The Sacred River Read Free Page B

in their language, breath was life, the gift of the gods, symbolized by the ankh , a cross with a rounded top.
    She began to make up her own symbols. A cup-shaped crinoline for her mother, who in those days had still worn them, and for her father a sovereign bearing the profile of Queen Victoria. A four-fingered hand for Rosina, who’d lost a digit in childhood to an iron gate. Boots for her three brothers, in three sizes. A stethoscope for Dr. Grammaticas.
    Aunt Yael had a symbol straight from the hieroglyphs. The drooping ostrich feather stood for Maat, goddess of truth, and symbolized balance and justice. To Harriet, the feather represented the bonnet festooned with bedraggled gray plumes that her aunt wore winter and summer alike.
    As Harriet grew older, she understood more clearly that the pictures did not always stand for themselves. Some indicated sounds or had a general meaning. Over the years, the signs she devised for herself became more opaque. An open book signified a kind of escape for which in English there was no satisfactory term. She drew narrowed eyes for envy and weeping ones for grief, official, justifiable grief such as that felt after a death. A head resting at a slant on a hand for the other kind, the kind she mainly felt, sadness that had no cause, that crept into her like the fog crept into the house. She used the symbols, mixed with words, in her journals to ensure no other eyes could read what she wrote.
    Harriet closed the book and inhaled its odor of dust and gravitas, felt its familiar weight and heft in her fingers. Along with the elation prompted by Dr. Grammaticas’s words, she felt another, more mixed, emotion. All the while traveling to Egypt had been an impossibility, she’d been certain that she wanted more than anything to go there. Now that it had become a possibility, she felt a sense of apprehension that was new to her.

FOUR

    “Yael! What a pleasant surprise.”
    Louisa hadn’t expected her sister-in-law. She’d been upstairs in the old day nursery, looking at the globe, when the girl had announced Yael’s presence in the drawing room. It was late for calling and the smell of roasting beef was escaping from the kitchen downstairs.
    “What does Blundell wish to see me about?” Yael said, glancing at the nearest of the several clocks that ticked at discordant intervals. She removed her gloves. “I’ve a meeting to attend but he said in his note that it was urgent.”
    Louisa felt further taken aback. She had no idea that Blundell had summoned his sister, or why.
    “Father, probably,” she said, tugging the thick silk tassel on the end of the bell pull. “I hear he hasn’t been well.”
    “He has a sore throat from the atmosphere. He refuses anything for it but whisky and hot water. I don’t think whisky right, in the mornings. But I don’t suppose that’s what Blundell wishes to discuss.”
    Yael discarded her bonnet on the chesterfield and lowered herself onto a chair, its upholstered velvet arms a snug fit around her hips. Her hair, silver since she was thirty years old, was wound into the customary coils over her ears and she was dressed in the muted grays and lavenders and mauves that she’d adopted since her mother passed away ten years earlier. Louisa found such prolonged mourning an affectation. Yael had refused outright her suggestion that she could consult Mr. Hamilton, discover whether the late Mrs. Heron might come through with words of comfort.
    Louisa reached for her workbag. She’d made her decision, sitting on the omnibus the previous evening as it swayed back over the river, while a man walked in front of the horses ringing a hand bell. Despite the motion of the bus, she’d had a sense inside herself of stillness. The advice from her mother was clear. For Harriet’s sake, Louisa must take the risk and make the journey. She would travel to the ends of the earth, if need be. She would not allow her daughter to die.
    The maid appeared in the open