The town where Purchase took Magnus was not Berkeley, though. Rather, they rode some five miles in the opposite direction to a small building set off in the woods with nothing else around it. Inside men and women of all stripes and countries milled around, and it was easy for Magnus to see what kind of place he had been brought to, even if he had never been to one before. It was also immediately plain that Purchase spent a great deal of time here, for the proprietor seemed to know him well.
The two brothers ordered drinks from the bar and sat alone with each other, not speaking very much but watching the room in silence. When two men sitting at a card table went off with a pair of the harlots, who had procured their attention beyond what the cards could, a place at the gaming table was free for the first time.
“Would you care to play?” Purchase asked.
“I don’t have money.”
“It is my invitation.”
They sat down with the four already present: a Creole and an Indian, who didn’t seem to know either each other or anyone else there. In addition there was an Englishman and an African woman, who seemed to be partners of some sort or other. When they sat, the woman began the deal, but neither the Creole nor the Indian had very good cards and soon put down their hands. Purchase proceeded to bet with abandon, studying the African woman very carefully, as the Englishman made friendly talk with Magnus. When there were as many coins stacked on the table as he had ever seen, Magnus had sense to put down his cards and watch the other players, knowing that the monies he had already lost were not his but Purchase’s.
Purchase, though, did not seem to care about the coins and continued to put more into the stack in the center of the table, until the Englishman also withdrew and there was only Purchase and the woman left in the game.
By now the men who had sat there earlier were finished with their business and took seats at the bar to watch the card game unfold. “She’ll have his very skin before long,” one of the men said, looking at the cards on the table. At this Purchase cut his eyes menacingly and pulled a pistol from his belt. “Not before I’ve had yours if you keep flapping,” he answered, leaving the gun on the table pointed at the other man. The man who had been threatened was quiet after that, as much from fear of Purchase as the fact that the gun was made of unmixed gold. “It will put a golden bullet in you too,” Purchase said, looking steadily at his cards.
Magnus could tell very little about who had the better hand from the cards that showed on the table, but when the next one was revealed, he saw Purchase’s face slump and the woman begin to glitter. “It’s all right, Sugarloaf,” she said to him. “If you lose I’ll let you stay the night with me in my room.” The Englishman who had been her partner was not pleased to hear her talk so saucily, but he held his tongue, waiting for the last card to be turned over.
Before it could be revealed, though, there was a ruckus outside that spilled immediately through the door of the tavern. Three highwaymen stood back-to-back-to-back, holding guns, and began moving through the room, taking purses from the patrons at the bar. When one of them saw the money stacked in front of the cards, and the golden pistol, he broke away from the others and went to take the bounty from the gaming table. As he held his hand over the pile of money, though, a shot rang out and he fell where he had stood.
Contrary to what Purchase had claimed, the bullet from the gun was made of lead. He and the woman then jumped from the table and rushed toward the door, as the other robbers fired randomly into the bar. In the melee Magnus searched for a way out, before finally discovering a back door and sneaking out into the hushed night air. The scene he left behind was of bloody carnage, and when he found his horse he whipped it into a frenzied gallop, not caring which direction he was going as long as it was away from that place, before he was shot or the authorities descended upon them.
The horse half obeyed and half did as it pleased, until Purchase rode up from the other direction and took the reins, as Magnus drooped in the saddle full of liquor. The jostling of the ride was awful on his head, and when they reached the road before Stonehouses, he climbed down and began walking the horse to the stable, unable to ride any longer.
“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.