TWENTY

Yael put down her spoon and looked at the French door. “It can’t be getting dark at this hour,” she said. “Can it?”

The three of them were sitting in the places they had made their own around the long table in the dining room. Harriet pushed back her chair and went to the window. On the other side of the glass, the mulberry trees and palms waved in silent salutation. Opening the door, she stepped out into the garden and looked up at the sky. The sun had disappeared and the air was hazed with brown, carrying the scent of brick and cinders. Somewhere nearby, women were shouting to one another in Arabic. The peculiar quality of the light, the sound of the wind, made her shiver.

“It’s dusty,” she announced, coming back inside, the wind banging the door behind her. “That’s why the sky’s overcast, Aunt Yael.”

Harriet returned to the table and took another mouthful of a jelly that contained pieces of a sweet, soft-fleshed fruit. Nothing could dim the sense of happiness she’d felt since Eyre Soane’s visit. He wanted to paint her. Each time Harriet remembered the fact, she experienced a little jolt of pleasure. On deck, the first time they met, the painter had barely noticed her. When he joined them for dinner, he had seen her for the first time. Now he wished her to be the subject of one of his works. Despite Louisa’s discouragement, he would call again. Harriet felt certain of it.

Mustapha entered the room with a tray. Setting out small cups with no handles, he began to pour the coffee, holding the pot high, filling the little cups with a dark, steaming stream. The room was growing dimmer by the minute.

“What is happening, Mustapha?” asked Louisa.

“It is the wind, madame. The Khamseen.”

“I think we ought to investigate, Louisa,” Yael said, getting to her feet.

“If you insist,” said Yael.

With Mustapha following, the three of them walked through the front part of the garden and out of the gate, onto the wide, unpaved street. The watchman had enveloped his entire head in his white turban, leaving only a slit for his eyes.

Their dresses blew against their legs as Harriet, Louisa, and Yael stood staring at the horizon, at a dim, dark shape bearing down on the city like a soft, moving mountain. Harriet felt a sense of foreboding. She enjoyed extremes of weather—found thunder and lightning exhilarating, relished the drama of high wind—but the brown cloud looked ominous. She’d never seen anything like it.

“ ‘For, behold, darkness shall cover the earth,’ ” said Yael.

“There’s no need to be dramatic, Yael.” Louisa rubbed her eyes and turned her back on the horizon. “Come inside, Harriet.”

By the time they had finished the coffee, they could barely see each other across the dining table. Khamseen meant fifty, Mustapha told them as he took away the cups. It was the fifty-day wind and it had arrived early. There was no saying when it would leave.

•  •  •

Parting the curtains of net around the bed, Harriet swung her legs out from under the blanket. A shutter was banging against the wall outside the window. She leaned out over the vanished garden and pulled the shutter back into the frame as the wind blasted dust at her face.

Back in bed, exhausted by the effort, she listened to the sound of her own breath, harsh on the air. She felt empty, devoid of the hopes and thoughts and ideas that had been filling her mind. In the weeks since they had left London, she’d allowed herself to begin to believe that she had left her illness behind. She’d been deceived. Asthma had stowed away inside her, waiting for the moment to spring out and make itself known.

If she couldn’t be well here, a voice in her head insisted, she couldn’t be well anywhere. Propped up on the pillows in the position meant to ease the constriction in her chest, Harriet wiped her eyes. The hope and excitement she’d felt on first entering this room seemed to mock her. How could she live, when it was all she could do to keep breathing?

She turned down Louisa’s offer to sit with her, Yael’s suggestion that she might read aloud. At mid-morning, Suraya arrived.

“Good morning, Suraya,” Harriet said in Arabic, rousing herself. The greeting translated literally as morning of light, and Harriet enjoyed using it. Arabic seemed able to inject poetry into anything. Suraya didn’t answer. Putting down a glass of black tea on the chair by the bed, she fetched a can of water from outside the door and began scattering it on the wooden floor, casting drops as if she were sowing seeds, then picked up a grass brush and began sweeping in quick, efficient strokes, hinging from her waist, the silver bells around her ankle tinkling as she moved.

She dropped the brush and sat down on the edge of the bed. Reaching for Harriet’s hand with her small, strong one, she squeezed Harriet’s fingers.

“You’re well, by God’s will?” she said in Arabic.

Harriet nodded.

“I’m well,” she said, using the Arabic Suraya had taught her. “Thanks be to God.”

She didn’t know how to say that she was ill, that she felt hopeless and lonely. That more than anything she was filled with a bitter disappointment.

Suraya’s dark eyes, lined with a sooty cosmetic, were unconvinced. Glancing toward the door, she reached into the neck of her robe, pulled out an envelope, and handed it to Harriet. It was addressed to Miss H. Heron. Harriet turned it over. There was no name on the back but she knew who had sent it.

“From where, Suraya? Who?”

The tinkling receded, and when Harriet looked up, Suraya had gone. Harriet tore open the envelope and unfolded a single sheet of paper.

Parthenon Hotel

March 15th 1882

Dear Miss Heron,

Quite unaccountably, I find I’m missing you awfully. In fact, I long to see you again.

I will call on you as soon as this wind subsides. We shall take a picnic in the Palace gardens and perhaps you will be persuaded to pose for sketches. Above all, I should like to paint you.

Believe me, I shall pay no heed to your mother’s opposition.

Yours very sincerely,

Eyre Soane

Harriet turned over the sheet of paper but the other side was blank. Returning it to the envelope, she caught a faint smell of cigars. Lying back again on the bank of pillows, Harriet looked about the room. Nothing had changed. The Turkish rug lay flat on the floor, forming an imperfect rectangle, one side longer than the other. Brown light filtered through the slats of the shutters, throwing a soft ladder of shadows onto the wall. “Eyre Soane longs to see me,” she said aloud. The room made no response.

Her breathing seemed looser. Lighter. She took a sip of tea and grimaced. The water in Alexandria was brackish, its saltiness impossible to disguise even with the quantities of sugar the Egyptians used. How could he long to see her again? It wasn’t possible. She didn’t believe it. But perhaps it was true. Why would he say it if it was not?

Closing her eyes, Harriet slipped away from the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the fast thud of her heart, and into a dream. Eyre Soane admired her. He painted her portrait and, in doing so, fell in love with her, begged her to marry him. Harriet Heron, spinster and invalid, became a woman like other women. Mrs. Cox’s prediction was fulfilled.

Opening her eyes, Harriet felt disoriented. She got out of bed and wrapped her old pink pashmina around her shoulders. Brushed her hair at the washstand and splashed her face with water. Retrieving her pen and travel bottles of ink, a sheet of paper from the trunk, she got back into bed.

Dear Mr. Soane,

Thank you for your note.

I should be glad to sit for a painting when the weather improves. I am perfectly able to make up my own mind, in all matters.

Yours,

Harriet Heron

At three o’clock, the hour that Yael dubbed “Egyptian lunchtime,” that Louisa had tried and failed to alter, Suraya brought up a tray covered with what looked like a conical woven hat. She removed it to display a plate of tomatoes stuffed with rice and minced meat, sprinkled with green herbs.

As she balanced the tray on Harriet’s lap, Harriet passed her the note. It was addressed to E. Soane Esq., care of the Parthenon Hotel. Suraya couldn’t read but she would know who it was intended for, Harriet was certain, and would find a way to deliver it. Suraya slipped the envelope down the neck of her robe.

“Eat!” she commanded in Arabic, as she twitched the edge of the sheet, straightened the tray. “Eat.”