The Sacred River (16 page)

“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.

TWENTY-FIVE

Standing on the landing of a wide staircase, leaning her elbows on the ebonized banister, Harriet looked down at the lobby of the Oasis Palace Hotel. The hotel was for invalids. Mr. Moore, whose wife had been treated here for her nerves, had recommended it to Louisa, and they were spending a few days there before traveling on to Luxor.

It was a place of hushed conversations and little laughter, elderly women with hair like dandelion seed and wizened men with female nurses hovering close by. Harriet found it depressing. She was in the state familiar to her of being neither well nor ill, not in crisis but not able to breathe freely. Even here in Egypt, that condition felt like a half-life. More than anything, it made her feel lonely. However sympathetic, no one else could really understand what it was like. No doctors seemed able to help.

The floor down below was of smooth, polished marble with Oriental rugs laid on top. A green glass chandelier hung in the center over a vase of flowers, and around the edges of the large hall, pairs of chesterfields, dark leather twins, faced each other across tables made from engraved brass trays.

The revolving doors turned, disgorging a man in a safari jacket and pith helmet. Something about his gait was familiar. A moment later, from the next quarter, a second figure emerged, straight-backed, clad in a broad-brimmed hat swathed with a veil that covered her face. Harriet gasped.

“Mrs. Cox!”

The woman threw back the veil. “Harriet!”

Mrs. Cox began to cross the lobby, a lace-trimmed parasol swinging from her wrist, the train of her skirt swishing on the tiles. Ignoring Louisa’s protests, Harriet almost ran down the stairs.

“What are you doing here?” Mrs. Cox said, gripping Harriet’s elbows.

“We’re staying here until we travel to Luxor. And you?”

“I have an appointment with the doctor.”

Mrs. Cox glanced at her husband. Zebedee Cox’s hands were clasped behind his back, his head tipped back in close examination of the chandelier.

“Afternoon, Miss Heron,” he said.

Harriet nodded at him and returned her eyes to her friend. She pictured her in her nightdress, soaked, lying curled up on the bunk in the same shape that the tiny form had been. She hadn’t seen her since that awful night.

“I am so happy to meet you again, Mrs. Cox,” she said. “How are you?”

“I hardly know,” she said softly, looking up at Louisa, who was still standing on the stairs. “The lemonade here is delicious, Mrs. Heron,” she called, her voice bright and social. “Have you sampled it?”

The four of them arranged themselves around one of the low tables.

“We’ve come this minute from a tour of the Pyramids,” Mrs. Cox said. “Do tell Mrs. Heron about it, Zeb. It was the most marvelous thing.”

Mr. Cox turned to Louisa.

“They used to bury the slaves with the pharaohs, you know,” his voice boomed out. “Still alive. Absolute barbarism.”

Sarah Cox turned to Harriet. She looked drawn, her eyelashes and the fine hairs on her cheeks and top lip thickened with dust.

“Are you any better?” she asked.

“Yes, I’m much . . .”

Harriet was overcome by coughing. It hurt Harriet to admit that she was still ill; an invalid, like the other residents of the hotel, the old people who belonged there. She was ashamed of her illness, she understood suddenly. She’d never allowed herself to realize it before. She felt responsible for it, as if it were a personal failing.

“This awful wind lays everyone low,” said Mrs. Cox. “Zebedee’s had bronchitis.”

“I was improving until the Khamseen came.” Harriet breathed in toward the pit of her stomach, as deeply as she was able. “And you? Are you recovered, Mrs. Cox?”

Mrs. Cox’s eyes glistened. She pulled a handkerchief from her sleeve, squeezing the fine lawn into a ball in her hand.

“I see him everywhere, Harriet, dream about him at night. I can’t stop thinking about the way he—”

“Here we are,” announced Zebedee Cox, as the waiter set down four glasses, their rims frosted with sugar, bright sprigs of mint floating on the drink.

Mrs. Cox blew her nose and smiled at her husband.

“I was just telling Miss Heron that we are traveling to Suez shortly. To meet the shipment.”

“What are you shipping, Mr. Cox?” Louisa asked.

“Parts for a flour mill,” said Zebedee Cox. “But since the natives cannot afford to buy bread, I don’t know what earthly use it’ll be.”

“What a coincidence it is,” Louisa said to Mrs. Cox, “to see you both again.”

“Small world,” said Mr. Cox. “We ran into another chap from the steamer earlier, out at the Pyramids. What was his name, Sarah? Had his easel set up there under an umbrella thingy.”

“I don’t recall,” said Mrs. Cox. “Have you been yet? Really, Harriet, you simply must see them.”

“Soane. That’s it. His father was a well-known painter, you know. Julius or Octavius. Name escapes me now.”

Louisa had taken her fan from her handbag and was waving it in small, agitated movements. Harriet lowered her face to her glass, swallowed another mouthful of the cool, sweet liquid. Mr. Soane was here, in the same city. He must have followed her. She had misjudged him.

Zebedee Cox got to his feet. He slid his hand into the pocket of his jacket and drew out a watch.

“Ready, Sarah?”

“Yes, Zebedee,” said Mrs. Cox. “Do write to me, Harriet, as soon as you’re back at home. Come.” Linking her arm through Harriet’s, leading her to the reception desk, she picked up the old-fashioned quill pen and wrote a few lines. “Here is our address. I insist on your coming to tea.”