The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 7

Flo doubted either Frenchman knew much about equine pedigrees.

When Charles got no response to the famous name, he took a different tack. "The Bedouins knew a thing or two about horses. Every single Arabian in the world, not to mention every Thoroughbred, traces its origins to the Orient, to the desert."

"Mais oui," Max said. He seemed genuinely curious. "And are they still breeding them?"

"Oh, yes, and we English are forever trying to buy the good ones." Charles folded up his napkin. "They're highly prized. Marvelous animals. Intelligent. Swift. And sweet as honey. I love them as I would my own children."

Selina looked down at her plate for a split second, visibly shaken by Charles's declaration, and then mopped her brow. Flo wondered if in mentioning children, he had violated an unspoken pact between them, one that provided that only Selina, not Charles, could bring up the subject of offspring and thus of her own barrenness. The Frenchmen hadn't noticed anything amiss.

"Initially the sheiks used them as warhorses-only the mares, mind you." Charles added.

As Max and Charles nattered on, Flaubert's eyes grew heavy. Max continued to pose questions-about prices, training methods, cavalry battles. He had, Flo saw, an innate appet.i.te for learning about things whether or not they directly interested him, while M. Flaubert was easily bored.

The sky had turned a deeper shade of black, pushing the stars forward, like a scene in a stereoscope. The Milky Way might have just been sprinkled there by an invisible hand. She whispered as much to Flaubert. He looked up.

"The backbone of the night, we call it. I've never seen it so clearly," he said dreamily.

On the Nile, the horizon often seemed to disappear, leaving a dome of brilliance above and a reflection of speckled silver swimming unanch.o.r.ed below. It was no wonder, Flo thought, that some civilizations (Hindus? Buddhists? She couldn't recall.) believed the universe was an egg, painted on the inside with the blue sky, pinp.r.i.c.k stars, and the golden yolk of the sun.

While the crew cleared away the dinner plates, M. Flaubert pulled out her chair and guided her by the elbow to the side of the boat near the cabins, away from the others. He brought along a shot gla.s.s full of Irish whiskey.

They leaned over the rail watching the watery moonlight jiggle along the surface. He excused himself and quickly returned, bearing a bottle of wine and a gla.s.s, which he handed her. "For you," he said simply.

"Have you read Baron Bunsen's book on the ancient Egyptians?" she asked. "Or studied the hieroglyphic drawings?" Below them, the Nile lapped at the boat like paint jostling inside a bucket. She drank her wine in a bit of a rush. In another moment she'd feel it in her knees.

"I haven't," he confessed. "Not that one. Though I love to read, to do research." He looked sheepish, as if worried he was not making a good impression. "I have read several of the volumes on Egypt written by Napoleon's savants."

"Then perhaps you already know that according to the Egyptian religion, when G.o.d created the world it was made of water, including the celestial heavens." She rested her gla.s.s on the gunwale. "Isn't that wonderful, to imagine that the stars are made of water, that everything is?"

He frowned. "I embarked on this trip to escape from that . . . studiousness for a while. Often I used to read and write for fourteen hours a day."

"That's remarkable," she said, fighting the feeling she'd been chastened or, worse, ignored. "Are you studying for one of the professions?"

"I was reading law, but I've decided it's not the best course for me. I've given it up." He took a short gulp of whiskey. "Anyway, I suppose that's the effect of the Nile."

"What is?"

"The belief that the world began as water. Without the Nile there would be no Egypt."

"Oh, yes. Vraiment." Florence was relieved that he didn't think the Nile had caused him to give up the law and that he had been listening to her. He simply seemed sad and distracted, forlorn. Perhaps something about the law or his inability to pursue it. Despite the sympathy naturally welling up in her, she probed no further, pursuing instead her subject. "And before the Creator made dry land, he made an orb of fire, the sun, but with the spirit of a living being. That, of course, is Ra."

He topped off her gla.s.s. "Yes, Ra was his original name, but he had many names, didn't he?" He carefully set the bottle on the deck. "Amun-Ra and also Ra-Horakaty."

"And Aten-Ra," she added. He really had read about the Egyptians. She was again relieved, her enthusiasm sparked. "Bunsen says he absorbed the lesser G.o.ds and took their names. But that's the scientific view. I prefer the simple story, don't you? Instead of human beings, G.o.d creates this sun who is like a man, but more powerful."

"Look at that!" he cried, pointing to the water, where comets flared and extinguished and flared again. They surfaced briefly, an array of pale green and pink efflorescence. "This I have read about-animals that glow at night in the water."

Together they leaned over the side to watch the underwater fireworks. As if the stars were made of water after all, she thought. The creatures-Fish? Snails? Jellyfish?-swam about like underwater birds in loose flocks, sometimes shooting out of the water in a fountain spout.

Standing at ease alongside him, she felt pleasantly small, as if she might take shelter in his substantial presence, his large, shapely limbs and impressive height. Richard Milnes, the "Poetic Parcel," was more refined, with hands just slightly bigger than a woman's and a head that had always reminded her of a Shetland pony, because it was sweet but too ma.s.sive for his slight body. M. Flaubert radiated palpable warmth, she noted, like the earthy and amicable body heat that collected in a barn at night. This natural warmth, visible in his flushed cheeks, promised safety, too. But she did not trust it, aware as she was of its origin in her own diminutiveness, which she had battled all her life, frequently wanting to scream I am not a small person. If they could see into her mind, into her heart, she was gigantic. But except for the years in Europe in the bloom of her womanhood, she went mostly unnoticed by the world, as befit a person of female s.e.x and stature. If only she had been born a man! Even a short man gained admittance to university, Parliament, the army, medical school. If only, if only- "I wish to be a writer," Flaubert suddenly said. "I have written a book."

She turned to look him full in the face. "But that is marvelous!" she exclaimed, touching his hand in admiration. "Mmm," she said, drinking more wine. "I seriously considered being a writer, too. My family tells me I write the best letters. But in the end, I need to live a more active life. I feared it would be like looking in a mirror day after day, that eventually I should grow quite sick of portraying myself, in whatever guise." She stopped and caught her breath, appalled at having held forth about herself at such length. A breeze encircled them and departed. "Oh, I must beg your pardon. It was rude of me to go on and on, especially as you are the writer, not I."

"It's quite all right, truly. Many people think of becoming writers. They think writing a book is like reading one." He considered his gla.s.s of whiskey, then took another drink.

"No, on the contrary, I know it's hard work, that my hand should always be wrapped around the pen, that I should feel chained to my desk-"

"Exactly!" His eyes rested on her face, then he turned away, apparently gazing at the palm islands in the river. "You are exactly right. It's a monotonous life, almost no life at all. But I like that about it, the devotion, the impracticality of it. It's rather like the religious life in the end."

She felt a further need to explain. "Yes, I can see that. But even if I had the talent, it wouldn't be right for me because there is so much I want to do, so much that needs to be done in the world. But there is no profession I admire more than writing." Behind her, she heard the others. They were discussing photographic techniques, the revolution of the camera. Charles called it a "first-rate gadget" and poured another jigger of whiskey for himself and Du Camp.

At least the men had remained with the women after dinner. At home, the females moved in a herd to a parlor to discuss trivialities while the men availed themselves of the chamber pots stowed in the buffet for their exclusive use, and retired to the library to smoke and drink brandy while they discussed the state of the world. How she resented that separation! She turned toward her new companion. "What is the subject of your book?"

He placed his shot gla.s.s on the deck, removed a pipe from his pocket, and began tamping tobacco into it, glancing up briefly for her permission to smoke. "I dare not say. You'll think me a boor."

"I promise I won't. Cross my heart." She made the motion.

"It's about goodness and temptation, but mostly about goodness." He struck a match and puffed at the pipe until it caught. "Which is why, my friends tell me, it is perfectly dull and should be fed to the flames."

"So, it is a book of philosophy?" She was amazed that he was a philosopher. The physiognomy was wrong-lips too full, eyes too wide, forehead not deep enough, not enough severity in the features. In sum, the face of a pleasure-seeker.

"No, it's a novel about a saint. That is, apparently, one reason it's so boring. It's called The Temptation of Saint Anthony."

"I see," she said, somewhat surprised that the young Frenchman should find the topic of saintliness of burning interest.

"But do you think it's boring?" She sipped at her wine.

"I've done a good job describing the temptations, but the saint is too stalwart, he's never truly tempted." He exhaled a plume of smoke over the water. "Maybe I should have chosen to write about an ordinary man." He pointed to Max holding forth at the table. "My friend there says the demons and Satan are more alive than Anthony is. Should I ever publish it, it will make a great hypnotic for insomniacs."

She laughed and raised her winegla.s.s to acknowledge the quip. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Selina observing her, a smile on her face. Dear Selina. Charles and Max had moved on to grander subjects: railways and the industrial revolution. "I have no doubt there will be steamers on the Nile . . . railroads in Lower Egypt, and sooner than you think." Charles's voice was booming, stentorian. Du Camp did not contradict him.

She was not entirely in favor of the industrial revolution, having visited the Arkwright Mills in nearby Cromford, the most modern factory in the world, when she was sixteen. The noise of the spinners had been deafening, the air white with lint that caught in her throat and lungs. A supervisor had cuffed two girls in the spinning room as if it were completely natural. Flo knew that her family owned a share in the mills and in the lead mines near the Hurst, too. It was the ceaseless toil of others, of children, that paid for her fine paisley shawls, leather riding boots, and velvet dresses; for f.a.n.n.y's endless sets of porcelain and WEN's wall of partridge guns. The village children were sickly; they did not learn to read; they had no time for walks in the woods, no money for a pet pony or even a dog. How could such injustice be G.o.d's will?

They had said nothing for a while, she realized, turning to gaze at M. Flaubert. Though he was droll, he still seemed sad. The gloom possessed his entire body. He moved little and only slowly. He seemed to require all his energy simply to converse, though the voice itself gave no hint of misery.

Should she do as she had been taught? Fill the silence, prop him up with encouragements, with flattery, with questions whose answers were already known or easily produced? She was not in the mood. And he seemed so sincere. "And are you writing now?" she asked. "Do you have some project under way?" She sipped more wine. It gave her something to do with her hands.

"Other than a personal journal, no. I am simply living, absorbing the colors of the East. And you, mademoiselle? Do you keep a journal and will you write a book of your adventures?"

Was he taunting her? His tone was polite, but his brevity almost dismissive. She fanned the pipe smoke from her face. It would be easy to take umbrage and to reply in cutting kind, but something prevented her. His large round eyes looked too vulnerable to endure the slightest cruelty. "No," she announced. "I have been quite unhappy for a long time and I am trying to find my way clear of it." She would leave it at that. If he answered in kind, fine and well. If not, she had gambled only a sentence, a single shocking disclosure. Dangled it, more accurately, like a worm. Was it flirtation if you admitted to a private weakness?

He stared at her face until she blinked and looked away. "You do not jest, I see." Setting his pipe down, he took her hand. The gesture seemed forward, and yet completely without guile or affectation, offered with the certainty that she would naturally grasp his motive.

"I have a tragic flaw, you see," she said.

He gazed at her hand. In the moonlight, her flesh was bluish, bloodless.

"And what is that?" he asked.

Now that she had his full attention, it startled and pleased her, the way his warmth had. She reminded herself that she might never see him again, that they were anch.o.r.ed at a four-thousand-year-old temple whose origins were as perplexing as life itself. "I am ambitious," she began. "I want to change the world, make a mark in it. This is not acceptable. I have a mind and wish to use it, which is considered a great failing in a woman." What had f.a.n.n.y called her desire to palliate the suffering of others? Unthinkable? Impracticable? "My mother says she can never make peace with my ideas, that they are scandalous."

"Your mother must be a conventional woman," Flaubert said. "Perhaps she is frightened for you and wants to protect you."

"Yes, that's part of it." Flo thought back to an early and especially painful rebuff. "But she doesn't approve of me." She looked him square in the face, her tone rising. "She's never approved of me. She didn't even want me to sing when I was a girl."

"What sort of singing?"

"Opera." Flo thought back to the family's European tour. "I was quite young then, only eighteen, but still, she ruined it for me." She explained that she had discovered the power of music in Genoa. She had had a voice tutor. But it was the performances nearly every evening-chamber orchestras and chorales, violin soloists, concerts by top tenors and sopranos-that had awakened her pa.s.sion. When she attended her first opera, Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, she was stricken with opera fever. "Music-mad" f.a.n.n.y had called her, gleefully at first. "After that, I went to the opera three times a week and practiced my scales devoutly."

"You are a soprano?" He smiled; his eyes widened.

"No, I'm nothing because I don't sing anymore." She continued the story. When her music teacher commented upon the drastic improvement of her voice, f.a.n.n.y reminded her that divas were famous, and therefore unworthy of imitation or adulation. "It isn't respectable, apparently."

Still she had dreamed. And dreamed, allowing herself to pretend that hordes of aficionados might stampede through the doors of the parlor to throw themselves at her feet. Her ridiculous name now made perfect sense: Enter the golden-throated, Italian-born Miss Nightingale! Enter the Bird-Throated Gentlewoman Who Could Not Help but Be Called to a Career on the Stage! The English Thrush, the diva, holding forth in a lone spotlight center-stage or dying, tormented, closer to the footlights, in a pall of magenta satin and black lace- "She forbade you to sing?"

"Indirectly, yes. And I had an unusually persistent sore throat for months that winter." As if, Flo had thought at the time, G.o.d Himself disapproved and had sent her one infection after another. "The family moved on to Paris, and f.a.n.n.y refused to hire any more singing masters."

"That is awful," Flaubert said. "Je suis desole."

"Thank you. Now, of course, I have a different ambition-to be of use in the world. Still, my mother says she will never forgive me if I try it."

He gripped her hand firmly, turned her into the shadow cast by the mast of the dahabiyah, and kissed her on the cheek. "You are . . . an Athena," he said. "Brave and above all, clever and uncompromising."

She was totally taken aback. His eyes were softer now, not with sadness or heat, but with sympathy.

"An idealist," he continued. "Or a rebel. No, a revolutionary." He seemed to be working out the details of her nature, half talking to himself.

"A freak," Florence added, "of nature."

"No, no, you will find your way, I am sure of it. I feel it," he declared, "here in my heart"-he pointed to his chest-"and here." He touched his temple.

"I don't mean to sound ungrateful for your compliments, but you hardly know me. Of course, I hope you are right, but what makes you so certain, M. Flaubert?"

"Please, call me Gustave." He beamed at her.

"All right."

"To answer your question: I trust my judgment, my animal instincts." He smiled again. "Call it intuition."

"Oh, monsieur-I mean Gustave-if only you were right! I have been so unhappy." A silence had gathered nearby: the threesome at the table had stopped talking. Had they been listening?

Du Camp was packing up his prints, preparing to depart. A wind snapped at the furled sails; the boat creaked in response. Clouds resembling spindrift materialized, streaking the sky with a frothy layer. The world, for all she knew, was made of water. Flaubert let her hand drop, planted his pipe in his mouth, retrieved his whiskey and the wine, and escorted her back to the group.

Selina said, "Our friends are going to Philae, too. We shall have to meet again."

"Indubitably," Du Camp chimed in.

"That would be most pleasant," Florence added, her hand still stung with warmth where monsieur-no, Gustave!-had grasped it.

He turned to her. "Perhaps you could help me with the squeezes, if that would interest you."

"I'd be delighted," she said. "I'm sure we could adjust our schedule to accommodate a lesson or two." Hearing this, neither Bracebridge objected.

"Shall we plan to meet in Philae?" he asked.

"That would be grand. The Temple of Isis will be full of inscriptions." She could feel a smile stretching across her face for the first time in weeks.

"Tres bien," he said, kissing her hand and clicking his heels.

The men said their farewells, gathered up their packages, and started down the gangway.

"But you never showed us what's in your valise!" Florence called out.

"Squeezes! From Luxor." He turned and shrugged his shoulders. "I'll show them to you next time." Max was already ash.o.r.e. "I completely forgot."

"Alors, au revoir!" she shouted. She waved with both arms, in case he looked back. She realized she was standing on tiptoes.

A moment later, the clouds began to scud past more quickly. From his stool at the foredeck, the captain ordered the crew to secure the sails and anchor in case of a storm. Charles poured himself a last jigger of whiskey and carried it belowdecks, humming as he went. "Good night, dear ladies," he said, blowing kisses.

"I think he had a very good time with Du Camp," Selina confided, dropping an earring into her hand and unfastening the other. "And you?"

"Very nice. Were you bored to death by the talk of machines?"

"Oh, no, my dear, I enjoyed myself sneaking glimpses at you. The conversation looked quite intense." Selina seemed about to burst with joy and curiosity.

Feeling slightly disloyal for withholding the details, Flo simply kissed her good night. "Very lively indeed," she said.

Belowdecks, she stretched out, still dressed, on her divan, head propped on pillows by the window to breathe the fresh, roiling air. Beside her, Trout snored contentedly.

How strange he was, writing the life of a saint, when most writers were more interested in flaws. Their chat, without preliminaries or artifice, had created a hunger in her. She'd spoken her heart and he'd spoken his, both of them with the candor and intensity of the condemned. Because, yes, she felt condemned to live as either a misfit or a failure. Yet, he hadn't been dismayed by anything she said.

She sat up. She'd prolong the evening on paper, unfolding yet another corner of her soul to him in a letter before she went to sleep. As she reached for her desk, the smell of impending rain gusted through the windows.

8.

NOT A WOMAN.

Max by his side, Gustave was pleasantly tipsy as he trudged home carrying his portmanteau with the half dozen squeezes he'd intended to show his hosts. No surprise, really, that he hadn't. He hardly took pride in them or considered them relevant to his ident.i.ty. He had shown the English party the ridiculous certificate charging him with authoring agricultural reports. The Bracebridges had pored over it admiringly after the meat course. Written the way a puffer fish would write if it could, he had joked, to their delight, it had the single virtue of making him sound like somebody of importance-just not somebody he would actually wish to be.

On the other hand, he had lied to Miss Nightingale when she asked if he were writing anything at present. L'Encyclopedie du Con was proving a marvelous exercise-a treatise on the c.u.n.t that would ignite glorious melees if it ever saw the light of day. He'd allow no treacly lyricism; neither did purely clinical description appeal to him. Being the son of a surgeon, he'd seen every part of the body on the dissecting table at the Hotel-Dieu-the unlikely valves and pumps within the fist of the heart, the hinges and sockets of the joints, the fine seams of the skull. He knew that sheaths of muscles overlaid the organs like a divinely st.i.tched corset. The body, even dead, had never frightened him.