Although Madeleine’s happiness was palatable, Jack’s was even more so. Kitty had been his companion through the sticky months of his divorce and all the notorious, lonely days after, when even the crème de la crème of society, his own kind, had angled away from him. So she was happiest, actually, for him. For her husband, the hard creases lining his brow now lessened, his gray eyes lightened. He had his friend back. It gladdened her heart.
“Let’s just keep her in the cabin with us at night,” Madeleine suggested, because they’d been letting her roam before this, patrolling the boat in the silky dark, calling back to the jackals that cried in the distance.
“Yes,” Jack agreed. “We’ll make a bed for her. She shouldn’t put up too much of a fuss.”
Jack was right. After her escapade offshore, Kitty seemed perfectly content on her bed of folded blankets, as long as she could keep the colonel in sight. Madeleine thought both human and canine slept easier in each other’s company, although she might have preferred a little more private time in the long stretch of night away from a snoring dog in need of a shampoo.
But this was her honeymoon, this time of sun and water and adventure. In its own unique way, this was how her family would knit together, bone to bone, husband and wife and child and companion. They were all here already. Already a unit.
In those final few days aboard the Habibti, it seemed to Madeleine that every hour was a raindrop, perfect and enclosed, falling down in a blessing from the sky to the earth.
At night, she would slide into sleep wrapped in Jack’s arms, each of them with a hand cradled warm over her belly.
Goodnight, baby, she would think. Goodnight, my daughter or son, my princess or prince.
*
In Alexandria, the sun flirted from behind a flock of woolly white clouds, and their little group broke amiably apart. Jack and Madeleine accompanied the Browns in a horse-drawn calèche to the port, waved farewell as Margaret and Helen boarded their steamer to Naples.
“I’ll see you this summer in Newport,” Margaret said. “You can introduce your new baby to me.”
“I will,” Madeleine promised, and swallowed the rise of tears in her throat. She still wasn’t accustomed to it, these wild emotional swings that would overtake her. Carrie had assured her it was normal for her condition, and eventually her moods would stabilize, but Madeleine wasn’t there yet. Margaret Brown, her only ally in the social thicket of Rhode Island, was leaving, and would be absent for months. In just a short while, Madeleine was going to have to endure the icy gazes again alone.
Almost alone. Jack rubbed a slow circle between her shoulder blades with his palm.
“Bon voyage, fair ladies,” he’d said, and in a froth of lace and netting, Helen had embraced them both, then Margaret, and then they were gone, lost to the bustle of passengers and crew and the gray columns of steam from all the ships, puffing and rolling up into the sky.
*
They would follow on their own steamer in a few days. They had plenty of time before they had to reach Paris again, and then Cherbourg for the voyage home. Jack had booked their passage to New York on Bruce Ismay’s fine new steamship, her maiden voyage, which to Madeleine sounded like a recipe for enduring all sorts of little things going awry, but which her husband was looking forward to with open enthusiasm.
They spent the next few days visiting bazaars filled with spices and lamps and jewelry and blown glass; Pompey’s Pillar in the acropolis; the medieval-looking Citadel of Qaitbay, where Moslem princes fallen out of favor had been imprisoned, and the doomed soldiers of the sultan fought off the Ottoman Turks as long as they could. Everywhere she stepped, her feet stirred up the dust of history, hundreds of years old or thousands. She wanted to memorize all of it, so she could carry these days and nights with her back to America. She wanted never to forget the perfect heat, the sand, the stars spread above her in a shifting, infinite river of platinum, stretching from end to end above the earth. The meteors that fell in silence all night, every night, sketching slow blazing lines into the heavy blue.
*
The rooms they occupied now at the New Khedivial had a very different character than the ones they’d been given during their initial visit.
Notre suite arabe, the manager had said, opening the double doors wide.
The rugs were sage and cobalt; the plaster walls baby blue. The ceiling and all the arched doorways were elaborately tiled, mosaics of interlinked circles and stars, diamonds and chevrons and dots, with punched-brass lanterns—orbs and pagodas and more stars—hanging from chains. Wooden screens covering their windows hid their own enclosed garden, with roses and jasmine and a guava tree, growing right in the middle of the grass.