The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (14 page)

“It would be my honor,” Gustave answered in French.

“M. Flaubert?”

“At your service,
mademoiselle
.” He pushed back his pom-pommed hood, exposing a sunburned face, shaggy beard, and shaved head.

The squirming figure on the ground paused in her struggles to watch the pair become reacquainted. “Leave off of me!” she screamed as the guide misread her momentary stillness as an invitation to try to hoist her from the ground. Poor fellow, Gustave thought, he thinks the soles of his feet will be blistered if he doesn’t get her up in the next few minutes. Bastinadoes all around when news of the debacle reached their captain.

“This is my maid, Trout,” Florence began. “Trout, meet Mr. Flau—”

“For the love of God, mum, save the introductions and just get me up. I’m sinking. Is it quicksand I’m in?”

“No, definitely not. Plain sand.”

Gustave liked being the hero, but he wasn’t certain that he was equal to this feat. He wondered which would be easier to move: deadweight or weight attempting ineffectually to rise? He waved the guides back. “It would help,” he told Florence in French, “if she would stop fighting and lie still.” Florence translated and Trout quieted, her hand stiffened into a visor on her forehead.

Planting his feet apart on the incline, Gustave bent to the task, placing one arm under Trout’s knees and the other under her neck, swashbuckler-like. He lifted with all his strength, but the hot dune immediately shifted under him, spilling him up to his calves in sand. He let go and stood, shaking his head. What was that principle of the lever he had studied in school? The longer the handle, the greater the weight? He remembered an illustration of Archimedes lifting the earth with a pole, but the only lever he had handy were his arms, which weren’t getting any longer. He stepped closer. Perhaps the fireman’s carry, the maid like a gunnysack over his shoulder?

Miss Nightingale said, “Trout, I think it would work if one person could lift your head and another your feet.”

Trout made a sour face. “I don’t want these heathens touching me, mum. It ain’t proper for an Englishwoman to be handled by such as these.”

Gustave resumed his position to try again.

“Let me help,” Florence said, bending down.

“No, you are too small.”

“I’m very strong,”

“I have no doubt of that, but it would not be enough,” Gustave said. “The sand sucks everything down.”

They stood pondering while Trout lay in the sun, her face red, sweat forming in droplets on her upper lip and in the rolls of her neck. She wiped her brow with the sleeve of her dress.

“J’ai une idée,”
Miss Nightingale said. She removed her brown Holland jacket and stuffed it into Gustave’s hands, then knelt, bare-armed, beside Trout and whispered into her ear.

“No,” Trout objected loudly. “I won’t do it!”

Florence stood up. “There is no other way.”

Trout’s face turned crimson with rage. “I wish I’d never come to this godless desert.”

“You are not in England now. You are in Egypt and you are being unnecessarily difficult.”

Trout began to bawl; small bubbles inflated and popped at her nostrils.

“As your employer, I must insist.” Miss Nightingale retrieved her jacket from Gustave. The native guides shuffled their feet, looking ill at ease and fearful. Relentless sun, indifferent sand. This was, after all, the eastern Sahara. Gustave felt the heat thickening the rough wool of his robes, secreting itself into every fold of fabric and skin, sweat dripping from his armpits, chest, neck, and groin. Through the soles of his boots, his feet were beginning to burn. Trout would soon be Trout
frite
and then they would have to bury or eat her.

Miss Nightingale knelt again, and folding her beige jacket in half,
blindfolded Trout, tying the sleeves behind her head. She waved the servants to return to the reluctant lady in distress and gestured for Gustave to take charge. She did not have to say a word. Everyone understood the enterprise. Trout was to be tackled by however many hands as were needed, placed on whatever parts of her body provided traction.

And so the Englishwoman was hefted silently from the dune by six hands and borne like a ceremonial offering toward the temple of Ramses II. Behind Trout’s improvised blinders, Gustave thought he detected a muffled sigh of resignation or relief. He followed the pink of Miss Nightingale’s bonnet, the tiny masterful hands. She had placed herself alongside the procession, at his shoulder. How delicate she was, deerlike, and yet how practical, resourceful, and forthright. But there was something beyond those familiar English traits in her. He sensed it in her bearing, in the way she had taken charge of the situation—eagerly, like someone with a sense of purpose. It seemed to him that where the French had raised passion to a universal good, the English had substituted purpose, social progress, and sexual prohibition.

The innocent Miss Nightingale (most likely she was a virgin, he theorized) smiled at him, a commendation for a job well executed as the entourage struggled at last into a patch of shade. There they were met by the picnickers he‘d observed earlier, a small mob of concerned Europeans oohing and aahing at the sight of an Englishwoman being transported like a pharaoh across the blazing sand.

Among the crowd were Miss Nightingale’s companions whom he’d seen before from a distance when he first met her on the road. The man loped forward and arranged a blanket to receive the still-airborne servant. But she wasn’t having it and insisted they put her down on her own two feet, whereupon she all but collapsed on the blanket, her skirts deflating around her like laundry in a dead wind.

The natives vanished in a wink, going, he figured, behind the temple or in it for shade. Miss Nightingale hastened to introduce everyone and invited Gustave to join her for sugar water and English biscuits. She really was polite, this little deer, with a heart-shaped faced and lustrous brown hair, some of which had come loose from
her pink hat and hung in damp tendrils on her neck and shoulder. Her skin was as pale as cream, with an inner glow, the result of the heat, no doubt. She untied her jacket and shook it out. Her arms were thin, but with well-defined muscles. Unbidden, the image of himself licking them clean of sweat flashed to mind.

When he did not respond to her invitation, she repeated it, but her companion, Charles, had already moved into gear, pumping Gustave’s hand. “Biscuits, posh! You must join us for dinner.”

Gustave agreed to meet on their houseboat at eight the next evening.

“Along with Mr. Du Camp,” Flo added.

“Who?” Charles asked.

Flo reminded her dear friend that she had met two Frenchmen on the road. Didn’t he recall? They had had guns.

“I love to shoot,” Charles said. “Almost as much as I love to visit Greece. My two favorite pastimes.”

Miss Nightingale stepped away, in deference to Mr. Bracebridge, and was conferring with Mrs. Bracebridge, one hand on her bonnet and the other clasping her friend’s hand. He watched her moving in her dress, a costume that made her larger than she was from the waist down, and smaller than she was from the waist up. The most fetching fashion for most women, as far as he was concerned, was a bedsheet.

“I must return to work,” he said, draining the tumbler of sugar water.

“Mr. Flaubert is an emissary of the French government,” Flo explained. The Bracebridges nodded, appropriately impressed if still unclear as to his occupation.

“We are making squeezes of the monuments,” he explained. “Inside the temple. I have my man, Achmet, working, but he slacks off if I don’t supervise.” That was a lie. Achmet worked harder than a man ought, as if in fear for his life. Gustave planned to reward him with a generous baksheesh at journey’s end.

“I’m sorry you can’t linger,” Florence said. She offered him her hand, that dainty and delightful frond of flesh. Ever the cavalier, he bowed and pressed it to his lips. He took the taste of her skin with him as he walked toward the three Ramseses steadily regarding the scene.

7

THE WORLD IS MADE OF WATER

T
onight’s meal would have no hand-lettered place cards or menus, not that Selina had not volunteered to make them, but Florence had convinced her that the Frenchmen needed no such formality, as they, too, had been on the Nile eating native fare for months. Menus, groceries, baking, and such were of no earthly interest to Flo. That was her mother’s domain, a world of ostentation and waste, where awful “menu French” prevailed, which in England was nothing like the living language but a kind of decorative captioning chefs used to impress their employers. They added
à la française
and
à la reine, glacé,
and
sauté
to the menu like salt and pepper to a brisket. Once Fanny had served “julienne of soup” and Flo had piped up with, “Why not filets of carrots?” in earshot of the assembled guests. Fanny had brooded for a day.

Despite its location in the wilds of Nubia, Abu Simbel suffered no shortage of food vendors catering to the small but steady European trade. Bakers hawked fresh bread; butchers, goats, lambs, and chickens; fishermen, fresh catch. The crew, too, found commodities to their liking—dates and spices, and the henna with which they continually dyed their hands and hair. The captain had procured Nile perch, rice, dried figs, dates, almonds, and fava beans. Paolo would attempt a fruit
pudding, using goat’s milk and raspberry conserve from home. If that failed, they’d munch biscuits from Fortnam and Mason’s slathered with marmalade and Darjeeling tea. In any case, Charles would proffer his best Irish whiskey, a hypnotic strong enough to engulf the memory of any supper in a smoky, intoxicating fog.

Florence spent the afternoon exploring the façade of the great rock temple, writing about and sketching figures and cartouches, all the while knowing M. Flaubert was somewhere nearby. At five-thirty, she and her companions returned to the dahabiyah for the afternoon rest. This was the time for writing letters and journals, for Trout to snooze on the divan and Charles to read the classics. (He had brought, in the original Latin, Strabo, Ptolemy, and Herodotus that he might become better acquainted with the classical view of the late Egyptian dynasties.)

Despite his unconventional clothing, Florence counted M. Flaubert a man of quality. He was tall and hearty, with an expressive face that she took as proof that significant cogitation was ongoing behind his large and lively hazel eyes. Most would call him handsome, though she refused to use that word (along with
beautiful
and
pretty
) because it reduced people to specimens, like the dumb animals at county fairs unknowingly vying for a ribbon. Still, Flaubert would have earned first place, a blue. He had been so helpful. Trout might still be roasting on the sand had he not happened along. He’d been self-possessed and understood her wishes without explanation, captaining the rescue earnestly and without pomp.

Trout, who was sulking in her bunk, had not shown a smidgen of gratitude to Florence, M. Flaubert, or the quaking guides. Once delivered to the fretwork shade of the stumpy trees alongside the rock temple, she had nibbled a few dates, then spent the afternoon feverishly crocheting an infant’s layette and drinking small beer. To avoid another spill in the sand, Flo had urged her to allow a crewmen at each elbow for the return walk to the boat. She had flapped down the ramp like a flightless bird.

Flo looked forward to dining with two French adventurers and
with no one to glare at her or pinch her leg under the table if she made an immodest remark. She might be herself, Florence Nightingale, idealist and voracious consumer of knowledge, not Miss Nightingale, spinster and object of pity and revulsion, the living monument to Fanny’s failure.

• • •

There was hardly a ripple that evening, the breeze having moved on, the captain said, to the eastern desert. The Nile resembled a lacquered tray inlaid with nacre stars and a slender moon. One might almost think it solid, the polished stage of a theater with the arch of the heavens as its twinkling proscenium. In the air above the glossy expanse, a current flourished. Swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, midges, and biting flies hung in a particulate mist above the surface, while in pale green and gray patches, moths swam like a school of slow fish dodging bats and nighthawks. The heat had relented enough for the women to wear long sleeves and stockings as protection against the insects.

Trout had decided to take dinner in her cabin. No doubt she felt stranded, socially and geographically, and preferred the role of misunderstood and benighted lady’s maid to temporary equal. Not a peep was heard from her that evening.

Because the dinner was the Bracebridges’ first social event on the dahabiyah, they decided to dress. They had packed with such occasions in mind—visits with compatriots in Alexandria and Cairo, as well as with new acquaintances made while touring. Charles appeared in a clean white shirt, dinner jacket, and cravat, hair brushed to a shine, whiskers freshly trimmed. Selina, bedecked with cameo earrings and brooch, wore a rose-colored gown covered with a fine alpaca mantle trimmed in rabbit fur.

Florence, who had brought no such finery, was content in a navy silk and wool dress with a white lace collar and matching lace headband to set off the hair curled into a rosette at each ear. A fichu of Sea Island cotton Grandmother Shore had tatted completed her crisp
if plain outfit. The year before, at a tiny arcade in Rome, Selina had convinced her to purchase garnet earrings that dangled midway down her neck on gold-filigreed wires. Inserting them in her ears, she’d worried that she looked like a Gypsy. Selina had persuaded her that they suited her complexion, lending a hint of reflected color to her skin, which, on its own, tended toward the paleness of bone china. “No need to be a plain Jane when you have such a lovely face, “Selina had said. “I don’t want to look like a baited hook,” Flo had replied. Though she enjoyed fine things as much as any young woman, she had adopted plain clothing as a necessary defense against the wrong sort of men. “I would rather look like a vicar’s wife,” she had explained, accepting the small box of earrings from the merchant, “than a demimondaine.” Tonight would mark the third time she had worn them.