Baker's Woman

by Tess Enroth

“No. Neither you nor Saat abandoned me when I was ill, and I am going to do whatever I can for Saat now.”

  “This is different. It’s a plague. It’s fatal!”

  “Any disease can be fatal if nobody looks after you. And you and Richarn have enough to handle.”

  “You must not expose yourself to infection,” Sam said, and then pled in a softer tone, “Be sensible, Florence.”

  “I am being sensible. We all may have been in contact with the cause of this disease, and who knows if one of us will be next? I’m no more likely to be ill if I look after Saat than if I hide in my cabin.”

  She sat down on a nail barrel and asked Achmed to bring a basin of water and a canteen of drinking water. Sam and Richarn went below, to follow instructions, she hoped. Achmed had set up the cot and now brought her a comfortable chair.

  Florence stayed beside Saat, bathing his face and reading to him in a soft voice, which he sometimes seemed to hear. When it was necessary to leave his side, she removed her outer clothes and scrubbed herself with strong soap before taking her own meal. She took a short nap in the evening and sat at his side through half the night, at which time he went to sleep and she went to her bed for a few hours. At daybreak Florence resumed her vigil beside the thin form under the sheet. When the sun rose higher and sounds of the work crew reached the upper deck, Saat did not stir, and laying her hand on his, she realized he was dead.

  They were near the place where they had buried Johann, and Sam and Richarn and two diggers took the body of the seventeen­ year-old boy to a grave high above the water line and under a mimosa tree. Sam spoke a few words about Saat as a steadfast and loyal friend to them all, and Richarn spoke sorrowfully of plans he and Saat had made for the future working together in Cairo.

  That evening while Achmed was cooking, Florence asked him whether he would return to his people when the venture was ended.

  He said he wanted to visit his parents and sisters and his many cousins in Nubia. He hoped that then he and Sahba could remain in Upper Egypt and work in a hotel in Luxor. Florence said she would see that he could go home as soon as they reached a place near Nubia.

  An east wind picked up and freshened the air, and no new cases broke out. The dahabiah scudded along on a swift current, and the days passed in easy routines. Yet Sam expressed his impatience, saying he couldn’t wait to reach Khartoum, he said.

  “How would you feel about a day aboard a camel?”

  “A day soon? Where?”

  “If we could hire a pair of camels, we could travel faster than the boat. Richarn could bring it to Khartoum.”

  “How fast, how long?” Florence hesitated at the very thought of leaving the boat for a camel ride.

  “Entirely possible we could do it in one day.”

  “And where are the camels?”

  “Out of sight at present.”

  Earlier in the day a camel train had passed heading north, laden with cane and dates, and it had given Sam an idea. If the train stopped at Renko, he might negotiate for a pair of camels.

  In the evening when the dahabiah dropped anchor at the market town, Sam immediately rowed the dinghy ashore alone, saying he’d be back in time for dinner.

  Florence smiled and opened her palms in a gesture of helplessness, and Achmed laughed. As she waited on deck, she thought about the Consulate and seeing the Pethericks again, and perhaps seeing Ferasha. Could the woman still be there, serving Consul Petherick and his wife? If she and the Arab woman should meet, what would they say to one another? Her reverie was halted abruptly by Sam’s shouts as he paddled along side the dahabiah.

  “We shall ride a pair of handsome camels!”

  “Indeed. And are they good-natured as well?”

  Chapter 29

  Khartoum Again, March 1865

  Sam put Richarn in charge of the dahabiah and warned him not to allow visitors on board and to keep the crew on board until he returned.

  Sam spoke to the men, saying it was important for them all to remain during the offloading because he knew they could be trusted. He told them he understood their desire to see their families, but warned that a plague still raged in the city.

  Sam helped Florence onto the camel, tapping on its knees with his riding crop, the signal to rise. Then he took her hand and asked if she remembered the camel rides in Abyssinia.

  “How your eyes shone as we raced ahead of the caravan!”

  She touched her finger to her lips, then to his, and he leaned his forehead against her knee and sighed.

  With food, drink, and a bed roll behind their saddles, they rode slowly at first, then at a rapid pace. When they saw a grove of flame trees, they stopped and unpacked their lunch.

  After lunch and a short rest, they were on their way again and kept a steady pace until they glimpsed the last of the sun’s rays striking the minarets of Khartoum.

  It was dusk as they passed through the hovels and lean-tos on the outskirts of the city, then rode between clusters of houses. At a time of day when the people usually crowded the streets and markets and filled the cafes, they saw few customers and fewer weary proprietors serving them. No men sat over their games and pipes, and no women lingered in doorways. Tattered leaflets warning of the epidemic clung to walls where they’d been plastered long ago. Yet it was not long before a gang of ragged boys appeared and surrounded them, clamoring for baksheesh and promising to take them any place in the city. Sam selected one who said he knew the way to the British Consulate.

  “Then go ahead of us and tell the bowab the Bakers have returned.”

  By the time Sam and Florence arrived at the Consulate’s gates, they were open and the staff waiting. Servants from nearby houses had heard the news, too, and stood out in the square or in doorways to stare at the fair haired woman riding a camel. The Pethericks, however, had gone back to Great Britain, leaving only staff to look after grounds and house. Several remembered the Bakers, and all knew about them and how the Consul had worried about their long absence. But having had a slender hope for their safe return, he had instructed the staff to make them welcome should they arrive while he was away.

  The secretary displayed his delight in the role of host, ordering half a dozen servants to take the guests to their former quarters and provide for all their needs. When they were left alone in their quarters, Sam swept Florence into his arms and danced her in circles around the room. Then, breathless, they dropped their garments on the floor and bathed together in the huge bath tub.

  In the morning Sam picked up a card left by a French man named Serge Delorme, who returned while they still sat at the table over cups of cafe au lait and amid stacks of papers and letters.

  “I feel as if I know you, though I had not expected to meet you.” Delorme said. “Louis Ronsard, my dear friend, is away at present, but this morning I shall send him word of your return and report, I assume, that you are both well. Nearly everyone, I regret to say, accepted rumors as truth, but you appear unscathed by the rigors you must surely have endured.”

  “Yes, quite, thank you,” Sam said, and signaled the safragi to bring coffee. “Then Louis has left Africa?”

  “Yes, on a visit to France, I believe. And Marcel is away, too. You knew him, the archeologist?”

  “Indeed, we often dined together,” Sam said.

  “Meeting you gives me great pleasure, and I shall feel it my privilege to serve you in any way I can while you are here.”

  “We are certain to need your advice and happily accept the offer,” Sam said.

  “Very well. I’ll leave you now to settle in, but you must promise to dine with me tomorrow at eight.”

  It was late afternoon when Sam returned from the wharf and the warehouses where he’d talked with Koorshid Aga. Upstairs he found Florence asleep on a chaise near the open doors to their balcony. Her head rested on the curved back of the chaise, and her hair fell almost to the tiles and moved slightly as a gentle breeze dried it. He was glad he hadn’t called out to her as he often did when
returning to her, and he gazed at her and thought he might well be seeing a romantic painting. Her multi-colored silk robe fell away from her throat and shoulder, and the tilt of her head revealed her perfect profile.

  He hoped he wouldn’t disturb her as he hurried to bathe and put on a thick cotton robe. He vigorously toweled his hair and beard and wondered is he could find a decent barber. When he opened the door, she still had not moved, and he walked barefoot across the bedroom and bent over her. At his touch, she opened her eyes and murmured his name. As he lifted her and carried her to the bed, feeling her flesh against his bare chest was almost unbearable. He laid her on the bed, and as he untied her sash and opened the robe, she arched her back, lifting herself to him. “Wait, Florrie. Though I’ve never wanted you more than I do now, I want to look at you. How long has it been since we’ve had so much privacy and time?”

  “I’m too thin,” she said as he traced her hip bone with his finger tips.

  He shook his head and continued his caresses as she lifted her arms and drew him down to her.

  That evening Sam read aloud news from the stack of papers and letters more than a year old.

  “Word here from my daughters and my sister, and from James and John, even from Val. Not one of them believed the rumors. They knew we would return home.”

  “How happy they will be to get word, can you send a message that will get there before you – we – do?”

  “When you and I, we, reach the Red Sea or Cairo, I can send them a telegram.”

  He handed her the letters and picked up a French edition of Speke’s Journal of Discovery of the Sources of the Nile. Turning the pages slowly, he admired detailed tables of scientific data and the index.

  “The man wasn’t much of a botanist, but he kept track of every animal dead or alive.”

  “And are you mentioned?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  He perused an appendix which told of Speke’s having donated botanical specimens to the Hooker Herbarium. Then turning a page, he was confronted by an editor’s note framed within a black border.

  “Good God, Florence, he’s dead! The publisher’s note says Speke died in a hunting accident outside of Bath on September sixteenth, 1864, almost nine months ago! I shall have to go through these papers, see if the news is in any of them.”

  They had been in Khartoum three days before the dahabiah docked, by which time, Sam had learned the extent of the dire conditions in the entire region. His first business had been to try to keep his crew on the boat and isolated from the general population. Hundreds of captured blacks in transport back to their villages had died, and continued to die in the crowded alleys of Khartoum. Typhus and bubonic plagues had killed ninety percent of the four thousand soldiers charged to maintain what civil order they could, and the city was in more than its usual disarray.

  Even before the plague, two years of drought had brought rampant suffering, destroying crops and businesses. New shoots burned at their roots or withered on their stalks or vines. What little grain did grow rotted on the barges, which could not float down to Khartoum’s market because the Blue Nile was no more than three feet deep. In the ensuing famine, the camels kept for transport and the cattle raised for food either starved or died of diseases. All of Soudan was in ruins.

  “When I meet with the crew and see to the boat, I don’t want you to come with me,” Sam told Florence. “The less we are in the streets the better. The only good news is that this year there has been rain in Abyssinia and Eritrea, and the Blue Nile is rising. With luck, it will feed the White Nile enough to make it navigable. It will be a long time before this region recovers, but for us, it means we might sail through the cataracts to Berber.”

  “But I worry about your going out there every day.”

  “Delorme is sending his driver with a calash. I’ll take care to avoid contagion.”

  * * *

  For two months they waited in Khartoum for the Blue Nile’s flood to reach the White Nile. It was the hottest time of the year, and a time of desert winds. The khamsin blasted the city with sand, and Sam wore a keffiyeh on his headgear, pulling it across his nose and mouth, when he had to go out daily to direct the transfer of their supplies from the dahabiah and Koorshid’s warehouse to a mooring where he had rented a smaller boat.

  Florence kept to the house, where servants fought the sand by daily mopping, dusting, and polishing. She recognized none of them as having been serving here during their previous time at the consulate; she wondered if Ferasha might still be somewhere in the house and was keeping out of Florence’s sight on purpose.

  One day she chose to ask the friendliest of the boys if he knew Ferasha; he did not even recognize the name. She tried again with a servant who looked older, but the result was no different. In a way, she felt relieved.

  On days when the winds didn’t blow, she walked in the gardens and sat on the terrace, where from time to time, she tried again to read the book Adrianna had given her. The stories were short, for which she was grateful, but she was impatient and blamed her poor command of French for her inability to grasp their point.

  One calm afternoon while Sam was there and sat near her writing in his journal, Florence envied him his concentration. She closed her book and looked at the flowers and trees, then laid the book on the table between their chairs and took the water pitcher into the house. When she returned with fresh water, Sam picked up her book.

  “You’ve been at this one a long time, Florence. You find it tiresome?”

  “My French is not up to it, and well, yes, it is tiresome to try so hard with so little effect.”

  “I don’t recall how it got into our collection.”

  “Adrianna gave it to me. She said it was for a time when I might feel discouraged. But when I felt that way, our books were in Gondokoro. Or maybe I wasn’t sufficiently discouraged. When I was ill I couldn’t have held it, let alone concentrated on it.”

  “Then why go on? Surely Adrianna would understand your giving up.”

  “If it were in English, I would have more reason to try. Do you know this Balzac or his stories?”

  “I do.”

  “What do you think? Are they amusing or instructive? Are we to laugh? Or take from them a lesson? Nobody in it behaves well, and I wonder if it is a criticism of them or if this is how the writer perceives all people.”

  “You don’t find the antics of these people amusing?”

  “Should I? They are so empty-headed I cannot. They are terrible people, no feeling or kindness in them, just preening and posing and being deceitful.”

  “Yes, the stories are about human frailties.”

  “Then God help us! I can’t think why Adrianna gave it to me. If I were discouraged or unhappy, these tales would not make me feel any better.”

  “Perhaps she thought you took things too seriously.”

  “Things like making love? Well, I do!”

  “And so do I, my dearest.”

  Late in July, they boarded the small steamer with Achmed, Sahba, Richarn, and Zeneb, a Dinka woman he had married in Khartoum, and four of the crew who wanted to go farther north. As it passed between the basalt cliffs north of the city, the Nile deepened and provided swift passage. As they were making ten to twelve miles an hour above the sixth cataract, they passed skeletons of boats wrecked on the rocks, and the erratic winds forced their boat onto a sand bank.

  After a jolt that knocked Florence against a bulkhead, the boat rolled sideways and settled at an angle against the bank. Not knowing what might be next, she found a place on the high side of the deck and clung to the rail. She could see Sam and the crew and knew she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t swim and feared some of the crew might panic. However, Sam immediately set them to work, crawling out onto the banks with heavy cables to be used if they all had to abandon ship. Then for five hours crewmen hauled on tow lines and shoveled sand away from the hull.

  Finally, the steamer floated free and upright. They fired up the
boiler enough to make the steering mechanism work while the current took them through the rapids.

  Florence looked on, not letting go of the rail, and recalled their exhilarating passage through the first cataract. This one was called the sixth cataract, counting from downstream, and now she knew they might face at least two more before Berber. This one wasn’t dangerous enough to force them to leave the river, and she was enjoying the ride on the plunging boat, even if it was less wild than the first.

  Once again in smooth water, Sam gave Richarn the helm and sent other men down to caulk any cracks in the hull, promising they’d go ashore in a few days when they reached Shendi market. When they passed the mouth of the Atbara River, it swelled the Nile and bore them swiftly toward the wharf and the end of their time on the river.

  Florence remembered well the Berber market, where they had camped after the harrowing eighteen-day trek across the Nubian desert. It had been the middle of June 1861, and near their camp on the river banks, trees had burst into bloom overnight.

  “What shall we do, Florence? If we go by caravan to the Red Sea, we can travel by boat and then take a train to Cairo. Or we can go back the way we came.”

  “If only we could go all the way down the Nile! But I don’t want to cross that desert route again. How does the route to the Red Sea compare?”

  “It’s not quite as long, and it’s a well-traveled trade route. I’m told there are oases.”

  “And you rather prefer it?”

  “Unless you’re set on the Nile.”

  Several days later, when all arrangements had been completed for their caravan to Souakim, Florence stood beside Sam in the caravansary as they parted with most of their crew.

  “The camel drivers are ready at any time we choose to start.” Sam said, “Just a few of our men will go with us.”

  “They’re not all men, now, Sam. Richarn’s wife might now be considered a crew member.”

  “I didn’t mean to leave her out, but she doesn’t draw attention. Wherever Richarn goes, she will go.”

  “Yes, of course,” Florence smiled at the familiar phrase. “And you know what Achmed and Sahba plan to do?”

  “I do. Achmed tells me they will join a caravan that will pass near the Kurkur Oasis. I’ve given him a bit more than his accumulated wages, which will be useful while he establishes himself.”