14
The island is honeycombed, a lattice of caves. In some distant past, these were homes, shelters, hideouts for women and children. Now they house only relics, scattered bones, and, according to legend, the spirittatane.
Two femaletatane —Kava-ara and Kava-tua—are said to live in a cliffside cave on the northeast coast, keeping watch over the sleeping figure of the man they fell in love with centuries earlier and kidnapped from Hanga Roa. It is said that from the cliff’s edge you can hear the man gurgling in deep, silken sleep, and above that the singing of histatane captors as they try—for if his spirit awakens it will take flight—to prolong his slumber.
This is the only cave Biscuit Tin avoids. He knows them all, the caves strangled by grassy overgrowth, the caves clogged with lava rocks, the ones beneath the sharp cliffs splashed by surf, as though his short life has been spent exploring every inch of this island. Small and lithe, he can wiggle into the smallest of holes, emerging with a bone, a cracked clay pot, a wooden figurine, a salamander. He gives everything he retrieves to Alice, but she cares only for the strange tablet he presents one day: a three-foot-long piece of wood, oiled and worn, covered with pictorial engravings. As if reading braille, Alice runs her small hands across the mysterious script.
Alice then hands the tablet to Elsa. “Squiggles,” she says.
The moment Elsa touches it, she knows this is what she has been looking for. This is the script González noticed on his voyage almost one hundred and fifty years earlier, and deciphering it will be her project. Themoai fascinate her, but their story belongs to Edward, and though she is glad to assist him, Elsa needs something of her own. She wants to secure a balance between them, even a distance. The tablet could record a genealogy, a legend, a codification of ancient law. It might help unravel the story of this island. If she can learn to read it, or grasp some small part of it, it will mean all her choices have served some higher purpose.
Her first task is to see if they can find more tablets. For weeks, led by Biscuit Tin, Elsa searches scores of caves, upturning skeletons, swatting at cobwebs, moving, one by one, the stones blocking secret chambers. Alice refuses to enter, so Edward waits with her outside while Elsa and Biscuit Tin survey the chambers. Edward has offered to go in, to let Elsa sit with Alice, but she has politely declined. If the tablets are her study, she should retrieve them. And, for practical purposes, she knows she is more agile than he is.
Soon they have amassed over twenty tablets and several inscribed staffs, the likes of which Elsa has never seen. The writing is an endless stream of small bulbous figures, hundreds squeezed onto each line. She has no immediate sense of whether the script is logographic, syllabic, or alphabetic. Some combinations of images appear over and over again, and some are unique. As she lays them side by side in the tent at night, the ambition of her task begins to overwhelm her. Where on earth does one begin to understand the markings? What she desperately needs is a key, her own Rosetta stone or Behistun rock, but the tablets seem filled with the hieroglyphics of one language alone.
She is thankful, now, for the distance from England, from scholars, from those qualified to take on this job. She knows it’s not the kind of project for a former governess, even the daughter of a professor. But she is here. And what, after all, is better than opportunity and desire?
First she decides to have Alice copy the figures, so they will at least have an accurate record. Also, Alice will be kept out of trouble.
For several weeks, Elsa sits on the hill above their campsite and reads Sir Henry Creswicke Rawlinson’sA Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylon and Assyria and Champollion’sSummary of the Hieroglyphic System of Ancient Egyptians. Alice, beside her, sketches near-perfect reproductions of portions of each tablet.
As each series is completed, she shows Elsa. “Here, look.”
“They look like birds,” says Alice. “Angry birds. And trees. My drawings are better, don’t you think?”
“Much better,” says Elsa.
Alice’s renditions allow Elsa to examine each image individually. She sorts Alice’s copies, and assigns a number to each character. Soon she has almost one thousand unique figures, which suggests the script is not alphabetic. But it is difficult—some figures look very similar. Day after day Elsa stares at them; at night they dance across her dreams. So many seem to be birds and plants and animals—the very things lacking on the island. If the script is indigenous, it should use representations the islanders would have known. But perhaps the figures are not what they seem—perhaps she is seeing only whatshe has seen before.
As Alice begins copying the larger tablets, the task seems to bother her. Occasionally she hurls her notebook down and stomps off across the grass. She chucks pebbles at her pony, tugs at her own hair.
“What’s wrong, Allie?”
“They’re ugly. That tablet is ugly. All the faces are angry. I don’t want to look at it anymore.”
“Then we’ll just tuck it aside. You don’t have to look at it.” Elsa wraps the tablet in canvas. “Why don’t you take a break from all that and do some nice portraits? That always makes you happy. How about a drawing of Biscuit Tin?”
So for several days Alice makes a portrait of Biscuit Tin, though he can’t stop giggling for more than a few seconds at a time, and this only when Alice looks away to grab a new charcoal or a rubbing cloth. As soon as she studies him, he plants his palms on his cheeks and laughs. Then Alice scolds him, tosses grass at his face. It is only in the brief moments when Alice seems to disappear, when her eyes retreat, when the motion of her charcoal suddenly stops, that the boy’s face becomes still and solemn. He composes himself and sits patiently, as though in the presence of one who is sick. And when she returns to the world, to him, her feet kicking at the sand, he is clearly relieved. After a week, when the portrait is finished, she presents it to him. He has not been permitted to see the work in progress, and when finally he does see it, Biscuit Tin nearly bursts into tears. It has, thinks Elsa, captured his spirit: the disarray of his hair, the loyal eyes, the mischievous grin, the narrow neck suspending the full moon of his face. Snatching it from her, Biscuit Tin darts off across the sand, then through the tall grass, the paper flapping beside him.
The next day Alice draws a picture of their father’s house in spring, surrounded by thick hibiscus and wild roses, the trees shading the front path, the hills in the distance blanketed with clover and thyme. But the likeness is too good, and Elsa cannot bear to look at it—this reminder of home, of the past.
When Alice hands the picture to the boy, his eyes widen.
“Home,” Alice tells him. “That is where Pudding and Father and Elsa and I live. I share a room with Elsa.”
The boy’s finger traces the flowers, the bushes, the tall trees.
“That is home. Far from here. In Europe.”
Gesturing at the tree, the boy hands Alice a blank sheet of paper.
“Just a tree?”
The boy squints, as though trying to figure out what she has said. As she draws two sweeping lines of trunk, he nods.
“I’m going to put birds in it. A tree without birds is no good.”
Elsa is happy that Alice is enjoying drawing, but when Alice returns to work on the tablets, they again upset her. One afternoon, returning from a visit with Edward, Elsa finds Alice crying over her notebook.
“I don’t like them,” Alice shrieks. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Very well, Allie. You can do whatever you like. Do you want to go for a ride with me? We can go fetch Biscuit Tin for you.”
“I miss the boat,” Alice huffs. “I liked the water, going fast on the water. Beazley was funny on the boat.”
“I know.” Elsa rubs Alice’s back. “I promised you that if you were unhappy, we would go home. Didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“And we don’t have to stay here. We can go back on the water, back to London, whenever you like. . . . Do you want me to braid your hair? Here. Turn around. Let’s give you some braids.”
Elsa runs her fingers through Alice’s heavy hair. Yes. Shehas promised Alice they would go home the moment she wanted to. But what good will come of leaving now? Before they’ve even made a full survey of themoai ? They can’t just abandon the expedition. The voyage took nearly a year, and now that they are here and have finally grown accustomed to the wind and the rocks and the strange language, they are making real progress. This isn’t, after all, just a honeymoon. Their work—the measurements, the copying of the tablets—is unprecedented. Besides, returning to England will take at the very least eleven months, and in that time Alice will likely change her mind. Elsa’s promise to Alice was made before they reached the island, before they even left England. At that point she had imagined the worst; she feared being stranded, friendless, in the farthest reaches of civilization. She had wanted the trip, but had also imagined it as a necessary part of her arrangement with Edward, something she would endure for the sake of Alice, perhaps for her benefit—was it wrong to imagine Alice would flourish away from the scorn of Europeans? But the promise, she now realizes, was really meant for herself. She made sure she could escape ifshe needed to. How could she know this sacrifice would become her greatest pleasure?
Of course, her hands still blister from washing their bloomers and blouses each morning, Edward’s shirts and socks; her face warms uncomfortably as she stirs chowder over the fire, though she is learning to make the Kanaka-style earth oven; she still hikes down to the shore in the moonlight to plunge greasy pots into the surf. And, as always, she has to look after Alice, and now Edward. She is still pinned like a butterfly to the frame of her circumstances, but here she can, for a few hours each day, at least imagine herself free.
Riding her pony up the slope of the quarry, she likes to gaze at themoai , the vast stone spirits, the work of strangers who lived centuries before. She remembers reading about the Egyptian pyramids, that tens of thousands were conscripted to build the great limestone tombs. Well, themoai , too, must have been the work of hundreds of men, carving and chiseling in the sun day after day. And the scale of it all—the ages of labor, the tons of stone, the decay of abandon—astounds her. She feels small, irrelevant, and utterly safe. What comfort there is knowing she is a part of something old, something larger than herself. Elsa, when she looks in the quarry, thinks to herself:God . It is the only name she can think of for the feeling the place gives her. Is God, she wonders, simply a sense of history? A sense of others having stood on the exact same patch of earth, years before, of strangers filled with the same fears and regrets?
Being on the island gives Elsa a sense of peace she has never before known, and with this comes purpose. The past lurks around her like a mystery demanding to be unraveled. Why shouldn’t they unravel some of the mysteries? Perhaps they will decipher the native script, and they will—shewill—be a part of something important. Her life, despite the compromises, might at least have larger meaning.
“Ouuch!”
“Sorry, Allie.” She has pulled Alice’s braid too tightly. “Let me loosen it. You know what, Allie? I think we should give the island time.”
Alice clutches at her braid, feeling the uneven bumps and ridges.
“Do you love Beazley?”
“Allie, you know Edward and I are married. We’re husband and wife. Just like Father was with Mother. But I don’t love him as much as I love you. You know that. Don’t you, Allie? You are my true and absolute love.”
“Does Beazley love you?”
“Of course he does. But not as much as our little Mr. Biscuit Tin adores you! Allie, just think how it would break Biscuit Tin’s heart if you left. You must stay for him. And for now, you don’t have to look at another tablet, ever. I’ll put my poor artistry to work.”
For the time being, Elsa is busy learning the native language, since fluency seems the natural step toward unraveling the script. Gertrude Bell knew Arabic well before making her journey through Mesopotamia. Elsa’s initial phrase book can get them directions to fresh water and fig trees, but she wants to talk to the islanders about their culture. Where did they come from? What kind of a society did they create? What might they have wanted, or needed, to write on the wood? And now that sheep shearing has ended, the islanders are taking an interest in the expedition. Several children come by the quarry one day to watch as Elsa helps Edward measure themoai. On their ponies, the children laugh and sway, hollering in a fusion of Rapa Nui and Spanish, “Amor los moai?” But when they see Biscuit Tin emerging from behind amoai, they begin to hiss. With his chubby forefinger, one boy smashes his own nose and emits a series of grunts. Another tugs wildly at his own cheeks. A freckled girl with red hair flips back her eyelids and juts out her tongue. Then a dirt-smeared boy jumps from his pony and lobs a large stone at Biscuit Tin, who ducks behind the statues. In a flash Alice lunges forward with her parasol, shrieking wildly. As though it is some mystical weapon, she rhythmically opens and closes the parasol. Alarm spreads among the children and they scream,“Tatane! Tatane!” The boy who lobbed the stone fumbles back onto his pony as Alice continues her charge up the grassy slope. He trots off, his small body convulsing with sobs, just as Alice reaches the rise. Edward says to Elsa, shaking his head, “My goodness, I’ll have to be careful never to incite her wrath.” When Alice comes back down the slope, Biscuit Tin finally emerges from behind themoai . For the rest of the day, he does not leave her side.
“I like the boy,” Elsa whispers to Edward in the tent one night. “Very much. But I wonder why he’s alone.”
“Alice likes him too. I think you’ll have to let Alice have him. She seems to have won his heart.”
“I know.”
“Do you want . . . Elsa? I didn’t think you wanted children. . . .”
“No. Of course. I can’t.”
“You have Alice to take care of,” he says. “And you think of her . . . as your child.”
“No,” she says. “But I think of myself as her mother. It isn’t quite the same.”
Elsa closes her eyes. It is true. She cannot imagine looking after Aliceand a child of her own. But it is more than that. It is the memory of the midwife clutching Alice to her chest, of her father forbidding Elsa to open her mother’s door. “Your mother gave her life for our little Alice,” he had said, trying to mask his despair. “She sacrificed herself for a new child.” But this version of events wasn’t shared by Elsa. Behind that door Alice haddone something to their mother, and for this Elsa felt hate. For an entire year she cursed her sister, whispered angry words when her father was asleep. So when they began to notice the strange roaming of Alice’s eyes, the tantrums and the silences, Elsa believed her hate was the cause. That the curses, the prayers, and the whispered accusations had harmed her.
“Are you asleep?” she whispers.
“Not yet,” says Edward.
“Sometimes, I’ve thought, well, that Alice was my fault. I’m sure it sounds mad. But why should a thing like that happen to a child? To anyone? There must be . . . a reason.”
“Elsa.”
“My whole life I’ve wondered if . . .”
“Alice is a blessing.”
“I know that.”
“You mustn’t ever let yourself think it would be better if she were different.”
“Sometimes, Edward, you sound so very much like my father.”
“Your father,” says Edward, “was a wise man.”
For weeks afterward, there are no visitors to the quarry, and Elsa suspects that the story of the Englishtatane with her parasol has been tearfully recounted and embellished. But soon a man on horseback arrives on the crater’s rim. Elsa recognizes him as the man who led the islanders in song that first night on the schooner, his arms thickly tattooed, wearing the same hat he did then: a faded red velvet tricorn with a row of brass buttons. He looks to be in his forties. Thin brown curls, with a few streaks of gray, fall to his shoulder. He introduces himself as Te Haha Huke.
It appears he wants to make his services available, but what exactly these are it is difficult to discern. At first he seats himself atop amoai, his bony legs crossed, and begins to sing. His curls shift in the breeze; his eyes close as he loses himself in his song. But his voice, an unsteady flux of gravelly bass and bursts of soprano, distracts Edward. “Really, Elsa, I shouldn’t like him to think I’m declining his kind offering. However, I’ve a suspicion he’s inebriated. I should hope nobody would sing like that if he were sober enough to hear himself.”
Sensing their disappointment, the next day Te Haha returns with a guitar, strumming pleasantly atop themoai. They enjoy this, and attempt to show their gratitude by stopping work and sitting in the grass below his perch, but Te Haha soon tires of his own performance, shaking his head and muttering what seem to be admonishments.
“Nota bene,” Edward whispers to Elsa, “the so-called artistic temperament is not restricted to the European continent.”
When Te Haha next returns he sits for hours carving their likenesses in wood, a craft at which he is exceptionally skilled. Edward suggests to Te Haha that he could be of great use in other ways—could he help bring a bucket of water up the hill? Could he help move this pile of rocks? Could he hold this end of the measuring tape? Te Haha assists with a few of these tasks, but he is clearly bored—and Elsa can’t blame him. He sets his finger on his forehead to indicate for Elsa and Edward the source of his real strength—he is not a physical laborer; he is a man of the mind.
Well, thinks Elsa, perhaps he can help with my project. She tries to explain that she wants to learn the language.
“Arero!” he shouts and runs off.
The next day Te Haha appears on his horse with a large sack on his lap. He dismounts hurriedly, and tugs his sack up the hill, zigzagging through themoai . As Elsa greets him, he drops the bag and quickly pulls off his hat.
“Hau,” he says to Elsa, rounding his lips. “Hau.” This is the first time she has seen him without his hat, and a large bald spot crowns his head. “Hau,” he says, setting the hat back on his head. From the sack, he pulls a dried fish and holds it in front of her face, making it swim through the air. “Ika,” he chants. “I-ka.”
Hau. Ika. Miro Toki. Mamari. Auke. Karu.One by one, he waves before her familiar objects, and when his sack is emptied, he points to the crater and says“Rano.”
“Crater?” Her arms form a basin and she makes the roar of an explosion. “Volcanic crater?”
He nods and pats her proudly on the shoulder.
It soon becomes clear Te Haha is a born teacher, and Elsa guesses she is his first pupil. He is thorough, rigorous, demanding. He shows her every subtlety of the language.
He greets her at sunrise at the campsite, instructs her to sit beside him with her journal open while he slowly names nouns, verbs, prepositions.
And this is how Elsa begins her dictionary, and finally learns the name of the hieroglyphics she is trying to decipher.
They are calledrongorongo.
5th March 1914
I have apparently generated much amusement among Te Haha and his friends through my inquiries into the relations between the sexes. For the purposes of the RGS, it seemed best to determine the preponderance of polygamy on the island and to attain some sense of the general position of women, concerning property & marital rights, etc. I therefore asked the men gathered round our circle how many wives each had, or hoped to have. “O te aha?” (why) they all asked with broad smiles. They could not understand why this was of interest. They pointed to my notebook. Why was I writing this down? (They have had the same reaction to our study of the moai, a general disbelief that anyone would be so interested in the statues they have been looking at every day since infancy.) I therefore thought it best to attempt an explanation, in my still awkward Rapa Nui, of the monogamous habits of our western world, with more than a little suggestion that our arrangements were of a more civilized nature. Well, I might as well have told them I was part monkey! The men all shook with hearty laughter. On pressing the source of this riotous kata, I foundmyself the sudden object of inquiry. Was I not uha to matu’a Edward? Of course, I responded. And was not vi’e Alice also uha to matu’a Edward? The source of their confusion suddenly evident, I set them to a correct understanding of our familial relations. Edward, I explained, had only one wife, and one sister-in-law. They were very disappointed, and a bit confused.
I have decided, however, to postpone further anthropological inquiries and focus primarily on the rongorongo. This is the most important task, as the most reliable information about the tablets is stored within the minds of the island’s elders. Thus far, I have determined that the Rapa Nui believe the original rongorongo symbols were brought to the island by the first settlers, and that they were on some form of paper (probably bark). When the paper was exhausted, they began inscribing on banana plants, and then, finally, wood. It is believed the inscriptions were made with a shark’s tooth. It seems, however, that most of these tablets were burned with the houses during tribal warfare. (There seems to have been a prolonged war between the island’s two main clans—the Hotu Iti and Kotuu—of which I plan to make further inquiries.) As for the inscriptions on the tablets, several middle-aged islanders offered quite eagerly to “read” them for me, but after ten such episodes of entirely different readings, it is clear they are holding the tablets in front of them and reciting random stories. I have not yet made much contact with the eldest members of the population (some are believed to live at the leper colony just outside Hanga Roa), whom I hope will offer the much-needed knowledge of the script.
I have asked what is known of how the island was settled, where the people came from, and when. They have no numerical dates, but they say there have been twenty-seven kings. The first was Hotu Matua, who landed his canoe on the beach at Anakena, the site of our very own camp. They say he came from a group of islands in the direction of the setting sun, and the name of that island was “Marae-toe-hau,” which seems to translate as “the burial place.” They say that Hau Maka, advisor to Hotu Matua, had a dream, and that Hau Maka’s dream soul visited the island, found it to be beautiful and bountiful, and that is why they searched for the new land. If the legend is true, one must wonder if the king Hotu Matua was disappointed in the barren land that he found, if he must not have wondered if he had found the wrongone.
Edward is on the verge of deciding which statue he will first excavate. Each evening, with several lamps burning their new stores of porpoise oil, he sifts through his data. Elsa tries to tempt him with the tablets, holding the wooden slabs before him in their tent, rattling off information—Now, this one is the only Kohau we’ve found from the caves near Puna Pau, and it’s markedly different from the others. See the repetition of the hunched figure followed by the tree? Quite lovely, I think.
But for the moment the shadow of Edward’s interest falls only on the statues.
“We should begin digging soon,” he says, peeling off another page of notes. “Whatever we find at the base will be essential in understanding the method of transport. That, it seems, should be the thrust of my inquiry.”
When he decides whichmoai to excavate, the logistics consume him. With sufficient barter incentives, he finds a group of islanders willing to help. But preparing the site proves difficult because of the lack of wood.
“There isn’t a single branch on this whole island that could be used for construction,” Edward complains. “It’s amazing, really, that the people here ever managed to make a life.”
Eventually, he decides to dismantle some of their crates for scaffolding.
Once the excavation begins, Edward relaxes again. Each afternoon when he returns from the quarry, and Elsa from her interviews, they share the details of their day, blurry with an invigorating fatigue, already imagining what the next day’s work might hold.
“I think,” Edward says one night after she’s described a particular series of bird images, “you may have found your true calling.”
Between them a kindness, a mutual respect, has arisen. They have become like business partners, talking excitedly over dinner about their work. Their routine is fixed, comfortable, and forged entirely by common interest.
Still, she finds her true companionship in the pages of her books. Her copy ofThe Voyage of the Beagle seems to be gone for good, and she has finishedThe Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species, so she returns once again toOn the Origin of Species, where she finds what seems to be a confession by Darwin:
My work is now nearly finished; but as it will take me two or three more years to complete it, and as my health is far from strong, I have been urged to publish this Abstract. I have more especially been induced to do this, as Mr. Wallace, who is now studying the natural history of the Malay archipelago, has arrived at almost exactly the same general conclusions that I have on the origin of species. Last year he sent to me a memoir on this subject, with a request that I would forward it to Sir Charles Lyell, who sent it to the Linnaean Society, and it is published in the third volume of the Journal of that Society. Sir C. Lyell and Dr. Hooker, who both knew of my work—the latter having read my sketch of 1844—honoured me by thinking it advisable to publish, with Mr. Wallace’s excellent memoir, some brief extracts from my manuscripts.
“Edward,” she says across the tent, “do you know the work of Alfred Wallace?”
“The Malay Archipelago man.”
“Was he working on a theory of evolution at the same time as Darwin?”
“He was, but it’s hard to say whose came first. The Linnaean Society presented their papers at the same time, but Wallace’s got no attention. Darwin was a Cambridge man and Wallace was self-taught, had to finance all his travels by sending insects and stuffed snakes back to England. I suppose he didn’t have much of a chance at being taken as seriously. Then Darwin published his book before Wallace’s, and, of course, Darwin is credited with the theory.”
“Did Wallace need a degree from Cambridge in order to have a theory?”
“Of course not.”
“With that thinking, thousands of England’s best should have discovered evolution.”
“It’s just how these things work, Elsa. Darwin was a man of the establishment, you can’t blame him for that.”
“No blame, I just feel sorry for Wallace.”
“Well, Wallace accepted it. He called his own book on natural selectionDarwinism . That certainly concedes the discovery.”
“Perhaps he didn’t think he could win the fight.”
“Well, don’t be too hard on either of them. They were both, after all, in search of the truth.”
In these words she hears an echo of her father’s admonitions against her hasty judgments. Edward has, in fact, become very much like her father, or her ease with him has become the same. Even the arrangements of watching Alice take on new simplicity. After Alice’s fits bring one of Elsa’s interviews to a hasty end, Edward offers to take her along to the excavation.
“You must be able to work without interruption, Elsa. It’s simply too important. And at least we know for certain she won’t frighten the statues. I hope you trust that I’m able to look after her.”
She does trust him, after all these months. He is attentive with Alice, has grown accustomed to her outbursts, and Alice seems comfortable with him.
“Of course,” says Elsa. “Of course I trust you.”
One more leash untethered. Now Elsa can move about the island freely—a true explorer, a true scientist—with nothing to divert her from her work.
Elsa throws herself into the island, the language, therongorongo . She can now converse comfortably in Rapa Nui, and Edward even uses her as a translator. She takes copious notes as the islanders share their legends and myths, but they seem to lack an oral history of themoai building and their collapse. Elsa suspects the wooden boards might record such history. An account of major events must have been stored somewhere, and if not in the memories of the people, then perhaps on the tablets. But each time the strange glyphs begin to hint at a meaning, they pull back, as though teasing her. And she is beginning to wonder about the wood itself. The tablets are made of a dark and dense wood she has not seen anywhere on the island. Where did it come from? Could the tablets have arrived here from somewhere else? Could they all have been carried in that first canoe with Hotu Matua?
She thinks of Hotu Matua’s long journey, and of their own journey from England. Neither the Polynesian king, nor Edward, nor she, could have known what awaited them on this new shore. It was a place of myth until they arrived. But now her past has become the myth; Max, her father, their house in England—all of it seems an island once dreamed of.
And when Elsa lies in the tent at night, her books piled beside her cot, listening to waves break against the shore, she feels she has done the right thing. She is supposed to be here, on this island. Even now when she sleeps beside Edward, she is content. The languorous weight of his heavy arms, the smell of soap and tobacco rising from his chest—it helps her drift into a delicate sleep. She is growing used to him. And caring for him, being comfortable with him, helps ease her guilt. No longer does she see him as an opportunity to help Alice and herself. She sees him as her husband. Is it really, she thinks, so awful to be loved by this man? He is Edward, dear, sweet Edward. And this—Edward, Alice, this windswept land in the middle of nowhere—is now her life.