He led her limping inside and gave her feed and an apple, then a blanket, before returning to his wife in bed.

Sanne did not say anything as he wormed his way back under the covers, but let him try to sleep.

In the morning Merian repeated his routine of the day before, uncertain how she had made her way back on just three legs but determined she would not do so again. This time he led her even farther away, by back roads he was confident she had never trod. That night the mule was at the house again, same as any other day in the last four years. Sanne helped her husband feed the animal, and stroked the back of the poorman’s head when he lay down to sleep. The next day he tried once more but to no avail.

“I know,” was all she said, when he led the mule in the third night.

Despite the pretension of taking a name for the house, he knew it was senseless to keep and feed a used-up animal. That morning he faced the task as it was laid out for him, taking Ruth Potter by a long tether — as she was used to having when she had any — into the same field, where he leveled the musket against her temple. His anger, though, flashed and welled up as he saw how innocent she looked at him and munched dumbly on the summer’s sweet grass. “Goddammit, Ruth Potter, what good is it letting you loose if you don’t know what to do with yourself?” he growled at her. “If you don’t know that, what sense is there in living?” He fired the musket into the animal’s head. She fell where she stood, in a tumult of limbs, and he dug for her a grave, which he did cover back up with dirt and sweet grass.

As he made his way home late that morning his heart blazed with emotion, as the sun itself fires false things true.

eight

A train of princely coaches thundered over the road the first passable day of spring that year. A herald out front proclaimed its origin, and the king’s standard flew high overhead, guarding it against inhospitable actions. Its presence so far out was a confounding mystery to Merian and Sanne, and it was continuing on even farther — to an outpost that had cropped up more than two days’ journey from them, for it was a long time since they were the final dwelling on the road.

The mystery of the coach remained unsolved until Merian’s provisioning trip a few weeks later, when he stopped for his usual draught, and Content mentioned the self-important travelers who had stayed over at the inn about three weeks earlier.

“Who were they?” Merian asked. “What was their business?”

“I guess you didn’t hear”—Content nodded, offering him another pint—“but we’re going to be a colony of our own.”

“Don’t you think Dorthea and Sanne might be a little upset by that?”

“It’s no jest,” Content countered. “The colony is dividing in two.”

“On what grounds?” Merian asked, though he didn’t see how it could make a difference to them out there, whatever the case.

“Rulers and ruled upon. Anglicans and Presbyterians. Plantation and freeholder. Crown and colony,” a man sitting in shadow at the end of the bar interjected. “Past and future. However you want to square it. There’s not a whole lot of grounds where things aim to stay the same.”

“That’s all dukes’ and governors’ business,” Content said. “It won’t matter any to us out here.”

“You are an optimist, my friend,” the man at the bar argued, standing and coming over to join the other two, “as well you should be, all the way out here with no arrow in yer skull. But it will have everything to do with what goes on. Mark that, both of ye.” The stranger looked intently between them, and when he said, “Mark that,” Merian recognized his costume as one and the same with the fellow whose carriage he had fixed out on the empty road a few years past.

“You’re one of those wandering preachers, aren’t you?” Merian asked him. “One of your kind passed this way before.”

“I am no such thing,” the man answered. “If I were, though, I would tell you great fortune has smiled on both of ye in the sundering of these lands. The other side is no place even for a dog, or else a king’s created harlot.” With that he downed his drink and stood to depart. “They want inventory of things that should not be in their cupboards to count,” he said. “Give them those stores and you’ll not run a free house anymore than you will the Holy Roman Empire.”

When he had gone, Content went to collect the monies left on the bar and held up a silver coin of the same marking that Merian had seen once before. The two then drank silently for a spell, wondering whether there was anything in the preacher’s forecast to concern them.

They decided in the end there was nothing for them to do about it and switched the conversation over to local gossip and general speculation about the future. Merian arrived home that night in a good mood, although there was nothing to account for it other than a feeling of being near to great events, even if those unfolded happenings concerned more the great landowners and estates of religion and did not weigh on him directly.

“There are going to be two colonies from here on,” he told Sanne. “One for the religious planters and another for everybody else.”

“I don’t see what religion has to do with it,” she asserted, as always on guard against his blasphemies. “In any case, they’re both for the big planters.”

“Well, one of them wants everything for Crown and landed, and the other claims looser confederation.”

“Will you still be able to go between them or will you need special permission?”

“They’re both still the king’s lands,” her husband answered. “I imagine for somebody with the idea, it will be just like going from here to Virginia or from there to London.” As he finished his sentence Merian grew suddenly less jocular, and he stood up to go out-of-doors where he could walk a spell by himself.

Outside the sky teemed low with stars and he charted the figures as he had known them in his childhood, trying to remember their names as he learned them then. He found, however, that he could not name them all as he used to and eventually went back indoors still burning with thought.

Sanne, after seeing him seized by one of his unpredictable moods, tried to ignore it, and when he reentered the house he found her already closing everything down for the night. He helped silently, then got into bed alongside her, where he attempted to mask his earlier moodiness with talk of how good the harvest was going to be again this year, if the weather should hold.

It was a mask but a true one; his yield from the ground had improved steadily as he invested it with fertilizers and good care each year, so that he expected nearly twice again what he achieved the year before. All the result of steady work and getting to keep his benefits for himself. This season, he reckoned, when his accounts were settled, he would leave with more ready cash than he had ever seen in his life, and no debt to any man.

When the harvest came he took his produce to market and received payment, more than a little amazed at the amount — for it was a sum that would have been unthinkable to him only recently.

He splurged then at the merchants’ shops and even spent a few pence at his sworn enemy the chandler’s, after seeing a handkerchief in the window he thought Sanne might fancy.

When he went home that evening he was loaded down with the winter goods in a new cart, which was pulled by the gelding he had bought to replace Ruth Potter, though he considered that particular creature irreplaceable and without peer in all the annals of animal husbandry.

He arrived back at Stonehouses at nightfall, and Sanne came out to help him unpack the cart and put things away in their cellar. He was proud then that, while before he had barely been able to fill a single basement with his labors from the season, this year two storerooms were scarcely enough to hold all his goods. He celebrated with a little of the bought whiskey he had picked up in his splurging, then presented his wife with her gift.