When the deal was finally struck, Ti Me looked from Ella to me expectantly. I smiled back, uncertain.

“What is it?” I said.

Ella wouldn’t meet either of our eyes. She looked down at her skirts, and then she stuck one hand to her side and fumbled for her purse there. She unhooked it from her belt and handed it to me.

It was soft and heavy in my hands, the coins inside it spreading over my palms. It was like holding an animal and feeling about on its belly for its organs.

“I suppose,” Ella said, still without looking at me, “that you should hold this now. Since you are now the first lady of the house. The purse and keys are yours.”

Her voice was halting, and strangely high-pitched, as if someone else was forcing the words out of her with a pair of bellows.

“It is not necessary,” I began, thinking that if I could spare her this humiliation, perhaps I could win her favor.

But her eyes flashed at me, and I understood it at once. Don’t you dare pity me. The likes of you could never pity me.

What had Ella herself said? You must be strong, in a place like this?

I took the purse and stepped in front of her and counted out the coins, one by one, to Ti Me’s hand, and when we reached the house, it was I who drew the big iron key from my waist and turned it in the door and let the other women inside.

I thought the keys at my waist would change things. Emmanuel led me to believe it was so. When he saw them there at dinner, his eyes became bright, and later, alone in our room, he held each one in his hand, one by one, only the length of the key between us as he worked them off their ring.

“The keys used to fascinate me as a boy,” he told me. “Ti Me wore them until Ella was old enough, and the sound of them, when Ti Me walked, the sound of their clanking, meant that we were safe. I was scared of this country then. I had not learned to love it yet. I wanted to lock it out all day and all night, and hearing the keys hit Ti Me’s hip made me feel safe.

“I learned,” he said as he let one key fall against my thigh and picked up another, to work off the ring. “I learned, as I learned to love this place, that the keys were an illusion. Why would you live in a place as beautiful as this and lock out the night sky? I promised myself that if they were ever given to me, I would exorcise their power. When we were sixteen and I found out that Ella got the keys because she was now the woman of the house, I was heartbroken. And she would never let me touch them, because she knew I meant to strip them of their power.”