Whispers in the Sand (65 page)

It was dawn when Louisa and Mohammed mounted their donkeys and, turning their backs on the river, headed westward across the rich, densely planted fields. They rode in silence, unencumbered by pack animals or companions, watching the dull, clear light grow stronger by the minute. As the first shafts of sunlight were throwing long shadows ahead of them across the ground, they had already reached the edge of the fertile ground and were heading out into the bright heat of the desert.

“Where will you put the bottle, Sitt Louisa?” Mohammed looked over at her at last. “Which tomb do you want to go to?”

Louisa shrugged. “Somewhere quiet and hidden so the bottle can rest in peace. I need to find a picture of the goddess Isis so it can lie near her.” Her donkey stumbled suddenly, and she grabbed at the saddle to steady herself. “That is all I want to do. Then we can go straight back to the boat and forget it.”

He nodded gravely. The path had narrowed as they reached the mouth of the valley. He glanced round at the dark entrances in the cliffs. He was not a dragoman. He did not have Hassan’s knowledge and experience of the valley. Reining in the donkey, he shook his head. “Do you remember where to go?”

She stared round her, hoping that Mohammed would attribute the tears in her eyes to the glare of the early morning sun striking off the glittering rocks. Her memories of this place were so closely tied to Hassan, every rock, every shadow bore the imprint of his face, every echo the sound of his voice.

Finally she urged her donkey on. There were other visitors in the valley this time, groups of travellers with their own dragomans staring round, or emerging into the daylight full of wonder at what they had seen.

They stopped the donkeys near one of the entrances. Mohammed slid from the saddle and helped Louisa to dismount, then he reached into his saddle bag for candles. He shivered. “I do not like these places, Sitt Louisa. There are bad spirits here. And scorpions.”

And snakes.

The word hovered unspoken between them. Louisa bit her lip and forced herself to move forward, leading the way. “We won’t be here long, Mohammed, I promise. You have the spade?”

They had brought a small spade lashed to the saddle of his mount so she could bury the bottle in the sand. He nodded. Swiftly he moved in front of her, and she saw he had his hand on the hilt of the knife tucked into his belt, and it gave her some comfort as they climbed the path towards the dark square in the dazzling rock of the cliff, to think that he was armed and prepared to use the knife to protect them. They reached the entrance, panting. Mohammed peered in. “Is this the right place?” She saw him make surreptitiously the sign against the evil eye.

She nodded. Somewhere inside she would find a representation of the goddess with her strange characteristic head-dress of a solar disc and throne, her hands clutching the ankh, symbol of life, and her staff.

She reached into the bag hung around her shoulders for the bottle, still wrapped in the water-stained silk. “It won’t take long,” she repeated. She stepped ahead of him into the darkness, hearing the rasp of a match behind her as he lit the candle in its little lantern, seeing the shadows run up the wall. Here they were, the pictures she remembered so clearly, the bright colours, the dense endless stories told in strange indecipherable hieroglyphics, the ranks of gods and goddesses stretching into the shadowed darkness.

“Sitt Louisa!” His strangled cry echoed into the silent depths of the tomb.

She spun round.

He was standing at the entrance almost where she had left him, still in the sunlight, flattened against the wall, frozen with terror. In front of him, she could see the swaying head of the cobra.

“No!” Her scream tore into the shadows as she hurled herself back towards the cave entrance. “Leave him alone! No! No!
No
…”

As the snake struck she threw the bottle at it and then went for it herself, grabbing at it with her bare hands. It thrashed for a moment in her grip—warm, smooth, heavy, and then it had gone. She was staring down at her empty fingers.

Mohammed slid to his knees, sobbing. “Sitt Louisa, you have saved my life!”

“It didn’t bite you?” Suddenly she was shaking so violently she, too, could no longer stand, and she found herself on her knees beside him.

“No.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “No,
Lillah!
It did not bite me. See!” He held out the width of the full trouser leg, and she saw the mark of the fangs and the long trail of the poison which had run down the cotton below the hole.

There was a rattle of stones below them, and they looked down to see two men scrambling up the path. One, dressed in Egyptian robes, had a drawn blade in his hand. The other was a European.

“We heard your screams.” The taller man when he spoke was obviously English. He stared round the tomb entrance as the two Egyptians spoke to one another in quick, agitated Arabic.

“It was a snake.” Louisa looked at him gratefully. “I think it’s gone.” She scrambled shakily to her feet.

“Did it bite anyone?”

She shook her head. “It missed, thank God!” She closed her eyes.

The bottle had gone. There was no sign of it on the path, in the tomb entrance, on the track down the steep hillside at the base of the cliff. It had vanished with the snake.

She accepted their rescuers’ offer of rest and refreshment, then she and Mohammed reclaimed their donkeys and headed back towards the river.

They arrived back hot and dusty to find the boat in turmoil. One of the travellers planning to return north to Cairo had fallen sick, and a berth had been found for Louisa on the next day’s steamer. There was very little time if she wanted to take it up. She must pack her belongings, say her farewells, and allow her trunks to be loaded into the launch and moved over to the larger boat without delay.

Later, she was glad it had all happened so quickly. There was no time for retrospection. Barely time for good-byes. Mohammed and the
reis
wept as she left the boat for the last time, as did Katherine Fielding, who had, to her delight, named her baby Louis after her. Venetia offered a cold cheek with barely a smile, David Fielding and Sir John both gave her huge bear hugs. Augusta took her hands and squeezed them. “Time heals, my dear,” she said gently. “You’ll forget the worst times and remember the good ones.”

It was strange, travelling with the constant sound of an engine and the splash of the paddle wheels as a background to her thoughts. There was no need to be at the command of the fickle wind. The river banks with their moving panorama of palms and lush crops, the shaduf, lifting the water endlessly from the river to the fields as they passed, the plodding water buffalo, the donkeys, the fishing boats. She watched them all from the deck, her reddened eyes hidden by smoked-glass spectacles, sketched, wrote a line or two in her diary to bring the account of her visit to Egypt to an end, and she slept.

She reached London on 24th April. A week later she was reunited with her sons. It wasn’t until the 29th July, on a hot afternoon, as she worked in the cool, tree-shaded room that she used as her studio at the back of their London house, that she opened the first of the boxes of Egyptian canvases and sketchbooks and began to pull them out one by one. Carefully she stacked them round the walls, studying them critically, allowing herself for the first time since her return to remember the heat and the dust, the blue waters of the Nile, the dazzling glare of the sand and the temples and monuments with their carvings and paintings and mementoes of a long-dead past. She paused to stare out of the window at the garden square outside her house. Her world, the English world, was predominantly green, even here in London. The desert and the Nile were nothing to her now but memories.

She stooped to pick the last canvases out of the box and frowned. Her old bag was there. She must have used it to wedge the paintings in place. She pulled it out and stared at it ruefully. The bag had accompanied her on all her painting trips. Even now there were brushes and some paints left inside. She put it on the table and rummaged inside to retrieve them.

The scent bottle was still wrapped in the stained silk, tied with ribbon. She stared down at it for a long, long time, then slowly she began to unwrap it.

She had taken the bottle out of the bag. She had thrown it at the snake. Surely she had. She remembered it being in her hand. She remembered looking down at it as she stepped out of the sunlight into the shadow of the tomb.

Dropping the silk to the floor, she stood looking at it as it lay on her palm. Then she shivered. Once again it had returned. Could she never be rid of it? “Hassan.” She whispered the name quietly. “Help me.” There were tears in her eyes as she turned to the Davenport at which she was accustomed to sit and do her correspondence. Opening the lid, she slid out one of the drawers and reached inside to touch the small lever that activated the secret compartment. She laid the bottle inside it and stood looking down at it for a moment then she touched her finger to her lips and pressed it lightly on the glass. The piece of paper telling its story she had left tucked in her diary, still in her writing box and unlooked at for months. One last look, one last thought of Hassan, and she pushed the secret drawer back. It clicked into place, and she quickly shut the lid of the desk.

She would never touch the drawer or her journal again.

“Did you know all this when you gave me the diary?” Anna was sitting next to Toby in Phyllis’s sun-filled sitting room.

Phyllis shook her head. “I always meant to try, but somehow with my bad eyes I never got round to reading it.”

“So you didn’t know about the bottle when you gave it to me?”

Phyllis shook her head. “I would hardly have given it to you, sweetheart, if I’d known its history!” She was indignant. “You were a little girl. As far as I knew, it had lain in that drawer ever since Louisa put it there. The Davenport came to me through my father, of course, and I knew nothing of the paper in the diary. Even if I’d known it was there, it would have meant nothing to me. None of us can read Arabic.”

The three of them sat in silence for several minutes. In the hearth the fire crackled cheerfully, filling the room with the scent of apple logs.

“What happened to Louisa in the end, do you know?” Anna asked at last.

Phyllis nodded slowly. “I know a bit. My grandfather, as you know, was her eldest son, David.” She paused thoughtfully. “She never married again. And as far as I know, she never went back to Egypt. She moved from London sometime in the 1880s, by which time she must have been in her late fifties or early sixties, I suppose. She bought a house down in Hampshire which she left to David when she died. I can remember going there when I was very small, but it must have been sold before the last war. She went on painting, of course, and became a very well-known artist, even in her lifetime.”

“Did she ever keep a journal again?” Toby asked suddenly.

Phyllis shrugged. “Not as far as I know.”

“I’d love to know if she ever thought about Egypt again,” Anna said wistfully. “What must she have felt like when she found she still had the scent bottle after everything she had been through to try and get rid of it? And why did she hide it? Why didn’t she destroy it as soon as she found it? Why didn’t she throw it in the Thames? The sea? Anything! But to keep it close to her. Wasn’t she afraid the priests would come back? Or the serpent?”

Phyllis sat back in her chair and stared thoughtfully down at the fire. The cat on her knees stretched luxuriously and kneaded the thick tweed of her skirt for a moment or two before falling back to sleep. “I’ll tell you what I have got. There is a box of Grandfather’s old letters upstairs. His own to the family and those from his brother John, mostly. I don’t remember there being anything particularly exciting, but you can have them if you want them. Toby dear, could you go up and carry them down for Anna?” She gave him instructions on where to find them and watched as he left the room. Then she smiled. “You hang on to him, darling. He’s a very nice man. Are you in love with him?”

Anna blushed. “I like him.”

“Like?” Phyllis shook her head. “Not good enough. I want to hear that you adore someone. And that someone adores you. He does, you know. He doesn’t seem to be able to take his eyes off you.” She sobered abruptly. “What really happened to you in Egypt? I don’t think you’ve told me everything. I’m sorry about that unfortunate man drowning. But there’s more, isn’t there. Do I gather you were ill?”

Anna nodded slowly. “Not ill exactly. I’ll tell you what happened. Did you know the scent bottle was haunted? I know that sounds crazy. Impossible. But it’s true. It was guarded by two Ancient Egyptian priests who were rivals for its ownership. They appeared on the boat and scared me witless, so I did something very stupid. I had made friends with a woman called Serena Canfield. She is an initiate of some kind of a modern day Isis cult. She summoned up the priests to try and send them away. A sort of spirit disinfection. But I let one of them get inside my head. I went a bit mad for a while after Andy died. If Toby hadn’t taken care of me, I don’t know what would have happened.”