned asparagus.

  Mrs. Cox was unwell, her female neighbor from the next-door cabin informed Harriet as she passed their table. She’d been removed to the surgeon’s suite in the early hours and no one knew what ailed her. Harriet felt sick again. Mrs. Cox’s condition must have worsened overnight. Either that or her husband had come to his senses and gotten the doctor to her.

  Yael tucked into her usual poached egg, emptied a pot of strong tea. Harriet ordered rashers of bacon and a cup of cocoa. She cut one rasher into pieces and fed it to Dash, looking around the deserted saloon, letting the dog lick her fingers. The painter’s chair was empty. She drank the cocoa then raised her fork and put it down again.

  “No appetite?” said Yael. “I hope Mrs. Cox will recover from whatever troubles her.”

  Harriet picked up her cup and scraped at the sugar at the bottom with a teaspoon, avoiding her aunt’s eyes.

  “She was seasick,” she said.

  “Indeed.” Yael’s expression was unfathomable.

  • • •

  At mid-afternoon, the Star of the East docked at the Italian port of Brindisi. The town looked solid and comfortable, its red-roofed buildings clustered like skirts around a great forbidding castle. Once the steamer was cleared by the Italian medical officer, Harriet, Louisa, and Yael took their turn to cross the gangplank to the shore behind an elderly man who, when he reached land, got down on his knees and kissed the worn flags along the edge of the quay.

  “Poor Father,” Yael said under her breath. “I wonder how he fares.”

  “Yes,” Louisa said, looking around her with a distracted air. “I wonder.”

  It was the first time any of them had set foot on the soil of Europe, but Harriet, shaken by the night’s events, disoriented by the sudden warmth and brightness, couldn’t find words to share the experience with her mother and aunt. Louisa’s face was blanched and even Yael appeared tired, her clothes crumpled and her face creased.

  The sun was warm on Harriet’s skin and the air drifting toward them from inland felt soft, scented with damp earth and leaves and blossom. She breathed in, feeling her body respond to its warmth and sweetness, as they climbed a flight of steps to a row of hotels and grocery shops that surveyed the harbor.

  Walking past the stores, with their displays of unfamiliar cheeses and liqueurs and dried fruits, Harriet felt as if the stone flags were rolling under her feet, the ancient-looking buildings rocking on their foundations. They sat down at a table under a tree, outside a small hotel. Oranges hung from the branches over their heads. Harriet had never imagined that oranges might grow like apples, with as little ceremony and as much profusion. She stood up and picked one, tore off the greenish, spongy peel, parted a segment from the whole, and sucked out the juice, savored its tartness.

  Yael refused the piece Harriet offered her.

  “I only take orange in the form of marmalade, dear.”

  Louisa didn’t want any either, on the grounds that unripe fruit might unsettle her stomach.

  Harriet finished the orange herself, slowly, picking pips from her tongue and flicking them into the gutter, looking down at the steamer. The blackened funnel was as quiet as an unlit pipe, dwarfed by the three high masts, the riggings hung with coats and breeches. The stern was carpeted with sodden blankets and boots, steaming in the bright sunlight. The crew baled out water, passing bucketfuls up from the lower decks and flinging it back into the sea, while Italian dockers carried carcasses of meat on board on their backs.

  After breakfast, on the pretext of needing fresh air, Harriet had sought out the medical rooms. She hesitated before she knocked on the door, wondering whether the surgeon knew what had happened to Mrs. Cox, and her part in it. She felt first embarrassment,
then a surge of indignation at the shame of her friend’s situation. Mrs. Cox was a good woman. She was sure of it.

  She knocked on the door and the surgeon opened it, looking her up and down. His solid body, encased in a navy tunic, blocked the entrance.

  “Yes?”

  Harriet made herself raise her eyes.

  “I’ve come to visit Mrs. Cox. I heard that . . . she was unwell.”

  “She can’t receive you.”

  “Could you tell her it’s Miss Heron. I only want a few minutes with her.”

  The surgeon frowned.

  “No one but her husband is to have admittance. Captain’s orders. Good day, miss.”

  Sitting in the sunshine, breathing in the balmy air, Harriet thought again about the baby. Even if he couldn’t live, it was wrong that he’d been cast into the waters without a burial. Still alive. If he had been an ancient Egyptian baby, he might have been preserved for all time. She’d seen in one of the books a drawing of a mummified fetus, thousands of years old. A being that had never lived and yet had outlived all humanity. It perplexed her to think about the length of life and its brevity.

  Shouts from the quayside interrupted her thoughts and Harriet stood up, shading her eyes with her hand, looking down at the harbor. The dockers were crowding around something on the quay.

  The gang parted to reveal a large object wrapped in sacking. It looked like a great flat-topped, spindly-legged animal, trapped and bound up with ropes. Harriet watched as the men secured it to a crane, then winched it up and swung it slowly out over the edge of the quay. Midway between the ship and the dock, the cargo lurched and slipped in its ropes, to shouts of alarm. It rocked, then stabilized and landed like a clumsy bird.

  As the crew released the piano from the sling, Harriet saw a man standing on the deck, watching. He was a head taller than any of the sailors, wearing a suit the color of sand and a straw hat. As she watched, he stepped forward and slit open part of the sacking with a knife, then lifted the lid and struck a key. A bass note resounded into the silence that had fallen. He played a couple of chords and the crew applauded.

  “What’s all the commotion?” Yael said.

  “It’s a piano, Aunt,” she said, sitting down. “A grand piano.”

  “How absurd,” said Louisa. “Don’t get sunstroke, Harriet, it’s very warm.”

  “I won’t, Mother.” Draining the sweet dregs of her coffee, Harriet looked again at the deck. The man’s hair was down to his shoulders, bleached at the ends as if by long exposure to the sun, and he stood very still. Harriet willed him to turn around; she felt curious to see his face. “Who can he be?” she wondered aloud.

  Yael had finished her seltzer water. She picked up her bag and pulled her bonnet more tightly onto her head.

  “Your grandfather never traveled, Harriet,” she said, as they walked back down the steps and joined the stream of people making their way back on board. “He has spent his whole life in England, as I believed I would do. We none of us know what plans the Almighty has for us.”

  TWELVE

  The weather grew milder each day, and when the winds were sufficient, the ship traveled under sail, the noise of the engines stilled. Louisa felt as if she were neither in the world nor out of it, as if she were nowhere at all. At night, lying in the darkness with her eyes wide open, her mind turned to the girl she had been. Louisa had stifled her memory for so many years, it was as if that girl had died.

  Louisa was fifteen when she first encountered Augustus. In those days, she was a hoyden. She never wore a bonnet or gloves except to church, her skin was brown as a gypsy’s, and she clothed herself in red as often as she could, from a secret conviction that it was the color of life.

  Her mother, ever since she could remember, had insisted that Louisa was beautiful. Beatrice was clever, Amelia Newlove declared. Hepzibah had an artistic gift and Lavinia was born gentle. But Louisa was a beauty. Peering into the old oval looking glass in the hallway at home, Louisa could see no evidence of it.

  Her brows were thick as a boy’s and demanded constant close attention with tweezers. Her mouth was too large, too definitely shaped, as if it had been drawn on her face with a pencil. Her hair was impossible. Was it true, she asked silently, walking the beach alone, listening to the midair squabbling of gulls. Was beautiful what she was?

  Louisa did not know what she was. She didn’t share the trust in God that her older sisters professed. She saw no evidence of any God yet was ashamed to admit her unbelief to anyone but herself. Frightened as well, since if there was no God, for girls like the Newloves, what was there?

  Still, she knelt by her bed each night, thanking the Lord for his blessings and asking him to help those in greater need than she. Who could be in greater need than she, Louisa wondered, sliding between darned sheets in a darned nightdress, brushing sand off her knees, curling up to try to generate some warmth.

  On Sundays, after lunch, she put on her favorite dress—a hand-me-down from Hepzibah, the color of rubies—and walked on the beach, dreaming of the life she would have. Its details were uncertain but it would be far from Dover and she would be at its center, not at the edge of everything, as she felt herself to be. After their father died, they had no society at home to speak of and Louisa longed for company. For a suitor. Even a glance from a man old enough to be her father, a lingering look while his wife’s fair head was turned and his small son watched mutely—even such an impoliteness was welcome. She nodded as she walked past, feeling his eyes drawn to her like iron to a magnet, sensing his gaze as she carried on over the sands.

  It was late May and the summer was beginning cool and wet. The next Sunday was rainy, the sand scarred with shallow depressions, the beach deserted. Louisa walked for an hour, then went home in low spirits, but the following week, she saw the man again. He was alone, standing on the shore as if he were waiting for an omnibus, puffing cigar smoke into the air over his head in short, fierce bursts.

  “There you are,” he said as she approached, pretending not to have noticed him. “At last.”

  “Good afternoon,” she said stiffly.

  He fell into step beside her, walking along the water’s edge, the dark stink of tobacco mingling with the smell of salt and rotting seaweed. He wasn’t much taller than she and he labored as he walked, his breath heavy, his watch chain rattling on the horn buttons of a check waistcoat under his overcoat. The tide was coming in, surreptitiously, flicking its tongue over the sand. A wave reached his boot and he kicked at it, splashed foam in the air.

  “Damned stuff.”

  Louisa giggled.

  “It’s just the tide. It’s coming home, sir,” she said.

  “Home?” he said.

  They had reached the end of the bay, under the cliff, and could walk no farther without wading out through the water, over the rocks, around the point. He threw the end of his cigar into the sea, turned to Louisa, and put his hand under her chin. His fingers were roughened and bent, the nails flecked with blue and black paint. He turned her face one way then another, tilting it to the sun.

  Louisa wasn’t given to blushing, to displaying her feelings on her face, as some of her sisters were in the habit of doing. Her burning was all on the inside and the gesture, the sureness of his touch, lit a fire in her.

  The man let go of her jaw.

  “I’m going to paint you. We stay at the dower house. Come in the morning, early.”

  She shook her head.

  “I cannot. My mother won’t—”

  “Yes, she will. Tell her Augustus wants you for a model. I’ll be waiting.”

  He looked at her again, up and down, as if he owned her. A faint, urgent ringing traveled through the still air. Lavinia was summoning her from the garden of the house on the top of the cliff, banging on the old saucepan with a flint. Louisa looked up, shading her eyes with her hand, squinting into the dista
nce. High up above was the figure of a boy, dressed in a sailor suit and so still that for an instant she thought it was a statue that looked down at her.

  “I must go now,” she said to Augustus. “Good day.”

  Turning back in the direction of the house, she walked away, faster than she knew she could, weightless, skirting around her footprints in the sand, and his, as the water began to fill them. She felt as if she could have walked on the surface of the sea, all the way along the bay.

  And so it began.

  • • •

  As the ship proceeded southeast through the Mediterranean Sea, past shoals of porpoises and huge floating turtles, past fishing vessels and, occasionally, a steamer traveling in the other direction, Louisa kept to the cabin. She rested on her bunk or sat at the small table with her tatting. She’d brought a pattern and a quantity of silk, intending to complete a tablecloth while they were away. One purl, one plain. Two purl, two plain. One purl, one plain. The repetition soothed her.

  There was nothing to worry about, she insisted to herself. If Eyre Soane had recognized her—and she couldn’t be certain that he had—she would avoid him. They would never meet him once they arrived in Egypt; she had seen from the globe what a large country it was. The idea of not encountering him again prompted a sense of loss. As much as Louisa dreaded it, she found herself longing to see Eyre Soane, to hear tidings that only he could provide.

  THIRTEEN

  Harriet’s first impression of Alexandria was its color. The city looked white, made up of white flat-roofed houses, white domed mosques flanked by delicate minarets, and pale-trunked palm trees topped with explosions of upward-reaching leaves. Standing on the crowded deck, almost shaking with excitement, Harriet felt as if it were impossible that the port should have looked anything other than exactly the way it did. She had an odd sensation, as if she already knew it.

  An Egyptian pilot came aboard and steered the ship between a solid stone lighthouse and a reef of black rocks into a wide natural harbor, full of ships of every description, the sky overhead smudged with smoke from their funnels. The ship received clearance, the surgeon blasted a whistle, and a flotilla of small boats that had been waiting at a distance began streaming toward the Star of the East, rowed by men in robes of blue and scarlet and green, their heads wrapped in turbans or covered in close-fitting caps. Egypt was coming out to meet them, the Arabs waving and gesturing at the passengers, their cries filling the air.