The shed door banging in it. Clatter now, of hail on the roof. I have seen what I should not see.
The fine, translucent hands, delicate fingers, nails like seashells, tiny, perfect. Mother of pearl.
This has been his real work.
My mother is and is not on the sea.
Harry Owen says, Come! Let’s go inside. We can discuss it further in the morning.
Some things, though, cannot be discussed. My father locks the shed door behind us, carefully slips the key into his waistcoat pocket. In the new world, the gangway has been lowered, my aunt’s hand is on my shoulder, she’s pushing me, a gentle hand but insistent, the moment of embarkation has come, Carlotta, she’s saying, Carlotta, it’s time to go.
IV.
ON A WINTER NIGHT A TRAVELER
On Christmas eve, late, I mounted the East Cliff in the rain: a ginger giantess, orphaned now, hugging my thin coat around me, carrying my sole remaining possession, a broken suitcase tied with twine. Below me, as I climbed, Whitby spread itself, the same sea-spittled, brine-slicked place it had ever been, stinking of rot and ocean, the harbor with its ships groaning restlessly at anchor, the cottages huddled stoically together like barnacles on a rock, backs turned, windows bundled, releasing only, like errant fingers beckoning, thin shafts of light that hinted at the hidden lives lived behind the tightly closed shutters and carefully drawn shades. I could not see the Birdcage, from where I stood; perhaps that was just as well, for it was my home no longer. I couldn’t see the Emerald Isle either where I knew it must be, turning at anchor, restless in the tide. Whitby was a place I knew, and yet I did not: it had been made strange for me; there was no longer, here, a door I could knock on, and expect to be let in, except, perhaps, for one. Penniless I mounted toward the Ravenscar Hotel and my future, whatever it might hold. I had been summoned there, and so I went.
As for that place, which had loomed large and mysterious over my childhood, it burned like a torch above the darkened city, threw off mad sparks of light and laughter and music, and gravel, too, from beneath the churning wheels of carriages ricocheting up and down the long drive—blurred faces turned toward me behind frost-covered windows, gawked, then were carried swiftly past, rocketing forward as I persisted in my own slow, orphan’s trudge: I a spectacle again as always, on the verge of the road with my flimsy case, my hair disheveled, my frock a baggy enigma in wool, my shoes unsuited to the snow, and yet.
• • •
And yet this was the one place in Whitby where they must let me in—which they did—though there was, it’s true, an exchange of glances at the threshold, the eyebrow raised. Does Madam wish a room? No. Does Madam wish to check her, ah, bag? No—. But the mockery of porters and bellmen, refined to the point of abstraction, were easy for me to step over and past, and I found myself, rather quickly, and for the first time ever, in that glittering, mythic lobby, where a tannenbaum stood, starred tip nearly touching the distant eminence of the dark-paneled ceiling, candles burning low and dangerously among the needles, branches festooned with gold garlands and glittering ornaments shaped like planets, seashells, saints, stars. Revelers, moon faced themselves, clustered like moons at the foot of the tree, festive hats tipped back at dangerous angles on seal-sleek heads, clutching their stemware as they toasted together giddily over the fizzing fruit of the second fermentation.
Anybody who cared to look could have seen that I didn’t belong there—gawky goony bird that I was, with my shabby clothes and my twined-together bag; but nobody looked, or else they looked quickly and then looked carefully away, in the usual mannerly violence of exclusion that is practiced in such places. Stranger in a strange land, that was I.
Until finally, from among one of the groups surrounding the tree, a single figure detached from the many, came toward, extended.
It was a woman, with long, straight, dark hair, wearing a snug, black velvet sheath with a low-cut bustier, droplet of pearls at the white throat, tapering black gloves, wristlets of marcasite gently tinkling, giving off those characteristic cold, black sparks.