“Who would have won?” Magnus asked, as Purchase helped him into the house.

“Hard to say,” Purchase replied. “But for the offer she made I would have gladly lost.”

“Not me,” Magnus told him. “Not for all the money that was piled on that table.”

“It wasn’t so much,” Purchase said.

“More than I’ve seen.”

“I would have given even more for her offer.”

“What about her white man?”

“I suppose that’s who would have lost.”

“Not with you paying through the nose for what you could have upstairs for a lot less.”

“I’ll have it later tonight for nothing,” he claimed.

“How so?”

“I left her where I can meet up with her.”

“You’ll stay in gunfights at this rate of living.”

“And you for stealing horses.”

“What horse did I ever steal?”

“The one you rode home on.”

“It was a mistake. I’ll return it first thing in the morning,” Magnus said, falling quiet. But he thought the woman from the bar reminded him of the wicked one in his dream. “I don’t think drinking is much for me.”

“Do you need help getting inside?”

“I’ll manage.”

Purchase watched as Magnus made his way inside, before turning and riding back to the room behind his workshop, where he had left the woman.

When he arrived he found she had gone without leaving any sign. He returned home alone not very long afterward, and in the days that followed he asked everyone what they knew of her. Try as he might, though, he could only gather bits and pieces of stories, each new one contradicting the last, so that all he knew for certain was that she had not waited and was gone from him.

four

He is a tiller of the soil with little interest in the affairs of other people, save the family that has taken him in, and no real bonds but to the air and the land that gives them sustenance. After his initial buffeting by the newness of the place around him he settles back into himself, keeping his own company and never complaining, but only occasionally imagining to himself other ways certain things might be done. At Sorel’s Hundred he engaged in the same idle wondering until it became a permanent ache and then a murderous craving he would have acted on, but for his mother. For her sake he held his hand patiently. After her he can be patient no longer.

* * *

At Stonehouses the days were more flexible and he worked as he saw fit, discounting, of course, the things Merian himself was rigid about and would broker no dissent or discussion over. He allowed Magnus a free hand with everything else, letting him, for example, experiment with the crops, if he pleased, but not on too large a scale, and even with his time — so long as all the work was done and no complaints from the men. Where he was rigid, though, he was hard as any overseer on the coast.

That second week he was on the land, after wages were paid out, Merian saw Magnus turn his money over to Purchase to cover his gaming loss from the week before.

“I told you it was for fun and my invitation,” Purchase said, refusing the money.

“You go ahead and take it,” Merian said sharply, startling the two of them, who had not seen him approach.

Under Merian’s watchful eye, Magnus paid from his wages the same number and kind of coins Purchase had given to him at the roadhouse.

“Now, how much do you have left out of what you just gave Purchase?” Merian asked, after the debt had been paid.

Magnus looked at the specie in his hand for a long time before answering. “Five shillings.”

“If I told you I was going to give you another five shillings, how would that figure up?”

Magnus thought hard, carefully imagining the coins in his palm before answering. “Ten shillings.”

“Now tell me the number of pence in that.”

Magnus was silent.

“What about parts of a pound?” Merian continued, as Magnus began to grow hot with embarrassment.

“You don’t have to make a fool of me,” he said finally, glaring at Merian.

“I’m not trying to embarrass you,” Merian answered. “I’m trying to help you get on better than you got on before. For that you need to know proper ciphering. A man can always trust somebody else to read something out for him, without too much worry over it, because what’s important here ain’t written down, unless you count the Bible — and there’s whole legions of preachers tripping over each other to do that for you — but if a man can’t cipher he can’t trust nobody to make up the balance or tell him what it is. Purchase is your brother, so he won’t cheat you out of your shillings. Then again he might. Do you trust him not to?”

Magnus thought about it, before answering, “I don’t think he would.”

“Well,” Merian said, “I’ve known him a bit longer than you, and he is dear as life to me, but I’ll count my own silver.”

Every day after that, when he left the fields, Magnus had to sit with either Merian or Sanne and practice arithmetic for hours on end, until he went to sleep at night with his brain aching from pondering figures and symbols. Still, he stuck with it every night that entire season and all the way into the next, until eventually he could count as well as a Dutchman.

When he found arrows out in one of the far fields, though, it did not take arithmetic to figure out there were three of them, all deadly.

At first Merian thought they were only old arrows that had been held in the ground for a long time, since the last hostilities with the Catawba, but he soon saw they were new and still bore the markings of being cut from their source. There had not been Indian troubles around Berkeley since before Merian settled there, but he knew immediately that the caravans pressing westward must have gone far enough out that the Indian was beginning to press back the other way.

He did not say anything else but gave Magnus an old musket to carry with him from then on, when working in the more distant fields.

“Can you shoot?”

“I can,” Magnus said, taking the gun.

“Good. If you see anything that looks like it needs to be shot, you do it.”

The next day as he worked out there again, with the gun slung over his shoulder, Magnus saw something approaching from the westward country and stood up to investigate. It looked to him like a wild animal of unusually large proportions, but as it grew closer he saw it was a man carrying pelts and skins for the market. It wasn’t until the man was almost right up on him that he saw that the pelts were human scalps, strung together and wrapped around his shoulders like sashes.

In addition to the scalps he also wore a double necklace of fingers, ears, and what Magnus finally figured out were noses. Other than that gruesome vesture he was stone naked.

In his arms he carried a large unadorned box, which he protected very carefully as he made his way up the road

When the man saw Magnus staring, he stopped at a distance and pointed at the articles on his person. “Any one of them will make you a good medicine,” he said.

When Magnus failed to reply, the man set down the box and opened it. “I have the vitals too, if that’s your aim: red, negro, white, whichever you want.”

Magnus looked into the box and saw a collection of grisly organ parts, and in the middle of it an intact human head. He turned away his face and looked back up the road.

“Well, I thought neggers liked such things for their doctoring. The one in the box was very powerful. Very good medicine.” The man closed his parcel of death and took it back up in his arms.

“Who is he?” asked Magnus, who had not spoken since seeing what the man was.

“I thought you could hear and talk,” the Indian agent replied. “I said to myself as I stopped here, Lacey, you done seen many things ye never thought ye would, and it’s fair you’ll see one or two more, but a mute Ethiop with a rifle, that you will never witness.”