FOURTEEN

Harriet sat on one side of the worn leather seat, Louisa in the middle, and Yael at the far end. The horse slowed to a walk as they passed along a narrow alley, past dark cavelike shops stocked with bolts of cloth, glassware, tinned goods. Over everything was a geometric pattern of light and shade, cast by lengths of sacking stretched overhead between the roofs of the buildings. The streets teemed with people, with color, with life and the cries of voices and animals.

Harriet felt the strangeness physically, like heat or cold; every part of her body tingled with impressions, as if the surroundings were both more real than any she had ever experienced in her life and at the same time utterly unreal.

“Arab town, Sitti,” Mustapha shouted, turning his head to them from where he sat at the front of the cab, next to the driver. Mustapha had met them on the quay and introduced himself as their housekeeper.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Yael. “How did you know it was us?”

“Three ladies,” he’d announced, helping them up, hitching his robe to display narrow, scarred ankles, naked feet clad in pointed slippers. “I know he is three ladies.”

A girl was hurrying beside them, squeezed into the gap between the carriage and the mud walls. Her eyes, half closed, oozing a yellow secretion, were trained in their direction and she held out a palm, calling for baksheesh.

“That poor child,” Yael said. “Can you see her, Louisa?” The driver touched the horse with his whip, and as the animal broke into a trot, the girl caught hold of the armrest and was pulled along. “Slow down, driver,” Yael cried, reaching forward and tapping the man on the shoulder. “Stop.”

Mustapha issued instructions in a strange, harsh tongue and with a yank of the reins the driver pulled up the horse. Yael began fumbling in her bag. Extracting two English pennies, she leaned down from the cab, pressed them into the girl’s hand.

“God bless you, dear,” she said as the child darted away.

“The guidebook advises against giving alms on the street,” Louisa said.

“She was half starved,” Yael said, closing up her Gladstone bag. “And did you see her eyes?”

“Poor,” Mustapha said, turning his head to them, smiling, showing a row of the whitest teeth Harriet had ever seen. “She is poor.”

He laughed and the carriage moved off again.

“We have poor children in London, Mr. Farr,” Yael said loudly. “But they do not go naked as the day they were born.”

Her hands gripped each other in her lap as the carriage swayed on through the old town and out under a stone gateway and into a grand square, lined with gracious buildings, made of white stone and adorned with balconies and striped awnings. The strolling people wore European dress and red felt hats. Harriet saw an African boy, laden with packages, running behind a fashionable woman. She had a sick, certain feeling that she saw a slave.

Minutes later, the driver drew up the horses outside a pair of high iron gates. A watchman scrambled to his feet and Harriet followed Louisa and Yael into a garden dominated by a huge tree. Its branches curled upward like the legs of spiders and its leaves were sharp and dark, as if they had been folded into triangles.

“Araucaria araucana,” Yael announced, pausing to look up into it. “The monkey puzzle. We had one at home.”

It didn’t resemble a living thing at all, Harriet thought, passing underneath it and along the path to a square stone house with shuttered windows. Mustapha ushered them through the double wooden door, across a vestibule, and into a courtyard in the center of the house that, she realized with delight, stood open to the sky.

Louisa looked around her. She tilted back her head, the sun falling on her white face.

“Where is the roof?” she said. “A house must have a roof.”

In a large, airy bedroom with long wooden shutters at the window, Harriet undid her pocket from around her waist and slid her journal under the pillow on the bed. Kicking off her boots, she lay flat on her back on a mattress with a dip in the middle and breathed into her stomach.

She felt filled with an unexpected happiness. She’d feared she was coming to Egypt to die, but now that she was here, she had the peculiar sense that her true life, the one that had always awaited her, had at last begun.