The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

19

KOSEIR

Gustave was excitable and nervous on the last day of the caravan. It was his habit, he explained, to grow increasingly impatient the closer he came to his goal. He hounded Joseph with questions: How many kilometers until Koseir? How many more hours? At midday, when the wind shifted, he sniffed the air, clapped his hands, and howled like a wolf, convinced he smelled the Red Sea. Dismounting his camel, he charged over the next rise. Flo sniffed the air, too—not a hint of coolness or salt. Moments later he returned, crestfallen. For the next two hours he alternated between clownish prattle and strained silences during which she thought he might spontaneously combust from the heat of his anticipation.

Oddly, she was in complete sympathy with his shenanigans, for he behaved exactly as she would have if Fanny and Miss Christie had not dampened her spirit. The only difference between herself and Gustave was that he expressed his ardor. Adorably. Inspiringly. If only she might act so free, so true to her nature! Furthermore, since he didn’t bother to hide his foolishness, she was inclined to trust it, and thereby trust him. How could she not trust a man who had confided that he patronized brothels?

In the afternoon, when the road dipped and flattened into a pattern of ridges like a seabed, he howled again and galloped off. In his wake, salt air arrived on a gust, and Koseir nudged the horizon in a dazzling white clump like a toy city. This time he returned content to parade with the rest of them as the road narrowed into the dusty main street of the town. They passed merchant stalls and cafés where men smoked narghiles and played backgammon at small wooden tables. At the last row of houses before the sea, the Arabs deposited them in the street, arranged the camels in a train, and bid farewell, calling loudly to each other as if to celebrate the end of a long enforced silence. Gustave stood silently in the road, looking dazed.

Her feet swollen and half numb after so many hours in the saddle, Flo felt light as thistle down. Each step she took was an unpredictable experience—as if a puppeteer were controlling her limbs from above, she explained to Trout. “And how do you feel?” she asked.

“Like I’m made of India rubber, mum.” Trout ventured small, wobbly steps, like a tightrope walker. “I can’t get purchase. It feels like I’m still riding the beast.”

Flo laughed.

Just then, Père Elias greeted them in the street. Flo could not help gawking: he was the exact double of Père Issa, down to his beard and braided leather sandals. And his hands? Yes, the same peculiar nail flourished on his pinkie. Gustave had promised to explain it but never had. She must ask him again.

“My brother did not tell you we were twins?” Père Elias inquired of his startled guests. “Our mother dressed us alike in every detail. She was determined to make us undistinguishable so Father would not know which one to beat.” He laughed. “I like to think that though we live apart, we still dress alike, not so difficult in the Orient because one doesn’t wear much.” He lifted the hem of his pelisse to illustrate his point.

“And you have the identical occupation,” Max said as they followed him inside. “Both French consuls.”

“I think you’ll find we’re very much alike.” He ushered them into his villa and ordered his houseboy to make coffee.

They sorted out the sleeping arrangements, and a servant took the bags and parcels to their rooms. Joseph retired to the veranda, where a hammock awaited him. Flo followed the consul into the salon.

She and Trout sat upon one divan, Gustave and Père Elias on another. Max, hypervigilant about breakage, toted the photographic equipment himself. She heard him repeatedly struggling up the stairs.

An exchange between the men proceeded in rapid French. Père Elias inquired about friends and kinsmen in Kenneh, but after a fusillade of names, it turned out they knew no one in common but his twin. Flo kept her gaze elsewhere, preferring to study her surroundings rather than join the conversation.

Divans with pillows in the Ottoman style lined the sitting room, while fringed carpets in shades of red, cream, salmon, and blue overlapped on the stone floor. Against the stark white walls, the effect was beautiful, like an indoor garden. Brass trays and bowls, placed about for decoration, glowed like patches of sunlight in a shady glen. She made a mental note to buy brassware gifts.

Trout was drifting toward oblivion, her head lolling to one side, her eyelids fluttering shut. As Flo watched her, she felt a stab of envy, the emotion she most detested in herself. Why did a lowly servant enjoy peace of mind while she was deprived of it? Other than simple chores, Trout didn’t have to lift a finger, relying on the others for every need. She didn’t have to communicate with anyone but Flo, whose concentration was excruciatingly punctured by overheard smatterings of conversations and the babble of vendors and beggars. Cocooned in a noisy silence, Trout, on the other hand, could relax into a state of carefree helplessness.

The problem, Flo knew, was that she liked to be in charge, and even when she wasn’t, she followed events as if she were. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust people to do their jobs; she simply knew she could do them better. But being responsible was as often a torment to her as a joy. She paid for whatever confidence and power it bestowed with exhausting, unrelenting vigilance. Lately, observing Trout, she had begun to wonder what it would be like to entrust herself to another’s care, body and soul. Wasn’t that what she had tasted the first evening with Gustave on the houseboat when she felt herself shrink until she was pleasantly small? And in the cave at Philae, too, while he sprawled next to her, radiating warmth? Surely that liquefying sensation of ease had something to do with wishing to yield herself to another.

Trout snorted. Her eyes flew open, then shut. The men chuckled, nodded at Flo, and resumed talking.

Max returned and took a seat between the two pairs. “What have I missed?” he asked her. A droplet of sweat coursed down his cheek and was sucked up by his collar. “What have they been talking about?”

“You shall have to ask Gustave,” Flo replied.

“You didn’t hear them?”

It was rare for Max to press. Usually he was the epitome of coolness, a French version of the Poetic Parcel now that she thought about it, though Richard had redeeming qualities Max probably lacked—interest in the poor, for one. “I’m afraid I was resting.”

“Ah,” Max said. “You must be tired.” He reached forward and patted her arm. “But Trout is sawing lumber for the gods!”

Flo’s heart pounded as jealousy stabbed and stabbed. It was so unjust and ridiculous that she envied Trout. Trout, who went everywhere alone—to the dentist, to the pub, on the train to Ryton. Were Flo to suffer a toothache, at least two people would accompany her to the dentist—Fanny, out of solicitude, and Parthe because she could not tolerate Flo’s going anywhere without her. “I’m sure you have no idea how I feel, Max.”

He leaned back. He fiddled with the top button of his shirt. “I hope I have not given offense in some way.”

She sighed, close to tears. “Forgive me, I am tired.” Which was a lie. Fueled by frustration, she could have sprinted into the street and screamed. Or, like Gustave, howled.

“Is anything amiss?” Gustave asked.

Was there a universally disquieting tone in human speech, she wondered, for the other two turned to her and Max as if an alarm had been raised.

“I was just teasing Miss Nightingale about her maid.” Max pointed to the sleeper, whose fitful snoring now sounded like the buzzing of a fly trapped at a window.

“You must all be fatigued from the journey,” Père Elias observed. “Would you care to retire to your rooms? We shall not dine until after dark.”

“Though I, for one, am about to drop,” Gustave said, “I want to walk on the beach. The Red Sea! Perhaps I could take a plunge—”

“The water is still cold at this time of year,” said Père Elias. “But the tide is out and if you go north, toward Old Koseir, you will find seashells just inside the cove.”

“Then I shall wet my toes. Who wants to come along?”

“I do.” Flo’s hand shot up like one of the boys in her Ragged School classroom. Fanny was right: too much enthusiasm. She was sure she was flushing.

“I’ll stay here,” said Max, patting his dyspeptic belly.

“Hakim, my houseboy, will go with you, if you desire.” Père Elias indicated the boy serving them thimblefuls of coffee in small white cups.

At the threshold of manhood, with a tall, long-limbed body, the boy still had the dewiness and brightness of a child. Flo had never seen such luxuriant eyelashes, pointy clumps of them, like shiny feathers. His skin was flawless as a newborn’s except for his upper lip and jaw, where the first down had sprouted in sparse patches. Rather like Parthe’s, she realized with dismay. Did a woman dare shave her face?

“We will be fine alone,” Gustave said. He polished off his coffee in one swallow.

“I need my bonnet,” Flo said. “I shall meet you in a moment.” She gently shook the maid, who came to consciousness reluctantly.

Trout had no interest in seeing the water. “I shall stay, mum, and unpack your things for the night.”

“That is kind.” As Trout awakened, Flo noticed her anger subsiding, as if it were the idea of Trout more than the actual person that annoyed her. “But then you must rest. It’s plain you are sleepy.”

Trout rubbed her eyes with both fists, like a baby. “That I am.”

• • •

As they descended the slope from Père Elias’s garden to the shore, the sky turned a lambent green. Flo stopped to retie her hat, stalling as she watched the bilious color scud above the whitecaps in streaks and fumes. On the second day in the desert, the sky had turned the same putrid shade before the wind picked up, wailing like a banshee and charging the air with grit.

“Shall we go then, Rossignol?” Gustave asked.

“I think a storm is coming. Perhaps another khamsin.”

“I wouldn’t worry.” He pointed down the beach. “It’s clear to the north, where we’re headed.”

They had taken refuge under whatever they could grab while the camels hunkered down, their backs to the wind, and sand heaped up around them. Flo had watched through a tear in the scratchy blanket until abruptly, as if someone had closed a chute in the sky, the khamsin ceased. Then just as they stood up, there had been another flash of green followed by hail the size of English peas. And the sound! Like a war. An assault by a thousand drummers, each pounding a different rhythm—

“Let’s walk toward the clear, chèrie, and find those shells.”

The green patch was scuttling southward, propelling itself like an octopus. The sun blinked on. “I’ve been collecting shells since I was a little girl.” She followed him to the edge of the water.

After he removed his boots, tied the laces together, and slung one shoe over his shoulder, he rolled his trousers and stepped into the surf. “This is bliss!” he shouted. “We have arrived in Paradise.” A groan issued from deep in his throat as he waded in.

It was thrilling to watch him relish each new sensation, to see his thick, strong feet with their long toes, the tournure of his calves, and the light brown hair on them, which she had a sudden desire to pet.

They continued walking, a wide swath between them—he in the surf, she on the damp packed sand of the tidal zone.

“These little waves nip like kittens,” he said. “Cold teeth, though.”

Immediately the spume solidified to fur; she felt the needle-sharp milk teeth.

“Will you join me?”

“I can’t.”

“Why, dear Rossignol?”

She did not expect the question. “I simply can’t—that’s all.”

He dashed some spray toward her with the heel of his hand. “Afraid of the cold? It is not so bad.” He submerged his hand in the water, extended it toward her, dripping. “Here, feel.”

She grasped his frigid fingers and quickly released them, then dried her hand on the other sleeve. “I don’t want to get my dress wet,” she explained. “If I take off my shoes, the hem of my dress will drag in the water. I can’t roll it up as you have your pant legs.”

“Quelle domage.”

“Yes.”

Pivoting, he addressed the sky like an audience. “I am here,” he announced. “I am walking in the Red Sea. The Red Sea!” he trumpeted. Two fishermen mending nets turned to stare. He scooped up a handful of water and licked it. “Salty! Saltier than salt cod or tapenade.”

Beyond him, a dull red fishing boat was nearing the beach, its dingy lateen sails loosely furled. Two men plied primitive oars, poles with a circular piece of wood lashed at one end.

Shivering, Gustave walked out of the surf, dried his feet with his shirttails, then replaced his boots. They continued north. He began to hum, occasionally singing words to a tune she didn’t know. She felt happy. They did not have to talk. She did not have to answer questions. The breeze was bracing, while the sun, hovering to the west above the town, warmed her left shoulder and the back of her neck.

They reached the natural jetty of the cove, a rocky scarp where children jumped, shrieking, into the chilly water. The beach was broad and fully exposed, with mounds of shells bleaching in the sun at the high tide line. Closer to the surf, bubbling holes where crabs and mollusks lived appeared at each recession of the waves.

Flo hurried up the dune. “Look!” she cried. “I’ve never seen so many shells in one spot.” She dropped to her knees and immediately found half of a blue-black pen shell flashing iridescent rainbows of nacre. “Oh, I wish we had thought to bring a basket or camel bag. We have nothing to put them in.”

Gustave silently unbuttoned his shirt and arranged it into a makeshift sack. She tried not to stare, but other than natives, she had rarely seen bare-chested men—only field hands at the Hurst in summer, and then from afar. Gustave’s chest was rosy, like his cheeks, with a perfect fan of hair between his breasts that narrowed to a furry chevron at his midline and disappeared beneath his trousers. His clavicle was as cleanly chiseled as a statue’s, the shoulders pleasantly rounded. Like fruit, she thought, feeling the idea in her mouth. And nothing at all like Richard, who was shorter and who, when not lolling on the furniture or floor, moved in fits and starts, like a small dog.

“Such riches, Rossignol,” he said, kneeling beside her. He had tied the shirtsleeves into a soft handle for the bag, which he placed between them before scooping up two clattering handfuls from the trove.

The shells might have been a stash of anything rare or delectable: jewels, gold coins, bonbons, puppies. Flo felt something in herself creak open and give way, like the door to a secret room. It seemed that she left her body or it left her. The two of them played with the mindless absorption of children.

She’d never seen such a varied and colorful shell assortment. Some looked fresh from the ocean depths or wherever they lived. Did anyone even know? There were turrets and turbans, heavy cones with runelike markings, volutes with fine spires lined in orange and rose. One bivalve had widening purple and gold rays like the sky in a Bible illustration.

Movements at the periphery caught her eye—small crabs scuttling sideways, brandishing single pincers. She tapped his arm and pointed them out.

“I would not like to sit on one of those. They look ferocious.” Whipped about by the breeze, his voice came and went at her like a train whistle.

“Do you suppose they are all right-handed?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Would nature design them otherwise?” He placed an elongated, fluted clamshell in her lap.

“That one looks like a bird’s wing.”

“Or an angel’s.”

“We are alone,” she suddenly said.

“Yes.” He continued to sort his pile.

“Really alone.”

He looked about the beach. There were children and fishermen, a few strollers playing keep away with the surf. “Not to worry—we have some company.”

“I mean we can talk now. Remember?”

His expression remained blank. She would have to prod him. “You said we must be more alone to discuss Père Issa.” She wriggled her little finger under his nose, at last eliciting a flash of recognition.

“I’d forgotten.”

She brushed sand from her lap and placed another shell in the makeshift bag. “His brother has an identical fingernail.”

“Does he? I hadn’t noticed.” He squinted as he lifted a specimen to the light. “Look at this one, so delicate, as translucent as”—he paused and stared at her—“as your earlobe with the sun shining through it.”

Reflexively, she touched her ear, then took the shell, which was ivory with pink undertones. “Isn’t it miraculous—the way spiders spin silk, and shells make this lovely bone china?” She tossed it in the sack.

“And some have portholes and make pearls.” He laid an abalone shell on her lap.

“I wish I could make something out of that one. A brooch. Or a necklace.”

“Be careful not to cut yourself. The edges are sharp.”

“I shall.”

She felt wonderful. There was nothing she had to do, nothing to figure out, no reason to be watchful. She could sleep on the beach, if she wished, like Trout. No, it was better to stay awake and feel this logy, indefinite joy. Though now that they were talking, she noticed, time had resumed, for the sand had turned a deeper shade of gold, with tiny flecks—mica?—glinting like electrum.

“All right. I shall explain the nail.”

“Good. You promised, so you must.” She folded her hands in her lap like a child waiting for her bedtime story.

“Where to begin?” He sighed. “You know that human habits vary around the world—for example, where we are now.”

“Of course.”

“And it is not a matter simply of dress, language, and currency. Customs regarding matrimony and courtship are different, too.”

Was there some reason he was going back to the story of the Flood? She wanted to hurry him along, but decided not to for the moment.

“And physical customs are also different. Sexual practices, if I may be absolutely blunt.”

“You may.” The door that had creaked open now swung back a tiny but perceptible notch. She pulled herself to a more upright position, her hands flat upon her knees, which were buried in sand under the damp, heavy folds of her dress, bits of which surrounded her like blue flotsam.

“Ideas of pleasure are different, I am told, and I have read and somewhat experienced. . . .” His voice trailed off, as if he had gone down the wrong path. In a second, he resumed. “In the East, pleasure is more highly regarded—”

“Is that why a Mohametan may take as many as four wives?” she interjected brightly. “To increase his pleasure?” She was glad of her candor. Proud of it. She would not be shocked by anything he said. “Or is it to produce more children?”

“I don’t know.”

“We had animals at the Hurst—that’s our summer home in the north—cows and horses. Lots of cats—”

He stared at her, visibly perplexed.

“I saw them whelp and nurse,” she explained. “And mate.”

“Oh,” he said, smiling. “I don’t doubt you know the facts of life.”

“Yes.” She was relieved to have that out of the way. She didn’t want him to think her completely naive.

He threw a handful of rejects to the side and pulled the sack closer. “But, of course, human beings don’t engage in sex merely to procreate. Sex is an expression of love. Of mutual enjoyment.”

She’d always pictured Fanny lying stiff as a board under WEN. Every woman. It was something the man did to the woman. She watched the surf arrive tatted with bubbly froth. “Naturally,” she agreed. “Why else would husband and wife kiss? The lower animals don’t.”

“Kissing. Exactement. The nail is like that. Not that it’s used on the lips.” His eyes darted about for a split second. They undeniably darted. Closer by than before, two crabs challenged each other. The crabs were losing their shyness, she thought, ignoring the two of them as if they were permanent fixtures on the beach, like trees.

“In the East, a woman’s pleasure is also highly regarded. The nail is grown to further that regard.”

How did a nail help a woman’s regard? She could not parse the sentence. No, the woman was not regarded, her pleasure was. She remained silent, hoping he would expand upon the point, but concisely. If he could conclude his disquisition in one short sentence, it would be preferable to this gradual seeping revelation. “Further” suggested distance, and she was certain he was speaking of something requiring closeness, something he couldn’t demonstrate.

“Another lovely one.” He placed a reddish-brown shell that resembled a turkey’s wing in her hand.

“‘Further’? I mean, please explain ‘further.’”

“Dear Rossignol.” His voice dropped and his eyes grew soft. “I shall say it plain. The nail is used to stroke that part of a woman’s body that is the center of her pleasure. I’ve been told married men take pride in that nail. So do their wives. When you think about it, the nail is a public declaration of mutual devotion. A carte d’amitié.”

“A valentine?”

“Oui.”

The center of her pleasure. She was blushing, but she didn’t care. Her curiosity, always the source of her boldness, trumped any discomfort. She hesitated over a huge orange scallop. “I don’t quite understand,” she said softly. She emphasized the word “quite,” suggesting her lack of clarity was a matter of refinement, not substance—of inches, not miles.

“My father, by the way, was a surgeon, so I learned about the human body firsthand as a young boy. We lived in a wing of the hospital.”

This was no help, either.

“You mother must have explained it to you,” he said. It was a question.

“Yes.” She saw that his cheeks had turned the color of rouge pots. Her own felt feverish. A match touched to either one of us would ignite, she thought.

“I believe the name for this part of the woman’s body is the same in both languages—”

“Stop!” She nearly grazed his mouth with her hand. “There is no need to say it. I’m sure I know to what you refer.”

She might retch if he named a part of herself she didn’t recognize. Her brain switched on—she actually felt it engage inside her skull like a mouse scurrying in a wall—as she tried to recollect everything she’d read and heard of female anatomy. What had Fanny said? There had been advice about menstrual rags, though Fanny hadn’t used those words, prompted by a collie bitch in heat trailing blood across the rug and hearth. Fanny had called it “a woman’s time of the month.” Parthe had been in the room, too. After breakfast. Fanny was embarrassed and avoided looking at the girls. It was an agony to watch her mother squirm, so Flo had focused on the lime trees just leafing out chartreuse in the orchard.

As she replayed that morning in her mind, she watched the waves curling shoreward, breaking into white freshets. Parthe had sat open-mouthed as a baby bird having food shoved down its craw. And then Fanny had said those dreadful words. You will bleed every month. Parthe was twelve, Flo eleven, leggy little girls still playing with dolls. So you can have babies. Fanny had repeated herself about days of blood and rinsing out the rags in cold water so the stain doesn’t set. At first Parthe hadn’t moved or made a sound. But then she smiled and nodded. Proud, pleased with herself. Not so Flo, who was silent, horrified, her whole body cold. Later, she was sure, they had laughed at her behind her back. Fanny had told all the aunts what Flo had said when she finally spoke. Which was, “Well, I’m not going to do it. I don’t want any children, so I shan’t have to.” Fanny had regarded her like a cat with a half-dead mouse, with pure power and gratification. “It isn’t up to you. It happens to every woman.” Then Fanny had guffawed and Parthe had mimicked her, their faces twisting up in horrid grins.

But what had any of that to do with Père Issa’s nail?

Gustave was staring at the sand. At a loss for words? Wondering at her strangeness? Regretting the entire conversation?

“Uterus,” she said. “It’s the uterus, isn’t it?”

He took her hand as a big wave far out crashed silently at the limit of her vision. The sea droned on, its boring lesson. “Ah, Rossignol. I am so glad we met. We shall be the greatest of friends.” Was he going to shake her hand to congratulate her for a correct answer? “I’ve never known anyone quite like you,” he said.

Her feet were numb from sitting on them so long, and she felt woozy. A sickening heat proleptic of dizziness spread through her face and chest. Her monster was rousing itself, like a Cyclops in a cave. There was something unspeakably wrong with her, and everyone sensed it. He held her gaze, then looked away.

Like a criminal in the dock, she could barely utter the words. Guilty. Guilty, guilty, guilty! I confess I know nothing. I confess my vanity of mind. “Is that it?”

He was still holding her hand, which felt to her detached and dead. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “It’s not exactly the word I had in mind.”

He was being polite, she knew, when, in fact, he pitied her. His kindness revolted her, or rather she found herself revolting to be the object of it. She was so humiliated she had to put her head down to avoid fainting. She heard herself whimper.

“Rossignol? Are you all right?”

She couldn’t answer.

“I’ve upset you, I see, when all I wished was to give you a candid answer. When one travels, one learns strange things,” he said more lightly. “One sees strange things. Rossignol?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“Are you ill?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice seemed to waft away.

He placed his hand flat upon her back. It was heavy and warm. “Perhaps you’ve never heard of this organ.”

She exhaled and inhaled and felt the ground beneath her once more. Sand had worked its way into her stockings, and each time she moved it grated the flesh. “I don’t know.” If only she could skip the next few moments of her life, but they would pass in perfect agony, one second dragging after another like a bag of rocks as her childish ignorance was revealed. Her stomach felt like sour custard.

“In France, women are taught such things, but in England. Well, I’ve heard rumors that they aren’t.”

If only she knew what he was talking about! Was it one thing or many?

His hand moved in circles on her back, as WEN’s used to do when she fell and scraped her elbows and knees. It soothed her into a sort of trance. If she kept her eyes closed to aid the illusion, she could believe he was stroking her hair, her arm, the soles of her feet.

“I’m sorry your mother or sisters or aunts didn’t educate you.”

She felt stupid beyond measure. Where was her reason, her logic? Where but deep in the well of her shame? And yet, when he soothed her, she cared a bit less. “There are women who cannot bear children,” she tried. “Likewise, perhaps not everyone has this . . . thing.”

“No, everyone has it.” The warm circles stopped. “At least at birth. Though there are places in the world, some not far from here, where they cut this organ out to deprive the woman of her pleasure.”

“Oh, no. Oh, that’s, oh, no.” She felt ill. As if her ears were stuffed with cotton wool, sounds were indistinct, the sea reduced to a faint murmur. She took a breath, then two more.

“Never mind about that.” His voice deepened. “I am an idiot to mention it—”

“Perhaps mine has been cut out.” The thought breached her last defenses. She broke down weeping big plinking tears like an overwrought toddler.

“No, no. Definitely no! You are innocent, Rossignol. That’s all.” He patted her back rapidly. “I am sure you are complete. Only barbarians deprive their women of pleasure.”

Pleasure. She understood the word but was certain she’d never known the pleasure he spoke of. She had never felt any particular sensation there, only painless bleeding, the occasional itch. Perhaps she would never feel the happiness women were supposed to feel. She lifted her head and looked at him. “Mais peut-être—”

“No, I will not hear any ‘buts.’ You have been done a disservice, simply that. Everyone knows the English are terrible prudes.”

“I didn’t know we are prudes.” She furrowed her brow. “But I have often heard it said that the French are the opposite. Loose. Too amorous. Immoral,” she added, hoping it wouldn’t offend him.

“Bollocks! The French are worldlier. I heard of another English-woman your age who knew nothing of her own body, so you are not alone.” He put his arm around her and squeezed her in an avuncular hug. “Promise me you will forget all this.”

She considered the idea and rejected it out of hand. “No. I wish to know about it, if I can bear the added embarrassment.” Actually, she didn’t think she could be further embarrassed. She’d never felt so unsure of herself, so ignorant, so reduced in stature in another’s eyes. Yet, at the same time, safe.

“You must never be embarrassed with me. Will you try?” The arm upon her shoulders went suddenly limp. He lowered it to his side. “I said those same words to my darling Caroline, who died so young.”

“Oh, your poor sister. I am sorry.” They had returned to familiar ground, to the world of the loved and lost where she felt more herself, more normal.

“I wonder if I’ll ever get used to the idea.”

“Surely, with time.”

“I expect to see her running to greet me when I get home. I keep imagining it. And then”—he choked up—“I stop myself and grieve all over again.”

Parthe would race to greet Flo when she returned, and Flo would be elated to see her, for despite their differences, she loved her sister.

Gustave’s face was wet. He let out a low moan, then lay his head on her lap, crossing his arms awkwardly at the chest, as if he didn’t know where to put them or didn’t wish to impose the bulk of himself on her.

He was so genuine, she thought, patting his wide, sunburned, and surprisingly hairy back. “There, there,” she murmured. “It’s good to cry, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he blubbered into her dress. “Yes.”

He was so quixotic! Listening to him sniffle and snob, she marveled at the openness of his emotion and felt honored by his trust. He pulled a handkerchief with difficulty from his back pocket and blew his nose in three short bursts. Then he was quiet. They sat breathing together, each in a world of private contemplation. She watched the waves rushing toward her. One might think of them as hopeless, their furious repetitive energy spent and spent and spent. Or one could find them cheerful, full of merry abandon. They were a mirror, she decided, of their observer.

Precisely because she was reduced to meekness and shame, she wanted to ask more about the pleasure center, but surely, after his outpouring of grief, it would seem selfish. There would be other occasions. Maybe they could talk in the evenings on the return trip; perhaps he’d be less occupied with other things. In some ways he was like a sibling to her, an intimate completely different from Parthe, who was tentative and fearful, waiting to follow Flo’s example, while Gustave was an explorer and guide who presented her with curiosities and oddments from the larger world.

He sat up and moved closer, cupped her ear with both hands, and whispered a single word into it. As she’d feared, it was a word she’d never heard or read. She couldn’t bear to repeat it in the silence that followed. But being polite and kind, he said it again—louder, slower, clearer—as if inscribing it on her brain.

Oh, Fanny, she thought, what have you done to me?

• • •

That evening, Flo sat in her nightgown on the edge of the bed and watched the flimsy white curtains at the windows billowing like the waves they framed in the moonlight. With the lightest touch, the breeze tugged at everything in the room.

She was a mystery to herself. In her monthly bath, she was a slick object that sank in the zinc tub except for ten nursery-rhyme toes. She’d never seen her whole body naked in a mirror, and her backside not at all.

After removing her slippers, she turned down the bedcover, stretched out flat, and pulled it to her chin. She extinguished the oil lamp and lay listening to the sea’s pulse, the regular whoosh and pause.

It was a luxury to be alone in the dark. To be alone. At home, Parthe was always in the room. Seventeen bedrooms and still they shared. At her cousins’, too, it was unsociable—egotistical, by Fanny’s lights—to sleep in a room by oneself. One mustn’t do anything that was too important to be interrupted, not even sleep. One must be ready to offer companionship and comfort to others around the clock. From this single restriction she might go mad. But since the caravan began she’d had her privacy, and tonight Trout was sleeping downstairs, in the servants’ quarters. Max and Gustave shared the chamber next to hers, but the walls were thick as a tomb’s.

Gustave’s contention that the English were prudes seemed plausible enough. But there was the evidence of Mary Clarke, a Scots woman who, for all her propriety, had chosen to live in Paris, where she kept company with two men night after night for a dozen years without marrying either man. Why hadn’t Clarkey told her about the pleasure place? If anyone knew, she did.

Perhaps customs were different on the whole of the Continent. When doctors in Italy and France attended on WEN and Charles, both men had undressed. But when Great-Grandmother Shore lay dying, the doctor literally didn’t see her. Modesty could not be dispensed with, even at the risk of death! He had merely examined her head, hands, feet, and a few inches of what was politely called the décolleté. Everything else was a guess.

Flo. Flo. When she thought of herself, the image in the tilting looking glass of the mahogany dresser came to mind—the top half of a creature corseted and laced into an unchanging shape. Rather like a vase when you got right down to it, the arms being handles, the head a single blossom, like a peony. How did she look from an angle? Was her profile strong? When Parthe sketched her reading on the settee, she was shocked to see the length of her own nose.

She might as well live in a rented costume. The drawings in her medical books were no help either, with their stylized ovals, circles, and wands for the innards, and their doll-blank exteriors. The spark of life was planted in a place too deep for her to see or touch. No one could. Her torso and legs? A small Antarctica, where she didn’t trespass. Why had it never occurred to her that she could lock herself in a room and place a hand mirror between her legs?

The thought made her shiver.

An owl pierced the quiet, its downward-sliding whu! so sharp it blotted out the crashing surf. It took a moment to collect herself, to sink back into the lumpen mattress and close her eyes.

She began with her breasts, small by any measure, tracing lightly, raising gooseflesh, the nipples quickly shriveling into points as if with cold. But it felt wrong to touch them. Were they not God’s design, intended for an infant‘s nourishment?

She curled her hand into a fist and placed it by her side.

Yet, perversely, there they were all the time, as if at any moment she might be called upon to strip off her camisole and feed a regiment. Some men found them stunning, stirring. Naughty. Richard had several times managed to fondle hers, pretending it accidental, but coloring furiously.

Her fingertips barely alighting, she pulled on them, gathering a funnel shape. She felt a tug deep inside, in a place she’d never felt anything and couldn’t identify. A radiating twinge like a flame inside her flared and dimmed.

The desert sand had lent itself to astounding textures, tawny curves and scoops so like flesh one could hardly believe they were just mounds of dirt. The dunes’ shapeliness pleased the eye the way the hollow of her belly and the jutting swells and slopes of her hips pleased her roving hand. There were massive drifts like the thighs and shoulders, breasts and buttocks of a giant race that slept beneath the sand, that were the sand, figures defined by clefts and ramparts of unmitigated, velvety black. For five days she had marked time by their expanding and subsiding shadows, watching them ripen from palest gold through deep persimmon to ebony. Gustave had pointed out plaques where camel urine had dried to a varnished gloss. Elsewhere, the sand gleamed in creamy tufts, like frosting. Tier after tier of caramelized sugar. If you looked long enough, you felt sick, as if you’d eaten a gouty meal.

All this accidental sculpture at the wind’s decree, she thought, pulling up a knee and turning onto her side, resting there.

Beneath the coverlet, the air was close, humid with sweat and bodily exhalations. In the desert, her sense of perspective had vanished until a distant pit could be the dimple of an elbow or a mile-long crevasse. The soft down of her thighs, the softer skin inside them. Move my hand away. Don’t.

Don’t! She felt so guilty. Was her body not hers? Apparently it was not. In the darkness, she resolved not to care.

She was too shy to sleep naked, and wore a nightgown and drawers on the hottest nights. The slaves, the destitute hajjis, the Ababdeh in their mud huts—all seemed less naked, less ashamed, than she was in her nightgown. Their skin seemed a more natural covering than hers, which was the pallid, sickly shade of animals you found when you turned over a rock.

She must get a French medical text. A text would be proof beyond the nudes so beloved by the French, who thought it perfectly acceptable to draw from life, which she’d always suspected was a ruse for men to ogle naked girls. A fine art tradition, Clarkey had said at the Louvre when Flo turned away from Ingres’s painting of a naked Turkish concubine sprawled on one haunch, defiantly gazing over her shoulder at the gallerygoers.

She tried to imagine a long nail drawn across the different folds and bulges. Or a finger. If only she knew where to touch—how to touch—so that the unpredictable trickles of pleasure—they felt like music swelling within her—would continue.

It was very hot in the room. Suddenly she wanted nothing but to sleep.

Tomorrow she would unpack the hand mirror—she couldn’t possibly use the one she had borrowed for her coiffure from Charles. Tomorrow she’d look.

• • •

The next morning she awakened before sunrise and worked on a letter to her mob based on notes she’d scribbled in Lavie each night. Fanny and Parthe would be incredulous—aghast—at her descriptions of the journey’s hardships and splendors. (Hopefully, Fanny would not hold it against the Bracebridges, whose reputation for mildness verging on laxity was well known.) And while Flo hadn’t intended to scheme, as she wrote she realized that once the family learned she’d caravanned through the desert, Kaiserswerth would seem tame to them in comparison. They might even welcome the news.

The past five days had been more stimulating than five years in England. Life had flown at her in such a welter of color and pity and threat, she’d been unable to absorb it all—the indescribable palette of earth and sky, the sandstorm, the death rattle of a dying camel. Now she took her time to catalog the details, to chew things over lest she forget them.

Never before had she seen human beings so debased, whether the buck-naked Ababdeh children, or the skeletal Ethiopes with pendulous breasts that reached their waists but were no thicker than a tea towel. Most appalling were the pilgrims who wandered for months or years en route to Mecca with nothing but a begging bowl, all the while marrying, dying, giving birth. Yet, in all this blaring cornucopia of sensation, the conversation with Gustave the previous afternoon loomed foremost in her mind. Assuming she could ever articulate her thoughts about it, there was no one—not even Mary Clarke Mohl—to whom she could confide the sensations on the beach. Between herself and Gustave an electric current like Mr. Faraday’s had jolted on and off, now emitting pretty glimmers, now hot sparks, now a skywide aurora borealis. All of which lay beyond her powers to probe and understand.

Except for one simple but enormous realization that had surfaced like cream in a jug of milk when she opened her eyes that morning: Gustave seemed to have forgotten that she was a woman! Or chosen to disregard the fact. Oh, there were the customary displays of chivalry, as on the third day when he and Max tramped on foot to guide her and Trout on camels through a steep pass. If the desert had had doors, surely he would have opened every one for her. But when they were alone, he no longer made allowance for her sex. And she had felt this difference as a bodily excitement just short of terror—a quivering in her belly and limbs—as if someone had set her down in front of footlights without telling her the play, or what role she must act.

Was this not what she had always wished and railed for and dreamed of? To be treated no differently than a man? And yet she found herself in foreign territory, ignorant of the language and customs, unsure how to react. Should she have taken offense when he spoke so frankly of carnal matters? Did she dare show enthusiasm for things she barely comprehended? Certainly she didn’t know how a lady would have responded. She did not know how a gentleman would have responded either, “gentleman” being a pretty word for a stranger with secrets. In her opinion, a gentleman was like nothing so much as the man in the moon. He revealed always and only the same distant half of himself to her, while his male friends were privy to all of him at gatherings after dinner in WEN’s paneled library. Sometimes, after everyone had gone home, she stood alone in this room which, despite regular airing, reeked of pipe smoke fixed with the antiseptic bite of brandy—pungent traces of the male of the species, like the footprints of a rare animal never observed in the wild.

It was too much to think about all at once. She set aside her paper and pen, crossed to the window, and peered out. The sea provided instant comfort, enfolding her with hypnotic insistence as the waves unwound onto the beach, dragging with them the solacing sight and sound of gulls wheeling overhead, herons hunting along the strand with deliberate, stately steps.

It’s a misnomer, she suddenly thought. The water was a sparkling aquamarine, as clear in the shallows as a polished jewel. Had it ever been red? Chevalier Bunsen proposed the name resulted from a clerical error, “reed” having been shortened by mistake over the centuries to “red.” So: the Reed Sea.

Her head swam, her temples pulsed. From the multitude of rollers in the distance she settled on a particular foment of whitecaps peeling toward the shore and watched until it dissipated in the sand. And there, beyond the boats, another string of white curls. Then another.