Cleo

Cleo is a servant entrusted with taking young Sarah away from home, but her care proves unreliable: at the Four Winds, she leaves the child unattended and later directs her own bitterness about men toward her. Sarah’s adult recollections place Cleo among the people and circumstances that made her childhood one of abandonment and exploitation.

Identity and Introduction

Cleo accompanies Sarah from home to town and buys their coach tickets as the coach arrives. She lifts Sarah aboard and presents the trip as an adventure, though Sarah is reluctant to leave her mother. Cleo says they will stay at the Four Winds, where Sarah’s parents want her out of the way while Mae entertains Alex Stafford.

Neglect at the Four Winds

Cleo’s attention shifts from Sarah to Merrick. After spending the night with him, she wakes with a hangover and discovers that he has left. She then remembers that Sarah, her charge, was left in the cold hallway throughout the night. Afraid Mae will learn what happened, Cleo carries Sarah inside and asks her not to tell, making the child responsible for protecting Cleo’s position.

Bitterness and Its Effect on Sarah

Cleo later returns to Sarah after drinking and speaks from her heartbreak over Merrick. She tells the child that men use women and destroy them when they are loved, extending that judgment to Alex and his treatment of Mae. When Sarah tries not to listen, Cleo insists that she pay attention. The episode shows Cleo turning adult resentment into a lesson imposed on a frightened child; Sarah’s later account of her childhood makes clear that such experiences contributed to her early sense of rejection and damage.

Later Recollection

As an adult, Sarah tells Michael Hosea that Rab sold her to a brothel and that Duke exploited her as a child. In the same account, she recalls that her mother became a prostitute, drank, and died when Sarah was eight. Cleo is not identified as the person responsible for those later events, but her earlier abandonment of Sarah at the Four Winds forms part of the childhood history Sarah remembers as beginning in rejection and instability.