The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  “May I ask your name?”

  “I am the Sheikh Hamada.”

  “Miss Heron,” the Reverend called, over the stony ground. “Is the fellow bothering you?”

  Sheikh Hamada didn’t hear.

  “It is our duty,” he said, “to receive guests. Your servant should not have allowed you to go alone.”

  • • •

  Gripping the back of the pew in front, Yael pulled herself to her feet as the congregation, a thinner gathering than the Reverend Griffinshawe had suggested, rose for “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” She opened the hymn book and began to sing.

  Marching as to war.

  She could hear her own voice, a little out of key, slightly out of time with the rest, as she had always felt herself to be with other people and not only in choral matters.

  With the cross of Jesus . . . Going on before.

  Hearing the familiar words, Yael felt the pull of England. The high, tremulous voices, the faith expressed in them, however imperfectly, dignified their country more than the Union Jack pennants in the harbor, the British consul’s residence in its grand and formal square. It was faith in a Christian God and England’s capacity for charity that made the nation great, not their talent for trade, their subjugation of other lands, whatever Blundell might believe. Curious how, thousands of miles away from him, it was easier to think thoughts different from her brother’s.

  The hymn finished and the Reverend announced a period of private prayer. Yael eased herself onto her knees, to a plain hassock on the stone floor. Closing her eyes, resting her forehead on her hands, she asked God for guidance on what help she might offer in the time she was here.

  As the vicar embarked on a reading from Corinthians, she pulled herself back onto the seat. Light poured through the panes of crimson and blue and gold glass set into the round high window over the entrance of St. Mark’s and threw a rainbow along the aisle, between the rows of carved pews. The altar, spread with a white cloth, was dressed with a trinity of tall, lighted candles, a vase of flowers so bright and vivid they too might be aflame. The church was beautiful, she saw. As beautiful as any she had worshipped in.

  On the way back to the villa, sitting in a rusty brougham as it lurched through the narrow streets—its driver miraculously avoiding haughty-faced camels, donkeys laden with swollen, dripping water skins, barrows piled high with carrots and tomatoes, blind beggars, sherbet sellers rattling brass cups—the answer came to her clearly. The little girl was a messenger. Both of them had been. She would establish a first-aid post, to treat eye disease. She could offer simple cleansing and rudimentary treatments. Alum could be procured here, she assumed, and supplies of gentian lotion. Soap. She had had experience in tending the sick at home, who could not be so very different from the sick here. She would make herself useful.

  Yael gripped in one hand the pound borrowed from the Reverend for her fare, as the cab moved along a gracious avenue lined with opulent Greek and Turkish emporia displaying in their windows imported groceries and gowns and perfumes. The clinic would need to be in the Arab city, where the poor children were, not the broad and imposing thoroughfares of the Frank quarter, where the Europeans made their home. If she found a simple room at street level, put herself there with soap and water and medicines, the children would come. Their mothers would bring them.

  SEVENTEEN

  Harriet felt restless. They had been in Alexandria for a fortnight and at Louisa’s insistence had developed a routine for their days. They rose at eight, breakfasted at nine, and spent the mornings in the house and garden. In the afternoons, after the daily rest prescribed for Harriet by Dr. Grammaticas—and weather permitting, because it rained often, a drenching, cool rain blown in off the sea that seemed to fall horizontally, or sometimes even from below, as if defying the rules of nature and rising from the ground toward the sky—they went on excursions.

  Pompey’s Pillar was the first of the sights they visited.

  “Smaller than the Monument,” Yael announced, walking around the plinth of red-speckled stone. “And why do men always want to build things pointing up into the sky?”

  They walked in the public gardens on Friday afternoon, admiring the blooms in pink and scarlet, to the strains of a brass band. Took a carriage to see the Mahmoudieh Canal, from where people set sail to Cairo.

  Most of their time, they spent at the villa. Mustapha had a wife, Suraya, who lived with her four small children in a room at the back, beyond the yard that serviced the kitchen. The room was built from mud bricks and roughly plastered with more of the same mud. It was roofed with palm branches, and the interior, reached through the ragged curtain that served as a door, was smoke-blackened and low-ceilinged.

  Harriet took to visiting Suraya, picking up Arabic words from her and teaching her a few English ones. Ignoring Louisa’s objections, she sat on a rope-strung stool in the tiny apartment, playing with the children, as Suraya went about her housekeeping. From the pictures in her books, Harriet had believed that all Egyptian women would be slim and beautiful, watchful under their heavy black wigs, half-smiles playing on sealed lips. It wasn’t true. They were as unalike in looks as Englishwomen were.

  Suraya was plump and purposeful. In the privacy of her home, she wore her hair uncovered, in a long plait down her back, the thin strands at the end always coming undone. Her blue-and-black-striped robe bore marks of flour and cooking oil. Are you married? she asked repeatedly, by means of gesture. Not married? No children? She shook her head and frowned. Why?

  Harriet couldn’t answer, in any language. Everyone except she and Aunt Yael seemed to be paired with a male. Even Aunt Yael had God. Harriet found herself waiting for Mr. Soane’s promised visit. As the days passed and the painter did not come, her disappointment grew.

  At night, alone in her room, she got out her books and studied the dictionary of hieroglyphs, the spells in the Book of the Dead. The little symbols possessed even more power for her, by the light of Egyptian candles. She wasn’t here to look for a husband, she reminded herself. It had been true when she left London and it was still true. She was here to reach the place that the pharaohs had called Waset, the ancient Greeks had named Thebes, and was now known as Luxor, from the Arabic for palaces.

  Harriet got out her inks and her journal and arranged her things on the small table in her room. As before, she wrote the title of the spell in red ink, to give the words extra power. Underneath, in black ink, she embarked on a series of pictures. First she drew herself: a tall, thin figure, taller than other people, which she was in life, and which was how the royal females were always shown. Next was Louisa’s cup-shaped crinoline, Dash’s paw print. In the second column she drew a boat, with a sail hoisted to show that it was traveling upriver against the current. She followed it with a sinuous, meandering stretch of the Nile, and below that the leaning columns of the temple at Luxor.

  Harriet held the book away from her and looked at the page. The column of symbols appeared incomplete. Picking up the pen again, dipping it in the neck of the black ink bottle, she drew another image below the pillars of Luxor: a figure of a longhaired man, holding a paintbrush aloft in one hand. He looked straight at her, seemed to summon her to him.

  Blotting the ink, she closed her journal and secured the ties around the cover. She was short of breath; the effort had tired her. Lying on her bed, she held the book against her chest, feeling it rise and fall with her breath. Harriet felt almost afraid of the power of her spells, or if not of the spells, then of the strength of the longing that lay behind them. It was that longing, she had an instinct, that had made the first spell come to pass.

  EIGHTEEN

  The piano, a Bösendorfer, had been unloaded by crane at the harbor at Alexandria. A tugboat transported it to the dock, where it was hoisted onto a flatbed cart pulled by two asses and, at the railway station, transferred to a freight train to Cairo. Reaching the old port of Bo
ulak, the piano was trundled on a dolly along a ramp and onto a barge; it was secured by the side of a cargo of cedar from the Lebanon that was destined for a new hotel at Luxor.

  Eberhardt Woolfe was traveling with the piano on the barge, sleeping at night in a hammock on deck, listening to the sailors’ plaintive dirge. They sang to their Prophet, their voices becoming part of nature, like the sounds of the wind and the water. Ya Mohammed, ya Mohammed, ya Mohammed.

  Eberhardt was impatient to get back to his house on the mountainside and resume his work. More than once, he’d cursed his own folly in bringing the piano all the way from Heidelberg. Everyone who’d learned of the plan had given the same verdict. The instrument would be damaged, perhaps catastrophically, by the clumsy porters he was sure to encounter in Egypt. The fine wood was bound to be eaten by foreign beetles; the wires would certainly rust and the ivories yellow. As for tuning! Each rested his case.

  He listened patiently to the objections of his friends but did not waste his time in attempting to counter them. Not one of the fellows had been to Thebes. None had experienced the silence there, the immense and engulfing quietude, which, more than the rock tombs, more even than the loss of Kati, had shown Eberhardt Woolfe the meaning of death.

  Only his mother thought to ask the question that discomforted him. How would he get the piano back home again, when his work was finished? That question he did answer, promptly and confidently. “Mutti, you worry too much. The same way as I took it there, of course, but everything backward.” His mother nodded. She knew and he knew that he would not bring back the piano. That he would not return to Heidelberg except as a visitor.

  Apart from the small matter of a grand piano, Herr Professor Doktor Eberhardt Woolfe—as his trunks were labeled—was traveling light. He had in one sturdy wooden box the tools needed for excavation and exploration: pickaxes; hammers; trowels; chisels; scalpels; sable brushes. In a small leather suitcase, he’d packed three of the same lightweight and light-colored suits and white shirts that he wore in all seasons and for all occasions. One spare pair of boots. A few books of sheet music. His binoculars. A framed photograph. All other needs could be supplied locally. Mutti had insisted on a hamper that he hadn’t had the heart to refuse.

  As the barge plied on to the south and the dwellings grew smaller and simpler, the factories fewer, the railway line came to an end, Eberhardt felt content. Even Cairo had been too crowded, too noisy, too full of clamorous life. He would soon be back in the Necropolis, in the only place where he belonged.

  NINETEEN

  Louisa surveyed a drawing room furnished with two long low-backed sofas upholstered in striped cream and green satin. The few English scenes on the walls—a pair of watercolors depicting milkmaids with bucolic brown cows, a small and indistinct oil of the Thames by moonlight—only added to the sense of England being impossibly far away.

  The room wasn’t tasteful, contained nothing of beauty or value, and yet with the vase of trailing white flowers shedding petals on the sideboard, the French doors draped with a pretty, tattered lace curtain and standing open to the garden, it was relaxing. She had thought she would feel the loss of her home more than she did. It was only Blundell she missed. The hook flew in her fingers around the skein of silk, producing neat and even stitches.

  “Yes, Mustapha?” she said at the tap on the door.

  “Visitor, Sitti.”

  Louisa put down her handwork. They’d had few callers. The manager of the local branch of Blundell’s bank, the Anglo Ottoman, had been twice to offer his services. Mr. Moore, a Yorkshireman, had seemed relieved when Louisa had insisted that they would not need to call on him except in case of emergency. Their neighbors on the other side of the brick wall at the back of the garden, a Dutch family with a line of noisy, fair-haired children, had welcomed them with a tin of sugar biscuits imported from the Low Countries. Reverend Ernest Griffinshawe arrived at the gate one morning and was persuaded to take luncheon. Louisa had hinted to all of them that they were in Alexandria for the sake of Harriet’s health and intended to pass the time in a state of seclusion.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Soane, ma’am,” Mustapha said. “It is Mr. Soane. I shall show him in?”

  “Well, Louisa?” Yael said, her voice mild. “Give the man an answer.”

  “I . . . Tell Mr. Soane we are not at home.”

  As she said the words, a figure entered the room from the garden. Louisa felt confused. She knew it was Harriet, by her height and the way she moved, but the person in front of her was not her daughter. She was hidden under a black robe, only the toes of her boots visible. A pair of light-colored eyes looked out from between two strips of black cloth.

  “Well, Mother?” came the well-known voice. “Does Suraya’s veil suit me?”

  Louisa sprang to her feet and reached for a corner of the fabric, tugging it from Harriet’s face.

  “Harriet, please. Take that dreadful thing off.”

  “It looks charming, Miss Heron.”

  Eyre Soane stood in the doorway, smiling. “Mrs. Heron. Miss Heron.”

  He nodded at Louisa and Yael in turn. Harriet had blushed scarlet and was still standing in the center of the room, the folds of black cloth lying on her shoulders.

  Yael put down her pen.

  “Do come in, Mr. Soane, and take a seat.”

  “Thank you.”

  He sat down on the empty sofa, arranging his leather satchel on the seat beside him, stretching out his legs. He wore a suit made of fustian, the color of cocoa powder, a white calico shirt under the unbuttoned jacket. Leather shoes, in brown and cream. His hair was waxed, smoothed back on his head. Despite his clean-shaven cheeks, he reminded Louisa of his father. She looked away.

  “Would you care for a sherbet?” Yael said.

  “I believe I would, Miss Heron.”

  “I’ll go and tell Mustapha,” Harriet said, heading toward the door.

  Yael blotted her letter, smoothing the paper with the side of her fist.

  “The weather is warm today,” she said. “It might be spring.”

  “The weather is warm most days.” He turned to Louisa and assumed a smile of polite inquiry. “Are you enjoying your stay, Mrs. Heron?”

  Louisa took a deep breath. She would not be bullied in what currently passed for her own home.

  “We spend our days very quietly, Mr. Soane, for my daughter’s health. She is an invalid, as you may remember.”

  The door opened again and Harriet entered with Mustapha following behind, bearing a tray. He set out woven mats on the scarred surfaces of the tables, put down the cold drinks, and withdrew. Harriet sat next to Yael, her hands clasped over her knees. Eyre Soane regarded her.

  “I would scarcely have recognized you, Miss Heron. I believe Egypt agrees with you.”

  The blush reappeared like a sunrise on Harriet’s neck, spread upward to her cheeks.

  “Aren’t you going to inform me of the sights you’ve seen?” he said.

  “I . . .” she said. “We—”

  “We have explored the town a little,” Yael said. “And visited the monument, of course. How have you been passing the time, Mr. Soane?”

  “I’m continuing work on my Oriental portfolio. I intend to paint Cleopatra while I am here. I shall seek out some beauty to serve as a model.”

  Louisa remained quite still, looking through the open French doors into the garden. In the early afternoon sun, the flowering shrubs and bushes looked bleached, the deep pinks and purples robbed of their strength and richness. The lace curtain, which had possessed a certain beauty earlier, was limp and shabby. No doubt could remain. Eyre Soane intended to torment her.

  “It is airless in here,” she said, reaching for her fan, flicking it open.

  “In fact, Miss Heron”—Eyre Soane fixed his gaze on Harriet—“I should like to sketch you, just a
s you are now. Native dress becomes you.”

  Harriet raised her head and Louisa caught sight of her eyes, bright with a look Louisa didn’t recognize. Louisa had a feeling inside, of plummeting, as if some structure were collapsing like a card house.

  “It is time for your rest,” she said, getting to her feet.

  “Mother, I—”

  “No arguments, Harriet. Mr. Soane,” Louisa continued, “you may care to see the monkey puzzle tree in the front garden on your way out. We are told that it is two hundred years old.”

  Louisa walked to the door and held it open. Eyre Soane rose from the couch, retrieved his satchel, and bowed to Harriet.

  “Until we meet again, Miss Heron.”

  Louisa led the way through the shadowed courtyard. The thin stream rising from the fountain, falling into the shallow pool surrounding it, sounded like a gutter discharging into a rain butt. Opening one half of the front door, she walked into the garden. Through the soft leather of her summer shoes, the points of the fallen cones underneath the tree were sharp against the soles of her feet.

  At the great iron gate, she turned to face Eyre Soane.

  “My daughter is ill, Mr. Soane. I would not wish her to be disturbed by anything that does not concern her.”

  “Disturbed? What do you mean, Mrs. Heron?”

  On the other side of the gate, the watchman lifted the catch. Louisa lowered her voice.

  “I am asking you not to call on us again.”

  The gate opened and Eyre Soane stepped through it. He hitched the strap of the satchel higher on his shoulder and got out a cigar case from his pocket.

  “It’s a fine specimen,” he said, gesturing back into the garden toward the tree. “They’re considered unlucky, as I’m sure you know. Goodbye, Gypsy.”

  Louisa turned away, breathing in the odor of dry earth and drains and blossom. She had just time to get behind the scaly trunk of the monkey puzzle, to notice that it looked like a blackened pineapple, before she was silently and violently sick.