Dominion (21 page)

“You didn't even ask what I wanted. You couldn't even treat me with that decency but just turned me away from you.” She did start crying then, and Magnus was very moved by her tears.

“What is it you want, Adelia? Tell me that now and I will try to hear it.” He walked closer to her and looked down at the top of her head as she wiped her face with her hand. She looked back up and he saw again that she was very pretty, and was sorry he could not maintain the steadiness of devotion that a good husband must have. He was, however, taken again with wanting for her and touched her very lightly, in case she should be shocked or offended by his gesture.

Instead she put her head upon his chest and cried there, until he lifted her chin and kissed her. It was not what he had meant to do, but he told her to visit him again that night. It was not what she intended either, but she found herself in his chambers when all the rest of the world was asleep and it was only the two of them awake in creation.

She began to spoil him after that, making little cakes and cookies every day or cooking his favorite meals for dinner. He was kind with her for a while as well, until it seemed they would be together. Inevitably, though, it turned off in him again. The ability to reciprocate her feeling toward him. When it did, he told himself he was wicked, but he did try his best to rekindle his former feeling. When this failed he simply withdrew into himself remorsefully.

For a time he still suffered her company on occasion, but gradually refused even that and spent all his time with work or, in the evening, sitting late with his aging father discussing matters of great outward import, so that she dare not interrupt.

As he removed himself from her she offered more of her best attention to him, leaving the little sweets outside his door or knitting him warm things to have on his body in the cold weather. He took her gifts but could not enjoy them.

When he came into the kitchen one night, after two weeks of this treatment, she sat waiting up for him and asked why he abused her affections. He replied that he did not mean to. He was merely bound to his own ways and could not be always spending so much time in idling with her.

She began then the same weeping that had worked on him before, but his heart was steel and would not bend to her words or tears. He went off and left her crying in the kitchen. “What have I done to be abused?” she sobbed loudly in the night, so the whole house was awake with pity for her until dawn.

The next night he had his dream of the naked woman again, and it set in him the determination to have nothing to do with Adelia but get on instead in his work. During the time he had been there, Stonehouses had grown in size, as he and Merian worked more and more as a team, and his influence grew steadily to the point that when their neighbor to the east died he was able to convince Merian to buy the dead man's land. Not that it was so difficult, as he was merely rekindling a dream Merian had in his own youth, so that when the properties were combined it was a sizable estate by any measure. There were also stores to be managed and disputes to settle and new tilling methods to try out, all of which suited him well, as he shared with his father a love for the land. He was in all other matters a quiet soul, and domestic life was too turbulent to him. He knew he must eventually either marry her or send her away, and he was not the one for marriage.

All that spring he stayed away from her, and eventually left her little gifts untouched by the door where she left them, until she stopped leaving things altogether. She determined in her heart then to leave that house and find work and a living elsewhere.

One day he came into the kitchen and found Sanne there with a girl he did not recognize. He did not think to say anything of it, but after a week of not seeing Adelia he did ask after her whereabouts. Sanne thought it was bold of him to mention her at all, but told him Merian had arranged for her to go work at Content's place.

For a week he did not go, satisfied with merely knowing she had not gone too far off. Eventually, though, he had one of his bouts, as he had begun to refer to them, since they had become so frequent that they were no longer a separate part of his life and seemed to need to be called something. When it came it was like truth to him, and he went bravely, as he saw it, to seek her out.

When he entered Content's the older man greeted him warmly, and they talked for a time about Merian, and then whether there had been
word from Purchase—for his case was beginning to be known around the colonies and sometimes news or conjecture would reach them there in Berkeley. “What happened to him was a bewitching I would not wish on any man,” Content said, as he moved away to another customer, “but for you, Magnus, you know it is not so bad being close to someone else. Nothing at all for a man to fear. Then again, I am often surprised by what people do and don't fear.”

“Will she see me?” he asked, when Content finished lecturing him.

“Ought she to?” he asked. “If you don't know your own mind, you don't need to go stirring her up again.”

“Well,” Magnus said, “to be all the way honest, Content, I don't know if I know my mind or not. Some days I think about her and I am ready to be with her and all that means. Other days I think about it, and part of me doesn't know if I can be with anything else that stirs.”

“Well, you are already with others that stir. What do you think Jasper thought when you showed up? It wasn't, Can I be with another thing that stirs?”

“We are not the same.”

“It's a matter of what is right to do.”

“Content, do you think it is more natural for a man to be with a woman all the time than for both of them to go about their business and come together when it suits them?”

“It might be or might not be,” Content answered, “but I don't see what kind of coming together it can be, any more than beasts.”

“You think I should see her?”

“I think you should see her if you can get clear in your own heart what it is you want of her,” Content answered. “She is round back in the kitchen if you figure it out before closing.”

He did not go immediately round back, but took his glass to a far table, where he sat staring out the window, nursing both pint and thought. When he finished his drink he called Jannetje to bring him another, which surprised her, as he seldom had more than a single drink and that one more for social custom than want of beer.

As he looked through the window and waited for his pint, it began to snow, lightly at first but then becoming very dense and beautiful. The
thick flakes fell all in a pattern that to him looked like a very cold night in winter set deep with stars. He drank and stared up until he felt himself beginning to move through them all into the deep infinite darkness. It was then, as he was rising up into the firmament, that he thought of the water for the first time in a great many years.

He is very young and his mother calls him to come with her to see Mr. Sorel, their master. The man who is his father visited recently and there was a great upheaval in their lives for a few days before settling back to normal, but this he feels is somehow part of that upheaval. She has scrubbed his shirt and combed his hair, and he knows that before this meeting there were others with their mistress that kept his mother agitated and on continuous edge.

Now as they prepare to go to the house, she is nervous and fidgets with the buttons on his blouse repeatedly until she is ready to go. At the main house they are taken into Mr. Sorel's office, which he has never seen before and finds extremely frightening as they stand there. When Mr. Sorel greets them he is even more afraid, as the children on the place all try to avoid their master.

“My wife tells me you have something to request,” their master says to his mother, making what seems to him a point of not using her name.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Sorel,” his mother answered. “I was wanting to buy me and Magnus out.”

“Out of what?” Sorel asked.

“Out so we can be free,” she answered.

“Well, that is not generally my practice or view of business, Ruth,” he said, “but I tell you what I will do. I'm going to take this little boy of yours here and put him to a test. If he passes the test you can pay for both of you and go free. If he fails, though, you will stay on here until the end of your days, and so will he, and so will his children and so on, as the law says should be.”

“No, sir, Mr. Sorel,” his mother answered, “he's just a boy and I don't reckon he's ready for tests.”

“Well, you have tested me already tonight, Ruth, so it's my terms from here on.”

When they left the meeting his mother was crying sharply, and he drew near trying to console her. “I'll pass whatever test he put me to,” he said.

Instead of being consoled, though, his mother began to cry even more, until he was afraid indeed.

That next morning a man came to their room to take him away. She gave him a kiss before relinquishing him. “They want everything,” she said. “If you ever make it back, just remember that. It is not human wanting that they have but something unmade and unnatural.”

He did not know what she meant for a long time, but he thought over what she had said as he sat in the back of the cart being carried away from her. When they arrived at the river, Mr. Sorel was there with some of his men and watched as those who had been sent to fetch him placed him in a large sack. The boy did not struggle but could only succumb to the power of his master's men.

“Listen to me,” Sorel said, before they closed up the sack. “If you drown in this water your mother will get to have what she wants and go live with your sire, but if you live you will both stay on here exactly as you have been.”

He finished speaking and nodded for the men to close up the sack, crowding the child in dark fear. The boy breathed in quickly and deeply, hoping for air to be in him whenever the bag was tossed into the water. Finally, he felt himself up in the air; then a hard slap on the surface of the river and a frigid inrush of water as he hoarded his breath. The bag filled at first with a pocket of fresh air; then everything was water and he began to go very slowly to the bottom. He struggled against the sack, and struggled with it, until to his amazement it came open for him, and he began to swim up. As he swam he remembered his master's words and thought whether to allow what it was his mother wanted so badly or what his body told him he ought.

As he thought of this, he felt a tap at his shoulder and Jannetje standing over him. He stood up to leave and made his way toward the door unsteadily, for he had been drinking the entire while. When he found his horse out in the pen, he brushed it briefly to give it some warmth, then stood in the stirrup.

As he began to head to Stonehouses, he looked back at Content's place and saw Adelia in the kitchen through the snow. He stood there awhile, watching her in her movements against the yellow light from the warm room; then, when he thought he saw her turn to the window, spurred the horse for fear she might see him out there not knowing what to do.

Purchase ranged the countryside in desolation after Mary Josepha left him, sometimes earning his living by honest means and sometimes in more expeditious fashion. A month after she went back to her husband he knew he would not forget her but made it through the winter alone as best he could. Nor was his heart heavy with anything else that winter, except failing in his union with her.

He was almost in Maryland before he found her again and, after much persuading, convinced her to come off with him. It seemed to him it was either easier than before or else he no longer felt the pain of what he went through. This time, so say the stories that eventually sprang up around the two of them and reached Berkeley, he swore he would employ all his powers of strength and intelligence to keep her. When she came to him then, in a rented room, he put a potion in her drink that made her sleep very sound. She awoke in an impenetrable cage of his besotted construction.

He had dreamed of that enclosure all the way from the border of Florida to where they were now. At night small details would come to him, and he would get up then and there to jot down a diagram of what had been revealed to him.

The bars of the jail were stronger even than the blade of the sword he had made for his father, and the lock was of ingenious design. No one would ever break it or learn its secret mechanism. The entire contraption was exceedingly light as well, so that it could be taken up and put in the back of a wagon, suspended in air, or even floated on water. Inside he tried to make it as comfortable as possible for her, and when they were not on the move it had a mechanism that allowed him to expand it and give her more room. In all those hours without her he
had figured out how to make the cage perfect for what it was and escape-proof. If it was cruel he did not see it, only that it accomplished his goal and kept her near him.

The only time he opened the door was to give her food, or when he wanted to be with her. For a month she suffered this fate, until one day she suddenly warmed to him again, calling out for him to come to her of her own accord. They were happy like this for many weeks. It was after one of these episodes, though, that he awoke to find himself imprisoned in his own trap and Mary Josepha gone back to the Englishman.

It took him twice as long to escape the dungeon as build it. When he finally was able to let himself free he was bitter with a disgrace that forbade him from returning home, as he should have, so he continued roaming northward until he could forget or else find a way to redeem who he had become. He swore this time he would not go after her again either but reflect upon what he had learned those months, until the suffering itself had become a kind of balm and solace. “Suffering has always been the price of God's love,” Mary Josepha used to say to him, when he had convinced her to come off with him, just before she left. He did not feel loved, though. He felt hated, and he was all the way down bitter with himself over what he had done. For he was no longer Purchase of Stonehouses but someone far removed.