LIE DOWN WITH DOGS, rise up with fleas,” Mumma used to say. She was referring to moral corruption that came of falling in with bad companions, although she also thought that people who let their dogs sleep indoors were asking for trouble.

Ah, but those who lie down with dachshunds rise up with smiles, even if their own night’s sleep has been disturbed. Dachshunds are structural comedians; their very existence is a cause for amusement. In the full light of morning, I awoke to the spectacle of Rosie lying flat on her back: pointed nose in the air, stubby forelegs folded demurely across her chest, hindquarters sprawled in lewd abandon.

“Trollop! Just look at you,” I murmured, stroking her belly. “No wonder Arabs think short dogs are odious.”

Waking, she rolled over. Yawned, her long tongue unfurling like a paper noisemaker. Stretched, a two-part motion: first fore, then aft. A cylindrical shake from one end to the other, and she leapt into my arms, all exuberance and kisses, as though we had been cruelly parted for days, not sleeping in the very same bed all night long.

Someone just outside my door must have heard my laughter, for there was a tiny knock and a piping voice. “Walk you dog, madams?”

I pulled on my dressing gown, lifted Rosie, and opened the door to a small boy wearing a barely respectable white cotton shift and sandals. This little capitalist held up a worn leather leash, probably scavenged from some European’s trash. “Yes, madams? Walk you dog?”

Rosie customarily barked at strangers, but perhaps she did not yet consider the hotel room entirely her own. And this child had, after all, uttered a magical word. She looked at him and then up at me, trembling with anticipation. He said ‘walk,’ Agnes.

“How much?” I asked.

We quickly brokered a price and I attached his leash to her collar. Before I even learned the boy’s name, he and Rosie raced down the corridor toward the stairs.

I don’t know what I was thinking. I suppose I simply presumed that the concierge had sent the boy. When he and Rosie failed to reappear by the time I’d washed up and gotten dressed, dreadful possibilities began to occur to me. Was this how poor Egyptians obtained meat—by walking foreigners’ dogs? What if the boy held her hostage and demanded a ransom? What if the doorman of the Semiramis had sent the boy here to execute the offensive animal? That was absurd, but still…

Idiot! I thought. Why didn’t you call the desk clerk before sending her off with some little stranger?

Five more sickening minutes, and I left the room, hoping at every step to hear a child’s pounding footfalls and Rosie’s scrambling scamper up the staircase. With no sign of them three flights down, I was close to frantic as I approached the concierge. “Sir, I’m afraid I’ve made a terrible mistake,” I began, embarrassed at the quaver in my voice.

Just then I heard a deep male voice cry, “Ein Wursthund!” right outside the hotel door. There was a stream of delighted German followed by a question in Arabic that was answered by the boy, who entered the lobby and lifted his chin toward me.

The German gentleman appeared with Rosie draped happily over one strong forearm. He was a rather handsome person, quite tall, and broad in the chest. My age. Perhaps a bit younger. When he saw me, his smile widened beneath a luxuriant mustache, and he leaned over to place Rosie on the floor.

Crying “Woo-hoo!” she sprinted across the lobby and pirouetted at my feet as if to say, Look, Agnes, look! I found us a new friend!

I picked her up, careful to bend at the knees, and straightened just in time to see the gentleman hand the little boy a coin and dismiss him with a word or two in Arabic. “You are English, miss?” the gentleman inquired cheerily with a slight but pleasant accent.

“American,” I said.

“You must forgive my forwardness, Miss—?”

“Shanklin.”

“You see, Miss Shanklin, I had a dachshund when I was small, just the same as your—?”

“Rosie.”

“Such memories your Rosie brings me! My Tessa was just the same,” he said again, astonished by this coincidence. “Black and brown with markings just the same.” He held out his hands with a pleading look, begging for the opportunity to hold Rosie once more. Disarmed, I passed her to him, and the hussy allowed herself to be transferred without a struggle.

“She is a vamp,” the gentleman said with mock disapproval, as though reading my mind. “My Tessa was the same. But I forget my manners as well.” Rosie looked put out when he offered me the hand that had been stroking her long back. “Permit me to introduce myself, Miss Shanklin. I am Karl Weilbacher. Please,” he urged, extending an arm toward a sunny room just off the lobby. “You must allow me to buy you and Rosie some breakfast.”

This meal was included in the price of my accommodation, or it had been at the Semiramis. Uncertain if the same arrangement obtained at the Continental as well, I turned toward the desk clerk to inquire.

Herr Weilbacher must have misread my hesitation. “Please, Miss Shanklin, I assure you that my intentions are entirely honorable.”

The notion that a man’s intentions toward me were anything else seemed improbable but intriguing. I tried to think if I was properly attired for a meal in public, and yes—even preoccupied by Rosie’s fate, I’d taken time to select the longest frock Mildred had allowed me to purchase and had pulled the navy jacket on over it. I wore neither gloves nor hat, but I could feel the marcelled wave that Antoine had created swagging low and becomingly over my wayward eye. And I was in Cairo! I was far from home, you see, and free from all my own ideas of myself. It seemed just possible that—

“Not another thought,” Herr Weilbacher declared. “Please, do me this favor,” he pleaded, looking sweetly sad as he added, “It has been so long since my Tessa has been gone from me.”

When I agreed, his face lit up. Chatting cheerily, he led me to a dining room ringed with ferns and orchids where gleaming silver and cut glass on white linen caught the glorious morning light. The waiters all seemed to know Herr Weilbacher, and if they were unenthusiastic about Rosie’s presence in their domain, his good humor—and perhaps a history of genially distributed tips—overcame their dismay.

“Now, what would you enjoy for breakfast?” he asked, rubbing his hands together with anticipatory relish.

“Anything, as long as it’s not oatmeal,” I said and listened, dazed, as he ordered for us while keeping up a steady stream of amiable small talk. Soon a team of waiters delivered large trays bearing tea and coffee, and boiled eggs, and rolls with butter and marmalade, and sausages, and oranges and melon.

I thought it was all delicious, but Herr Weilbacher’s face twisted as he chewed and swallowed a forkful of meat. “This is not so good as our sausages at home,” he told me in a low voice and then explained, “Like serious Jews, Muslims eat no pork and so: there is rarely any sausage worth eating in Egypt, not even in hotels that cater to Europeans. This sausage is fit only for dogs.” His face lit up again. “But we are in luck: here is a dog!” he cried and slipped a tidbit to Rosie.

“Oh, don’t feed her from the table,” I objected.

“It is only a tiny piece,” he said, winking. “When I was a boy, my brothers and I fed Tessa, just so.”

“But didn’t she learn to be a beggar?”

“Of course, but she was very adorable,” he said with a shrug and a look that asked, Why should we resist?

His face was remarkable, capable of all sorts of vivid, interesting things as he spoke. Straight and serious one moment, crooked and amused the next, his expression changed as quickly as his topics, which were as varied and light as clouds racing across a spring sky. He was so interested in me and Cleveland and how I’d come to be in Cairo—why, before ten minutes had passed, he made me feel as though having breakfast with a German gentleman in an Egyptian hotel was the most natural thing in the world for a lady from Ohio.

“And where is your home, Herr Weilbacher?” I asked.

“Please,” he said, buttering another crusty roll. “Call me Karl. I am from Stuttgart, in Württemberg.” When I grew thoughtful, his mobile face quieted. “You are thinking: he was the enemy.”

“Not at all!”

He smiled at my lie, and I looked down at my plate. “We Germans are not all the same,” I heard him say in his resonant, musical voice. “Germany has a north and a south as your country does, Miss Shanklin. We southerners are quite a different breed from Prussians, who love war and wish to rule.” He leaned over the table. “The kaiser came to Stuttgart when I was a child. My friends and I threw stones at his parade,” he confessed merrily. “In the beer hall, men gave us boys pretzels when we sang silly songs or recited a rude poem about the kaiser.”

“I know just the sort of boy you must have been. I was a schoolteacher,” I said, and began to speak about my students back in Little Italy. I meant to tell him about how hard they studied and how quickly they learned English, but Herr Weilbacher seemed so curious, so sympathetic…

And the truth is, I can never seem to stick to a subject, as you’ve probably noticed, and I really do apologize for that, but everything always seems so connected to me! Anyway, before long I found myself recounting my struggles with resentful, bitter parents, frightened by their children’s success. Americanization was a Faustian bargain for such immigrants, I told Herr Weilbacher. Yes, their children could go to public schools with no bribes, no fees, and no questions asked, but American tuition was paid in estrangement. Daughters told mothers that they dressed funny, they cooked funny, they talked funny. Sons stayed out late and went to dance halls, and quarreled with their fathers over who would keep the money earned from after-school jobs.

Fed up, the parents would decide enough was enough. A father would appear at my classroom door. Hat in hand but defiant, he would declare, “My kid don’t wanna go to school no more.” Listening to those men, you’d have thought their sons and daughters wished for nothing more earnestly than to work for a pittance in a steel mill or a laundry.

“And the children stood there, dying inside,” I told Herr Weilbacher. “I could see it! The boys would hang their heads. The girls would weep. I could do nothing, and it just broke my heart—because honestly? What the father meant was, I’m losing my power. I am diminished every day as this child grows more knowledgeable—”

I realized suddenly that Herr Weilbacher, so charming and chatty before, had fallen utterly silent.

You simply cannot see it when you bore others, Agnes, Mumma whispered. He doesn’t care that you were a schoolteacher. My land! He’s only being polite to sit with you at all, and here you are with your crossed eyes, braying about immigrant children. You’d drive gentle Jesus to drink, Agnes. Honestly, you would.

I stared at my lap, hands clawed around my napkin. “I—My apologies, Herr Weilbacher,” I stammered, trying to drop my voice an octave and to soften its harsh midwestern timbre. “One does get carried away.”

Still he said nothing. He is disgusted, I thought. Disgusted by me, by my opinions, and my loudness and my accent. He is struck speechless by disgust.

He bent and lifted Rosie, one hand cupped under her muscular behind, the other supporting her chest. She could be wary with strangers, but there was something calm and assured about his hands. He shifted Rosie to the horizontal and stroked her back all the way to her feather-duster tail. His fingers stopped moving when he felt the misshapen bones.

“She was born that way,” I said, ashamed of her and of myself. “Her tail is a defect. I know that.” I glanced up then and saw that his face had become…Well, I don’t know how to describe it except that he seemed impressed and entertained, at once.

“You are compassionate,” he said softly, as though he knew that I had saved her life by taking her for my own on the day she was born. “I was not much of a student,” he confided then, “but perhaps I would have been if I’d had such a teacher as you, Miss Shanklin.” He set Rosie on the floor decisively. “I had an appointment this morning, but it was canceled. Cairenes are so unreliable. Everything with them is inshallah—”

“If it be God’s will,” I said, remembering the word from Lillian’s stories.

“Yes, but also ‘perhaps,’ or ‘someday.’ Or ‘not bloody likely,’ as the English say. Today, I think, this is good luck. It would be my pleasure to show you something of the city, if you and Rosie would do me the honor?”

Agnes, no! Mumma cried. He’s a complete stranger, and a foreigner.

Here in Cairo, Agnes is a foreigner, too, said Mildred. And that was true, of course.

“What a lovely offer,” I said brightly. “Just let me get my hat.”

         

We left the lobby with Rosie trotting ahead on her leash while Herr Weilbacher pointed out the sights. “Gardens like these are among the many European amenities in this neighborhood. This part of Cairo reminds me of Paris. Have you been to Paris? No? Ach! You must see Paris someday! Notre-Dame is on an island in the Seine just as Gazirah sits between two parts of the Nile. That is the Cairo Opera House, just there. It was built to celebrate the completion of the Suez Canal. Do you enjoy opera, Miss Shanklin?” When I allowed as how I’d never had the opportunity to hear one, he cried, “Then we must make an opportunity. I’ll try to get tickets for a performance. Perhaps Aïda! What could be better than Aïda in Cairo?”

Halfway across the Gazirah Bridge, noise began to lap at us like waves against a shore. Arriving on the beledi side of the city, we were suddenly in the midst of it all: camels, carts, crowds, and an astonishing number of trucks and motorcars. Many were Fords, in considerably reduced condition. Stripped to their essentials, they made the kind of deafening racket that might have been produced by a thresher attempting to harvest a stone wall. Behind each ramshackle vehicle, a crowd of boys followed, “hoping for a breakdown or an entertaining collision,” as Herr Weilbacher put it. “Amazing how few parts a Ford needs,” he shouted when a particularly skeletal flatbed truck clattered past. “If something falls off, a Ford rolls right on—although it complains rather loudly.”

“No wonder people here yell all the time,” I remarked at the top of my voice. “Everyone in Cairo must be hard of hearing!” And I was thrilled when Herr Weilbacher produced a booming laugh, amused at my remark.

Engulfed by Cairo’s kaleidoscope of odors, Rosie dashed to the end of her leash in every direction, as eager to sample Cairo’s scents as I was to see its sights. Before long, however, her jaunty rolling trot slowed, and Herr Weilbacher scooped her up. “The world is very large for a sausage dog,” he observed. “It’s a short life but a hairy one, ja, Rosie?”

With humor and insight, he began to interpret the street life for me, giving meaning to yesterday’s exotic chaos. The ladies’ long black garments, he explained, were allowed to trail in the dust purposely, to erase the tracks of their bare feet—in which an evil spirit might read hieroglyphs that could bring their families bad luck.

“Look at that,” Herr Weilbacher murmured, speaking close to my ear. I followed his glance and was amazed by the sight of a woman balancing on her head a large chicken coop—complete with chickens! A man walked a step or two in front of her, carrying nothing more than a cigarette between his lips. “Probably her husband, or perhaps a brother,” Herr Weilbacher said. “Egypt is a man’s world. Women bear all the burdens of Cairene life. Clay jars, children, baskets of goods…You are lucky, Miss Shanklin, to be independent and free. What an extraordinary woman you are to come so far—all on your own!”

We turned down a side street. For a short time, the noise around us diminished to the crunch of discarded pistachio shells beneath our feet and the ka-lop, ka-lop of delicate donkey hooves, followed by the rumble of wooden wheels on cobbles when a little cart passed by, laden with oranges. Soon, however, we entered an enclosed passageway where shouts and cries echoed against ancient stone walls.

“I think we will not go farther inside. Just look from here,” Herr Weilbacher advised. “It is too dirty for your pretty shoes.” That was just the sort of thing Mumma might have warned against, but on Herr Weilbacher’s lips, the instruction seemed to convey concern for my welfare and carried no implication that my own judgment was inadequate to the situation.

The covered bazaar was called a souk, he told me, and it teemed with jostling shoppers haggling over sacks of spices and beans, and piles of melons and cucumbers. Each item was the occasion for the sort of shouting matches I’d observed the day before, and when I inquired, Herr Weilbacher explained, “The negotiation is designed to make every transaction take as long as possible. It is a form of sport and justifies the time men spend on it. When they are tired from their bargaining, they must sit and smoke, or play dominoes for a while—to recover their strength, naturally.”

Rosie wiggled in his arms, and he paused to set her on the pavement just as a gang of small boys gathered around us calling, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!” Herr Weilbacher shook his head and waved the children off, but one of them noticed Rosie, who was backing up, circling. When she curled like a comma to deposit her own malodorous contribution to the bazaar’s collection of garbage, donkey droppings, and camel urine, the little boy alerted his friends. In an instant, the whole group doubled up with glee. Herr Weilbacher tossed a coin into the souk. The boys ran off to retrieve it and were quickly lost amid the hawkers’ wares.

“Baksheesh,” I said. I remembered the word from Lillie’s letters but couldn’t recall the meaning. “Is that a sort of fruit?”

“Yes, in a manner of speaking. Foreigners are the tree and all Egypt harvests us.” When I smiled uncertainly, he explained, “From the Persian bakhshidan, to give. It means a tip or a small gift.”

“And how have you come to be in the Middle East, Herr Weilbacher?” I asked as we strolled onward.

He stopped walking and waited with a hurt expression for me to look back. “Please, must I beg?” he asked, sounding comically aggrieved. “Call me Karl.”

“Karl.” The word was soft in my mouth. “And you must call me Agnes, of course.”

“That’s better.” He had a smile like sunrise. “Before the war, I supervised the construction of a railway my government built for the Turks.”

“You are a civil engineer, then? My brother was an army engineer,” I said, delighted by the coincidence.

“An engineer?” He laughed, but kindly. “I’m afraid I have no head for such things. No, Agnes, I was—let us say—an observer. I reported on progress to my superiors. There was a considerable investment of money. Many important people were interested in the project.”

Toward noon we circled back toward an impressive square, which was, Karl told me, the very heart of Cairo. There, all the colors of humanity were in evidence. “Sudanese,” Karl whispered, indicating a family so dark as to be nearly purple. As we strolled, he nodded toward Greeks and Italians, Jews and Armenians, Syrians and Lebanese and Cypriots: all sallow and hirsute in varying degrees. “But look there!” Karl said quietly. A slim, square-shouldered youth passed by, slender brown limbs moving with fluid grace beneath his homespun cotton robe. “That is the true Egyptian, Agnes, just as he is depicted on the walls of ancient tombs.”

Together we gazed at the young man’s beauty until Karl was distracted from it by a pair of white-skinned men. “Turko-Circassians,” Karl said. “They ruled Egypt until recently but were displaced by the French and then the British. Which reminds me! Was that not the famous Colonel Lawrence I saw with you yesterday? How do you know him, Agnes?”

I spoke of my sister’s connection and then of Mr. Thomas’s presentation. Karl smiled knowingly. “The world’s most famous spy, our Lawrence—barring only Mata Hari, I should say. They both enjoyed dressing up as Orientals.”

“I’m sorry, Herr—Karl. No, I don’t believe you have the right man. Colonel Lawrence is a British army officer.”

“Among other things.” Karl smiled. “I have followed his career for many years, Agnes. We met near Baghdad before the war, when he was an ‘archaeologist’ at Carchemish.”

“You say ‘archaeologist’ as though it were some sort of joke.”

“Not a joke, but part of the truth, only. Lawrence was competent in his field and Carchemish was an important Hittite site, but there are many such sites. Why choose one and not another?” he asked playfully. “Because Carchemish was very near a bridge we were building for that new German railway, of course! Lawrence spent a good deal of time taking photographs and making notes that would be of use during the war we both knew was coming. I came to know him rather well…” Suddenly, a cloud seemed to pass over him. Karl shook his head sadly. “He was built like a young bull in those days—not tall, but great strength in the shoulders and chest.” The colonel had not struck me as robust, and I must have looked doubtful because Karl remarked, “It was a hard war for him, I fear.”

He brightened up as we approached the famed Egyptian Museum, an immense building of peony-pink stone. “They held an international competition for its design. Worthy of the splendors it contains but, like Egyptian history, it contains too much. I will remain outside with Rosie while you spend just forty-five minutes in the museum—no more or you will be overwhelmed, dear teacher! You can come back again and again, and you will look at the same objects with different eyes. Learn inside, learn outside, then learn more on your return!”

         

The museum was laid out clockwise, with the oldest objects to the left of the entrance. Circling, one encountered five thousand years of rulers: Pre-Dynastic, Old Kingdom, New Kingdom, Ptolemaic, Roman, Ottoman.

Despite Karl’s wise advice, I tried to take it all in. The striding vitality of Ka-Aper, whose gleaming eyes seemed alert and lively; the seated Khufre, whose throne is enveloped by the protective wings of Horus; the lifelike statue of Princess Nofret, whose “real” hair can be seen poking out from beneath her royal wig. The sad, severe face of Ramses II, once mighty but now a beak-nosed, lipless mummy exposed to the vulgar curiosity of tourists.

My eyes swept over death masks, coffins, armchairs. Statues of falcons preparing for flight and of crocodiles lying in wait. Alabaster perfume bottles that would not have looked out of place on a modern woman’s dresser. Gold jewelry that Tiffany’s might have sold that very day in New York City. I paid as much attention as I could to the exhibits so that I would have something interesting to tell Karl when I returned to him, but I will be honest with you: I was as giddy as a schoolgirl with a crush.

Looking back now, it seems plain that I had passed into a sort of delayed adolescence on my first visit to Halle’s Department Store. After decades of defining myself by what I would not do, what I did not want, what I could not be…Well, my young friend Mildred had allowed me to see myself in an entirely new way—as a grown woman really, making my own choices, hearing myself think.

And what I thought that first afternoon in the Egyptian Museum was, Forty minutes…thirty minutes…ten minutes, and then I will see him again.

I made myself stay inside a while longer to keep my eagerness to rejoin him from being too obvious. When at last I allowed myself to go back outside, Karl was sitting on a stone bench in a cool green square a few steps from the entrance and waved to catch my attention.

“An hour!” he called, releasing Rosie and grinning as she dashed toward me and danced at my feet, wagging herself almost in half. “I warned you, didn’t I? Quite overwhelming!”

He had assembled a picnic for us: tomatoes, creamy goat cheese, disks of soft flat bread dotted with blackened, bubbled dough. “These tomatoes are delicious,” he told me when I joined him on the bench. “I am thinking of importing them to Europe. A man could make his fortune that way. And so, Agnes, what was the best thing you saw?”

I chewed, and thought, and swallowed. “Akhenaten,” I said, and then described the winsome oddity of that strange pharaoh with his soft little potbelly and long lantern jaw. There he sat, basking in the sun with his beautiful wife, Nefertiti. I was especially intrigued by their peculiarly adult children, sitting on the royal laps or playing at their parents’ feet. The children looked like Mr. and Mrs. Tom Thumb.

“A touching image,” Karl agreed. “And here we are, you and I, under the very same sun, with our little deformed daughter!” It took my breath away, that casual joke. “All those gods,” he went on, “each demanding attention! Amun, Osiris, Isis, Horus. Anubis, Ra. Maat, Geb, Bes! Monotheism must have been a welcome simplification,” he remarked, and I shocked myself by laughing at what I suspected was blasphemy. “Of course, polytheism has its advantages,” Karl pointed out. “If you fall suddenly in love with an unsuitable person, you may say, I am struck by Cupid’s arrow and helpless to resist! Or if something awful happens, you needn’t ask, What have I done to deserve this misfortune? Or, How could a just God permit such a thing? You merely say, Alas! Poor me! The gods are playing in the sky, and I have stumbled into their path.”

With that, he licked the last of the tomato juice and cheese from his fingers and stood, telling me regretfully that he had an appointment that afternoon. “And you, I think, must now have a rest—siesta, the Spaniards call it. A nap in the heat of the afternoon. You must keep up your strength, Agnes, for more adventures later.”

         

After the warmth and noise of beledi Cairo, my frangi hotel room was a cool and quiet oasis. I took off my street clothes, put on my robe, and lay back on the soft bed with Rosie at my side. Hands clasped behind my head, I watched the bed’s white cotton netting lift and sway in the slight breeze that drifted through the balcony doors. I felt enveloped, and…cared for.

It occurred to me then that no one had ever really taken care of me. Papa was always working and, you’ll recall, Mumma was never a great one for fussing over children. I learned early not to need much. After Papa died, it fell to me to look after everyone else. So, you see, to have someone like Karl anticipate my need to learn, to eat, to rest, to enjoy—that was profoundly moving.

Old as I was, I was innocent, but innocent as I was, I knew the difference, even then, between love and an infatuation. Infatuation is a mirror in which one gazes at one’s own longing for love and acceptance. Mirrors are fragile. Love endures.

What I felt in those first hours with Karl was a sense of excitement at discovering a person who seemed to find me witty and perhaps even a little attractive. His joy in sharing his knowledge of the city made my own enthusiasms seem well proportioned and justified. He had a great deal to teach but did so without talking down to me. That meant a lot. Until I met Karl, I was a daughter before parents, or a student before teachers, or a teacher before students. Even with my brother and sister, my responsibilities took me somewhat out of their spheres. I would not have said so at the time, but I suppose I had been lonely all my life. Karl was a companion, you see. Someone who treated me as an equal, worthy of his thoughtfulness and care.

He even mentioned Cupid, Mildred whispered.

And, of course, when a couple walks side by side, they look out at the world together, not at each other. The voice becomes more important than the face, you see. The soul and the intellect can be more beautiful without the dross of physicality.

Well, not entirely without.

Built like a bull. Great strength in the shoulders and chest. Karl’s description of Lawrence seemed more a self-portrait…

“Ah, vain delusion!” wrote the poet. “The fancy that flits before my mind is not the truth.”

There’s no fool like an old fool, Mumma sneered.

Pay no attention! Mildred advised. She’s just jealous.

“What do you think, Rosie?” I asked as she chewed meditatively on her toes. Receiving no clear reply, I answered for her. “You think he’s a nice man who feeds you sausage, don’t you!”

And for the moment, that was good enough for me.

         

I was awakened in the full heat of late afternoon by the sound of knuckles rapping on wood. Convinced now that the room was hers to defend, Rosie hurtled off the bed, barking maniacally until I could make myself decent, pick her up, and open the door.

It was Karl. Merry eyes averted, he murmured apologies for interrupting my nap and explained that he’d overheard the desk clerk’s instructions to deliver a message immediately and wait for an answer.

Blinking and benumbed by interrupted sleep, I traded Rosie for the loosely folded note Karl offered on a silver salver as though he were the hotel bellhop. “I took the liberty,” he admitted and waited, smiling broadly, for my reaction.

The handwriting was small, upright, and worth no better than a C for penmanship. “Miss Shanklin: Dinner party this evening. The Semiramis, 8 P.M. Short notice, but may I send a taxi for you? TEL”

Colonel Lawrence had by that time completely slipped my mind, but he had not forgotten about me. I looked at Karl, astonished, then abashed. “Oh, no, I—I couldn’t possibly.”

“Agnes, why not?” Karl cried quietly, coming inside and pulling the door closed behind him. It seemed so natural—not forward or frightening. It was the simple act of one who wished a private word with a friend. Perhaps you, too, have met a stranger with whom each hour is so open and so enjoyable that you feel you have always known each other?

Anyway, Karl sat down on the slipper chair in the corner of my room and lifted Rosie onto his lap. “Agnes,” he said, face serious and hilarious at once, “the Uncrowned King of Arabia invites you to dinner and you will refuse him? Tell me why, please. This, I wish to understand.”

Bit by bit, Karl pulled the story from me. I was trying to make a comedy of my excruciating experience at the entrance of the Semiramis when Karl raised a hand to stop me. “Winston Darling?” He looked confused and then delighted. “As in the Barrie play of Peter Pan? Like Wendy’s father, yes? Mr. Darling? Agnes, you are adorable!” he declared, then continued with specious formality: “My dear Miss Shanklin, if I am not mistaken, the gentleman’s surname is Churchill, not Darling. You really must tell me what you think of him when you meet him. I am not inclined in his favor, but I will trust your judgment.”

For my part, I trusted Karl’s own goodwill toward me, and my growing confidence in this friendship was confirmed when I got to the part about Gertrude Bell and her obnoxious remark about my clothing.

“Ah, Miss Bell,” Karl said with a roll of his eyes. “Immensely knowledgeable but not beloved, I may say to you. She must make everyone aware immediately that she is a person of importance—telling you who she knows and where she has traveled and what she has done. She believes herself the equal of any man on earth, saving her father. No doubt she is more capable than most. She can often bring men round to her way of thinking, but it must annoy her to work always through her inferiors. As for other women, well…You are distressing reminders that she herself is female. And now that all women are claiming the freedom she took for herself many years ago, she is not so special, do you see?”

Karl looked into the middle distance, considering the circumstances of our encounter. “Miss Bell used to travel like a queen—her caravans had a cook, muleteers, servants. Twenty camels. A bathtub for her tent! Wedgwood china and silver cutlery for her meals. In those days she was quite stylish—Paris shops would send crates of clothing to her tents in the sand.” His merry eyes met mine. “Perhaps,” he said with a wicked grin, “when she saw you, she was dismayed to realize that she has fallen rather behind times?”

Oh, Miss Shanklin, he really is a living doll, said Mildred, and I admit I found Karl’s suggestion deeply satisfying.

“That said,” he continued more soberly, “the entire female population of the Middle East is a millennium behind the times. Dress rules for Muslim women are quite strict. They don’t apply to infidels, but it wouldn’t go amiss if you were to cover up a bit while in public. A matter of courtesy, if you like. However, at a dinner for Europeans? You may be as fashionable as you like! Miss Bell may not even be attending, but if she is?” His hands spread and his brows rose in a theatrical display of guilelessness. “After such a catty remark, it would be fair play to show her up a bit, don’t you think?”

The ivory silk charmeuse, Mildred whispered. I turned to the wardrobe and pulled the dress out. “With pearls?” I asked.

A long, slow smile bloomed on Karl’s face. “Perfect. It’s settled. You will go to dinner with Lawrence and I’ll take care of Rosie, and you will tell me all about it when you get back!”

         

It was a quarter of nine before my cab arrived at the Semiramis that evening. Colonel Lawrence was waiting for me at the hotel’s taxi stand, propped against a low stone wall with arms folded over his chest. He had on the same badly fitted brown suit he’d worn the day before. Oh, my, I thought, am I completely overdressed or is that the only suit he has?

He leaned in to pay the driver and held my door open as I climbed out. We could clearly hear the chant of “Ah-bah sure-shill! Ah-bah sure-shill!” a few blocks away.

“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” I said. “The police have roped off the road down at the corner. There’s some kind of demonstration.”

“Egyptian nationalists,” Lawrence said. “Allenby keeps smashing their uprisings, but everyone blames Winston for the bloodshed.” He took up the chant and translated it. “À bas Churchill: Down with Churchill.”

“À bas? But that’s French, isn’t it?”

“Ever since Napoleon was here, it’s been traditional to riot in French. Where is your little dog?”

When I said I’d made arrangements for her at the Continental, Lawrence seemed disappointed. He’d been prepared to do battle on Rosie’s behalf, he told me, and produced a bad-boy giggle.

“Brace yourself,” he advised then, cryptically.

He stood aside as I approached the exalted precinct of the Semiramis lobby, grinning when I stopped dead, immobilized by a quarryful of marble, mines of gold leaf, forests of precious woods. The Continental had seemed extravagantly appointed to me, but this! This was—

“Enough to turn you Bolshevik?” Colonel Lawrence supplied, reading my expression.

“Ghastly,” I agreed.

He touched my elbow briefly to get me moving again. “The dining room’s worse,” he warned and a good thing, too, or I’d have been stupefied by the display.

Just beyond tall double doors we could see a dozen round tables. Set for eight, each was crowded with extravagantly gilded porcelain surrounded by a myriad of crystal stemware and enough silver to supply the U.S. Mint with a decade’s worth of dimes. Filled to capacity by close to a hundred guests, the room was vivid with flowers and patterned silk and beaded bags. Black tuxedo jackets and red dress uniforms contrasted dramatically with white linen tablecloths. Champagne fizzed and sparkled within candlelit cut glass. Cigarettes in ebony or tortoiseshell holders dipped and waved. Now and then, shrills of feminine laughter rang out above the manly buzz of conversation.

The entry to that Aladdin’s Cave was guarded by a gentleman who stood well over six feet tall and had the physique and demeanor of a prizefighter who has yet to lose a bout. Some of my students’ fathers were more frightening, but none of them was more imposing. He and Lawrence exchanged a few words before I was introduced to the colossus. Naturally, I offered my name and waited to hear this gentleman’s in return. He seemed surprised and gratified that anyone would bother and said, “Detective Sergeant Thompson, miss.”

I don’t know what came over me. Certainly I had taken an instant dislike to the ostentation of the Semiramis and its guests, whereas Thompson seemed one of my own kind—outranked and out of place amid that dazzling assembly. Perhaps—with Karl’s encouragement—I was simply feeling confidently well dressed, and that let me imagine what Mildred might say, although with better diction. “Nice to meet you, Sergeant,” I said brightly. “Have they got you here to keep the riffraff out of the party or to guard the silver?”

He stifled a laugh. “Bit of both, miss.” And then he turned his attention to the next pair of glittering party guests, arriving even later than Lawrence and I had.

“Thompson is Scotland Yard. Churchill’s bodyguard,” Lawrence informed me quietly as we entered the dining room. “You’re not supposed to notice him.”

“He’s rather difficult to overlook,” I pointed out, smiling over my shoulder at the policeman.

The colonel gave a little giggle, for Thompson had indeed made him look half-grown by comparison. In my heels, even I was taller than Lawrence but, as we moved through the throngs of ramrod-straight soldiers and their willowy ladies, I realized that Lawrence was deliberately making himself look worse. Slouching and shoving his hands into the pockets of his cheap brown suit like a snippy schoolboy was a sort of reverse snobbery, I think: a brazen if silent disparagement of the occasion and the company.

“Gerty!” he cried suddenly, spotting Miss Bell. “You two’ve met,” he said with a significant stare, which seemed to remind that lady that she’d been put on notice to play nicely with the new girl.

Miss Bell, tall and sharp-jointed, was covered from neck to ankle in gauzy lace and mushroom-colored silk. My sleek, defiant dress received a cool appraisal, but I held my head up and met her gaze, just as she’d instructed. She nodded, acknowledging this, and I took the opportunity to thank her for sending the lovely dinner to my room the night before. She appeared puzzled. Both of us turned toward Lawrence.

He coughed and found somewhere else to look.

“Dear boy! How very diplomatic,” Miss Bell remarked dryly. “And yet, you do find a way to get credit in the end, don’t you.”

Before Lawrence could respond, she introduced me to the gentleman on her right: “Lieutenant Colonel Arnold Wilson, until recently His Majesty’s high commissioner in Mesopotamia,” Miss Bell informed me. “We worked together in Baghdad.”

In his late thirties, this person matched Miss Bell’s own considerable height and had an equally commanding gaze, but seemed annoyed by the way she had characterized him. There was something muttered about “Persia, these days,” and oil, and then their interrupted conversation resumed without us.

I whispered to Colonel Lawrence as we moved on, “Those two don’t like each other much, do they.”

“It’s been a long day, and they’ve spent it arguing. Gert believes that no people will enjoy being governed very long by another. She’s for indirect rule in our Middle Eastern protectorates. Wilson is of the firm opinion that—apart from a few troublemakers—His Majesty’s colonial subjects desire nothing better than to be granted material and moral progress under the tutelage of Great Britain.”

I snorted, by way of comment. It was a bad habit, the unattractiveness of which Mumma often noted, but Lawrence smiled with enigmatic satisfaction. “I thought an American might be amused.”

“Americans,” I recalled, “were notorious colonial troublemakers.”

“As the Arabs promise to be,” Lawrence said quietly. “A considerable portion of Mesopotamia rose against Wilson’s administration last summer.” Lifting himself on tiptoe to see over and around the shoulders of the crowd, he scanned the room while remarking, “Cost His Majesty’s Government eighteen million pounds to put the rebellion down. The Exchequer has been hemorrhaging money onto the sand ever since. Ah. There’s Winston, who’s angling for chancellor and earnestly desires there be something left in the Exchequer to preside over when he gets the job.”

Lawrence introduced me to His Majesty’s secretary of state for air and for the colonies, and I received a pleasant welcome from the man I’d originally thought was “Winston Darling.” Thickset and square, with a stooping head and hooded eyes, Mr. Churchill was not yet the bulldog he would come to resemble, but all the signs were there, even in 1921. He, in turn, introduced me to his wife, Clementine, a vivacious woman in her mid-thirties, visibly in love with the husband who was perhaps a decade her senior.

Other introductions followed, the names and titles coming at me so quickly I caught only a few of them. There was an elderly couple named Cox who were some sort of nobility, I gathered. Was I to call them Lord and Lady in direct address or some other variation on that imperial theme? The honorifics stuck in my democratic throat. “How nice to meet you both,” I said warmly and let it go at that.

Just then a uniformed gentleman pulled Lawrence aside. I was immediately taken up by a stylish young woman whose name I’d already forgotten. She was holding what may not have been her very first cocktail of the evening and made a point of exclaiming over my dress.

“How lovely! And so becoming!” I was told in a voice meant to be overheard by Miss Bell. “Wherever did you get it? Cleveland? Oh, but it positively screams Paris!”

I returned her compliment, for she was wearing a brilliant green-and-gold gown cut sleeveless and low. Breathlessly up-to-the-moment. She moved to stand at my side so that we could both observe Miss Bell, layered in elaborate Edwardian drapery and holding forth among the gentlemen.

“I heard what the dreaded Gertrude said to you,” the young woman whispered. “You’re not the first, believe me. She made the very same remark to me when my husband and I arrived in Baghdad last year. Horrible old thing…”

Having found this ally, I was hoping to be seated at the children’s table with her, but Colonel Lawrence reappeared at my side and steered me toward a damask-covered expanse with the Churchills and the Coxes, Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson.

“Cleveland,” Wilson noted, having heard the drunken girl’s cry. “Standard Oil, of course. And do you know Mr. Rockefeller?”

“Colonel Wilson served in Mesopotamia until recently,” Lady Cox informed me with a condescending pat. “He is with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company now.”

My reply was delayed by the arrival of an army of Egyptian waiters. Wearing spotless white gloves and starched linen jackets, they distributed the first of what would become a farcical number of courses. I hoped everyone would forget that I’d been asked a question, but the table remained attentive, so I answered, “Mr. Rockefeller and I do not ordinarily move in the same circles, Colonel Wilson, although I did work near a settlement house named for his daughter. I was a teacher until recently. I’m here on holiday.”

“How nice for you,” Mrs. Churchill said after an awkward pause that conveyed what everyone was thinking: Why on earth has Lawrence invited a nonentity like her to the table? Is this some sort of prank?

“Miss Shanklin’s sister was my hostess in Jebail when I was starting my thesis on crusader military architecture,” Lawrence told them.

I’d spent enough time with schoolboys to find his tone suspiciously innocent, but everyone else seemed happy with his explanation. Parallel conversations quickly developed. With a teacher at the table, Mrs. Churchill took the opportunity to talk about her children, the latest of whom was a daughter named Marigold, of all things. No, the children were not traveling with their parents, my query was answered. The Churchills had been separated a great deal during the war. This trip to Cairo was a chance for the couple to enjoy some time together, a sort of second honeymoon.

Over and around Mrs. Churchill’s praise for the nanny who was taking care of her younger children while she traveled, snatches of the conversation across the table reached me. Colonel Wilson, Mr. Churchill, and Miss Bell were all engrossed in the topic of oil and the administration of the lands it lay beneath. Lord Cox merely harrumphed occasionally, as though dismissive of everything he heard. He reminded me of the mummies at the Egyptian Museum: fleshless, lipless, rigid. On my right, Colonel Lawrence grinned, taking it all in and occasionally tossing out an incisive remark, rarely more than a few words long. Happily left out of that discussion, I leaned toward Lawrence to ask, “Were you by chance a middle child, Colonel Lawrence?”

“Temporarily,” he whispered. “I was the second of five brothers, and you’re right: one had to be quick to slip a word in.”

“What you must understand, Wilson, is that the British people are sick of war,” Mr. Churchill rumbled in a slightly slurred baritone. “We simply cannot sustain an expenditure of thirty millions a year to control the place.”

“You know as well as anyone, Winston: the Royal Navy needs oil,” Colonel Wilson replied. “There’s every indication that Mesopotamia has fields as productive as Persia—”

“The cost is all out of proportion to whatever we can expect to reap from that wilderness. If we pull the troops back, Trenchard assures me that we can keep order with airpower.”

“Nonsense,” Wilson snapped. “We need more troops on the ground, not fewer.”

“And with Marigold ill with influenza, the whole experience was positively nightmarish!” Mrs. Churchill was saying.

I tried to look interested and sympathetic, but I was distracted by a rising tension between Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They sat side by side, staring straight ahead, but now addressed their remarks to each other. Mrs. Churchill and Lady Cox began to discuss the scandalous state of “checkers.” When I looked lost, Lawrence told me in a low voice that they were speaking not of the board game but of the prime minister’s official residence. “Chequers was built in the reign of Henry II for his clerk of the Exchequer. Hence the name,” he said. The home was last remodeled in 1580. I gathered it was in need of repair.

“Arnold,” Miss Bell was telling Colonel Wilson, “when we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there won’t be an Arab in Syria or Palestine who won’t want to be part of it, but they will never accept direct rule. You saw that last year.”

“Gertrude,” he countered, “you cannot simply draw a line around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra and declare everything inside it a nation! It won’t matter whom you use as the figurehead.”

“Well, of course,” Miss Bell said airily, “we’ll have to take Kurdish sentiments into account.”

“I rather like our Gertrude’s idea,” Mr. Churchill declared. “Saves the expense of administration in triplicate.”

“It will cost more in the long run,” Colonel Wilson insisted. “What do you propose to do about the Shi’a in Karbala and Najaf? The level of religious bigotry in those regions is staggering! The Persian clergy spends half its time fostering hatred—”

“And what age of child do you teach, Miss Shanklin?” Mrs. Churchill asked, trying to draw me back into the ladies’ conversation.

“Fifth grade,” I said. “That would be ten-year-olds, for the most part.”

“Tikrit!” Colonel Wilson cried. “Don’t talk to me about Tikrit—that city is home to the most brutal, boorish, savage—”

“Ten? Why, that’s just my Randolph’s age,” Mrs. Churchill said, raising her voice slightly as Colonel Wilson’s grew louder.

“You must miss him very much,” I offered, hoping to send her off on a maternal soliloquy so I could hear what Miss Bell would say in reply.

“I simply do not understand that child,” Mrs. Churchill confessed. “His sister Diana is high-spirited, but Randolph!” She lifted her eyes heavenward, and I saw the look of exasperated incomprehension that my own mother so often wore in my childhood.

Half-listening to Mrs. Churchill’s complaints about her son, I thought it obvious that the boy was doing everything he could think of to get his peripatetic parents to stay home for a change and pay some attention to him. With no children of my own, I had no right to voice an opinion, so I confined myself to mute courtesy during her despairing account of the governesses her son had driven away with a dismaying series of insurrections.

“Yes, like the one last summer,” said her husband. I thought he was referring to his young son’s rebellion, but Mr. Churchill went on, “And not just in Mesopotamia. We’ll be lucky to hold off the Bolsheviks in Persia—there’s no shifting them from Russia now. There’s trouble in Ireland, and India. And Egypt! And Palestine! And why our esteemed prime minister has decided to back the Greeks against the Turks in Cyprus simply passeth understanding.”

To my astonishment, the cadaverous Lord Cox turned unblinking eyes toward me and growled, “We have your President Wilson to thank for these rebellions. All that talk about the end of colonial rule—”

“The Great Promiser,” Mr. Churchill sighed. “Freedom and democracy for all!”

“Arab nationalism is a fraud. Their loyalty is to their tribe,” Lord Cox declared, glaring at me. “They have no concept of democracy,” he said, making the word sound as though it were a synonym for “turd.” “They believe freedom is an object that can be delivered, like a parcel that arrives in the post.”

“They must surely know what freedom isn’t,” I said. “It isn’t having British troops all over their land. It isn’t taxation without representation.”

At the sound of that ringing phrase, Miss Bell informed me tartly that the taxes we Americans had protested were incurred when the Plymouth colonists started a war with the Wampanoag and wiped out the buffer tribes that had shielded them from the Iroquois Confederacy. “You needed troops and we taxed you to pay for them,” she told me, and then addressed the table: “Our American cousins…often ignorant, but never without opinions.”

“Well, perhaps if you’d asked our opinion about the troops and the taxes, you might have avoided a war,” I replied. Lawrence giggled happily, and thus encouraged, I went on, even though the others began to look uncomfortable. “It appears to me that Britain proposes to follow American footsteps in the Philippines,” I said, “and I don’t recommend it. We helped the Filipinos overthrow the Spanish, but did we allow them then to choose their own form of government? No! We annexed the islands. We installed a colonial administrator, and for the next fourteen years, we had one hundred and twenty thousand American troops there! Four thousand of our boys were killed—fighting the very same guerrillas we encouraged to rebel against the Spanish. Who knows how many natives died? Is that what you want in the Middle East?”

“Goodness, you are quite well informed, Miss Shanklin,” said Mrs. Churchill, her voice sweet. “And what do you think of your new president? Mr. Harding is from Ohio, I understand. That’s near Cleveland, isn’t it?”

“I passed through Cleveland on the way to Niagara Falls from Chicago,” said Miss Bell. “Dreadful. Did you vote for Harding?” she asked me, her brows arched. “Many women did, of course. Handsome man, if vacuous. So much for suffrage.”

“‘O! Why did God, Creator wise, that peopled highest Heaven with Spirits masculine, create at last this novelty on Earth, this fair defect of Nature?’” Mr. Churchill declaimed, his fork stirring the air. “Be careful, Miss Shanklin. Our Gertrude has as low an opinion of her sex as the immortal Milton. She lent her considerable energies to the Anti-Suffrage League when she was at home before the war.”

I was, I must tell you, stunned speechless. Karl had warned me that Miss Bell was hardly a believer in female solidarity, but to oppose votes for women actively? Well, the shock must have shown on my face.

“The role of women in society is fundamentally different from that of men,” Miss Bell said firmly. “They have no business meddling in the affairs of state—”

“Never stopped you, Gert,” Colonel Lawrence remarked, to general amusement.

“But then, I am hardly representative, am I, dear boy? The intelligence and experience of a few do not argue for giving the vote to masses of illiterate and exhausted women surrounded by screaming toddlers and infants wailing for milk.”

“Perhaps if they had the vote,” I said, “they could choose representatives who’d protect their interests. What they need is education—”

“Spoken like a teacher,” Lawrence said.

“I, for one, welcome the opportunity to vote,” Mrs. Churchill said, taking my side.

“But surely you’re not old enough, my dear,” said her husband.

“Women must be over thirty to vote in England,” the elderly Lady Cox informed me with another pat.

“That alone will keep most of them from the ballot box until they’re fifty,” Miss Bell added.

“I am quite old enough to vote, thank you,” said Mrs. Churchill primly, “and not too vain to admit it.”

“Clementine, don’t tell me you were a suffragette!” Lady Cox cried.

“Heavens, no! I supported votes for women, but not like that awful Mrs. Pankhurst and the harridans who followed her,” said Mrs. Churchill bitterly. “One of those women tried to push Winston in front of a train, Miss Shanklin. They threatened to kidnap our children! We had to hire armed guards.”

“Well, I suppose they felt forced to such extremes,” I said recklessly. “In America, women asked courteously for the vote for sixty years. We collected hundreds of thousands of signatures and rolled up miles of petitions. We met with politicians again and again. They reneged on every promise—and when we howled at their lies, they told us we were too emotional to vote!” I said, infuriated by the memory. “Well! When six decades of nice manners fail to produce a result, you have to become a nuisance or you’ll never get justice.”

“I doubt the Arabs will wait sixty years before becoming a nuisance,” said Colonel Lawrence softly. “I’m curious, Miss Shanklin. The Marquis de Lafayette. Generals Kosciuszko and Pulaski…they all came from Europe to aid the American colonists’ fight for independence from the British Empire. What do you suppose would have happened if they’d proposed afterward to divide North America between France and Poland?”

The notion was startling. I thought a moment, imagining the betrayal we’d have felt if such heroes had turned on us after the Revolution. “We certainly wouldn’t have named cities and parks after them,” I said. “After all, if British rule was obnoxious to us—”

“With a shared language, shared laws, centuries of shared history,” Lawrence murmured.

“—we wouldn’t have accepted rule by a different colonial power. We’d have fought Poland and France just as the Filipinos fought us. Five years, fifteen…we’d never give up! Never, never, never.”

Across the room, someone finished telling a joke and laughter erupted, but a withering quiet had settled around our table. Miss Bell sat still, her hands in her lap, shrewd eyes on Lawrence, who grinned gnomishly back. The Cox corpse tossed a linen napkin onto the table in disgust, and Colonel Wilson’s face was stiff.

Well, Agnes, Mumma said, I think you’ve had quite enough to say for one evening.

Evidently Mrs. Churchill agreed. For the rest of the meal, she gracefully steered the talk toward topics unlikely to elicit American commentary. Decisively exiled from polite conversation, I finished my meal in silence, trying not to blush. I meant what I’d said, of course, and I’d only been answering Lawrence’s question. Even so, dessert came as a relief. Grateful for a sign that the evening was nearly over, I spooned at something custardy, only vaguely aware of the others until Colonel Wilson leaned over the table and addressed Colonel Lawrence with such venom that we all took notice, one by one, around the room.

“You were in Basra for two weeks! And on the basis of that vast experience, you presumed to lecture those who’ve given years to the region!” Wilson said, punctuating his accusations with a blunt index finger that thumped the table again and again. “You did immense harm to Great Britain at Versailles. Our difficulties with the French in Syria I lay at your doorstep.”

Astonished, I shifted in my seat to look at Lawrence, and so did everyone else in the room. He was smiling slightly, the corners of his wide mouth turned up in a curious, predatory curve, while he watched Wilson with lazy, heavy-lidded eyes. The snickering schoolboy, the Oxford scholar, the teasing gadfly—all these had disappeared; in their flashing, prismatic place was a strong, slim figure of intensely male beauty.

It was like seeing an opal turn to diamond.

Massive and austere, Colonel Wilson continued to pile denunciation upon indictment with a measured cadence that revealed how often he had rehearsed this litany in his mind. Miss Bell, who had no love for Wilson, grew increasingly agitated and seemed to blame Lawrence for provoking the assault. Certainly his lack of response was driving Colonel Wilson to barely contained fury. Finally, Wilson seemed to remember that they were equals in military rank and changed his tack. “If you commanded an army of Arabs and I had so much as a division of Gurkhas—”

Lawrence spoke at last. “You would be my prisoner,” he said simply, “within three days.”

This was evidently the last straw for Miss Bell. “Lawrence!” she hissed through unmoving lips. “You little imp!”

Lawrence blanched, then flushed, the sudden pink startling against his yellow hair. You cannot imagine how ruthlessly insulting the remark was, especially in that company. It was the sort of thing a kindergarten teacher might say to a naughty child, and the patronizing scorn with which it was delivered silenced even Colonel Wilson.

An instant later, Lawrence had mastered his reaction. Fixing Miss Bell with a steady blue gaze beneath raised eyebrows and above a small skewed smile, he sat still, letting the silent awkwardness gain weight and solidity.

“It’s getting late,” he observed at last, “and if this is the best we can do for political discourse…” He shrugged as if to say, There’s no point waiting around for brandy and cigars.

With that, he stood. Inclined his head to our dinner companions. Bowed slightly to the other guests in a general sort of way. Then he put his hands in his pockets, and sauntered out of the room.

         

I was there at Colonel Lawrence’s invitation and, in any case, I had no wish to remain at that table. Without apology or farewell, I picked up my handbag and followed him out of the dining room, through the lobby, and into the midnight moonlight beyond.

By the time I caught up to him, he’d come to rest across the street and stood with one hand against the thick cylindrical trunk of a palm tree, talking to himself and looking almost nauseated by anger. “The sheer arrogance of the lies!” he was snarling, evidently halfway into a topic. “The relentless concealment! The British public were tricked into this adventure in Mesopotamia by a steady withholding of information,” he told me when I arrived at his side. “They have no idea how bloody and inefficient the occupation has been, or how many have been killed. The whole business is a disgrace to our imperial record. And those people”—he jabbed a finger in the direction of the hotel—“those people are determined to make it all worse!”

Too agitated to keep still, he set off along the boulevard. I hurried to keep up as he went on vilifying the bureaucrats and diplomats he had to work with here and back in London. Like Wilson’s, this diatribe seemed to have been accumulating for some time, and I felt honored to be of use to him, if only as a sounding board. For a while I simply listened, but I knew something about self-consciousness and injured pride, and waited to address that which I suspected had truly wounded him. Little imp…

When Lawrence’s anger began to circle toward the personal, I saw my opening. “Wilson and Cox are the worst kind of India Office bureaucrats,” he muttered as he strode along. “And Gertrude—sitting there with Cox, agreeing with his nonsense. That’s her flaw—she always gravitates to the man in power!”

Arms crossed, I stood my ground, as though I myself were furious. “And all three of them are entirely too tall!” I declared, matching his emotion but trying to make him see the funny side of the situation. “It’s very disagreeable, and really quite unnecessary.”

Lawrence turned to stare at me. For an uncomfortable moment, I wondered if he understood that he was being joshed and worried that I’d misread him. Then he slumped, and laughed a little, and nodded. Some of the tension went out of him, and we walked on, though not quite as quickly.

“It’s the condescension I can’t abide,” he continued, calmer now but still needing to talk it out. “The self-satisfied presumption of supremacy! ‘Silly wogs,’” he said, mimicking Colonel Wilson’s clotted tones. “‘How improvident not to be born into the British aristocracy and how perverse to stay that way! We’ll soon sort them out. White man’s burden, don’t you know!’ Who, exactly, is carrying that burden? Arnold Wilson never lifted anything heavier than a polo mallet in India. I just wanted him to say it all aloud, to reveal it for what it is—”

“So you did provoke him.” I had stopped again, and he looked back. “And you knew I was going to say all that about the Philippines as well.”

Caught out, he let a guilty giggle escape. “I certainly hoped so,” he admitted, and we walked on.

“You let me make a complete fool of myself,” I accused, “and in front of all those lords and ladies.”

“The toffs at that table needed to hear what you told them. I’ve said the same, but…” He grew serious once more. “Perhaps it will carry more weight coming from a citizen of a former colony—” He looked down and came to a halt so suddenly that my own momentum carried me a few steps beyond him. “Your poor feet!” he cried. “I’m sorry! Would you like a taxi? I should have thought!”

My buckle shoes were going to punish me, but it was too late to change that now. “It’s not far,” I said. “After a meal like that, the exercise will do us good.”

As we approached the Nile, the air was rippled by fluttering bats swooping through invisible clouds of insects. What at first seemed silence was actually filled with the rhythmic trilling of crickets and cicadas—surprising, there in the middle of the city. A large, pale bird swept past us on powerful wings, passing so near that I clearly saw its heart-shaped face and bright brown eyes. “A barn owl,” I said, amazed. “We have them in Ohio, too.”

Standing on the Gazirah Bridge, we paused to watch the majestic bird gliding out along the riverbank, head cocked, searching for rodents.

“How,” I asked, “could you be sure that I would say what you wanted the ‘toffs’ to hear? What if I’d been what Miss Bell assumed I was? Some superannuated flapper, too featherbrained to vote.”

“I knew your sister,” Lawrence reminded me, resting his forearms on the stone balustrade. “She knew your politics. You were intelligent and argumentative, she said. You’d follow an idea and get lost in the journey. And when you forgot yourself and spoke your mind, it was…wonderful,” he whispered with Lillie’s own dear emphasis. “She admired that in you.”

I turned away, pretending to study the black water moving sluggishly beneath the bridge. With quiet kindness Lawrence asked, “Would you like to visit Jebail, Miss Shanklin? To see where Lillie and Douglas lived? I could arrange it. After the conference.”

I cleared my throat and blinked into the darkness. “Yes. I would like that very much. That would be lovely. If it’s no trouble.”

We started again toward Gazirah. “So!” I said briskly. “Miss Bell wants to rule the Arabs, but sneakily. Colonel Wilson wants to rule right out in the open. Mr. Churchill wants to save money and rule on the cheap. What do you want, Colonel Lawrence?”

He took a deep breath and let it out, glancing at the moon riding low over the deep blue geometry of Cairo’s cityscape. “A state for the Kurds,” he said, “and one for the Armenians. Separate kingdoms for Basra and Baghdad. A national home for the Jews in Palestine. And biff the French out of Syria!” Embarrassed, he sniggered in recognition of the absurdity: big ambitions, little me.

“And what do the Arabs want for themselves?” I asked, since no one else seemed to have.

“Independence,” Lawrence said. “A single caliphate: a single state encompassing all the tribes and all the territory that was unified under the Ottoman Empire.”

“Well, then!”

“Miss Shanklin, there are at present nine men claiming to be caliph. None of them can unify Shi’a and Sunni Muslims, let alone hold the lands ruled by the Sultan.”

“I—I’m sorry. Sunny Moslems?”

He corrected my pronunciation and explained that after Muhammad died, the question arose as to who would lead the Muslim community. The Shi’a believed that Muhammad had named as his successor his cousin Ali—who was also the husband of the Prophet’s daughter Fatima. The Sunni denied that any such appointment had been made. They believed the Prophet desired that Muslims be guided by a caliph: a leader who arises from within the community and who lives according to the precepts and example of the Prophet.

There was more about tribes and emirs and sherifs, but it was late and my feet hurt. This has nothing to do with me, I decided, feeling very American and far removed from the fine points of impenetrable foreign customs. Before long, Lawrence saw that I was lost and waved it all off.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “France will never agree to Arab rule in the Middle East. They want Syria and the Lebanon for themselves, and they’re bargaining hard to annex the Mosul oil fields. The India Office will fight me as well. So one must focus on the possible,” he said decisively. “Tomorrow I hope to convince His Majesty’s Government—in the person of Winston Churchill—that our Middle Eastern protectorates should not be our last brown colony. They should be the British Empire’s first brown dominion.”

We turned a corner. Karl was out in front of the Continental, lounging against a huge potted plant, smoking an evening pipe. Rosie noticed me at the same moment and gave a strangled little whine of joy. Karl let slip her leash. She sprinted down the quiet street. For the next two minutes, I was wholly occupied by her exuberant, wiggling greeting.

When at last I could return my attention to the two gentlemen, my broad smile faltered. From this distance, Karl seemed relaxed and amused; Lawrence was motionless as a snake. Their eyes were locked. Lawrence seemed absorbed in some sort of mental calculation.

Rosie struggled to be let down, and I bent to put her on the pavement. “No harm done,” I heard Lawrence say breezily. When I straightened and looked around, he was no longer at my side. Mouth open, I watched him disappear into the darkness.

         

“An Arab dominion,” Karl said. “Like Canada. Or Australia…Self-governing for internal affairs, but without a separate foreign policy. It’s an interesting solution. The Arabs might be less offended than by the notion of being ‘protected’ by the British, but Lawrence is correct: the India Office will oppose him.”

We had already chatted for nearly half an hour by then, sitting in the club chairs of the Continental’s quiet lobby. To be honest, I wanted to go to bed, but Karl had been waiting all evening to hear about the dinner party and I couldn’t disappoint him.

“Why would the India Office care?” I asked.

“Great Britain rules India, and India has the largest Islamic population on earth. An Arab dominion in the Middle East would give dangerous ideas to millions of Indian Muslims.”

You’re probably thinking, Agnes, India is mostly Hindu, not Muslim! But, remember, this was back in 1921, before India became independent and before Pakistan became a separate country.

India was the primary source of British prosperity, Karl continued. “It is governed by bureaucrats who live like royalty with palaces and servants,” he said. “Who among them would give up wealth and privilege for such airy ideals as liberty and equality for brown people?” He puffed on his pipe for a time before shaking his head. “No. It cannot happen. And in any case, Lawrence is right about the French, as well. They’d never agree.”

“What have the French got to do with anything?” I asked—a little irritably, I’m afraid. Lawrence’s abrupt departure had thrown me off balance. Rosie was shedding all over my dress. My feet were killing me.

There was nobody else around, so I kicked off my shoes. To my astonishment, Karl lifted my feet to his lap and began to knead the soles. Like so much of what Karl did, the gesture seemed equal parts caring and casual, merely a small physical favor done for a friend. I shouldn’t have allowed it, but it felt so good! Frankly, I’m amazed I remember anything he said after that, but the gist of it was that France had lost an entire generation of young men to the war. Their politicians had begun to debate polygamy as a way to repopulate the nation! Having paid such a price, the French believed themselves entitled to the greatest spoils.

“They want real colonies, not self-governing members of some international gentleman’s club,” Karl said. “If the British give self-rule to their protectorates, it will stir up trouble in French possessions. Just a few months ago, the French had to crush a revolt in Syria that was led by Lawrence’s friend Feisal. They won’t want to risk that again.”

His voice trailed off and Karl sat silently, the glow of his pipe going dark while his mind was far away. His hands had stopped moving, too, just as I had sunk into the sensation of his fingers on my feet and had almost begun to imagine…well, more.

A few minutes passed. Feeling invisible and let down, I lifted my feet out of his lap and slid to the edge of the chair.

Karl noticed the movement and shook off his thoughts. “Agnes, forgive me,” he said, his face showing genuine concern. He reached toward my hair and lifted it slightly away from my temple. My eye must have been wandering, because he said, “You are exhausted. I can see this. And perhaps bored. Yes! Don’t deny it! Let me walk you to your room.”

The concierge nodded as we passed and wished us a good night. It felt cozy and intimate: to be sleepy and on the way up to bed, to laugh quietly together at Rosie’s comic leaping progress up the stairs.

Her short little legs reminded me of Lawrence’s sensitivity about his height, and I asked Karl about that. “Yes,” he told me, “Ned’s brothers were quite tall, but he broke his leg as a boy and never grew after that. Here’s irony: if he’d been drafted instead of volunteering for intelligence work, the Uncrowned King of Arabia would have been relegated to a ‘bantam brigade’ filled with malnourished little men from the countryside! For anyone to be underestimated seems a personal affront to him, I think. He is drawn to the underdog.”

While I fit the key into my door, Karl asked, “Agnes, what are your plans for tomorrow?”

“Goodness! I’ve lost track of the days. Was today Saturday?” I asked, and he nodded. “Well, I have a tour of the city booked with Cook’s on Sunday and—”

“Cancel it,” he urged. “You must rest, I think. Take a day or two to recover from your travels. Sleep late. I’ll make sure the boy comes round to walk Rosie for you.”

I unlocked my door. Rosie trotted ahead and waited to be lifted, tossing her nose toward the pillows expectantly. Made shy by the hour, and the quiet, and the bed so near, I busied myself with her, embarrassed by my own thoughts.

“I have business in Alexandria,” Karl told me, “but on Tuesday? Please, allow me to take you to the Old City. It is one of my favorite places in Cairo. I would like to share it with you.”

“That would be lovely,” I said for the second time that evening, “if it’s no trouble.”

Karl’s face changed again, softening but serious. Eyes on my own, he took my hand and brushed it with his lips. “Truly, Agnes, I believe this: to be enjoyed, life must be shared.”

Even now, I can remember how I felt that night as I watched him turn and stride down the corridor. Can you see why I loved him so quickly? I hope you can. He was such a nice man.

         

As Karl promised, the little boy came for Rosie first thing in the morning. I stumbled back to bed. Half an hour later I roused myself briefly to welcome her return and paid the child what was obviously too much, given his reaction. Utter disbelief was rapidly replaced by a studied nonchalance that said, Oh, yes, madams! This is most assuredly the common fee for walking foreign dogs and includes, naturally, a surcharge for being seen in public with a loathsome short-legged one.

Dachshunds have a remarkable capacity for resting even under the most leisurely of regimes, but thirty minutes on foot was a twenty-mile hike for Rosie. Reunited, we went back to bed and slept again until it was nearly noon. Feeling refreshed at last, I dressed in no great hurry and ordered a light lunch from room service.

“Goodness gracious,” I said to Rosie. “Two days ago, we were still on the boat! We’ve ridden the whirlwind to Oz, haven’t we! But this will be a lazy day,” I promised us both.

When we’d finished with our meal, I carried a lemonade out to the balcony and made use of the wicker chair and table there. Rosie settled in my lap. Contented and becalmed, I stroked her long back and watched the sky begin to whiten. The day was going to be hot, though it was still early spring and vast flocks of birds were traveling northward. Squadrons of pelicans, storks, and cranes soared high above a layer of violently flapping warblers and swallows. Nearby some sort of shrike gripped the hotel’s telephone wires. Boldly patterned if dully colored, it opened its wings and swept downward, noiselessly capturing what might have been a grasshopper or perhaps a small lizard. Horrified and fascinated, I watched the bird impale its tiny victim on the thorn of a climbing rose that scrambled up the hotel wall, a few yards from where I sat.

Retreating to the printed page, I spent a quiet hour browsing through my guidebooks, reading with special attention about the Old City. I was wondering just how one pronounced the name of the Church of El-Moallaqa when an immensely long black car rolled up to the entrance of the Continental.

The sun was at full strength. Yesterday’s warmth was now real heat and made me think of July in Cleveland. Even so, I felt a shiver of dread when I saw Mr. Churchill’s enormous bodyguard climb out. Of course, there were plenty of other guests in this hotel and no reason in the world to imagine that I was the subject of Detective Sergeant Thompson’s errand, but a minute later the telephone in my room rang, just as I’d feared.

“Miss Shanklin?” a weary voice asked. “Thompson here. I’m in the lobby of your hotel, miss. Mr. Churchill requests the pleasure of your company this afternoon. We’re going to see the pyramids.”

Well, who wouldn’t want to see the pyramids? But I had imagined I might go with Karl. “Sergeant Thompson, that’s a very kind invitation, but I was counting on a quiet day today and—”

“Miss? I was assigned to this duty six weeks ago,” Thompson told me in a tone that suggested his spirit had been broken. “I’ve learned this much about my boss already: it’s no good arguing with him. Please, miss. I’d take it as a personal favor.”

I let out a long breath. Rosie did love car rides. “I couldn’t leave my little dog in the room. May I bring her along?”

“Miss Shanklin, you can bring the contents of Noah’s ark, if that’s what it takes,” Thompson said, sounding infinitely relieved. “Honestly, miss, thank you. Once he’s made up his mind…you have no idea.”

Well, I didn’t then, but I would soon obtain one.

Sergeant Thompson was waiting for me at the far end of the lobby. With the stiff and stoic look of a man who was duty-bound to follow foolish orders, he escorted me outside. “I was supposed to have the afternoon off as well,” he told me while Rosie made use of a flower bed, “but he took it into his head to paint the pyramids. It’s a disease with him, painting. I’m fed to the teeth with it. You couldn’t pay me to walk into a museum now. I’m not a bloody porter, but he’s got me carrying his damned boxes of paints—pardon my French, miss—and his easel, and his umbrella, and his chair.”

Rosie was already panting. I shrugged off the linen jacket I’d tossed over my dress. The car was going to be hot, and I’d be among Europeans.

“We’ve been attacked by mobs twice since we docked in Alexandria,” Thompson continued. “I’m supposed to be guarding his life, not carrying his bloody boxes.” He leaned past me then, to open the door, but not before muttering, “If something happens, miss, I’m required to protect him. Get yourself back to the car and stay away from the windows.”

Have you ever found yourself agreeing to something because you’re simply too polite to object? If I’d had a moment to think things through, I might well have said, “On second thought, perhaps I’ll take a rain check,” but it was all such a surprise that I just ducked into the car and hoped for the best.

Inside, it was hot enough to bake bread and large enough to house an immigrant family. Sweating and jovial, Mr. Churchill sat in the center of the broad leather bench—away from the windows, I noted—and indicated that I was expected to perch on a folding jump seat opposite. “Miss Shanklin! And her dread dachshund, terror of the Semiramis!” he rumbled cheerfully as Thompson took his place up front. “Thank you for your companionship. Clementine and I operate on entirely different schedules. She’s up before dawn and does a full day before I so much as stir. Then—just as I’m finishing the day’s meetings and ready for some recreation—she’s off to take a nap. It’s a wonder we see each other at all! Still, we’ve had four children, so we’re not doing badly, are we?”

Our driver, a young man in the blue uniform of a Royal Air Force corporal, coughed his surprise. I myself hardly knew what to say, but it didn’t seem to matter.

“My mother is an American,” Mr. Churchill went on, without taking a breath. “It was a treat to hear your accent last night! Such interesting inflection, and the vowel shifts are fascinating! I thought, Wouldn’t it be grand to invite our American friend along this afternoon and hear some more of it?”

“Where in America is your mother from?” I asked.

“She was born in Brooklyn. Her father was a titan of Wall Street! Made fortunes and lost them just as quickly. Family moved to Paris when Jennie was four. She grew up in France.”

That would seem to make his mother French rather than American, I had intended to remark, but Mr. Churchill evidently didn’t need to hear very much of the American accent I had been invited to supply. Instead, he himself spoke at length of his mother. Jennie, as her son always called her, was one-quarter Iroquois, which made her fascinating, in his opinion. She was an enduringly glamorous, if rather capricious woman for whom the conventional was simply too boring to bear. As evidence, her son described her as an accomplished pianist whose recitals showcased a tattooed snake coiling around her left wrist.

She had married several times. Widowed by her sons’ unlamented father, she was quickly divorced from a second husband twenty years her junior and nearly the same age as Winston himself. Despite that less than agreeable episode, she had recently married another young gentleman. This third husband no longer lived with her. Jennie’s social life remained energetic in his absence.

All of this was conveyed to me in considerable detail and with much affectionate tolerance while the car crawled through the Cairo traffic. By the time we reached the outskirts of the city, I had stopped trying to follow the twisted skein of names and relationships and began to be glad that Mr. Churchill’s conversation did not require a great deal from his companions.

I’m going to melt, I thought and blotted up a trickle of perspiration with my hankie. “How much farther is it to the pyramids, Mr. Churchill?”

“Oh, but we’re not going to the pyramids.” My surprise must have been obvious, for Mr. Churchill immediately shouted, “Thompson! Did you tell Miss Shanklin we were going to the pyramids?”

Sergeant Thompson did not turn around. “I believe I said we’d see the pyramids, sir.”

“Hah! Well! There you have it. Forgive the confusion, Miss Shanklin. An understandable misunderstanding, eh? I shall be very happy to include you in our excursion to Sakhara next Sunday. This afternoon, however, we’ll remain at a distance so that I may obtain some useful perspective. Did Thompson complain about my paints? Hah! I expect he did. ‘I’m not a bloody porter!’ Yes? Do I have him?”

I smiled. Rosie panted.

“Do you paint, Miss Shanklin?”

“Why, yes,” I said. “I’ve studied watercolors since college and—”

“Watercolors! Watercolors! I have no word of disparagement for watercolors, but with oils you can approach your problem from any direction!” Mr. Churchill cried. “You need not build downward from white paper to your darkest darks. Attack where you please! Start with the middle tones, then hurl in the extremes when the mood strikes. Lay color upon color! Experiment! And if the attempt fails? One sweep of the palette knife will lift the blood and tears of a morning from the canvas, and you’re ready to make a fresh start!”

Blood and tears? you ask. Yes, indeed. You can imagine my own surprise decades later when that casual remark would become his ringing wartime declaration, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” In 1921 he was merely remarking on the advantages of oils over watercolors, but all his life Churchill recognized a good turn of phrase when he created it and was not above reusing one when the occasion presented itself.

“Oils are delicious to squeeze out,” he confided cozily. “Splash into the turpentine! Wallop into the blue! You really must try oils before you die, Shanklin. You will see the whole world differently! There are so many colors on a hillside, each one different in shadow and in sunlight. I had never noticed them before I turned forty and began to paint. I saw color merely in a general way, as one might look at a crowd, for example, and say, ‘What a lot of people!’”

Beyond our windows were men, women, and children, donkeys, dogs, and poultry. All small, all dusty, and all the color of khaki in the afternoon glare.

“I must say I like bright colors,” he said, following my gaze. “I cannot pretend to feel impartial about colors. I rejoice with the brilliant ones and feel sorry for the poor browns. In heaven, I expect, vermilion and orange will be the dullest colors needed. When I get to heaven, I mean to fill a considerable portion of my first million years with painting. Armed with a paint box, one can never be bored!”

He went on like that, all exclamations and opinions, for the entire drive. When he shouted, “Perfect! Here! Stop here!” the order was lost in the general stream of enthusiasm, so I twisted on my jump seat to tap the driver’s shoulder and convey the order to pull over.

Amid squealing brakes, outraged shouts, and honking horns, we cut across traffic to circle back toward the place Mr. Churchill had selected. The car jolted to a halt at the side of the road. Thompson immediately left the car to survey the site from a policeman’s point of view. The driver came around to open our door. Rosie jumped out and darted to the end of her leash. I unfolded myself to follow.

Relentlessly eloquent, Churchill emerged last, heaving himself toward the door, expounding all the while on Egypt’s fierce and brilliant light. Still talking about the “triplex theme of Nile, desert, and sun,” he strode off, carefree, with Thompson stalking along behind him, alert for trouble.

That left me alone with the driver, who touched his cap. “Davis, ma’am,” he introduced himself. Then, eyes on Churchill, he sighed and said something that sounded like—and I am being approximate here—“Lord luv a duck, but ’e ain’t arf a talker.”

I took a few steps away from the heat of the car’s scorching metal and lifted a hand to shade my eyes. You can easily imagine the vista for yourself. It is familiar from ten thousand illustrations: massive triangles on the horizon, the defaced and enigmatic Sphinx squatting in the foreground. The sun was lowering and the shadows were dramatic. I could see why Mr. Churchill had chosen this time of day for his expedition, but I envied his wife her nap.

What surprised me was the nearness of modern life to these ancient monuments. Motorcars and trucks clattered and roared ten feet behind me, blaring their horns at the camels and donkeys and pedestrians with which they shared the thoroughfare. Clusters of Europeans snapped photos of each other with their arms extended, pretending to hold the distant pyramids in the palms of their hands. Filthy barefoot boys begged or sold postcards or figs or soft drinks.

Tongue lolling, Rosie plumped abruptly down on her haunches. Taking pity on her, I opened my purse and motioned to a tiny child who staggered beneath a vestlike contraption that held a jug of tea and a few small crockery cups.

“Don’t buy anything, miss,” I heard Sergeant Thompson call. “We have lemonade and clean glasses.”

His tone of voice made his meaning clear, for the child shot him a look of purest hatred, then aimed liquid eyes full of pleading at me.

Thompson trotted back to the car, glancing repeatedly over his shoulder at Churchill, who stood immobile, apparently absorbed in artistic rapture. The sergeant gave Davis orders to “haul out those damned boxes—pardon my French, miss.” This Davis did, muttering in the same Gallic dialect. “I’ll find something for the dog. Just give me a moment, miss,” Thompson pleaded, gathering the rest of the equipment. With that, he and Davis scuffed profanely through sand and scrubby weeds toward Mr. Churchill, who awaited delivery without moving a muscle.

Rosie looked close to prostration. After tapping my lips for silence, I motioned to the tea boy and held up a coin. In an instant, I was surrounded by a half-pint mob of children waving their pitiable wares and crying, “Baksheesh! Baksheesh!”

Dropping the easel and a box of paints, Thompson sprinted back to run the children off. “Buggy little beggars,” he snarled. “I told you, miss! Don’t buy from them! If you give them anything at all, they’re all over you.”

“Well, I’m sorry, but Rosie’s thirsty! Look at her! And I hardly think lemonade is something dogs should—”

“There’s milk for the tea,” Thompson said, rummaging through a picnic basket in the trunk of the car. With a tense courtesy that said, Please, don’t make my job any harder than it is, he handed over a thermos. I opened it and poured a drink into the cap for Rosie, refusing to feel guilty.

Ten yards away, Davis was setting up a large umbrella. With his easel erected, Mr. Churchill had begun to work, and this was inevitably a matter of professional concern to his bodyguard, for any public painter will naturally attract a crowd. There is something magical about the process of turning blank canvas and blobs of color into something recognizable and pleasing. Presently, a group of blue-jacketed British airmen came along, off duty and nonchalant. When they stopped to watch, Sergeant Thompson relaxed slightly and returned to my side. “That lot can handle trouble if it’s offered. Mind if I smoke, miss?”

“No, but I mind if I’m lied to,” I said. “See the pyramids, indeed.”

“There they are,” Thompson replied, all innocence. He lit a cigarette, pulled in, and coughed. “I used to smoke a pipe, but—” He jerked his chin in the direction of his charge and mimicked Churchill’s stuffy sonorities. “‘Put that beastly thing out! If you must smoke, smoke a cigarette, and make it a Turkish one.’ Pretty rich, coming from him, with those endless foul cigars.”

Sitting with his back to the gawking airmen, Mr. Churchill dabbed at the canvas with a paintbrush in one hand and a stogie in the other. Smoke curled upward and began to pool beneath the green sunshade that rendered his own color bilious.

“Looks like an upholstered toad,” Thompson observed with deadpan venom, “slowly incinerating itself.”

The assembled airmen were no more respectful, delivering artistic appraisals in stage whispers that we could hear from where we stood. It wasn’t until one of them suggested that the gentleman might be better employed painting the outside of a blimp hangar that Mr. Churchill turned to look at him.

“Gawd! It’s Winston,” the young man cried.

Appalled by the discovery that they’d been “razzing” such an important personage, the airmen backed away. Churchill grinned and motioned them nearer, happily criticizing his own work, detailing what he thought was still missing, and set about trying to put it in.

For all the artistic paraphernalia Mr. Churchill had for himself, there was nowhere for us to sit, apart from the car, which would have roasted Rosie alive. Years of teaching had made me tolerant of standing, but for heat and flies, summer in Ohio couldn’t compete with a spring day in Egypt.

“How long do these painting sessions last?” I asked Thompson. He just rolled his eyes.

Churchill shouted another stream of peremptory orders, this time for Thompson and Davis to unpack the picnic hamper and share its delicacies out among the airmen. While the boys ate sandwiches and slurped tea, the great man painted and chatted about his plans to put additional air force installations in Egypt. If the Sudan and Mesopotamia could be policed from the air by flyboys like themselves, it would represent a great savings to the empire. “Trenchard agrees,” Churchill told them. “What do you think?”

The airmen were voluble on that topic and a variety of others. Mr. Churchill seemed particularly interested in their canteen and barracks. When a sergeant mentioned that the married quarters assigned to noncommissioned officers were abominable, Churchill promised to look into the problem personally.

“They don’t realize it, but they’re giving him a report on their morale and readiness for combat,” Thompson remarked, waving flies away from his face. “You’re watching His Majesty’s secretary of state for air at his best. Do anything for those boys, he would, but with his own staff?” Thompson shook his head. “Thoughtless, selfish, rude. That’s his class: casual tyranny. Treating the help like menials.”

“Including professionals who deserve better,” I surmised, scratching as discreetly as I could at an insect bite on my ankle.

“We’ve had a few short, sharp discussions,” Thompson admitted. “End of the day, I’ll be walking out the door to go home to my supper—he’ll announce we’re off to inspect some military base on the coast, or we’re going back to his London office. I’ve got kiddies, same as him, and a wife who expects to see her husband from time to time, same as his! I doubt he remembers that. Keeps insane hours and assumes I’ve nothing better to do than stand behind him and watch. But he’s mad for his airmen. Do anything for them, and they can tell. Good balance for their real commander. Trenchard. Block of ice, that one. ‘Boom’ Trenchard, they call him. ‘Bomb it!’ That’s his solution to everything. I’ve never known a man less able to reach people or be reached. Good match for the Sphinx, I’d say. Sorry, miss. I don’t usually blather.”

“I imagine you build up a conversational head of steam, listening to him all day.” I pressed the hankie against my neck and thought of murder. “Why don’t you ask for a transfer?”

“I tried, miss. This assignment was supposed to last two weeks. Marched into my chief’s office at the end of it and said, ‘Sir, I’d like very much to be relieved of this protection duty.’ Chief just laughed. ‘Well, it’s yours whether you want it or not,’ said he. ‘Winston’s asked for you to be with him permanently.’ It’s this or quit the Yard.”

“And you have a family to feed.”

“I help my brothers and sisters out, as well. I’m one of thirteen.”

“Gracious! Is your family Catholic, Sergeant Thompson?”

“Methodist.” He shrugged as if to say, No excuses.

“Your mother must have had…great stamina.”

“I worked it out once. She was preggers for one hundred and seventeen months.” The sheer scale of the feat lingered while he tossed the cigarette butt into the sand and lit another. “I’ve seen my Kate go through it four times.” He blew smoke high into the air and vowed, “No more for us!”

His own story was a familiar one. Like many of my students, he’d had no difficulty learning whatever he was taught, but he’d worked from the age of nine, helping to provide a bare living for his family. Mornings, he told me, he’d run three miles from home to a draper’s, where he took down two dozen big wooden shutters and carried them to a storage cellar. He’d clean the windows, polish the brass, and then run to school. He’d return at lunchtime to deliver parcels for an hour, and return again late in the evening to haul the shutters out and replace them for the night.

“Heavy work, even for a big, strong boy,” I said. “How did you keep your eyes open in class?”

“I didn’t, often enough. And I was caned for it. Justice in this matter was not served, from my point of view. You cane your students, miss?”

If I had, I wouldn’t have admitted it to a giant with a long memory. “No,” I said honestly, “but my classroom was notoriously undisciplined. Cost me more than one reprimand from the principal.”

“Good job you didn’t,” Thompson said. “Caning eats at a boy.” He dug out another thermos and two small glasses. “Have some lemonade to drink, miss. This heat.”

I hesitated initially to drink all that he urged on me that afternoon, but the bone-dry air pulled moisture from me so quickly that I never felt the need to relieve myself. My skin, on the other hand, gradually took on the color of sunset, despite my best efforts to stay in Thompson’s considerable shadow. “So how did you get into police work?” I asked, to pass the time and because I really was interested.

“Suffragettes,” he said.

By 1913, British suffragettes had moved on from merely disrupting political meetings with acts of public disorder to staging full-scale riots and burning down churches. The shift in tactics horrified women like Clementine Churchill, who was a suffragist. I imagine everyone’s forgotten the difference between suffragists and suffragettes after all these years, but believe me, it was significant. Anyone who favored votes for women was a suffragist, whether male or female. Suffragettes were women only, radicals determined to wrest their rights from the patriarchy by any means necessary, including the occasional plot to push a government official or two under the odd locomotive.

In response to their campaign of violence, Scotland Yard was ordered to expand the Special Branch. Thompson was working in a factory that made shirts and collars at the time. “Wasn’t enough money to marry Kate on, though. Neighbor of hers said, ‘Big strong lad like you! You could join the police force.’ Took the written exam. Week later, I’m a detective, loitering in Kingsway, tailing suffragettes to their meetings. Arrested Emmeline Pankhurst once. Never knew a woman to speak so!”

“French?” I guessed.

He chuckled grimly. “But they weren’t all like her,” he said. “One lass—pretty little thing—she knew I was tailing her. When it started to rain, she waited for me, and we shared her umbrella the rest of the way.”

For the next hour, Thompson told story after story of the undercover work he’d done. Wartime London was a hotbed of anarchists, Irish rebels, and German spies, all of whom “had a go” at Mr. Churchill, who seemed to invite both hatred and attack.

“I never thought I’d be working for him,” Thompson said. He poured each of us another glass of lemonade, and when I had accepted mine, he asked out of the blue, “How long have you known Karl Weilbacher, miss?”

“We just met,” I said, surprised. “He had a dachshund just like Rosie when he was young. When I checked into the Continental, he—”

“Weilbacher’s not interested in you,” Thompson said bluntly. I must have looked stunned and confused. Thompson cleared his throat. “He’s the kind who is more likely to be interested in Colonel Lawrence, miss.”

To cover my surprise, I poured some more milk for Rosie, hoping it hadn’t gone bad in the heat. I knew it all along, I could hear Mumma say. That German’s just using you to get near important people.

That’s not fair! Mildred cried. Colonel Lawrence is a celebrity. Everyone’s interested in him.

“Everyone’s interested in Colonel Lawrence,” I said, straightening. “He’s a celebrity!”

“Did Weilbacher tell you about Carchemish, miss?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, he did,” I said. “Karl is German,” I admitted freely. “I understand that he was your enemy. Well, the war is over.” And America never should have been involved with it anyway, I thought. Karl isn’t my enemy!

“Funny, though, wouldn’t you say, miss? A German agent who knew Lawrence before the war suddenly shows up now?” Thompson’s gaze was level. I looked toward the Sphinx, feigning indifference, but Thompson went on: “It may be a question of blackmail, miss. Breach of security.”

“Well! I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that!”

Thompson waited.

“Being suspicious is your job,” I pointed out. And it’s none of his business, Mildred whispered. “And in any case,” I said huffily, “my friendships are none of your business, Sergeant.”

“Just be careful,” Thompson said with such mildness that I was disarmed. “My job, miss. I don’t like to see people hurt.”

“Well, put your mind at rest. Herr Weilbacher has been a perfect gentleman.”

“I’m sure, miss.”

“Is that why I was invited to come along today? So you could quiz me about my social life?”

Thompson’s eyes were on his boss, who was shouting again. “No, miss,” said the sergeant with a sigh. “You were invited because that man cannot stand to be without an audience for more than ten minutes, and he knows I’ve stopped listening. You’ll excuse me? Duty bellows.”

Off he went, leaving me alone with my thoughts and my discomfort. Without Thompson’s conversation, there was nothing to distract me from the accumulating facts: the sun felt like an open flame against my face; my feet ached; the biting insects of the Nile Valley were many and various. Rosie began to scratch as well. Worried about fleas, and scorpions, I toppled decisively into a foul mood.

“Rosie,” I said, “what on earth are we doing out here?”

Glaring across the scrubby sand, I rehearsed what I would say: Mr. Churchill, I am neither a paid member of your staff nor an adoring wife hanging on your every word. I am not a colonial subject, and I am not a British airman on duty, and I am not charmed by you, your slutty mother, or your theories on painting. I prefer watercolors, which require subtle skill, and I have had just about enough of standing out here in the broiling sun while you talk yourself blue, thanks all the same!

“Mr. Churchill!” I called loudly. “I—I’m afraid I may miss a dinner engagement. Will we be leaving soon?”

There was no response and I grew angrier by the moment at him, at the bugs, and at my own cravenly courteous white lie. Just as I was imagining the satisfaction of gaining his attention by dumping half a thermos of heat-curdled milk on his head, His Majesty’s secretary for the colonies and air stood to announce that the light no longer served his artistic purposes.

The airmen moved off, laughing and keyed up by their brush with fame. Paint boxes, easel, umbrella, canvas chair, and picnic hamper were folded, furled, packed, lugged, and stowed. Davis paused in his duties long enough to ask, “You right, then, miss? You look a bit off, like.”

“I’m not used to the sun,” I told him. “It was the dead of winter when I left Cleveland.”

One by one, we climbed into the furnace heat of the long black car. Quiet for a change, Mr. Churchill pulled a carved wooden secretary box to his lap, opened it, uncapped a fountain pen, and began to make notes, careful not to perspire into his ink. Thompson slammed his door shut. Davis put the car in gear and we lurched out onto the highway.

Dizzy and slightly nauseated, I rolled down the nearest window and held Rosie up so that her ears could fly in whatever breeze our progress might generate. Sergeant Thompson looked over his shoulder and thought to tell me to raise the glass. He reconsidered when he saw my face and the threat that was easily read on it: If my dog dies of heatstroke, you will not be defending your boss from Arab assassins, buster!

Mr. Churchill observed this silent exchange and chuckled, but he was wise enough to refrain from comment. For twenty minutes there was no sound but the whine of the tires, the noise of the evening traffic, and the scratching of a pen nib on rag paper.

By the time we reentered the city, the sun had set and it was noticeably cooler. Rosie’s misery lessened and my arms were tired. I decided she’d do fine on the floor and leaned over to set her down. That was the only reason the first rock missed my head.

Churchill lurched to his left, quickly rolling up the window. More rocks thumped and banged against the car. An instant later, the mob was on us physically, beating on the tonneau with sticks, shouting the now familiar chant: “À bas Shershill! À bas Shershill!”

“Stay down!” Thompson yelled over his shoulder.

I heard a whine of fear; I honestly cannot tell you if it was Rosie or I who produced it. Cowering on the floor, I curled myself around her as much for comfort as to protect her from the stones and shards of glass that came crashing down around us.

“Get out on your side!” I heard Thompson command, but I was too terrified to move and, in any case, he meant Davis. The light brightened briefly as both front doors flew open, then slammed shut. Roaring, Thompson plunged into the mob, punching any face that came within reach. Davis had a big iron wrench in his hands and brought it down repeatedly. Howls joined the screams and chanting.

Churchill, pink and cheerful, had capped his pen and remained upright in the center of the backseat, watching the mayhem like a spectator at a prizefight. “Seems Lawrence was right,” he observed. “They respect hand-to-hand combat, he said, but don’t pull a pistol on them.”

A rock bounced off the seat, onto the floor. I strangled a scream. Churchill gazed down at me benignly.

“Dachshunds have extraordinarily expressive eyes,” he remarked. “It’s the whites around the iris, I think. Most dogs have no sclera, but dachshunds are possessed of an almost human eye. This is the great appeal of the breed—Thompson! Behind you!”

I looked up. Just beyond the window, I saw a wooden club lifted overhead. Warned, Thompson ducked, and I lost sight of him after his shoulder drove his fist into the belly of the man who’d meant to brain him.

“So, Miss Shanklin!” Churchill exclaimed. “Whom did you vote for?” He might have been speaking Chinese for all the sense this question made to me. “In the presidential election,” he prompted. “Were you taken in by the attractive Mr. Harding, as our Miss Bell suspected?”

A brick shattered the windshield. “Debs!” I screamed. “I voted for Eugene Debs!”

“Debs! Really, Shanklin, you surprise me. I took you for a sensible woman. You should have voted for Cox! He was a better man than Harding in every way, and he stood a chance of winning. You wasted your ballot on Debs.”

“I did no such thing!”

“Yes, you did. It was a foolish choice. A foolish woman’s choice!”

“I am a woman, sir, but not a fool! My choice was just as valid as the next man’s!” I cried, flinching at the dent a truncheon made in the side of the car. “Eugene Debs spoke truth to power!”

“He’s no better than this rabble. He is a radical and a troublemaker who deserved prison.”

“He had every right to speak out against the war and the lies that got us into it. He is a martyr for the Constitution!”

“Hah! He is a Communist and a subversive.”

“He is no such thing! He was for racial equality and workers’ rights. He believed that all men are created equal—even if some of them are women! He believed everyone should have a voice and a vote, even Negroes!”

“Even Arabs like these?”

“Especially Arabs like these! It’s no wonder they’re angry! If powerful people won’t even ask what you want—it’s as if you don’t matter a bit. And that’s not fair, because we all matter the same amount!” I insisted, cringing away from the shrieking, gesticulating men I was defending. “President Wilson was right about that! All nations matter the same amount, even if they aren’t rich and powerful like Great Britain!”

“Piffle.”

“Don’t you ‘piffle’ me!” I said, infuriated. “You ask British airmen what they think, but you don’t ask Egyptians. That’s why they hate you. It’s—it’s like—like oatmeal!” I cried, my voice breaking on the word when a stone thudded onto the back window and came to rest in a spider’s web of crazing. “Oatmeal is a perfectly fine breakfast, but some people just don’t like it. It’s only good manners to ask! ‘Would you like some oatmeal?’ What’s so hard about that? Maybe they’ll say, ‘Yes, please.’ Maybe they’ll say, ‘No, thank you. I’d really rather have eggs.’ Or maybe they just want coffee! Well, then—that’s their choice! These men are throwing rocks because you think everybody wants to be like you and—and eat oatmeal because—because that’s what you want—”

Churchill was grinning. I looked around and slowly became aware of shrilling police whistles, clomping boots, and a sudden relative quiet. Just like that, the riot was over, and I realized that I had been making an utterly incoherent argument about political rights and breakfast food at the very top of my lungs for some time now.

Assured that Churchill was unharmed, Thompson and Davis conferred with the Egyptian police. Mr. Churchill helped me back up onto the jump seat and leaned over to remove a shard of glass from my shoulder, as though he had noticed a bit of lint there. “How is your dog?” he asked.

Rosie was practically catatonic: trembling and panting, eyes half out of her skull. And those were not the only signs of her distress.

“Oh, my goodness. Oh, I—I’m sorry,” I stammered. “She never—She’s always—Oh, Rosie, you’ve disgraced yourself! I’m so sorry, Mr. Churchill.”

“Please! Call me Winston.” He pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped up the offending material with a flourish. “Quite a common reaction to combat,” he confided, and tossed the linen packet into the street.

Up front, Davis and Thompson cheerfully compared contusions, swapping extravagant stories of earlier brawls they’d enjoyed. As we continued our drive, Winston sat back, thoughtful and removed. I murmured soothingly to Rosie, who buried her head in my lap and shook.

When we arrived at the Semiramis, the car’s battered condition quickly drew a British crowd. Performer that he was, Churchill regaled the assembly with his version of what had happened, making it all seem like a grand day out. Drawn by the excitement, Lawrence appeared at the hotel door. In three quick steps, he was at my side. “Are you hurt?” he asked, his voice low and controlled. “Do you need a doctor?”

“A doctor! Hah! She needs a soapbox! The woman could run for Parliament!” Churchill cried. “Thompson was punching faces and young Davis here was breaking heads with a wrench. And there sat Shanklin: a pillar of moral strength, lecturing me on constitutional law and Arab suffrage!”

“That’s not how it was,” I told Lawrence shakily.

“Battles are always better in the telling,” he said with a wry smile that did not change his eyes. “Do you want to come inside, or would you like to go straight on to your hotel?”

“Back to the hotel, thanks—”

“Nonsense!” Churchill shouted. “She’s been eaten alive by savage Egyptian mosquitoes. No argument, Shanklin! Quinine water is your only hope. Someone get this woman a gin-tonic!”

“It’s not a bad idea,” said Lawrence. “You’re very pale.”

“You should thank her, Lawrence,” Churchill cried. “I’ve decided your friend Feisal can have a kingdom after all. Gertrude! Wilson! Our Miss Shanklin has given me the solution to the election problem in Mesopotamia. Take everything but oatmeal off the menu! They’ll choose what we want them to have.”

For the next few hours, Winston kept my drink topped up during the general merriment he made of our adventure. I was briefly aware that he was eliminating the emptying glass that might have warned me of overindulgence; very soon, it didn’t seem to matter. I rather liked the taste of the gin and tonic, and began to feel quite gay. The terror of the riot was swept aside by conviviality, and everyone was being so nice to me! For the first time in my life I began to understand why people enjoy drinking. Barriers are dissolved. Conversation is easy and unexamined. Nothing you say seems stupid, and everything seems amusing. No wonder gin parties were all the rage back home!

I had a vague impression that Lawrence was keeping an eye on me. While I do not remember getting into the taxi with him, I do recall his tolerant chivalry when I warned him that I was probably going to be sick. The colonel snapped an order to the driver, who pulled to the side of the road halfway over the Gazirah Bridge. Lawrence got out, opened my door, told Rosie to “Stay!” and steadied me on the way to the railing, where I abruptly contributed to the general fetidness of the Nile.

“Oh, good Lord,” I gasped, hilarious and horrified as I took the handkerchief Lawrence offered. “I just puked in front of the Uncrowned King of Arabia.”

“My dear Miss Shanklin,” Lawrence said with a gallantry I have never forgotten, “I was an undergraduate at Oxford. Believe me: I’ve seen worse.”