There wasn’t a single reporter or photographer in view, only a stooped figure in a robe in the distance, slowly pushing a hand mower in front of the far hedges.
“What a view,” murmured a voice behind her, and Jack came up, pulling her back against his chest. She sighed, resting against him.
“It’s incredible, isn’t it? I never thought I’d see anything like this.”
“I meant my wife,” he said, his jaw against her ear. “My ravishingly lovely wife.”
She laughed again. “I was just imagining myself as a monkey. The better to scale the pyramids.”
“I thought you were a mermaid?”
“Mermaids do not suit the desert.”
“True enough.” He lowered his head to her neck, breathed against her skin. “Let’s make you a gazelle. Graceful, fleet. A creature of the wadis and steppes, right at home in the heat.”
She lifted a hand to his hair, turned her face toward his.
“Perfect,” she said.
*
She did not run up the pyramids. No one ran up the pyramids; one might clamber awkwardly up them, block by enormous block, or else be lifted and tugged and pushed by whichever guides could be hired with enough piastres to carry the tourists practically in their arms the whole way.
Maybe a real gazelle could have managed it. But Madeleine was, in the end, a pregnant woman still worn out from a long series of voyages. Her spirit was willing; her body was not. And she didn’t like being lifted by strangers. It felt too much like the pressmen back in New York, trying to touch her, trying to crowd her, trying to get her to react to them however they could so they could write it up and publish it and laugh over it.
She managed seven blocks, then waved away the beaming men attempting to coax her higher. She sat with her feet dangling over the edge with Jack sitting beside her, peeling a boiled egg from the basket of food the hotel had packed for them. Two more guides squatted behind them, ready to lower her down again.
Jack handed her the egg. She took a bite, gazing out at the rippling sand.
“Still happy, Mrs. Astor?”
“Yes.” She looked at him sideways from beneath the brim of her Panama hat. “Are you, Colonel Astor?”
Like her, he faced the sands. Below them milled more tourists and guides, and camels adorned with bells and blankets, walking in trudging lines. Rosalie was down there somewhere, too, waiting for them, along with Robins, Jack’s valet, but Madeleine couldn’t pick them out. All the American and European women carried parasols; everyone, of both genders, was hatted. A line of native women in robes and veils sat at makeshift wooden stalls, selling everything from figs and oranges to crocodile teeth.
It wasn’t yet noon, and the sun felt fierce. In the early desert light, beneath his own Panama hat, Jack’s eyes paled to silver, and his skin warmed to honey.
“I am,” he said soberly, “without question, the happiest man in the world.”
*
At midday, they took a carriage back to the hotel, Madeleine sleepy enough to lean her head against his shoulder. She tried to keep her eyes open but couldn’t; it didn’t feel as if she slept, though. She still heard all the city around her, the clip-clopping hooves of the horses, the lilting calls of the street vendors, children constantly begging for baksheesh, horns bugling. The pace of the calèche along the crowded roads was erratic, surging and slowing, but even that didn’t rouse her.
When they reached the hotel, she drifted into their suite, kicked off her shoes, and aimed for the bed. Rosalie barely had time to unpin her hair before Madeleine embraced her pillow and sank into peace.
*
That night, that second night, long after dinner, they swam together in the huge marble swimming bath. Fires in iron braziers marked the edges of the pool, casting dramatic dark shadows along the stone and water. Jack told her that later on, after all the guests had retired, the bath would be drained and cleaned and refilled again for the next morning, so that each new day it shone clear and fresh, an aquamarine jewel gleaming at the edge of the desert’s dust and heat.
A pair of attendants waited silently in the dark by the cabanas, minding the towels and stars.
The water in the swimming bath felt like her skin, exactly the same temperature somehow. It was certainly warmer than the air, cooled to an arid crispness with the fallen sun, and best of all, they had it nearly to themselves. There was only an older German couple sharing the pool with them, who clung to the steps near the shallow end and had said nothing beyond guten Abend, occasionally chortling and splashing each other with the flats of their hands.