Sibyl was too frightened of another episode to take her meals in the first-class dining room. But her fellow passengers still greeted her with warm smiles and respectful nods when they passed her on deck, as if she were their trusted companion simply by virtue of having embarked upon the same journey.
A few of them, mostly British aristocrats returning from a holiday in the United States, inquired as to her repeated absences during meals. To this Sibyl invented a story about the trip being so last minute she didn't have time to pack the formal wear appropriate for dinner. Perhaps if these fellow travelers had been American they would have insisted on some breach in decorum, but to the British, her desire not to appear out of place or beneath her station seemed perfectly understandable.
She did not, however, share with them her very real fear that after her terrible spell aboard the Twentieth Century, it would not be wise for her to travel more than a short walk, or a short jog, from her stateroom, where Lucy always waited with a glass of water and some tablets she rarely needed.
And so she had arranged to take most of her meals there. This gave her time to pore over her journals, to form a coherent chronology of the strange mental disturbances which had begun to alter the very course of her life.
It was a connection, this thing that plagued her now. There was no better word for it.
Articles you may like
Battle of the Scheldt | World War IIBattle of Aachen | World War IICombat of Hurtgen Forest | World War IIOperation Market Garden | World War IIAds by AloneReaders.comShe felt a powerful and inexplicable connection to another woman, a beautiful, raven-haired woman who went by the rather grand name of Egypt's last queen. And she thought it very possible she had imagined this part of it; that her own lifelong obsession with Cleopatra had resulted in a kind of mental misfire as she'd tried to process her most recent vision. But this woman, whoever she was, appeared to be moving through contemporary life, just as Sibyl was. And even if the whole thing were simply a series of hallucinations--and that was doubtful given that one of the nightmares in question had contained a very real man, this Mr. Reginald Ramsey--the nature of each vision was that she was suddenly and violently seeing the world through another woman's eyes. And for some reason, this connection had gathered enough strength to escape the confines of her dreams.
All of this seemed to make utter and complete sense when she put these words to paper. When she whispered them aloud to herself, she felt like a complete madwoman.
And those were usually the moments when she'd risk a walk around the Mauretania's decks.
Her favorite time of day for this ritual was the late afternoon when the setting sun silhouetted the great ship's four matching smokestacks, making them look like ancient monoliths gone suddenly aloft.
She would pass knots of well-dressed first-class passengers getting their last breath of fresh air before dinner.
Sometimes she would peer far enough over the rail that she could glimpse the children in third-class jumping rope and playing excited games of chase on the lower decks. But her delight in their abandon would soon turn to bitterness. She had no taste for class systems that divided people into groups deemed upper or lower. It angered her that all the children aboard were not free to run the entirety of the ship in great breathless circles, imagining themselves pirates or Vikings or whatever great seagoing figures filled their dreams. Worse, she was confident her brothers and her late mother, and perhaps even her late father, would have vociferously defended such a system, even though it left children with only a small patch of deck on which to run and play and dream.
When her anger threatened to get the best of her--and it was threatening to get the best of her more and more of late; another strange by-product of the disturbances, it seemed--she would stare out at the gray, choppy waters and say a prayer for those passengers on the Titanic who had lost their lives in these seas a few years prior.
And then, once this ritual was complete, and usually when she was on the northward-facing side of the ship, with the sun having descended fully behind the smokestacks and most of the passengers having filed inside for dinner, she would do something dangerous.
She would attempt to open the connection herself.
She would take the rail in a dual, white-knuckled grip and summon every fragment of each dream and nightmare, every last scrap of the vision that had taken hold of her on the Twentieth Century. The deck of another ship, not quite as grand as this one. Charging across the sea; possibly this sea, maybe not. She had no way of knowing, but she tried to remember it in the clearest detail.
Who are you, Cleopatra? Speak to me. Tell me where you are. And while you're at it, please tell me, how is it you can justify such a grandiose name?
After several days of vain attempts, there was no response.
She remained entirely powerless, and this disappointed her. But this disappointment did something far more significant.
It proved to her that she no longer feared it, this connection. That it had, in ways both small and large, awakened a part o
f her which had lain dormant for too long. This part of her had been able to stand down her foolish brothers; it had given her the courage to take to the North Atlantic, to London, on her own. In some ways, these were miraculous things, as miraculous as the idea that she might be receiving glimpses of another part of the world through a strange woman's eyes.
Whoever this other woman was, was Sibyl drawing strength from her?
Were they drawing strength from each other?
She had no way of knowing, only the vaguest sense that this Mr. Ramsey would have answers of some sort. And until then, she had her journals, and the splendid and luxurious isolation of her stateroom.
*
On the third day of her crossing, Sibyl had just begun her afternoon walk when she spotted a man reading a copy of a book she'd published five years before.
It was called The Wrath of Anubis, and like so many of her novels it had been inspired by a lifetime's worth of vivid dreams about ancient Egypt.
The man was seated by himself and reading her words with such intensity she had trouble suppressing a smile as she passed him.
In the book, a powerful queen awakens an ancient Egyptian king who has been rendered immortal by a curse from the gods. The king agrees to act as her counselor. Soon the two fall madly in love. But their love is shattered when the queen makes an impossible request: that the king unleash the same curse that rendered him immortal on her own private army, granting her, in turn, her own band of indestructible mercenaries.
The king refuses and abandons her. In despair, she throws herself into a crocodile-infested stretch of the Nile.
Her editor had insisted on the preposterous ending, even going so far as to demand Sibyl add extensive descriptions of the queen being torn limb from limb in the maws of bloodthirsty reptiles. But she had managed to have a bit of fun with the scenes, giving her imagination over to them with abandon even as her stomach lurched with each new line.