she’d inherited her father’s red-gold hair, his blush-prone complexion, and his pale gray eyes, in place of her mother’s dark, dramatic beauty, still evident even now. It was a disappointment to Louisa that her daughter didn’t resemble her.
Harriet shrugged.
“I suppose it’s because I’m not well. Why are you going to Egypt, Mrs. Cox?”
“My husband has business interests in Cairo. He decided we should take our honeymoon there. He said we could kill two birds with one stone.”
“How delightful.”
“I wanted to go to Italy,” Mrs. Cox said, turning her head in a sudden movement that caused her earrings to swing. “But they are already well supplied with parts for flour mills.”
Harriet felt uncomfortable. Mrs. Cox surely couldn’t be being disloyal to her new husband. Looking around for Zebedee Cox, Harriet spotted Yael, sitting on the far side of the saloon, her feet in their polished brown boots braced on the floor, her hands gripping the seat on either side of her. Yael nodded in their direction and Harriet waved at her.
“She looks like a fish out of water,” Mrs. Cox said.
“My aunt wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me. She’d be at home in St. John’s Wood, pouring a whisky for Grandfather on the dot of six, or going off to her refuge for fallen women. My father made her come with us. She’s a spinster, so she couldn’t refuse.”
The floor below them rolled and they both leaned sideways in order to stay upright. Mrs. Cox looked queasy. Harriet enjoyed the sudden shifts to the perpendicular, the capriciousness of the horizon. It seemed to say that change was possible, that it could occur at any time, unexpectedly.
Mrs. Cox took a sip of her chamomile tea and picked a round yellow flower from between her teeth.
“You don’t want to live like your aunt, do you? I’ll tell your fortune, Harriet,” she said.
Producing a leather pouch from a bag that matched her dress, she began laying out a spread of cards in rows, face upward, with some placed sideways, others with their pictures upside down. Harriet sat in silence, watching. She hoped Yael couldn’t see. Aunt disapproved of what she called soothsayers and was more than capable of arriving at the table to say so, delivering her views on the inadvisability of trying to peer into the future, which she considered God’s business.
“You will marry,” Mrs. Cox said, as if in answer to a question Harriet had asked. “And have children. I see three, but only two births.” She looked up at Harriet with shining eyes. “Perhaps you are going to have twins. Do they run in your family?”
“Really, Mrs. . . .”
“Oh, call me Sarah.”
“Sarah, I . . .”
“You’ll recognize the man when you meet him. You will know him immediately. His occupation is something quite out of the ordinary. He won’t be a banker or a businessman or work in any kind of office. He’ll work with his brain and his hands together.”
Mrs. Cox peered at the spread.
“You won’t believe this.” Her voice was incredulous. She reached out and touched Harriet’s wrist with small fingers that were unusually even in length and with a row of three diamonds glittering on one of them. “You’ll encounter him on a voyage. A nautical one.”
Harriet felt herself blushing, but whether with embarrassment or annoyance, she wasn’t sure.
“I doubt that.”
Mrs. Cox looked around the crowded saloon and Harriet’s eyes followed, roaming over elderly Mrs. Treadwell, a suet-pudding-like couple with four round, pale children, two spinster sisters who conversed solely with each other. The only unmarried man present was Reverend Griffinshawe, a widower, who explained to everyone from under bushy white eyebrows that he was taking copies of the Bible in Arabic to his parish in Egypt and would appreciate most kindly any support they could offer for this worthwhile venture.
“He’s here somewhere,” Mrs. Cox said. “He must be.”
“I hardly think