The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (24 page)

He had been cruel to Louise. But now, miles and months removed, his fury had been replaced by wistfulness, by the memory of her tongue darting between his lips like a hungry bird, the salty tang of golden thatch under her arms. “In the main,” he continued to Florence, “I have found another outlet for my passions in the brothels of Paris.” In the spirit of full disclosure he added, “And Egypt.”

She did not move, her head still nuzzled against his chest. He felt her bony rib cage rising and falling. “Brothels?”

“Oui. J’ai frequenté des bordels presque depuis mon enfance.”

Her voice altered, resembling a schoolgirl’s neutrally reciting the population of Spain, the successor to Henry VIII. No, it was the sexual peccadilloes of members of Parliament. “It’s bruited about that lords in England do the same. Not that I would know. Or condone it.” She looked up at him. “I am sure it is degrading to all concerned.”

“Of course,” he lied. Clearly, Florence knew nothing about brothels. How could she, being English, rich, pious, and protected? Had he ever felt degraded? He did not think so. Had he ever degraded the women? Without doubt. He had once fucked an old woman while wearing a hat and smoking a cigar as two friends cheered him on, then passed her around like a bottle of cognac.

“I suppose it is better than deceiving a girl by promising to marry her to gain an advantage,” she added.

In other circumstances, he might have found it amusing to think of sex as an “advantage” rather than his rightful due. The only time, as far as he was concerned, that sex was not an advantage was when it led to marriage. Then he feared it. But he wouldn’t say that. He could never say that. Because once he began to think so coldheartedly, so truthfully, love in the brothel became impossible, the brothel itself distasteful, actually a pathetic substitute. No, he could not give up his whores.

“I shall die a virgin, I suppose,” she said, brushing away a channel of sand in the pleat of her skirt, “though I came close to marrying once.” She told him about refusing Richard. “I reasoned that if I married, I would be a prisoner of my household, unable to do whatever it is God wishes of me. My family didn’t understand how much it pained me to disappoint them. And myself, for I have a deeply passional nature.”

“So you said earlier.”

“Not just carnal passion.”

“I understand. There is the mind. Ah, and the yearning spirit.” She would die, he thought, without ever discovering the bazaar of flavors, sights, and sensations that was the body. A shame, all those nerve
endings wasted. He remembered the corpses in his father’s dissecting room, he and Caroline watching the autopsies from the apartment across the way, happy to be horrified.

“As I said, I am excessive in my likes and dislikes—my likes especially.” She was matter-of-fact again, her hands folded in her lap. “And with such a passionate nature, everyone believes that I am at greater risk than usual when I travel. I have a chaperone everywhere and at all times in England. Abroad, they say I am what is called in hunting parlance an easy target.”

“After a certain age, my sister, too, required a chaperone.” It was the age of breasts and blood, he thought but did not say. “When she was young, I schooled her to be a tomboy and a free spirit. She was a painter and actress. Then she grew up and married.” He had been angry with Caroline for yielding to convention, for joining the ranks of the enemy, only recently realizing that she had no choice unless she wished to become one of the sexless spinsters he joked about to her. Sometimes when they were together with her new husband, she would look at him as if to say
It’s not so bad. I’ve paid the price. Why can’t you?
Or perhaps he had only imagined that message in her glance. As a bride she seemed unquestionably happy, nearly gloating, not the Caroline he knew and loved. But why should he grow up to be like her? Why should any man wish to become a silo—a stolid, stationary provider for every hungry mouth?

She continued, “Everything must be planned with chaperoning in mind. You and Max follow your fancies, free to move about. You can be invisible—men among men—while wherever I go, I am a bauble trying to hang in the air as invisibly as a spider’s thread.”

He shifted to one haunch to relieve the itching. Stung with sweat, it had intensified. “Oh, but that is not quite correct, Rossignol. Max and I are not always safe. It just seems so to you. Of course,” he conceded, “we
are
safer than you would be.”

“Without the Bracebridges, I should be mad by now. They took me to Italy last year to prevent a civil war at home.” She had been feuding with her family, she explained, for ten years, ever since they
returned from their Grand Tour and Fanny undertook to marry her off. She enumerated a few of the battles: the opposition to mathematics as being manly, Fanny forbidding her to volunteer at hospitals and orphanages, both parents’ distaste for her work at the Ragged School, their horror at the amount of time she spent with the poor villagers.

“I am meant to sit quietly, look pretty, and entertain at the piano—in short, to be useless in a world where so much needs to be done.”

“Yes,” he said, “I see that now.” He did understand. He recognized the dull world she described. However, his unhappiness was of a different stripe, for he refused to aspire to the usefulness within it that she so desired. Could she grasp his nature after all? he wondered.

“According to Father, every man in the world has his mind on seduction and conquest, and will revert to it at the first opportunity, like a traveler to his native language. Then he becomes a ravening monster. The way Father talks, it is only their suits and cravats that separate men from beasts.”

“He’s trying to frighten you to protect you. It isn’t true.” Actually, it was. He was certainly guilty of making the lives of unescorted women miserable, taunting them on the street, catcalling when drunk and sometimes when sober.

“I must be out in the world to accomplish anything, but how will I do it if the world is so dangerous that I can’t take a walk alone?”

“Dear girl,” he said, petting her hair, “here’s an idea. Why don’t you come with Max and me to Koseir. It’s on the Red—”

“Sea. Yes, I know where it is. I looked it up on the map when Max wrote me about it.”

Max hadn’t told him that he’d written to her. The lout! Did he have his rascally eye on what he called “English pudding”? He’d set him straight: Miss Nightingale was not to be prey, but comrade. “The Bracebridges could come along or wait for you in Kenneh.”

She sat up briskly, eyes glittering. “Is that a genuine invitation?”

“It is.” He swept the air gallantly with his hand and bowed his head. “It would be my great pleasure to remove you from your scheduled
itinerary. Imagine”—he stretched an arm toward the opposite wall, using it as a canvas—“the sun turning the sea to a golden laver that stretches to the horizon. Immersing yourself in the ancient waters where all those Egyptians drowned with their horses and chariots.” But the more he painted the scene, the more disheartened she became. “What is wrong, Rossignol?”

“I shall still need a chaperone. The Bracebridges are in poor health and would never allow me to go with the two of you. The chaperone must be a male relative or older woman or married couple. Those are the rules, even in the Orient, even in the emptiness of the Sahara.”

“You can take your servant,
La Truite.
It might do her good.”

“Trout?” she repeated dubiously. Her face, moments before glowing like an alabaster lamp, clouded over. “I don’t think she’ll agree to it.”

“Leave it to me.” He dreaded the thought of flirting with the churlish hen, but then he had slept with whores older than Trout. “Oh, but I cannot!” He smacked his thigh. “She doesn’t speak French!”

“She hates me,” said Flo. “It would turn her against the idea if I translated for you. She’d smell a plot.”

“But Max can get by. I shall set him the task.” Even in broken English, Max was adept at melting hearts with the saga of his life as an orphan. (He never mentioned his wealth and that his parents died when he was nearly grown.) “Max could photograph the old biddy. So few people have seen a photograph, let alone owned one. Surely she could be bought with a portrait of herself on the rump of a camel. He could say he needs her as a model on the caravan.”

Florence clapped her hands. “If only it could be done.”

How good it was to see her animated. He felt himself expand with pleasure, too. Not only had he cheered her up; he’d also found a way to put some distance between himself and Max. Max would be less inclined to ask for his assistance if Miss Nightingale came along. She would be Gustave’s project for the desert trip.

“Let’s find Max,” he said, offering his hand as she stood.

They brushed off their clothes and located the entrance, then crept up the stairs. Bending through the doorway as one, they stepped
onto a slab of light on the threshold. Flo extended her palm. “Oh, my letters, please.”

He’d nearly forgotten them. “Will you put them back?”

“No. I left one inside the chamber of Osiris. That is enough.”

Reluctant to return them—he cherished his mementos of women—he dug one of the two from his pocket. “I seem to have only this,” he said, placing it in her palm. She tucked it in her bodice.
A mummy . . . dates from Derr . . . Rossignol’s secret scroll . . .

They tramped arm in arm over the rubble in silence. As they neared the temple to Isis, Max hailed them excitedly.
“Venez ici!”
he shouted, waving to them. “Look what I’ve found.” Hadji Ismael lounged nearby, braiding a palm frond, his one eye focused elsewhere. Joseph was nowhere to be seen.

Max indicated a stele behind the pylons. When they did not react, he pointed to a French inscription incised near the ground:
En l’année 1799, Napoleon à conquis les Mamelukes dans la Bataille des Pyramides.

“Do you think our great emperor wrote his name everywhere, like Ramses?” Gustave asked. “Why is there no mention of his sweetheart, Josephine?” He winked at Flo, who began to laugh. In a moment, they were both howling. He assured Max they were not laughing at him. The truth was they were laughing because they needed to after the intense encounter in the temple. Anything might have triggered it.

“Laugh all you want,” Max said, kicking at the ground. “I have photographed this historical marker for my book.” Behind his bluster was clearly dismay.

“I suppose we shall need a squeeze of this,” Gustave said.

“As a matter of fact, yes.”

“You did promise to teach me how to make a squeeze, M. Flaubert,” Flo said nonchalantly. “Might it be this one?”

So he was M. Flaubert again. “This one is awfully low,” he said. “It will be difficult, with a lot of bending and groveling in dirt. A higher engraving would be easier.”

Max tapped Flo on the shoulder and pointed to the back of Gustave’s
robes. Two ovals of solidly caked sand formed a tawny imprint of his buttocks. Gustave hung his head in mock shame. “All right,” he conceded, “we shall make a squeeze of this. We shall call it ‘What the Great French Left Behind.’” He wiggled his fanny. Flo and Max howled.

“Agreed.” Max shook his hand and bowed to Flo.

“Tomorrow?” Flo asked.

“I shall send a letter to your dahabiyah, setting the time. And now”—he extended his elbow to her—“shouldn’t you be returning?” He patted her hand as she linked it with his. Max looked to him for a clue, but Gustave gave no hint of the events that had played out while Max was taking photographs. “I will see you back on the
cange,
” he said, keeping his face impassive.

Staying within the perimeter wall of granite and sandstone, they trudged along, arm in arm, toward the dahabiyah.

“What do you think of the temple to Osiris?” Flo asked. Judging by her tone, it was clearly a place deeply laden with meaning for her. She pointed to it in the near distance.

“I’m not quite sure.” He had been so distracted by her desperate notes when he wandered by that he had paid no attention once inside. “Let’s go down to the beach here,” he said. Forming a stirrup with his hands, he gave her a boost over the low wall.

“This is not the way I came,” Flo said, scrambling over the top. “I never climbed the wall.”

“But you came alone today.” He hadn’t thought about it in those terms until that moment. “You had no chaperone.”

“That’s true. But it’s an uninhabited island. And I was only gone a short while.”

He wagged a finger at her. “Still, you’ve broken the rules as you explained them to me.”

“I suppose so.”

It genuinely pleased him that she had shown some gumption, that she had the potential, like Caroline, to be a miscreant. What other rules might she be willing to break?

From the shore, the encircling river fractured and multiplied the light like the beveled edge of a looking glass. He felt deeply content, as when he and Caroline wandered the riverbank at home with no destination.

They reached Trajan’s bed, an open-sided tomb that resembled a greenhouse, with vigorous weeds growing up through the floor. In the cove below, they spied the dahabiyah. Selina and Charles were sitting under the reed panel, drinking tea and reading.

Selina raised her arm in welcome. “You’ve come back, my dear. And with an old friend.”

He saw that Miss Nightingale was blushing and smiling, happy to see her dear friend. Or was she, possibly, happy to be seen in his company? For an unpleasant moment he wondered if the Bracebridges had a role in finding a match for Flo. He banished the thought.

As she set foot on the gangplank, Flo waved good-bye. He waved, then turned around, his back burning with her gaze.

They had been in the temple of Osiris? He made a mental note to return. It was one of the most important monuments on Philae. He’d noticed nothing but Miss Nightingale.

13

MAHATTA

T
he next day, as promised, a letter from Gustave arrived before breakfast. His plans had changed. They were relocating the
cange
to the eastern side of Philae to camp there later in the week. In the meantime, he and Max would trek overland past the cataracts to Aswan to replenish their stores. He would return in a few days and write again.