The night with her had been tender, and the one before that endearing, but after this there would only be the power of his will and her will when they were with each other, locked in contest.

seven

When Purchase disappeared from Stonehouses everyone thought he had simply slipped off for a few days, as he was wont to do when one thing or other had caught his attention. After three days of not seeing him, though, Merian knew something must have happened and tried to keep Sanne calm while he discovered what it was.

He went first to Magnus to ask whether he knew what had happened to his brother. Magnus, looking at his father, knew he had to confess what little he knew. “He sure had it for that preacher woman,” he offered, leaving Merian to ponder aloud whether Purchase could be foolish and unsensible enough to run off after a married woman. Sanne, when she heard this, was filled with woe, worrying that his emotions had led him somewhere irredeemable.

Magnus, for his part, could not understand his brother at all in this instance and, try as he might, could not relate to him. Not long after Purchase disappeared he had the dream again about the woman who lifted her skirts and taunted him. When he awoke, instead of the malaise the dream usually left him with, he found himself thinking about the nights he had spent at the roadhouse with Purchase. He tried then to recall the women he had done his best to avoid looking at before, as he satisfied himself on these pictures drawn from memory. His nature had gotten up, though, and he knew he would eventually have to do something about it.

When he saw Adelia in the kitchen that next morning his eye lingered on her longer than usual, until the girl grew uncomfortable under his staring. It was the first time since the month he arrived that he had paid any more attention to her than he had the dining room table. This morning, though she was entirely present to him. “What a pretty girl you are,” he said, sounding full of sorrow, as he left the kitchen with his cup of coffee that was mostly milk.

As he walked past her she tried to shrink out of his way, not wanting an involvement that could jeopardize her position.

She thought momentarily about confessing her uneasiness to Sanne later that morning, after the older woman had come into the kitchen, but was not certain Sanne wouldn’t reprimand her as having done something to invite Magnus’s attention, or else of being the kind of servant who was just a certain way, no matter who the man was or how imprudent the idea would strike a reasonable person. In the end she kept her misgivings to herself, deciding out of hand it was all inappropriate to her station and employment.

As the weeks wore on into winter that year, Magnus did not leave her alone but grew more and more forward with his interest and intentions. In the face of such attention, Adelia found herself growing increasingly ambivalent in her refusals, until she was no longer certain about her position in the matter at all.

Sanne was the first to suspect there was something between them, seeing how Adelia became silent whenever Magnus entered a room, always hurrying herself away or else lingering over him, if she thought no one was paying attention.

When she mentioned Adelia to Merian as a possibility for Magnus, though, he was set against the idea and said he would speak to Magnus about his behavior.

“He can’t help if she is who he’s drawn to,” Sanne argued.

“Yes, he can,” Merian answered. “Everything can always be helped, and what can’t be helped belongs to the devil.”

“Who are you to be so high-and-mighty all of a sudden?” Sanne asked. “Their coming together, if that’s what they want to do, can’t hurt anything.”

“It just isn’t proper,” Merian argued. “And what isn’t proper, if it is allowed to happen in a house, begins to break down the very roof.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time such a thing has happened,” she answered. “Besides, there’s nothing improper about it.”

“He should think about himself in a different way,” Merian countered. “She’s not the kind of wife who will make him a good helpmate and partner.”

“And what do you know of that?” Sanne wanted to know. “She’s perfectly capable.”

“That’s just it,” Merian said. “He needs someone more than just perfectly capable, or else he’ll start heading backward.”

“Is that how you chose your wife?”

“It did not hurt,” he answered.

Sanne was angry at him then for assuming airs and growing so far out of his own station that he looked unkindly on another.

“A station isn’t a given thing,” he countered, “but something a man makes for himself if he can, and if he doesn’t like it he changes it or not — loses or gains what he should in the great marketplace — so that by a certain age he should end up in the correct one.

“I came out here without a station. I was not even a slave. A slave is something that belongs to the system of organization of courts and law. But if I had been taken up on charges, what would the law have called me? It would not have properly known. That is why I came to where there was no law and no station, so I might answer the question myself.”

“Well, you are certainly in one by yourself now,” she said, turning her back and giving him her coldness. “Just what do you think he has done?”

At this Merian was silent, but there was still something in the arrangement that did not sit right with him. Nonetheless, he said to Sanne, “Let them do as they please back there, then, but don’t come to me if it turns out poorly.”

Whenever Sanne saw Magnus around Adelia after that she would smile beatifically at both young people, in such a way that put Magnus at ease but made Adelia feel very lonely in the house, for now she knew Sanne would not be her champion against Magnus if it came to that.

She was only twenty-two years old at the time, but she sensed something odd about Magnus’s interest in her. She also knew she had to be very careful in the business of love and husbanding, not having anything else in this world. As he continued in his pursuit, though, she eventually could not bear it any longer and took control of the situation one evening, when they were alone, when she gave him a little kiss.

The kiss fired his imagination and he persuaded her to lie with him in an upstairs room after the house had all gone to sleep. By the time she came to him that night his head ached from needing her. It was very intense and passionate then, and even though she felt she had done something she should not have, she came to him again the following night. They burned through with need again that night as well, but when she visited him again the next day he did not want her as much and, in fact, sent her away at the end of the week.

He could hear her crying through the floor when she went back downstairs, but he was helpless to do anything for her. The day afterward she seemed very tired out as she went about her chores, and Magnus tried to avoid her. She continued on in her theater of sadness for the rest of the week, though, until Merian himself had to intervene.

“That is no way to treat a person,” he said, as the two of them worked at repairing a broken door on the barn. “If you didn’t want her you should have stayed off.”

“It’s not that I didn’t want her, but that I wanted her very badly and don’t anymore,” Magnus answered. “There are no guarantees in things.”

“You should be shamed to talk to your father that way,” Merian said. “Do you think I’m Purchase to just go support you in whatever you want, instead of what is rightful? They have places where you can treat a woman that way, but my wife’s kitchen is not one of them.”

After such a strong rebuke, Magnus did feel ashamed of the way he had behaved and apologized to Merian for it. “I couldn’t help it,” he said. “I just couldn’t.”