The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Louisa stepped carefully, avoiding the goats’ pellets flattened into the ends of straw, the rotting skins of mangoes and bananas, picking her way around the ashy circles of fires, stinking fish heads with their attendant bat-eared cats.

  The light was pink; the water, the boats, even her own hands, were fire-touched. In the hour before sunset, all living creatures seemed to wait, in anticipation of the sinking of the sun. The birds grew frantic, searching for a place to roost, and the people were arrested, poised between day and night, between life and death.

  She had not intended to kill Eyre Soane. She had pulled the trigger intentionally but as she did so, it was not him she aimed at but Augustus. For those few months of her girlhood, she had loved Augustus with all her heart. For thirty years, she had hated him with the same intensity. Louisa had meant to shoot him through the heart. It would have been just, to have wounded Augustus where he had wounded her. She supposed she was glad that she had missed.

  The departure of the dahabeah had been delayed while Mr. Soane rested, Mr. Simpson had informed them at breakfast. The bullet had passed through the outer side of his right arm, his painting arm. Mrs. Simpson had dressed it, flooding it with iodine, packing the wound with lint and bandaging it with one of Eyre Soane’s own shirts, torn into strips. Her father was a surgeon, Mr. Simpson had informed Harriet, rolling his eyes to the ceiling, avoiding looking at Louisa; he had taught her first aid.

  Mr. Soane had not wished to involve the British consul. He’d insisted, when Monsieur Andreas arrived at a run, calling for Madame and brandishing an antique firearm of his own, that it was an accident. His own fault. Louisa hadn’t disputed it. It was his own fault.

  She looked about for one of the crew to fetch her in the small rowing boat and, seeing no one, walked into the shallows of the river. Wading toward the boat, she felt the pressure of the current running against her legs, her overskirt rising behind her on the water. The cold was a relief. She felt cleansed by it, as if the immersion was overdue.

  She had resolved to tell Eyre Soane the truth. She wouldn’t waste another minute in informing him of what he had to know. It would prevent him from threatening them, pursuing Harriet any further. Reaching the set of wooden steps on the side, Louisa pulled herself up and boarded the boat.

  A pile of drying antelope hides occupied one end of the deck. The stench was sickening. Mrs. Simpson sat in a deck chair under the patched canvas awning, reading a book. She looked as if she had been weeping; her eyes were red-rimmed. She stared out from under her sun hat as Louisa stood in front of her, wringing out the hem of her skirts, twisting the silk like a rope between her hands. “You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “Coming here.”

  “Good evening, Mrs. Simpson. Where is Mr. Soane?”

  “In his cabin. He doesn’t want to see you.”

  “I don’t wish to see him either,” Louisa said. “But I must.”

  Mrs. Simpson burst into tears, covering her mouth with her hand.

  “I hate it,” she said. “All these guns. Shooting everything that moves. I hate guns more than anything in the world. I wish I’d never agreed to come to Egypt.”

  Louisa felt a wave of dizziness pass over her; the sense kept afflicting her that she couldn’t stay upright any longer. That a collapse was coming, whether she liked it or not. She slid down into the chair next to Mrs. Simpson’s, her shoes leaking water.

  “Why did you?” she said.

  “Jim. He’d set his heart on a crocodile.”

  “I didn’t want to come here either,” said Louisa.

  “Why did you, then?”

  “My mother spoke to me from the other side, of a death. At first, I thought it was my daughter’s. That we could get away from it here. Then, for a moment, I believed it was Aug . . . Mr. Soane’s. Now, I am certain that it must be my own.”

  Mrs. Simpson reached a small hand over to Louisa’s, patted her. Her nails were pink, small as shells on an English beach, shaped, and buffed to a shine.

  “There, there,” she said. “Don’t upset yourself. We’re a long way from home, that’s the trouble. It was an accident, anyway. Soanie said so himself.”

  “It wasn’t an accident.”

  Mrs. Simpson got out of the deck chair and returned with a glass in her hand.

  “Have a drop of wine,” she said, passing it to Louisa. “And calm yourself, Mrs. Heron. Of course it was an accident. What else could it have been?”

  The cabin door was ajar and Eyre Soane lay in bed, propped on a heap of cushions with an unlit cigar between his lips. His right arm lay across his bare chest in a sling made from a red silk scarf; the upper part of the arm was bandaged, a dark stain blooming through the thick wad of dressing. The lamp was lit, suspended from a hook on the ceiling over his bed, and the air smelled of iodine and damp wood mixed with sandalwood pomade.

  Louisa gripped the door frame. “May I come in?”

  “Louisa,” he said, shifting his position slightly. “Are you armed?”

  She smiled. “How are you?”

  “In pain. You missed the bone.”

  “It was your father I wanted to kill. Augustus. He deserved it.”

  Eyre Soane turned away his head, lowering his eyelids as if the pain assailed him again.

  “Augustus was a great man,” he said. “A great, great man, with immoral and unscrupulous women throwing themselves at him all his life. It broke my mother’s heart.”

  He began trying to light the cigar one-handed.

  Louisa took the matchbox from him and struck a flame.

  “He was a scoundrel,” she said without rancor. “A scoundrel and a cad.”

  “My mother loved him, and my sister. They thought the world of him. Still do.”

  Louisa crossed the small cabin to the window and gazed out at the sinuous, amnesiac water.

  “Your sister?”

  Eyre Soane tipped back his head as if to blow a smoke ring, then seemed to think better of it. He breathed out the stream of smoke in a sigh, reached with his uninjured arm for a telegraph on the locker by the bed, and held it up.

  “She’s arrived. I’m going back to Cairo to show her the sights. We’ll return to London together. I believe when I get there I shall make a bequest to the National Gallery. Unless I can find a private buyer for Thetis. What do you think, Louisa? Would your husband care to purchase the picture? Hang it in the drawing room?”

  A rusted cargo boat chugged past, heading north, and the dahabeah began to rock in its wake, rippling waves hitting the craft in long, sloshing tides of brown water. Louisa returned to the door frame, holding to its upright support, feeling the floor rise and fall under her feet. She could not utter the words she’d come to say.

  “I should be glad to meet your sister,” she said. “I do hope an opportunity will present itself.”

  FORTY-NINE

  Harriet sat on the back of the donkey, her feet dangling to one side of its belly; the rein was slack and the animal made its own way through the flooded fields that lay behind the river, continuing around the edge of a thicket of strange human-looking cactus plants, as tall as she was. Fouad walked at the donkey’s head, holding Dash under one arm. The donkey boy had a thorn in his foot and had stayed behind.

  The night before, Harriet had been unable to sleep. She’d been picturing Dr. Woolfe’s house, clothed in darkness on the other side of the river, had looked for it out of her window, wondering if it betrayed its presence by a light, but had seen only darkness on the west bank. Remembering the hurry in which Dr. Woolfe had left the dinner, the boorish behavior of Mr. Simpson and Mr. Soane, she urged the donkey on with her heels. She wanted to see Dr. Woolfe, talk to him. She hoped she wasn’t too late. He’d mentioned at the dinner that he intended to visit another dig, to the south, out in the desert.

  Harriet could make sense of neither
her mother nor her supposed suitor. Louisa seemed to have temporarily lost her mind, firing the pistol at Eyre Soane. She was insisting that they leave Luxor the next day, on whatever boat presented itself. If necessary, her mother said, they would travel on one of the cargo boats that passed through laden with elephant tusks and feet, bundles of ostrich feathers, chattering monkeys tethered to the rails. She offered no explanation for what had happened in the garden.

  Eyre Soane had shown himself in the worst possible light. Harriet felt repulsed by the thought of him. Lying under the cotton sheet, in a cocoon of mosquito curtains, listening to wild dogs baying in the distance, she’d made a decision. She wasn’t ready to leave. She felt at home in Luxor. She had a sense as strong and unstoppable as the surging river that she could find life in this place of death. It was strange to Harriet how the west bank, the knowledge of the rock tombs concealed in the mountains, made life not morbid, as Dr. Grammaticas had feared, but more vivid.

  She would apologize for the embarrassment of the dinner party, then beg Dr. Woolfe to take her on as an assistant, allow her to work on the dig until it was concluded. Harriet had a small amount of money; her father had given her some before they left, for emergencies, and when she’d opened the tin that Yael had pressed on her at the railway station, she found not peppermints but sovereigns, wrapped in a note that, in her aunt’s familiar handwriting, wished her bon voyage. Away from the hotel, she could live on almost nothing; the little she had would last for months and she could lodge with Mrs. Treadwell. She would think about what had happened with Eyre Soane, none of which she could understand, afterward.

  They came through the fields, skirting the two giant statues, and began the climb into the hills. Beyond the floodplain, the ground grew dry and arid; the air was hot and still, the silence broken only by the unshod feet of the donkey striking the ground and the slosh of the water skin behind her on its back. Despite the intense heat, Harriet shivered. She never quite grew accustomed to this landscape, never altogether threw off the feeling it had aroused in her the first time she visited, of fear.

  The donkey quickened its pace, pricked its ears, as they entered the steep-sided ravine. It was Friday; the site was deserted and the valley looked as desolate as she’d ever seen it. Fouad halted the donkey, dragging on the rein.

  “This bad place. Let us leave, Miss Harry.”

  “No, Fouad. I must see Dr. Woolfe.”

  Harriet shook the rein, urged the donkey on, and the animal picked its way toward the entrance to the tomb. She slid off its back, not waiting for Fouad’s assistance, her feet meeting the ground with a crunch. At the tomb entrance, the usual lamps and matches were arranged neatly on a wooden box. The guard wasn’t at his post.

  “Stay here, Fouad. Stay with Dash and wait till I come out again. Don’t move from here.”

  Lighting the first lamp that came to hand, Harriet blew out the match and adjusted the wick. She walked in slowly, her eyes growing accustomed to the gloom, keeping one hand in contact with the wall and feeling the curious softness of the rock under the tips of her fingers as she made her way along the passage.

  “Dr. Woolfe?”

  No answer. At the panel of plaster, she paused, raising the lamp to the queen, arrested in her game, still undecided about where to place her piece.

  At the blocked entrance to the tomb, she held the light aloft. Underneath the white stone lintel, a gap had opened up in the rubble. There was an opening of a foot or more in height, the same across. Harriet’s heart leaped. Dr. Woolfe had opened the tomb. He was inside, exploring.

  She leaned her head through as far as she could. “Dr. Woolfe? Are you there?”

  A faint sound of pebbles shifting and sliding came from somewhere inside. He must be there, working. She brought her head out again, her skin crawling with a mix of excitement and dread at the idea of entering the tomb. Straightening up, she inhaled to the pit of her stomach, counting the breaths in and out until she felt steady. The opening was more like a tunnel than a doorway, the remaining rubble underneath still thick. She longed to see what was on the other side of the wall, to see the resting place of the Lady of the Two Lands. And she had to see Dr. Woolfe. It was vital.

  Harriet took another deep breath. She wrapped the orange scarf tightly around her head, tied the ends at the back of her neck. Holding the lamp in one hand, pushing the pocket around to the back of her waist, she maneuvered herself through the opening headfirst, as if she were swimming across the heap of remaining rubble, and half fell through to the other side. Setting the lamp down by her feet, she wiped her face on her sleeve and shook the dust from her skirts. Righted the pocket. Her hands were grazed.

  “Dr. Woolfe?”

  No answer. In front of her was a flight of fifteen or twenty steps, hewn into the rock, leading downward. She picked up the lamp and walked down the steps, her heart thudding with excitement. At the bottom was another doorway. As she stepped through it, every hair on Harriet’s body rose. She was in a rectangular chamber, the walls covered in columns of hieroglyphs, painted on a white background. The symbols were bright, the colors vivid and jewel-like. The writing, she saw immediately, related to the funeral ritual. Harriet cried out in awe. She had stepped inside the books of her girlhood. At last, she had arrived.

  Turning up the wick, she held up the lamp. The room was large. Farther doorways led off it and in the center were four tall pillars going from the floor to the ceiling, their sides made smooth by plaster, decorated with more hieroglyphs and pictures, all perfectly preserved.

  Holding the lamp close to the wall on her right, moving step by slow step, she gasped again and again. The hieroglyphs were beautiful, each one a work of art. The curving serpent was represented; Maat’s feather of justice balanced on one side of a pair of scales; the length of twisted flax; the sickle; the seated woman; the sun disk, colored crimson; and again and again, the ankh that symbolized breath. Her eyes came to rest on the heron hieroglyph. Its long legs were striped with black, its breast tufted with feathers, its pose curious and hesitant.

  “Dr. Woolfe?”

  She longed to read the story told by the signs. The longing was physical, strong and fierce as hunger. She must find Dr. Woolfe without delay, persuade him to allow her to stay and work with him. Straining her ears for evidence of where he was, she called his name again. No answer came.

  Dr. Woolfe was not there. Harriet stood for a moment, absorbing the knowledge. She felt a compulsion to go on, to reach the place where the Lady of the Two Lands lay at rest. The flame in the lamp seemed to flicker, despite the stillness of the air. The tomb was hot, hotter than the passage outside.

  Gripping her book in its pocket, feeling the soft leather under her fingers, holding up the lamp with her other hand, she walked down another set of steps and around a pillar painted with priests, recognizable by their garb of leopard skins. In the space between four pillars was a pink granite sarcophagus. The stone lid had been heaved off it and was balanced like a playing card between the coffin and the ground. Harriet inched her way toward it, sweat pouring down her back under her dress. Bending over the side, she held the lamp aloft and peered in. Except for a heap of sticks that looked like kindling, some dirty bandages, the sarcophagus was empty.

  The queen was gone from her ornate palace of death. Harriet felt sad. She stood still for a minute, then raised her eyes and held up the lamp toward the ceiling. It was a rich violet blue, the color of midnight, lined with gold five-pointed stars, thick with them. The queen had lain under the starriest of all starry skies, the movement of the hands that had painted them seeming to live on in their shapes. As Harriet gazed up at the ceiling, the lamp flickered again. With a flare that lit up the celestial realm, the flame went out.

  FIFTY

  A party of Italians had arrived earlier in the day and was taking coffee in the gazebo. The exuberance of their language, its extravagant rise and fall, made it sound as
if they were debating matters of life and death. Listening from a table in the dining room, by the open doors, Louisa wondered if they could see daubs of oil paint on the ground in the gazebo where the easel had stood, or found a remaining spot of blood outside on the grass, where the gardener had so painstakingly sluiced and scrubbed, and were piecing together the incident. But perhaps they were discussing the dinner menu, the heat, where they would go next.

  Louisa lifted a piece of chicken on a fork and ate it slowly. She was taking a late lunch alone; Harriet had gone to the west bank to say farewell to Dr. Woolfe, with Fouad and the dog. Looking at the white meat on the bone on her plate, Louisa put down her fork. The waiter brought a pot of the English breakfast tea that Monsieur Andreas had procured from somewhere, and which Louisa drank at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She topped up the pot from a jug of hot water and sat on in the dining room.

  She had to get Harriet back to Yael. Her own death might come at any moment. It was right, that if one of them were to die, it should be herself. Louisa had had a generous helping of life, more than many, and Harriet’s was at its beginning. Still, it was hard to face death. In all its comedy and pathos, life was dear. Its imperfection, its ridiculousnesses and failures, were its more precious parts. She’d never realized it until now. Before she died, she would absolve herself for the mistakes she had made. She’d borne their weight too long and would not take that same burden into death. If she could only say goodbye to Blundell, look on his face once more, she could die in peace. It was a terrible cruelty to die without farewells.

  “Good afternoon, madame.”

  Monsieur Andreas stood by the table, his hands linked behind his back, wearing the white bow tie in which she had first seen him, the wing collar and rusty-looking black tailcoat. Ruler of his small empire by the Nile, which was, more than anything, an empire of the imagination. One of his front teeth was chipped, she noticed for the first time. Teeth were the only part of the body not capable of healing themselves, she’d read somewhere. If they suffered an injury, it was permanent. Louisa wished she could offer him her own unchipped teeth. Soon she would have no need of them.