The Mistress of Nothing (8 page)

“But you are not a slave.”

I laughed. “A lady’s maid is a special, privileged position. I stay close by my Lady. She needs me to attend to her most intimate …”

“I know she needs you, but …”

“It would not be appropriate for me to marry. I couldn’t carry on as lady’s maid. I would no longer be able to fulfill my duties.”

“I am married, Miss Naldrett, and I fulfill my duties. And a woman must have a husband, children. Who will care for you when you are old and frail?”

I had no answer. I had never dared consider my position in this way. As with the stays and the heavy English clothes I had kept wearing, washing, mending, and wearing again, it had not occurred to me to do otherwise. I am accustomed to doing as I am told; to do otherwise would be frightening. I spoke carefully: “I will be with my Lady until she no longer needs me.” Then I changed the subject.

“Mr. Abu Halaweh,” I began.

“Yes, Miss Naldrett?”

“I need—” I stopped myself.

He glanced at me. We continued through the village.

“I would like—” I stopped again.

“You would like?”

“I would like to buy—” I stopped, and looked across the dusty passageway to where a woman was emerging from a doorway. She was dressed in typical Upper Egyptian style, in a simple garment draped so that it covered her body, fastened at her shoulders, secured at her waist; as I watched, the woman pulled a piece of the cloth up from where it hung down her back and covered her head neatly.

“You want to buy a maidservant?”

“No!” I laughed and Mr. Abu Halaweh looked at me, amused and puzzled. “I would like to dress as she is dressed. My clothes, Mr. Abu Halaweh, I am always too hot in my English dress.”

“You want to dress like a
fellah?”

“No, but—you’ve seen Lady Duff Gordon and what she is wearing.”

“Sitti
Duff Gordon is wearing men’s clothing.” Mr. Abu Halaweh smiled. I could see he was amused and only slightly disapproving.

“My Lady will do as she sees fit. But what do Egyptian ladies—what I mean is, where can I buy—”

Mr. Abu Halaweh held up his hand to silence me. “You should dress as my wife does, Miss Naldrett. I will ask a woman in the village,” he said. “She will come and see you. It is better this way.”

And so it was that Umm Hanafi and her two daughters arrived at the French House one morning, their donkey laden with baskets of cloth. In the salon my Lady lay back on a divan that was covered with great soft cushions and pillows to watch while I was measured and prodded and draped. Mr. Abu Halaweh remained in the kitchen, out of sight, but within hearing, translating when necessary, while the women discussed my hair (“so fine, so straight”), my skin (“so clear, so white”), my figure (“so tall, so strong”), my English dress (“so hot! so heavy!”). They stripped me down to my underwear, which they studied with great incredulity; my Lady said, “Those are the most heavily repaired and restitched knickers I have ever seen, Sally.” Mr. Abu Halaweh translated from the kitchen and everyone laughed, including me, who hadn’t the heart to remind my Lady that what I wore under my clothes was what she had deemed no longer fit for her to wear under her own. I pulled my dress back on and went to my room to fetch the stays which Umm Hanafi and her daughters examined like three men of science given their first opportunity to handle a new species.

And then the process of re-dressing began. Mr. Abu Halaweh was told to fetch my Lady’s accounts notebook—she kept a careful tally of all household expenses—and a complete set of Egyptian lady’s clothes was ordered for me: two long, full shirts or tunics, one of colored crepe, the other black; two pairs of very wide trousers, tied around the hips and just below the knees, one in colored striped silk, the other in plain white muslin; one long dark outer vest, with long sleeves, buttoned up the middle to below the bosom, and one short outer vest to alternate, buttoned in the same manner; one embroidered shawl to tie around the waist; one long outer coat of blue velvet, called a
gibbeh.
“Surely I’ll be just as hot as ever with all of this on,” I wailed, but my Lady said, “Hush. You will look magnificent. You can peel off the layers as the temperature rises.” A
tarhah
to cover my head, and a pair of slippers in yellow morocco with high, pointed toes. I balked at the last piece, a long outer gown to be worn when I left the house to go to market, its sleeves also reaching to the floor—“No one covers up to this extent here in Luxor,” I said—but my Lady insisted we have it made. “You never know when we might need you to be able to move freely through the city without being seen to be European, Sally, to pass as Egyptian; this way, you’ll be able to accompany Omar, unnoticed.” I couldn’t imagine the circumstances in which such a thing would be necessary, but I did not continue to object. The walking cloak, the
tezyerah,
would be made of violet silk, and Umm Hanafi also insisted on including a veil. “And a new set of undergarments as well,” my Lady said, “please.”

I, who had never possessed a single item of new clothing in my entire life, looked at the gorgeous pile of fabric on the floor at my feet and, unable to speak, made a kind of involuntary noise in the back of my throat and, to my horror, began to cry. The three women stopped working and stared at me in wonder and consternation.

“What is it, Sally?” asked my Lady.

“I’m not—I won’t—you’ll have to take it out of my wages, my Lady.”

“Sally, I’m buying these things to give myself the pleasure of seeing you wear them. It’s the least I can do,” she said, “after all you do for me every day.” And that made me cry even more.

During the fitting, I had been able to examine Umm Hanafi and her daughters as closely as they, in turn, were examining me. Their black eyes were rimmed with kohl, their glossy black hair was done up in plaits, and they had intricate henna patterns tattooed on their hands and their feet. “Do you like them?” the elder daughter had asked, smiling and holding out her hand so I could look more closely, and I nodded, unsure of the correct reply. When the women were finished measuring and discussing, the elder daughter disappeared into the kitchen and reemerged carrying a bowl of henna paste. “Oh Sally, you must,” my Lady exclaimed, and before I could make up my mind whether or not it was a good idea, the girl had taken my hand and begun to paint a pattern of diamonds and stripes on it. Mr. Abu Halaweh emerged from where he had been sitting behind the door. “Now you are a true Egyptian, Miss Naldrett,” he said, smiling.

I
LEARNED TO READ WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN. MY MOTHER HAD
begun to teach me when I was young, but then my parents were taken from me. My Lady taught me, though I doubt she’d remember; she teaches all her household staff to read; she says it’s a practical skill no servant can do without. The Esher house was full of books—books in German and French as well as English, books my Lady had translated and published, as well as all the books she had ever read and, indeed, books she had not yet got around to reading. She was always surrounded by pens and ink and piles and piles of paper, even when she was ill. And here in Egypt, in place of her work as a translator, she has her letters home. Her letters home have become as important to her as any paid translation work might have been, and not just because they are her only true link to her beloved family; there is already talk of publishing them in book form one day.

I write to my sister, Ellen, in Alexandria twice a week, as she does me, and her letters are full of the British colony there and the Rosses’ life within it. Mr. and Mrs. Ross played bridge with this consul or that, Mrs. Ross hosted a wonderful supper party to which Mr. Ross’s colleagues at the bank were invited. Ellen fills me in on the gossip about what the other servants are getting up to, talk that I would have spurned had we been in England but that I find entertaining to read here, now that I myself am so far beyond gossip’s reach. Sometimes I find it hard to believe that my sister and I are living in the same country; it’s as though there exist two Egypts—the one my sister lives in, looking across the Mediterranean to Europe, and the one that my Lady and I inhabit, our gaze fixed firmly on the Nile.

We have only a few books here with us in the French House, and when a new parcel arrives from England, my Lady falls on it avidly. Whenever European guests come to call, and now that the season is upon us they do come to call, once or sometimes twice a week, my Lady begs them to leave behind whatever books they have with them, and so, in this way, the novels find their way to me. Recent acquisitions include the most recent books by the “three Georges” as my Lady calls them, her great friend George Meredith, George Eliot, and, indeed, Georges Sand, though I can’t read that one. When we were traveling we fell into the habit of sitting and reading together, for the companionship. My Lady liked to see what I was reading so that we could discuss it; I was forever having to implore her not to give away the plot. With the French and German novels, she used to summarize the stories to me as she read. I’d assumed that once we’d settled in Luxor the sessions would end; I had a household to run and plenty to be getting on with. But most afternoons, once she’d had her rest, I’d hear her call out for me. “Sally,” she’d say, then more loudly, “Sally! It’s time.”

When I entered her room I discovered she had put all of her many cushions (“You can never have too many cushions, my dear!” she’d say to me each time she spotted a new one to purchase in a market) into a great gorgeous pile on the floor, and she was sitting in the middle of it.

“I’m your new Pasha,” she declared. “The Sultana of Pillows. Sit, and read to me.”

So I sat, and we read, and this became our new habit. If I’d written home to our old Esher household and described this scene, no one would have believed me. But here I thought nothing of it.

Sometimes when it was my turn to read, my Lady would take it upon herself to brush my hair, which she claims is longer and darker than she could have thought possible: “Are you sure you weren’t an Egyptian in some former life?” she asks me. When Mr. Abu Halaweh brings us our tea, I don’t even try to get up to help him, the reading and the hair brushing make me feel so lazy. Some days my Lady tries to persuade him to sit with us but he always says the same thing, “Too busy.”

In the kitchen one day when we were clearing up after lunch I asked him why he never joined us in the salon. “My Lady would like it if you would sit with us for a while.” But as soon as I said it I saw how unlikely it was to happen.

He shook his head. “If I sat down with you and Lady Duff Gordon, I might never get up again.”

Our sojourn on the cushions ends when the men from the village begin to arrive for “my Luxor parliament,” as my Lady calls it, and I return to my duties. My life here in Luxor, now that we are settled, is much easier than my life as lady’s maid has ever been. There are no bedroom fires to attend to now that it is growing warm once again, and our conditions are so basic that all my duties are much lighter. My Lady’s clothes are simple to care for; she has kept to her preferred à la mode and favors the loose tunic and trousers exclusively. What our esteemed guests make of her attire is beyond me, but my Lady is comfortable and she breathes easily and that’s all that matters to me.

While the men and my Lady converse, Mr. Abu Halaweh not only provides a concise translation when I need it but also explains the content of the discussion to me. The political situation in Egypt is complex and changing rapidly and my Lady mines the men’s knowledge of it deeply, often provoking heated exchanges. The Khedive, Ismail Pasha, is a grand modernizer, and in England I heard Mrs. Ross speak of him as a true progressive in the Arab world; indeed, that is how the majority of
Frangi
—the Egyptian word for Europeans—see him. He has made great progress in modernizing the country’s railways, bridges, roads, and irrigation. However, here in Upper Egypt, the perspective is somewhat different, and we hear of the true cost of the Khedive’s monumental program: he subjects his people to the corvée, the lash, enforcing labor on his huge building projects with immense cruelty. His great ambition is concentrated on building the canal at Suez, to provide a shipping route between the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, thus linking Europe and the Far East and generating income for the country. Construction began more than three years ago, but it will take many more years to complete. However, this project, and others like it, is enormously expensive and requires a huge labor force. The
fellahin
are being abducted from their villages and forced to work; in some villages virtually all able-bodied men have been taken away, often for years, to work as slaves, without food or pay. All the young men who, under Mustafa Agha’s command, helped us move into the French House the day we arrived have gone away over the past few weeks. “But surely this must have been how the Great Pyramid itself was built,” my Lady says mildly one day. “I don’t condone it—far from it. But needs must, as they say.”

“Sitti
Duff Gordon,” says Sheikh Yusuf solemnly, “in ancient times workers labored with love and devotion for their Pharaoh and the promise of reward in the afterlife, but the Khedive inspires none of this loyalty.”