Every window of every house in the Camino sa Eglesia was shuttered against the heat. The children were indoors, the cats had retreated from the sunlit to the shaded doorsteps to sleep, the flowers with which the citizens beautified their steps and windowsills wilted in the blazing light. Behind the houses were benches under the citrus trees, under the canopies of vines, where usually it was pleasant to sit out the siesta in a dappled shade, with glimpses of the towering mountains and little gusts of mountain air, but nobody sat in any such garden now; the broken shards of sunlight fingering through the leaves were fierce and sharp enough to burn. In the entire town of Santanya only one person was about, and that was Josefa, the daughter of Taddeo Arta, the cordwainer, and she, half-blinded with sweat from under the brim of her hat, was hoeing the lettuce plot and spreading manure from the donkey byre at the far end of the garden, out of the shade of the trees.
When she had done, she splashed her burning face with water from the pump, washed her hands, slipped off her sandals, and went as softly as she could indoors. Not softly enough; Margalida heard her, and called out at once, ‘Josefa? I told you to see to the garden!’
‘It is done, Margalida,’ said Josefa.
‘Bring me a goblet of water!’ Margalida called.
Josefa returned to the pump. She filled a jug and carried it to the kitchen. She poured the water into a goblet, and went slowly and sulkily up the stairs with it. She entered the bedroom reluctantly. Margalida was lying stretched out on the bed, wearing only a thin shift, unlaced at the neck. Her hair spread lavishly over the pillows, the very pillows on which Josefa’s mother had tossed feverishly only a year since. The little painted picture of Sant Catalida which had been propped as long as Josefa could remember beside her mother’s bed had gone now, replaced by perfume bottles and a trinket box.
‘There is a pile of sheets in need of pressing,’ said Margalida, without moving, as Josefa put down the water. ‘Go and do that.’
‘I am going to rest,’ said Josefa. ‘I will iron when the heat eases, later.’
‘You will go now, at once, and do just as I tell you,’ said Margalida, opening her limpid eyes, and adopting a furious tone, half masked by sleepiness.
‘Even a dog has a siesta,’ said Josefa.
‘I will tell your father!’ said Margalida. But for once this threat failed to work. Josefa climbed the stairs to her room, stamping on the wooden treads so that Margalida could not fail to realize that she had gone upstairs, and not downstairs to more work.
But in the safety of her room she did not lie down. Instead, she sat in the little rocking chair that had belonged to her mother and that she had rescued just in time, when Margalida would have sold it to a passing tinker, and sat rocking herself and thinking. Her face was still burning from her exertions in the heat, but that would cool and fade faster than her bitterness at her stepmother.
Margalida did indeed complain to Taddeo when he returned at dusk. Josefa, standing at the head of the stairs, heard the voluble flow of the stepmother’s voice and the low rumble, indecipherable, of her father’s replies. Sighing, he sent one of her little brothers to fetch her, and attempted to sort it out. He sat in his chair at the end of the family table, and she stood facing him from the other end.
‘What is this I hear?’
Josefa made no answer.
‘If you have quarrelled with Margalida, you must apologize.’
‘Father, am I a daughter in this house, or a servant?’
‘A daughter, Josefa, of course, but . . .’
‘Then why must I obey her every order, like a drudge? Why must I work through the heat of the day, while she lies at ease?’
‘You are to do your share. You are to obey her, because she stands in the position of mother to you . . .’
‘Father, she is barely three years older than I, and besides . . .’
‘She is my wife, Josefa. You must respect her.’
‘And besides, if a mother gives orders it is with kindness. What mother sends a daughter to work in the sun at midday?’
‘Did she order you to work in the heat, today? What work was asked of you?’
‘Hoeing and manuring the garden patch. At noon. She did not tell you that? She did not tell you that she was taking a siesta, herself?’
Taddeo frowned. ‘I expect you misunderstood,’ he said, and then saw with distress that his daughter’s face was covered with flowing tears, although she made no sound.
‘There, there,’ he said. ‘I will speak to Margalida. But if you two cannot get along, what is to be done?’
‘You must find me a husband, Father,’ said Josefa.
‘Well, but that would not be easy! You are very young, and what with the expenses of the wedding and the new rope walk . . . in short I need time to amass a sufficient dowry . . .’
‘If I am a little younger than Margalida, I have twenty times more sense!’ said Josefa. ‘And you took her without a dowry!’
‘That’s different!’ said Taddeo, angry now.
‘Why? How different?’
‘Because she is as beautiful as a flower, and you are ugly,’ he said.
The only mirror in the house was in the parental bedroom. At that moment Margalida was clashing pans in the kitchen, pretending to be engaged with the evening meal, which Josefa had cooked and made ready before her father’s return. She left him without a word and marched straight to it. She drew breath, like one plunging into cold water, and then confronted herself through the misty and flecked medium of the glass. She stared for a long time. It had never occurred to her that she was ugly, because she had been tenderly loved, and as clearly as the boys looked like their father, she looked like her mother. But she saw it now, in the light of her ruthless stare. A long and bony face stared coldly at her out of the glass, with flared nostrils and red-rimmed eyes, like a startled horse. She had cut her hair short as a sign of mourning when her mother died, and it had grown again coarse and spiky like a bush of thyme. Looking, she learned despair.
Later, lying close by his wife, but not touching, because of the heat, Taddeo asked her, ‘Did you really send Josefa to work outside at noon?’
‘It wasn’t so hot,’ said Margalida. ‘You are judging by how it was on the quays, where you were, but up here there was air from the mountains. It was almost cool, in fact. In fact, I thought the air would do her good . . .’
‘Couldn’t you ask her to do something and leave her to choose for herself when to do it?’
‘You promised me I should be mistress in the house and have all things at my disposing,’ said Margalida. ‘You promised. Now she defies me.’
‘She asked me to find her a husband.’
‘Now that’s a good idea! I would be rid of her, and if it’s what she wants . . .’
‘It would be some time before I could find a dowry for her. Nobody will take her without a good one. And we would need to stint ourselves to find it.’
Paddling a tender finger in the hollow of her husband’s cheek, Margalida said, ‘The nuns at Sant Clara will take her with a small one. With very little; almost nothing . . .’
‘Holy Mary!’ cried Taddeo, sitting bolt upright. ‘Even the cats are allowed to litter before they’re spayed!’
‘What a way to talk about a life of prayer, husband!’ said Margalida, genuinely shocked. ‘We could ask her, couldn’t we?’
‘We must speak softly; she will hear us,’ said Taddeo. ‘Won’t it be too much for you, doing her work as well as your own?’
‘I can make sacrifices to see the motherless girl well-placed,’ said Margalida.
Taddeo lay awake for a long time.
In the morning, two conversations took place. Margalida went to visit her mother. After all, she needed to know what an older woman might think of her if she contrived to get her stepdaughter sent to Sant Clara. Margalida’s mother reassured her. ‘They won’t have her as a novice, Margalida. Only as a servant. You have to have some schooling to be a nun. And a servant can always be fetched back again if you need her later. Don’t let Taddeo overdo the dowry at the last minute. Men are so sentimental. A few goats will do.’
While Margalida was gone, Taddeo put the suggestion to Josefa.
‘Is it the only alternative to staying here, Father?’
‘I’m afraid so. But you may choose either possibility, as you like.’
‘Take me to Sant Clara, then,’ she said.
Like the Galilea, the nunnery of Sant Clara was remote. The road to it ascended the face of the mountains, rising from the plain a few miles further north than the road which passed through the gorge to the Galilea. It was steep and rough all the way, and Taddeo and Josefa had to stop several times to let their donkeys rest. At last it arrived at a narrow pass between bare crests, going along a rocky, narrow floor below the facing steeps. Nothing grew so high but little clumps of thorn and a pungent form of creeping thyme that scented the donkeys’ steps. There was no beauty; everything was grey, rough and harsh; the pass looked as though some giant had smashed the face of the land in rage and tumbled the debris around. Josefa showed no emotion but kept her thoughts to herself; they rode in silence all the way.
When the road emerged from the narrow defile at the other end, it was already descending, and it shortly plunged into woods. Sparse woods, at first, of stunted trees, stooping beneath a wind that did not blow that day. But as they moved down the turns of the track, the woods stood upright, prospered and thickened. The sweet balm of the scented pines drifted on the air, and there were woodland flowers growing. On that further side of the mountains the land dropped steeply and abruptly into the sea, and soon the two travellers could see the water below them through the trees. Its blueness was bleached out by its sheen, and it showed like grey silk covered with tiny sequins. Gulls drifted, poised motionless on the ascending air. The road turned suddenly inland and entered a little valley, a thousand feet above the shore, a thousand feet below the crest, and Sant Clara lay in view. They were looking down on it from above and could see it in plan – a courtyard, with a cloister round it, a simple church, opening into the cloister. On one side it had edged to the brink of the drop to the shore; on the other a cluster of farm buildings and a garden stood between the nunnery and a few fields, folded into the shelter of the wooded heights. On this rainy side of the mountain, everything was verdant and dewy. The nunnery was built of gold-coloured stone and roofed in brown-earth tiles. A little cupola above the church was decorated with blue and green tiles and topped with a cross of gold. Nothing had prepared Josefa to expect beauty.
The abbess of Sant Clara, Mother Humberta, had been offered many ill-favoured girls in her time. She was always torn. Torn between rage for her master, the Lord Jesus, who was offered the second best, the leavings of the feast, those whom nobody else had a use for, instead of the fairest and brightest of the flock; and, on the other hand, pity for ugly and rejected poor girls, whose prospects in the harsh world of the island were so unpromising. She was not an islander herself, having come from France with her order, and felt free to disapprove. She looked at Taddeo with cold blue unflinching eyes that comprehended only too well.
‘She asked to come, Mother,’ he said.
The abbess turned her eyes on Josefa. Big face, big hands. Had the look on the girl’s face been docile, the abbess would have accepted her at once as a lay sister – a farm servant was needed. But she was met with an expression of such grief and rage on the child’s face as astonished her. ‘Did you?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Mother.’
‘You wish to be a nun?’
‘The world is hateful to me, Mother.’
‘That’s a possible starting point on the journey, certainly,’ said the abbess, looking balefully at Taddeo, ‘though not the best.’
‘The best is not for me, Mother,’ said Josefa, surprisingly. ‘I will gladly take any way possible.’
‘There’s a humility,’ thought the abbess, looking at her with interest. ‘Can you read and write, child?’ she asked. Taddeo said, ‘No, Mother,’ and Josefa said, ‘Yes, Mother,’ in one breath.
‘My mother taught me,’ said Josefa, looking scornfully at her father.
The abbess got up, slowly – she was an old woman now and walked on two sticks – and moved painfully to a secretaire placed on a side table. She brought a sheet of paper and a pen. ‘Show me,’ she said to Josefa. ‘Sit there and write something.’
While Josefa bent over her task, the abbess said to Taddeo, ‘We require a dowry.’
‘I cannot afford much, Mother,’ said Taddeo. ‘A few goats . . .’
‘How many is a few?’ the abbess enquired.
Taddeo meant to say five, but cringing under the remorseless gaze of the old woman’s cold blue eyes he said, ‘Ten.’
‘We don’t need goats,’ she said. ‘We need donkeys. And a donkey cart; we could do with a donkey cart.’
‘I haven’t any . . .’
‘Then sell those ten goats in the market at Sant Jeronimo, and buy a donkey and a donkey cart. Off you go now; you can leave your daughter here, and return with the dowry later.’
Josefa finished writing and put down her pen. The abbess watched. Taddeo shifted from one foot to another. He said, ‘Goodbye, then, Josefa.’
‘Goodbye Father,’ the girl said. She did not get up from her chair.
‘Show me that,’ said the abbess, pointing at the paper on the table in front of Josefa. The girl brought her the paper. In a large, clear hand she had written, ‘I believe in God the Father almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible; and in Jesus Christ, his only son, Our Lord, born of the Father before all ages; God from God, light from light, true God from true God . . .’
‘Kiss your father, Josefa,’ the abbess said. ‘It is the last time you will kiss a man as long as you live.’