The Sacred River (2 page)

Mrs. Hamilton opened the door, a raw-chinned baby imprisoned in one arm.

“If you could see yourself in, missus,” she said. “I’ve got my hands full.”

The woman pressed herself against the coat stand and Louisa edged past her along a narrow hallway, walked down the decrepit wooden steps to the back parlor. The little window was draped in its customary swag of purple velvet and the air was heavy with the scent of a burning incense tablet, the room dimly lit by a single oil lamp hanging from a beam. Despite the thickness in the air, the powerful scent of musk overlaying a reek of tomcats and burnt potatoes, it was cold, the fireplace empty. Mr. Hamilton’s clients were staying away, Louisa supposed, due to the atrocious weather. She wouldn’t have come herself if she’d had any choice.

From his place behind a table, Mr. Hamilton nodded at her. “I saw your note. Be seated, Mrs. Heron.”

Louisa settled herself on the chair opposite him and rested her hands on the softly furrowed cloth, palms upward. Malachi Sethe Hamilton was Romany by origin; it was the source of his special gift and, she thought sometimes, of his peculiar manners. All year round, he wore a broad-collared coat that reached to his ankles, the hem embroidered with fishes and bulls, scorpions and prancing goats, a pair of twins holding hands. His hair, neither gray nor white, issued from the sides of his head in two matted pelts, leaving the dome naked and exposed. Louisa imagined the inside of it, stuffed like an overcrowded drawer with visions and voices and dreams.

People said that he’d adopted the name of Hamilton on arrival in London, the day he stepped off the boat. Many things were said about Mr. Hamilton, but in her years of consultation with him, Louisa had found no reason to doubt him. He had never been wrong.

“I have a question for my mother.”

Mr. Hamilton nodded.

“You want Mama’s advice, about a journey.”

Mr. Hamilton’s powers of discernment gave Louisa a sense of safety. In the cramped back parlor, she felt as she had when their father, a sea captain, used to tell her and her four sisters stories around the fire, in his periods of shore leave. All too soon, Father would be gone, but the stories remained. Thinner and less satisfactory than by the firelight, but present nonetheless, worlds in themselves, resistant to time or breakage, pilfering by older sisters.

“Yes, Mr. Hamilton. I want you to ask her whether I should take my daughter abroad. Her doctor insists on it. But I . . .”

“Somewhere warmer than our own island? A place far away from here?”

Louisa nodded, overcome with gratitude. Mr. Hamilton knew the questions before she uttered them. It was remarkable.

He closed his eyes, his face creased in effort.

“Speak, dear lady,” he intoned, taking hold of Louisa’s hands on the table. “Speak to us, by your kindness.”

Louisa’s hands were cold and his warm around them, rough-palmed, one finger constricted by the bright wedding band he’d affected lately. The new Mrs. Hamilton had appeared one day in spring, visibly with child, answering the door with an unspoken challenge in her eyes. The baby was crying upstairs and there was a faint disturbance of the air that could be something or nothing.

Louisa’s voice was a whisper.

“Do you hear anything, Mr. Hamilton?”

He didn’t respond. Mr. Hamilton sat not more than three feet away from her but Louisa had the distinct sense that he’d left the room, no longer inhabited the large and flesh-rounded body that she saw before her. The silence around them altered. It became full and complex, layered with possibility, and the hairs rose on Louisa’s arms and spine as Mr. Hamilton’s lips parted, seemed to struggle.

“I expected you sooner.” A high, true voice, quavering a little, issued from the mouth of Mr. Hamilton. It was the voice of Louisa’s mother. “My poor Izzy.”

The childhood nickname that her mother invariably used now, although when she was alive she’d called all of the older girls by their full names. Hearing her voice again, Louisa saw in her mind her mother as she’d been when Louisa was a child, when Amelia Newlove had seemed to represent through her slight frame the entire mystery of womanhood. For a moment, Louisa forgot what she’d come about. She bowed her head and blinked back tears.

“Oh, Mother. I miss you so.”

For what she estimated afterward had been a whole minute, there was silence. When Amelia Newlove’s voice came again, the tone was altered, a bleak authority entered into it.

“Death is near,” she said.

Louisa felt a chill that began at the base of her spine and spread through her body. Her teeth began to chatter.

“What shall I do? Tell me, Mother, please.”

“The way is far,” said the voice. “Make haste, Izzy.”

Mr. Hamilton closed his mouth and shuddered. He dropped Louisa’s hands and began mopping at his brow with a spotted handkerchief, sweat pouring from him, drops scattering like rain from his chin and cheeks as if he had undergone a great exertion. Taking a swig from the pint pot on the table, he cleared his throat. “Clear as day,” he said, his own voice returned to him in all its gruff depth. “I take it you heard her?”

“I heard her.” Louisa’s throat was so dry she could barely utter the words. “I almost wish I had not.”

“No cause to take fright, Mrs. Heron. Death’s always near, when you come to think of it. You walk on bones in London.”

“But what shall I do? What does it mean?”

“That’s for you to decide.”

Mr. Hamilton shifted his chair back from the table and stood up. Something about him had altered. His lined forehead appeared not a map of other realms but the face of a tired man, and the coat looked shabby, faintly ridiculous, as if he’d stumbled out from a fancy-dress party. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse.

“Awful foggy, ain’t it? They’ve suspended the shipping again.”

Louisa handed over the half-sovereign, climbed the wooden steps, and let herself out. Pulling her wrap over her shoulders as she closed the door behind her, drawing it up around her cheeks, she groped her way back along Antigua Street toward the terminus.

She had a peculiar feeling of recognizing nothing, of the way back being different from the way out, as if already she had traveled far from everything that was known to her.

THREE

Harriet lay back on a pile of feather pillows, staring at the window. The fog hung like a dirty curtain on the outside of the glass, and in his basket by the fire, the dog snored softly, sounding as if he were far away. Shifting her gaze, Harriet looked about the room at the familiar faded white of the walls, the dark wooden footboard of her bed. The attic bedroom had been the night nursery; Harriet had slept in it for as long as she could remember, had spent long stretches of her life confined to the same bed looking at the sky.

Whether she was well or ill, she thought of it as a sickroom. The air weighed more than air in other rooms; it bore the memory of the repeated burning of niter papers, fumigant powders of belladonna or carbolic, stramonium cigarettes made from the dried roots and stems of thorn apple that she was required to inhale, alternated with vaporous basins of menthol, camphor, and eucalyptus, emergency whiffs of chloroform from a sprinkled handkerchief. The smoke and steam cleared but the odors lingered on, clinging to each other in the walls and blankets, the old red rug that waited in front of the tiny fireplace.

A quill was poking into her back through her nightgown and she shifted her position on the pillows. Her breath was shallow and her heart still beat fast. She could feel it thudding away, scurrying along like a friend running ahead on a pavement, in more of a hurry than she was herself. Harriet had read once that every person was born with an allotted number of heartbeats. That when the count was reached, the person died. Her heart was hastening toward the total, careless of the cost to her in days.

All winter, she’d urged Dr. Grammaticas to recommend going away. Every time she raised the subject, he refused. It would be dangerous. Reckless. The death of her, perhaps. Then, the previous morning, he had arrived early. After he’d examined her, he sat down on the chair drawn up to her bed and looked at her with his soft brown eyes.

“What is it, Grams?”

“It’s you, Hattie.”

“What of me?”

“There is a thickening of the membranes of the bronchial tubes. Percussion of your chest reveals emphysematous hyper-resonance. Forced respiration produces rhonchus and sibilus.”

“Speak to me in English.”

“Your condition’s worse, Harriet. It saddens your old doctor to see it.”

Harriet pressed her hand against her chest. The bones under her skin felt sharp and light as wishbones, lifting slightly as she breathed in, falling almost imperceptibly as she breathed out, the effort unmatched by the movement. No one knew better than she the state of her health. This winter, more than ever before, she’d wearied of the struggle for breath; no one wanted to hear that the thought that she could cease to struggle, could one day stop breathing, was a comfort to her. Only Dr. Grammaticas nodded his old head when she told him that she was tired.

“Help me, then,” she said. “Help me to get away.”

“Where did you want to go? Bournemouth? Bath?”

“D’you mean it?” She pulled herself up on the pillows.

“Boscombe? Broadstairs?”

Harriet took hold of his liver-spotted hand with both of hers and kissed it. Shook her head.

“Where, then? Menton? The Riviera?”

“Far—” She broke off in a fit of coughing. “Farther.”

Dr. Grammaticas removed the rubber tubes of his stethoscope from around his neck and stowed the instrument in a case, fitting its curves to the empty, waiting spaces.

“I’ve a nephew in Sydney.”

“Egypt. I want to go to Egypt.”

The doctor barked with laughter. “Sightseeing amid the tombs.” Closing the brass clasp of the case, he sat down again, resting his elbows on his knees. “A tonic climate might benefit you, Harriet, but it’s risky. My opinion is that you’re not well enough to travel.”

“I’m not well enough to stay here.”

“You may rally, when spring comes. You have before.”

Harriet met his eyes with her own and the doctor looked away first.

“All right. I’ll do my best for you.”

He stood up and when he spoke again his voice was loud, filled with artificial cheer.

“Meanwhile, rest! Do you hear me, young lady? Rest.”

•  •  •

Groping under the bed, Harriet picked up a book. The corners and spine were bound in leather the color of fallen leaves, the nap worn to the texture of peach skin. Lying back on the pillows, she balanced the volume on her knees and opened it. Her books were her medicine. It was her books that kept her alive.

Great-Uncle Redvers had instructed in his will that his collection on ancient Egypt be passed to Harriet’s three older brothers. Not one of them was interested. The books remained on a high shelf in the study, dusted and unread, until the day Harriet happened to retrieve one and began turning the pages.

In it, she found a dictionary of the hieroglyphics used in the writing of the ancient Egyptians. Looking at the tiny images of birds and beetles, stars and moons, legs walking, Harriet was entranced. The pictures were thousands of years old yet many were as recognizable as if she’d drawn them in her own hand. There were horned vipers and serpents, sickle moons and sun disks, stems of lotus flowers.

Some of the meanings were transparent. A man with upraised arms meant
to praise
, an eye
to see
. Others could not have been guessed at: a bird with a human face represented the
ba
, the aspect of a person that made them different from all others. Immediately, the
ba
bird became one of Harriet’s favorites.

Losing herself in the dictionary, Harriet had a sense of having come home. The ancient Egyptians had named things that still needed naming; there were dogs and cats, sparrows and swallows, loaves of bread. They depicted the male phallus, a woman in childbirth, prisoners of war. And in their language, breath was life, the gift of the gods, symbolized by the ankh
,
a cross with a rounded top.

She began to make up her own symbols. A cup-shaped crinoline for her mother, who in those days had still worn them, and for her father a sovereign bearing the profile of Queen Victoria. A four-fingered hand for Rosina, who’d lost a digit in childhood to an iron gate. Boots for her three brothers, in three sizes. A stethoscope for Dr. Grammaticas.

Aunt Yael had a symbol straight from the hieroglyphs. The drooping ostrich feather stood for Maat, goddess of truth, and symbolized balance and justice. To Harriet, the feather represented the bonnet festooned with bedraggled gray plumes that her aunt wore winter and summer alike.

As Harriet grew older, she understood more clearly that the pictures did not always stand for themselves. Some indicated sounds or had a general meaning. Over the years, the signs she devised for herself became more opaque. An open book signified a kind of escape for which in English there was no satisfactory term. She drew narrowed eyes for envy and weeping ones for grief, official, justifiable grief such as that felt after a death. A head resting at a slant on a hand for the other kind, the kind she mainly felt, sadness that had no cause, that crept into her like the fog crept into the house. She used the symbols, mixed with words, in her journals to ensure no other eyes could read what she wrote.