The Sacred River (11 page)

Hepzibah’s eyes shone. She clapped her hands.

“I want to know everything, Izzy. Absolutely everything.”

Louisa threw her shawl over the rocking chair.

“I’m thirsty. Get me a glass of water first, can’t you?”

Hepzibah ran to the scullery, returned with a brimming glass. Lavinia had come in from outside and their mother was in her chair. Amelia Newlove sat by the fireplace even in summer. Louisa emptied the glass, swallowing down the clean, cold water, concentrating on the vase in the grate that held a great mass of stems, the flat-topped, white-headed bloom that sprawled in the hedgerows, that they called Queen Anne’s lace and that was meant to keep away flies.

“It was all very well,” she said.

Hepzibah caught hold of her hand.

“Tell us, Izzy,” she said. “Tell us what happened.”

“I stood there, that’s all. It was dull,” she insisted, looking past Hepzibah’s disappointed eyes and her mother’s pensive gaze. Lavinia had her hand clamped over her mouth. “And I’m not going back.”

“You are,” Hepzibah said into the silence that followed. “You have to. We’re counting on you, Louisa.”

•  •  •

The singsong wailing from outside began again, a long lament in a man’s voice. Louisa opened her eyes and found herself looking at an unfamiliar ceiling, the rough plaster crazed with cracks. She rose from the bed and began to walk about the room, hugging her arms across her chest. Sweat dampened the underarms of her bodice, a cold sweat that came not from the mild warmth of the morning but from fear. She must conquer it.

Sitting at the washstand, she examined herself in the mirror. Her dark hair was drawn back into the style she’d adopted on her marriage, copied from the pages of a magazine that had furnished step-by-step instructions on how to create it. Her tasteful costume, her cloudy opal earrings and plain gold wedding band, reflected her position in the world as the wife of a successful man of business, mother of his four children. An accomplished and careful housekeeper.

If Blundell knew even a part of what had happened before their marriage, he would cast her off. The life she had made for herself would be destroyed. Her sons would be disgraced by the knowledge of what their mother was and Harriet would see her as a stranger. Just to think of it made Louisa feel sick. And yet a part of her persisted in longing to see Eyre Soane again. She hungered to know what had happened to his family in the long years since.

Rising from the stool, she opened the bedroom window and leaned her head out. The call to prayer had given way to the cries of a man selling vegetables from a cart. Down below, Mustapha was standing by the barrow with an open basket, receiving a quantity of potatoes. Louisa turned back into the room and lowered the window.

Drawing herself up straight, she prepared to go downstairs and arrange the week’s menus. She was a woman in her middle years, wintering in Egypt to save the life of her daughter. She was no longer a girl in a hand-me-down robe who knew nothing and hoped everything of life. Eyre Soane could not harm her family. She would prevent it, by whatever means proved necessary.

SIXTEEN

The sound was growing louder. Yael stopped and lifted her head, listened to the sonorous tone of a bell, coming from somewhere in front of her, somewhat to the right. East, she supposed it might be called. Or west, if she was facing south. She did not know which way she was facing. No matter. All she had to do was to follow the note of the bell, incongruous in this harsh light, this dry street, where the shadows of the mud buildings lay deep and angular across the way.

Yael had resolved before leaving London that on arrival in Egypt she would find some useful work with which to occupy herself. Cooped up in the bank’s villa with dear Louisa and Harriet, she felt even more at risk of cabin fever than she had on the steamer. She intended to approach Reverend Griffinshawe at the church and offer her services in his endeavor, the promulgation of the Bible to the native women.

She’d breakfasted early, put on her bonnet, and left, rejecting Mustapha’s urgent wish that she have someone accompany her. She could not wait, as he entreated, for his nephew to guide her.

The Mohammedan boy was unlikely to know the location of the church, and if the bell ceased, she would have no means of orienting herself. Yael quickened her step.

The wind was cold; she felt chilly. She’d been misled by the brightness of the sunshine, hadn’t thought her ulster necessary. As she walked underneath a branch hanging over the wall of a hidden garden, her eye was drawn by bright vermilion petals. She stopped and stared up at the papery blossoms, which seemed to vibrate with their own brilliance.

Yael had always believed that England, English flora and fauna, English people and ways, were the summit of His creation. But these flowers were a marvel. She had never witnessed such a hue in nature. Reaching up, she broke off a stem, slipped it into her Gladstone bag. She closed it, snapping the clasp on the flash of vivid scarlet, and lifted her head again, listening. She would press them, later, between the pages of her Bible.

The sun grew stronger as she walked, stinging the backs of her hands and her face. She wasn’t certain now if she was too warm or too cold. Surely it was impossible to be both. Following the slow peal of the bell, which did not sound as if its source was getting any nearer, scanning the blue horizon for a spire, seeing only flat roofs, interspersed with domes and minarets, she continued on into a poorer-looking, native neighborhood. Hobbled donkeys nosed the ground outside dim doorways; red and orange rugs hung out of open windows above caged white doves. A man had slit open a mattress and was spreading the cotton stuffing in the sun, along the edges of the alley.

Sunday was not a day of rest for the Mohammedans. They observed Fridays. Yael hurried on, thinking about Fridays, their potential as holy days. There was Good Friday, of course. Fridays were clearly holier than Mondays, except at Easter. Preferable to Wednesdays or Thursdays but not as inevitable and right as Sundays. Not by any means. The Jews observed Saturdays, which she had always considered the most utilitarian of days.

A little girl appeared in front of Yael, hastening toward her. For a moment, Yael believed it was the same girl they’d seen from the carriage, that the child had recognized her and wished to greet her, but as the small figure came closer, she became aware that it was not the same girl. This one was even younger, not more than three years old, naked except for a scrap of fabric tied around her head. Her curls were matted, her cheeks and chin smeared with dirt. Only her eyes were the same as the other girl’s, oozing a yellow secretion, the lids beginning to turn inward. They commanded attention the way the raised bloom of a birthmark might, or a harelip. It was odd the way the eye was drawn to what was wrong in a face. “Hello, child,” she said, wishing not to frighten her, sounding, to her own ears at least, absurd.

The girl held out her palm. Yael couldn’t be sure if the child could see, but it was clear that the little mite had heard. Yael had coins with her, intended for the collecting plate at St. Mark’s. She would give them to the girl. As she fumbled for her purse, feeling inside her capacious bag, other children began to gather around. Boys, jeering and elbowing each other in the way of lads anywhere, calling out English phrases, the words oddly conjoined.

“Goodmorrning.” “Thankew.” “Gowaway.”

Sweat trickled down from under the hair coiled over Yael’s ears. She was now certain she was too warm, although the air still held a chill, and confined between the windowless mud walls of the houses on each side of the street, she, and all of them—a number of lads had gathered now—were in shadow. Her fingers at last encountered the silver mesh of the purse, the weight of coins. Yael smiled down at the infant as she drew her purse out into the air, held it aloft.

“Here it is, dear. Now, let me see . . .”

She hesitated. She wanted to give more than pennies, but the half-crown she’d earmarked for the collection plate was a considerable sum. Standing in the alley, looking at the tattered smocks of the boys, their feet bare on the mud, she decided to give it all to the child. Half a crown might mean her mother was able to seek treatment for her; it could even save her sight. As Yael shook the heavy coin out of the purse and onto her palm, a silver threepence slid past it into the dust. The clamor around her increased and several of the boys dived for the coin.

There were fifteen or twenty of them gathered around her in a circle, eager and smiling, their teeth in various conditions of evolution, their heads cropped. All boys, aged seven, eight, nine—it was hard to tell; so many had hardened, wizened faces on slight and childish bodies. Every last one of them appeared half-starved. More were arriving, tumbling out from the narrow paths and stairways that led into the alley, racing and shouting.

“This is for you,” Yael announced, extracting the silver half crown and stooping down to take hold of the girl’s hand, trying to fit her fingers around the unwieldy coin. “Stand back, boys. The baksheesh is for this little one.”

At the word
baksheesh
, the older children surged forward. The coin dropped to the ground and a boy lunged for it, knocking the child off her feet. The little girl began to bawl.

“No,” Yael called sharply, trying to put her foot on the silver disk. “It’s not for you.”

Two larger boys jumped on top of the first one, elbowing and shoving at each other. Others hurled themselves into the scrum, one falling heavily against Yael. She staggered and righted herself.

“I am sorry. I must insist—”

Her voice was lost in the noise all around her. Boys pressed against her from all sides, stretching out their hands, shouting for baksheesh, drowning out the sound of the bell. Several fought like men for possession of the half crown.

“You must stop this.”

“Goodafternoon. Godblessyew. Damnfilthybeggar.”

She was taller than any of them but imprisoned, as if she were Gulliver among the Lilliputians. The little girl was nowhere to be seen, and hands were plucking at her arms, her bag.

“Excuse me,” she cried. “Let me through. I am going to church.”

Yael looked up at the carved wooden jalousies protruding from first-floor windows all along the alley, then down, at the seated figures positioned inside dim doorways, fingering their tasseled amber beads, watching. Craning her neck for a police officer, she saw a woman, dressed in black from head to toe, her face shrouded, approaching down the dusty street.

Yael freed an arm, waved at her, and called out, her voice high and strained, more fearful than she knew herself to be.

“Please, ma’am, I need assistance.”

The woman skirted around the youths and passed by, as if she had not seen Yael, as if not she but Yael were the invisible one. Just then, a voice shouted something from behind her. The noise died suddenly, as if the needle had been lifted from a wax pressing.

Seated on an Arabian horse, his silver-tipped stick raised in the air, a man was bearing down on them.

The boys fell away as quickly as they had gathered. In seconds, they were gone, vanishing into the dark doorways, racing away up twisting flights of steps. Yael stood alone on the churned ground, her bag gaping open.

She felt in it for her handkerchief. Her peppermints. Her hymnal. Her purse. Nothing remained. Only the stem of flowers. She closed the bag, mopped her forehead on her cuff, and attempted to straighten her bonnet. Her legs felt weak and for a moment she believed she’d have no choice but to sit down in the dust, there where she stood. She thought of the dear Queen, beset by every kind of trouble and grief, and made herself remain on her feet.

The man had dismounted. His neatly trimmed beard was stained orange and he wore a green turban wound innumerable times around his head, a long striped kaftan cut from what looked like silk, girdled at the waist, with a light, embroidered woolen robe worn open over the top. He was looking at her with piercing brown eyes set in a clever, mournful face.

She spoke loudly, enunciating clearly.

“Thank you, sir. I am most grateful for your assistance.”

“At your service,” he said, speaking more softly than she, inclining his head. “Where are you going?”

Men were approaching now, half a dozen or more of them, drawn not by Yael but by her rescuer, crowding around to pay respects to him, raising his hand to their foreheads, kissing his hem.

“St. Mark’s Anglican Church,” Yael said loudly. “I am a Christian.”

“You are lost. Come.”

Leading the horse by the reins, he dismissed the men and set off on foot. Yael looked around her. The street was empty again, as if the incident had never occurred nor been witnessed by anyone at all. The bell had fallen silent; she didn’t know when. The man and his horse were already fifty yards away. Yael clamped the new flatness of her bag under her arm and hurried to catch him up.

•  •  •

The church was a white building, recognizable by its spire, the wooden cross mounted in the alcove of the porch. There was a little graveyard around it, some bleached stones, but no wall or fence. It stood in sandy waste ground, adorned only by rocks and boulders, looking as exposed as she felt herself.