TWENTY-SIX

Louisa sat at a breakfast table on the deck of a dahabeah. Amid the clatter of china, the hum of conversation, the screech of birds from the banks, Harriet was quiet.

“Some more coffee, Harriet?”

Harriet shook her head.

Fouad had found a cabin for them, sharing the boat with a party of eight French people on their way to Abu Simbel. Louisa and Harriet had boarded the previous evening, hours after seeing the Coxes. They’d sailed through the night, by moonlight, the captain saying they would take advantage of the wind. Harriet had been wakeful, troubled by fits of coughing, but had announced in the morning that she felt well enough to breakfast on deck.

In the bright sunshine, she looked almost gaunt, her hair thickened with red dust, its color dulled. She’d taken only a few mouthfuls of an omelette.

“Is there anything I can fetch you?” Louisa said. “Do for you?”

Harriet laid down her fork.

“No, thank you. I’m going back to the cabin, Mother, to rest.”

Louisa felt sure she was thinking of Eyre Soane. Her heart ached for her daughter. It was natural, that Harriet should want a suitor, should have hopes of a family of her own, a future. It was cruel, that the first man to present himself should be Soane, trying to use Harriet in a game of cat-and-mouse.

Louisa followed her down the wooden steps, wishing she could bestow happiness in the way she’d been able to when Harriet was a child, with a story or a sugar mouse. Louisa didn’t know, now, what made Harriet happy. At Christmas, she’d given her a bottle of scent in a pretty cut-glass bottle but she’d never noticed Harriet smelling of lily of the valley. Blundell had given her another great tome on the pharaohs, which she’d insisted on bringing.

“Do you need a lozenge?” she said, feeling helpless. “I could burn a paper?”

The traveling medicine chest was to hand in the cabin, restocked with the prescriptions of the doctor in Alexandria, new supplies of Espic cigarettes, Legras and Escouflaire powders, from France. She’d bought pastilles of ipecacuanha and a salve he’d recommended.

“No, thank you. Leave me now, Mother, if you would.”

Harriet was grown up, Louisa thought as she climbed the steps back to the deck. She didn’t know why it should have taken so long for this self-evident truth to come home to her. Her daughter was an adult and her life, the preservation of it, was not in Louisa’s hands as it had been when she was a baby, an infant, or even a little girl. Harriet’s life belonged to Harriet and to God. Her death, when it came, belonged equally to her and the Almighty.

Resuming her seat at the table, Louisa sent up an urgent, silent prayer that they were doing the right thing and that the climate in the south would benefit Harriet, the journey not exhaust her further. She added one for herself, that the voyage to save her daughter’s life would not mean the end of her own.

Eyre Soane was bent on creating scandal. Blundell would feel it dreadfully. Blundell cared above all for propriety, for doing the correct things, at the correct time, in the correct way. His sense of what those things, times, ways were, never failed him.

Thinking about her husband, from so far away, Louisa wondered why he adhered so rigidly to what he called good form. Why he found it necessary. She asked herself, not for the first time in her married life, what secrets he might have from her. Where his mind wandered in sleep, in the shared silences of their life together. When she returned to London, to the substantial house, the tree-lined crescent, she had an instinct that they could never go back to how they had been. She felt a yearning sadness that he was not near and might never again be near.

Moving to the little writing desk in the open-air saloon, she wrote to him describing the landscape, the crew, the French fellow travelers. The letter was humorous and even-toned, could not have been more different from how she was feeling.

The Amon-Ra plied its way up the great gray-green river, past emerald patches of clover, fields of waving new grain, and flocks of stick-legged egrets. While Harriet rested in the cabin, occupied with her books, her journal, her inks, Louisa reclined in a deck chair, hypnotized by the changing panorama of ruined monuments and tumbledown hovels, farmers astride donkeys in the palm groves. They passed what appeared to be a large and ramshackle factory, from which came the unmistakable smell of boiling sugar, transporting Louisa to her own house, to a dozen pots of strawberry jam cooling on the marble slab.

Accompanying it all was the ghostly creak and groan of water wheels. The archaic-looking contraptions were everywhere, pulled by blinkered asses that trudged in circles, dipping empty vessels on a wheel down into the water, raising them up brimming, for spilling over the fields.

Louisa tried to conjure home again. She strained her ears for the sound of hot water splashing into an enameled bath, Rosina singing in the kitchen, the strike of the several clocks in the drawing room that at midday and midnight made a symphony of the passing of the hours. She could not. Only a high female voice made itself heard, still insisting that death was near. It seemed Amelia Newlove wasn’t aware that Louisa had heeded her words, taken her advice.

At sunset, Louisa rose from the chair and wrote another letter, this time to Mr. Hamilton. Did her mother have any more to say to her? Anything at all? Please would he be so kind as to send Louisa a note, care of the British consul at Luxor in Egypt, passing on any message that might come through.