“I see,” Mrs. Sorel answered, smoothing the top of her salt-and-pepper head and looking out the window, as his intention became clear to her. “Jasper, I don’t think he will go along with it. You must know that already. Peter doesn’t run things as Father did, and he doesn’t believe in selling slaves, let alone freeing them.” She said her words all at the same time, not at all certain how she should answer her former slave. “In any case, he is away until the middle of next month.”

Merian looked around the kitchen, which unlike the rest of the house had barely changed since it was first put up. He had been there with them since the beginning, when they were newlyweds, and counted this room among the ones he had joined in building.

“Mrs. Sorel, fair is fair,” he protested.

“I wish I could believe that as true, Jasper,” she replied.

He knew she was being honest with him, and that there was little in her power to do. His own manumission had been on terms set by the original estate, not her husband’s. The old man dictated his fate, as he did everything else when he lived, allowing him to leave either because of caprice of will or because he had served them so well from the beginning, as he had stated — when she was setting up house with the strange planter from Barbados and Jasper was her only reminder of home. Her father had made her promise as much when he presented her with him.

“How much do you think he might want?” Merian asked, returning to business.

“I don’t know, Jasper.” She could barely look at him as she said this. “I am glad to see how well you’re doing for yourself in the new colony, though. You must come back to visit them again.”

Their congress concluded, she left the kitchen, telling the cook to fix him something for his belly. “He’s getting thin down there so far from home.”

Her last words stuck in his ear, as he thought how he had lived over half his life here and grown all the way from child to manhood. He even allowed that he felt more a part of Sorel’s Hundred than he did his own place in many ways, but he did not want it to be his own family’s home. He thought then of Hannah Sorel’s father, who had always called both him and Hannah little Columbians. He wondered at the time what had been meant by this, but it was a bond to the place and the daughter through the father, not the strange island man she married or his British friends, who hung about the house scheming adventures that should never be allowed to transpire.

When he left there that evening, his trip a failure, he pressed on Ruth the money he had brought to purchase them out with.

“What do you want me to do with this?” she asked.

“When he comes back see whether you can still do it. Go to her first, though, not him.”

“Is that it?” she asked. “Is that all?”

“Ruth, what else do you want me to do?” he demanded of her sharply. “I am just a man and have done all I have it in me to do. I need to get back to my own place now.”

“Yessir, my own place,” she taunted him. “Go say good-bye to your boy now. Make sure you tell him you did all you had it in you to do.”

Her cruelty stung at him, but as he hugged Ware good-bye he told her again, “Do like I said.”

Ruth began to weep as he went to his horse, leaving them a second time trapped in captivity with little chance of ever seeing him again. Less than little, she thought, realizing his new woman was unlikely to let him get away a second time. She tried the word never in her mouth and knew immediately that is what it would be.

* * *

He spurs the horse and looks out on the gray horizon, heavy with a black storm cloud that darkens and gathers everything around itself, like spilt ink on a blotter. It is the Columbian sky. He hurries on beneath it back to Stonehouses.

nine

As he traveled the road home Merian found himself muttering various half-remembered recitations, though he did not know who or what he was invoking when he spoke them. They came to his lips all the same with the persistent force of ingrained habit: Amama amachaghi amacha. He would say the words from memory, then look down at his hands, desirous of glimpsing some part of his destiny or journey that had not been revealed before, or else praying that the fate of Ruth and Ware, called Magnus, would be gentle. He prayed because he knew their future was no longer in his power to affect. He recited his prayer again, then opened his hands again unconsciously, to release them, hoping that God, such as He was, would catch both.

How many people would have ever gone back there at all? he asked himself, trying to absolve any stain of felt guilt that might rest upon him. Amama amachaghi amacha. He chanted the strange words like a talisman of battle, yet he still could not remember what they meant or how he knew them in the first place. He rode the horse harder and followed a slope of his knowing southward through the forest toward his home.

Nor did he sleep the first night of his journey, but only got down from the horse and built a lean-to in the woods, while the animal watered and recuperated for the night. For him there was no rest; he cursed himself again for his failure and eventually for going back there at all.

He rose at the first shading of light and took to the southward trail again. For the first time since the week before, he began to wonder what had happened at Stonehouses during the days he was away. It was not concern, he told himself, but only curiosity. He did not even ask himself how Sanne and Purchase might have gotten on in his unannounced absence. He was headed back to them, so saw no harm done for anyone to complain about.

When he stopped the second night it was in Huguenot country, and he decided to try an inn he had not seen on his earlier trip. He tied the horse up and knocked at the door, then went inside, where he was greeted by two small round people — one a man, the other a woman. Whether they were husband and wife or brother and sister he could not say, but that they were related was unarguably clear, as both had the same set to their face and a general shared air about them. When he tried to order pork they responded to him in a language he thought might be Frankish but could not understand. They brought him out what he had asked for without further complaint, though, and he was satisfied until the little one, the woman, spoke to him sharply and pointed at a picture of the Accepted Son of God that had been pinned to the wall. He nodded his head at it, turned back to his plate, and began eating. At that point the larger one of the two came and took the spoon from his hand.

“As I haven’t paid, I guess it is your spoon. So you are lucky today,” Merian said, standing and towering over the man. The hotelier then pointed at the picture drawing and folded his hands together with bowed head. Merian understood that they expected him to pray before he had his meal, or else they thought he was not Christian and were trying to convert him. It was not his understanding, though, of how such things were done. He took his coat and continued out the door.

Outside he sat his horse again and pulled a piece of hardtack from the saddlebag, which he ate, half wishing he had not left in such haste. He appreciated, however, that he would now get home that much sooner, so long as the gelding’s legs should hold.

He rode half possessed into the evening, when the sun became a thin yellow line at the horizon, silhouetting the heavy tarnished-gray sky that descended from the heavens as a breeze from the east began to tremble and scatter the clouds. When he finally stopped that night it was to sleep under the stars, as he had not done since he was still a young man. Half his natural life, he thought, bending slowly to avoid aggravating an ache in his knees, was passed now and over. He lay down on his pallet and tried then, as he watched the night, to draw out all the lines that had led to him, and all that led away — parsing events and faces, trying to remember the different iterations of his character and seeming fate. One had gone to Ruth and Ware, and another to Sanne and Purchase. One to Virginia and Sorel’s Hundred, another to Stonehouses, or else one led to Virginia and then away, breaking again across the schism of that place into two. Only one line, though, continuing through each station, both itself and its own tangent, bending before the objects in its path and reuniting on the other side of them to continue its passing march. And one of those boys to grow up fathered and the other abandoned; one left with a knowable inheritance; the other a patrimony of questions. There is no sense to be made of it all but a pretend one, he told himself, pulling his saddle blanket up under his chin and staring up mutely before falling asleep, as he used to in times past, under the blanketing stars, the cold and naked canopy, systemic and random, of heaven.