The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

16

A CABINET OF RELICS

Trout’s toothache followed an erratic course over the next two days. She improved, then worsened, sometimes better in the morning, sometimes in the evening. The swelling, too, increased and shrank unpredictably. But she slept through the nights, and awoke rested.

Flo didn’t mind caring for her patient, though without her medical texts, she had to improvise. Twice a day she applied whiskey-infused cotton wool to the inflamed area and immobilized Trout’s jaw. She continued the warm broths and added a vinegar and chamomile wash six times a day, boiling the concoction first.

With Trout indisposed, Selina replaced her as lady’s maid, helping Flo to dress and coif. Trout watched with dismay, but abided by Flo’s strict order for complete bed rest. The only exception was the chamber pot, which Trout would not so much as allow Flo or Selina to touch.

On the third morning, after an hour-long application of the cotton wool, pus and blood erupted from the area around the tooth. Trout was appalled, Flo relieved. Within hours, the gums were less tender and the swelling had decreased. “One more day in bed,” Flo told her that afternoon. “That is the best medicine.”

For all Trout’s complaining, Flo was surprised to note, she clearly did not enjoy being ill and the object of so much attention. She was a compliant patient, following Flo’s regimens to the dot, but seemed faintly humiliated to require help from others. After the pain subsided, Flo made her promise not to chew on that side of her mouth until she could consult a dentist on the Continent or back home. “Even if you are tempted,” Flo insisted, as Trout, thinner and pastier, prepared to take the stairs for her first breakfast on deck in four days. “You mustn’t forget.” Trout agreed.

After she recovered, Trout’s demeanor changed, though Flo could not say exactly how or why. At first she thought Trout had sweetened (perhaps in gratitude?). But the change was subtler than that. Trout seemed no happier, merely a tad less sullen and more cooperative. Perhaps the change was simply the kittenish softness of persons who have been ill and not yet fully regained their strength. What energy Trout had she seemed to waste in restlessness, pacing back and forth on the deck, her crocheting slung around her neck or stashed in her pocket. She spoke little and sat apart, writing in her brown notebook, silently watching the river’s green ribbons spool past. She must be lonely, Flo thought, though neither woman made an effort to alleviate that fact. They hardly spoke.

• • •

Four days later, on a bright Tuesday in April, they drifted into Kenneh. After lunch, Flo went ashore with Efreet-Youssef, along the wide curve of sand that served as the harbor, eager to find Gustave’s cange.

The overall impression of the town was of buildings thrown up overnight to make a dazzling first impression. Close to the river, mud brick houses with lopsided balconies leaned over the dusty thoroughfares, creating doglegged passageways that hovered uncertainly above the streets. Most were whitewashed or painted in bright colors—turquoise famously warded off the evil eye. Farther inland, she glimpsed grimmer wooden shacks, and streets converging into alleys or footpaths irregular and narrow as animal tracks. A gentle disrepair marked every structure, suggesting that neither better materials nor greater precision would count for much against the onslaught of the heat and the sand and the inundation.

She soon found the cange, its tricolor bunting deflated in the still air. She waved to the sailors swabbing the deck. They waved back, calling out greetings in Arabic to her and Youssef. Joseph came running, obviously dragged from a nap by a crewman. Bowing, he explained that the two gentlemen had gone into town for supplies. He did not know when they would return.

Supplies again. And, suspiciously, without Joseph’s assistance. She tore a sheet of paper from her aide-mémoire:

My dear Gustave:

We arrived in Kenneh today at noon. Can you come to the Parthenope tomorrow night? Would 7:30, directly after dinner, be convenient? I hope you are prepared to convince the customers. I am counting on it!

Yours in haste,

Rossignol

She folded the note in half and handed it to Joseph.

She decided to wander around the colorful quarters of the harbor before returning to the houseboat. As when she rode a donkey, Youssef trotted in semicircles around her, persistent as a housefly, a man determined to be in two places at once. In the midst of his flurry, she could walk unhampered by tradesmen and beggars. They passed all manner of shops—a local pottery; a dark, narrow booth beneath a palm-leaf canopy vending oil, olives, and dried herbs; a bakery; a saddlery.

As she made her way through the glare and dust, she noted a warm sensation in her belly and, with alarm, felt it spread into her face and limbs—the beginning of an attack of nerves. These episodes inevitably caught her off guard, as if her body knew something her brain had not yet realized. Today’s anxiety, she guessed, was a measure of how eagerly she was anticipating the trip to Koseir, and how much she dreaded its going by the wayside.

Her hands and knees beginning to shake, she tried to quicken her step lest the nervousness escalate. Her head felt light, as if it might detach from her body and float off, like a soap bubble. She stopped to collect herself, looking for something to lean upon. There was nothing but Youssef. In Egypt, everyone sat upon the ground. She bent forward into her own shade, clutching his arm.

“Madami, madami,” he whispered, looking terrified.

It was hellish to have a mind divorced from her will, a mind that in a frantic instant leaped from ember to consuming flame, from a singular concern to every worry at once. She had never told anyone about this affliction (or was it merely another character flaw?)—it would sound insane. At home, she took refuge in the bedroom and locked Parthe out. In Egypt, however, there was nowhere to hide to regain composure. Suddenly it felt to her that not just Koseir was at stake, but also the rest of her life. When the trip ended in five months, she’d be trapped again in the bosom of her suffocating family.

Her face was burning now, her head abuzz. The battle would resume, with endless arguments over her appetite for government reports, her desire to learn statistics, her unseemly projects. Every single thing she wished to do made Parthe sick and Fanny scream and slam doors and throw cushions to the floor. Even WEN would desert her—good, mild WEN!—because she was monstrous. It was hopeless, utterly hopeless. She had no future at all.

Oh, but there was one light on the horizon—Kaiserswerth, near Cologne, which she planned to visit on the way home. For years, Baron Bunsen had kept her abreast of this institute of deaconesses, the only Protestant equivalent to a convent. Two years ago, he’d arranged a weeklong sojourn for her. Fanny had given her grudging permission. As far as she knew, Flo’s visit was merely a side trip from a family jaunt to Carlsbad, where WEN would consult an eye specialist. When, at the last moment, Fanny canceled both trips, Flo became despondent, saying she wished to die, but careful not to reveal to her mother the source of her distress in case another chance for Kaiserswerth arose in the future. And now it had, though she’d not allowed herself to fantasize about it in any detail in case her hopes were shattered again.

Youssef looked frozen in place, afraid to move. For she had touched him—which was strictly taboo under Mahometan law—and he, in return, was touching her. If anything befell her, he would pay the penalty, perhaps with his life. She looked up, offering a thin little smile that did nothing to reassure him. Sweat accumulated in the furrows of his brow. His face had gone ashen.

“I am all right,” she said. She straightened up and left off gripping him. Certainly he would not wish to be seen with her holding his arm!

“Madami?”

“We shall go now.” She adjusted her bonnet, and tugged both cuffs over her wrists. She felt wretched.

“You are safe with me, madami.”

“Yes. Merci beaucoup.” The very sky felt oppressive, a pitiless blue, devoid of a single puff. Daylight on the Nile was as startling as the flare of a match, and as revealing.

He extended his forearm to her as if they were going into a formal dinner. She gladly took it. Thus they promenaded slowly down the beach. Please God, she thought, let Charles and Selina not be above-decks to see how rattled I am. She slowed her pace, nearly creeping, her feet so heavy her shoes might have been filled with sand. Despite this caution, the panic was unabated.

Trembling, she continued stiffly down the beach.

When she was younger, she’d tried simply to bury her disappointments. Then, too, she had suffered physically—the same breathless panic, weeping so strenuous that it left her exhausted and speechless. In her twenties, it occurred to her it might be better to cling to her losses, to cherish them like relics. Wasn’t that the purpose of history? To remember triumphs and defeats? And if she didn’t have any triumphs, shouldn’t she catalog the losses? When Fanny canceled the first Kaiserswerth trip, a new tactic had occurred to her: deceit. At twenty-eight, she’d taken up outright lying. It was so simple—she would tell Fanny about Kaiserswerth, but only after she had done it. She’d conspired with the Bracebridges before they left for Egypt. Charles and Selina wouldn’t flaunt defying Fanny, but Fanny would be far away in England while they toured Europe. “We shan’t be lying,” Selina had told Charles at Flo’s prompting, “so much as not paying attention to Flo’s daily doings.” Since then, Flo had pondered Kaiserswerth the way one ponders a sliver of light under a door one dares not open—yet.

The voices of children had replaced the low mutter of tradesmen. She turned to see youngsters naked in the river noisily splashing, hacking at the water with their elbows so that it broke apart in great liquid slabs. At her side, still supporting her arm, she felt Youssef’s presence, the bodily solace of it. He stared ahead with a cool formality, his movements graceful, his robes fluttering in a steady ripple just above the sand. The surf crashed, then crashed again. They passed tea and water vendors.

Back in the days when the sisters discussed such private matters—before Flo turned Richard down, thus dashing Parthe’s hopes of floating through life like a feather on her bonnet—Parthe had tried to lift her from her funks. Out of love, for if there was one certainty in Flo’s life it was that Parthe loved her without limit, a love so overwhelming that it mystified Flo. It was dutiful, to be sure, an unchanging affection based on blood. But it never wavered, even when Flo behaved badly, ungratefully. Did Parthe depend on Flo as a cure for her own loneliness? Was it jealousy turned inside out? Parthe herself was unable to elaborate on the subject, and no one held her accountable for her actions. Flo loved Parthe and at the same time considered her completely exasperating. One might as well be vexed at a puppy.

They were walking more smoothly now. A light breeze swept the shore. Flo glanced back at the chain of footprints on the sand; it hardly seemed possible she had placed her feet there. Her legs felt remote, disconnected. Beside her, Youssef breathed calmly. She turned to him and smiled. He cast his eyes down, too modest, she thought, to acknowledge her gratitude. He stopped and gently withdrew his forearm from her hand, removed a clay jar from his pack, and offered her a drink of water. She had the sudden urge to embrace him, to clasp him to her breast. He might allow her to hold him, rigidly, not knowing what else to do, while she wept freely, luxuriantly, without the need or expectation of understanding.

She took the jar from his hand and drank. The water was cool, and smelled like the garden at home in early morning, the scent of dew on soil. He watched, pleased, as she swallowed.

He pointed down the beach toward the dahabiyah, as if to warn of its proximity. She nodded. “Merci. You are a good man.” He smiled shyly and offered his arm again. She took it, at ease in their newfound sympathy.

The houseboat was seesawing gently in the shallow water. Aside from the captain lounging near the brazier, paring his nails, it seemed deserted. In the middle of the afternoon everyone was asleep or resting.

She curtsied her thanks to Youssef and quietly went belowdecks, still wishing to cry and exhausted from not allowing herself to. Her throat ached as if she had swallowed an apple whole. Trout was asleep, her needlework in a pile on the floor beside her bed.

Lowering herself on the divan, she stared at her small hands.

Twice in the past two years she believed she’d found a way to pursue God’s calling—two crippling disappointments in her cabinet of relics, both set in motion by kind men trying to help.

The first was Dr. Fowler, a family friend who ran the Salisbury Infirmary. They had become confidants, discussing the latest medical treatments, from bandages and surgical procedures to homeopathy. While they ambled through the park among the giant rhododendrons, she explained how one could convert Embley into a hospital. She’d thought of everything, from how to dispose of the sewage to installing dumbwaiters to reduce the time orderlies spent on the stairs delivering meals.

Miraculously, Dr. Fowler found nothing repellent in her ideas, and invited her to work alongside him, tending patients, writing their letters, managing supplies. For the first time in her life, she had a plan with a sponsor. But after three screaming debacles in as many days, Fanny crushed it. Flo’s aspirations, she said, were so unappetizing as to constitute a blemish on the family’s name. Only slatterns and opium smokers, tipplers and laudanum addicts hung about hospitals. She banished Dr. Fowler from the house. Flo went to bed for a week.

Dr. Samuel Howe, world famous for his work in America with the blind and deaf, set the second crisis in motion. After several afternoons of talking, he suggested that she, too, devote herself to the handicapped. Of course, he lamented, no formal curriculum existed for such work. He recommended nursing. No, that was not his word. What was it? Caretaking? A caretaking career? She could not recall.

She had plunged into the subject up to her neck, reading government blue books on the education of the deaf and blind in Europe and Canada. And then—she could still remember the shiver of excitement as she wrote the letter—she arranged to visit a boys’ academy for the deaf while in Rome with Selina and Charles. She had barely slept the night before her appointment. But when she arrived, clear-eyed and articulate, immaculately garbed in a modish lavender bodice and skirt, the headmaster denied her entrance. He had thought Florence was a man’s name. Undeterred, the next day she returned with Charles, who conspired to pass her off as his personal secretary. Or had he said “assistant”? Or was it “attendant”? Charles had pulled himself up to his full height, spewing his best flourishes in Italian to no avail. The headmaster, a self-righteous Benedictine, proudly informed them that no woman had ever set foot in the institution. Her presence, he observed in a tone suggesting she had offered to perform the dance of the seven veils, would have a deleterious effect on the boys. Devastated, she had returned to the hotel and retired for the rest of the day. That evening, she gave the purple dress to Mariette. She would no longer be a public embellishment. She wished to work, not brighten a dim room.

When she returned from Italy, she found Parthe, whose health had always been delicate, a confirmed invalid. This was the height of what the blood mob dubbed “the Parthe situation,” of which Flo was believed to be the root cause. The doctor declared it a case of hysteria and predicted that Parthe would never thrive without her sister’s steady companionship. Fanny immediately ordered Flo to devote the next six months to Parthe. What had she written in Lavie? “I feel myself perishing when I go to bed. I wish it were my grave.” She obeyed Fanny, staying home with Parthe even though she found her sister’s debilitation a frightening harbinger of her own future. Parthe worsened anyway, suffering a complete collapse within three months. When the Bracebridges intervened with the invitation to Egypt, Fanny had reluctantly agreed. Though the Bracebridges were rather reclusive, they knew important people. In Italy they had introduced Flo to the Herberts, a couple powerful in government circles. People had talked about Sidney Herbert being a prospect for prime minister from the time he reached his majority. Fanny probably considered Egypt a potential matchmaking excursion. In any case, all her attention was focused on Parthe.

• • •

The aromas of food preparation tinged the air, the piquancy of raw chopped onions, the charred odor of the brazier heating up.

As Flo prepared herself for dinner, she spotted a letter at the foot of her bed, and on top of it, artfully arranged, a twig with two supple green leaves—a gift, no doubt, from Youssef, who could enter and leave a room without displacing a molecule.

5 p.m., Tuesday

My dear Rossignol,

We have found an ally, a Christian gentleman who will help present our brief for the Koseir trip. Do not fret. Max and I and our new friend will be persuasive. All you will have to do is smile and keep Trout topside.

Yours until tomorrow at 7:30,

Gve.

What impressed her most about Gustave was his liveliness. And now he would put it to use to help her sway Selina and Charles and, most especially, Trout!

But what if Trout exerted her will? What rights did a servant have? At home, she was free to quit. Oddly, when Fanny hired her, Trout had set two conditions of employment, neither of which suggested that she would be put off by the hardships of travel. The first was her preference for the filthiest, most arduous jobs—blacking the grates, scrubbing the flags on the stoop, polishing boots. While other maids took a bashful pride in their feminine limitations, Trout had the unself-conscious bearing of a draft animal as she moved trunks and furniture about the house. The second condition was a special curfew. Without providing a reason, she had asked permission to come home at ten instead of nine in the evening.

The real question, Flo knew, was this: how deep was Trout’s loyalty? Flo thought she had ingratiated herself to a degree during the toothache ordeal, but the threat remained that even if Charles and Selina agreed to the caravan, Trout might not.