But then his world had been upended.
He hadn’t been in Paris himself to witness his daughter’s collapse. If he had, he would’ve recalled another episode from his bachelor years: a drunken night at a California brothel, where he’d opened the wrong door and glimpsed a blood-slicked, delirious girl groaning over a chamber-pot while the madam held her upright, murmuring in Spanish. Instead the absent Francis had taken the polite fiction of womanly troubles at face value. And when wife and daughter returned, and he saw Sophia for himself, her pale face and shaking hands, still he accepted the falsehood—until the morning when a stranger had rolled naked from their blazing hearth to land at Sophia’s feet. She hadn’t gasped, hadn’t run. She’d bent over him, and taken his hand. She had spoken his name.
She was misled, Julia had insisted afterward, when he demanded that she accept the clear and obvious truth. She was taken in. But Francis had seen, as his wife had not, the look in their daughter’s eyes when he’d moved to intervene. It was not that of an innocent beguiled—it was plain defiance, the unmasking of a mutineer.
And so, when Sophia announced her wish to break the engagement and leave the country, he’d consented at once. Yes, let her go, let her disappear abroad, so that he might forget what she’d been to him. Only then could he begin to reconcile himself to what she’d become, and to his own neglectful role in her transformation.
With her back to her ever-roaring fireplace, Sophia Winston stood in her bedroom and surveyed her luggage, her notes and lists. Servants passed by in the hall, whispering; she ignored them, focused instead on the stacks of books that vied for precious space in her trunks. The Journal of Biblical Archaeology. Turkey Ancient and Modern. Folk-Lore of the Palestine Peasants. A Beginner’s Arabic Grammar. Narrative of an Expedition to the River Jordan. Syrian Traditions and Superstitions. She’d tried to winnow their numbers, but found it impossible to choose—and so into the trunks they all went. Not for the first time, she reflected that her mother had done her quite the favor by denying her the servants’ help. Otherwise, someone might’ve noticed that none of her books had the first thing to do with India.
Sophia Winston had never deliberately set out to rebel. She had, in fact, resigned herself to the existence her mother had planned for her: the engagement she hadn’t wanted, the stultifying society life. And then, one autumn day, she’d met a man in Central Park, a stranger who called himself Ahmad. He’d come that night to her balcony, and she’d allowed something to happen—an indiscretion, a liberty. It ought to have ended there—except that the stranger was no ordinary man, but a being of living flame. And for a time, a pinprick of that flame had grown inside her until, in that room in Paris, her body had cast it out, leaving her to tremble in perpetual chill.
Sophia knew that her mother worried for her sanity; she could only imagine what would happen if she told her parents the truth. They would send for the specialists, and Sophia would then vanish into some well-appointed prison, erased neatly from the world. Better, far better, to erase herself instead, to vanish for her own purposes. She’d learned much from her father’s stories and the books he’d allowed her to read in spite of her mother’s misgivings. And now, under the guise of the young explorer and adventuress, she would travel to the desert where the man of flame had come from, and the lands that surrounded it—Syria and Turkey, Egypt, the Hijaz. There, she’d search in secret for a way to rid herself of what he’d done to her—and she wouldn’t come home again until she’d found it.
The Winstons saw their daughter off at the pier as though it were any other sailing.
The two new servants boarded the Campania first, to make her stateroom ready, while Sophia and her family stood by the gangplank, no one knowing quite what to say. At last the ship’s horn blew its warning. Neither parent reached for her, only watched as she knelt down and gave little George a last embrace.
“Good-bye,” she told them, and walked alone up the gangplank.
George had wanted to stay a while and watch the ship depart; but within a few minutes he began to fidget in the cold, and Julia led him away, unprotesting, to their carriage. Alone, Francis watched as the tugs pushed the Campania away from the pier and into the Hudson. He’d given his daughter no true farewell, no private words of advice or encouragement. He’d expected, in this moment, to regret his silence—but instead all that he felt was envy, as deep and sullen as a child’s.
Wrapped deeply in her woolen shawls, Sophia stood trembling at the Campania’s rail as the Hudson widened and became the bay, its shoreline a painter’s smudge of autumn set against a robin’s-egg sky. The city withdrew, narrowed to a point, and vanished.
I have escaped, Sophia thought. She wiped away her tears, and went below.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Sophia Winston’s new servants to suspect that their mistress was bound and determined to make their job as difficult as possible.
For one thing, the girl simply refused to leave the stateroom, not even for a brief promenade. They inquired, was she seasick? No, she replied, she merely wished to stay out of the breeze. They were certain she’d change her mind after a few days, if only out of boredom—but she seemed perfectly content to remain
