Page 14 of Homeless

The kitchen struck her like a wall — heat, onion, smoke, the sour reek of a pot boiling over, unwatched. Pilar turned one full circle, lost, then was all hands at once: a servant’s cap off its peg and jammed onto Elizabeth’s head, a fistful of flour dragged the length of her sleeve, her own kerchief hauled down round Elizabeth’s throat.

“No habla. No habla.” The girl’s whisper shook. “Aquí. Aquí.”

She shoved Elizabeth toward the angle where the hearth met the wall, where the hanging pans and a stack of baskets might hide a smaller woman than Elizabeth had ever been in her life.

Her uncle came to the threshold and no further. Behind him, the corridor was full of scuffles and shouts.

“Good thinking with the cap, Pilar. Keep it on — Lizzy, pull it over your eyes.”

“What is happening? Uncle, I do not understand what —” It was his face that stopped her. Her uncle, who had haggled with customs men and laughed at storms in the Channel, looking at her as though he had done her a murder.

“You are a kitchen girl. You do not know me. You have never seen me before in your life. If they ask you anything at all, you weep, and you point at Pilar.”

“Uncle!”

“I told your aunt this town was safe! I told her I would answer for you.”

“You did not know —”

“Tie the cap.”

Her hands did it. Pilar was already hauling her down behind the baskets, muttering more pleas to keep quiet. Her uncle crossed the little space between them and put his hand against the side of her head, once, the way he had when she was a child and had frightened herself in the dark.

“Whatever you hear from that room, you make no sound. Not one, Lizzy. If they take you, too, there is no one left to write to England, and no one to come for either of us. Do you see? You are the only part of this I can still put right.”

“No, no, do not! You cannot go out there!” She had his sleeve in both hands. “There must be someone, the consul, we can send to the consul! Uncle, please —”

The boots were at the turn of the passage.

“Say you will stay hidden until they are gone, and then you must find the consul and get out of Spain. Go back to England as soon as you can, Lizzy.”

“I will not —”

“Say it!”

She lowered her face like a scolded child. “I will stay hidden.” Her voice went to pieces on it.

He touched her cheek with the backs of his fingers, as though she were still six years old and crying over a broken thing.

“Forgive me, Lizzy. I brought you here, and I hope to God some mercy sees you safe.”

Then he straightened his coat, the way he did before entering a counting-house, and went out to meet them.

Pilar dragged her down by the wrist, and the girl was shaking so that the pewter spoons on the shelf above them touched and rang, touched and rang — a thin, senseless music Elizabeth would have given anything to stop.

Then the passage filled. Boots on the stair and boots overhead, doors going in above her, a man somewhere shouting the same word again and again as though repetition were a kind of law.

She could see nothing. She had a hand’s breadth between two baskets and the pans hanging in front of that, and beyond it the kitchen doorway, and beyond that, a slice of passage wall.

Her uncle was speaking somewhere beyond the wall, and she had never in her life heard him speak so — furious, at times profane, and thoroughly outraged.

Then she heard other men, mostly English and all demanding justice — someone protesting his papers, someone else demanding a consul. There was an old man crying out in what might have been Dutch, and another who sounded like an Englishman from no shire she had ever heard of. American, perhaps?

But under all of it, again and again, the same Spanish words, and the same answers coming back in the same order, until she understood that she was not listening to an arrest at all. She was listening to a transaction being conducted at the top of a man’s voice.

“¡Hay multa!” — There is a fine — and then a great deal she could not follow, and then, patiently, as one explains a simple thing to a child: “El que paga, se va. El que no, viene con nosotros.”

She had that one entire. He who pays, goes. He who does not, comes with us.