Dominion (14 page)

When he opened the door he saw there a very tall man who seemed vaguely familiar—for he had seen him in the sword—although he had never met him before in life.

”I'm looking for Jasper Merian,” the man said, holding his road-beaten hat down over his hands.

“Who should I tell him is calling?” Purchase asked, wondering that one who looked as lowly as the fellow at their door should have come to the front and not gone around to the rear of the house. “What is thy name?”

“Tell him it is someone from Sorel's Hundred.”

Purchase nodded and went back inside to his father.

“There is someone at the door who says he's from somewhere called Sorel's Hundred and claims to have business with you,” Purchase announced to his father, after reentering the dining hall. “Didn't seem to mind that it's well past normal visiting time.”

Merian excused himself and stood to go to the door, as his wife and son milled there waiting to see who this late arrival could be. When Merian returned, he held the other man with great affection and introduced him to the two in the room. “I'd like both of you to meet someone very dear to me, who I have not seen in a great many years,” the old man said, presenting the stranger to his family. “His name is Ware, though he is also called Magnus, and he is my son. You can see that, because he is punctual.

“Purchase,” he said, leading Ware over, “this is your brother, even if you never knew you had one.”

This was not entirely true. Sanne had told him on a couple of occasions, late at night when the two happened to meet up in the kitchen or else were otherwise awake when the rest of the house was quiet, that his father had whole secret lives she knew but little of, and one of them included another wife and child. This, though, was first proof to Purchase of his father's life before them. Still, he went to Magnus and embraced him as bidden, and the affection between them was very natural.

Ware, called Magnus, stood there in the center of the great room and received his brother's embrace. He would have returned it but could not hug him back, because his hands they were still shackled.

The two men sat across from each other with the fire burning low behind them, looking at one another only tentatively. Although they touched often, it was by accident and caused them both some small embarrassment at first, until they grew used to it. Breaking the center chain was very simple. Purchase did this with a strong chisel and a good sharp whack from one of the hammers on a workbench in the barn. The bracelets, though, were another matter, and he was forced to work at them a long time with the smallest tools in his possession.

It was an admirable lock, and when he finally deciphered its clenching mechanism he would feel some small sympathy for his defeated adversary, for its maker had designed that lock with great care and deep insight and intended it to hold until whosoever had mastery of the key released it, but not before.

“How is that?” Purchase asked, pausing in his work to get a better hold on one of the shackles.

Ware massaged his raw flesh beneath the iron and answered, “Not bad. But I have lived with them awhile and am not the best judge.”

“Do you want me to wait so you can catch your breath?” Purchase asked, for he could see how the skin under the handcuff had been almost completely removed and what pain Ware must be in, despite shrugging it off.

“No. Better to go ahead and have done with it.”

Purchase resumed work, trying not to aggravate the skin under the irons, which was orange with rust around the wounds where the metal had contacted his blood. As he watched the stoicism with which Ware
bore this pain and intrusion, Purchase felt a tremendous respect for the other man and his private travails.

Ware, for his part, looked at Purchase, and how deliberate he was with what was undeniably an unpleasant and rough business, and his affection for the younger man took hold as for a brother raised under the same roof, and even if they were very different men, they were bound together then nonetheless.

They went on like this, with unspoken tenderness for each other, as they shared a singular understanding until the lock finally revealed itself and opened. Nor when it was done did they thank or comfort each other, but took it each in stride as roles that might easily be reversed.

When the irons were finally off, Ware plunged his hands up to the elbow in a vat of water, washing the filth and dried blood from them. As he did this, Merian and Sanne came into the barn. Sanne carried with her a parcel of clean rags, which she had cut into bandages. When Ware took his hands from the water, she dried them and began to dress his raw wrists in the cotton.

Merian surveyed this scene and did not speak, but he was exceedingly proud of all his family. This, he thought, far surpassed any birthday he had ever celebrated before, even that original year of freedom when he was still in Virginia and first gave himself one, knowing not when he was actually born. He went carousing that year with friends until the celebration turned some unmarked corner and he was left very sore off from celebrating. He figured then it was because he had not done it before and so was not used to it, but soon learned that that was the nature of joy—a flying that could also turn full around if you took it out of sensible range.

He thought this year he had achieved perfect balance.

When Sanne finished dressing Ware's wounds, they all returned to the main house, where Sanne had Adelia bring out food from the kitchen for Ware, which he devoured at first in a rush, but soon slowed down, seemingly full. When he had his fill of meats he took a very little bit of pudding and a half glass of cider to wash it all down.

“Are you feeling better?” Purchase asked.

“Do you want anything else?” Sanne wanted to know.

“I'm fine, I'm fine,” he answered them. “A whole heap better than before.”

“What else—” Sanne began, but Merian intervened.

“There's plenty of time for getting acquainted. I think Ware might like to rest right now.”

Merian led him to an empty room above the kitchen and asked whether there was anything else he needed to pass the night in peace. The new arrival replied there was not, and very soon after Merian left the room.

Magnus, as he himself preferred to be called, looked around in the dark, staring into the edges and corners of the unfamiliar chamber, trying to grow used to the climate indoors again and to figure what sort of course he had charted—not knowing whether he would be received here or not, or why exactly he chose to come to this place rather than great Philadelphia, or even as far off as Boston, anyplace where he might blend in with the general population instead of stopping where he had. He wondered still whether the law might catch up with him—and if they had been pursuing him at that very moment they surely would have, for he scarcely finished the thought before falling asleep from tiredness.

After showing Ware the room Merian went to his own bed, where Sanne lay awake waiting for him. “How is he?” she asked when he entered.

“Fine as might be expected,” Merian answered.

“And you?”

“It's a great day for me, Sanne. I never on earth thought I would live to see it. Thank you.”

“Well, what happens now? He just shows up a grown man, very likely wanted by the authorities, and you take him in?”

“We will see, Sanne.”

“What about her? Where is she?”

“He didn't say, and I haven't asked him yet,” Merian said. In truth, though, he knew what had most likely happened. The boy would have never left Ruth if she was still alive, not if he had suffered everything long enough to become a full-grown man and hadn't left before that. “There will be plenty of time for questions.”

“Don't you want to know?”

“Good night, Sanne.”

“And I'm supposed to just stand back, whatever happens.”

“Good night, wife.”

“Good night, husband.”

Merian woke the next day before the rest of the house stirred and went first thing to town, where he met with Content but did not tell him straightaway of the new arrival.

“If a man needed to get papers, Content,” he asked, “where would he go?”

“Depends on what he needed them to say.”

“That he was legitimate.”

“Legitimate what?”

“Legitimate free before the law.”

“Are they for you?”

“In a way.”

“Everybody knows you and knows who you are.”

Seeing no other avenue Merian confessed to the new situation on his place and slid a guinea across the table. “Can you take care of it for me?”

Content nodded that he could but asked Merian why he hadn't come out and told him the thing to begin with. “It would be a lot simpler that way, Merian.”

“Don't give me your lectures, Content,” Merian said. “I don't see that it's all so complicated now.”

“It isn't,” Content answered. “It just would have been simpler the other way.” Content went to the door, locked the tavern, and had Merian come with him to his office in back. There, he took out a sheet of very fine writing paper, an ink pot, and his quill. He asked Merian again for the name of his son and began to write a letter stating that the bearer was a free man. When he finished, Merian asked him to read what he had written and, satisfied, expressed to Content his deep gratitude.

“You would do the same for me,” his friend answered him, pushing the coin back at him.

“Well, you and Dorthea ought to come out and meet him soon. Maybe this Sunday,” Merian said, as he stood to leave.

“We just might. But why not give everything awhile to get to normal out there first,” Content replied.

Merian tipped his hat to his friend and took his leave. No longer able to sit a horse as he used to, he climbed into his carriage and rode the seven miles back out to the farm, remembering his own first days of freedom, and his own fresh beginning in this strange new country, though he was not a fugitive as his boy was.

Sanne had given Adelia instructions to let Magnus sleep as long as he wanted and to see that he had whatever he required as soon as he stirred. When he finally did awaken, she went immediately to see to him. Being unaccustomed to service, he could not even think what a person might need brought to him first thing in the morning other than another parcel of sleep. “No,” he said, rubbing his eyes, “but I might like a spot of breakfast if that's no trouble.”

When he went downstairs, she directed him to the dining room where the family ate, not knowing what his position in the house was and deciding to err on the side of generosity, as Sanne had always told her to do with their guests.

When he sat down she asked what he would like, and he responded that he wouldn't mind some milk and biscuits. She then brought out to the table a breakfast of eggs and bacon, as well as what he had asked her for. He ate everything and seemed satisfied, but when still more biscuits and milk were put before him he ate the biscuits in a flurry of surprisingly tidy activity, then drained his glass of milk with one turn up to his mouth. The girl asked whether he would like more and he said yes. She filled his glass again and watched as the milk disappeared, and another glass after it, until he had drained nearly an entire pailful.

When it was reported to Sanne later how he had consumed an entire cow's morning offering, she said that the girl should find out whether he required any special preparation for it, or if it was fine as brought to the table. Magnus told her any way he could get it was fine with him, and proceeded that first week to consume milk at a more prodigious rate than anyone would have thought possible.

Merian entered the dining room, just as Ware—as he would always insist on calling him—was finishing his breakfast, and asked after his sleep.

“It was very good, sir,” Ware answered, but did not tell him either on that occasion or any other that he preferred to be called Magnus and, in fact, did not remember ever being called Ware to begin with. None of this mattered to Merian, who had given him the name in the first place.

“Is it great yet, though?” Merian asked. “I want you to let me know when it gets to be great.”

Magnus looked at him but did not know what he meant. “I'm sorry?”

“I want to know when your sleep start to feel different. After you wake before first light and realize you can sleep all the day and won't nobody say nothing. Then again when you realize you still got to get up around first light if you want anything from the day. The first time you sleep a night knowing the day before you and every one after that is yours. I want you to tell me when it starts to feel great to you.”

Magnus smiled ruefully, unable to imagine that such a moment might ever come or that such an idea was anything but an old man's fanciful remembering of his own past. “Well, they might still come after me.”

“No, they won't,” Merian said. “Nobody is after you. And if they were they surely won't look this far from where you started.”

“I don't put it past them,” Magnus said. “Sorel hate to see anything get out from his control. That's why he wouldn't let my mama buy us out in the first place, on account of that would be one more thing in the world, besides the sun and what-all, that he didn't have say-so over.”

Merian nodded and said nothing, not wanting to interrupt the other once he had started talking—for fear he might never tell what it was he had to say. He did allow himself a question, though. “How is your mama?”

Magnus looked at Merian, and it was hard to tell just then whether there was not hatred in his eyes for the man who had given him life and was providing him shelter. Whatever it was passed quickly, and his face sloped toward sadness when he replied, “She passed on.”

Merian was sadder than he had thought he would be when he first suspected it to be the case, and sadder than anyone would have ever been able to tell him he would be to hear the tragedy of a woman he had known so long ago. He withheld his emotion from Magnus, for it was something he found he did not understand entirely, and that was not a pleasant sensation or knowledge for a man his age to discover about his own inner life: that his heart it was still very cunning.