Laying the book on her lap, she pressed her back against the rock. With her eyes closed, she could still see the flame of the lamp as it had been before it went out. The outline of the flame and the pool of light around it. She thought of all the lamps she had known, from when she first became aware of her own life, and used to watch the night-light, trying to stay awake longer than it did, aware that darkness and sleep were almost the same but not the same, that there could be darkness but no sleep. Louisa always expected her to be afraid of the dark but Harriet remembered a time before she was ill, when she was not afraid of the dark. It was only when the dark filled up with the whistling creature that sat on her chest and prevented her breathing, the thing she could hear but not see, that she became afraid.
She pictured herself as a girl in the attic room, listening to the wind outside, trying to hear life itself, fathom her place in it. The bed had seemed huge, a world in itself. She saw herself with Rosina, sitting on her lap, cushioned by her plump thighs and stomach, her smells of boiled onions and cough drops, her even kindness, and remembered how she loved her when she didn’t know any better, didn’t know that servants weren’t for loving. She had wished that Rosina was her mother, had told Louisa so at the age of three or four and been surprised, first by Louisa’s laughter then by her tears.
She considered Louisa, who had been so dissatisfied with her daughter, so anxious for her transformation into another girl, for as long as Harriet could remember. From when she was born, it seemed to her now. Harriet had believed as a child that she must have been a foundling. Later, she understood from her reading that it was a common conceit amongst girls who fancied themselves misunderstood. It wasn’t the simple truth that she didn’t look like Louisa that caused those thoughts to flourish. She did, after all, take after her father. It was the knowledge that on the inside she did not resemble Louisa, that in their hearts and minds they were somehow unrelated. Strange to each other. That as much as Harriet had wished for another mother, Louisa too had wanted another daughter. She never said so but Harriet felt it. The signs were in her voice, her eyes.
In the hours that followed, Harriet grew calm. Opening her eyes, she let the darkness wash over her and welcomed it. She need not fear it. The chamber was the same as it had been by lamplight. A place of beauty and magic. Nothing had changed. What a fool she had been. She had no feelings for Eyre Soane. And he had none for her. She’d always known it, deep down, if she’d only admitted it to herself. She had no wish to see him ever again. In that, at least, Louisa had been right.
If she survived, she would carry out her plan and plead with Eberhardt Woolfe to take her on as his assistant. If she could assist in the exploration of the tomb, help record its treasures of pictures and hieroglyphs, then whatever happened afterward, she would have done something exceptional that could never be taken from her. At whatever age she might die, she would do so in the knowledge that she had lived.
The dust caught again at the back of her throat and she swallowed, tasted its sour, enduring strength. This dust was what every person returned to. The small clay figures of servants and handmaids, the shabtis that the people who made this chamber put in the tombs with the mummies, were longer-lasting than the people they represented. Death was a greater truth than life. The wrapped bodies of kings and queens were no more than macabre dolls, the vain attempts of the ancients to defeat the human foe.
The darkness changed again. It became iron, pressing on her from every direction, constricting her. She hated to breathe it in, feel its intimate reach in her mouth and ears, between her fingers, entering the pores of her skin. It was death, her body telegraphed to her mind. She heard herself whimpering and experienced an animal fear that counting could not tame.
The minutes, even the seconds, seemed to pass very slowly, as if time wasn’t a line, as she had always imagined, a line that might have been drawn by a pencil, that went from birth to death, but something in three dimensions, someplace where gravity failed, and she drifted like a leaf caught in the wind. Only now had she appreciated the grandeur of a moment. A heartbeat. Three thousand years in the tomb might be fifty thousand in the land above. Time was an altered thing here; it too had died. Was stilled. She was its frail representative, its ghost from the overworld. It was the Egyptians who had invented time, Herodotus said. It was they who first divided a year into months, a day into hours. Harriet felt as if she was in the time before time, when such divisions had not been devised, when time simply was.
She thought about the queen. She’d been young once, and perfectly alive, must have zigzagged across the Nile in a felucca, eaten the muddy-tasting perch and perhaps had a pet cat that wore gold earrings. She had brushed her black hair, watched the moon out of a window, and dreamed of a man. Harriet felt sorry that the girl who grew up to be the Lady of the Two Lands had not been allowed to rest undisturbed in her coffin of pink stone. As she thought about her, she pictured her cartouche and at last its meaning came to her. The queen was called Nefer-hor, beautiful of face, and she was beloved of the goddess Isis.
Unwrapping the orange scarf from her head, she matched the corners to each other and laid it on the ground. Lying down on her side, she felt for the soft cotton with her hand, rested her cheek on it. Sharp shards of rock, or bone, pressed through it, painfully, into her flesh. She groped in her pocket for her journal, laid it on the scarf, and rested her face on its cover. The leather was smooth and blank, skin against her skin. Resting her head on it, she slept.
FIFTY-TWO
Eberhardt Woolfe was dressed and drinking his first cup of coffee when the pounding on the door began. Setting down the cup, he emerged from the kitchen, swallowing. It was barely light and he felt annoyed. It was the foreman’s role to deal with the complaints and problems the workers had, their crises when children fell sick, wives died, or they themselves had accidents and could no longer work. Eberhardt took the view that for every problem there was a solution, was willing in all cases to see what help could be found, but he disliked having emergencies thrust at him. If he could not get away from the dramas of the living here, there could be no escape anywhere. “Ach, what is it now?” he muttered to himself, reaching the door, opening it.
On the step, her head wrapped in a green turban, was Harriet’s mother, Mrs. Heron. Behind her, in evening dress, stood Monsieur Andreas from the Luxor Hotel.
“Good morning, Mrs. Heron. Monsieur Andreas. What can—”
“Is she here, Dr. Woolfe?” said Mrs. Heron.
He struggled to take in the meaning of the question. “Forgive me?”
“My daughter. Is she here?”
“Your daughter?” He shook his head, befuddled. “Nein, she is not.”
Mrs. Heron broke into a wail and covered her face with her hands.
“She was over on this side,” Monsieur Andreas said. “She has not returned.”
“Come in, please.”
Eberhardt held open the door, led them into the single large room that he used for study, dining, and sitting, that had no satisfactory name. Swiping dust from the leather seat of a chair, he helped Mrs. Heron into it. Pulled his own forward for Monsieur Andreas. Was Harriet with the Englishman? Had she eloped with the fellow? A tide of anger ran through him and he believed for a moment he would smash something, pick up the scarab that he had been working on the previous night, after his return, and hurl it at the wall. The fury was not with Harriet. It was not even with Soane, cad though he’d appeared from the first to be, in his ludicrous clothing, his sneering superciliousness. It was with himself. He ought to have acted. He had been a coward.
Mrs. Heron was hunched forward on the chair, rocking backward and forward, her hands still clasped over her face. She was dressed in a traveling coat over what appeared to be a nightgown, her head curiously wrapped in a length of green muslin, and she was moaning like an animal. From the other side of the small room, Monsieur Andreas regarded her with a look of
helpless pity.
“Take some coffee, Mrs. Heron.”
Eberhardt returned to the kitchen, stood by the slab of pink granite on which he kneaded bread, chopped onions. Testing the bottom of the coffeepot on the palm of his hand, he found it still hot, almost burning. He filled two cups, placed them on a tray, with a bowl of sugar, a slender silver spoon. Ritual. Routine. They were always there, present when people died. Vanished. Altered. Eloped. He returned to the room.
“Bitte, Mrs. Heron,” he said, his voice even, as he put the cup of coffee into her hand. “Let me understand what has happened. Where is Harriet now?”
“We don’t know, Doctor,” she wailed. “What time did she leave you yesterday?”
Eberhardt stared at her white, upturned face, her swollen eyes. He was confounded again.
“Leave me?”
Mrs. Heron ran her hands over her covered head.
“She was here. She came to say goodbye to you, Dr. Woolfe.”
Eberhardt began pacing the room while he readjusted what he thought he knew and tried to reconcile two feelings that rose in him: exultation, at the idea that Harriet had not run away with the Englishman; dread, that some accident had befallen her.
“I returned last night, late,” he said. “I’ve been away for two days.”
Monsieur Andreas put down the untouched cup of coffee.
“The boy Fouad isn’t back either. Nor the dog.”
Eberhardt had a strange sensation in his body, as if everything around him, his papers, his tools, the grand piano, had altered, moved from the foreground to the background, become less solid and real than the urgency that was coursing through him, making it impossible to be seated, causing his palms to sting. He knew where Harriet was.
“I shall go ahead to the dig,” he said, bowing to Mrs. Heron. “You can follow. My foreman will conduct you to the site when he arrives.”
“It is too late,” Mrs. Heron said, her voice flat. “She has perished, Dr. Woolfe. It was all foreseen, before she even left London.” She began to cry. “I don’t want to live. It should have been me. I believed it was me.”
Eberhardt Woolfe felt another spurt of anger. This was a crisis, undeniably, but to give up hope when hope could remain was wrong. It was morally wrong. It hindered fate. His eyes fell on the scarab. It had proved perfect when cleaned, the green malachite divested of its casing of dirt and mortar and bat droppings; by the look of it, it might have left the manufactory last week. He picked it up from his desk and went to where she sat, pressed it into her hand, closed her cold fingers around it.
“Please, Mrs. Heron. This symbolizes rebirth. You must not despair.” He left the house on the hillside, leaving the door hanging open. Unable to wait for the foreman to bring up his horse from the pasture, he went on foot, running along the narrow path made by the horse’s hooves, toward the valley. By the gathering light of dawn, the landscape of limestone mountains and valleys looked blue, unearthly as the moon.
Harriet’s black donkey stood in the entrance to the passage, its head hanging. Next to it, Fouad was sitting on the ground. He scrambled to his feet and saluted. The boy looked frightened out of his wits.
Eberhardt took his hand.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said in Arabic. “Where is she?”
Fouad gestured toward the passage.
“Miss Harry inside.”
“Why didn’t you come for me?”
“She said I must stay here,” Fouad said.
The dog appeared and began springing at Eberhardt’s knees in a frenzy of recognition, the shrill bark echoing up and down the valley.
He reached down and rubbed its head, trying to think clearly. She must have gone through. The opening was too narrow for him but it must have admitted her. She was inside, he was sure of it. The dog continued to yap as Eberhardt Woolfe lit a lamp, grabbed the pickax, and ran along the passage to the blocked doorway. He tried first to force his own broad shoulders through the opening and, failing to do so, began swinging the pick with all his might at the edges of the aperture, smashing through rock and rubble, careless of the amulets and shabtis and scarabs that flew through the air.
• • •
Harriet woke to the sound of hammering. For a minute, she remained where she lay, quite still. The sound was faint, so slight and distant, it might have come from inside her own head. Sitting up, she took a drink from the tin bottle and listened again. She could hear another noise. The faint strains of a bark, recognizable by its rhythm, its persistence, still overlaid by the sound of demolition.
Getting to her feet, shaking out her skirt, Harriet wound her scarf around her neck. Holding her journal to her chest with one hand, putting the other straight out in front of her, taking one cautious step after another, she followed the source of the sound. She walked into a stone pillar, bruising her elbow, then moved away from it and continued, inching forward, until she tripped on an obstruction. It was a step. The step led to another, moving upward. As she crawled up them, on her hands and knees, the sound grew louder, almost deafening.
“Dr. Woolfe?” she called, as the faintest glimmer of what was unmistakably light appeared before her.
The hammering ceased. “Miss Heron? Is it you?”
“Yes. It is me.”
“Come, Miss Heron. Ach, please come to me.”
Reaching the top of the steps, shaking all over, Harriet crawled back through the opening. A pair of hands reached for her, helped her to stand, and in the bright light of a lamp she found herself blinking, looking at Eberhardt Woolfe.
“I am sorry,” she said. “I thought you were inside. I should not have entered the tomb before you. It is beautiful in there. Miraculous.” Eberhardt Woolfe shook his head, then stepped forward and took hold of her, enveloped her for a long, enduring moment in his arms.
FIFTY-THREE
Sitting on the wooden chair, with a table beside her bearing a bowl of water, a bar of soap, a pile of clean white rags torn from a nightdress brought from England, Yael was humming. She encircled the squirming body on her lap with one arm and with the other reached for a scrap of cotton, dipped it into the water, and squeezed it out, dabbing a corner on a thinning oval of translucent soap. “Send her victorious,” she said, drawing the cloth over the child’s forehead.
She plunged the rag back into the water, squeezed it out again, and applied it to the little girl’s right eye, cleaning it from the inside corner to the outside. The lashes were long and lustrous, each one thick and black as a miniature quill.
The infant sent up a scream. “There, there,” said Yael.
Wiping the other eye in the same way, she rinsed out the cloth, gave the girl’s nose and mouth a rub with the damp, soft cotton. Cleaned her cheeks and ears, dabbed her dry. She looked like a child again. She’d ceased crying, was looking at Yael curiously from between the long lashes. Her eyes were still healthy, the iris clearly defined, delicate as a watercolor. Only the youngest children, and animals, did not know that one was foreign. Or, at any rate, gave one the benefit of the doubt.
Yael experienced a sudden yawning ache inside, that she would never experience her own baby wriggling and warm on her lap. She wanted to tell the mother that her child was beautiful, a miracle, that she trailed clouds of glory. She could not, knew better, understood that such remarks risked bringing down the evil eye. “God save the Queen,” she said, dropping the cloth back into the bowl, lifting the child up underneath her arm, handing her back to the mother. “Clean water, Suraya, please. Another rag.”
Suraya put the other bowl down on the table, took away the used one. Yael added the alum herself, one teaspoonful per half bowl of boiled water, stirring it in until the white powder dissolved. The mothers only wanted her to treat the children who were already affected by eye disease but Yael was trying through Suraya to teach them the value of prevention. She had spent long hours spe
aking to her, with Mustapha acting as translator, at the villa. Washing the hands and faces of their children. Explaining the meaning of hygiene.
She and Suraya had developed a rhythm for the mornings at the clinic. First, Yael treated the children. Afterward, Suraya demonstrated to the women the washing of the doll, explained the connection between dirt and disease. Only then did they distribute the rations bought with the donations from the congregation of St. Mark’s.
Yael heard a knock and looked up. Through the crack in the door she saw a long robe, draped on a tall, upright figure. Sheikh Hamada. He had never been to the clinic. She handed back the child she was about to treat and hurried toward the door, held it open.
“What a surprise. An honor. Welcome, Sheikh Hamada. Come in, please.”
He remained outside, his eyes flickering over the inside of the room, then resuming their gaze down the alley. The women were dragging their veils back over their faces and had fallen silent. Suraya was scrambling for her burka. Yael understood that the sheikh could not come in. She removed her apron, dried her hands on it, and dropped it on the wooden bed. Picking up her umbrella, she stepped outside.
“I am honored that you have come to visit us, Sheikh.”
He stood a couple of paces away, his bearing as proud as on the first occasion she had met him, his gaze as elusive, fixed on a spot beyond her shoulder. She put up the umbrella, feeling a sudden need for some form of shelter. Not from the sun but from the scorch of the sheikh’s presence, his unwillingness to engage in social niceties.
She answered the question he had not asked.
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