What an awful long way to have come for more gilt.
CHAPTER 18
It rained and gloomed until Cairo.
But I sleepwalked until then, letting your father’s meticulous plans buffet me this way and that. I had absolute trust in him to keep me safe, no matter how much I did not or could not see happening around me. I remember falling into my dreams that night in the hotel in Alexandria, relieved enough to be in a downy soft bed that did not rock, relieved even more to have my husband next to me.
（On the steamer from France to Egypt, there had been some mix-up with the ship, or the tides, or the captain or something—I still don’t quite know; it was explained in a rapid torrent of French—and in the end, all we could manage to procure in first class were single cabins with narrow bunks.） I hope it doesn’t shock you, me telling you these things. I hope that someday, when you are married, you will read these words and think, “Of course.”
I mean for you to know, in every motherly way that I can convey it, that your parents were in love. That we were twin spirits in love. And how special you were to us from the very beginning, the spark born from us both.
Anyway, Cairo. We stayed at Mena House, naturally, so close to the pyramids, with its modern amenities and tram service and stables and swimming bath. We meant to take in the sights and then meet Margaret Brown and her daughter a few days later aboard our rented dahabiya for the journey up and back down the Nile.
I went to bed that first night in gray, fuzzy Cairo still asleep. Already asleep.
Overnight, the rain marched out into the desert, evaporating into clouds. The next thing I knew was the dawn.
February 1912
Cairo, Egypt
She opened her eyes. Everything was covered in stars of rosy gold light, a color so warm and intense that it seemed not quite real. The pillow beneath her cheek was scented of lavender and lemon; with the glowing pink stars and the perfume and the rumpled covers all around her, Madeleine sat up, groggy and blinking, and wondered where she was.
Jack was asleep to her left, one arm flung over the quilted silk counterpane. The light poured in from the quartet of floor-to-ceiling windows to her right, festooned in mulberry gauze and masked with carved wooden screens punched through with star-shaped holes, hundreds of them, each one aglow.
From somewhere nearby came a tinkling of chimes, high and delicate.
Cairo. The desert, the Nile.
She slipped out of the four-poster, careful not to wake her husband, and padded to the windows. It took a moment of fumbling to realize the screens didn’t open outward or in, but slid on rollers along metal tracks, overlapping each other. She pushed them apart with both hands.
The sunrise flooded over her. She had to squint against it, raising a hand to shield her eyes, and only then did she realize she stood at the edge of a very wide balcony, and the windows weren’t really windows at all, but doors left open to allow in the air and sun. She took a single step out and swam in the burgeoning dawn. Her hands and feet and nightgown were rose; the walls were rose; the sky was rose streaked with bronze and copper, a thick band of lapis still lingering low to the west.
Before her, right directly before her, soared the great pyramids of Giza, so towering and perfectly formed, so radiantly orange-pink with dusty blue shadows, that they looked like the painted backdrop of a play. They looked simultaneously both near and far, impossible to touch and impossible not to want to.
The wind stirred and the chimes sounded again, a pretty pair of them dangling above a table set close to the railing, their pipes and tails flashing. A bird in the gardens below began to sing, a low, mellow warble, soon joined by another; beneath them came the sounds of early morning traffic, motorcars and donkeys and roosters and voices, all reaching her from somewhere unseen. The hem of her nightgown ruffled against her shins, and even though she stood there in her bare feet, clad only in a sheath of fine lawn and lace, Madeleine realized she wasn’t cold. Finally, at last, she wasn’t cold.
“Egypt,” she said aloud, letting the breeze steal the syllables from her lips. She wanted to laugh, so she did, making hardly any sound at all. Inside her, deep inside her core, something seemed to unclench.
“Baby,” she whispered, cupping her hands over her womb, feeling perhaps the slightest hardness where she had been soft before. “Little baby, here we are.”
She felt at once that anything was possible. That she could leap over the balcony railing and clamber down the side of the hotel like a monkey, run across the grounds, across the clipped green grass and in and out of the palms until it all melted into sand. She could run up the pyramids themselves, all the way to the top, giddy with the power of herself. With the power of being free.