“It’s not me going, it’s being bonded to begin with,” he answered.
She did not respond but allowed him to draw in closer as they negotiated whether it would be a night of greater or lesser rest.
In the morning, before Ruth set out, there came a knock at the door. When she opened it a small child blurted that Mrs. Sorel said Merian should come by the house and say hello.
Ruth looked at Merian and asked whether he had heard.
“Tell her I’ll be there directly,” he answered. He had thought fitfully about how he would encounter the Sorels on his ride from Stonehouses, but the scenarios always pushed against, then overflowed, the boundaries of his imagining. Now, once it was put to him, he tried to assume the best possible mood. He finished dressing and went up to the house as commanded, mindful of his original purpose in coming.
In the kitchen he greeted the new cook cordially and sat down familiarly to wait for his audience with Mrs. Sorel. Sitting there he felt like a younger version of himself and tried to remind himself of all that had changed for him since he lived here.
Nothing proved changed, though, when Hannah Sorel entered the kitchen. He found himself standing promptly then as on any day in the past to greet her.
“Jasper, Mr. Sorel is at Richmond,” she said, sweeping into the room. “He will be upset to have missed you.”
Merian’s breath stopped in his chest but he was quick to mask the fact, asking how she had been and admiring how much the place seemed to be prospering.
“It is not the same since you left,” she answered. “I’m almost sorry we let you go.”
“Well, I’m almost sorry I left,” he replied, playing in this game with her.
She asked him again how he was getting on and then whether he had been keeping up with church. “You haven’t joined with those Congregationalists or any nonesuch out there, have you?”
“I hardly know what that is,” he said, assuring her he kept much to his own company as he had always done. He asked again when she said Mr. Sorel would be getting back. “Because I actually wanted to speak to him, if I could, about Ruth and Magnus.”
“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.