I heard Rafe saying, “I’ll take the two of them off your hands. There’s room enough for the second one and you’ll be freed of both.”
“Where is August?” I began, but I said no more. Ma grabbed my shoulder so tightly it hurt, and bustled me along with them. In Patience’s room, Ma let go of me and took Patey by both shoulders, frowning.
“Move the armoire,” she said. “Help me, lasses.” Ma pushed the heavy furniture from its nook. Patience took hold, too.
I started to ask why we were moving it, but the moving cabinet came toward me as if Ma had grown the strength of five men. Instead, I asked, “Ma, why do you let that awful Uncle into our parlor if all he wants is to steal Patey?”
“Sometimes you have to befriend those you do not like, my bairny, to keep away others you like even less. Rafe is a powerful man.”
“He hates Pa,” I said. “I can see it in his eyes. I think he loves you.”
“It’s not love you see in him, lass, but something else not so grand. Now, help us push. You’ll be safe in here.”
Patience’s room overlooked the bay. From my windows I could see only cane fields. There had been work done in Patience’s room, part of fixing the house for a new waterwheel system besides the one that crushed cane all day. We had kept out of the way for nine long weeks as men tore through the wall to add the wheel and its gears, pounding, banging from morning until night. I remember because Patience slept in my bed with me and the nights had passed intolerably crowded. She tossed around, she smelled like a grown-up, and she constantly put my counterpane off the end of the bed though I asked for it. She said girls should not sleep so warm at night but did not tell me why. After they restored her room and Ma put back the bedding there seemed not a speck of difference except that the stones in the niche were a newly cut color and the armoire stood taller.
The armoire rolled on cannonball legs away from the wall where they had bolted the side of it with a door hinge of worked iron. A passageway as narrow as one stone opened behind it. Patience and I looked at each other, astonished that it was there, and I was doubly puzzled that she had not inspected her own room. From the dark opening we heard a soft whistling like a garden bird. “Go,” Ma said, and pushed Patience to the opening. “Down the stairs inside, and when you get to the bottom, hide.”
To my horror I was next, pressed through the slot in the wall by hands from which I had never felt pain, shoved in like a sack. The armoire swung into place, crushing my protest in the thump of the tight-fitting frame. My hand lay at the corner. If one finger had lain in the spot where the hinge slammed, that finger could have been crushed and Ma would not have known. I whimpered, not from pain but from the possibility of it. “Oh, la, Patience. What are we to do? It is so dark.”
“Shush,” whispered Patience. “You had n’a cry out now. Reach for my hand. I am below you on the steps.” The bird called again. “That is August,” Patience said. “My hand is before you. Take it and feel the side for the rope.”
A palpable, clinging blackness enveloped me and for a moment it cut out all sounds, too. I found my sister’s hand as I touched the walls, wet as if rain had fallen upon them, and felt with my feet for the steep stairs. “If Rafe MacAlister is pretending to be our uncle, why would he want to marry you?”
“He doesn’t. Not really. His family fought against our pa though they were but yeomen on our estate back in England. They were devious to the last, stealing, poaching. He thinks Ma and Pa owe him a woman, for his wife died. It was none of our doing, but she died. He pretends to court me, but I’d not have him if I had to hang myself first.”
“Patey! But if they were only farmers, why have we aught to do with him now?”
“He sallies with every picaroon in the Carribbean Sea, and keeps them from our door. Stop talking and come this way.” The stairway of short, narrow stone took us down into night that grew ever darker with air so damp it pushed against our every movement. A ship’s mooring rope, latched to the wall on one side, hung loose in its channel bolts. Slipping off a stair I fell upon Patience. The rope gave with my weight like a loose stitch in a fabric of stone. I hung from it by one hand, flailing for her lost grip until I found her hands. She whispered, “Be caresome, Ressie.”