The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

11

FRIGHTFUL ROW WITH TROUT

Flo felt lighter than air when she returned to the cabin after her predawn visit to the temple. Trout lay with her face pressed into her pillow. Flo decided not to wake her yet.

Bending to a low cabinet, she retrieved a battered black wooden box. Dear medicine chest, friend since she was seventeen. A carpenter in Wellow had built it to her design. She grasped the brass handle. Affixed on a piano hinge, the lid folded back to make a walled gallery.

Her hands reached toward the contents, fluttering over them like a hummingbird in a sea of blossoms. Arranging her kit was the closest thing to play since childhood. She enjoyed it the way other women took pleasure organizing their jewelry, folding their shawls and pelerines, organizing toiletries on the bureau top. Pride of ownership, the glass and steel in her hands, the orderliness—all were deeply gratifying.

On the top tier in compartments lay salves and implements: tar and camphor ointment, mint liniment, balm of arnica, scissors, golden-eyed straight and curved sailmakers’ needles, and last, wrapped in a green velvet square, three surgical needles along with silk thread for sewing up wounds. Satisfied with the inventory, she proceeded to the drawers. Here were metal tubes of smelling salts as well as the boxed set of perfumes she’d bought as souvenirs in Italy the year before, four diminutive glass bottles: orange-blossom from Spain; attar of roses from Smyrna; French lavender; and her favorite, frangipani, from India. She never wore perfume. In warm weather it attracted bees, and in winter overpowered the shuttered rooms. Also, she did not wish to advertise herself. But in the bedroom at home, with only Parthe to see, she sniffed it, or daubed it on the hem of her pillowcase, added a drop to the washbasin.

She’d longed to ease suffering for as long as she could remember. At first it was childish play. Then, when she was eleven years old, the sheepdog, Cap, had broken his leg. The shepherd—grizzled old Stennis, was it?—had come to the house to ask for a gun and a single bullet to put the dog away. Flo had interceded. “Let me set the leg,” she had begged WEN, tearful. She remembered the burning in her face and neck, how she had felt she might die, too, if they shot the whimpering animal. She’d watched the doctor set broken bones in the village, but she’d only set the cloth limbs of Parthe’s dolls. WEN had yielded and Flo had splinted Cap’s paw, wrapped it up with clean rags, and covered the whole with an old stocking doused with oil of peppercorns to discourage chewing. She fixed him a bed in the kitchen and brought him milksops and scraps. The dog had recovered.

Since then, her doctoring had grown more sophisticated. In Italy and Egypt she applied leeches to Charles, poultices to both Brace-bridges, and cured the servants of stomachaches, headaches, sunstroke, and housemaid’s knee. She was familiar with the standard remedies, compelled, as a youngster, to memorize what she overheard when the doctor came around. James compound: 16 grains for an old woman, 11 for a young woman, 6 for a child. Homeopathic curatives in tiny glass bulbs stoppered with rubber filled the second drawer of her kit. So little was needed to ameliorate a host of conditions, everything from bad appetite to scurvy. She had the country remedies by heart: Saint John’s wort for melancholy, chamomile for nervous agitation, witch hazel for rashes, cider vinegar for bowel distress. They lived in her mind, along with favorite poems and hymns, things that required no effort to memorize because she loved knowing them; they’d become a part of her, and only death would take them from her. What was that Egyptian spell? I am the woman who lightens darkness and look, it is bright! I have felled the evil spirit, I have—

A loud thump followed by a shout: Trout lay sprawled on the floor between the two beds, just in front of Flo’s feet. Twisted up in her levinge, she thrashed like a butterfly struggling to break out of its cocoon. Flo kneeled at her side. “Are you hurt, Trout?”

“What a question! You have eyes.”

A flicker of rage licked at Flo’s heart. “Let me help you up.” How dare Trout speak to her in such a fashion! She took a deep breath. She would counter with kindness. “You must have fallen in your sleep.” She picked gingerly at the tangled net of the levinge. Lately, their roles had reversed.

“I can manage on my own.” Trout ripped the netting of the levinge loose from the ceiling, wadded it up, and tossed it to one side.

The violence of the gesture offended Flo. She stood and backed away, fury rising once more in her craw. She fantasized sailing off in the dahabiyah without Trout, leaving the sourpuss asleep over her needlework at the temple. She’d send a punt when they reached Philae, then book passage for Trout to England, meanwhile writing Fanny to dismiss her. But what would Fanny do? Likely berate Flo for ineptitude, maybe take Trout’s side. Either way, she’d never let the matter alone. It would join the collection of distortions that passed for Nightingale mythology, already chock full of Flo’s worst moments in the bosom of her family reduced to epithets. Homeric ones, now that she thought about it. But nothing beautiful, like wine-dark sea or rosy-fingered dawn. Not flattering, like swift-footed Achilles and owl-eyed Athena. No. It was Flo of the terrible table manners, Flo the queen of melancholy. And now, Flo flummoxed by a servant and Flo who lost herself on the Nile. Feeling the ire coloring her neck, she said, “I think it would behoove us to talk about our present situation.”

Trout had managed to gather herself together on the edge of the divan. Her face was the red of uncooked mutton; she kneaded her skull absently. “Hmph,” she muttered.

“I beg your pardon. Did you speak?”

“What’s the use, mum? I wish I’d never come here. If it was up to me, I’d of stayed home where I belong.”

Flo heard desperation in Trout’s words. Her heart softened a bit. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.” She wondered if Fanny had been aware of Trout’s reluctance. “Did you tell my mother?”

Trout lowered her gaze. “That’s a purely ridiculous question.”

“You didn’t?”

“Oh, no, mum, I did.” Trout stood, turned her back to Flo, and changed into an old shift. “There was no one else, Mariette being indisposed and the other girls inexperienced. Besides, Mrs. Nightingale told me this place was—how did she put it?—a jewel, mum.” She sat back down on the bed. “Perfumy and busting with Turkey carpets and velvet drapes. And the creatures, she said, would be straight from the London Zoo. Camels and lions and zebras.”

Since Fanny had never set foot in Egypt, it was hard to know if she believed what she had told Trout or was simply inventing enticements. “I’m truly sorry for my mother’s inaccuracies,” Flo said, hoping that a ready apology would placate Trout and feeling, too, that she should not be held responsible for Fanny’s half-truths. “I must say that explains things to a degree.” There, she had kept her head and responded kindly. “I didn’t know you felt that way.”

“You don’t know much about me, mum, truth be told.”

Flo was at a loss, pulled one moment to sympathy, the next to anger. “But we are here now, and you have a job to do as do I, dear Trout.”

Trout rolled up a stocking and plunged her foot into it. “No need to dearie me.” She smoothed the stocking on her leg. “You don’t even rightly know my name, I’d wager.”

Flo was beside herself. She was trying to be accommodating and getting nowhere. They had always called her Trout. The image of a fish no longer entered her mind, though at first it always had—a sleek fish sporting a rainbow and a silky black fin. “Of course I know your name.” She reached across the divide between the two divans and patted Trout’s hand. “It’s Troutwine. How could you think you could be in my employ without—”

“I mean my given name, not my family name.”

Flo froze. Who was this impossible person who caused her to feel abashed and ashamed when she had done nothing wrong? Whatever else she was, Trout was not forgiving, she saw that now. She seemed bent on asserting her malcontent and forcing Flo to acknowledge it.

She had never heard anyone, not even other servants, call Trout anything else. The Nightingales did not make a habit of renaming their servants, unlike many of their acquaintances. Fanny considered it demeaning and bad for morale to dub a girl “Mary” or “Jane” simply because it was easier. Perhaps Trout’s name was a sore subject with her because in a previous household she’d refused to answer to a fake name, insisting on her real one. Florence was horrified to realize that she had no earthly idea what Trout’s name might be. Nor had she seen any of Trout’s travel documents. Charles took charge of all that. “What is it, then?” she asked timidly. Tears of frustration welled in her eyes.

“Christa,” Trout said, looking up.

“Christa,” Flo repeated, leaning against the wall of the dahabiyah. How fitting that her servant bear the feminized name of her Lord, as if the woman were yet another obstacle in her path to discover God’s plans for her. She looked into Trout’s eyes still puffy from sleep. “May I call you Christa then?”

Trout blew her nose into her handkerchief and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear while she considered. Her dress drooped off one blotchy shoulder. “No, I prefer Trout, mum. Only my family, what-ever’s left of them, called me Christa.”

In the small cabin, Flo felt trapped. Trout would concede nothing for the sake of her feelings. The orderly surface between them had ruptured, and Trout did not wish it repaired. “All right then, Trout, it’s time to get up. I’ll have my cotton day dress. You may begin with my hair.”

Flo took her place on the carpet-covered stool. In a moment, Trout rose and picked up the hairbrush. Flo felt her fingers moving roughly against her scalp. At first, the brushing was too vigorous, but soon enough, the strokes softened, the touch of the hands lightened. Trout would go no further for the time being. Flo relaxed into the pleasure of her morning coiffure.

• • •

At eight o’clock, when Flo went on deck, the Bracebridges had not yet appeared. The crew was engaged in cooking and cleaning the boat when the muezzin’s call to prayer rang out from the shore. Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar!—God is great, God is great!—the voice plaintive and piercing, an imprecation edged with dolor. The crew stopped what they were about, washed with a bucket of river water, and pulling prayer mats from every crack and crevice, dropped to their hands and knees, facing east. Flo watched the familiar sight of their rumps rising as their heads grazed the floor in the required humility. Up and down they bobbed for several minutes before returning to their chores. What, she wondered, if Englishwomen and -men prayed with their bums to the sky? Women with hooped skirts might be stranded and scandalous, unable to right themselves, rolling in circles like enormous tops.

A crewman crept toward her with an envelope in hand. She thanked him and smiled. He was the man she called Efreet-Youssef, to distinguish him from the other Youssefs among the crew. Why did the Egyptians use the same few names repeatedly? He had been her efreet weeks before in Cairo. In the narrow city streets, he had run in front, holding the halter of the ass on which she rode bouncing up and down as the tiny burro hurtled forward. Otherwise, Paolo had explained, the animal would bolt for his stall or the nearest shade.

Turning the letter over, she felt a pang of disappointment: it was not from Gustave but from Max, a note of thanks for the dinner party. Rather effusive, she thought. Except for the last lines, where he spelled out their itinerary. They’d remain another week at Abu Simbel, photographing and collecting squeezes. Next, as he’d mentioned at dinner, would be Philae. After that, they planned an extra excursion—overland from Kenneh to Koseir on the Red Sea. Then, north again, toward Cairo. He closed with polite regards.

Flo consulted the foldout map in Murray. Kenneh lay just north of Karnak and Thebes, where the river jigged to the east, forming an elbow that poked into the eastern Sahara.

How she envied the Frenchmen! They would gallop horses or lope on camels in a caravan, and visit the Red Sea. Who knew what adventures might lie in wait for them in the desert?

With their frail constitutions, the Bracebridges weren’t up to an overland trip. It was a wonder they managed any travel. For a good part of every journey, they remained indoors, reading esoteric books, writing letters, and resting—resting hour upon hour. Charles’s big, whiskered face beneath the London papers as he dozed on one foreign sofa after another, Selina napping away the afternoons in bed, always in a dress, her hair loose on the pillow like sunrays. And her face, which Flo loved in all its idiosyncrasy, plump and pink, the features clustered too closely together in the center, as if they had stopped growing before the rest of her. The face of a happy child.

Now Selina appeared, slightly dazed, holding and reading a book in one hand as she climbed the steps from her cabin, her skirts swept up in the other hand. As she stepped into a patch of sunshine, she looked up. “Darling Flo,” she called in her light soprano. Her face broke into a smile and she closed her book on its scarlet satin page-marker. Charles, she said, was having a tray belowdecks, something about a scrabbling sensation in his chest. They decided to breakfast together.

They ordered eggs and tea while a sailor laid the table, bowing and offering guttural sounds of apology as he whisked between their chairs. The teapot arrived first, aswim with loose pekoe leaves. Efreet-Youssef offered a cinnamon stick, but the women politely refused it. He returned to the brazier on the bow.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” Flo said.

“And I, you,” said Selina. Selina was never without her fan, and now she wagged it slowly, like a dog’s tail in greeting. “If we don’t talk, whatever we’ve done or seen doesn’t seem quite complete. I always need my Florence addendum.” Selina raised one eyebrow, anticipating. “Is it about last night, the Frenchman?”

“I do want to talk about that. But no”—Flo smiled shyly—“I’ve been wanting to ask you why it is you decided to travel without a maid. You had one in Rome. You don’t mind the question, do you?”

“Why would I mind? I have no secrets from you, and in any case, there’s no secret involved. I didn’t bring a maid because I have Charles and you, and I am more comfortable in close quarters doing things for myself. Our lodgings in Rome were spacious, but here . . .” Selina hugged herself tightly.

“Who fixes your hair, then? Charles?” Flo’s chair scrooped as she dragged it into the shade of the reed awning.

Efreet-Youssef served the eggs, a bowl of olives, and a plate of cheese, then retreated backward, bowing, the same way Florence had left the queen’s presence when presented at court. Despite his desire to be invisible, Flo could smell an oily aroma whenever Efreet-Youssef approached. Hair pomade, she supposed. He was clean. After he scrubbed the pots and dishes with sand, he rubbed it on himself before jumping into the river.

“Charles do my hair? That would be a sorry sight!” Selina tapped at her boiled egg. They always ordered three-minute eggs, but as the crew didn’t have a timepiece, they never came right. “I do my own coif, can’t you tell?” Selina turned her head from side to side. “A simple chignon, nothing more ambitious. Why do you ask?” Selina cinched up her mouth around a spoonful of eggs.

“I’m having problems with Trout.” Three weeks earlier, Flo had recounted Trout’s hypochondriasis to Selina and they’d joked about it. Later, when Trout took ill with a pounding headache as they sailed south from Derr, Flo had doctored her and the tension between them had dissipated for a time. Trout had thanked Flo for her ministrations. Flo explained now what had happened that morning, how humiliated she had been when challenged about her servant’s name. “She resents me, I’m afraid, and nothing I do reaches her, nothing pleases her.”

“Goodness!” Selina said. “I’ve never had a servant challenge me, though one reads about it in Mr. Dickens and in the papers. There have been cases of forged characters, theft—”

“Trout had excellent characters, one of them from the husband of a woman she cared for while the poor thing was dying.” Flo sighed. “I think she despises me.”

“Nonsense. You are one of the kindest people on the face of the earth. I’m sure it will pass. And remember: she is a servant. The point is whether you are satisfied with her, not she you.” Selina frowned. “You haven’t touched your food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Selina blotted her lips with a square of cotton damask. “Try some anyway. Perhaps appetite will follow.”

Flo obeyed, spooning egg onto a crust, sipping at her tea. “What would you do?”

“Continue as usual. Ignore the ups and downs.”

“She hates it here. Did I say that already?” Flo slumped back in her chair.

“Would you like me to speak to her?”

Flo didn’t have to think twice. “No, then she’ll think I’m weak of will. No, I’ll speak to her.” But Flo knew she wouldn’t, as she had no inkling of what to say. She’d simply wait. The situation might improve on its own. If not, she’d reason her way through to a solution and when she hit upon the answer, inform Trout as kindly as possible.

“Don’t let it upset you. Trout will come around to remembering her place.” Selina gulped some tea and set her cup down, ringing, on the saucer. “May I change the subject?”

Flo nodded, her face brightening.

Selina plied her with questions about the dinner party and the Frenchman. Flo admitted gladly that she was intrigued by M. Flaubert and felt a strange kinship with him. She did not mention that she had written to him. The omission would spare Selina, who would fret if he did not reply.

“Did you ask if he knew Mary Clarke?”

It hadn’t occurred to Flo to ask Gustave if he knew her. “He doesn’t live in Paris,” she explained. “He’s from Rouen.” She handed her dirty dish to the servant. “Dear Clarkey,” Flo said with a sigh, the warmth of recollected affection radiating throughout her chest. Both she and Selina had the highest opinion of Mary and considered her the ultimate authority in matters of taste. Flo’s reverence for Mary’s wisdom in affairs of the heart was unmitigated, zealous. For here was a courageous woman with an entirely original way of living, a woman who had suffered the loss three years earlier of her great amour, Claude Fauriel, and did not let it ruin her life.

Flo laughed suddenly. “Did I ever tell you what happened when I came home after first meeting her? I must have.”

Selina hesitated, thinking. “I’m not sure.”

“About my plans for Embley Park?” She pictured the Gothic manse with its steep gables and rows of mullioned windows. WEN had built it for Fanny in Hampshire, conveniently close to the London social scene.

Selina leaned forward. “No, I don’t think so.”

Flo smiled, remembering herself at age nineteen. “It was quite outrageous now I recall it. No wonder Fanny was beside herself.”

“Oh, do tell now.” Selina’s fan had stopped moving.

Flo explained that the first thought that crossed her mind when she returned home from Paris after meeting Mary was to convert Embley into a boardinghouse for intellectuals and musicians. Men and women, living communally, would maintain stimulating friendships as equals, enjoying solitude in their rooms, and fellowship at meals and in the evenings. No one would marry, except to have children. “I wished to live as Clarkey did, don’t you see, in a scintillating salon.”

“I’m sure that Clarkey would find Mr. Flaubert suitable for her salon,” Selina said. “So tall, such a warm and welcoming manner. I had the sense he was an independent spirit. And isn’t M. Du Camp a delight with the camera?”

Though Flo loved modern inventions and all things scientific, she hadn’t paid much heed to the pictures. She was drawn more to Gustave’s brown-green eyes, which bulged slightly in their sockets like marbles. “I am more interested in the squeezes,” she said, thinking his heavy eyelids gave Gustave a drowsy and somewhat dissolute expression. “M. Flaubert”—she smiled at Selina as she folded up her napkin—“actually, we are on a first-name basis.”

“You do like him, don’t you?” Selina smiled and blinked.

Flo felt her cheeks redden. “He seems good-natured, and he is intelligent. I hardly know him, but I do, I like him.” She drank some tea. What had drawn her to him most was his artistic refinement coupled with his frankness. “He’s been unhappy, too,” she said quietly, “like me.”

“He” had referred to Richard Milnes for so long that his face suddenly popped into her mind. She’d loved Richard’s company—just not enough to marry him. They had talked and talked, a constant chatter like lovebirds, but never about sadness. She’d never felt the impulse simply to gaze at his face the way she had wanted to gaze at Gustave’s. No one knew how much it had pained her to refuse Richard, or that she’d made a vow to herself afterward in Lavie: Now no more love, no more marriage. Only work, whatever it may be.

“I see,” Selina said. “Unhappiness.” She wiped her hands with her napkin. “There would be plenty to talk about if one were honest.” Selina smiled at her, opened her book to the satin marker, and began to read.

• • •

Flo remembered vividly the first time she met Mary. She was eighteen, and nearing the end of the two-year-long Grand Tour with her family during which, to Fanny’s delight and surprise, Flo had attracted the attention of eligible males from eighteen to eighty throughout Europe. The Nightingales had been in Paris about a week when Fanny left her calling card and a letter of introduction at the Clarkes’. The next morning she had received by first post a charming note on green linen paper inviting the Nightingales to a soiree that evening. “And when I read that word ‘soiree,’ I imagined we should have a very good time,” Fanny said, picking her way toward the coach in front of their apartment as they set off for the party. “The young Miss Clarke is quite the salonnière. Seems she has taken over Madame Récamier’s circle with her blessing.”

“Who?” Parthe asked.

“The most famous hostess in Paris,” Flo said crisply.

“Well, I don’t care,” Parthe cheerfully announced, pulling her skirts closer to make room for her sister on the leather seat. Up in the driver’s box, the coachman shouted, and with a crack of his whip, the cab lurched forward.

At four-thirty, darkness was descending upon the city, accumulating in alleys and passageways like indigo dispersing in a dye vat. Lamplighters had begun their slow inroads, attending first to the bridges, while in the imposing hôtels particuliers along the boulevards, yellow oblongs of candlelit rooms hung in the darkening air like perfectly taut strings of paper lanterns.

After Italy, Flo had felt fed up and bored. What she missed most was music, especially since Fanny had canceled her singing lessons. In Paris there was only one weekly opera performance. Luckily, Flo had annotated all the librettos from Genoa, including observations on the costumes and singers, which enabled her to occupy herself reliving the performances. Parthe had imitated her sister, matching her swoon for swoon, sigh for sigh at concerts. But it was Flo whom Fanny chastised, Flo whom Fanny worried about. Why, she had asked only the day before, must Flo continue to take things to extremes? Flo did not care to answer. She had thrown back her head and stomped from the room.

“Here we are,” Fanny said, pulling Flo from her daydream. The liveried footman alighted from his niche, opened the door, and spread a rug upon the ground. Fanny exited first, taking care over the narrow wooden step.

The ladies Clarke occupied the third and fourth floors of an imposing house on the rue du Bac, from which sounds of merriment drifted down to the front stoop. The three Nightingale women smiled at each other in anticipation. They had barely knocked on the door when a maid appeared and led them, skirts clutched in their fists, up three flights of marble stairs. At the landing, the maid opened the door to number 7, then padded away without a word.

They gathered at the threshold like three hens staring into a new coop, caught between pecks and clucks. The sounds of mirth had subsided, and they waited. When no one appeared, Fanny withdrew an ivory fan, snapped it open, and stepped into the room. They removed their coats, laying them across a wooden bench, and ventured farther into the foyer. The air was warm, scented with spiced apples and ripe cheese.

Hesitantly, they stepped into the adjoining room, a small salon sparely furnished with sofas, drapes, and easy chairs in various shades of pink velvet. Overall, the room gave the impression of a soft hand extended in welcome. In the corner sat an elderly woman in a gray satin gown with spectacles and a white mobcap. Engrossed in her book, she’d clearly not heard them. Not one to stand on ceremony, Florence approached her. “Bon soir,” she said.

Just then, three children raced across the room, a blindfolded woman lunging after them. The children skittered out of the way, then flew, shrieking, into the hallway, sideswiping Fanny and Parthe as if they were pieces of furniture. The woman’s hands seized Flo’s blue silk skirt. “Maman, c’est toi?” she called out. “Oh, pardon!” She untied the towel around her eyes.

Florence laughed. “Non, pardonnez-moi!”

At which the senior Mrs. Clarke looked up from her book.

Into the gaping silence that naturally follows chaos, everyone spoke at once, then fell silent, and then laughed.

The woman with the blindfold was the daughter, Miss Mary Clarke. Florence was amazed that this slight woman dressed in a casual wrapper should be the great salonnière. Her reddish hair, not conventionally dressed by any measure, lay in soft, loose curls around her face, more like the fuzzy aura of a sheepdog than Parisian coiffure. She was short, with soft hazel eyes and pale, lightly freckled skin. With almost no bosom and tiny hands, she appeared elfin. This was a children’s party, she explained, one she gave every Saturday evening for the offspring of friends and neighbors. Children, too, needed a regular social life, she believed, to be fully civilized.

Flo was constantly surprised in the hours that followed. Surprised that they had been invited to a children’s party, since they had no children in their entourage. (Would Fanny feel insulted?) Surprised by the casual food and its service—butter cake, popcorn, cream puffs, and bonbons laid out à la russe on a wine-tasting table. Surprised, too, by the children. First, that they were permitted the run of the two-story flat. Throughout the evening, they galloped rambunctiously upstairs, and several times swooped back through the adults, rowdy as geese. Second, that they were not dressed like children, but rather as miniature adults—the boys in long trousers and frock coats, the girls in tea gowns like their mothers’.

In fact, every room chez Clarke contained some surprise or other. In the kitchen, two famous men were fussing with a tea kettle. Miss Clarke introduced them as her best friends in the world. They were the Orientalist Julius Mohl, and Claude Fauriel, a scholar of Provençal poetry, which he recited from memory whenever Miss Clarke wished. Flo had never known an unmarried woman whose best friends were men. Miss Clarke was by now in her thirties and seemed to have dispensed with chaperones altogether. By comparison, Flo existed in a cloister.

Finally, there was the perpetual surprise of “Clarkey” herself, a woman without a shred of pretension, and surely the most extraordinary person Flo had ever encountered. It was impossible not to love her. She did nothing to conceal her emotions, was kind to everyone, and encouraged memorable friendships among those who frequented her salon. Indeed, her enthusiasm and easygoing nature were contagious. Having spent the early part of her life figuring out how to live, she told Florence, she was now completely unfettered by social convention. Yet, her reputation remained impeccable.

While the children and the two distinguished scholars resumed the game of Blindman’s Buff, Mary consulted with the cook and introduced the Nightingales to three scowling fur puffs sitting on the windowsills. Her Persian cats. Miss Clarke was, in fact, besotted with cats of every description. Over the years that followed, kittens would travel back and forth between Embley Park and Paris, some more cooperatively than others.

“She is the perfect candidate for a friend,” Fanny said on the way home that first evening. “We’ll have to see her whenever we go to Paris, and she can visit us when she comes to see her sister at Cold Overton!”

Flo had never heard her mother so enthusiastic about another woman. Though by Fanny’s standards Miss Clarke was a maverick, her salon attracted the best minds of Europe: Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Madame de Staël. No doubt, Fanny hoped to find husbands for her daughters there.

Flo had spent most of that winter at Clarkey’s, equally charmed by Messrs. Mohl and Fauriel, who, having discovered the depth of her education, undertook lively exchanges with her. Being at Mary’s was like being back in Father’s library, a place where Flo did not have to demur, where she could express her opinions and display her intellect rather than hide it.

It was Clarkey’s idea of amitié amoureuse—chaste love—that made her friendships with men possible, she explained to Flo that year. There was no earthly reason, Clarkey argued, why men and women could not be loving friends rather than succumb to marriage, with its insuperable desolations and duties. Clarkey was not opposed to marriage so much as beyond it. She was madly in love with Claude Fauriel, with whom she’d spent every evening for the past eleven years. Still, she did not intend to marry him or anyone else. She encouraged Flo to pursue her interests and, like Mary, avoid the matrimonial bed. It felt to Flo as if a strong-willed woman from the George Sand novels she relished had come to life and befriended her.

• • •

Just before Flo left for the day’s excursion, Joseph brought her a second letter. She was in a rush, but went below and read it quickly, delighted by the speed of Gustave’s reply, and by his warmth, which seemed to transfer directly from the paper. His observations about the Copts were provocative and new, especially their view of Jesus as purely a god, not a man. Since the Copts were the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, she wondered if the idea of a divine man derived from the worship of pharaohs like Ramses the Great.

She tucked the letter inside her diary. Not surprisingly, Selina did not inquire about details when Flo reported that he had written and all was well.

Flo drifted the rest of the day, revisiting the temples while Selina sketched them from different vantages. Selina excelled with a pencil and watercolors, capturing the essence of things with a few assured strokes, conveying bulk and gravity as surely as if her paper bulged with sand and granite where her marks divided the dun surface. Flo had no talent for art.

But she did have talents, she reminded herself, just not ordinary ones. Her big ideas and flair for organization were unseemly, especially coming from a woman—which was why the future loomed not like a sunny path but a brick wall. What could she do with her life? Continue teaching the boys at the Ragged School when she returned home? Or would Fanny deny her that, too? Once, she had brought to Embley three boys with grimy hands and knickers—sniveling boys with chopped hair and nostrils rimmed in black who shrieked and stampeded up the stairs to her room, where she read to them. Fanny had reacted as though intruders had absconded with the silver plate and Limoges. Later, she’d sent the upstairs maid to scrub the woodwork and furniture, as if poverty were a contagious disease. How could her younger daughter, she demanded at dinner, bring rabble into their home? Home being the sanctum sanctorum to Fanny, more venerated than a cathedral. WEN had laughed off the shouting, as if they were in a cartoon out of Punch. He refused to take sides, saying he could not abide displays of temper. He hated it when the servants had to fix their eyes on the floorboards. He had retreated to the library, after which Parthe promptly swooned in the parlor, claiming a headache. Fanny’s furor had lasted for two full days, doubled, she claimed, by her daughters, the one inexplicably delicate, the other incorrigibly stubborn.

• • •

They sailed for Philae midweek, catching a fair wind. Flo relaxed. She sat on deck and watched the verdant border on either side reappear as narrow fields of corn and barley waving in sinuous patterns. The Nubian Desert carpeted the high cliffs with sand on either side, the river threading between them like a winding column of mercury. After the halting upriver sail, the boat skimmed the water, pulled powerfully along by the current’s twisting green ropes. Against the rocky banks, the river flung airborne sprays of lace, while the damp sails drying in the sunny air smelled fresh and bright as a laundry line. Sometimes the wind and current were so strong, the crew had to furl them.

The second day, spotting sand spilling from the heights in golden waterfalls, they weighed anchor so that she and Selina—Trout wasn’t interested—could feel the dry droplets sift through their fingers. They climbed up the cliff on a goat path. The unceasing wind had swept the desert plateau into a thicker version of the river, its currents frozen in great furrows and dips, a swirled sea of figured ridges stretching to the horizon.

When they set sail from Abu Simbel, the Frenchmen were still moored at the small temple. There were no farewells and no more chance encounters, no more letters or notes. She had decided it was best—more dignified and less chancy—not to write again, to wait for the reunion in Philae. Besides, she liked his letter about the patriarchs so much that she could not imagine he would ever write her a better one. She set aside her hope, locked into a compartment in her mind. She did not reread his letter after the day it arrived, when she had read it four times. Though its existence was a small comfort, she was cautious not to daydream about him. She did not want to risk disappointment. Besides, what would she dream? Surely not of marriage or a tryst. All she knew was that she wanted to be standing alongside him again, chatting and joking.

She distracted herself with the extensive library she’d brought to Egypt, her beloved dead languages—Latin, Greek, and now Hebrew, which she was teaching herself so she could read the Old Testament in the original. Dead languages were comforting: because they never altered, you could master them completely. Since they were no longer spoken, they were not part of the social fabric that so chafed her, not part of the insincerity, hypocrisy, and deceit with which living languages teemed. A thousand years of obsolescence had purified them as surely as if they had been cooked down to their essence over a slow flame. The words meant exactly what the dictionaries said and nothing more, nothing newer, nothing sub rosa. They were orderly, neatly contained in vocabulary lists she could tick off, in verb conjugations, tenses, and moods to memorize, declensions of nouns to recite that made a singsongy poetry. And there was no shortage of texts. A cornucopia waited in her cabin: Hesiod and Ovid; Sophocles; Pliny the Elder; Tacitus; and Sappho, poor Sappho, torn to shreds. And Epictetus and Claudian; Livy; Pindar. All of them fixed forever, unamendable as yesterday.

And though she knew it was evil, she was again in thrall to her awful dreaming—to fantasies of her own storied greatness—which she despised and felt obliged to confess to her diary. Though a vapid solution, dreaming countered her despair. Oh, the French was superior: desespoir, the sound more beautiful, more expressive of the feeling, the final syllable—des-es-poir—mimicking the sound of her life’s breath leaking out, attenuating into the void . . .

Except to answer direct questions, Trout had retreated into a cordial standoff based in silence. Having brought enough wool to clothe a flock of sheared sheep, she crocheted constantly, her hook stabbing into the skeins with the avidity of a hungry bird. Growing arms and a collar, a bed jacket accumulated in her lap; a baby blanket was also in the offing or perhaps it was a coverlet for her room at home. In the evening, she read her Bible.

The rift opened a deep old wound in Flo, which began to fester, setting her mind on a familiar path of disgust—with the upper classes, of which she was a guilt-ridden if alien member, and with herself for her inability to transcend her privilege, and her unwillingness to renounce it. She did not know which was worse: being thwarted by her family or the guilt of knowing what a burden she was to them. She always had to protect them from her own unhappiness.

If her desire to care for the sick were monstrous, then she was monstrous. There was no middle ground. Those who cooked the fowl or grew the corn? Do not look at them. They are not like us. Which is why she spent so much of her free time going back and forth to Wellow along the muddy path from Embley, reminding herself that they were exactly like her. In Wellow, when old Mrs. Crane suffered, she would rub her limbs by the hour and the old woman spoke to her as if to a daughter. But there was no muddy path between her and Trout. She hardly had a language in which to communicate with her. It was laughable to think she could help the world’s unfortunates when she could not deal with a lone maidservant.

And so it was that as they neared the island of Philae on the fourth day, a black mood enveloped Flo, so dark and bottomless that even dreaming provided no respite. She wanted only to sleep.