Lotta’s house was the first off the cliff steps; no one reached the back beach before her, but Franco and his donkey were soon at her heels. The wet sand under their feet had been swept clean of its usual filth by the strength of the outgoing tide; and, sure enough, huge waves were already dumping the shattered ship ashore. Broken spars, sodden lumps of sailcloth and all the other rubbish of a wreck were already flung along the beach. Lotta leaned into the wind, heading for a wooden chest that was driven into the sand by its edge. Skirting a spouting rock, she found the first body, face down in a new-formed pool tinged pink. She heaved him over. His head was a mush of bone and brains, and she could tell nothing about his face. Crossing herself, she turned away. She did not need to rob the dead, though of course there would be those who would.
She reached the chest. A good, strong box and still shut, even though it was not roped together. It was either locked or stuck. With a quick thanks to San Antonio, who looks after things that are lost, Lotta called out to Franco. He rose from his knees beside the corpse, where she hoped he had been praying, and helped her pull the box out and rope it onto the beast. Lotta picked her way over a clutter of new white planks. Someone with a cart could fire a baker’s oven all next year. She shrugged. And then she saw the boy.
He lay awkwardly on his front, one white arm thrown forward, long legs splayed, his bloody shirt rucked up to show their full extent. His pigtail had come free so that his long pale hair clung to his face and fanned across his bare shoulder; a golden chain gleamed through it at his neck. He lay as if asleep; but of course, he must be dead. He was handsome, in a stern northern way that Lotta had seen before: strong brow, high straight nose, a perfect mouth, smooth cheek. No sign of a beard, though he must be taller than she was herself. She reached out to touch – and he was warm. Urgently, she tipped him onto his back, pulling the ripped shirt away and put her cheek to his throat to feel for a pulse, and there were two surprises: he was alive; and he was a girl.
It was bright day by the time they got the limp body up to the house, and the storm was wearing itself out. Lotta could not tell how badly hurt the stranger was, nor whether the donkey’s slow, jolting climb might make the harm much worse. But there was no leaving that beautiful body on the beach, and now the girl was lying in Maria’s bed, deathly pale but still alive. Lotta bent her head, and listened to the low breathing. She put her fingers in the mouth. No blood. Holy Mary be praised, then, the broken ribs – there must be broken ribs – had not pierced the lung. There was nothing more Lotta could do, except wait. So after she had taken the gold locket and put it into her dress for safekeeping, she placed a bucket by the bed in case the stranger woke and then, leaving the shutters closed against the sun, went out to buy food just as if it was an ordinary day. But all the time she was at the market, she thought about the stranger with the beautiful pale face, lying in her sister’s bed.
When she returned, the young woman was still unconscious, her breathing shallow but regular. American, they had said in the town – a merchantman out of Salem (wherever that was) bound for Jamaica and lost with all hands. Lotta didn’t intend to lose this one, however. She touched the pale face. It would not hurt to wash away the blood, and perhaps then she would be able to see how bad the wounds were. She fetched water and a sponge, and gently wiped the girl’s cheek, combing back the fine, light hair with her fingers. Then, very carefully, she pulled off the stained shift and began to wash away the blood and dirt. The cuts that had made all this blood were not after all, too deep; the worst hurt was the purple bruising all along the left side, and almost certainly there were broken ribs there, as she had thought. But perhaps not too bad. She smiled, and continued her work. It was a grown woman’s body, she realised, not a young girl’s as she had supposed from its thinness. She could not tell how old: no childish roundness in the face or neck, but no sign of childbearing either – the small breasts and flat belly were firm and unstretched. Lotta could see why she had mistaken this long, straight-limbed body for a boy’s. She smiled. The bodies she knew best were men’s, but she took pleasure in women, too. She bent and kissed the lips of the boy-girl from the sea, then covered her tenderly with the bright cotton coverlet.
The young woman did little that day but doze and mutter – in English, of which Lotta knew almost nothing – but the next day, when she could sit up and eat a little, they began the difficult work of trying to talk. It was hard indeed, when they had so little language between them. Lotta had lived in Havana since she was a tiny girl; Spanish and the local patois both came as easily to her as her native French. Beyond that she knew a few curses and the words for what men wanted, in a dozen languages including English, but none of it was useful now. This woman, like the few other Americans Lotta had come across, understood no language but her own.
So Lotta simply talked all the time, in her own mixture of Spanish and French, with dumbshow to help explain her meaning. This worked quite well when she wanted to find out where the woman had pain, or whether she felt hot or cold, or needed the chamber pot, or if she was hungry or thirsty. On the second morning, Lotta tried to ask her guest’s name, pointing to herself, saying ‘Lotta!’ then tapping her friend’s chest.
For a moment the American woman looked so blank that Lotta was worried she might have lost her memory in the wreck. But then she looked straight at Lotta and said firmly, ‘Judith.’ At which, to Lotta’s horror, the grey eyes filled with tears, and the tears spilled over and rolled down Judith’s face, and she lay there not even trying to wipe them away.
And of course Lotta reached out and held her, kissing the wet face and holding it against her own, but that was wrong, too, for Judith reddened and flinched away, and pulled the thin sheet up under her arms as if she did not like to be looked at, let alone touched.
For the first few days Judith dozed or gazed blankly through the window at the hot blue sky, and seemed too weak, or stunned, to talk much. But as the days went by and she returned to herself, she began to talk much more, and grew distressed when she could not make herself understood. Lotta did understand, quite quickly, that the woman wanted to speak to the Governor. But he was dead of the yellow fever, like most white folks who came fresh from Europe. As this Judith would very soon be also, Lotta feared; but she could not tell her any of this. Slowly she made her understand that no others had come from the wreck alive, and that the seaman’s box she and Franco had brought up from the beach was the only chest that had come ashore whole. She went and fetched the locket, and put it round Judith’s neck, so she would know something of her own had been saved.
She smiled at that, and opened it, showing Lotta the beautiful old picture inside – which Lotta admired afresh, asking her guest whether the picture was her mother, or her grandmother, or some fine lady who had been patron of the family? She had such splendid jewels, such a haughty turn of the head, it was hard to imagine she belonged in the New World. Judith said something, urgently; but Lotta could not make it out. She finally got her guest to understand that the locket was all that had survived the shipwreck. Then Judith gazed out of the window for a long time without speaking, as if she thought, or prayed. When she turned back, she looked so lonely that Lotta took her in her arms and this time she did not resist, laying her head on Lotta’s breasts like a child. This time she did not cry.
So, what with cooking and washing and bandages, and trying to learn English words and teach Judith Spanish ones, Lotta did not find much time for her clients. Sometimes men came banging on the door, and she shouted to them to go away and come back next week, she was busy; and they went off cursing her for a faithless whore, or laughed and said the man she had in there with her must be a fine one, to last so many days. Sometimes when Judith was asleep, Lotta had time for one of her regular clients, so there was at least money for food.
She wondered what food they ate in the north, in New England. Judith clearly did not recognise most of the things that Lotta put in front of her, poking at her plate uncertainly, as if the food would burn her. After a while, though, she ate more heartily and Lotta, who prided herself on her cooking, took trouble to make tasty dishes to tempt her. In particular, Judith had clearly never seen a tomato before, and looked quite shocked the first time she was asked to put one in her mouth, but soon she got quite a taste for them, watching hungrily from her window as Lotta tended the vines in the yard where the big red and green fruit grew. She only tried once to help, but bending made her cry out with pain. Lotta tried to comfort her, counting on her fingers the weeks that would mend the broken ribs, and then pretending to be Judith marching about with a watering pot for the tomatoes. It made her new friend laugh, though whether she understood the meaning of it was hard to tell. Judith was always very brave about the pain, and made Lotta strap the bandages tightly so she could be up and moving round the house. The weather was hot, and no one could see her, so she did not need more than her shift and sometimes, at night, a shawl. But the problem of her clothes – and indeed all her other lost possessions – would have to be faced soon.The days passed and Judith mended quickly. She moved more easily and smiled more often; her fair skin flushed gold in the sun. They did not talk much – at least, Judith did not. Lotta told her every thought that came into her head, but it did not matter, since she could not understand. Sometimes, though, Lotta felt they were very aware of each other, moving carefully, alert, like two stranger cats in the same room. She would catch Judith’s eyes on her, and preen a little to show she knew she was being watched, and Judith would look down – but not for long. They drank wine, ate and slept and laughed, tidied the house, sat on the terrace; and all the while Judith’s body mended and Lotta fell more in love with it, and with her.
Lotta began to dread the moment when her friend would be well, would go away. But she also knew that she would soon run out of money. She had few hours now to give to the clients, and was worried Judith would say something about them. But most of all, as she grew more and more fond of her handsome new friend, she was more and more afraid about the yellow fever. Few incomers lasted much more than a month in Cuba before they succumbed to the shakes and the vile black vomiting; you had to have been born here to have much chance of surviving, or at least to have had the fever as a child. Lotta remembered her dose well, soon after she arrived from France with her parents, when she was seven, and they had set up their little shop. The fever had killed her father; her mother had survived. Mama had always been a strong woman, and was today, even now she was old. Her fall last month and the broken leg had still not killed her. Lotta wondered briefly how Mama and Maria were getting on, out in the country. Perhaps Maria would have to stay there for good now. Then Judith would not have to go away, but live here always and they would be lovers. She smiled wistfully, knowing it for the dream it was; Judith must go, before the fever came. So Lotta pushed aside a pleasing picture of kissing Judith, very slowly, all over, and started to look around for an answer to her problem.
It came much sooner than she cared for. They had only had two weeks together after Judith began to move about, when the Belle Heloise was sighted beyond the harbour bar. The cannon boomed out, and people began to flow down to the harbour to see her come in. A French ship meant old friends as well as customers. Lotta oiled her hair, put on her red dress and went downtown. She took her keys, and checked the shop was secure and all was well there, before she joined the expectant crowd of traders, rooming-house keepers and whores on the quayside. The ship was only a few days out of San Domingue, they said, on the voyage home to France, and had stopped to add good Cuban tobacco to its cargo. That done, and more water and fresh fruit taken on board, it would sail again in a few days.
She was in luck. The Heloise carried many of the same crew as the last time it had put in at Havana, and she found a dozen old friends at their accustomed inn. The night was a profitable one. She bought a bargain walrus tusk, with neat pictures of harpooning, from a sailor who’d gambled away his advance pay already. Even more usefully, talking to old acquaintances gave her an idea about what she could do for Judith. She went home in the early morning feeling hopeful. Over the next few days she did brisk home business. She knew Judith did not like it when the men came. But Judith would soon be gone; and next week there was the rent to pay. She sighed. Her new friend would have to go. But not before she had taught her some useful things. Lotta smiled to herself.
The next afternoon, she looked out and saw what she had been waiting for: a brown-skinned man with a great belly and blue tattoos on his forearms, sweating up the steps from the beach. Armand. She ran out, smiling and waving. She had known him since she first started working here, when she was scarcely more than a pretty child and he a thin, lonely young man far from home. Now he was fat and bald and had friends everywhere. For the last three years he had been ship’s cook on board the Belle Heloise, but still he never failed to come to visit whenever they were in port.
‘Armand! You are welcome, cheri, as always,’ she told him, and took his arm to lead him indoors. ‘Now I will do something nice for you. And then, mon vieux, you will do a little something for me.’
He laughed and pulled her close. ‘Bien sûr I will do that,’ he said,
In the end, he did agree to what she asked. Judith, not surprisingly, took longer to convince. But, as Lotta pointed out, she had no money, and no way of earning any. There was clearly no point in Lotta offering to take her into the trade, and there was no honest work here for a woman who had neither French or Spanish. Judith had no friends – except Lotta – and no clothes. And soon she would take the yellow fever, and then she would die.
Judith agreed, with whitening face, to each elaborately acted-out argument. And finally Lotta, triumphant, produced the things she had found in the seaman’s chest. Shirt, breeches, waistcoat, all washed and aired and mended; knife, tinderbox, tobacco box. Then she told Judith, with much miming of pot-stirring, tasting, swaying on her feet and looking out to sea, about Armand, and about their plan. Judith was outraged, incredulous, scandalised. If there had been any other possibility at all, she would never have agreed. But what choice did she have? So finally she calmed down, and let Lotta help her to put the clothes on.
Lotta, who had helped numberless men get in and out of their breeches, was an expert. She showed Judith how to wrap the long tails of her shirt between her legs, as men did to protect their soft parts. In a moment of inspiration, she took the ends of the shirt-tails and twisted then into a knot in front. When Judith had pulled on the breeks and buttoned them up, the effect was truly impressive. Lotta laughed out loud, and Judith blushed.
When Judith was completely dressed, her hair bound into a sailor’s pigtail and a red handkerchief knotted at her throat, Lotta fetched the piece of looking-glass from the bedroom and Judith looked at herself. She did this for several minutes, frowning and holding the glass at different angles. Then she put it down slowly and, with a wistful little smile, lifted a pretend spy-glass to her eye and gazed out to sea. Then she turned back to Lotta and gave a little bow.
‘Buenas noches, Señora,’ she said. ‘My name is Jude.’
Lotta, surprised, put out her hand, and her friend grasped it formally, raising it to her lips, as she had seen a French sailor do.
Lotta giggled.
So they had two days to alter the clothes to fit, and to teach Jude to be a boy. She swaggered up and down the little yard, or sat astride her chair, or lounged against a wall, while Lotta looked judiciously on and told her what to do differently. Judith’s stiff shyness had vanished. In her new clothes, she was not playing the boy: quickly, quickly she became one. Her chin tilted up, and her eyes flashed; she laughed; she filled the room. Lotta was more than delighted, indeed overwhelmed. The second evening, they went out and walked in the street, with Lotta holding her new client’s arm, and no one looked at them twice.
That night Lotta said, ‘One more lesson only.’ And she pulled Judith’s face down to hers and kissed her. Then she led her into her own room, where the big bed was.
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