The suitcase she would leave behind. She needed to be unencumbered, needed to get out, into the streets, and hide herself somewhere until the pawnshop opened, and then she would go there to give over her mother’s bracelet and take money in return. And then what? Then she would start walking — on the road out of town that ran up through San Marcos Pass to Cold Spring Tavern, where she would catch the stage north after it left Santa Barbara, and if anyone should come along the road in a wagon or buggy or on horseback, she would hide herself in the bushes till they passed. It would be a long walk — ten miles, fifteen? — and most of it uphill. But it was nothing to her — all she’d done on the island was walk.
The house was as dark as the inside of a closet, the windows shut tight and the shades drawn. She felt her way along the corridor and down the stairs, spots floating before her eyes in random patterns, straining to see and seeing nothing. There was a rustling, a moan, the faint whisper of one of the old women snoring in her bed behind an invisible door. Shuffling her feet, one step at a time, afraid of stumbling into a chair or table and giving herself away, she read the wainscoting with her fingertips like one of the blind. She bumped into something — wood, cloth there, the coat tree? — and then finally she was at the door. She felt for the doorknob, gripped it, twisted it, but the door wouldn’t open. The latch, where was the latch? She ran her fingers over the smooth wooden plane, feeling for the latch, but there was no latch, only a keyhole, and the keyhole was empty. She was trying to come to grips with that — had the landlady actually locked them all in? What if there was a fire? An earthquake? But there must have been a back door and that couldn’t be locked too, could it? — when there was a noise behind her and the room came to sudden life.
Mrs. Cawthorne, in her nightgown, her feet bare and her expression blank, was standing there at the edge of the carpet, a candle held aloft in a pewter dish. “What’s going on here? Who is it now?” she demanded.
She was a very fat woman, fat and lazy and old, and Edith felt a surge of contempt for her. She said nothing.
The light wavered as the landlady took a step closer, her eyes lost in the dark tumid contours of her face. “Is that the new boarder? Edith, is it?”
“Yes. I was looking for a glass of water. I was thirsty.”
For a long moment the landlady merely squinted at her, breathing heavily, a gasp and wheeze that scratched away at the silence of the sleeping house. Then she said, “There’s a glass and pitcher on the table in your room.” Another silence. “Right next to the lamp.”
* * *
During the course of the next three days, Edith’s stepfather took her out for a meal exactly once, at a cheap restaurant where men with snarled whiskers and bad teeth sat sucking at one thing or another and everything stank of sour milk and chili beans, and he took her to the shops exactly twice, to buy toilette things, cloth for a new dress to replace the ones that were so worn and stained they’d become an embarrassment, and, of course, to lay in supplies at the grocer’s — more sacks of beans, more rice, more flour. Each sack, as the clerk checked it off in his ledger and she stood there at the counter trying to keep from screaming, was a weight drawing her down, another link in the chain she had to drag behind her like Marley’s ghost, dead in life, dead on her feet, dead to the world.
She was up in her room, plotting frantically, when her stepfather came to take her back to the ship. She’d seen no one, seen nothing, and now she was to go back. It wasn’t fair. It was criminal. An insult. Hadn’t Lincoln freed the slaves? Wasn’t this America? For three days she’d watched for her opportunity, even measuring the distance from the second-story window to the nearest tree, but Mrs. Cawthorne was like a watchdog and her stepfather was worse — he was Argus of the hundred eyes, keen to her every movement. Mechanically, she paced from the dresser to the bed, packing her suitcase and listening to the voices rising from below.
“I want to thank you,” her father was saying, and then he paused and she imagined them nodding at each other in satisfaction, the prisoner in her hole and a job well done. “I appreciate your keeping an eye on her.”
And then Mrs. Cawthorne, her voice level and hard: “Yes, but I’m afraid I won’t be available to her next time round.”
“And why is that — you’re not thinking of closing down, are you?”
“No, it’s not that, not that at all. It’s just — well, a young girl needs a mother, and I’m sorry to say it. She doesn’t look after herself, that’s what I mean to say. Her clothes, her hair, her shoes, her corsets. She’s ragged. Not at all what I expect from a young lady.”
Her stepfather made some sort of meliorating comment — the island, the weather, rough conditions — but the landlady wouldn’t be swayed. “It’s to do with standards,” she said. “My boarders, I’ve got to think of my boarders. And my own reputation too.”
And that was it. She was condemned. Her stepfather called up the stairs to her—“Edith, will you put a hurry on, for God’s sake? We can’t keep Charlie waiting all day”—even as she stepped to the mirror, pushed her hair back and gave herself a good hard look. It was true. Her hair was dirty, her dress no better than a patchwork quilt. Her face had taken the sun till it looked as if it had been stained in a barrel. Her eyes stared out like a madwoman’s. She was like a savage, like Jimmie, like Caliban — or no, even worse, because she’d let him touch her as if he and she were the same, as if she were his wife, not Miranda, not even Sycorax, but worse, far worse, Mrs. Caliban herself.
The Shearers
The shearers came back in August and this time there was a new face amongst them. At first she didn’t notice — she glanced up one afternoon and there they were, outside the window, milling around in the yard with their bedrolls flung over their shoulders and that greedy craving look in their eyes, and all she could think of was the extra work they would cost her. Five of them — or no, six — and each one going through three pounds of meat, a stack of tortillas and half a gallon of wine every day, though the wine was to be watered and doled out a glass at a time till they sat down to dinner so as to prevent a general riot, and her stepfather was absolutely strict on that score. They wore straw hats — sombreros, they called them — that were as stiff as tin and finger-greased till they’d taken on a dull gray sheen, Mexican boots that cocked them up off their heels and stained bandannas knotted jauntily round their throats to lend them the only bit of color they seemed able to support. She recognized most of them at a glance, lean reticent stripped-back men in their thirties and forties who spoke a garble of Spanish, Italian, English and Portuguese and maybe Indian too, she couldn’t say — all she knew was that it wasn’t French and it wasn’t German and the thought made her ache all the more for the life that had been taken away from her.
Of course she recognized them — she ought to, since they’d worked her nearly to death when they’d come out at the end of February. There was Luis, in a pair of leather chaps, and next to him Rogelio, quietly spitting in the dirt, and who was that, the one with a concave face like the blade of a shovel? The Italian. They just called him El Italiano. And — but here she caught her breath — there was a new man amongst them, young, with a smooth unseamed face and a guitar strapped over his shoulder atop the bedroll. He was standing there with the others, taking everything in, the chickens, the barn, the bunkhouse and the pigpen and the hills dotted with sheep that must have been replicas of the sheep-dotted hills on all the other islands, nothing new under the sun, and what was he doing here with these old men? Was he somebody’s son? Rogelio’s maybe? Luis’? That was when he suddenly glanced up at the house, at the window behind which she was standing, and they locked eyes till she was the one to turn away.