The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Part 10

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 salonniere. 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 f.a.n.n.y feel insulted?) Surprised by the casual food and its service-b.u.t.ter cake, popcorn, cream puffs, and bonbons laid out a 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 Provencal 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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," f.a.n.n.y 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 f.a.n.n.y's standards Miss Clarke was a maverick, her salon attracted the best minds of Europe: Tocqueville, Victor Hugo, Stendhal, Madame de Stael. No doubt, f.a.n.n.y hoped to find husbands for her daughters there.

Flo had spent most of that winter at Clarkey's, equally charmed by Messrs. Mohl and Fauriel, who, having discovered the depth of her education, undertook lively exchanges with her. Being at Mary's was like being back in Father's library, a place where Flo did not have to demur, where she could express her opinions and display her intellect rather than hide it.

It was Clarkey's idea of amitie amoureuse-chaste love-that made her friends.h.i.+ps with men possible, she explained to Flo that year. There was no earthly reason, Clarkey argued, why men and women could not be loving friends rather than succ.u.mb to marriage, with its insuperable desolations and duties. Clarkey was not opposed to marriage so much as beyond it. She was madly in love with Claude Fauriel, with whom she'd spent every evening for the past eleven years. Still, she did not intend to marry him or anyone else. She encouraged Flo to pursue her interests and, like Mary, avoid the matrimonial bed. It felt to Flo as if a strong-willed woman from the George Sand novels she relished had come to life and befriended her.

Just before Flo left for the day's excursion, Joseph brought her a second letter. She was in a rush, but went below and read it quickly, delighted by the speed of Gustave's reply, and by his warmth, which seemed to transfer directly from the paper. His observations about the Copts were provocative and new, especially their view of Jesus as purely a G.o.d, not a man. Since the Copts were the direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, she wondered if the idea of a divine man derived from the wors.h.i.+p of pharaohs like Ramses the Great.

She tucked the letter inside her diary. Not surprisingly, Selina did not inquire about details when Flo reported that he had written and all was well.

Flo drifted the rest of the day, revisiting the temples while Selina sketched them from different vantages. Selina excelled with a pencil and watercolors, capturing the essence of things with a few a.s.sured strokes, conveying bulk and gravity as surely as if her paper bulged with sand and granite where her marks divided the dun surface. Flo had no talent for art.

But she did have talents, she reminded herself, just not ordinary ones. Her big ideas and flair for organization were unseemly, especially coming from a woman-which was why the future loomed not like a sunny path but a brick wall. What could she do with her life? Continue teaching the boys at the Ragged School when she returned home? Or would f.a.n.n.y deny her that, too? Once, she had brought to Embley three boys with grimy hands and knickers-sniveling boys with chopped hair and nostrils rimmed in black who shrieked and stampeded up the stairs to her room, where she read to them. f.a.n.n.y had reacted as though intruders had absconded with the silver plate and Limoges. Later, she'd sent the upstairs maid to scrub the woodwork and furniture, as if poverty were a contagious disease. How could her younger daughter, she demanded at dinner, bring rabble into their home? Home being the sanctum sanctorum to f.a.n.n.y, more venerated than a cathedral. WEN had laughed off the shouting, as if they were in a cartoon out of Punch. He refused to take sides, saying he could not abide displays of temper. He hated it when the servants had to fix their eyes on the floorboards. He had retreated to the library, after which Parthe promptly swooned in the parlor, claiming a headache. f.a.n.n.y's furor had lasted for two full days, doubled, she claimed, by her daughters, the one inexplicably delicate, the other incorrigibly stubborn.

They sailed for Philae midweek, catching a fair wind. Flo relaxed. She sat on deck and watched the verdant border on either side reappear as narrow fields of corn and barley waving in sinuous patterns. The Nubian Desert carpeted the high cliffs with sand on either side, the river threading between them like a winding column of mercury. After the halting upriver sail, the boat skimmed the water, pulled powerfully along by the current's twisting green ropes. Against the rocky banks, the river flung airborne sprays of lace, while the damp sails drying in the sunny air smelled fresh and bright as a laundry line. Sometimes the wind and current were so strong, the crew had to furl them.

The second day, spotting sand spilling from the heights in golden waterfalls, they weighed anchor so that she and Selina-Trout wasn't interested-could feel the dry droplets sift through their fingers. They climbed up the cliff on a goat path. The unceasing wind had swept the desert plateau into a thicker version of the river, its currents frozen in great furrows and dips, a swirled sea of figured ridges stretching to the horizon.

When they set sail from Abu Simbel, the Frenchmen were still moored at the small temple. There were no farewells and no more chance encounters, no more letters or notes. She had decided it was best-more dignified and less chancy-not to write again, to wait for the reunion in Philae. Besides, she liked his letter about the patriarchs so much that she could not imagine he would ever write her a better one. She set aside her hope, locked into a compartment in her mind. She did not reread his letter after the day it arrived, when she had read it four times. Though its existence was a small comfort, she was cautious not to daydream about him. She did not want to risk disappointment. Besides, what would she dream? Surely not of marriage or a tryst. All she knew was that she wanted to be standing alongside him again, chatting and joking.

She distracted herself with the extensive library she'd brought to Egypt, her beloved dead languages-Latin, Greek, and now Hebrew, which she was teaching herself so she could read the Old Testament in the original. Dead languages were comforting: because they never altered, you could master them completely. Since they were no longer spoken, they were not part of the social fabric that so chafed her, not part of the insincerity, hypocrisy, and deceit with which living languages teemed. A thousand years of obsolescence had purified them as surely as if they had been cooked down to their essence over a slow flame. The words meant exactly what the dictionaries said and nothing more, nothing newer, nothing sub rosa. They were orderly, neatly contained in vocabulary lists she could tick off, in verb conjugations, tenses, and moods to memorize, declensions of nouns to recite that made a singsongy poetry. And there was no shortage of texts. A cornucopia waited in her cabin: Hesiod and Ovid; Sophocles; Pliny the Elder; Tacitus; and Sappho, poor Sappho, torn to shreds. And Epictetus and Claudian; Livy; Pindar. All of them fixed forever, unamendable as yesterday.

And though she knew it was evil, she was again in thrall to her awful dreaming-to fantasies of her own storied greatness-which she despised and felt obliged to confess to her diary. Though a vapid solution, dreaming countered her despair. Oh, the French was superior: desespoir, the sound more beautiful, more expressive of the feeling, the final syllable-des-es-poir-mimicking the sound of her life's breath leaking out, attenuating into the void . . .

Except to answer direct questions, Trout had retreated into a cordial standoff based in silence. Having brought enough wool to clothe a flock of sheared sheep, she crocheted constantly, her hook stabbing into the skeins with the avidity of a hungry bird. Growing arms and a collar, a bed jacket acc.u.mulated in her lap; a baby blanket was also in the offing or perhaps it was a coverlet for her room at home. In the evening, she read her Bible.

The rift opened a deep old wound in Flo, which began to fester, setting her mind on a familiar path of disgust-with the upper cla.s.ses, of which she was a guilt-ridden if alien member, and with herself for her inability to transcend her privilege, and her unwillingness to renounce it. She did not know which was worse: being thwarted by her family or the guilt of knowing what a burden she was to them. She always had to protect them from her own unhappiness.

If her desire to care for the sick were monstrous, then she was monstrous. There was no middle ground. Those who cooked the fowl or grew the corn? Do not look at them. They are not like us. Which is why she spent so much of her free time going back and forth to Wellow along the muddy path from Embley, reminding herself that they were exactly like her. In Wellow, when old Mrs. Crane suffered, she would rub her limbs by the hour and the old woman spoke to her as if to a daughter. But there was no muddy path between her and Trout. She hardly had a language in which to communicate with her. It was laughable to think she could help the world's unfortunates when she could not deal with a lone maidservant.

And so it was that as they neared the island of Philae on the fourth day, a black mood enveloped Flo, so dark and bottomless that even dreaming provided no respite. She wanted only to sleep.

12.

LAMENTATION AT PHILAE.

On a bright morning in late March, the cange drifted, sails furled, toward Philae. Gustave had glimpsed the island, an outcropping of red and black granite no bigger than the place des Vosges, when they had sailed past it, going upriver, but they hadn't stopped. Joseph had insisted that the proper approach was from the south, as the priests of Isis and Osiris had intended their suppliants to behold it.

When it seemed they had gone too far north, the captain thundered a command and the crew rowed furiously across the current toward the southern tip. There Gustave set eyes on the ancient quay with its grand submerged staircase. The crew moored the boat. He watched as the rope smeared the green slurry of algae on the north face of the stone piling.

Wearing his slippers on his hands, he sloshed up underwater steps the color of splotched limes. Midway, there entered his mind the vivid image of Cleopatra disembarking in splendor, her gold-trimmed, Tyrian purple robes deflating like the fins and tails of an ornamental carp as they dragged through the graduated shallows. Surely there would have been pomp and circ.u.mstance when the queen paid homage to the G.o.ds. For a musical flourish, he clapped the slippers together.

Ash.o.r.e, he wrung out his djellaba, which was sopping wet from the waist down. The approach to the temple of Isis was either across open ground or through two long colonnades; he chose the easternmost colonnade. Max, being more nimble, soon outpaced him on the western side, while Joseph, bare-chested under his red vest and wearing his usual Turkish trousers, paused to light a pipe at the top of the stairs.

Walking in the slashed shade of the columns, Gustave heard the cataracts downriver at Aswan. The miles between softened the roar to calming ambient refreshment, like a hotel fountain. Philae, he wrote in his head: the orchestra section of the Nile's concert hall, best seats to hear the liquid tympany of the rapids, but still distant enough that one could think and converse.

The island was enchanting. Gusts rattled the palm trees sprouting from the rocks at odd angles. Light filtering through the forests of columns wove a luminous tapestry that hung in the air, turning and changing by the moment like a rotating pane of gla.s.s. He could not have dreamed up a more quintessentially Oriental paradise. Only dancing girls and music were missing-preferably harps and flutes to ricochet among the ruins. An occasional birdcall and the subdued ground dither of lizards and insects broke the silence. "No one lives here!" he shouted into the golden air.

Trailing pipe smoke, Joseph hurried toward him, a rare sight. Usually he moved at the pace set by the slow clock of the pyramids and the colossi, to whom a millennium was but a forward tick, the imagined blink of a stone eye.

Max stood fingering the hieroglyphs on one of the pylons of the temple to Isis. He threw his arm around Gustave's shoulder. "Yes, O Sheik Mustache. Amazing to see a holy place so totally abandoned." Somewhat out of breath, Joseph added, "They say the last priest he die in anno 500. The peoples stay away, afraid for ghosts."

Gustave leaned against a fallen pillar and scanned the view. He was standing in a painted postcard, the sky hand-tinted cerulean for added grandeur. Philae was almost too beautiful to be real. A profusion of chapels and temples-sacred, Joseph had said, to Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and early Christians alike-conveyed a wealth of choices, like so many stuffed chairs invitingly angled in a room. Everywhere columns of varied vintages drew his eyes upward, testaments to orderliness and stability. Of all Egyptian sites, Philae was the most human in scale, as casual and unimposing as a rambling country estate lapsed into dereliction.

Max stepped back from the pylon and framed it with his thumbs and forefingers. "A perfect time of day for photographs," he announced. "I'm going back for my equipment. Perhaps you'll pose for me, Garcon, at one of the temples?"

Gustave pivoted, pointed his rump in Max's direction, and pretended to fart. Max ignored him, loping back to the boat with Joseph following. The Father of Thinness moved with the deftness of one who had grown up negotiating rocky scapes instead of Parisian pavement, as if he had hooves instead of feet. He'd have made an excellent goatherd.

Gustave struck out for the interior, following a promenade of lotus-topped pillars, the gritty earth crunching beneath his leather carpet slippers. In moments he found a trove of columns with basreliefs still polychromed in the jewel tones the Egyptians favored: gold and turquoise, green, orange, marine blues, and red-red for blood and evil, he recalled. Antiquity and beauty had not deterred graffiti artists in the past thousand years. Signatures in Greek and Latin and what he took to be demotic, the common man's hieroglyphics, provided chilling proof that a Constantine, Junonius, and Theodora had once lived and graved a small eternity in the sandstone. He, on the contrary, had no desire to leave tailings of himself in the Orient, but rather to take tokens of it home. A monkey, six meters of Dacca cloth . . . maybe a mummy . . . a red vest. . . .

Though surely the painted pillars had once had a roof, Gustave preferred them as they were, with ceilings made of weather. He liked the turn of phrase. The G.o.ds were in charge of rolling out a sky to match the human drama below. At the moment, distinct puffs like dumplings floated in blue soup.

He noted again the watery silence-cloistral, somber, imbued with a ritual purposefulness, though the ritual had been lost in the sweep of time. He knew that as the Egyptian religion moved south from Abydos to Thebes to Karnak, it became more specialized, and that the temples at Philae were dedicated to the wors.h.i.+p of Isis and her mate, Osiris, the G.o.d of the underworld and afterlife. Whatever the lost ceremonies were, they had inspired a gorgeous setting-facades carved in intricate relief, rocks exquisitely hewn and fitted-a model of perfection for the perfect eternity to follow.

Just then, something cream-colored protruding from the nearest wall caught his eye. It reminded him of the straw pigeon nests that stuck out from the upper stories of homes in Cairo. Closer up, he saw it was a scroll of paper jammed between two blocks. He pulled it loose and unrolled it. Dear G.o.d, it read in a familiar and handsome hand, take me to you. I do not wish to live. Your faithful servant. Stunned, he wiped his brow and stuffed the paper into the pouch of his robe.

Around the corner he spied another note, rolled tight as a cigarette, and forced into an intaglio of Ra in his bark. His heart began to pound. I am no use to You or myself. I do not think I am a human being but a deviation from Nature. Despite the English, he understood the gist: desperation.

Rossignol's handwriting was neat and diminutive, marked somehow by inwardness, by containment, claiming scant s.p.a.ce on the slip of paper as if not to offend, or as if she might be graded on her copperplate in a note pleading for a quick, painless, and pa.s.sive death. Such politesse was, he hoped, the mark of a pious soul afraid to take her own life, or perhaps convinced she would go to h.e.l.l if she did.

Miss Nightingale had departed Abu Simbel on her blue-bannered craft a week before he had. Parthenope, that was the name on the pennant. Her sister's awful moniker. Like naming a woman "Veritas" or "Fido."

He had never heard of leaving notes to G.o.d in temple walls, but away from good, gray England, it might be an acceptable subst.i.tute for a church prayer box.

He heard a whimper followed by a sob. Folding himself in half, he bent through the low doorway to investigate. Inside, he was able to stand. The floor was hard-packed earth dappled with sunlight.

He heard a gasp edged with high squeaks, like the harmonics of a violin bow, and recognized the terrible restraint of someone determined to avert all-out caterwauling. She mumbled a few words between the stifled sobs.

With a hand on either side, he groped his way through the glutinous dark of a stone pa.s.sageway and down a short flight of stairs until the wall on one side ended in what he presumed was the entrance to a room. Cus.h.i.+oning his head with his hand, he stooped into a duskier realm with pinholes of light leaking through the roof. The air was so stale and arid it stung his lungs, like the heavy, pungent atmosphere of a disused root cellar. He sensed more than saw a figure huddled on the floor. "Bonjour?" he called. "Est-ce-qu'il-y-a quelqu'un? Rossignol?" He stepped forward.

"Go away!"

"C'est moi, Gustave. Please, let me come in." He took a step and stretched his hand into the muzzy, desiccated air.

"No." The shape squirmed into the corner, revealing the outline of an arch, like a saint's niche within a cathedral. He recognized the pretty curve of her bonnet brim.

"Please, Rossignol."

"Don't come any closer."

"All right." He retracted his hand. "I shall stay where I am." He peered into the room without success for her face. "Do you mind if I visit a while?" It would take a few more minutes for his eyes to adjust to the dismal light.

"What? What are you saying?" She seemed befuddled by the mundanity of his question.

"I'm just going to take a seat now." He was overcome with a rare compa.s.sion, the same tenderness he had felt for Caroline, and also, oddly, for Louise's little pink slippers-a hollowness in his chest that radiated out, turning his hands and feet rubbery. He had to keep a calm head, for it occurred to him that the notes might be more than requests to be whisked heavenward. Perhaps she had brought the means of her liberation. A knife. Or poison. Dahabiyahs were notoriously vermin infested, with poison casually stocked alongside coffee and chickpeas. He decided he would not leave her. Eventually Max and Joseph would search him out; then the three of them could chivvy her into returning with them, or, if necessary, gently overwhelm her. He had merely to keep her engaged and talking. Above all, he must show no alarm, despite the rapid throbbing in his neck. He must cultivate an offhand att.i.tude when in reality he wanted to rescue her, hurling himself forward like the lifeguards at Trouville to breast the waves, his heart about to burst, every muscle burning with the effort. Instead, his limbs tingled with unspent urgency.

"What are you writing, Rossignol?" He could distinguish her more clearly now, scratching on a pad of paper, a lady's aide-memoire that dangled from a cord around her neck. A cord. A noose!

"Nothing much," she managed, her voice unsteady.

He had crossed his legs Indian-style, but now he stretched them out in front and leaned back against the stone. "If I were guessing," he said mildly, "I'd say you were praying."

She turned and looked squarely at him, her face blank with astonishment. "How did you know?" Curiosity seemed to calm her; she sounded more normal.

"I found some notes outside the temple." He gestured toward the corridor behind them.

"You didn't take them, did you?" Her voice tightened with concern. He could see her features clearly now.

"I read them. Would you like me to replace them where I found them?" He felt the pebbled earth pressing through the damp wool homespun of his robe. His b.u.t.tocks were starting to itch.

"Oh, yes," she said solemnly. "I would appreciate that. I chose the placement with great care."

"Let's do it together," he proposed. "I have them in my pocket." He patted the pouch where he'd lodged them, imagined mounding his body around hers in a soft fortress. Was the poor girl mad? Was he? In fact he thought he was, but she was mad in a different way, too much sincerity and care for other people, while his madness had to do with detesting almost everyone.

"Just give them to me." Her voice was still shaking. "I can do it on my own." She began to collect herself, her skirts shus.h.i.+ng along the rock and sand. Rising to a squat, she braced herself with one hand on the wall.

"I shall help you with them outside and then escort you to your boat." What more could he say that would not call attention to the seriousness of his concern?

"All right." She straightened up with difficulty, wedged the newest note in a crevice, and moved closer, standing above him. He didn't budge. Into the freighted silence between them, she at last lowered herself onto the floor alongside him, primly covering her knees with her dress. He thought of reaching out to pat her arm, but she was wary as a wild animal and might interpret the slightest motion as a threat and vanish into the gloom, there driven to some drastic act.

She stared at him unabashedly. He watched the wisp of a smile solidify into a blithesome grin. The instant he offered a smile in return, she metamorphosed into a different person: her shoulders lowered; her neck softened from a post into a slender curve; her arms settled against her torso, relaxed as wings. She seemed to be sane again. He was pleased that he had managed to soothe her with his cleverness and rationality.

She covered her mouth with her hand to stifle a giggle, but the hand flew up, as though yanked on a string, and she exploded with laughter. Unlike her sobbing, she did nothing to fight the impulse, producing guffaws and snickers limited only by the necessity to draw breath.

He s.h.i.+vered in the oven of the chamber. Was she laughing at him? Surely she was mad. What would she do next, especially if she had brought a knife or poison? Didn't the insane cackle at the most unlikely moments-while setting buildings afire, diving from rooftops, stabbing their husbands with pitchforks?

"Oh, Gustave," she said with a sigh, "I am sorry to have worried you, for you are worried, I see it in your face." She leaned closer, inspecting him.

Her eyes glimmered, wet with tears of hilarity. Although she was small with a flat chest, she was distinctly feminine, her torso rising like the stem of a water lily from the circular pad of her skirt. "I have been through this before, this . . . hopelessness. I shall recover." She picked up one of his hands balled into fists in his lap. "I never thought anyone would find my letters. They were intended only for G.o.d." She pried open his fingers and sandwiched his hand between hers. Her face turned serious again, the veins at her temples suddenly prominent, blue pentimenti of the keening woman he had found moments before.

Was she going to cry? He hated it when women cried. His mother cried daily, not that she lacked a reason to be in perpetual mourning, but he could not abide it. Each of Mme. Flaubert's tears pierced his heart like a sliver of gla.s.s. Louise's tears had been largely histrionic, intended to melt his resolve, to provoke pity followed by guilt. In the end he had become immune to them.

"Gustave, dis-moi que tu me pardonnes. Forgive me especially for frightening you," she added. She held his hand in hers. Rather surprising for an Englishwoman, but in her case not coquetry, simply the sign of an openhearted and trusting nature.

"Of course," he heard himself say, "I forgive you. But only if you swear you are not so despondent as the notes suggest. No, disregard that." He erased the words with his free hand from the air. He knew she was desperate, and that suicide might beckon again even if her crisis had pa.s.sed for now. He started over. "Promise me that if you are so melancholy, you will take me as your confidant here, away from home."

She nodded. "I am not, and I shall."

Had they just been married? The order and brevity of her words sounded like vows. He withdrew his hand, then thought better of it, and took both of hers. From his mouth (his best feature, everyone said, and his favorite body part after his p.r.i.c.k) poured words that bypa.s.sed his brain. "My dear Rossignol, I sensed I would be your friend from the moment we met. Fate has brought us together in Egypt for a purpose." He stood outside himself, marveling at the florid declaration.

"Oh," she said, glancing down demurely, "if only that were true. But even if it were, we shall soon be parted." She ignored the tears spilling down her cheeks, as if they were someone else's, or droplets of rain. He was happy to ignore them, too. "In any case, you may not find me a worthy friend," she continued. "I am, I'm told, too intense. Too serious. Too ambitious. Oh, and too talkative and I have an impossibly deep, pa.s.sional nature that will find its outlet. I have loved music too much and friends too much and my family insufficiently-"

"Arrete, Rossignol!" A tender pity surged in him. Beneath the cleverness, candor, and humor, she was shattered by self-doubt. "You must defend yourself first from yourself, for the world will be all too eager to find fault with you." The rock upon which he sat might have been proclaiming, oracle-like, for all he felt connected to his words, though he intended them sincerely and, to tell the truth, found them moving and sage.

She s.h.i.+fted her weight, copying his position, her feet extended in front, her back against the wall, next to his. She sighed. "As a woman, I am unnatural." She measured her bony hand against his meatier one. "Everyone says so. I wish to be of use, but to my family I am only a burden, which I loathe. Since I cannot change my s.e.x, I would be better off dea-"

"Don't say it! Or if you must, consider it only philosophically." Their hands were still palm to palm. He locked his fingers around hers and squeezed them, shaking her hand with conviction for both of them.

"All right," she relented. "Let's consider it philosophically. Which of us shall be Socrates and which the questioner?" She turned toward him and removed her bonnet, which had flattened her hair into two s.h.i.+ning wings plastered to her head. Between them, the white of her scalp was startling. A bead of sweat slid down her forehead. He regretted that he did not have a handkerchief to offer her, only the fetid hem of his robe.

He rarely confided in women. Certainly not his dear mother, who, given more information, fretted more, fluttering around baby Caroline's nursery in paroxysms of dread and grief with her arms upraised and her hair in a tangle. She'd always been a worrier with a gloomy disposition, and who could blame her? Long before the recent tragedies, she'd borne inordinate losses. When she was nine days old, her mother had died, and her father when she was five years old. In the eight years between Gustave and Achille, three babies had died in her arms. Tragedy had shaped her into a woman who suffered in antic.i.p.ation as much as from outcomes. No, he told her only ebullient news. As for women of his cla.s.s, they were untrustworthy gossips who viewed him as a potential investment, like a bank bond. Louise had used his confidences to taunt him.

"I have a question, then," he told Florence. "Shall I give up, too, as you wish to? I've already told you that I am a failed novelist-"

"What a n.o.ble undertaking, the pursuit of art," she interrupted. "How I admire you."

He wanted to disabuse her of the naive veneration he heard in her voice. "The truth is that I am fit for nothing else, least of all ordinary life. I wish to write, but that will require all my resources, my will and bodily strength, my time and affections, and yet I may fail again."

To his annoyance, she still looked starry-eyed, as if in the presence of Rousseau, Moliere, or even a lesser light like Lamartine. "I hate conventionality," he added, determined to give her a taste of his soured reality. "People are sheep. Sheep-mayors and sheep-grocers. In the esteemed Academy, immortal sheep! I shall never marry, never have children. I hate all that. I refuse to become the standard-bearer of all that I despise for the sake of offspring."

She stared at him, mouth slightly agape.

He hadn't planned to tell quite so much, but in all likelihood, they'd never meet outside Egypt. Of course, they could continue a friends.h.i.+p by mail. She seemed to enjoy writing letters and was at ease on the page. But the prospect was unappealing. Rossignol was much more interesting in the flesh, more mercurial, more chemically alive, like a fire. By comparison, her letters emitted only sparks. Anyway, he mused, it was impossible for a man and a woman truly to be friends the way he and Bouilhet were friends. The way he had been a friend with Alfred, the way, mostly, he and Max were friends. Women were more like household accoutrements-walking, talking furnis.h.i.+ngs with especially alluring appendages and apertures. Except for wh.o.r.es, who had no interest in conversation, other than bantering about price. It was better that way. Prost.i.tutes kept alive his ideal of an honest love unfettered by gingerbread morality. As for Miss Nightingale, she was, apparently, another sort of being-female and an intellectual (unlike Louise, who was more enamored of her own career than of ideas). Plus, Miss Nightingale had a touch of severity that was aesthetically pleasing. He had never met anyone like her. Nevertheless, he was sure that if he told her the truth of himself, she'd be appalled. And there was nothing worse, nothing more enraging, nothing that caused his gut to churn more than the expression of disapproval on a woman's face. It made him feel like a bad smell. He was especially susceptible to his mother's outrage, even when it was unjustified.

"I, too, shall never marry," Florence said, breaking his reverie. She seemed proud of it, her chin tilted up, her expression defiant. He'd never heard a woman say that. "But continue, Gustave. I didn't mean to interrupt, only to second your notion."

Leaving out his seizures (known only to his family, Bouilhet, and Max), he recited all his recent desolations: failing law school, the tragic year when Alfred, his father, and sister had been flattened one after another, like stick puppets at a saint's fair. She listened attentively, with murmurs of sympathy. "When I was a younger man, I took refuge in the Romantics," he explained. "I thought I'd found my life's work and a way to rise above the petty world-like Byron, Wordsworth."

"Yes, great poets. And Byron, so heroic, a martyr to Greek freedom."