FIFTY-SEVEN

Yael had altered. The sleeves of her dress were loose on her arms and her waist had emerged from its long hiding. Her face, framed by the coils of silver hair, looked older and more serious. Arriving at the villa the previous day and finding her in the drawing room, writing letters, Louisa had wondered for an instant who this dignified-­looking person was who rose from the table, pen in hand. From the look on her sister-in-law’s face, Louisa had remembered that she too was not immediately recognizable. They had embraced, then stepped back to look at each other again. Louisa couldn’t think of a time when she had been so glad to see Yael.

The air in the garden was still, heavy with the scent of the white mulberry blossom on the branches over their heads. Louisa unclenched her fingers from the arms of the wicker chair and patted the short ends of hair on the nape of her neck. She’d taken to going without the head covering while she was in the house and garden. Yael had appeared barely to notice that her hair was gone and Harriet insisted that it became her. Harriet was with Suraya in the hovel at the back of the kitchen yard, helping to prepare supper.

Louisa lowered her voice. “We’re in June. It’s been five months, Yael. If you’re not prepared to go home now, when will you be?”

Yael’s chair creaked. “I cannot say. The situation deteriorates by the day, Louisa. Most of the children are surviving on the ration of beans and rice we give out at the clinic. Nearly all our families are in the same situation. I cannot leave them at present.”

Louisa straightened herself in the chair. She might embark on the steamer and then die on the journey home. She had to get Yael to return with Harriet, see her safely back to London.

“They are Egyptians, Yael. There are millions of them. You cannot save them all. You must come back with us.”

Since Harriet had been found alive, Louisa’s certainty that it was her own death that was near had been reconfirmed. For those hours when Harriet had been missing, she had believed—despite herself, unable to suppress the realization—that she’d had a reprieve; along with that came the terrible understanding of the price of her renaissance, that she would be condemned to live a blighted life, a life against nature, in which she outlived her own daughter. When Harriet had been found, brought back to Dr. Woolfe’s strange house on the mountainside, Louisa had sent up weary prayers of thanks that it was indeed she whose days were numbered. She who would soon go to meet her maker and her mother.

The heavy scent of the blossom reached her again on a current of air and for a moment she had a vision of growing a mulberry tree herself, in the south-facing spot in the corner of the garden. Then she remembered that things of the future were in the past for her now. Only the present moment was available to her. She rose from the chair and snapped off a twig of white flowers, held them to her nose. The scent of flowers had always been one of life’s sweetest pleasures.

“Miraculous,” she said, holding the stem out to Yael. “But we must go home now.”

Yael blinked at her. “Our work at the clinic is important, Louisa. It matters to me and to our families. This is their hour of need.”

If Yael refused to come with them, it might be only Harriet who arrived back in England. Louisa pictured Blundell on the quay, meeting one woman in the place where he had dispatched three. It would break his good heart. She flopped down again into the chair, her legs weak.

“I cannot return without you, Yael. Blundell would never forgive me.”

“It’s not your decision, Louisa, dear. I have made that clear in the letter I have already written to my brother. I sent it before you arrived.”

Despite her smaller form, Louisa could not escape the sense that Yael had grown larger. Her sister-in-law had a presence and authority that were never apparent before. For some minutes, the women sat in silence. Yael’s face in the moonlight appeared distracted when she spoke again.

“Our friend Mr. Soane is back in Alexandria.”

Louisa laid the sprig of blossom on the table. “Oh?”

“He attended the service last Sunday, with a young lady. Reverend Griffinshawe informs me that she is his sister.”

Louisa felt faint. She thought for a moment that she might be about to die now. Here. This moment.

“Did you . . . Did you have the opportunity to speak with them?”

Yael shook her head. “I didn’t seek it, dear.”

The lump in Louisa’s throat threatened to close it. She swallowed.

“Did Mr. Soane’s sister look well? Does she . . . resemble her brother?”

“Not altogether.”

They sat in silence again, the wicker chairs creaking as they moved, until Yael began to speak.

“Once upon a time, Louisa, when I was still very young, another girl told me a story. She shouldn’t have done so, because it was not her story to tell. But nonetheless, she did. She told me of a girl she knew who had fancied herself in love with a man. A powerful man used to having his way in all matters. The man did what many would. He seduced her and afterward he went away. He left her and her family to try to cover up what had happened, put things right.”

“There are so many foolish girls.” Louisa’s voice was a squeak. She didn’t recognize it. “Foolish and immoral.”

“Do you believe so?” Yael rocked backward and forward, in a leisurely way, as if the question might occupy her thoughts for some time. She sighed. “I always felt pity for that girl. I had sympathy for what befell her when she was little more than a child herself.”

Louisa’s hands were clenching the arms of the chair so tightly that her fingers hurt. The scent of the mulberry flowers was overpowering, the sawing of the crickets louder than she had ever noticed before.

“Who told you the story?”

Yael hesitated. She held her chair at the farthest incline of its backward tilt, then allowed it to roll forward again, and came to rest.

“It was Lavinia.”

“My own sister? I don’t believe you.”

“She meant no harm, Louisa. I was a child myself at the time, of twelve. She made me swear on the Bible never to repeat the secret to another living soul and I never have done. Except one.”

Louisa rose from her chair in a single rapid movement, as if pulled up by a string. “You mean me? Now?”

Yael sighed. She rocked for some moments without speaking. “On the same day as I heard it, I told my older brother the whole story. I believed that before he married, he had a right to know.”

Louisa cried out as if she had been struck. Then there was silence.