Chapter Six

The taxi smelled of old pine and the driver's lunch. Mud had dried on her shoes in gray-brown flakes, and one heel had cracked without her noticing.

The driver did not talk. She liked him for that.

She paid him at the villa gates and added a little more than the meter said.

"You ruined your shoes for a swamp," he said, taking it.

"Yes."

"Was it worth it?"

She leaned down to the window. "Ask me in two years."

He laughed once and drove away.

Isabella heard Clara before she saw her. A radio was playing in the kitchen, too loud, and a drawer opened and closed twice as though someone had forgotten where the spoons lived. She set her bag on the bench by the side door and stood there a moment, tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Clara stood at the counter with a glass of wine and a plate of fruit she had not touched. She was still in the red coat from the morning, which meant she had been out, come back, and not bothered to change. That meant she had been thinking about something all day.

She turned around and stopped. Her eyes went from Isabella's face to her hair and down to her shoes.

"You are covered in mud."

"I know."

"Your shoes..." Clara set her glass down. "Those were the grey ones. The ones I bought you in the spring."

"They are the brown ones now."

Clara came around the counter and turned her by the shoulders, left and then right, the way a mother checks a child for damage. "Tell me all of it. Start at the beginning, and do not skip the part where you thought this was a good idea."

So Isabella told her about the road that stopped being a road, the smell of salt and rot, and the man on the step with a folded newspaper.

"He laughed at me," she said. "Not cruelly. The way you laugh at a child who says she is going to fly. He told me fifteen people had come to look at that land in eight years, and not one had bought it."

"And what did you say?"

"I asked him how much."

"Isabella."

"I handed him the bank draft before he finished telling me I would regret it."

Clara closed her eyes, trying hard to make it look like anger. "How much did you give him?"

Isabella told her.

"That is nearly everything."

"I know what it was." Isabella drew a folder from her bag and set it on the counter. "And I have this."

Clara did not reach for it. "Show me."

The deed was a single sheet of thick paper with a seal at the corner and Isabella's name at the bottom, in the same small, neat hand that had signed a marriage certificate and a divorce paper. Clara put one finger on the seal.

"Western Parcel, one hundred and four acres," she read. "You actually did it."

"You thought I would not?"

"I thought you would come home at noon with clean shoes and tell me it was worse than you imagined. You never used to stay when things got difficult."

Isabella did not answer, because it was true of a woman who was no longer sitting on the stool.

Clara drank, and when she spoke again her voice had gone level and businesslike. "What do you need?"

"Nothing. I told you, I wanted to do the first thing alone."

"You did. It is done. You own mud and a piece of paper. You cannot build a harbor with a stamp. You will need surveyors, lawyers, filings and a road, and every one of those costs money you no longer have."

"Then I will start with the smallest of them."

"That is not a plan. That is a sentence that sounds like one."

Clara walked around the counter and sat down beside her. "I am going to back you."

"Clara..."

"Do not say no yet. I am offering a partnership, and I will be clear about what I want, because I refuse to spend two years being quietly generous and then be surprised when you feel small about it." She counted on her fingers. "One, my lawyers. Not my father's, mine. They will eat a city planner alive. Two, trucks. Blacks Holdings has forty-one, and eleven sit idle on Sundays. Three, my name."

Isabella said nothing.

"Not on the gate. It stays yours. But when a man at a counter in this city hears that the swamp wife has Clara Blacks behind her, he stops watching the clock and starts reading the paperwork."

"It will make you a target."

"I have been a target since I was nineteen. Now I get to choose the fight." Clara's voice went rough at the edges. "Do you remember what you said to me in that corridor?"

"I remember."

"You said I was a bad friend. You slammed the door so hard the frame shook, and a maid walked past with towels and pretended not to look at me. I stayed. Two years of that, and I stayed. So do not tell me I do not have to do this. The only thing that has changed is that now it might actually work."

Isabella looked at her for a long moment. Then she said, "The trucks."

"What about them?"

"If I take them, the drivers are paid by me, not by your father, and I sign the manifest. I will not have it said that I built anything on your father's fuel."

Clara's mouth curved. "That is the first sensible thing you have said all day."

"I have said several."

"Three. I counted."

Clara poured a second glass of wine and set it in front of her without asking. "Now tell me what he said when you signed."

"He said congratulations. Before that, he asked me what I saw out there." Isabella picked up the glass. "I told him deep water."

"In a swamp."

"There is a channel on the western side. Nobody has looked at it because the east dock has always been closer. But the water is deeper, and it runs out to sea instead of along the shore, so the current keeps the silt moving. The east dock is a dead end. The west inlet is not."

"How do you know that?"

The golden script came at the edge of her sight, thin and faint. Chapter one hundred and eighty. The consortium buys the deeds quietly, holds them for three years, and builds the wealthiest trade harbor on the eastern seaboard.

Three years. She did not have three years. She had whatever she could build before the city noticed her, and the city noticed everything.

"Isabella." Clara's voice had gone careful. "How do you know?"

"I grew up in my father's firm. I have read deeds and survey maps since I was twelve. I know what water looks like on a map."

The script flickered and went out.

Clara studied her, then drank. "I said I would not ask again. I will say one thing and stop. Last week you could not read a room without asking me what a face meant. Now you talk about silt and currents and buy land nobody wants with money you saved in secret. I am glad. Whatever it is, keep it going."

"Thank you."

"What did I say about that word?"

"Sorry."

"Stop that too."

They sat while the light went from gray to gold, and Clara cut an apple and pushed half across the counter. Isabella ate it. She had not eaten since morning and had not noticed until then.

"The man with the keys," Clara said. "Did you get his name?"

"Wallace. He wrote it on the receipt."

Clara laughed suddenly and covered her mouth. "Last week you did not know the name of the woman who cleaned your floors."

"I know it now. Rosa. She has a son in the north who writes to her on Sundays."

Clara did not answer. She rested her hand on Isabella's wrist for a moment, then stood to order food, since neither of them was going to cook.

Isabella stayed on the stool. She looked at the deed with her name at the bottom, at the mud drying on her shoes by the door, and at the city switching on its lights below the hill. 

She had spent two years in a house on a cliff with a man who never looked at her. She had never once felt as alone as she had in that house, and she had never once felt as little need to be rescued as she did now.