Will you be summering in Rhode Island this year? Tell me if so, and I shall direct my letters accordingly.
Sophia
She put down her pen, reviewed the letter, and decided it was as bland and agreeable as she could make it. The line about the faience vase was perhaps a bit pointed. I recall little of you, it seemed to say, except for that summer gown. But really, how far was that from the mark? Her memories of her family were faded, arrested in time. George, especially: he was nearly seventeen now. She’d almost sent him a block of halawa from a Cairo bakery, before remembering he was far too old for a gift of sweets.
In truth, her letters home were mostly for her father. She chose the stories she thought he’d enjoy: the ruin she’d camped beside at the outskirts of Latakia, unmarked on any map; the fragments of a double-handled amphora that she’d found in Amman, near the Temple of Hercules. His responses often took months to arrive, and there was rarely any true news in their pages. Your mother is busy as always. George is adjusting well to his school in Connecticut. He never spoke of his own life, his own doings. Sometimes she pictured him at his desk in the library, reading her letters with an atlas at hand, tracing her journey, imagining himself in her place.
Only once had she dared to propose that the family reunite. We could all meet in Italy, she wrote, or Spain, during the summer. The answering letter said nothing of her suggestion until a brief postscript, in her mother’s handwriting: We would be very glad to see you at home, in New York. Apparently it would happen on her mother’s terms, or not at all.
She sealed her letter, addressed it to her father’s Wall Street office—never the mansion, to keep it from the servants’ prying eyes—and slipped it into her jacket-pocket. She had errands to run, supplies to purchase. Carchemish lay on the Turkish border, near the town of Jerablus; it was farther north than she liked to go in the springtime, but she was genuinely interested in the ruins, and could hardly pass up the opportunity.
From her trunk she took a bulb-shaped brass flask, the sort used for storing gunpowder. She uncapped the flask, measured out a spoonful of powder into a glass of water, stirred it, and drank it down. Her medicines had changed over the years, as the healers that she found moved from place to place, or simply passed away. This particular powder was her least favorite of the lot: it did nothing to warm her, only stopped her trembling so that she might move and eat and speak with no outward sign of her misery. Taking it made her feel like a living statue, a woman trapped in ice. But the herbalist who made it had the advantage of a stall in the Al-Hamidiyeh souk, only a few minutes’ walk from her hotel.
She went to the lobby, gave her letter to the desk attendant to post, and stepped out into the blinding sunlight of Marjeh Square. The ancient Orontes River had been tamed here, its lazy curves narrowed and straightened into a swift channel that ran beneath a vast, unbroken plaza of red brick. The Ottoman government had built its regional offices around the square, in tall stone buildings with iron balconies. Imperial bureaucrats in fezzes and round-collared uniforms breakfasted in nearby cafés, sipping coffee over their newspapers. As always, they stared at Sophia as she went by, taking in her Western dress, her unaccompanied state.
She passed by the Citadel of Damascus with its forbidding stone parapets, and then entered the covered expanse of the souk, threading through the morning crowd, past stalls laden with rugs and teas and caged pigeons, vegetables and sheepskins. Children ran up to her, displaying scarves, slippers, sweets. She smiled and waved them away, then paused at a clothing stall to consider a thick wool tunic, thinking of the cooler weather in Jerablus. At last she went on, resolving to buy one later.
The herbalist Sophia frequented was named Umm Sahir. Her stall was toward the far end of the souk, near the Umayyad Mosque and the Old City’s maze of alleys, where the market was somewhat quieter. The stall itself was set inside the low, arched entrance to an old granary, one of the citadel’s many half-crumbled outbuildings that had been absorbed into the souk as it grew. To Sophia the entire structure seemed perpetually on the verge of collapse, but if it worried Umm Sahir, she made no sign of it. As usual, she’d sighted Sophia from across the alley, and by the time Sophia reached the stall was already collecting what was needed.
“Greetings, Umm Sahir,” Sophia said when the woman emerged from the granary’s arch, her arms laden with bottles and bundles.
“Greetings, Miss Williams,” Umm Sahir replied, her sharp eyes upon her ingredients as she worked. “I’d hoped I might see you today.”
“Oh?”
“I have a visitor,” the woman said, with a quick nod toward the dark beyond the arch. “My great-aunt Umm Ishaq. I haven’t seen her in many years. She’s come from As-Suwaida to be with my cousin, who’s close to giving birth.”
“May it be an easy birth and a healthy baby,” Sophia said, a touch confused.
The woman said, “When I was a child, Umm Ishaq was known as the most powerful exorcist from here to Amman.”
Sophia’s heart leapt against her ribs.
“Perhaps you’d like to meet her.”
The granary went farther back than Sophia had imagined.
The noise of the souk receded as Sophia followed Umm Sahir into the depths. Herbs hung from the wall in string-tied bundles,
