In all of this Purchase did not speak but did as his father bade him, taking a sack that was already packed for his stay.

When Merian returned home Sanne wanted to know where Purchase was.

“He is apprenticed to the smith,” Merian answered.

Sanne was stunned when she heard this. “You cannot apprentice the boy,” she said. “He is hardly ten years old.”

“He looks fourteen to the smith.”

She yelled at him to hitch the cart and go retrieve her son. Reluctantly Merian did as she bade, and when she joined him for the ride into town he fully expected to be upbraided the entire way.

“What were you thinking, man?” Sanne asked. “How could you do such a thing?”

“I was thinking he is old enough to learn to work.”

When they arrived at the smith’s shop she pushed her husband from the cart to go reclaim her son from the harm in which Merian had left him. Inside, where she had expected to find him crying and miserable, waiting for his rescue, she instead found him studying all the action without complaint and performing his chores with such diligence he did not notice their arrival. All around them the heat from the smith’s oven baked the room, and the hiss of hot metal placed by another assistant to cool in water nearly drove her to distraction, as she told Purchase to get his things so that he could come home.

The smith complained to Merian that they had a deal and that any boy in the county would be happy to apprentice there. “What can I do?” Merian replied to the man. “His mother says he isn’t old enough yet.”

“Fourteen is old enough to work at the devil’s own hearth,” the smith argued.

“Yes, but the problem is he’s only barely ten. He’s just a bit large for his age.”

“I’ll be,” the smith swore, slapping Purchase on the back. “You can come back in a few years, or any other time you like, son. I promise to make you a place.”

Purchase was happy for this, for he had found in the furnace of the shop and the working of the element of fire an excitement he knew would never be present on the farm. “If my papa says so.”

Merian was pleased to be deferred to by the boy and thought his brief stint at work was already beginning to pay dividends. He assured him it would be all right to rejoin the smith as a proper apprentice when he was older. “As long as you do your chores at Stonehouses in the meanwhile,” he said exactly.

Sanne looked from her husband to the smith, trying to decide if they had arranged some pact between themselves that she was not privy to.

“Jasper, you’ll tell me what this is about yet.”

“Say what you want about his age, it’s never too young to teach him good habits and honest work.”

In subsequent years Purchase would recall his day at the smith’s as among the most memorable of his early years. Although he did not speak much about the experience later, the primacy of heat and water and force was nearer to him than the slow plantings his father dragged him around to witness and help with every spring, or the wheat that was harvested when the seedlings had matured. “Eating seems to interest you plenty, though,” Merian, in lighter moods, would always joke when Purchase was older.

Still, Merian worried deeply for all he had sacrificed to create at Stonehouses. Feeding a family is enough satisfaction for your labor, he always tried to console himself, but with a second story added and very nearly the entire land under cultivation or pasture, he thought it would be a shame and a waste if the boy never developed an interest in it. “I wish my father had given me an interest in something,” he reproved whenever the youngster rebelled against his work or teachings. “Or that I had been anything other than an orphan. You don’t know yet how difficult it all is.”

To Purchase’s young ears, his father’s words sounded like little more than scolding. He wished to be a falconer and hunt his birds, or else a governor with the king’s business on his hands, or a knight defeating great dangers. He did not want to be a farmer ruled by weather and caprice. Despite this, he respected his father and tried to obey him. Still, he never did know whether he would be able to please him.

Sanne watched the two of them and hoped they might fulfill the hopes and expectations each had for the other, which she knew to be different from her own for either of them, which were only that each should find contentment.

Merian watched the land, taking satisfaction in what he had done but aware that someday all would be dismantled, and that he should plant on a scale small enough to sustain alone in his old age. He no longer remembered what he made that first year at market, but it was still the season he was proudest of, when he had no company and battled nature without a reserve of food or safety. Having survived that he could not fret for the future. His natural optimism, though, no longer had a place to expand to and express itself.

“He is young still,” Sanne counseled. “You’ll be proud of him yet.”

Merian hoped she was prescient in the way mothers often are — and fathers too seldom — but he spent the fall months after the harvest going on long walks, inspecting both his lands and the new buildings that had gone up in the intervening years. A new road, north and south, now crossed the original westward line ten miles farther on. It moved goods and peoples all in a tumultuous rush, to settle the areas of the even farther-outlying counties, making him wonder how long before everything had been seized and a man either had gotten in with the original parceling or would be left without, until some new land and new parceling of it, fair and first-come, came about. And what about the last one there at the great partitioning? He could not answer but thought he should like to see Chiron again one day and ask him what would happen to him who had no direction, physical or otherwise, to move in away from his original source. Would he be satisfied, never knowing the tear of separation or else pained by the constriction of his movement?

He thought only that the boy better make up his mind on one thing or the other before too long, and that the other lines he had crossed, and been custodian of, must take custody of themselves soon.

He thought again then for the first time in years of Ruth and Ware, called Magnus. In his mind they were locked on the Sorel place, as he knew they always would be, either because she had lost courage to ask what was even in the rights of a bondswoman or because he had been too impatient to wait. He forced this last thing away from himself. He had done what was his responsibility and knew you could no more make someone free than you could keep that same thing away from one determined to have it.

On his walk home from the edge of his lands, he stared out over the rolling hills and valley, which were now under cultivation as far as he could see, and decided then he would continue in any case with the land and no more wait for the boy, Purchase, to show an interest.

He took this new optimism and set out on a project of improvement, so that when he finished it would be the equal of any farm in the colony and his fortune beyond any he might have imagined for himself when first beginning. Jasper Merian set his mind to growing rich.

Sanne, who was well into her middle years now as well, watched her husband in his new ambition for fortune. It reminded her of their early years together and also instilled in her a new hope for the future. She took it that he was decided on being less demanding and more forgiving of the boy, but also that he would rest less of his own ambition upon him. She was more tender in turn with her husband, cooking and teasing as she did all those years ago when he was clearing the second field and she was building her stove.

Purchase that winter often sought his father’s approval for his various pursuits, telling him, “I’m going to build an army camp in the barn” or “I am off in search of pirate’s treasure in the woods just there,” so his father would take it that he was engaged in constructive activity.