The Sacred River (25 page)

Harriet’s expression changed.

“I would like to but I cannot, Mr. Soane. I’m working on the west bank, assisting at a dig.”

“Are you really?” Soane raised his dark eyebrows and a smirk traveled across his features. “No doubt you are a great help, Miss Heron, but I daresay your expertise can be spared for one day.”

Harriet looked puzzled.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure that it can. But Dr. Woolfe expects me.”

Soane reached to the ashtray on the reception desk, twisting out the stub of his cigar, smiling again.

“The good doctor will excuse you, I am certain, for the sake of friends who have journeyed for a fortnight to see you.”

Harriet stooped and unfastened the lead from the dog’s collar. She stroked the top of his head.

“I suppose that missing one day won’t matter,” she said, straightening up, removing the pencil from her hair. She looked at Louisa, her face still flushed. “If Mother agrees, that is.”

Louisa had suspected it in Alexandria, had her fears fueled in Cairo when they met the Coxes. It was being confirmed before her very eyes. Harriet thought herself in love. Her heart ached for her daughter and she felt a murderous impulse toward Eyre Soane, for his cruelty.

“Harriet, I—”

“You’ll come too, I hope, Mrs. Heron.” Eyre Soane’s expression was bland and pleasant, his voice persuasive. “I’ll call for you both in the morning at five.”

“If Harriet wishes it, Mr. Soane.” Gripping her skirts in one hand, holding to the banister with the other, Louisa began to ascend the stairs. “Come, Harriet. We shall be late for dinner.”

•  •  •

At midnight, Louisa knocked on the door of Harriet’s room. She entered without waiting for an answer and sat down on the edge of the bed. Dressed in her white nightgown, Harriet was sitting in the chair, her journal on her lap, her inks out. At Louisa’s entrance, she closed the book and screwed down the lid on a red ink bottle. “I thought I heard you moving around,” Louisa said. “Can’t you sleep?”

Harriet shook her head. Louisa hesitated. “Harriet?”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Mr. Soane . . . Do you care for him?”

By the light of the bright, quick-burning Egyptian candles, Harriet began brushing her hair in long strokes, the strands rising to the brush, crackling with electricity.

“Yes, Mother. I do care for him.”

“He isn’t a suitable acquaintance. Please believe me.”

Harriet dropped the brush on the floor.

“You know nothing about him.”

“Please believe me, Harriet,” Louisa said again. “I know everything that I need to know.”

“You don’t want me to have a suitor.” Harriet walked across the floor and stood in front of her mother. “Why don’t you want my happiness? Why do you always try to prevent it?”

“That isn’t fair.” Louisa jumped to her feet, feeling as if Harriet had struck her. “Your health and happiness are all I want.” Her voice softened. “Don’t let us quarrel, Harriet. Do you need a glass of water?”

“I need to be allowed to live, Mother. That is all I need.”

Louisa stared at her, at the long shining tresses on the white shoulders of her nightgown, the pinkness of her complexion. Harriet had lost the elderly look she’d had since girlhood. She at last looked like what she was, a young woman.

Opening her mouth to speak, closing it again, unable to think of what she might possibly say, Louisa left the room. She would speak to Eyre Soane. She would impart the knowledge that would cause him to desist, to leave Harriet alone. She would do it as soon as she had the opportunity.

THIRTY-NINE

Harriet held the dog more tightly on her lap as her donkey brayed in the fresh chill of the dawn. She was glad of the near darkness. It made it easier to think. Her pleasure at the arrival of Eyre Soane was marred by her unease at breaking her promise to Dr. Woolfe. Riding toward Karnak, along the half-ruined avenue of sphinxes, her mount led along by the donkey boy, she couldn’t shake off the feeling she was heading in the wrong direction. Eyre Soane and Jim Simpson were ahead and on either side of her were Louisa and Mrs. Simpson.

“I’ve been so impatient to meet you,” said Effie Simpson. “Eyre has told us so much about you.”

“I wasn’t aware that Mr. Soane knew much about my daughter,” Louisa said.

Mrs. Simpson seemed at a loss. “I hope we’ll be able to get to know each other better, now we’re here,” she said eventually.

Against her wishes, Mrs. Simpson had been persuaded to ride a donkey. It had taken some time to convince her that there were no carriages in Luxor, news she had greeted with openmouthed disbelief until Louisa suggested they either proceed or cancel the proposed visit to the temple. Harriet half hoped that the plan would be called off, but Mrs. Simpson had finally allowed her husband to lift her onto the back of a donkey.

They reached the entrance to the temple, and when Fouad hurried forward to help Harriet dismount, Eyre Soane flicked the glowing tip of a cigar through the air and dismissed him, taking hold of Harriet’s hands as she slid down from the saddle.

“We were beginning to think you were lost,” he said, squeezing her fingers, keeping hold of them too long in the concealing darkness.

Breathing in the familiar, mixed odors of sandalwood and cigar smoke, startled by Eyre Soane’s proximity, his solid physicality, Harriet felt light-headed. She knew Mr. Soane better as an idea in her head than as a man. She pulled away her hands as a dozen or more Egyptians rose from mats on the ground in front of the temple and hurried toward the visitors, winding their turbans while they came, offering their services in a mixture of English and Arabic.

The men crowded around them, thrusting forward scarabs and shards of pottery for inspection. They were skinny fellows, of medium height or less, all dressed alike in gowns that had grown thin and ragged, gray with use.

“Stand back, you blackguards,” said Mr. Simpson, getting in front of Mrs. Simpson and thrusting out his chest. “Get away.”

“They are guides, Mr. Simpson,” Harriet said, collecting herself. “They mean no harm. This man showed Mother and me around a week or two ago. His name is Abdullah.”

“They’re all Abdullahs,” said Mr. Simpson, lowering his fists. “Abdullahs or Mohammeds.”

Harriet glanced around for Fouad, who was standing at a little distance.
Abdullah
meant
Servant of God
, he’d told her, and she thought it a beautiful name. More beautiful than
Jim
. The other men retreated and Abdullah held out his handful of souvenirs—scarabs and
shabti
s, the small figures of servants placed in tombs to serve their masters and mistresses in the afterlife.

Dr. Woolfe had warned Harriet against buying what the guides called antikis. It was theft, he said, and anyway, most of the best-looking ones were fakes, made locally, then wrapped in bread and forced down the throats of geese. They came,
ach
, how could he put it, out the other end, looking two thousand years old.

Mrs. Simpson took a shabti from Abdullah’s hand. “Is it a doll?” she said.

“They put them in the tombs, Mrs. Simpson. To carry out the work for the dead.”

Mrs. Simpson shrieked and dropped the figure on the sandy ground, wiping her hand on her skirt.

“You might have warned me.”

“Do you care to have it, Miss Heron?” said Eyre Soane as Abdullah picked it up.

“Oh, no. Thank you.”

The party set off behind their guide toward the entrance of the temple. The sun was still below the horizon and the light appeared blue, the colors—of the stone, the trees, Mrs. Simpson’s sun hat—oddly bleached, like a tinted photograph. Entering the Hypostyle Hall, Harriet felt the same sense of shock as on the first time she saw it, at the grandeur of the temple and the scale of its ruin. Sand, mud, and rubbish were banked up eight or ten feet high around the bases of the pillars. Some of the columns had keeled over; great chunks of stone from the roof lay like tombstones on the ground.

Mr. and Mrs. Simpson were ahead, talking to Louisa. Reaching for Harriet’s hand, Eyre Soane drew her behind one of the massive pillars. He stood in front of her, looking at her intently.

“I set off as soon as I received your summons, Miss Heron.”

“Summons?”

“Once I knew you longed to see me, I came as soon as I could.”

Harriet felt her face warming at the reminder of the words of her note. It was true that she had summoned him, not through the note but through the spell she had written, the picture she’d drawn of him with his paintbrush. Now that he had come, she felt confused. He seemed to expect something of her and she didn’t know what it could be.

“I don’t suppose you came just to see me, Mr. Soane,” she said. “Did you?”

From the other side of the pillar, Louisa’s voice rang through the still air.

“Harriet! Abdullah has something to show us.”

The sun grew stronger as the minutes passed, the light altering from blue to pink, to the luminous crimson glow that the ancient Egyptian priests must have experienced as they made the ritual sacrifices of roasted meat and wine, burned the frankincense that they considered the breath of the gods. They walked on through a series of pylons, across open courtyards and around the maze of columns and obelisks. The scale of the temple gave Harriet a sense of peace. Mr. Soane and his friends had come to see the antiquities, not her. She owed him nothing. She would return to the dig the following day and explain to Dr. Woolfe what had happened.

Mrs. Simpson was walking in front of her, wearing white leather pumps under a fashionably short walking skirt; the narrow footprints she left in the dust reminded Harriet of the story of Monsieur Mariette, the great French Egyptologist, opening up a tomb in the desert and finding in it the footprints of the workers who had sealed it behind themselves more than three thousand years earlier. She considered telling Mrs. Simpson about him and decided against it.

They both stopped to examine a line of hieroglyphs—a lotus flower, a bowl, a pair of walking legs—carved in a granite wall. The symbols were perfect, as clear and distinct as if they had been chiseled out overnight.

“Soanie says you’re an expert on all this,” Mrs. Simpson said.

“Not an expert but I’m interested. You see? This vulture here symbolizes protection, like a mother.” Harriet traced the bird’s puffed-up chest and small head with her finger. “I think it’s wonderful that they can communicate with us, over three thousand years later.”

“How can a vulture be a mother?” said Mrs. Simpson. She yawned, covering her mouth with her hand. “Pardon me, Miss Heron. I’m not usually an early riser.”

The party reached the edge of the great rectangular lake, the symbol of the eternal ocean, where Amun’s priests had purified themselves. Eyre Soane once again stood beside Harriet.

“Do you admire the temple, Mr. Soane?” she said.

He made a gesture encompassing the whole site.

“Sublime. But I’ve seen it all before.” He lowered his voice. “It is you that I have come for, Miss Heron. Tomorrow we can begin.”

“Begin what?” she said, feeling dull and stupid, starting to be dazed by the heat.

“The painting, Miss Heron. Have you forgotten?”

“Oh, of course. I haven’t forgotten, Mr. Soane. But I must go to the dig tomorrow. I should have been there today.”

“I thought we had an agreement.”

“We did. We do. But . . .”

“Harriet,” Louisa called.

Eyre kicked a stone into the water as Harriet crossed back over a stretch of open ground and joined the others, who were sitting in the shade of a statue of a king, his false beard carefully shaped.

“That’s a corker,” Mr. Simpson pronounced, tipping back his head, aiming his wife’s opera glasses at the statue. He wiped his face on a handkerchief. “Look at the size of it. Remarkable!”

“Remarkable!” echoed Mrs. Simpson as Mr. Simpson rolled up his sleeves, climbed onto the plinth at the base of the statue, and began to carve his name.

Eyre Soane was walking around the edge of the lake, hands thrust into his pockets, smoke rising over his head in the clear air. Harriet wanted to go after him, explain that she had not forgotten about the painting but, in full view of the others, with Louisa watching her, she couldn’t. She sat on the toppled pillar, half listening to Louisa’s conversation with Mrs. Simpson about the news from England, while Mr. Simpson carried on with his laborious task, scratching his initials in thin, shallow lines.

By the time he’d finished the inscription, dated it May 1882, the sun was high overhead. Harriet was surprised to be reminded that it was May already, that they had been away for four months. The weeks had passed quickly but the span since they’d left London seemed to Harriet an eternity.

FORTY