The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  The deck was packed—with men, women with babies in arms, old people who’d scarcely been seen for the length of the journey. Harriet scanned the hats of the women, looking for one elegant enough to belong on the head of Mrs. Cox. She’d been back to the medical room to leave her another note. Since the storm, Zebedee Cox had avoided her when she’d seen him on deck, turning on his heel and walking in the other direction.

  Glancing around again, Harriet saw the man who’d embarked with his piano. The same back in the same pale jacket moved up onto the bridge, following behind Captain Ablewhite’s dark blazer. As the man ducked through the door, Harriet glimpsed his profile, serious-looking and straight-nosed.

  “Fine morning!”

  The Reverend Ernest Griffinshawe was standing by her aunt.

  “The Dark Continent lies before us,” he said, his eyes fixed on the horizon. “Awaiting the light of our Lord.”

  “I shall go no farther than Alexandria,” Yael said, raising her voice over the shouts of the porters, the clank of the anchor chain still unspooling into the clear turquoise sea. “Alexandria is on the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean is part of Europe. Europe is En­gland’s next-door neighbor. I declare before God that I shall go no farther than this city.”

  She got down on her knees on the deck and began to recite the Lord’s Prayer.

  Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .

  Some women standing near by began to titter behind their hands.

  “Really, Yael, I am not sure that this is the time or the place,” said Louisa, as Reverend Griffinshawe frowned at the women and knelt beside Yael, adding his louder voice to hers.

  Give us this day . . .

  Some of the older female passengers joined them, sinking clumsily to their knees behind Yael and the parson.

  And forgive us our trespasses . . .

  Harriet barely heard them. At the front of the crush of people stood a man dressed in a brown velvet jacket and breeches. The red scarf at his neck fluttered in the breeze as the painter handed a folded easel to an Arab who’d boarded the ship. He oversaw the unloading of a pair of matching portmanteaus, then disappeared over the side and down the accommodation ladder, his paintbox under his arm.

  Since the night of the dinner, Harriet had only glimpsed Eyre Soane at his easel, intent on his canvas, his posture inviting no interruption. She felt as if she might have imagined that he had ever watched them, ever come so purposefully to sit with them, as if—it seemed to her now—he had some mission that he had not declared.

  The man had imprinted himself on her mind. Each time she remembered the way he’d looked at her after she and Louisa left the table, a current of an unfamiliar feeling ran through her and left her disturbed.

  Pushing her way in between the crowd, Harriet looked down over the railing. Brightly painted boats crowded under the prow, with barefoot men standing up in them, holding out their hands to receive trunks and parcels, calling for business in a soup of languages. Half a dozen or more of the little crafts had their sails hoisted and were tacking back toward the quay with their passengers. Mr. Soane had disappeared.

  “Miss Heron!”

  Looking to starboard, she saw a red boat bobbing on the translucent sea, the painter seated in it. He raised his head from the match cupped in his hand and lifted his arm in a wave.

  “Good morning,” he called over the water in a pleasant voice, as if they were old acquaintances.

  “Good morning, Mr. Soane,” she called back.

  “Welcome to Egypt. Tell your mother I shall visit you.”

  Too surprised to speak, Harriet nodded, reaching automatically for her journal in the pocket around her waist. As the boat carried Eyre Soane toward the dock, she watched, feeling the strong beat of the sun on her face, breathing in air that smelled of salt and sun, that carried a trace of cigar smoke.

  FOURTEEN

  Harriet sat on one side of the worn leather seat, Louisa in the middle, and Yael at the far end. The horse slowed to a walk as they passed along a narrow alley, past dark cavelike shops stocked with bolts of cloth, glassware, tinned goods. Over everything was a geometric pattern of light and shade, cast by lengths of sacking stretched overhead between the roofs of the buildings. The streets teemed with people, with color, with life and the cries of voices and animals.

  Harriet felt the strangeness physically, like heat or cold; every part of her body tingled with impressions, as if the surroundings were both more real than any she had ever experienced in her life and at the same time utterly unreal.

  “Arab town, Sitti,” Mustapha shouted, turning his head to them from where he sat at the front of the cab, next to the driver. Mustapha had met them on the quay and introduced himself as their housekeeper.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Yael. “How did you know it was us?”

  “Three ladies,” he’d announced, helping them up, hitching his robe to display narrow, scarred ankles, naked feet clad in pointed slippers. “I know he is three ladies.”

  A girl was hurrying beside them, squeezed into the gap between the carriage and the mud walls. Her eyes, half closed, oozing a yellow secretion, were trained in their direction and she held out a palm, calling for baksheesh.

  “That poor child,” Yael said. “Can you see her, Louisa?” The driver touched the horse with his whip, and as the animal broke into a trot, the girl caught hold of the armrest and was pulled along. “Slow down, driver,” Yael cried, reaching forward and tapping the man on the shoulder. “Stop.”

  Mustapha issued instructions in a strange, harsh tongue and with a yank of the reins the driver pulled up the horse. Yael began fumbling in her bag. Extracting two English pennies, she leaned down from the cab, pressed them into the girl’s hand.

  “God bless you, dear,” she said as the child darted away.

  “The guidebook advises against giving alms on the street,” Louisa said.

  “She was half starved,” Yael said, closing up her Gladstone bag. “And did you see her eyes?”

  “Poor,” Mustapha said, turning his head to them, smiling, showing a row of the whitest teeth Harriet had ever seen. “She is poor.”

  He laughed and the carriage moved off again.

  “We have poor children in London, Mr. Farr,” Yael said loudly. “But they do not go naked as the day they were born.”

  Her hands gripped each other in her lap as the carriage swayed on through the old town and out under a stone gateway and into a grand square, lined with gracious buildings, made of white stone and adorned with balconies and striped awnings. The strolling people wore European dress and red felt hats. Harriet saw an African boy, laden with packages, running behind a fashionable woman. She had a sick, certain feeling that she saw a slave.

  Minutes later, the driver drew up the horses outside a pair of high iron gates. A watchman scrambled to his feet and Harriet followed Louisa and Yael into a garden dominated by a huge tree. Its branches curled upward like the legs of spiders and its leaves were sharp and dark, as if they had been folded into triangles.

  “Araucaria araucana,” Yael announced, pausing to look up into it. “The monkey puzzle. We had one at home.”

  It didn’t resemble a living thing at all, Harriet thought, passing underneath it and along the path to a square stone house with shuttered windows. Mustapha ushered them through the double wooden door, across a vestibule, and into a courtyard in the center of the house that, she realized with delight, stood open to the sky.

  Louisa looked around her. She tilted back her head, the sun falling on her white face.

  “Where is the roof?” she said. “A house must have a roof.”

  In a large, airy bedroom with long wooden shutters at the window, Harriet undid her pocket from around her waist and slid her journal under the pillow on the bed. Kicking off her boots, she lay flat on her back on a mattress with a dip in the middle a
nd breathed into her stomach.

  She felt filled with an unexpected happiness. She’d feared she was coming to Egypt to die, but now that she was here, she had the peculiar sense that her true life, the one that had always awaited her, had at last begun.

  FIFTEEN

  Louisa entered the room to see Yael and Harriet sitting opposite each other at one end of a long table. She pulled up a chair next to Harriet’s.

  “Did you hear the racket?” Yael said. “Late last night and again before dawn? I thought it was a funeral but Harriet says it’s the priest.”

  “It’s the call to prayer,” Harriet said. “Mustapha explained it to me.”

  “You must have heard it, Louisa. Such a queer-sounding dirge and we’re to be subjected to it five times a day.”

  “I believe I did,” Louisa said, shaking out a napkin and spreading it on her lap. She smiled at Yael. “I can’t be sure, I slept so deeply.”

  It wasn’t true. She had slept badly, then risen early and taken a shower, standing under the trickle of water and looking up at a small, high bathroom window through which bright light poured. It was peculiar to be naked in a foreign country. She felt more exposed than if she were in her own bathroom, clothed by the familiarity of her house and city and country.

  Back in her bedroom, drying herself on a towel stiff as a board, she dusted talcum powder under her arms and put on her lightest dress. It was one of her favorites, a fitted jacket and skirt in emerald green with a darker, bottle-green train over the hips of the skirt, falling in a fishtail at the back, but once she’d fastened the jacket, draped the train over the bustle, it felt wrong. The fabric carried in its folds a whiff of fog, something sour and dirty, mixing with the smell of her soaped and powdered skin, the odors of salt and pine that drifted through the open window.

  Louisa surveyed the table. The cloth bore pale stains of days gone by and the food was spread on unmatched china plates. The fare consisted not of the raw sheep’s eyeballs she’d feared but slices of white cheese, flat round loaves the size of saucers, piled high, and a tall jug of what smelled like coffee, strong and aromatic.

  “Are these eggs?” she asked, reaching out and touching one.

  “Hard-boiled,” Yael said. “And perfectly edible.”

  Louisa sipped her coffee and listened to Harriet’s breathing. It was shallow but soft, neither badly impeded nor quite clear. It was foolish to hope that Harriet would be completely cured as soon as they reached Egypt, yet in some primitive part of herself Louisa had hoped exactly that. She had wished for a miracle, a means to silence the words Mr. Hamilton had conveyed from her mother and that she had continued to hear, as if they had planted themselves in her ears. Death is near.

  Harriet rose from her chair, brushing crumbs from her lap.

  “I’m going to look around the garden,” she said, standing between the long, open doors.

  She was wearing a tea gown in a floral print and Louisa, seeing her slender waist, the curve of her long neck, had the sense that still afflicted her sometimes, of loss, because Harriet was taller by a head than she, a woman, not a child.

  “Shouldn’t you rest for a few minutes?” she said. “Digest your breakfast.”

  “I am perfectly all right, Mother.” Harriet turned to face back into the room and the sun lit up her hair from behind in a scarlet halo. “By the way, Mr. Soane said he would call on us. He asked me to tell you.”

  Harriet walked into the garden. Louisa stared after her as the dog rose from under the table and trotted out, his claws tapping on the tiled floor.

  “Dear Harriet is in better health already,” said Yael, spreading jam on a piece of bread.

  “Sea air always agreed with her,” Louisa said, cracking the shell of the egg on the rim of her plate, peeling the sharp shards from the softly solid albumen. Her mind was racing. How could Eyre Soane call, when he did not have their address? It was impossible. He was taunting her.

  “Perhaps some of our fellow passengers have lifted Harriet’s spirits. I believe she enjoyed making the acquaintance of Mrs. Cox, and Mr. Soane.” Yael chewed and swallowed, took a sip of coffee. “You seem troubled, Louisa.”

  “Is that so?”

  “You know that . . .” Yael regarded her with her earnest gray eyes. “That if I could aid you by any means, I would.”

  Louisa put down a half-eaten slice of cheese, rolled up the napkin, and pulled it through its ivory ring, looking at the carved elephants condemned to walk forever in a circle.

  “Thank you, Yael,” she said, more stiffly than she intended. “You mean well, I’m sure, but I am not troubled by anything. Please excuse me. I must finish unpacking.”

  Back in the bedroom, surveying the peculiar contents of her trunk, wishing again she had thought to slip in a fourpenny card of pins, Louisa found that her hands were shaking. She had a feeling of time having turned inside out, of the present being flimsy and contingent, less real than the past.

  Sitting on the bed, closing her eyes, she found herself again back in the flint house of her girlhood, hearing the cry of gulls. Louisa was home from her walk on the sands, her head spinning, unable to sit down as her mother urged and take a turn with shelling the glut of peas. Amelia Newlove looked up at her from her chair by the fireplace.

  “Whatever is it, Louisa?”

  “I met a man,” she said, “and his family. On the beach. An artist.” She avoided her mother’s eyes. “He wants to paint my picture.”

  Louisa had never heard of a person famous enough to go by their first name alone. But her older sister, Hepzibah, staying with the family for a summer holiday following her marriage, informed her that all England knew about the painter Augustus, member of the Royal Academy, whose pictures of goddesses and muses sold for vast sums.

  “Diana the Huntress fetched a thousand guineas. Imagine! Did he offer you money, Izzy?”

  Louisa shook her head.

  “How very proper. He is an honorable man. He will reward you afterward. He will make you celebrated.”

  Next morning, Hepzibah woke her early with hot water and said she must bathe and brush her hair, couldn’t arrive looking like a gypsy. After her sister’s scrubbing of her, Louisa discovered she didn’t want to wear the red dress. She took her church dress, navy, with a ragged white collar that hung lower on one side than the other, out of the chest and stood with her hair lifted in her hands while Hepzibah did up the row of hooks and eyes at the back. Downstairs, perched on a stool in the scullery, she drank a cup of tea, refused Hepzibah’s pressing offer to accompany her to Augustus’s house, and set off along the cliff-top path, carrying a cloth bag containing a dozen new-laid eggs, sent from Louisa’s mother to Augustus’s wife.

  Once she was out of sight of the upstairs windows of the flint house, Louisa dawdled, spinning flat disks of chalk along the path with short, violent kicks from the toe of her boot, looking in the springy turf for four-leaf clovers. Down at the beach, a group of village girls played hopscotch in the sand, their boots discarded, lined up in a row. Louisa stood watching, wishing she were one of them, not herself, alone on the cliff top and expected at a big house.

  She didn’t lift the rusty ring of iron that hung from a lion’s mouth. She rapped on the wood with her bare knuckles. The door opened immediately and Augustus stepped out of the house, into the morning brightness. He looked older than he had the day before, the skin under his eyes falling in soft pleats, the beard around his lips flecked with white. He appeared rumpled, as if he had just risen from his bed.

  “It’s fortunate that I was expecting you,” he said as he closed the door behind him. “No one would have heard that.”

  He went ahead of her across the garden and into what looked from the outside like an old barn. On the inside, it was unlike any barn Louisa had ever seen. No straw or mountain of hay. No animals. It was a great, high-roofed place, almost empty. The top hal
f of one wall was made of panes of clear glass through which light flooded down onto the wooden floor. She felt for a moment as if she’d walked into a church.

  Two enormous easels on wheels stood next to each other along one wall, as well as a stuffed peacock perched on a stand. In the middle of the room was a large table bearing a collection of shells and feathers and carved stones. Something oily and sharp pervaded the air and Louisa sneezed three times in a row, light, quick sneezes that she couldn’t prevent.

  “Pardon me,” she said, when she could get the words out.

  Augustus sat on a stool looking at her, his face frank and curious.

  “Your father agreed?” he said.

  “My father is away.”

  Something prevented her from telling this man that her father was dead, had been dead for three years. Augustus couldn’t have asked anybody about her, locally, or he would have known. Everyone knew about the drowning of Captain Newlove, within sight of land and home. Married to the mermaids, the village boys said he was. The man’s eyes shifted.

  “Your mother, then?”

  At the memory of the conversation that had taken place around the hearth, Louisa felt the burning begin inside. Hepzibah, altered since her wedding from the crosspatch she’d always been, now perpetually sunny-tempered, had spun the whole family into a tale of their altered fortunes, of what would occur once Louisa’s painting too was sold for a thousand guineas and eminent painters beat a path across the cliff to the door of the flint house. On the advice of her twenty-one-year-old newly married daughter, Louisa’s mother had agreed that she should go for her portrait.