SEVEN

“What’re you going to Egypt for?” Mrs. Cox asked. “If you didn’t have to?”

“My doctor believes the climate will benefit me. And I have always wanted to go there.”

“Why?”

Harriet felt for her journal, gripped the top of it between her fingertips. She paused before she answered, steadying herself by breathing into her stomach.

“I was a sickly child, Mrs. Cox. From a young age, I read books. The ancient Egyptians, their writings and pictures, have been my consolation. They were for me what fairy tales were for other girls.”

Mrs. Cox raised her elegant eyebrows. Since their first meeting, Harriet had seen Mrs. Cox every day. In the afternoons, while Louisa rested in the cabin, Yael joined the Bible-study group in a corner of the dining saloon, and Mrs. Cox’s husband occupied himself with reports of the stock exchange in old newspapers, Harriet and Mrs. Cox strolled on the top deck, weaving between the thick cobwebs of rigging, stopping sometimes to rest on the curved back-to-back wooden benches or to watch other passengers play a game of quoits.

If Harriet was short of breath, or too fatigued for walking, as today, she and Mrs. Cox remained in the grand saloon, at a table they’d made their own.

Mrs. Cox wore a different outfit every day. She was dressed in a raspberry-colored gown; a panel of ruched pink satin stretched from the high neck of the dress under her chin, down to the floor, and gave her the look of a curvaceous and elegant mermaid, her stomach rounded under the glove-like fit of the gown.

“I suppose you will look for a husband at the same time?” she said.

“I’m not looking for a husband.”

“Why ever not?”

Harriet couldn’t immediately answer. It was Louisa’s oft-repeated belief that Harriet was unlikely to marry. That with her delicate health, her ill fortune in the matter of her looks, the best place for her was by her mother’s side. Often, as she said it, Louisa reached out and touched Harriet, a gesture upward to her shoulder which Harriet experienced as some form of arrest. She felt sorry more on Louisa’s behalf than her own that she’d inherited her father’s red-gold hair, his blush-prone complexion, and his pale gray eyes, in place of her mother’s dark, dramatic beauty, still evident even now. It was a disappointment to Louisa that her daughter didn’t resemble her.

Harriet shrugged.

“I suppose it’s because I’m not well. Why are you going to Egypt, Mrs. Cox?”

“My husband has business interests in Cairo. He decided we should take our honeymoon there. He said we could kill two birds with one stone.”

“How delightful.”

“I wanted to go to Italy,” Mrs. Cox said, turning her head in a sudden movement that caused her earrings to swing. “But they are already well supplied with parts for flour mills.”

Harriet felt uncomfortable. Mrs. Cox surely couldn’t be being disloyal to her new husband. Looking around for Zebedee Cox, Harriet spotted Yael, sitting on the far side of the saloon, her feet in their polished brown boots braced on the floor, her hands gripping the seat on either side of her. Yael nodded in their direction and Harriet waved at her.

“She looks like a fish out of water,” Mrs. Cox said.

“My aunt wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. She’d be at home in St. John’s Wood, pouring a whisky for Grandfather on the dot of six, or going off to her refuge for fallen women. My father made her come with us. She’s a spinster, so she couldn’t refuse.”

The floor below them rolled and they both leaned sideways in order to stay upright. Mrs. Cox looked queasy. Harriet enjoyed the sudden shifts to the perpendicular, the capriciousness of the horizon. It seemed to say that change was possible, that it could occur at any time, unexpectedly.

Mrs. Cox took a sip of her chamomile tea and picked a round yellow flower from between her teeth.

“You don’t want to live like your aunt, do you? I’ll tell your fortune, Harriet,” she said.

Producing a leather pouch from a bag that matched her dress, she began laying out a spread of cards in rows, face upward, with some placed sideways, others with their pictures upside down. Harriet sat in silence, watching. She hoped Yael couldn’t see. Aunt disapproved of what she called soothsayers and was more than capable of arriving at the table to say so, delivering her views on the inadvisability of trying to peer into the future, which she considered God’s business.

“You will marry,” Mrs. Cox said, as if in answer to a question Harriet had asked. “And have children. I see three, but only two births.” She looked up at Harriet with shining eyes. “Perhaps you are going to have twins. Do they run in your family?”

“Really, Mrs. . . .”

“Oh, call me Sarah.”

“Sarah, I . . .”

“You’ll recognize the man when you meet him. You will know him immediately. His occupation is something quite out of the ordinary. He won’t be a banker or a businessman or work in any kind of office. He’ll work with his brain and his hands together.”

Mrs. Cox peered at the spread.

“You won’t believe this.” Her voice was incredulous. She reached out and touched Harriet’s wrist with small fingers that were unusually even in length and with a row of three diamonds glittering on one of them. “You’ll encounter him on a voyage. A nautical one.”

Harriet felt herself blushing, but whether with embarrassment or annoyance, she wasn’t sure.

“I doubt that.”

Mrs. Cox looked around the crowded saloon and Harriet’s eyes followed, roaming over elderly Mrs. Treadwell, a suet-pudding-like couple with four round, pale children, two spinster sisters who conversed solely with each other. The only unmarried man present was Reverend Griffinshawe, a widower, who explained to everyone from under bushy white eyebrows that he was taking copies of the Bible in Arabic to his parish in Egypt and would appreciate most kindly any support they could offer for this worthwhile venture.

“He’s here somewhere,” Mrs. Cox said. “He must be.”

“I hardly think so.”

Harriet picked up one of the cards and examined a man hanging upside down, his ankles suspended from the branch of a tree. It was humiliating to have one’s fortune told and even worse to experience the rush of unaccustomed hope she’d felt on hearing the prediction.

“Do you really believe I could marry?”

“Of course. Why ever not?”

“There’s my poor health. And some people think red hair is unlucky.”

“It’s clear as day, Hattie. You will join with a man whom you meet on the water.” Mrs. Cox gathered up the cards and slipped them back into a worn wallet of morocco. “I have seen one eligible gentleman,” she said, raising her finely shaped brows. “You must have seen him too, that day we first—”

Harriet rose from the table, accidentally stepping on Dash’s tail as she emerged from the bench seat, making him whimper.

“Excuse me, Mrs. Cox. I must return to my mother.”

Bidding her friend goodbye, she picked up the dog and left the saloon, made her way down the spiral of iron steps to the second-class cabins. At the bottom, she stopped by a porthole, resting her elbows on its inside rim.

On the other side of the glass, the sea was agitated and unsettled, rearing up around the ship as if it were trying to communicate something from the deep. The sea was becoming a companion, true and constant; Harriet felt a new pleasure every time she looked at it. Perhaps that was the union that Mrs. Cox foresaw.

With Dash at her heels, she continued along the narrow passageway, bracing herself to meet Louisa’s anxious solicitude.