The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger

said, the little brown owl came to his door and looked at him and flew away and he knew then that you would come to find him, Missy.”
    “See if you can get him to drink. I’m going to fetch Lady Duff Gordon’s medicine box.” As I stooped to clear the doorway I realized that I’d spoken Arabic without pausing to think, without first formulating the English, then planning the translation.
    Life in the French House went from calm and slow to urgent and fast-paced that day. A strange epidemic was upon the village, a gastric condition that produced as its symptoms chronic stomach pain, constricted bowels, and terrible fever. Left untreated, one simply weakened, poisoned, then died. Though I went home with the sole intention of getting her medicine box, my Lady herself insisted on returning to Ahmed’s house with me. “I’ve nursed my share of sick children,” she said, “and I know the contents of this dreadful box of tricks better than anyone.” In fact, there had been several occasions on
Zint el-Bachreyn
during our Nile journey when a boatman had been injured and the medicine box produced, its poultices, tinctures, salts, and wraps providing far more sophisticated treatment than any of these men, the
reis
included, had received or witnessed elsewhere. My Lady had become quite adept at treating minor injuries and ailments, and my own skill at physicking when she was ill was already well established.
    However, Omar and I spoke at the same time: “You must stay here, my Lady, you must not—” We stopped speaking and looked at each other, shaking our heads and frowning in agreement.
    My Lady folded her arms firmly. “I want to see Ahmed. We shall go together, Sally, you, and me.”
    My Lady was aghast when she saw Ahmed’s condition and heard what had happened to the boy’s mother. She insisted we transport him to the French House, where a bed was made up for him in a cool and quiet alcove. There he could be nursed properly.
    When the villagers heard that Ahmed was receiving treatment, they began to arrive at the door of the French House to ask my Lady to treat their own families who had been brought low by the epidemic. Mustafa Agha came to the house that afternoon to warn my Lady not to treat them. “You’ll contract the fever yourself,” he said, to my relief. My Lady might pay heed to Mustafa Agha’s advice.
    “Nonsense,” she replied. “How do we know this disease is infectious?”
    “Half the village is sick!”
    I had wondered myself how the disease was transmitted, but I kept quiet; my Lady had a theory that the villagers were eating too much green corn and green wheat and this, combined with the religious fasting, had led to the sickness.
    “I’ll dose them with castor oil and that will clear out the digestive tract,” said my Lady.
    “Lady Duff Gordon,” Mustafa Agha replied, and his expression was very serious—Mustafa Agha was rarely entirely serious—“if your treatments do not work for the
fellahin,
they’ll accuse you of poisoning them, or giving them the evil eye.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous! Is it better to leave them to languish with terrible stomach pain? Sally,” my Lady ordered, “go and fetch my lavement machine.” The machine, a collection of tubes and sacks and pumps and funnels, was stored in a cloth bag at the bottom of the largest trunk; while I unpacked it I could hear my Lady arguing with Mustafa Agha in the next room. “We’ll give them castor oil,” she repeated, “and if that doesn’t work, we’ll treat them with my lavement machine.”
    My Lady and I knew all about stoppages of the digestive tract; laudanum also caused this problem and I had had to administer this expensive but effective sedative—kept in a special bottle in its own lined wooden box, for desperate emergencies only—to my Lady on several occasions. And laudanum invariably led to castor oil, and if that failed to work, to the gruesome lavement machine.
    Omar and I spent the rest of the