hurried after her mother.
NINE
The wind blew a shower of spray against the porthole and the ship pitched. Under the pressure of Eyre Soane’s hand, the point of the pencil broke, a fragment of lead skidding across the page to the floor. He felt in his trouser pocket and found his penknife. Testing the sharpness of the blade across the pad of his thumb, he began to shave wood from lead with swift downward strokes.
The page where he’d been working lay open on the table. It was filled with the same portrait, repeated a dozen or more times. Each picture was different but the woman was recognizably the same, multiplied as if in a hall of mirrors. Her face was oval, pleasing in its regularity, and framed by curling hair. She was young in several sketches, in the middle years in some, and ageless in others. Here, her eyes were lowered, and here, raised as if in challenge or looking into the distance.
In every drawing, exaggerated to the point of caricature, one thing distinguished the woman. Her hairline was strikingly irregular. On the left side of the parting, the hair at the top of her forehead grew in a straight line. On the right side, it grew back in a pronounced widow’s peak.
In the final drawing, the woman’s head appeared shaven. Her face was reduced to its features—a straight nose, a well-shaped mouth—and above the large eyes the curiously asymmetrical line ran starkly across the top of her forehead.
Eyre had seen her at dinner on the first day of the voyage. He’d begun to feel a sense of sick unease familiar from his childhood, had wondered what prompted it as he pushed mutton around the plate. The curious hairline had caught his eye and as he returned to studying the woman, examined it further, he knew whose it was. She had aged, of course, was altered in every particular except that one and a way of carrying her head that was birdlike, inquisitive, and as if poised for flight.
With the sharpened pencil held in his fist like a dagger, Eyre began to score out the faces. By the time he’d finished, the paper was pitted and torn, the lead broken again, and all but one of the sketches obliterated. Only the picture that looked like a living skull remained.
Throwing aside his sketchbook, Eyre dropped the pencil and rose from his chair, rubbing condensation from the inside of a porthole. No moon or stars were visible outside and he couldn’t distinguish sea from sky. Lighting a cigar, walking up and down the cabin, he remembered the way the younger Miss Heron had looked at him across the dining saloon and he smiled.
Louisa, once she’d understood who he was, had been guarded; even her spinster sister-in-law had appeared to regard him with suspicion. But the girl was open, her eagerness for life transparent.
What he would do with her willingness, he didn’t yet know. Only that he would make full use of it.
The ship rolled in a great lurching movement that made him feel as if his stomach rose in his body. Opening the cabin door, he poked out his head and shouted for the steward. The passageway was empty; his call went unanswered. Eyre absorbed these facts with equanimity. Other than escaping the English winter, making some desultory additions to his Oriental portfolio, he’d had no particular purpose in setting out for Egypt. Now he had found one. By sheer good fortune, he had the opportunity to wreak a revenge he’d awaited all his life.
TEN
Seawater ran over the wooden boards of the weather deck like a tide flooding a beach. The pair of rattan chairs in which Harriet and Mrs. Cox sometimes sat had been overturned, their curved rockers upended. Sailors were lowering the remaining sails, hurrying and grim-faced, some with ropes around their waists that secured them to the masts.
Harriet stared as a crate of live chickens floated toward her. She’d woken from a dream of falling, found Louisa sitting down below on her bunk, gripping its sides, her head hung over a bowl on her lap. Yael’s bed was
NINE
The wind blew a shower of spray against the porthole and the ship pitched. Under the pressure of Eyre Soane’s hand, the point of the pencil broke, a fragment of lead skidding across the page to the floor. He felt in his trouser pocket and found his penknife. Testing the sharpness of the blade across the pad of his thumb, he began to shave wood from lead with swift downward strokes.
The page where he’d been working lay open on the table. It was filled with the same portrait, repeated a dozen or more times. Each picture was different but the woman was recognizably the same, multiplied as if in a hall of mirrors. Her face was oval, pleasing in its regularity, and framed by curling hair. She was young in several sketches, in the middle years in some, and ageless in others. Here, her eyes were lowered, and here, raised as if in challenge or looking into the distance.
In every drawing, exaggerated to the point of caricature, one thing distinguished the woman. Her hairline was strikingly irregular. On the left side of the parting, the hair at the top of her forehead grew in a straight line. On the right side, it grew back in a pronounced widow’s peak.
In the final drawing, the woman’s head appeared shaven. Her face was reduced to its features—a straight nose, a well-shaped mouth—and above the large eyes the curiously asymmetrical line ran starkly across the top of her forehead.
Eyre had seen her at dinner on the first day of the voyage. He’d begun to feel a sense of sick unease familiar from his childhood, had wondered what prompted it as he pushed mutton around the plate. The curious hairline had caught his eye and as he returned to studying the woman, examined it further, he knew whose it was. She had aged, of course, was altered in every particular except that one and a way of carrying her head that was birdlike, inquisitive, and as if poised for flight.
With the sharpened pencil held in his fist like a dagger, Eyre began to score out the faces. By the time he’d finished, the paper was pitted and torn, the lead broken again, and all but one of the sketches obliterated. Only the picture that looked like a living skull remained.
Throwing aside his sketchbook, Eyre dropped the pencil and rose from his chair, rubbing condensation from the inside of a porthole. No moon or stars were visible outside and he couldn’t distinguish sea from sky. Lighting a cigar, walking up and down the cabin, he remembered the way the younger Miss Heron had looked at him across the dining saloon and he smiled.
Louisa, once she’d understood who he was, had been guarded; even her spinster sister-in-law had appeared to regard him with suspicion. But the girl was open, her eagerness for life transparent.
What he would do with her willingness, he didn’t yet know. Only that he would make full use of it.
The ship rolled in a great lurching movement that made him feel as if his stomach rose in his body. Opening the cabin door, he poked out his head and shouted for the steward. The passageway was empty; his call went unanswered. Eyre absorbed these facts with equanimity. Other than escaping the English winter, making some desultory additions to his Oriental portfolio, he’d had no particular purpose in setting out for Egypt. Now he had found one. By sheer good fortune, he had the opportunity to wreak a revenge he’d awaited all his life.
TEN
Seawater ran over the wooden boards of the weather deck like a tide flooding a beach. The pair of rattan chairs in which Harriet and Mrs. Cox sometimes sat had been overturned, their curved rockers upended. Sailors were lowering the remaining sails, hurrying and grim-faced, some with ropes around their waists that secured them to the masts.
Harriet stared as a crate of live chickens floated toward her. She’d woken from a dream of falling, found Louisa sitting down below on her bunk, gripping its sides, her head hung over a bowl on her lap. Yael’s bed was
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