FORTY-EIGHT

Louisa stepped carefully, avoiding the goats’ pellets flattened into the ends of straw, the rotting skins of mangoes and bananas, picking her way around the ashy circles of fires, stinking fish heads with their attendant bat-eared cats.

The light was pink; the water, the boats, even her own hands, were fire-touched. In the hour before sunset, all living creatures seemed to wait, in anticipation of the sinking of the sun. The birds grew frantic, searching for a place to roost, and the people were arrested, poised between day and night, between life and death.

She had not intended to kill Eyre Soane. She had pulled the trigger intentionally but as she did so, it was not him she aimed at but Augustus. For those few months of her girlhood, she had loved Augustus with all her heart. For thirty years, she had hated him with the same intensity. Louisa had meant to shoot him through the heart. It would have been just, to have wounded Augustus where he had wounded her. She supposed she was glad that she had missed.

The departure of the dahabeah had been delayed while Mr. Soane rested, Mr. Simpson had informed them at breakfast. The bullet had passed through the outer side of his right arm, his painting arm. Mrs. Simpson had dressed it, flooding it with iodine, packing the wound with lint and bandaging it with one of Eyre Soane’s own shirts, torn into strips. Her father was a surgeon, Mr. Simpson had informed Harriet, rolling his eyes to the ceiling, avoiding looking at Louisa; he had taught her first aid.

Mr. Soane had not wished to involve the British consul. He’d insisted, when Monsieur Andreas arrived at a run, calling for Madame and brandishing an antique firearm of his own, that it was an accident. His own fault. Louisa hadn’t disputed it. It was his own fault.

She looked about for one of the crew to fetch her in the small rowing boat and, seeing no one, walked into the shallows of the river. Wading toward the boat, she felt the pressure of the current running against her legs, her overskirt rising behind her on the water. The cold was a relief. She felt cleansed by it, as if the immersion was overdue.

She had resolved to tell Eyre Soane the truth. She wouldn’t waste another minute in informing him of what he had to know. It would prevent him from threatening them, pursuing Harriet any further. Reaching the set of wooden steps on the side, Louisa pulled herself up and boarded the boat.

A pile of drying antelope hides occupied one end of the deck. The stench was sickening. Mrs. Simpson sat in a deck chair under the patched canvas awning, reading a book. She looked as if she had been weeping; her eyes were red-rimmed. She stared out from under her sun hat as Louisa stood in front of her, wringing out the hem of her skirts, twisting the silk like a rope between her hands. “You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “Coming here.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Simpson. Where is Mr. Soane?”

“In his cabin. He doesn’t want to see you.”

“I don’t wish to see him either,” Louisa said. “But I must.”

Mrs. Simpson burst into tears, covering her mouth with her hand.

“I hate it,” she said. “All these guns. Shooting everything that moves. I hate guns more than anything in the world. I wish I’d never agreed to come to Egypt.”

Louisa felt a wave of dizziness pass over her; the sense kept afflicting her that she couldn’t stay upright any longer. That a collapse was coming, whether she liked it or not. She slid down into the chair next to Mrs. Simpson’s, her shoes leaking water.

“Why did you?” she said.

“Jim. He’d set his heart on a crocodile.”

“I didn’t want to come here either,” said Louisa.

“Why did you, then?”

“My mother spoke to me from the other side, of a death. At first, I thought it was my daughter’s. That we could get away from it here. Then, for a moment, I believed it was Aug . . . Mr. Soane’s. Now, I am certain that it must be my own.”

Mrs. Simpson reached a small hand over to Louisa’s, patted her. Her nails were pink, small as shells on an English beach, shaped, and buffed to a shine.

“There, there,” she said. “Don’t upset yourself. We’re a long way from home, that’s the trouble. It was an accident, anyway. Soanie said so himself.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

Mrs. Simpson got out of the deck chair and returned with a glass in her hand.

“Have a drop of wine,” she said, passing it to Louisa. “And calm yourself, Mrs. Heron. Of course it was an accident. What else could it have been?”

The cabin door was ajar and Eyre Soane lay in bed, propped on a heap of cushions with an unlit cigar between his lips. His right arm lay across his bare chest in a sling made from a red silk scarf; the upper part of the arm was bandaged, a dark stain blooming through the thick wad of dressing. The lamp was lit, suspended from a hook on the ceiling over his bed, and the air smelled of iodine and damp wood mixed with sandalwood pomade.

Louisa gripped the door frame. “May I come in?”

“Louisa,” he said, shifting his position slightly. “Are you armed?”

She smiled. “How are you?”

“In pain. You missed the bone.”

“It was your father I wanted to kill. Augustus. He deserved it.”

Eyre Soane turned away his head, lowering his eyelids as if the pain assailed him again.

“Augustus was a great man,” he said. “A great, great man, with immoral and unscrupulous women throwing themselves at him all his life. It broke my mother’s heart.”

He began trying to light the cigar one-handed.

Louisa took the matchbox from him and struck a flame.

“He was a scoundrel,” she said without rancor. “A scoundrel and a cad.”

“My mother loved him, and my sister. They thought the world of him. Still do.”

Louisa crossed the small cabin to the window and gazed out at the sinuous, amnesiac water.

“Your sister?”

Eyre Soane tipped back his head as if to blow a smoke ring, then seemed to think better of it. He breathed out the stream of smoke in a sigh, reached with his uninjured arm for a telegraph on the locker by the bed, and held it up.

“She’s arrived. I’m going back to Cairo to show her the sights. We’ll return to London together. I believe when I get there I shall make a bequest to the National Gallery. Unless I can find a private buyer for Thetis. What do you think, Louisa? Would your husband care to purchase the picture? Hang it in the drawing room?”

A rusted cargo boat chugged past, heading north, and the dahabeah began to rock in its wake, rippling waves hitting the craft in long, sloshing tides of brown water. Louisa returned to the door frame, holding to its upright support, feeling the floor rise and fall under her feet. She could not utter the words she’d come to say.

“I should be glad to meet your sister,” she said. “I do hope an opportunity will present itself.”