The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (20 page)

Efreet-Youssef served the eggs, a bowl of olives, and a plate of cheese, then retreated backward, bowing, the same way Florence had left the queen’s presence when presented at court. Despite his desire to be invisible, Flo could smell an oily aroma whenever Efreet-Youssef approached. Hair pomade, she supposed. He was clean. After he scrubbed the pots and dishes with sand, he rubbed it on himself before jumping into the river.

“Charles do my hair? That would be a sorry sight!” Selina tapped at her boiled egg. They always ordered three-minute eggs, but as the crew didn’t have a timepiece, they never came right. “I do my own coif, can’t you tell?” Selina turned her head from side to side. “A simple chignon, nothing more ambitious. Why do you ask?” Selina cinched up her mouth around a spoonful of eggs.

“I’m having problems with Trout.” Three weeks earlier, Flo had recounted Trout’s hypochondriasis to Selina and they’d joked about it. Later, when Trout took ill with a pounding headache as they sailed south from Derr, Flo had doctored her and the tension between them had dissipated for a time. Trout had thanked Flo for her ministrations. Flo explained now what had happened that morning, how humiliated she had been when challenged about her servant’s name. “She resents me, I’m afraid, and nothing I do reaches her, nothing pleases her.”

“Goodness!” Selina said. “I’ve never had a servant challenge me, though one reads about it in Mr. Dickens and in the papers. There have been cases of forged characters, theft—”

“Trout had excellent characters, one of them from the husband of a woman she cared for while the poor thing was dying.” Flo sighed. “I think she despises me.”

“Nonsense. You are one of the kindest people on the face of the earth. I’m sure it will pass. And remember: she is a servant. The point is whether you are satisfied with her, not she you.” Selina frowned. “You haven’t touched your food.”

“I’m not hungry.”

Selina blotted her lips with a square of cotton damask. “Try some anyway. Perhaps appetite will follow.”

Flo obeyed, spooning egg onto a crust, sipping at her tea. “What would you do?”

“Continue as usual. Ignore the ups and downs.”

“She hates it here. Did I say that already?” Flo slumped back in her chair.

“Would you like me to speak to her?”

Flo didn’t have to think twice. “No, then she’ll think I’m weak of will. No, I’ll speak to her.” But Flo knew she wouldn’t, as she had no inkling of what to say. She’d simply wait. The situation might improve on its own. If not, she’d reason her way through to a solution and when she hit upon the answer, inform Trout as kindly as possible.

“Don’t let it upset you. Trout will come around to remembering her place.” Selina gulped some tea and set her cup down, ringing, on the saucer. “May I change the subject?”

Flo nodded, her face brightening.

Selina plied her with questions about the dinner party and the Frenchman. Flo admitted gladly that she was intrigued by M. Flaubert and felt a strange kinship with him. She did not mention that she had written to him. The omission would spare Selina, who would fret if he did not reply.

“Did you ask if he knew Mary Clarke?”

It hadn’t occurred to Flo to ask Gustave if he knew her. “He doesn’t live in Paris,” she explained. “He’s from Rouen.” She handed her dirty dish to the servant. “Dear Clarkey,” Flo said with a sigh, the warmth of recollected affection radiating throughout her chest. Both she and Selina had the highest opinion of Mary and considered her the ultimate authority in matters of taste. Flo’s reverence for Mary’s wisdom in affairs of the heart was unmitigated, zealous. For here was a courageous woman with an entirely original way of living, a woman who had suffered the loss three years earlier of her great amour, Claude Fauriel, and
did not let it ruin her life
.

Flo laughed suddenly. “Did I ever tell you what happened when I came home after first meeting her? I must have.”

Selina hesitated, thinking. “I’m not sure.”

“About my plans for Embley Park?” She pictured the Gothic manse with its steep gables and rows of mullioned windows. WEN had built it for Fanny in Hampshire, conveniently close to the London social scene.

Selina leaned forward. “No, I don’t think so.”

Flo smiled, remembering herself at age nineteen. “It was quite outrageous now I recall it. No wonder Fanny was beside herself.”

“Oh, do tell now.” Selina’s fan had stopped moving.

Flo explained that the first thought that crossed her mind when she returned home from Paris after meeting Mary was to convert Embley into a boardinghouse for intellectuals and musicians. Men and women, living communally, would maintain stimulating friendships as equals, enjoying solitude in their rooms, and fellowship at meals and in the evenings. No one would marry, except to have children. “I wished to live as Clarkey did, don’t you see, in a scintillating salon.”

“I’m sure that Clarkey would find Mr. Flaubert suitable for her salon,” Selina said. “So tall, such a warm and welcoming manner. I had the sense he was an independent spirit. And isn’t M. Du Camp a delight with the camera?”

Though Flo loved modern inventions and all things scientific,
she hadn’t paid much heed to the pictures. She was drawn more to Gustave’s brown-green eyes, which bulged slightly in their sockets like marbles. “I am more interested in the squeezes,” she said, thinking his heavy eyelids gave Gustave a drowsy and somewhat dissolute expression. “M. Flaubert”—she smiled at Selina as she folded up her napkin—“actually, we are on a first-name basis.”

“You
do
like him, don’t you?” Selina smiled and blinked.

Flo felt her cheeks redden. “He seems good-natured, and he is intelligent. I hardly know him, but I
do,
I like him.” She drank some tea. What had drawn her to him most was his artistic refinement coupled with his frankness. “He’s been unhappy, too,” she said quietly, “like me.”

“He” had referred to Richard Milnes for so long that his face suddenly popped into her mind. She’d loved Richard’s company—just not enough to marry him. They had talked and talked, a constant chatter like lovebirds, but never about sadness. She’d never felt the impulse simply to gaze at his face the way she had wanted to gaze at Gustave’s. No one knew how much it had pained her to refuse Richard, or that she’d made a vow to herself afterward in
Lavie: Now no more love, no more marriage. Only work, whatever it may be.

“I see,” Selina said. “Unhappiness.” She wiped her hands with her napkin. “There would be plenty to talk about if one were honest.” Selina smiled at her, opened her book to the satin marker, and began to read.

• • •

Flo remembered vividly the first time she met Mary. She was eighteen, and nearing the end of the two-year-long Grand Tour with her family during which, to Fanny’s delight and surprise, Flo had attracted the attention of eligible males from eighteen to eighty throughout Europe. The Nightingales had been in Paris about a week when Fanny left her calling card and a letter of introduction at the Clarkes’. The next morning she had received by first post a charming note on green linen paper inviting the Nightingales to a soiree that
evening. “And when I read that word ‘soiree,’ I imagined we should have a
very
good time,” Fanny said, picking her way toward the coach in front of their apartment as they set off for the party. “The young Miss Clarke is quite the
salonnière
. Seems she has taken over Madame Récamier’s circle with her blessing.”

“Who?” Parthe asked.

“The most famous hostess in Paris,” Flo said crisply.

“Well, I don’t care,” Parthe cheerfully announced, pulling her skirts closer to make room for her sister on the leather seat. Up in the driver’s box, the coachman shouted, and with a crack of his whip, the cab lurched forward.

At four-thirty, darkness was descending upon the city, accumulating in alleys and passageways like indigo dispersing in a dye vat. Lamplighters had begun their slow inroads, attending first to the bridges, while in the imposing
hôtels particuliers
along the boulevards, yellow oblongs of candlelit rooms hung in the darkening air like perfectly taut strings of paper lanterns.

After Italy, Flo had felt fed up and bored. What she missed most was music, especially since Fanny had canceled her singing lessons. In Paris there was only one weekly opera performance. Luckily, Flo had annotated all the librettos from Genoa, including observations on the costumes and singers, which enabled her to occupy herself reliving the performances. Parthe had imitated her sister, matching her swoon for swoon, sigh for sigh at concerts. But it was Flo whom Fanny chastised, Flo whom Fanny worried about. Why, she had asked only the day before, must Flo continue to take things to extremes? Flo did not care to answer. She had thrown back her head and stomped from the room.

“Here we are,” Fanny said, pulling Flo from her daydream. The liveried footman alighted from his niche, opened the door, and spread a rug upon the ground. Fanny exited first, taking care over the narrow wooden step.

The ladies Clarke occupied the third and fourth floors of an imposing house on the rue du Bac, from which sounds of merriment
drifted down to the front stoop. The three Nightingale women smiled at each other in anticipation. They had barely knocked on the door when a maid appeared and led them, skirts clutched in their fists, up three flights of marble stairs. At the landing, the maid opened the door to number 7, then padded away without a word.

They gathered at the threshold like three hens staring into a new coop, caught between pecks and clucks. The sounds of mirth had subsided, and they waited. When no one appeared, Fanny withdrew an ivory fan, snapped it open, and stepped into the room. They removed their coats, laying them across a wooden bench, and ventured farther into the foyer. The air was warm, scented with spiced apples and ripe cheese.

Hesitantly, they stepped into the adjoining room, a small salon sparely furnished with sofas, drapes, and easy chairs in various shades of pink velvet. Overall, the room gave the impression of a soft hand extended in welcome. In the corner sat an elderly woman in a gray satin gown with spectacles and a white mobcap. Engrossed in her book, she’d clearly not heard them. Not one to stand on ceremony, Florence approached her.
“Bon soir,”
she said.

Just then, three children raced across the room, a blindfolded woman lunging after them. The children skittered out of the way, then flew, shrieking, into the hallway, sideswiping Fanny and Parthe as if they were pieces of furniture. The woman’s hands seized Flo’s blue silk skirt.
“Maman, c’est toi?”
she called out.
“Oh, pardon!”
She untied the towel around her eyes.

Florence laughed. “
Non, pardonnez
-moi!”

At which the senior Mrs. Clarke looked up from her book.

Into the gaping silence that naturally follows chaos, everyone spoke at once, then fell silent, and then laughed.

The woman with the blindfold was the daughter, Miss Mary Clarke. Florence was amazed that this slight woman dressed in a casual wrapper should be the great
salonnière
. Her reddish hair, not conventionally dressed by any measure, lay in soft, loose curls around her face, more like the fuzzy aura of a sheepdog than Parisian coiffure. She was short, with soft hazel eyes and pale, lightly freckled skin.
With almost no bosom and tiny hands, she appeared elfin. This was a children’s party, she explained, one she gave every Saturday evening for the offspring of friends and neighbors. Children, too, needed a regular social life, she believed, to be fully civilized.

Flo was constantly surprised in the hours that followed. Surprised that they had been invited to a children’s party, since they had no children in their entourage. (Would Fanny feel insulted?) Surprised by the casual food and its service—butter cake, popcorn, cream puffs, and bonbons laid out à la russe on a wine-tasting table. Surprised, too, by the children. First, that they were permitted the run of the two-story flat. Throughout the evening, they galloped rambunctiously upstairs, and several times swooped back through the adults, rowdy as geese. Second, that they were not dressed like children, but rather as miniature adults—the boys in long trousers and frock coats, the girls in tea gowns like their mothers’.

In fact, every room chez Clarke contained some surprise or other. In the kitchen, two famous men were fussing with a tea kettle. Miss Clarke introduced them as her best friends in the world. They were the Orientalist Julius Mohl, and Claude Fauriel, a scholar of Provençal poetry, which he recited from memory whenever Miss Clarke wished. Flo had never known an unmarried woman whose best friends were men. Miss Clarke was by now in her thirties and seemed to have dispensed with chaperones altogether. By comparison, Flo existed in a cloister.

Finally, there was the perpetual surprise of “Clarkey” herself, a woman without a shred of pretension, and surely the most extraordinary person Flo had ever encountered. It was impossible not to love her. She did nothing to conceal her emotions, was kind to everyone, and encouraged memorable friendships among those who frequented her salon. Indeed, her enthusiasm and easygoing nature were contagious. Having spent the early part of her life figuring out how to live, she told Florence, she was now completely unfettered by social convention. Yet, her reputation remained impeccable.

While the children and the two distinguished scholars resumed
the game of Blindman’s Buff, Mary consulted with the cook and introduced the Nightingales to three scowling fur puffs sitting on the windowsills. Her Persian cats. Miss Clarke was, in fact, besotted with cats of every description. Over the years that followed, kittens would travel back and forth between Embley Park and Paris, some more cooperatively than others.

“She is the perfect candidate for a friend,” Fanny said on the way home that first evening. “We’ll have to see her whenever we go to Paris, and
she
can visit us when she comes to see her sister at Cold Overton!”

Flo had never heard her mother so enthusiastic about another woman. Though by Fanny’s standards Miss Clarke was a maverick, her salon attracted the best minds of Europe: Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Madame de Staël. No doubt, Fanny hoped to find husbands for her daughters there.