The Twelve Rooms of the Nile

31

THE TWELFTH ROOM

She recognized the birdsong—redstarts, thrushes, finches—that punctuated the cool air. Bordered with tall cedars and thick-boled pines, the grounds were orderly, with gravel paths and flower beds, not a profusion, but enough to acknowledge that beauty had a place among the poor and sick. Flowers, in good measure, promised a future, added hope, though a superabundance of blooms could deny suffering, enforce a rote cheerfulness. At home they often had just this obliterating, chastising effect: how dare you be ill or poor when the snapdragon and lily of the valley lift their perfumed throats and offer their silent bells to the wind? No, Kaiserswerth was a practical place, she saw that right away—and her true destination after eight months of wandering. For the first time in her life, she was on her own—no family, no chaperones or maid.

She did her best to put Egypt behind her. On a good day, it was as if she had never been there—never walked along the beach at Aboukir Bay, where Lord Nelson vanquished the French, or saw the ships left to rot, their hulls bleached and bitten like the bones of giant, mythical birds. A different Flo had struck up a conversation with a stranger thoughtlessly discharging a gun in public. Better not to remember any of it.

Here is what I most wish as I write this, my songbird—that I could be with you in Cairo.

Her first impulse was to throw his letter away, but she relented and read it, then reread it, first to freshen her grief, and later for comfort on the long journey from Egypt to Prussia.

Please forgive me for the silence you have had to endure; I know that from silence, as from pain, one can make nothing. I have been ill in various degrees since we parted, often too ill to write. For days, I was quite delirious; I remember only Joseph bringing me tea and brandy with soft, tasteless bread.

• • •

A trove of letters had accumulated in Cairo during the remainder of Flo’s Nile voyage—ten in all, five from Parthe. The voices of loved ones from a distance constituted the best sort of homecoming. They professed to miss her, and she believed them. But she was no longer the person they missed. After knowing Gustave, she realized that she was not the singular freak it had suited them to believe. There were other monsters. Even two made a group. Two made her almost . . . ordinary. Run-of-the-mill Flo.

After Cairo, the family scanted on letters. Parthe claimed to have posted letters addressed to Trieste, Poste Restante, and to Flo’s hotels in Dresden and Berlin. They never reached her, while Selina and Charles received packets without interruption. Was the blood mob punishing her in advance? Had they guessed her secret plan?

The trip to Greece was improvised and panoramic. They stitched a crazy quilt through the Mediterranean and Adriatic on a thread of bad weather, with delays for quarantine and diplomatic disturbances. Twice they set forth from Trieste and were refused entry at Grecian ports. Remarkably, it took thirteen days instead of three to steam from Alexandria to Corfu, and ten days from Corfu to Patras. We are going to Greece by way of New York once the isthmus of Panama is cut through, she wrote WEN in a rare moment of jocularity. At last, they traversed the Gulf of Corinth and reached Athens, where the Bracebridges had a villa.

Dear Selina, determined that Flo love Greece as much as she did, insisted she wait for a sunny day to view the Acropolis. Yet even under blue skies Greece was a disappointment. Abu Simbel had evoked God for her, while the Parthenon deified man, its stone divinities poor facsimiles of the great philosophers and dramatists. Her hopelessness persisted.

Charles was ailing. Egypt, he claimed, had induced neuralgic headaches along with accumulations of phlegm and coughing spells. She applied leeches to his forearm with her customary care, glad for a task to divert her from dreaming and panic. He booked a reservation at Bad Pyrmont, in lower Saxony, for three weeks in the baths and vapor cave, first in salt, then in steel. On July 2 they departed for the north.

The meander through Europe was a revelation. Everywhere, from Vienna to Prague and on through Germany, tempers were flaring after the clashes of 1848. Berlin and Prague were in shambles, with soldiers garrisoned in civilian homes. The scent of gunpowder stung the air with the threat of armed confrontation. In every crowd, Flo saw flashes of steel and the dull glow of military braid, reminders of the fragile truce.

But O, her désespoir! The only way to fight it was by doing. Something. Anything. She visited galleries, churches, and museums. She walked and tended Charles. Sundays at unfamiliar churches anchored her, though expatriates latched on like hungry fleas.

In Prague she began to improve. The best distraction of all turned out to be hospitals. The Brothers of Mercy and Sisters of Mercy ran two exemplars of hygiene and compassion. Protestant establishments, they proved that women could serve like nuns outside a monastic order. In Berlin a trio of progressive institutions inspired her: the New Model Hospital; the Elizabeth Hospital; and most amazing, the Rauhe Haus, where delinquent boys apprenticed in the trades lived in cottages with deacons as a kind of family. The kindness wealthy Germans bestowed on their poorer brethren lifted her mood.

The second-best distraction was making Fanny squirm with letters that pretended to innocent motives. She pointedly described the new hospitals, contrasting them with one in Hamburg run in the English style by dissolute doctors and therefore full of bad women. From Berlin she lauded spinsters who had founded charities. With her private fortune, Mlle. de Sieveking had established a home for fallen daughters, and Mlle. de Bülow, an infants’ hospital and school for scrofulous children. Though the implication was clear, Flo spelled it out: if they were serious, WEN and Fanny could undertake genuine charity instead of hunt balls and poor-peopling. If Florence had funds, she certainly would.

She let drop that the women in Berlin were more liberated than their English sisters. Solitary fraus and fräuleins moved through the streets without risk to reputation. They shopped alone, spent afternoons reading in the free libraries, and attended evening concerts unescorted. “I have just turned thirty,” she wrote her mother, “the age Jesus was when he began his real work, and I hope to become useful in the world.” Though Fanny would be outraged, Flo knew she would not respond to these gibes.

While Charles recuperated in the spa, she and Selina sauntered arm in arm, companionable as ever. To Flo’s relief, Selina correctly construed Flo’s silence on the subject of Gustave as a large red KEEP AWAY sign. Otherwise Flo would have borne the untenable burden of defending the man just when she was trying to forget him.

She had less time to brood because her mind was working round the clock, absorbing information, formulating schemes she might undertake at home. Her Ragged School teaching, the work closest to the German mold, must certainly continue. But what of England’s major wasted resource—the indolent upper-class women who counted their lives in cross-stitch and bore children in a world teeming with orphans merely to keep occupied? What if they could make their way without footmen and chaperones, unencumbered by hooped and trained gowns too voluminous to pass through a gate or doorway? Fashion was nothing more than a pretty cage.

These women were bored, whether they knew it or not.

It rankled to think of how much suffering they could abate, were it respectable to do so. She began a tract called Cassandra, about the oppression of daughters. The upper-class English family uses people. If it wants someone to sit every day in the drawing room, she must comply, even if she may be destined by God for science or education. This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, others to silent misery. In a renewed frenzy, she filled the pages of Lavie with daily notes and tirades: July 20, Berlin: Suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting around a table, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books. How we should laugh!

Despite the displacements of travel, time passed rapidly. The German trains were efficient, with private sitting rooms in addition to sleeping cars in first class. Best of all, she dreamed less. Somewhere north of the Alps, the anticipation of Kaiserswerth began to outweigh her sadness.

Max was sure I’d recover, and ordered the cange to Beni Hasan, but the winds had curled up in their caves. Every day we were becalmed he ranted.

But no, it is foolish to delay what I wish to say with journalistic ramblings.

Let me begin again.

Three weeks by herself. No maid to launder or lay out clothes, dress her hair, or keep her calendar. Her own labor, she saw immediately, was the price of freedom, which was fitting, as Kaiserswerth was an experiment in communalism, with identical privations for all.

What did Kaiserswerth not grapple with? Infants, orphans, troubled adolescents, the old, the ill, the criminal, the homeless, the hopeless. Pastor Fliedner and his wife, whom she was asked to call “Mother,” were the epitome of methodical devotion. Familiar to them through Baron Bunsen and her own enthusiastic letters, she was welcomed as one of their own. Language was no problem: she spoke German, but wrote notes in French, which they read with ease.

Did she wish to be treated like a visitor or a probationer? A probationer, she said. She roomed in the dormitory, expecting austerity, but finding instead utilitarian plenitude: simple furniture, latchhooked rugs, kerosene lamps, and books. Books everywhere—medical texts, proposals for legal reform, reports from the Kaiserswerth colonies abroad. Manuals on teaching the deaf and blind and reforming delinquents. Accouchement for Midwives.

With Pastor Fliedner’s approval, she decided to write a pamphlet about the deaconesses for an English audience. If she penned it anonymously, WEN would print and distribute it.

First, I want to tell you something that only one other human being, my dear friend Louis Bouilhet, knows. (If you ever saw him, you would be struck by our resemblance. We are doppelgängers of each other. This was our first bond, not enough to sustain a friendship, but later, a constant emblem of our shared love of literature and writing.)

It was to Bouilhet I confided when I was nineteen that I was considering castrating myself. No doubt, you will find this idea engoué, if not horrific. Surely you must be thinking, “Why is he telling me this? And why has he broken his word to me?” Bear with me, Rossignol.

You see, I am an epileptic, though my family won’t admit it. They treat it as a dark secret, like a murder among the ancestors. I thought if I gave up gratification, I might be free of seizures. The idea appealed to me for another reason—the purity of renouncing the pleasures of the body. If I had done it, I believe I would have become a religious man and—dare I say it?—in that regard rather like you.

The probationers numbered one hundred and twenty, most studying to become deaconesses, a smaller number, nurses, like Flo. Nursing was a decent profession at Kaiserwerth, with standards of deportment and actual techniques to master. The hospital’s one hundred beds were always full. She learned all manner of care—bandaging, applying tinctures, the treatment for burns, for suppurating infections, for whatever wounds a body could sustain and survive. A man’s horse had crushed him; an aged deaconess was dying of tuberculosis; a child had almost frozen to death in a pond. A doctor from the village prescribed the protocol, and the nurses and probationers carried it out.

Real work, every day. She was so occupied and met so many people that her brief notes in Lavie did little more than track the blur of activity. Walked the bad eyes and the bad chest along the Rhine. An itchy family was admitted. Poison oak? Each morning she awoke eager for the day’s accomplishments.

Not that we are so different in other ways. Everyone thinks that only women are hysterics, while I believe that men are, too. Myself, for example! Often, for no reason at all, my heart beats like a tribal drum. I become emotional over trifles. Sometimes I begin to choke, or odd pains shoot through the back of my head. Other times I am in a state of exaltation. As for boils, I could write a book about the way they come and go like demons battling for my soul. In this intensity of feeling, we are, I know, alike. (Not that you suffer from boils!) Everything troubles and agitates me. A zephyr to others is the harsh north wind to me. I have become more vache, more beastly and yet more sensitive, more capable of torment. (Does this sound familiar?) Also, it goes without saying that the characters I create, such as Saint Anthony, drive me crazy. I live inside them and they in me. I suffered every agony Anthony did, but mine were self-imposed. Do you see this, dear Rossignol—that the same bells call out to us?

The Fliedners allowed her to assist at a major operation, a leg amputation set for August 1. The day before, she met the patient, Herr Fuer, a carpenter with sugar in the blood. A nail puncture on his shin had festered into gangrene. He was forty-five, with thick blond hair that stuck out from his head like shocks of wheat, giving him a clownish demeanor at odds with his grave condition. “I am frightened, fräulein,” he kept saying. “I need to pray.” She prayed with him. She wrote two letters for him and sang hymns. He joined in, his voice quavering with anxiety. Pastor Fliedner stopped by to pray with him, too, though Fuer was a Catholic. What higher purpose, she wrote that night, can there be than saving a life or a soul?

The next morning, she impatiently rolled bandages until summoned to the surgery. For the next five hours, she and Sister Sophie attended the surgeon in the small, brightly lit operating room. Using a circular saw, the doctor removed the leg as high as possible to forestall spread of the poison. The cutting was grisly but brief.

She hadn’t expected beauty—there was no other word for it—in such a dire circumstance. The reek of rotting flesh, the gore, even the patient’s suffering mattered less than the continual awe. Awe for the incision, the steel blade entering the flesh with an unparalleled and godly presumption of intimacy. Awe for the beautiful taking up of the blood vessels. She watched the arteries flex like molten canes still hot from the glass furnace. When they straightened, filling up with fresh bright blood, the surgeon tied them off with seven waxed threads. The room was a slaughterhouse, but she paid no notice. They packed the wound. The white gauze bloomed and bloomed, not sapping Fuer’s vitality but stanching the spillage as if with a crafty abstract rendering of bouquets.

In the afternoon and evening, Fuer suffered greatly. She prayed with him when he was conscious. What made the operation so arduous and prolonged, the doctor said that evening, was the insufficiency of healthy skin to fold over the wound. They dressed the stump a second time with collodium strips, but they proved too small to be protective. The surgeon removed them and she helped stitch up the wound with black silk, then put on a Maltese cross bandage. Cold water compresses every five minutes, one of us always with him. Flowerpots on the windowsill from Sister Ernestine. She fell asleep with her pen in hand.

Friday, 2 August 1850

12–12:30 Took my place by Fuer, who was going on well. In the afternoon I read to the dying man and the disfigured man in the garret, who are not allowed to join the others.

2 P.M. Cupped Margareta.

3–4 P.M. Making up powders, decoctions, infusions, etc., under Sister Ernestine’s direction at the apothecary.

6 P.M. Men’s ward. The amputated man.

7 P.M. Pastor’s class with the seminarists. They practiced telling him the story of Isaac and Elisha and the angels, which they will relate to the children tomorrow. He teaches like Socrates. Questions and answers, never outright lecturing or correction.

Early the next morning, while scrubbing glass vials at the apothecary, an extraordinary paradox about Abu Simbel occurred to her: at the heart of Ramses’s monumental splendor was complete anonymity. The pharaoh who ruled for sixty-six years would never be forgotten as long as his name, Ramses or, in Greek, Ozymandias, issued from the lips of the living, which his monument at Abu Simbel ensured. But he, too, like Osiris and the primeval traveler before him, the dying sun, had passed through the twelve rooms in the hours between sunset and dawn. He’d sailed the infernal river, past ogres and tormentors, ravenous snakes and crocodiles, while priests made sacrifices and recited spells from the “Book of Going Forth by Day.” At the Hall of Two Truths in the seventh room, Osiris weighed his heart against the feather of truth while the monster Ammit—she loved that name, which meant “bone crusher”—waited to devour the failures. Presumably the golden scales had balanced, and he rejoined Ra in the Barque of Millions of Years, sailing toward the glorious dawn of eternal life. But none of it was possible without the multitude of nameless artisans—the jewelers, cooks, embalmers, priests, stonemasons, bricklayers, painters. Their names, Bunsen said, survived more quietly, not in the mouths of people like her and Gustave and Selina, but buried with them, inscribed on parchment and protected by the magical rope of the cartouche.

She’d written a third note at Philae, she suddenly recalled. Not a plea to die, but a bargain offered to God. I am prepared to serve without reputation.

For a dozen years she had clung to God’s words. But what were these words anyway? Inventions of the brain, proximate fruits of intention. Wait, the Voice had said. And she had always understood that meant to await further instructions. But what if the waiting were part of His bidding, imposed not to humble her but to effect a sustained alertness, a sharpened attention to whatever happened? The eye of the falcon, the sun god’s eye, watching over everything.

By now her note, retrieved by the wind, would be nourishing rice stalks or lotus leaves. The notion pleased her. Perhaps His long silence was like that, not an absence but a slow fruition, as of the pale yellow, plate-size lotus blossoms that swayed over the sodden expanses of Nile silt.

I know how sensitive you are to words from our time together at Koseir when you forbade me to speak the name of a certain part that I later told you against your will. But in addition to my epilepsy, I have contracted an unspeakable disease. I am loath to write this word, but I must; otherwise, nothing I say will make full sense.

Pox.

She found it puzzling that the deaconesses had sprung up in Germany and not in England, both being Protestant. In England, the rural poor and the new industrial class cried out for such an institution. If she studied the Kaiserswerth methods, she might transplant them and start her own institute at home. Women not married to God, but to society, in His name.

Have you heard the old joke: One man to another: What is the price of love? Second man: Ten francs or marriage.

The true answer is pox.

What is a man to do who harbors this disease? I shall be lucky if I do not go mad. The cures are problematic. Valerian root is inexpensive and often prescribed but does not work. Gum from the lignum vitae is expensive and unproven. I shall try the mercury cure (“A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury”), which is what my father would have prescribed. The treatment must be repeated periodically, as the disease is thought to remain in the body until death.

I wanted to tell you this in Kenneh but lacked the courage. Even to speak of it is a great dishonor to you, for which I apologize.

No, she’d never gone to Egypt. Never set foot in the sand or sat on the shore of the Red Sea. It was not she who wished to die at Philae and instead was rescued by a man who became a friend, unlikely as that was.

And so, Rossignol, I want to say that you are beautiful. I wish that I had told you this before, but you are. Your mind is likewise beautiful. I have never met your like. I would say you have the mind of a man, but that would not suffice, either.

I know that marriage holds no appeal for you, but what else is there between a man and a woman that would not provoke the condemnation of society, that would not be considered an abomination, that would not cause us pain? I had hoped we could be lifelong friends, but alas, I am drawn to you in the way that men are drawn to women. I began to love you—it was so easy and natural. But how can we have a future with my illness?

Saturday, 3 August 1850

Walked the bad eyes and the rheumatism in the morning. Lunch with the infant schoolmistresses. Reading Bible with penitents at evening—a new group of ten women fresh from prison.

In her heightened existence, responsible for prolonging lives, it seemed natural to entertain opposing feelings, to be what she would have once called confused, though now she did not feel confused. She felt capacious. On the one hand, she suffered the scarifying sorrow of loss, and on the other, she was proud, filled with an immaculate and pure joy. For this was love, or had been.

No more love, no more marriage. When she had refused Richard, those words had been as much a judgment on herself as on him. She had pitied herself, as though her hands had been severed before she had touched a single thing on earth—not a leaf, not the honed blade of a knife, or the silky hand of an infant. Now she had. They had touched like God and Adam on her beloved Sistine Chapel. No longer a stranger to love, she had set it aside. Rushing between patients, measuring elixirs or sitting in a profound quiet with the dying deaconess, she felt joy and grief and had no need to distinguish between them. Like the good and evil in the temples at Abu Simbel, they flowed together. They were one.

• • •

The next Thursday morning, a week after the amputation, she was alarmed to find Fuer, who had been steadily improving, stuporous and hemorrhaging from the nose. The doctor visited three times that day. She followed his instructions, placing a bladder with artificial ice on Fuer’s head, renewing it every two hours, applying cold-water compresses to the back of his neck and temples. His moistened hair looked like the feathers of a molting bird. She washed his hands and chest frequently and checked his pulse every half hour. By 10 A.M. it had risen to 130. She and Sister Sophie put leeches on his temples as he drifted into and out of sensibility. She offered to stay the night with him, but Mother ordered her to her room.

She barely slept. Vigilance had rooted in her, her schedule shaped to his. She woke at 5 A.M. and found him bleeding at the temples. She held dry compresses against his brow, pressing upward with her hands flat on the cloth. Fuer stared at her so resolutely that she knew he was trying to communicate. His eyes rolled back in his head.

She called for a priest to administer extreme unction. While the old cleric prayed with enough heart for the three of them, she held the patient’s hand. After that, the room quickened with activity. At nine, the doctor arrived, examined Fuer, and declared it was typhus. Mother appraised the scene to determine who should care for him in his final hours. She chose Flo.

By evening, his teeth and tongue were black, the rest of him gray. Every half hour, per the doctor’s orders, she put thirty drops of ether on his head to assuage the pain. His hair was straw now, trampled and lusterless. She continued to refresh the ice bladder every other hour, and hourly applied strong chamomile tea compresses to the stump, which was pink and healing nicely, like the one healthy tree left in a forest decimated by fire. Through his coma, she sensed his fear, which had been the worst aspect of his suffering all along. Strong steel and acids every hour internally and as much water as he can drink, mixed with raspberry vinegar. All day I held dry cloths to the bleeding, pressing down with my hands. This it is to live.

She slept on and off at his bedside and awoke disoriented at 8 A.M., two hours later than usual. He was still alive. At nine the doctor came but did not dress the stump. He listened to Fuer’s heart and chest without ever looking at her, not wishing, she sensed, to convey emotion. After he left the room, she sat holding Fuer’s damp, clay hand. He was breathing, just breathing; it was all he could manage. And then, in a few minutes, without any struggle, he died. Gone in an imperceptible instant. And where had he gone? Where did they go when they left the body?

The job was not finished. She fumigated the room with vitriolic acid and supervised the removal of the body to the chamber of the dead, where it was sprinkled with chloride of lime and no one was allowed to enter. That afternoon his sisters came to call on him. She had to turn them away weeping.

• • •

Selina came to the institute for an afternoon’s visit. She noted what a rough place it was, lacking in the usual amenities: no hot water for a bath and very often no cold water. Flo bathed, she explained, when she swam in the Rhine with the orphans. Selina was glad that Flo’s family had not accompanied her. They would have been alarmed and disapproved. And interfered, Flo added.

That evening, after Selina left, Mother Fliedner asked her to accompany Deaconess Amalia the next day. They would be selling lottery tickets at the village inn to raise funds.

“What is the prize?” Flo asked.

“Money, just some money,” answered Mrs. Fliedner. Flo had never heard of such an undertaking. She wondered if it was better to award a gift. Perhaps chocolates or some other delicacy?

Mother said they hadn’t time to shop for chocolates and the people of the village were content to win a small pouch. Flo thought it undignified, but agreed.

The next morning she set out with Sister Amalia. Stationing themselves at a rickety table in the porte cochere where the carriages collected and deposited guests, they sold a small roll of chances. At lunchtime they picnicked by the river on bread and cheese. Sister Amalia returned to the hotel and retrieved the table and chairs. She asked Flo to help her set up outside a restaurant down the street.

“But we have sold all the tickets.”

“Yes,” the sister agreed. “Now we beg. People will throw in their change from dinner.”

“I see. And they do not expect anything for it?”

“It’s just small change,” the deaconess replied, “like the poor plate at church.”

They had no sign, no booklet or prospectus to distribute, Flo pointed out. The deaconess said everyone in town knew of the Fliedners’ institute. But Flo felt the need to identify herself for each customer who tarried at the table. “I am Florence Nightingale,” she recited, “asking for your generosity for the work of Pastor Fliedner’s Institute for Deaconesses.” The sated diners did not meet her eye or acknowledge her. She shortened her speech, mumbling “for the deaconesses” and looking down as she offered the bowl Sister Amalia had brought for the purpose.

In her boredom, she imagined people she knew exiting the restaurant. The Poetic Parcel and his new wife, Annabelle, arm in arm and deep in conversation, Richard tipping his hat, then scurrying away upon recognizing her. Parthe, flustered as usual, shifting from foot to foot as she chatted. Max, tripod in arm, to capture the event for posterity. WEN, in his silk top hat, and Fanny, swathed in fur, speechless before this beggar, their splendidly brought-up second child, who was pleased as Punch for them to see her.

They collected a pathetic sum. Flo guessed she’d been asked along as a test, to be mortified or shocked. If so, she had passed with high marks. Begging for alms did not bother her; she was not asking for herself, but for God.

That night she went home deeply contented. I have found my destiny, she wrote in Lavie, and it is so blindingly bright that I might have removed from a darkened parlor directly to a lakeshore in a single step and there seen my own reflection. At first I was a fractured and jagged rippling, but I have smoothed and settled into a trembling liquid whole.

• • •

Perhaps it is cruel to be so candid. If so, I send you my deepest regrets. You see, though in my heart I am a red romantic, I know how foolish the pursuit of romance is. The only cure for it is celibacy, at least in the ideal case, for there is no way to protect oneself from love. I shall have to settle for the friendship of other cynics like myself.

I am honored to have known you as my friend.

I cherish you. I embrace you and beg your forgiveness with a thousand tendernesses.

Gve

No, she had never been to Egypt. Never stroked his shaved head, mapping the tender bumps, placing her fingertips on his lips and eyelids. She had never entered his tent, been kissed and touched there and there, her body a night sky pierced by stars.

• • •

Saturday, 10 August 1850

8–9 Apothecary

2 P.M. A fever patient came in; longed to nurse him. Itchy family discharged.

4:30–7 P.M. Writing out receipts, etc, longed to be with the severely sick.

8:30 P.M.: Walked in the moonlight along the Rhine with Sister Sophie. Death is so much more impressive in the midst of life.

The last week was difficult on many counts, not least being the sadness of imminent departure.

On the wards, the patients worsened. Three were bedridden and three more she had to lift into and out of bed. What gainful experience could there be after Fuer? Nothing; only making beds and dragging the invalids out to bathe.

In three weeks they buried four patients, not unusual, Mother said. People tended to be very ill by the time they went to hospital.

On her last day at Kaiserswerth, she breakfasted with the probationers and deaconesses, bathed the infants in the river, and said her farewells at the hospital—all distressing, as these people felt like family now.

At four o’clock Trout and the Bracebridges fetched her in a coach. They’d taken rooms in Cologne, where they drove posthaste. Flo was anxious to draft the Kaiserswerth pamphlet. She wanted to finish it while things were still fresh in mind—her practical little room, the songs the orphans sang, everywhere the healing odor of iodine and disinfectant. She promised the Fliedners she’d return within the year. My home, my heart’s home, my salvation.

Saturday, 17 August 1850. Cologne.

Selina and Charles sightseeing all day and Trout here at the hotel with me, both of us glad for the leisure. Long letter home to Parthe explaining the blessed institute. She will not oppose me if I can win her over first. I know she will show it to Fanny. My happiness graces every word. The letter sings! I send her my sincerest love, for I do love them all and have missed them in my own way. Even the fighting is part of my care, I say.

In truth, her family had less power over her now that she had settled the question with God and met another monster. It was only a matter of money now, and time. Time until WEN surrendered to her will.

She had thought of Trout often at Kaiserswerth, not missing her assistance, but marveling at her situation, and at her own blindness to it. To be with her again at the hotel was comforting.

Though it was too personal and ephemeral for display, she would keep the cast of Gustave’s face. In every other way, it was a perfect souvenir, blank as the desert and the paper from which it was made, and yet as shapely as any object willed into existence. What had passed between them was just as unique and private. She felt no need to speak of it. Nor could anyone guess it. He was part of her now, and she of him. She had his face, not just in papier-mâché, but also in her mind, in her fingertips. And no one could fathom any of it simply by seeing her. Just as she had looked at Trout without seeing Gilbert, who was a part of her. When she looked at another’s face, she must remember this—that no one was strictly singular. A person was more than herself or himself. She determined in the future to imagine that every face she saw was illuminated that way, lit by something continuing to shine inside, like a sun that had not yet risen but would as it had every day since Creation.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, SOURCES, AND A NOTE

Perhaps because it is my first novel, this book has had many friends, which I am pleased to acknowledge here. I am thankful to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts for residencies that allowed me to complete this work surrounded by peace and beauty and nurtured by the fellowship of other artists. At the Florence Nightingale Museum, the archivists and curators, in particular Caroline Roberts, extended friendly as well as helping hands to me.

I am especially grateful to Anika Streitfeld for her Solomonic book sense. Nirah Shomer, Michael Nowak, and Francis Gillen all read an earlier draft and made crucial suggestions. John Giancola, Kathleen Ochshorn, and Julie Raynor offered unflagging support.

It is also my pleasure to thank the team at Simon & Schuster: in London, Jessica Leeke; in New York, Michele Bové; Emer Flounders; Nina Pajak; and especially my editor, Anjali Singh, for her brilliance, passion, and diligence. Thank you, as well, Jonathan Karp, for your strong support of this book.

Gillian Gill, who does not know me from Adam’s off ox, generously advised me about biographical sources and corrected my clumsy nineteenth-century French. Any remaining infelicities or inaccuracies are my own.

There are not enough words in the English language—or any other—to express my gratitude to my agent, Rob McQuilkin, who understood this book at every step and whose enthusiasm and confidence in it never wavered. His wisdom informs every page.

Margaret Joan Libertus, one of my dearest friends and staunchest supporters, died as this project was drawing to a close. May her name live on in the Field of Reeds.

SOURCES

Within the weave of language in this novel, scholars of Flaubert and Nightingale will recognize phrases and sentences familiar to them. For example, I use some of Nightingale’s actual diary entries verbatim, most famously the “no more love, no more marriage” excerpt that here, in her fictional life, she shows to Richard Monckton Milnes. Likewise, I have sometimes deployed genuine Flaubert quotations among the thoughts, writings, and remarks that I have invented for him.

Though I have relied in large part on primary sources—the letters, journals, and books of Flaubert, Nightingale, Du Camp, Mary Clarke Mohl, and others—I have also benefited from many secondary sources, including Gillian Gill’s Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004); volumes 1, 4, and 7 of Lynn McDonald’s definitive Collected Works of Florence Nightingale (Ontario, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001, 2003, and 2004; vol. 4 edited by Gérard Vallée); and Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale: The Making of an Icon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

Of the many French sources I consulted, one of the most useful was Michel Dewachter’s and Daniel Oster’s facsimile edition of Du Camp’s original travelogue and photographs, Un voyager en Égypte vers 1850: Le Nil de Maxime Du Camp (Paris: Sand/Conti, 1987). Also invaluable were Frederick Brown’s Flaubert: A Biography (New York: Little, Brown, 2006) and Francis Steegmuller’s The Letters of Gustave Flaubert, 1830–1857 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1980). Finally, Trout’s relationship with Gilbert Pennafeather is closely modeled on Hannah Cullwick’s relationship with Arthur Munby as described in The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant, edited and introduced by Liz Stanley (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984).

Websites devoted to Flaubert, Nightingale, Du Camp, and almost everyone else in this book appear on the Internet in an ever-widening tide. For the eternally curious, a little googling will yield fascinating information, such as Flaubert’s response to the government charges of obscenity against Madame Bovary; a photograph of “La Poétesse,” the marble statue that Louise Colet is sitting for in James Pradier’s studio when she meets Flaubert; and the round-robin pornography that Richard Monckton Milnes penned with Sir Richard Burton and other literary luminaries. Our knowledge of the Victorians continues to grow, providing us an increasingly rich portrait of their age and a mirror for our own.

A FINAL NOTE

This is a work of fiction inspired by real people. Though I have hewed close to the facts, I have also taken liberties with them. For example, Nightingale attended an amputation at Kaiserswerth, but a year later, on her second visit. The Baedeker that Flaubert drops in the Nile was in truth not yet available in a French version. Flaubert and Nightingale did indeed tour Egypt at the same moment with nearly identical itineraries, but as far as we know, they never met. However, the historical record does suggest that they glimpsed each other in November 1849 while being towed through the Mahmoudieh Canal from Alexandria to Cairo to that place on the Nile where still today one may engage a dahabiyah or cange and see the sights.





ABOUT THE AUTHOR



© BETH KELLY

ENID SHOMER won the Iowa Fiction Prize for her first collection of stories, Imaginary Men, and the Florida Gold Medal for her second, Tourist Season, which was selected for Barnes & Noble’s “Discover Great New Writers” series. She is also the author of four books of poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, and many other publications. As Visiting Writer, she has taught at the University of Arkansas, Florida State University, and the Ohio State University, among others. She lives in Tampa, Florida. The Twelve Rooms of the Nile is her first novel.

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