The Sacred River (5 page)

“Are you unwell?” said a voice.

It was the woman she’d seen earlier, alone now, picking her way down the wide steps from the deck. Harriet shook her head.

“I’m only catching my breath.”

“Pardon me, I thought you looked a little pale.” The woman reached the bottom of the steps and stooped to pat the dog. “What an adorable fellow.”

She rose, two pearls swinging on fine gold chains from her earlobes as her blue eyes scanned Harriet’s face, her high-necked bodice, then ran down over the robust skirt and reached Harriet’s feet, shod in flat boots; heels were out of the question for a female of Harriet’s height, Louisa said.

Putting her head on one side, the woman held out a gloved hand.

“I’m Mrs. Cox. Sarah Cox.”

“Pleased to meet you.” Harriet extended her own bare hand. She felt the softness of Mrs. Cox’s kid glove and the firmness and quickness of the hand inside it as it squeezed rather than shook her own, as if conveying some message of sympathy. “My name’s Harriet Heron,” she said, stiffly. Harriet was quick to detect pity and disliked it.

“Are you alone, Miss Heron?”

“I’m traveling with my mother. And my aunt.”

“How pleasant for you.” Mrs. Cox smiled. “I’m on my honeymoon.” Mrs. Cox looked about the same age as Harriet yet she was an adult woman, traveling with her husband. Next to her, Harriet felt as if she were an outsized and overgrown girl. She was twenty-three, but might as well have been twelve years old. Her chest tightened and the familiar struggle for air began to make itself felt more strongly.

“Please excuse me,” she said, picking up the dog. “I must go back to my cabin.”

SIX

“
In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life . . .”

Aunt Yael perched at the tiny table, her knees twisted round to one side, reading aloud from Revelation. She’d announced on the train her intention to use the time on board ship to persevere with her reading of the Bible. Since the death of her mother, she’d read it through five times and was close to completing the sixth cycle.

“And what will you do then?” Louisa had asked. “When you reach the end?”

“Start again, dear,” Yael had answered. “What else.”

It was the third day of the voyage and all three women were feeling queasy from the movement of the steamer. Louisa reclined on the bottom bunk, leafing through the pages of a magazine, and Harriet lay on the top one, holding her journal. The journal had arrived in the post a month before Christmas, sent from Penang. Aunt Anna, her mother’s youngest sister, traveled the world with her husband, Dr. Lucas St. Clair, establishing missions to sailors in foreign ports. She sent Harriet notebooks from whichever country she found herself in and this one was the most beautiful yet, bound in soft leather in a brilliant red, its pages bearing within their weave flattened shapes of petals and leaves. It had a red-ribbon place marker and could be closed up by a pair of fine leather ties of the same color.

At first, Harriet hadn’t written in the book. Feeling that no words could match its thick, expectant pages, she left it blank and new, occasionally turning it over in her hands, opening it to breathe in the sour, woody scent of the paper, returning again and again to an idea she had that excited her and frightened her at the same time.

The fifth volume of Bunsen’s great work on Egypt’s place in universal history contained Samuel Birch’s translation of a funeral ritual that he called the Book of the Dead. The ritual consisted of a set of spells and instructions that the ancient Egyptians had used for defeating death. If successfully followed, they believed, the magic ensured that the
ka,
or spirit, of the departed would be able to emerge from the tomb each day to hunt once more in the fields of reeds, dance again to the music of harps, train monkeys to pluck figs.

Harriet had been forced to contemplate her own death since she first became ill, when she was seven years old. If she had to die, that was the kind of eternal life she wanted. The English heaven had never appealed to her. Sometimes, comparing it to the one the ancient Egyptians had lived, she wondered if even the English life appealed to her.

The Egyptian spells were written on papyrus, by scribes with reed pens and palettes of red and black ink. The dead kept their instructions close; the scrolls were buried with the bodies, on the breast or at the side, between the legs or feet. Some people were buried with the texts unfurled, pressed against their chests under the bandages used to preserve their bodies.

Harriet had persuaded Rosina to buy her a bottle of red ink. She wanted to write her own spells, not for when she was dead, but to help her in her life. In the new book, she had her papyrus. The idea kept pressing at the edges of her mind, occurring to her at odd moments, demanding to be heard, but she put off carrying it out, fearing that it might be blasphemous, that the spells might succeed or that they might not succeed, she hardly knew which. Late one December night, with the London fog lying low and heavy outside, she got out her pens and inks.

The Egyptians had written their magic for the dead, to help them past tests of knowledge and judgments, into the state in which they were considered worthy of eternal life, their hearts weighed against the feather of Maat and found true. Harriet wanted to live before she died. It was life she longed for and it was life that her illness was denying her. Listening to the deep slumber of the household, the soft, interrupting rasp of her own breath, she opened the journal. Across the middle of the first pristine page, using red ink like the scribes of ancient Egypt, to give the words extra power, she wrote the title.

Harriet didn’t want what most young women wished for from life. Her dream was to see for herself the tombs of the ancient Egyptians and study the hieroglyphs carved and painted by their hands. And if, one day or night, she was no longer able to continue the fight for breath, she wanted to die there, in Luxor. Above all, she did not wish to end her days in the room in which she’d spent almost all her life.

Wiping the nib, dipping the pen into the black ink, she turned to the next page and began a column of pictures. The first was of the house at Cloudesley Crescent; its five stories stood for home. The next was of an open book, her symbol of escape, followed by a pair of legs walking, the hieroglyph for movement. Below that, she shaped the rounded lines of a steamship, its chimney smoking, and next, she drew herself, a head taller than others, her hair in crinkled locks down her shoulders, her feet flat and pointing forward, like ancient Egyptian feet, certain of their direction. Then her name, enclosed in a cartouche or circle, like the ancient Egyptian royals’.
Harriet
was written in sounds, followed by the heron hieroglyph.

In the second column, she drew the coastline of Egypt, flat, dotted with windmills as she had read that it was. For health and life, she drew Hathor, daughter of the sun god, Ra, and goddess of pleasure and enjoyment, associated with life and laughter. Hathor stood too for that love between men and women of which Harriet knew nothing, feared that she might never experience. Hathor was straight-spined and almond-eyed, the sun disk balanced on her head between two long cow’s horns.

For death, if she were to die, Harriet drew herself again, lying on the ground in an Egyptian rock tomb, with her hair fanned out around her, holding her book to her chest with her left hand, lines of lotus flowers painted on the wall behind her and above them the protective eye of the god Horus.

Finally, she drew a hand holding out an ankh, the symbol of breath. She laid down the pen and looked at the spell. Her magic was to ensure that she would reach Luxor. That she would live there and if she could not live, then she would die there. It was complete. Blotting the ink, she closed the book and secured its red leather ties.

She’d kept the journal close ever since. Slept with it under her pillow and carried it by day in a cotton pocket tied around her waist. Louisa said that it made her look like a bluestocking. Lying on her bunk in the cabin, Harriet undid the ties around its covers and for the first time looked again at her magic. She’d hardly dared to believe, when she wrote it, that it might be effective. And yet she was here, on her way. Closing the book again, shutting her eyes, she let the ever-present slosh and roar of the sea, the cries of a child in the next cabin, the murmur of her aunt’s voice, wash over her.

And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works.

SEVEN

“What’re you going to Egypt for?” Mrs. Cox asked. “If you didn’t have to?”

“My doctor believes the climate will benefit me. And I have always wanted to go there.”

“Why?”

Harriet felt for her journal, gripped the top of it between her fingertips. She paused before she answered, steadying herself by breathing into her stomach.

“I was a sickly child, Mrs. Cox. From a young age, I read books. The ancient Egyptians, their writings and pictures, have been my consolation. They were for me what fairy tales were for other girls.”

Mrs. Cox raised her elegant eyebrows. Since their first meeting, Harriet had seen Mrs. Cox every day. In the afternoons, while Louisa rested in the cabin, Yael joined the Bible-study group in a corner of the dining saloon, and Mrs. Cox’s husband occupied himself with reports of the stock exchange in old newspapers, Harriet and Mrs. Cox strolled on the top deck, weaving between the thick cobwebs of rigging, stopping sometimes to rest on the curved back-to-back wooden benches or to watch other passengers play a game of quoits.

If Harriet was short of breath, or too fatigued for walking, as today, she and Mrs. Cox remained in the grand saloon, at a table they’d made their own.

Mrs. Cox wore a different outfit every day. She was dressed in a raspberry-colored gown; a panel of ruched pink satin stretched from the high neck of the dress under her chin, down to the floor, and gave her the look of a curvaceous and elegant mermaid, her stomach rounded under the glove-like fit of the gown.

“I suppose you will look for a husband at the same time?” she said.

“I’m not looking for a husband.”

“Why ever not?”

Harriet couldn’t immediately answer. It was Louisa’s oft-repeated belief that Harriet was unlikely to marry. That with her delicate health, her ill fortune in the matter of her looks, the best place for her was by her mother’s side. Often, as she said it, Louisa reached out and touched Harriet, a gesture upward to her shoulder which Harriet experienced as some form of arrest. She felt sorry more on Louisa’s behalf than her own that she’d inherited her father’s red-gold hair, his blush-prone complexion, and his pale gray eyes, in place of her mother’s dark, dramatic beauty, still evident even now. It was a disappointment to Louisa that her daughter didn’t resemble her.

Harriet shrugged.

“I suppose it’s because I’m not well. Why are you going to Egypt, Mrs. Cox?”

“My husband has business interests in Cairo. He decided we should take our honeymoon there. He said we could kill two birds with one stone.”

“How delightful.”

“I wanted to go to Italy,” Mrs. Cox said, turning her head in a sudden movement that caused her earrings to swing. “But they are already well supplied with parts for flour mills.”

Harriet felt uncomfortable. Mrs. Cox surely couldn’t be being disloyal to her new husband. Looking around for Zebedee Cox, Harriet spotted Yael, sitting on the far side of the saloon, her feet in their polished brown boots braced on the floor, her hands gripping the seat on either side of her. Yael nodded in their direction and Harriet waved at her.

“She looks like a fish out of water,” Mrs. Cox said.

“My aunt wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. She’d be at home in St. John’s Wood, pouring a whisky for Grandfather on the dot of six, or going off to her refuge for fallen women. My father made her come with us. She’s a spinster, so she couldn’t refuse.”

The floor below them rolled and they both leaned sideways in order to stay upright. Mrs. Cox looked queasy. Harriet enjoyed the sudden shifts to the perpendicular, the capriciousness of the horizon. It seemed to say that change was possible, that it could occur at any time, unexpectedly.