The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (61 page)

“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

P
erhaps 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

E
NID
S
HOMER
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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