The Sacred River

by Wendy Wallace

  “Yes, all is going well. You see that the women attend,” she said. “They listen. They take the rations we’ve been able to find since the vicar’s welcome change of heart. You were right, Sheikh, about the food. Some of the children are improving now, in their health. In everything. The next thing will be to get them to school.”

  He nodded. His silence was unnerving her.

  “I am grateful to you,” she said. “Without your encouragement, they might never have come.”

  “The time is finished for this work.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your work here is over, Sitti.”

  Yael peered at him. She could understand the words he spoke but not what he meant by them. Half a dozen more little children played in the dust close to where they stood, the corners of their eyes studded with flies, their hands sticky with dirt. She felt a surge of indignation, like heat.

  “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “The work is not over, Sheikh. Far from it. It has only just begun.”

  “You must close your clinic. It is time to go home.”

  Putting down the umbrella, she looked him straight in the face. “Don’t you care for your people?”

  “We care for them, and for those who would help them. I am trying to inform you of something.”

  “I do not care to hear it, Sheikh Hamada.”

  Yael went back inside, controlling her urge to slam the door, closing it quietly behind her. Shaking with anger, she tied her apron strings behind her back and resumed her seat, holding out her hands to receive a little boy. He seemed not to see Yael as he arrived on her lap. His swollen eyelids were stuck together with dried yellow secretions and his ribs, clearly visible, narrow as matchsticks, rose and fell with each breath. He sat still, not, Yael sensed, from an absence of fear but from a state of weakness too great to allow for bawling.

  “Claptrap, sir,” she called toward the door to the street, baptizing the fresh cloth in the clean water, squeezing it out. “Drivel, twaddle, and bunkum.” She wiped her own eyes on her sleeve and, with the greatest gentleness, began to clean the little boy’s eyes. “Jack fell down and broke his crown,” she whispered. “And Jill came tumbling after.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  There was a tap on wood and Harriet jumped up. She put down her book, opened the door of her room, and looked into a pair of kind, soft-edged brown eyes. Disappointment spread through her like ink in water. She could barely get the words out.

  “Monsieur Andreas. Good morning.”

  “Mademoiselle.” He smiled at her over a wooden tray on which were a lace cloth, a sprig of bright flowers in a vase, and a battered teapot. “How are you this morning?”

  “Quite recovered, thank you.”

  He nodded.

  “The Amon-Ra has moored. There is a cabin available. They sail this evening, Miss Heron,” he said. “I have informed Mama.”

  Harriet nodded, unable to speak as she took the tray. Closing the door, she put the tray on the table by the bed and sat down. She had believed Dr. Woolfe would come. She felt he had something to say to her, something urgent.

  The next knock on the door was unmistakably Louisa’s. She came in, her head wrapped in her green veil. Her body looked altered and it crossed Harriet’s mind that Louisa didn’t have on her stays, her bustle. She looked flatter and thinner. Harriet had been speechless when she first saw Louisa’s cropped head. It seemed to make her a different person. Louisa could give no explanation for why she had done it. Only said she’d thought she had no need of hair, no need of anything. “And fortunately, I was right,” she’d added.

  “Good morning, Mother.”

  “We shall leave tonight, Harriet, on the Amon-Ra. I have spoken to the captain.”

  “I am not ready, Mother. I don’t want to go.”

  “Harriet, I am your mother. I am taking you to your aunt. Pack your trunk and prepare to leave.”

  Louisa spoke in the stilted voice that Harriet recognized from when they were still in London, as if she needed careful handling, could not be trusted to bear the truth.

  When Louisa had gone, Harriet leaned on the windowsill looking out over the river. In the urgency of his grip, the way he held her to him as if they were one flesh, she’d understood something she’d never understood from his conversation. She had seen Eberhardt Woolfe as a teacher, someone who could lead her into the world she had longed to enter. Until she stepped out of the darkness, blinking at the awful brilliance of the light, she had not seen him as a man.

  The west bank had almost disappeared in a haze of heat. It looked colorless, the hills displaying none of their complexity. She turned away from the window and filled the ewer, splashing water over her face and rinsing her hands, examined the cuts and grazes that covered them. What had she imagined that he might have to say to her? He had told her, early in their acquaintance, that he was married. Have you left a wife behind in Germany, she heard herself asking. She groaned, remembering how little she had meant by the question, and the unexpectedness of the answer.

  In the garden below, someone was beating rugs with great hollow thumps; farther away, the muezzin cleared his throat and commenced his singing summons to prayer. The heat was oppressive; it was 120 degrees Fahrenheit by the thermometer on the wall downstairs in the lobby.

  Harriet had a familiar sense of what she longed for being out of her reach. The clarity she’d experienced in the darkness about what she would do if she lived was being eroded, supplanted by the feeling that she must look after Louisa. That it was her responsibility to keep her mother safe, get her home to London. Louisa wasn’t herself. She’d had a reckless air about her since the shooting, compounded by her strange appearance now that she’d cut her hair. Harriet wondered again if her mother was losing her mind.

  • • •

  The trunks were stowed in the cabin; Harriet and Louisa stood side by side on the deck of the Amon-Ra, under the canvas awning, holding the railing. In front of them, on the bank, Monsieur Andreas waved a white silk handkerchief in the still air. Louisa held the posy of roses that he’d presented her with, lifting it in the air as Monsieur Andreas kissed his hand, hurried along the bank under the trees, calling au revoir. He had asked to be permitted to keep the painting of Harriet that Mr. Soane had abandoned in the gazebo. It would remind him, he said, of her mother. Harriet had agreed.

  The last blue-robed sailor climbed up onto the stern of the boat, the sails filled, and the Amon-Ra, with its rowing boat being pulled along behind, forged its way toward the center of the river. The inundation grew greater every day; the Nile looked as wide as a sea. Harriet moved to the other side of the deck and looked out at the west bank, her eyes searching the shore for a tall figure, running, commanding the rais to bring them ashore again. The shore on the other side of the river remained empty but for a couple of donkey boys, a group of women bent over their washing, pounding it with stones. She gazed beyond them, at the splendor and stillness of the mountains, held on to them with her eyes until the familiar contours were lost to view. She felt as if she was being torn from Thebes like a tooth.

  Louisa sat in a deck chair, leaning her head against the wooden frame. Fouad stood a little distance away, his polished shoes laced on his feet, facing north. He had recovered from his fright once he knew they were returning to Alexandria. Harriet threw herself down on the chair next to Louisa’s, wrapped her scarf around her head.

  “At last,” Louisa said. “We are on our way home.”

  “Yes, Mother. It seems that we are.”

  Harriet felt empty. She was well, for the first time in her adult life. Her breath ran freely and silently into her body, it left without effort. She could breathe like anyone else. But good health was only part of being alive. Going back to London seemed to mean the end of her life, not its beginning. She had regained her health in Luxor but she had not succeeded in starting to li
ve.

  Her book rested on her lap in its pocket, one corner digging into her thigh. Harriet did not reach to touch it. It seemed disconnected from her, mocked her with its corners, its implacable, closed cover, its self-contained and secret existence. It was nothing more than a book, leather and paper stitched together, the words meaningless marks, not words of power at all.

  Rising from the deck chair, she moved to the railings again and took the book out of her pocket. She held it out over the water. She was about to release it, drop it into the Nile, when some instinct prevented her from doing so. Gripping the cover between her fingers, she opened the book and looked at the title that she had written in red, months earlier, for the book of spells to help her not in death but in life. Magic for the Living.

  There was no magic for the living, Harriet told herself, feeling something shrink and shrivel inside her, some vital part of herself slip into sleep or death. They were just words on paper. Doing up the ties, she replaced the journal in her pocket. Then she went to the cabin, knelt on the floor by her bunk, and wept.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  From his house on the hillside, Eberhardt Woolfe watched through his binoculars as the Amon-Ra, the vivid flash of orange on its deck, was lost to view. He threw down the binoculars and went inside, banging the screen door. Sitting down at the Bösendorfer, he adjusted his jacket so that it hung over the back of the stool, placed his foot on the pedal. He ran his fingers up and down the ivories and the notes rang out freely through the room, animating the air, conjuring Europe even in their disorder, their raw form.

  Leaning over the keys, he embarked on the broken chords of the nocturne with his left hand, the songlike melody with the right. His fingers, as always at first, were stiff and reluctant, but as he played, he forgot his fingers and was aware only of Chopin’s music, felt in his bones its subtle insistence on beauty, its call to the soul to rise, venerate the world.

  Nocturne Opus 9, No. 2, had been his favorite from when he was a young man, from the time when he had no cause for melancholy but found it anyway. Eberhardt had a feeling of loss. Not the usual dull ache of Kati’s absence, her interminable silence, but a new sense, strong and present as the smell of fresh paint, of something missing. An absence that put all things awry.

  He shut the music book and moved to the desk.

  “Ach, Kati,” he said. “She is gone. And now I have lost her also.”

  Lighting the lamp, the tall one that he used for close work, he unwrapped the new piece he was working on, a shabti. Picking up the dry paintbrush, he began to work at it with the tip of sable, coaxing dust from the crevices. He occupied himself for some time at the work, then laid down the figure. He was nothing more than a shabti himself, a man of clay, serving corpses.

  The goal he had been working toward was almost achieved. He would be able to enter the tomb himself the following day. The aperture was enlarged sufficiently, the structure safe. All was ready. And yet he didn’t have the heart for it. He wanted to walk out of the house, despite the midnight hour, padlock the door behind him, instruct the guard to remain at his post at the tomb entrance until his return, and cross the river. Board the first craft that was leaving for Cairo. Chase after Harriet Heron. Find her and invite her—implore her, if necessary—to stay by his side.

  Returning to the piano, Eberhardt Woolfe played until his fingers hurt, dispelling the silence that surrounded him, the endless darkness. Longing was as real as archaeology. Feelings as important to excavate as artifacts and more valuable. He had lost something precious. This time it was his own fault. He had let her go. He closed the lid, let it drop with a thud of spruce on spruce.

  Moving onto the verandah, he looked out at the few remaining lights of the village on the opposite bank. A sickle moon, bright and heartless, floated on its back over the dimly outlined pillars of the Luxor temple, half submerged now by floodwaters.

  Back inside, in the bedroom, he pulled down the small suitcase from the top of the wardrobe. He did not go to bed but sat in the leather chair in the large room with his eyes closed. As he waited for what was left of the night to pass, an image came to him of Harriet, walking out of the tomb, decked in yellow gold, holding a pomegranate in her hands. She walked purposefully. He was in the moving picture too, hurrying behind her as she walked on through a white Theban valley. He ran as fast as he could but was unable to lessen the distance between them.

  The sun rose over a river that was high and swollen; the fast-flowing, mud-charged water appeared opaque, careless of the small sandal that skidded over its pulsing surface, its sails filled, carrying Eberhardt Woolfe sitting on a plank laid over the stern, his suitcase at his feet.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Harriet studied her hands, the scratches and scabs on her knuckles and fingers and palms. Lines of ingrained dust still lingered underneath her nails.

  “Coffee, miss?”

  “Thank you.”

  She pushed forward her cup. The waiter was the same one who had brought them their coffee when they last stayed in the hotel; the breakfast of cold beef was identical and she recognized most of the other guests by sight. She and Louisa faced each other across the breakfast table under the high molded ceiling of the Oasis Palace Hotel dining room.

  They had arrived the evening before, after ten days on the Amon-Ra, the journey downriver more rapid than the one upstream. The world, which had grown so immense, was contracting again. All that remained was the reunion with Aunt Yael in Alexandria, the passage to England, followed by the train journey to London. The house in Canonbury. Lifting her cup to her lips, Harriet pictured the wall by her bed, its plaster that was the color of old snow. She saw in her mind’s eye the raised pattern of the paper on the ceiling, inhaled the remembered smell of thorn apple and niter.

  “Look who it is,” murmured Louisa, her eyes fixed on the far side of the room.

  Mrs. Cox was hastening toward them, edging around the hooded chairs and walking sticks, past hovering, aproned nurses.

  Harriet jumped to her feet.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Cox,” Louisa said, dabbing her mouth on her napkin as the Coxes arrived at the table.

  “Miss Heron, will you come for a stroll?” Sarah Cox said, after a brief exchange of pleasantries. “There is a bloom in the garden that I wish to show you.”

  “Do sit down, Mr. Cox,” Louisa said. “And tell me all the news. It seems as if we have been away for such a long time.”

  Mr. Cox pulled out a chair.

  “Nothing but bad news,” he announced, “from the point of view of the man of business.”

  Harriet followed Sarah Cox’s neat silk bustle through the dining room, through a pair of large open doors, and down the stone steps from the terrace. Mrs. Cox wore a hat trimmed with poppies and carried a red silk parasol looped over one arm. She looked what ­Rosina would call blooming. As they reached the grass, she turned to Harriet and took hold of both her hands.

  “I want to hear absolutely everything,” she said. “I know already that Mr. Soane pursued you to Luxor. Did he . . . ?”

  “Did he what?”

  “Propose, Harriet. Propose.”

  Harriet shook her head, unable to speak.

  “He didn’t ask you to marry him?” Sarah Cox sounded incredulous.

  They walked under the shade of a line of sycamore figs, their trunks limed white. A tune played in Harriet’s head—the steady tapping of a trowel, overlaid by the sound of the wind, fluttering leaves among the tombstones. She pictured the bleached valley, the stack of palm-leaf baskets inside the entrance to the tomb. Perhaps at this very moment, Eberhardt Woolfe was entering the chamber, lamp aloft, one of the Egyptian workers walking behind with a pan of magnesium, ready to ignite it and illuminate the painted walls in a brilliant, momentary flare of light. She imagined Dr. Woolfe’s green eyes gazing in wonder at the sights she had seen and felt an ache in her chest, as if she had b
een thumped.

  Mrs. Cox was speaking again. “I saw it so clearly in the cards. That you would join with a man you encountered on a nautical voyage. I would have staked my life on it. I’m sorry, Harriet.”

  “Perhaps the cards were mistaken, Mrs. Cox.”

  Harriet looked at the tough green grass under their feet. Mrs. Cox knew nothing about Dr. Woolfe. She’d been ill, confined to the surgeon’s quarters, by the time he boarded the Star of the East. It was too late to confide in her now. There was nothing to say.

  “Whatever happened to your hands?” Mrs. Cox said. “You look as if you’ve been building a pyramid.”

  They ascended the steps and entered the hushed comfort of the Oasis Palace. Seated next to Harriet in the dim lobby, around a round brass tray embossed with a complicated Arabic script that seemed to fly and dance its meaning into being, Mrs. Cox ordered two glasses of lemonade. She leaned back and linked her fingers over her stomach, the diamonds on her ring glinting.

  “I have news, Harriet.”

  “Are you . . . ?”

  Mrs. Cox nodded, and when she looked up, her eyes glittered like her ring. “The doctor confirmed it this morning. We’re going home as soon as Zebedee has finished his business. The baby will be born in England.”

  “When will you leave?”

  “As soon as possible. Zebedee says it’s becoming unsafe.”

  “What does he mean?”

  “Oh, you know. The natives are so angry with everyone. Zebedee says they’ve no one to blame but themselves if they can’t pay their taxes.” Sarah Cox gave a sad, silvery laugh. “I’d be angry too, if I were in their position. I would hate us more than they do.”

  “We’re going home as well,” Harriet said flatly. “We’re taking the train to Alexandria this afternoon.”

  “Will you come and see me, Harriet? In London?”

  A bent old woman slumped sideways in a wheelchair approached, the chair propelled through the lobby by an attendant, the iron wheels rolling silently over the smooth expanse of marble. Turning back to Mrs. Cox, Harriet forced herself to smile. She reached out for her hands and squeezed them.