The Sacred River Read Free

moment, Louisa forgot what she’d come about. She bowed her head and blinked back tears.
    “Oh, Mother. I miss you so.”
    For what she estimated afterward had been a whole minute, there was silence. When Amelia Newlove’s voice came again, the tone was altered, a bleak authority entered into it.
    “Death is near,” she said.
    Louisa felt a chill that began at the base of her spine and spread through her body. Her teeth began to chatter.
    “What shall I do? Tell me, Mother, please.”
    “The way is far,” said the voice. “Make haste, Izzy.”
    Mr. Hamilton closed his mouth and shuddered. He dropped Louisa’s hands and began mopping at his brow with a spotted handkerchief, sweat pouring from him, drops scattering like rain from his chin and cheeks as if he had undergone a great exertion. Taking a swig from the pint pot on the table, he cleared his throat. “Clear as day,” he said, his own voice returned to him in all its gruff depth. “I take it you heard her?”
    “I heard her.” Louisa’s throat was so dry she could barely utter the words. “I almost wish I had not.”
    “No cause to take fright, Mrs. Heron. Death’s always near, when you come to think of it. You walk on bones in London.”
    “But what shall I do? What does it mean?”
    “That’s for you to decide.”
    Mr. Hamilton shifted his chair back from the table and stood up. Something about him had altered. His lined forehead appeared not a map of other realms but the face of a tired man, and the coat looked shabby, faintly ridiculous, as if he’d stumbled out from a fancy-dress party. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse.
    “Awful foggy, ain’t it? They’ve suspended the shipping again.”
    Louisa handed over the half-sovereign, climbed the wooden steps, and let herself out. Pulling her wrap over her shoulders as she closed the door behind her, drawing it up around her cheeks, she groped her way back along Antigua Street toward the terminus.
    She had a peculiar feeling of recognizing nothing, of the way back being different from the way out, as if already she had traveled far from everything that was known to her.

THREE

    Harriet lay back on a pile of feather pillows, staring at the window. The fog hung like a dirty curtain on the outside of the glass, and in his basket by the fire, the dog snored softly, sounding as if he were far away. Shifting her gaze, Harriet looked about the room at the familiar faded white of the walls, the dark wooden footboard of her bed. The attic bedroom had been the night nursery; Harriet had slept in it for as long as she could remember, had spent long stretches of her life confined to the same bed looking at the sky.
    Whether she was well or ill, she thought of it as a sickroom. The air weighed more than air in other rooms; it bore the memory of the repeated burning of niter papers, fumigant powders of belladonna or carbolic, stramonium cigarettes made from the dried roots and stems of thorn apple that she was required to inhale, alternated with vaporous basins of menthol, camphor, and eucalyptus, emergency whiffs of chloroform from a sprinkled handkerchief. The smoke and steam cleared but the odors lingered on, clinging to each other in the walls and blankets, the old red rug that waited in front of the tiny fireplace.
    A quill was poking into her back through her nightgown and she shifted her position on the pillows. Her breath was shallow and her heart still beat fast. She could feel it thudding away, scurrying along like a friend running ahead on a pavement, in more of a hurry than she was herself. Harriet had read once that every person was born with an allotted number of heartbeats. That when the count was reached, the person died. Her heart was hastening toward the total, careless of the cost to her in days.
    All winter, she’d urged Dr. Grammaticas to recommend going away. Every time she raised the subject, he refused. It would be dangerous. Reckless. The death of her, perhaps. Then, the previous