Reviews

A Thread of Sand

A Thread of Sand
Alan Souter
Prologue

Monument Valley, Arizona, 1895

Julia heard him ride up to their ranch house and dismount. After her month of waiting, she wanted to run out through the kitchen doorway and throw herself into his arms. But no, his homecoming routine was an untouchable ritual and she had been forewarned of his arrival by his Navaho brother, Shilah. As Buck turned his roan stallion out into the corral where water, fresh hay and a bucket of oats waited, she hoped in the blue-shadowed twilight he would see the small iron stove with its glowing firebox next to the kitchen’s outside log wall. Atop the stove, a hot water kettle bubbled. Two steps away, shaded beneath the lodgepole-porch roof, a Sears Roebuck enameled claw-foot tub squatted. Two buckets of cold water drawn from their well stood between the tub and an upside-down empty apple crate supporting a wood brush and a bar of lye soap.
Julia sat at the large kitchen table nibbling a fingernail. Tall, with auburn hair reaching down her back, her British breeding, coarsened by a brutal year in the western United States finally shone through. His tender care had put flesh and muscle back on her starved bones. Her cheekbones flanked a patrician nose above a full mouth and a strong chin, and unplucked brows shaded her large, wide-set chameleon eyes, today reflecting the color of the evening Arizona sky. Listening hard, her ears were the only gauge of his homecoming’s success.
A loud laugh outside the window made her heart leap. Splash! Splash! The cold water half-filled the tub.
“Hi-yah, hi-yah, hi-yah,” his Navaho half sang out as boots and spurs thumped and jingled off the kitchen wall logs. Shotgun chaps, followed by a linsey shirt and finally long johns completed the untidy heap.
“Hosh nateeli! Buck called out. “Hot water!” And more laughter as he emptied the kettle into the tub. Water splashed followed by a loud, contented “Ahhhhh!”
Julia wanted to join him in that tub. Her body seemed to hum like a tuning fork as her imagination saw that brush sudsing his massive chest and lean hips, playing over his picked-out abs, and plunging down between those bronc-gripping thighs. She tore a rip of bread off the loaf she’d baked, crusty on the outside and buttery soft in the center as he had taught her. Her teeth tore into the bread as she breathed through her nostrils, chewing and making small sounds in her throat.
Just the thought of him filled her. She’d spent months working the sheep ranch on horseback. He’d taught her how to whistle up his pair of keen border collies, Dog and Other Dog, black and white fur streaks among the cowed sheep. He’d taught her to drive off wolves at the gallop with a Winchester rifle. Julia had hoed the garden and learned to put up vegetables in Mason jars for the winter; she reveled in her new skills.
The corner of her eye lingered on the thick buffalo robes spread before a large stone fireplace that glowed black-edged with an armload of fragrant mesquite.
Outside, a final splash; the snatch of a large towel from a clothesline stretched between the porch-supporting poles; bare feet thudded on worn threshold planks. The door latch slid open.
With a squeal, the heavy door swung back on its iron hinges and he stood there, naked, gripping the towel in front of him so it hung to his knees. Buck looked like a large school boy surprised at a swimming hole. Tanned forearms, neck and face, the rest naturally bronzed from his Navaho genes. A sunburned face reflected his Caucasian father, squared, creased and sharply featured, framed by long black hair reaching down to his shoulders. He smiled at her, a soft little-boy smile that betrayed his weeks of loneliness on the trail tracking cattle thieves for the Arizona Rangers.
Julia fought back tears of joy as she lifted her one-piece shift above her head and let it fall to the floor. She swallowed the bread and stepped toward him, taking the towel from his hands.
Looking at her—almost at eye level—he gripped her shoulders and drew her closer until her erect nipples caressed his chest. She closed her hands around each muscular forearm and glided between them until their thighs pressed together. Buck searched her elegant facial features, strong but somehow sculpted in delicate sunburned flesh inherited from an ancient, high-born people. He had first seen it when he’d scrubbed off the whorehouse grime, and she’d bit him like an animal that had endured one beating too many. Back then, the eyes that now softened into his were steel, red-rimmed and ready to kill or die—but never to surrender.
She raised his arms to rest them on her broad shoulders, laying her cheek against his jaw. Her sweet-smelling hair crushed against the side of his face and collarbone. With a stoop, and a quick movement of his arms, he swept her off her feet and she laughed a deep, hearty laugh that had all of the young girl burned out of it, replaced by a hot lust that came alive as he strode to the crackling fireplace and lowered her to the heap of curly buffalo rugs. Julia fastened to him like a limpet with arms and legs as he thrust inside her. She laughed aloud again until his lips took hers, gently sampling and then devouring as they got down to the business of lovemaking too long denied.
The memory of that homecoming, and the days that followed, teased a smile from Julia as she stretched out her legs encased in baggy-knee Levis that came down to her calloused bare feet. Another rich sunset visited Monument Valley, called Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii in Navaho, meaning, “Valley of the Rocks.” She had been busy riding out to the Navaho villages, capturing the Navaho and their lives by splashing watercolors on thick paper—all courtesy of a Sears Roebuck catalog and the Santa Fe Railroad.
Julia had made the artwork as a surprise for Buck now that her painting skills had recovered. Each dawn and evening, she watched the long road that threaded between the great wind and water-scoured monuments that thrust up into every horizon. She patiently awaited his return from his latest ranger tracking job.
Julia leaned back in her homemade rocker with a cup of sun-boiled tea, squinting beneath the battered brim of her straw sun hat down the road that lead past their ranch. She’d been watching a galloper approaching from among the distant rock fingers and bread loaf formations and hoped the rider had news of Buck’s soon return. As the sombrero-topped rider got closer, he slowed to a canter and then down to an easy trot, sparing his horse. His riding tack was dun-colored jacket and pants, and soon she saw the low sun flicker off a brass badge pinned to his lapel, and the nickel buckle of his gun belt.
“Howdy ma’am,” he called out as he eased his weight in the saddle and lifted his wide-brimmed hat, revealing sweat-matted, ginger-colored hair to match the full mustache hung beneath a hawk beak nose. His Texas drawl slurred from a thin-lipped mouth above a large bandanna draped around his neck. “Would you be Miss Julia Carstairs?”
“I am she,” Julia replied.
The rider’s horse walked closer and halted, and the lawman slid down from his saddle. Holding onto his doffed sombrero and hanging onto the reins, he came up to a few feet from Julia in her chair and she put down the tea mug and sat forward, her elbows resting on her knees.
“Ma’am, I am Arizona Ranger Captain Lester G. Omahondro.”
“You have news about Buck?” she asked, raising the brim of her sun hat.
“Yes, ma’am, I do. I come t’ tell you, Buck’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“He’s dead, Miss Julia. He was killed in an ambush by a back shooter who I personally sent to the devil’s fiery pit.” He uncovered the revolver holstered high on his hip. “Buck was our top Ranger. The Rangers are saying good-bye to him at the headquarters a one-day ride from here and thought you ought to know and might attend.”
Julia had turned to stone. She could only manage one word.
“Dead?”
Omahondro nodded. “Yes’m, he never saw it comin’ and took a ball in the head. He couldn’t have felt a thing, it was that quick.”
Julia heard herself say, “Saying good-bye…?”
“Yes’m, a graveside service with an Episcopal parson and a Navaho shaman. I’d be honored to escort you.” He glanced at his lathered and near-blown horse. “If I could rest up my animal and camp the night here, we could leave in the morning and you’d be the guest of the Ranger Station until the ceremony.”
“Of course,” Julia’s voice said. “There’s hay and oats in the barn. You’re free to use the corral and you must take dinner with me. There’s a clean bunk house out back we use for hired help at shearing time. I’ll fetch bedding and you’ll have it all to yourself.”
“Much obliged, ma’am. Oh, I have papers here you’ll be interested in. Buck left this ranch and every dollar he had put away in the Merchant’s Bank to you in case of his untimely death. It’s a sorry exchange for a man like Buck, but I reckon you made a fine home for him here.” Omahondro looked around nodded and smiled. “A mighty fine home.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Julia’s voice answered. She made to rise from the chair, but her legs and arms failed. “I … I am sorry, I seem to be in a bad way. Could you help me to the house? Nothing … nothing seems to be working.”
Omahondro eased Julia to her feet and, gripping her arm, walked her to the front door and stayed with her until the last of her defenses crumbled. She drew up into a fetal position on buffalo robes, and the weight of rock-bound misery closed her eyes to escape in an oblivion of sleep.
The following three weeks passed in a fuzzy rush of legal and financial matters, of international communications to verify that she was, indeed, daughter of a British Peer. Her father’s legal representatives took over liquidating her Arizona property and transferring all funds and the bank account to Buck’s brother and the Navaho village. Arrangements were made for Julia to replace her dual passports, to be escorted to the nearest Eastern Seaboard port and shipped back to her family at Ashford Manor in Devon, England.
On the second day at sea, settled in a deck chair outside her first-class suite aboard the steam ship Pride of Denmark, screaming gulls helped Julia surface from her walking coma and take charge of her loss, her emotions and her failures.
She remembered crying for three hours, sipping some whisky, and finally agreeing with all the logical outcomes. The ranch was sold. To remain there would have left her in a state of constant melancholy. Buck was everywhere she looked. His spare razor, the coffee mug stained brown inside, the Navaho beaded vest he wore to visit his brother at the nearby village, the guitar hanging on the wall with its pick stuck in the strings from when he’d last played it, his thick, dog-eared book of Arizona Territorial Law he’d studied some nights—so many things he left behind. Buck’s most precious leave-behind, of course, was the reconstructed creature who now walked in her boots.
Buck had come into her life at her father’s behest to secretly watch over her while she studied art at the Chicago Art Institute. However, the classes and copying plaster casts had bored her. She’d made plans for an adventure, to cut short her studies and head into the American West to paint. By chance she’d discovered him, her watcher standing on a street corner, appearing in shop window reflections—a mysterious and constant shadow. Julia made up her mind to begin her adventure at once. Changing into rough men’s clothes, she’d packed her belongings in a seaman’s duffle, slipped out of her boarding house and lost the scary stalker in the night’s dark shadows. An omnibus had taken her to Union Station and she’d caught a train to Dodge City, Kansas.
Julia shivered recalling her naïve stupidity. A fragile British bird, half American on her mother’s side, raised in a manor house in the green hills of Devon, she’d gradually discovered the brutal side of life for an unaccompanied female in America’s rough and tumble railroad towns. Julia clearly remembered the derby and cravat of the smiling gentleman who’d shared an innocent dinner with her, a refreshing island of civility. A nightcap toast...
She’d awoken in a jostling box wagon, stripped of her clothes, bruised and sick to her stomach from the drug in her drink. The two-day trip without food or water ended at the back door of a large clapboard hotel and the stink of outhouses, stale beer and sweaty leather. Another week had passed as Julia was initiated into her whorehouse routine. At first, it was rape and then just business. She was offered to customers for four dollars—a stiff price commanded by her British accent and the grubby remains of her posh beauty. If she misbehaved, she was beaten or starved. If she gave her clients a good ride, she was allowed to bathe every two weeks. Some of the other working women, desperate for tenderness, had touched her and stroked her, wanting to be “friends.”
Buck, the “mysterious stalker” had found her at last. He’d barreled into the whorehouse with two other Arizona Rangers. They’d broken up the place, scattered the screaming women, and found her in her whore’s crib, backed into the corner of her bed, eyes wide, teeth bared.
“Ma’am,” he’d said. “I’m an Arizona Ranger. Your father, Sir Harold Carstairs, Earl of Ashford hired me to look after you. I been on your trail since you skedaddled from Chicago. You’re comin’ with me and I don’t mean t’ lose you again! You can sit astride, or across my saddle like a sack of beans, but you are comin’!”
He took her wrist. She bit him. He hollered, but his grip just tightened.
“Ma’am, we’re gonna find us a bath house!” Buck wrinkled his nose. “You stink to high heaven!”
Half stumbling, half dragging, Julia followed her wrist gripped in the strong hand down the back stairs and out the door into the chill desert night. She was pushed up against the flank of a nervous, sweating horse. Two gunshots rang out. Near her, three rapid shots answered, fiery muzzle blasts stabbing into the dark. A cry of pain. Her rescuer’s voice.
“Serves you right you son of a bitch!”
The creak of saddle leather and a muscular arm swung her up; her thighs bumped over the saddle horn and she was astride, her back against his chest.
As the horse leaped forward into a canter, his voice muttered into her ear.
“Scrub you down t’ the skin and fill you up on bacon and beans, an’ you just might be worth the price.”
Julia unconsciously gripped his arm around her waist as the roan stallion galloped into the moonless desert dark. That darkness meant escape. The dark meant freedom. The desert breeze on her face and the rhythm of the galloping horse meant distance from horror into the unknown. She surrendered to that unknown and tightened her grip on the Ranger’s encircling arm.
Chapter One

Egypt, 1898

Hotel Grand Oriental, Cairo, early morning

The flower girl stood at the foot of the hotel steps, looking up hopefully for potential customers, a friendly eye, a voice…
“I’ll have a bunch of those if you please,” Julia asked, sliding some coins from her traveling skirt pocket.
“Yes, m’lady. Very fresh…picked today.”
Beyond the flower girl stood the lobby boy from the hotel, guarding Julia’s bags and trunks and patiently waiting, sleepy-eyed, but still alert.
The Egyptian boy wore a white gallabiyah that hung loose from his shoulders to his sandals and needed a good wash. He had presented himself with a short bow and an eager face topped with a thatch of shiny black hair.
“Shall I load your bags, lady?” he had asked in slow, rehearsed English.
The tall pretty lady with auburn hair done up in a bun at her neck nodded, and he heaved her tack up onto the brass-trimmed barouche coach next to her trunk and then hurried to hold the bridle of the horse as the driver tied down the bags in the leather boot. All this time, the manager of the hotel, dressed in tailcoat and winged collar, grinned and nodded his head full of black hair slicked down with brilliantine as he raced through his own rehearsed speech.
“We hope you enjoyed your stay with us, Lady Carstairs, heh, heh. You honor us with your patronage and we hope you will favor us again on your return, heh, heh.”
The sun had risen and kissed the gold cap atop a nearby mosque. The muezzin, standing on a high platform within the minaret’s tower, faced in the direction of the Ka’bah in Mecca and sang out into an enormous conical megaphone his melodious sing-song recitation of the Muslim morning call to prayer. Without hesitation, the manager handed Julia up into the coach and the driver waited until she was settled and chucked the reins. The clip-clop of the horse’s hooves on the cobbles disappeared into the street noise as commerce took precedence over Muslim believers in the cool of the morning.
Julia sat back upon the upholstery in the shade of the folding calash roof that obscured the driver’s shoulders atop his box seat. After her long recovery from her American adventure and the steamship voyage from England, the second leg of her Egyptian journey began. In her organized way, she mulled over the details of her planned train ride to Luxor—a sudden jolt jarred the carriage and her half-awake morning calculations.
A carriage wheel rolled past her seat. Curious, she sat forward and looked out as the wheel passed first the driver and then the horse, picking up speed on the street’s slight downhill pitch. She looked back and saw a bare axel hub to which the wheel had been attached. Following it dashed the young boy from the hotel, running as fast as his short legs could carry him.
“I’ll get it, m’lady!” he called out.
The boy must have hitched a ride on the luggage boot. The wheel clattered and bounced over the cobbles and soon the boy was joined by passersby, all chasing the errant wheel. The carriage driver stared at his bare axel as the ride carried on, balanced on three wheels as if nothing had happened. Julia leaned out and shouted, spurring her champion on as the boy gained ground.
“That’s it! You’ve almost got it! Well done!”
The young porter grasped the wheel’s rim and dug in his sandals, braking and sliding until stumbling to a stop ahead of the pursuing crowd. He clung to his prize, shooing away the latecomers and cursing them in Arabic. The driver eased his horse to a stop and jumped down amid shouts and laughter. He brandished a spare wheel hub nut and a wrench as Julia sat back in her seat, joining in the humor of the situation. She waved the boy over to the carriage step and gestured for him to take the seat facing her for the rest of the ride to the train station. Was the faulty wheel a warning, or an omen? Whatever, she let it go.
“Bravo, you’ve earned a ride,” she told him. He folded his arms and looked down his nose with a haughty smile at the crowd who had gathered to jibe the poor driver as he remounted the wheel. From the corner of her eye, she saw the boy slip the original wheel hub nut under his seat cushion.
Regardless of his deception, she tipped the boy a ten-piaster gold coin. He must have hitched a ride to the train station in search of more good fortune from the rich pretty lady. Entrepreneurs should be encouraged.
At the station platform, amid the crush and crowding of passengers and shouting porters, he stood in front of her again. The boy certainly demonstrated admirable hustle and sharp ears. She showed her approval with two ten-piaster gold coins along with the ticket to her compartment.
He lit up with a smiling, “May Allah grant you a safe journey, Miss Carstairs.”
She answered with her book-learned Egyptian Arabic, Inshallah.—In Allah’s hands.
He called over two porters who snatched up her trunk and two cases and led them up the stairs into the Delta Light Railway first-class passenger carriage.
A middle-aged British couple, looking overheated in tweeds, had paused before boarding the coach. The apparent husband raised his finger and doffed his derby.
“Excuse me,” he shouted over the din, “since we will be fellow travelers, may I take the liberty? Are you, by any chance, Julia Carstairs, the artist? If so, we have one of your canvasses on our library wall.” The portly tourist’s pouched blue eyes fairly danced with anticipation.
“I am she,” Julia admitted. “I hope my work has given you some pleasure.”
“Oh, indeed,” piped up the apparent wife, with a broad smile beneath embarrassed pink cheeks, which she quickly covered with a spread of fan.
An awkward silence hung over the smiling encounter until Julia offered, “I’m sure we’ll see each other on the train.” As the couple seemed rooted to the spot, Julia nodded and stepped up, following her luggage.
***
The monotonous “click-click, click-click, click-click” of wheels over switch points and rail joiners lulled Julia as the outskirts of Cairo glided past her open widow. Aromas of cooking oil and sizzling mutton blended with the sweat of second and third-class passengers who sat in the baking heat waiting for the window breezes to dissipate their ordeal. Julia kept her straw traveling hat on to keep some of her coiffure from the locomotive smoke and ash that occasionally blew in the window.
She wore her sensible clothes: tan, high-neck shirtwaist, ankle-length dark skirt, cotton knee socks in high heeled lace-up boots. Her leather shoulder bag shared the upholstered seat that stretched across her compartment. Julia had just exhaled, musing about a curative dose of brandy, when one of her new traveling companions, the dual British upper-middle-class ambush from the train station, spoke from the seat opposite.
The elderly gentleman introduced himself as Archie Colton and his wife as Gladys. He grinned at Julia as he slid out a business card from its leather case, identifying him as a London garment manufacturer. To the dining car waiter standing in the open door, he looked up and said,
“I’ll have a pink gin, and the memsahib will have cold fruit juice. That all right with you, Gladys?”
The waiter made a note on his pad and looked at Julia, who smiled politely with her teeth.
“I’ll have a brandy, thank you.”
Gladys, a plain woman, flushed from the sun, smiled with lively gray eyes peering over the top of that spread fan she had pulled from her shoulder bag. She collapsed the fan.
“We didn’t know you were an American, Miss Carstairs.”
Julia replied, “My mother is an American. My father is British.”
Archie Colton’s jowly sunburned face radiated additional heat and his tangled eyebrows rose.
“I was right the first time and I’m going to try for a double,” he chuckled. “’Carstairs—is your father in Parliament?”
Julia opened her silver cigarette case and withdrew a slender black Balkan cigarette. She took a wood match from the glazed ceramic match holder on the table at her elbow and struck it against the striker patch on the base of the holder. In the match’s flare she replied,
“Yes, the House of Lords; he is Sir Harold Carstairs, Earl of Ashford.”
“Hah! Two for two,” Colton brought his hands together.
Gladys shook her head as their drinks approached.
“Most of the time, he can’t remember where he put his spectacles, or the day of the week.” When their drinks arrived, she sipped her tepid juice and made a thoughtful face. “Would that make you…?”
Julia hid a weary sigh.
“Yes, I am Lady Julia, but when I’m away from London and the social set I don’t flaunt the honorific except to get a better table, or a room with a view. My brother, Tarleton, inherits the title. He’s British through and through by my father’s first wife, Lady Irene Connaught, Countess of Winterhaven.”
She exhaled a blue-gray breath of cigarette smoke that instantly whipped out the open window to be replaced by an inward rush of coal smoke, and a cinder deposited in her brandy snifter.
“Pity,” Colton nodded gravely. “But still, to be listed in the Peerage…”
“No joy there.” Julia shrugged and dabbed the cinder from her drink with her fingertip. “We’re still only a short leg up on the local greengrocer and we keep ourselves to the back of the court when Victoria is in residence. The sheep we keep to groom our lawns get fewer every year depending on how many formal dinners we host at Ashford Manor.”
Colton pressed on.
“But your father, the Earl, is regularly quoted in The Times.”
“Yes, father has opinions on everything,” Julia smiled, “and the ‘Sir’ in front of his handle carries some weight at the local clubs and pubs, so his rural circle tends to defer to him on government and global matters. Those quotes for the Fleet Street crowd get him speaking engagements for a few quid so we don’t have to pawn our ancestors’ gold leaf picture frames.”
“Handle?’” asked Gladys, squinting as she pursued the unfamiliar term.
“Sorry,” Julia sipped her brandy, “that’s a word I learned in the Western United States—it means ‘given name.’ I lived in Arizona for a time to see something of the country when I quit my art studies in the East.”
Colton brightened again, “You mean with cowboys and Indians? I say, that must have been exciting!”
Julia’s eyes wandered to the open window and glimpsed water buffalos beside some women kneeling along the banks of the Nile, washing their pots and pans beneath shading palms as their children splashed in the fast-moving current.
“It was beautiful in the Navaho country,” she answered, following a pre-designed script that most people wanted to hear. “The colors, the people and the huge sky above those reaching stone monuments were quite irresistible.”
“Speaking of monuments,” Colton interrupted her travelogue, “our son, James, is with an archeological dig hunting for ancient Egyptians.”
Julia perked up.
“Really? I’m going to a dig. My father is one of the sponsors. That name—Colton—is familiar. I’ll have to examine my letter of introduction in my luggage.”
“How grand, maybe we’ll be neighbors,” Gladys Colton beamed. “This will be a jolly trip. You can tell us all about your adventures among the savages and the…the…hoot owls.’”
Julia bit off a giggle. “That’s owlhoots, Mrs. Colton.”
Gladys shook her head, smiling with her slightly prominent front teeth.
“Oh, please, m’lady, you must call us Gladys and Archie.”
Julia sat back in her seat, cupping her brandy snifter and listening to the waiter making his way unsteadily toward their compartment clutching a handful of menus and muttering “Pardon” to every passenger he confronted in the narrow hall. As the carriage rocked and rolled along the uneven track, he weaved around late diners tottering toward the dining carriage for the luncheon service. Gladys beamed as she unloaded paeans of praise for her Jimmy the archeologist and talked of how her boy always loved to dig in the garden back in dear old Blighty.
Julia mused—a jolly trip indeed—and ordered a half pint of porter to back her brandy for a good night’s sleep during the overnight ride to Luxor.
***
The train station at Luxor teamed with local vendors as the railway carriages rolled in with much whistle tooting and hissing steam. White-capped porters in scrubbed gallabiyahs smiled and scrambled for a good spot nearest the gravel path from the tracks to the cab stand. Some carried baskets of fruit, others small brown bags of uncooked dates—guaranteed to give most foreigners a case of the trots called “Pharaoh’s Revenge”—while buskers strummed gourd guitars and flautists tweedled their pipes. At the end of this impromptu commercial gauntlet, the barouche cab drivers stood by their black high-wheeled carriages. Black vests singled them out from the street sellers and most wore a conical black fez. Their horses were well-kept and many had been decorated with colored streamers trailing from their bridles.
Into this swarm plunged Lady Julia and party. She still wore her traveling ensemble, a bit the worse the wear from the hot smoky train ride, stopping and starting at every rural platform, or meandering herd of goats. Behind her, the Coltons, still swathed in damp itchy tweeds, gamely plowed on, both carrying formidable hickory walking sticks and looking bulldog British from topknot to toecap.
Archie wheezed.
“Enterprising beggars, aren’t they?” he said, crunching along at an unsteady quick march like a subaltern on parade.
Outreaching hands rushed past in a blur of smiling faces babbling, “God save the queen,” or “Good guide—see all temples!”
Julia led, scanning the horses first—prosperity showed itself in a well-brushed bay mare—and found a well-turned-out middle-aged driver whose smile seemed more genuine than his competition. The coach parked behind his appeared to be in reasonable repair, its driver grinning with one gold tooth. She chose it for the porters in the Carstairs/Colton wake who lugged a dozen pieces of baggage and Julia’s trunk.
Archie soldiered over to the luggage coach, his walking stick tucked under his arm a swagger stick of authority, and took charge of the loading.
Doffing his fez, the driver took Gladys’s reluctant hand and steadied her up into the shade offered by his coach’s leather top. Julia dove once again into her kidskin bag of coins and paid off the parade of porters who bit their gold piasters to test their authenticity, nodded, and stuffed them into cloth bags and pockets, then turned and ran back down the noisy gauntlet to mine any remaining rewards from slower-moving passengers.
Archie returned from the luggage carriage and hoisted his girth up to sit next to his wife. “See, here, m’Lady, you must let us share these expenses. We fully expected to pay our way on this journey.”
Julia turned back from handing the driver a slip of paper and gauging his smiling nod for a trace of comprehension.
“I’m sorry,” she answered, “but I’m so used to traveling alone that I forget my manners. This sack of gold piaster coins is heavy, but necessary to get the best service.”
“Hmph,” grunted Archie. “Good solid English pound sterling and pence not good enough for them? If you don’t mind me asking, what was in that note you passed to the driver?”
“The dock location of the steamboat I hired by telephone from my Cairo hotel. Do you have a reservation?” She brought out a small leather note pad with an attached gold pen. “I’ll give it to the driver.”
Gladys gave Archie the flinty eye.
“I told you to telephone ahead. Jimmy’s not expecting us for another week. He won’t have anything laid on.”
Julia peered sideways out of the open coach and sighed as the horse began its leisurely clip-clop down the cobbled road that paralleled the Nile. Stifling an internal shrug, she turned back to the flummoxed couple.
“You’re more than welcome to share my transport. It was the only steam dahabeah left so I took it for the upriver slog—it sleeps ten. Please, be my guests.”
Archie waffled and then nodded.
“I don’t know what to say, but we appreciate your kindness and”—glancing at his wife for affirmation”—we accept your offer as long as we pay our own way. But tell me, what the deuce is a dahabeah?”
Julia consulted her leather tablet, leafing its pages to an entry of close-written notes. “Dahabeah means Golden Boat,” she read. “The Pharaohs used them to transport themselves and their entourage up and down the Nile. They are very comfortable sailing vessels with two large sails rigged fore and aft with a main deck low to the water, and a top deck above the cabins in between.” She turned a page. “A journey upriver once took two or three months under sail power, depending on the number of stops and the cataracts. Our boat has two large triangular sails for the downriver trip, but a steam engine for the ascension south upriver against the current. The shipping company has a good reputation. We should be well looked after.”
Archie said, “Ah, sounds damned fine,” and withdrew a bent briar pipe with a hinged bowl cover from his inside jacket pocket. “Do you ladies mind? I feel the need for a taste of Latakia.”
Gladys gave her approval with a small smile of familiar forbearance.
Julia said, “Please, I’ll join you.”
In a few moments, Julia’s Balkan cigarillo joined Archie’s chugging billows of Arabic tobacco blended with a touch of Virginia to mellow its peppery aroma, while Gladys moved the hot smoky air around with her fan. The pretty bay mare drawing the coach undercut her brushed appearance and stylish gate by unloading a couple of pounds of second hand horse feed to add to their odoriferous wake as they approached Luxor dock.
The Kalesta Princess accounted for one hundred feet along her dock moorings and thirty feet out into the passing Nile. She glowed white, built low to the water with rectangular cabin ports cut into her single-level deck structure just above the water line. A gaily-striped canvas awning shaded the length of her open-lounge deck that formed the roof of the fore and aft cabins, which made up two thirds the length of the hull. Amidships, a black stack showing a trickle of preparatory smoke, thrust up through the roof and canvas, topped by a three-tone steam whistle. A very tall, slender mast rose from the foredeck and another pierced the stern fantail. Each supported a boom with a large, lateen-rigged, isosceles triangular sail furled for the leisurely upriver trip south against the current.
As the pair of carriages stopped opposite the deck’s open entry port and brow, a tall Egyptian man strode down the boards toward the arriving guests. He wore an English white shirt, a collar, and a gold striped white neck cravat. His shirt was tucked into white cotton trousers that ended just above a pair of white canvas deck shoes. He wore the typical Egyptian smile of wary welcome reserved for all new acquaintances. The white clothing accented his cinnamon-deep tan, chiseled clean-shaven features, and thin-trimmed mustache above those smiling lips. He made a small, friendly salute toward Julia’s party.
Julia regarded him with a sudden rush of familiarity—his confident stride, his build, the tan skin and black hair, his dark eyes… She tried to hide her flashback flush by stifling a non-existent cough with her gloved hand.
“Welcome to the Kalesta Princess,” he said with a slight British accent. “I am Ahmed, your dragoman for the voyage.” He carried some papers clipped to a thin board. “Am I addressing Lady Carstairs?” he asked Julia—the most fashionably turned out of the trio.
“Yes,” she forced her reply, turning to the Coltons, a few paces behind her. “These are my friends, Archie and Gladys Colton. They are also bound for Aswan, below the first cataract to visit their son. I … I asked them to join me on the Kalesta Princess for company on the voyage. Your agent told me I would be traveling alone so I hope my friends will not be a burden on your expected accommodations.”
Behind her recitation, she struggled to calm her racing pulse, but her eyes swept back to remain locked on his gaze as he tilted his head ever so slightly as if—oh Christ no—he sensed her internal stirring.
Ahmed offered the briefest of smiles, gave the situation two eye blinks and then beamed at the Coltons.
“We have more than ample crew and supplies to accommodate the friends of Lady Carstairs. It will be a pleasure to serve you.” Behind him, four porters streamed off the boat to unload the luggage carriage. “We will take your baggage to your suites if you would do us the honor of taking tea on the upper deck while your rooms are prepared.”
Archie stepped forward, pipe in hand.
“Thank you, ah, Ahmed. We will be paying our own fare so as not to burden her Ladyship who has already been so generous.” He paused and added sotto voce. “This ‘tea’ you speak of, could we, ah, substitute a pint of lager? It’s been a long dusty ride.”
Ahmed made a note.
“Of course. We have lager, brown ale and bitter. The same for you Madame Colton?”
Gladys offered a thoughtful smile.
“A half of lager for me please.”
Julia pursed a smile into Ahmed’s dark brown eyes.
“I’ll be happy with a brown ale, if you please.”
Ahmed gave a brief bow.
“Please follow me up to the lounge deck. We will be casting off as soon as your bags are aboard.”
Julia handed Ahmed four gold coins.
“Please see the drivers receive these gratuities.”
Ahmed closed his fingers over the coins and gave another of his short salutes.
“Very generous m’lady; I’ll see to it.”
The lounge deck boasted wicker tables and couches, with a bar at one end next to a single stairway down to the cabin deck. A narrow passage on either side of the smokestack led to the stairway down to the stern passenger cabins. Two boys flanked the down staircase, each wearing a red vest over his gallabiyah, and a red fez. As the Coltons seated themselves in deep cushions across the table from Julia, Archie retrieved his cold pipe and made to relight it.
“I say,” he said, “do you think those native drivers will see any of that color?”
Julia looked down from the lounge deck railing as the drivers turned their carriages. They saw her. First one and then the other tipped his fez in her direction. They both wore broad smiles.
“That tells me something about our dragoman,” she replied as she returned their wave.
Gladys asked, “What does that mean, dragoman?”
Julia held up her trusty note pad. “It means interpreter or guide. I imagine most of the crew who have to be around the passengers speak some English, but anything fussier than routine—we ask Ahmed.”
The boys approached their table with the drinks, a large basket of warm Aish merahrah—Egyptian flatbread—and a small basket of sugared cakes, together with dried fish, a small decanter of olive oil, and a bowl of dates in yogurt with stacks of small single serving bowls and dessert plates for three.
“How charming,” Gladys said. “I’ll be mother.” She reached for a bowl and looked up at Julia. “Dates?”
The Kalesta Princess’s stern swung clear of the dock, the helm was put over and the bow reached out into the Nile’s swift current. Julia watched the mooring lines being drawn aboard and let the sounds, the vibrations of the “kajunka-kajunka” laboring steam engine, and the smells of the Nile Valley wash over her, covering the aching void she left behind, recalled by this startling Egyptian dragoman, and drawing her toward whatever adventure lay to the south and west into the great Sahara Desert.

---

Books from Black Velvet Seductions

Total Book Tweets for Black Velvet Seductions is 7350