TWENTY-FOUR

The service was over and, with its wide doors standing open and congregation departed, the church had lost its hushed, sacred atmosphere. The bleating of goats floated in from outside over the rows of wooden pews, along with the smell of baking bread.

“There you are, Miss Heron,” a voice boomed. “I expected to see you before now.”

The Reverend Griffinshawe’s white eyebrows waggled as he spoke, distracting Yael from the speech she’d prepared, the appeal she’d intended to make to his Christian charity. Moving toward the dais where he stood, Yael braced herself. She had never liked asking others for help or favors but, she told herself firmly, needs must. She intended to inquire of Reverend Griffinshawe whether there was a doctor within the congregation who might lend his services once a fortnight, for the cases that were beyond her scope.

He beamed at her. “I have been considering your offer and I have a particular request to make of you.”

“Good morning, Reverend Griffinshawe. What is that?”

“I am in need of a housekeeper. An Englishwoman—”

“Reverend, I don’t think I—”

He raised his hands in the air.

“You misunderstand me, my dear Miss Heron. I am not for one moment suggesting that you would undertake the work yourself. I need a woman to train the servants to make English tea and order the groceries, teach my maid how to iron linen. I find myself so much taken up with domestic issues, there is scarcely time to pursue the mission.”

Yael wished that he would step down from the dais. She disliked looking up at him, from a greater distance even than that which nature had decreed.

“Reverend, I have an apology to make.”

“Come, dear lady.” The eyebrows knitted together as Ernest Griffinshawe looked down on her with a look of benign approval. “I cannot believe you can have anything for which to apologize.”

“I had thought that I could devote my spare time to assisting your project here in Egypt,” she said. “But I find I am called to other work.”

“What other work? Who by?”

“I intend to establish a clinic for children. An eye clinic.”

The Reverend took a step back.

“I wasn’t aware that you had expertise in ophthalmia.” He guffawed. “Should I have been addressing you as Doctor?”

“The clinic will be for first aid and teaching basic cleanliness. I will offer what simple treatments I can. But this is what I wished to talk—”

Reverend Griffinshawe looked up at the rafters.

“If there is teaching to be done, Miss Heron, it should surely begin with the word of God.”

Yael did not contradict him, although she was becoming aware since she had arrived in Egypt that the people here, as far as one could see, had their own word of God. From the same God or at any rate through one of His prophets. Not equal to His son, of course, but theirs nonetheless.

She smiled pleasantly.

“I hoped, Reverend, that you might be able to offer me some assistance. I wanted—”

“Don’t see how, dear lady,” he said, looking past her with a distracted air, his eyes ranging over the parched white ground outside the doors. “I am not much of a one for children. Females. More concerned with souls than runny noses and so forth.”

“Please hear what I have to say . . .”

Reverend Griffinshawe was gone, disappeared into the sacristy. A minute later he emerged with three great tomes hugged against his chest, and Yael glimpsed the distinctive brown and gold binding of Shaftesbury’s Arabic-language Bible.

“You may have these, Miss Heron,” he said, stepping off the platform at last, thumping the volumes down on a pew next to where she stood. “For use in your clinic. I hope you may find some opportunity at least for study with your ladies.”

Coated in a layer of dust, their pages still uncut, the volumes looked old already. Yael became aware of her back teeth clenched painfully together. She shifted her jaw experimentally and felt a stabbing pain in the hinge of it, below her ear.

“Reverend, these women are quite unable to read in any language. That much I do know, from my work in London. I wanted to ask—”

“My point exactly,” he said, nodding as he spoke, as if to confirm his agreement with himself. “You could serve the flock better by teaching them the English alphabet.”

Yael took a sudden objection to the word flock.

“I don’t believe so,” she said. “Children who are blind cannot read, after all.”

He looked at her with dislike.

“I must bid you goodbye, Miss Heron. I have a meeting to go to.”

His tone had been unpleasant, Yael decided, walking back through the narrow streets of the old town, skirting around a donkey laden with two milk churns. The jovial assumption of common purpose had departed from it entirely. She had omitted to give him back the pound he’d lent her.

She carried on, walking in the shadow of ancient-looking buildings, their foundations made of great boulders of white stone, the upper stories of mud bricks, roughly patched with plaster. Despite what had happened on her first outing, Yael had taken to walking everywhere she went. She enjoyed glimpsing domestic life through half-open doorways, peering into courtyards or the musty interiors of the large cupboards that in the native quarter passed for shops. Her experience with the children, the first time she’d gone out alone, had taught her a lesson. She no longer brought out her purse in public places. She kept half a dozen silver piastres loose in her handbag. If a child approached her, she slipped one or two of the small coins into his or her hand without fuss or fanfare, as she had seen the local people do. No one molested her.

The smell of food reached her and Yael’s stomach rumbled in answer. On the shady side of the alley, a group of men were squatting around a large dish. Dressed in black-and-white-striped sateen gowns, red felt hats, and embroidered shawls, each with the right sleeve pushed up to the elbow, they were dipping their right hands into the bowl, rolling bread and beans into balls and sliding them into their mouths with deft, economical movements. Seeing her looking at them, one gestured for her to join them.

“Welcome,” he said in English. “Welcome, Sitti.”

Mustapha called her Sitti on occasion. It meant lady, as far as she could tell, and was a respectful address to a woman, not only a foreign one. She disliked being called khawaga. Foreigner. Harriet had told her that in the ancient Egyptian script the sign for foreigner was the same as the one for enemy; a person with their hands tied behind their backs.

“Thank you,” she said as she passed by, nodding. “I shan’t join you but thank you.”

The gratitude Yael felt continued as she carried on toward the villa. It was not for the offer of food but for the acknowledgment of a common humanity. The Mohammedans treated her better than her own countrymen did.

Continuing on her way, she had an idea. Ernest Griffinshawe’s refusal to help was a blessing in disguise. When she felt ready, she would request a meeting with the sheikh. Tell him of her intention to find a room in the old town, where she could teach the mothers simple hygiene, and inquire whether he would support the venture, whether he knew an Egyptian doctor who might volunteer his services. It wasn’t inconceivable that Sheikh Hamada would help her. The idea of bypassing the Reverend Griffinshawe, of appealing to a local leader, and a Mohammedan one, pleased her. It was right.

Thinking again about her plan, Yael felt a surge of excitement. For all of her adult years, she had involved herself in charity work in London, trying to improve the lot of her fellow man or—more often—woman. Although the schemes had been varied, worthwhile, all had been established by other people. The prospect of following her own vision, offering assistance according to her own most dearly held principles, was entirely new.

She reached the Frank quarter and walked slowly across the Place des Consuls, the jacaranda trees making the square look as if it were aflame with violet fire. Stepping over fallen blossoms on the flagstones, walking past the wooden cabin where a man and his son sold long-handled pots of Turkish coffee and hard, twice-baked biscuits, Yael thanked God for bringing her to this far land. She’d agreed to it with the greatest reluctance, had boarded the Star of the East with gritted teeth, anticipating nothing more than a test of endurance. Yet she was experiencing a peace in Alexandria that eluded her in London. Searching her mind for its source, Yael found the answer.

By the white wall that ran along the front of the villa, she stopped, looking at the motionless, perpendicular form of a lizard, defying laws of gravity and reason. She could do things here. It was this, not language and sunlight, the complexion of the people, their religion and food and mighty river, that made Egypt a foreign country.