The Twelve Rooms of the Nile Read Online Free PDF Page A

knelt in the passageway. Trout was never without her chatelaine, which, with its many implements, comprised a small hand manufactory. Florence knew well what hung from each chain: scissors, a needle case, a bodkin, a brass-capped emery in the shape of a strawberry, a crochet hook, pin safe, thimble, buttonhook, another strawberry made of beeswax, and spools of black and white thread.Trout wore the chatelaine pinned at her waist, its parts dangling down, or else pocketed in her apron, like a watch. Florence had never noticed a key.
    Her own fancier, gold version lay in a drawer at home, a gift from her mother, Fanny, with items befitting a country lady: a dog whistle embossed with spaniels, a diminutive magnifying glass, a telescoping pencil, and a vinaigrette stuffed with cotton wool soaked in French perfume. With her chatelaine, Florence could make or repair nothing, as was proper for a fashionably helpless young woman who moved in society, while Trout’s was a portable wonder.
    The wooden floor of the dahabiyah was smooth, Florence noted, as she ran her fingers over its grooves, worn from the tread of so many feet, she imagined. She pictured its owner, a prosperous Ottoman functionary named Hasan Bey, standing barefoot on the very spot where she knelt. He used this boat, she knew, to ferry the veiled, bejeweled wives of his hareem and their children on pleasure cruises up the Nile.
    Florence felt the key with her fingers before she saw it. Lodged behind a wooden post, it was heavy, made of iron, and vaguely industrial. She was certain she’d never seen it among the shiny brass dangles on her maid’s chatelaine. Why had Trout never worn it before, and what did it unlock? It was too big for a diary, certainly. A desk drawer? But Trout didn’t have a desk. A lockbox?
    After teasing it from its hiding place, she stood up and offered it to Trout on the palm of her hand.
    “Thank you, mum. You can be grateful for your good eyes, Miss Florence.”
    “Perhaps I should take on the mending.”
    “Well, that wouldn’t do, would it?” Trout reattached the key and dropped it in her pocket. “No, I can manage the buttons and seams, though a body hardly wants to wear clothes in this heat. Oh, what a climate.”
    “Indeed. But it will be nightfall soon, and the heat will subside, as it has every evening.”
    “Not every night, no—that first evening in Alexandria I liked to go blind from the sweat pouring into my eyes.”
    “Well, then,” Florence said, patting the sides of her legs briskly, “I’ve letters to finish. Have you done with your nap?”
    “Not yet, mum, my mind keeps going round and round like them waterwheels on the riverbanks. I’m not used to so little work. Don’t know what to do with myself, seems.”
    “Oh. Then perhaps you can have a lie-down now . . . or read.” Just do be quiet, Florence thought in some desperation.
    “Yes, mum.” Trout stretched out on her divan and turned toward the wall, her back to her mistress. Sitting on her divan, Florence placed her desk on her knees but did not yet take up her pen.
    Trout had been miserable since they arrived in Egypt. She complained constantly of the heat, though this was the cool, dry season. She griped about insect bites, too, as well as stomachaches, headaches, and her deteriorating eyesight.
    Trout would never have spoken so freely in England. And sympathetic as Florence was to suffering, she couldn’t help wondering how a strongly built woman of forty-three years and Teutonic ancestry could suddenly turn so frail. Or how it was that the ailment jumped around so variously. For no sooner had a headache subsided than a muscle cramp or skin rash would crop up in its place. It was as if an ill wind had been trapped in Trout’s body, battering part after part in its attempts at escape. Florence suspected hypochondriasis, which she had read about in her medical books, an illness that the Greeks believed began in the hypochondrium, the soft area below