The Sacred River (7 page)

“Soane.” He raised his glass to her again. “Not an easy name to forget.”

“Come, Harriet,” Louisa repeated.

Calling the dog out from under the table, concealing her chop bone in her napkin, Harriet had no choice but to follow Louisa out of the saloon.

As she reached the sliding doors, Harriet glanced back at their table. The steward who had poured the wine now dabbed at the spilled wine with a napkin. Yael was eating pudding as if she were alone, her head bent over her dish. Eyre Soane sat upright in his chair, an unlit cigar between his lips, one ankle crossed over his knee. Mrs. Cox’s prediction made its way unbidden into Harriet’s mind and, as if he could read her thoughts, the painter turned and looked straight at her, his dark eyes fixing on her own gray ones. There was no doubt this time that it was she who attracted his attention.

Feeling her face begin to burn, Harriet hurried after her mother.

NINE

The wind blew a shower of spray against the porthole and the ship pitched. Under the pressure of Eyre Soane’s hand, the point of the pencil broke, a fragment of lead skidding across the page to the floor. He felt in his trouser pocket and found his penknife. Testing the sharpness of the blade across the pad of his thumb, he began to shave wood from lead with swift downward strokes.

The page where he’d been working lay open on the table. It was filled with the same portrait, repeated a dozen or more times. Each picture was different but the woman was recognizably the same, multiplied as if in a hall of mirrors. Her face was oval, pleasing in its regularity, and framed by curling hair. She was young in several sketches, in the middle years in some, and ageless in others. Here, her eyes were lowered, and here, raised as if in challenge or looking into the distance.

In every drawing, exaggerated to the point of caricature, one thing distinguished the woman. Her hairline was strikingly irregular. On the left side of the parting, the hair at the top of her forehead grew in a straight line. On the right side, it grew back in a pronounced widow’s peak.

In the final drawing, the woman’s head appeared shaven. Her face was reduced to its features—a straight nose, a well-shaped mouth—and above the large eyes the curiously asymmetrical line ran starkly across the top of her forehead.

Eyre had seen her at dinner on the first day of the voyage. He’d begun to feel a sense of sick unease familiar from his childhood, had wondered what prompted it as he pushed mutton around the plate. The curious hairline had caught his eye and as he returned to studying the woman, examined it further, he knew whose it was. She had aged, of course, was altered in every particular except that one and a way of carrying her head that was birdlike, inquisitive, and as if poised for flight.

With the sharpened pencil held in his fist like a dagger, Eyre began to score out the faces. By the time he’d finished, the paper was pitted and torn, the lead broken again, and all but one of the sketches obliterated. Only the picture that looked like a living skull remained.

Throwing aside his sketchbook, Eyre dropped the pencil and rose from his chair, rubbing condensation from the inside of a porthole. No moon or stars were visible outside and he couldn’t distinguish sea from sky. Lighting a cigar, walking up and down the cabin, he remembered the way the younger Miss Heron had looked at him across the dining saloon and he smiled.

Louisa, once she’d understood who he was, had been guarded; even her spinster sister-in-law had appeared to regard him with suspicion. But the girl was open, her eagerness for life transparent.

What he would do with her willingness, he didn’t yet know. Only that he would make full use of it.

The ship rolled in a great lurching movement that made him feel as if his stomach rose in his body. Opening the cabin door, he poked out his head and shouted for the steward. The passageway was empty; his call went unanswered. Eyre absorbed these facts with equanimity. Other than escaping the English winter, making some desultory additions to his Oriental portfolio, he’d had no particular purpose in setting out for Egypt. Now he had found one. By sheer good fortune, he had the opportunity to wreak a revenge he’d awaited all his life.

TEN

Seawater ran over the wooden boards of the weather deck like a tide flooding a beach. The pair of rattan chairs in which Harriet and Mrs. Cox sometimes sat had been overturned, their curved rockers upended. Sailors were lowering the remaining sails, hurrying and grim-faced, some with ropes around their waists that secured them to the masts.

Harriet stared as a crate of live chickens floated toward her. She’d woken from a dream of falling, found Louisa sitting down below on her bunk, gripping its sides, her head hung over a bowl on her lap. Yael’s bed was empty, the pillow straightened and blankets folded. Dash slid to and fro across the floor of the cabin with the movement of the ship, whimpering as he went.

“Can you find Yael, Harriet? I’d go myself but—” Louisa began to retch.

With Dash under one arm, Harriet had made her way up the iron steps, clinging to the rail with her free hand. There was no sign of the prayer group through the window of the saloon. She’d come up to the weather deck on impulse, to see if Yael was here and to see the storm for herself.

“Get below, miss,” a sailor called to her over the roar of the wind. “You’ll fetch up in the briny.”

Gripping the banister, she made her way back down the stairs. At the bottom was Zebedee Cox, his collar askew and his hair uncombed.

“Rough, ain’t it?” he shouted. “Damned queasy-making.”

“Yes,” she shouted back. “How is Mrs. Cox?”

“Indisposed. As a matter of fact, I was looking for you. She asked if you’d be kind enough to—” Water streamed down the polished stairs, soaking Harriet’s boots, filling Mr. Cox’s trouser cuffs. “To call in on her, Miss Heron.”

Harriet’s chest felt tight and she was shivering. She had to get back to Louisa and she still hadn’t found Yael.

“I cannot, Mr. Cox, I’m looking for my aunt.”

“I saw her just a minute ago, on her way back to the cabin,” he said. “My wife begged you to come to her.”

Harriet pictured Mrs. Cox. She knew what it was to be ill and to need someone by you.

“All right,” she said. “Take me to her.”

The Coxes were traveling first class; their cabin was on the port side of the middle deck, off a small, private sitting area shared with two other cabins. Mr. Cox opened the door and ushered Harriet inside. The cabin was bigger than their own, longer and wider, with a padded seat along the inner wall. Brushes and combs and clothes lay on the floor in disarray and a pair of satin shoes tumbled in a corner with the movement of the ship. In the gloom, Harriet didn’t immediately see Sarah Cox.

When she did, she cried out in surprise. Mrs. Cox was sitting on a chair wedged up against the curved wall at the end of one of the beds, bent double, her arms clutched over her stomach. Her hair was undressed, tied in a ribbon on the nape of her neck, and her face looked gray.

“You’re ill.” Harriet crossed the cabin, kneeled beside her. “Whatever is the matter?”

Mrs. Cox wiped her forehead on her sleeve and sat up in the chair. “I’m sorry, Harriet. I didn’t know who else to ask for.”

She raised the salts clutched in her hand to her nose. “I’m in trouble,” she said. “Awful trouble.”

Without warning, she began to shriek, making a series of staccato cries as if she were being murdered. Harriet felt terrified.

“Mrs. Cox? What is it?”

The cries subsided and she sat up again, her eyes wide; perspiration was running down her face and neck, soaking her delicate nightdress. The ship pitched violently and Harriet grabbed the back of the chair.

“You must fetch help, Mr. Cox,” she said, raising her voice over the thumps and cries that were going up from nearby cabins. “Your wife needs a doctor.”

Zebedee Cox was still by the door, braced against the frame. “I’m not calling any doctor,” he said. “Keep your voice down.” There was a knock on the door and Mr. Cox opened it partway.

Harriet caught a glimpse of one of the crew, outside, saluting. “Pardon me, sir,” he said. “Got to fit the deadlight. Over the porthole. Won’t take a jiffy and it’ll keep Mrs. Cox safe.”

“There’s no need,” Mr. Cox said. “We shall be quite all right.”

“But, sir—”

“I’ll leave you two ladies for the time being,” Mr. Cox called. And he left, shutting the door behind him.

Harriet stared at the closed door, then turned back to Mrs. Cox. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Cox. I’ll go for the ship’s surgeon. I’ll bring him straight to you.”

Mrs. Cox covered her face with both hands and moaned. “You mustn’t.”

“Why not? I don’t understand.”

Mrs. Cox began to keen again, the cry piercing, her head thrown back and her mouth open. The moment passed and she pulled herself up to standing.

“Look,” she said, gesturing behind her with one hand. The pretty nightgown was soaked at the back and stained with blood, the seat of the chair slicked with a sticky wetness. “I don’t know what to do,” she wailed. “It’s too early.”

“I’ll fetch the surgeon,” Harriet repeated.

Mrs. Cox shook her head.

“Everyone knows that we’re on our honeymoon. Zebedee won’t have me shamed in front of the captain.”

The ship tipped again and threw Mrs. Cox forward so she almost fell. Helping her back onto the chair, Harriet cast her eyes around the disordered cabin, struggling to take in this new view of Mrs. Cox. The motion and the noise made it hard to think, but she knew how babies came to the world; she’d persuaded Rosina to tell her how it could be that she always said she saw Harriet’s red hair first, before she saw any other part of her. Rosina had helped her own mother attend her older sisters in childbirth, from when she was a girl. She’d answered every one of Harriet’s horrified questions, then lain down on her back on the kitchen floor and demonstrated, shrieking and wailing in a way that had made Harriet hysterical with laughter and fear. Babies came when they wanted, Rosina said. They pleased themselves and there wasn’t a lot anyone could do about it.

With her hair hanging in rats’ tails around her face and her eyes swollen, Mrs. Cox looked like a different woman.

“I’m frightened,” she said, her voice soft and broken.

Harriet put her arm around her and squeezed her shoulders. “Lie down on the bed. If it will come, you cannot prevent it.” The certainty in her own voice surprised her. There was a newspaper on the floor under a table. Harriet opened out its pages and spread them on the bunk, helped Mrs. Cox to lie down. She held her hand as the woman’s body arched in the air with the next pain. Harriet was afraid that Mrs. Cox might die. It could happen, Rosina said. Did happen.

The pains started coming more frequently. Sarah Cox gasped and cried, gripping Harriet’s arm, her face contorted, her body racked with effort. She pulled herself up into a kneeling position. Seeing her sitting on her calves, her knees wide, Harriet remembered the hieroglyph for giving birth. She wondered if she would ever get to Egypt or whether they would all be lost before they made land.

After an hour—perhaps more, Harriet had lost her sense of ordinary time—something emerged from between Mrs. Cox’s white thighs. It came easily in the end, a clotted mass, not large, slithering out as if in a hurry, in a sea of purplish blood. As it lay on the newspaper, a feeble movement came from it. Mrs. Cox cried out again.

“Look. Oh, look.”

She reached forward and lifted up a tiny, curved form. The head appeared translucent and the back was curved, the fingers spread like a starfish. It was a boy.

“He’s alive,” Mrs. Cox said. “It’s a miracle. Zebedee, come and see him.”

Mr. Cox had returned and was standing by the door, sucking on his pipe, the smell of smoke mingling with the strong scent of blood. Throwing down the pipe, he reached the bed in three strides. Harriet scrambled to her feet.

“What are you—”

He dashed the little thing out of Mrs. Cox’s hands, onto the newspaper, bundled it up, forced open the porthole, and stuffed it through. Closed up the brass catch.

Harriet opened her mouth to speak and a tide of nausea overwhelmed her. She lurched to the basin and was sick, then sick again, spitting up a thin white liquid that burned her throat, until her entire body seemed emptied.