He took her in, and they lived for a while in great harmony, each forgiving the other for the things they had done to cause one another misery. They lived above the smithy where he worked, and the rooms were always warm from the furnace, and she set about making a home for the three of them there. He had long ago melted the cage down, and from its remains crafted a great wrought-iron bed, which they slept on as husband and wife, for she claimed that a man and woman could marry themselves to each other with no more officiating than that. That it was the way it had always been done until the church thought to step in and charge a fee, but the institution was still built of just two people.
Whatever this state was called, it was blissful to him, and he went to work regular most mornings, except those he stayed home to be with her. On those holidays he always worked late into the evening the following day so that they always had dependable meals and warm clothes against the seaside winters. From this routine, life in the house took on the contours of regularity that did much to ease both their minds.
She had come over from Africa not ten years earlier and Oswin had originally been her master, until he had a vision one night and immediately upon waking repented of how he lived, saying now that it was not proper for one human to own another. When he set his slaves free he had thirty other souls he had been responsible for during the previous portion of his life. He told them they were all permitted to go, but he said to Mary Josepha that he would be much pleased if she stayed with him of her own volition. It surprised her, for he had never seemed to so much as look at her before. She agreed to stay with him, and they were happy awhile.
In time she found he was a very jealous husband and snuck off with Purchase, at first to punish him. The second time, however, it had been because she had found she preferred to be with Purchase and had no want of punishing anyone, if such were possible.
They wrestled with this for the years they were on the road together, him telling her she was his wife and her saying it was difficult to find a difference between that and being his slave. Shamed, he would be silent a bit, but when she abandoned him for Purchase he beat her to within an inch of her life. The next day, heavy of heart, he gave two very popular sermons: the first was about the rights of slaves to freedom, and the second was about the duty of the wife and the pain of marriage. “Both are among the truest penance to God,” he claimed. That day they saved two dozen souls, more if one included the slaves one of the parishioners set free after the sermon.
Purchase was irresistible to her after that and she had come to him in Maryland intending to stay, until she found herself in the cage. When she returned to Oswin he at first took her in, and even kept her after he saw her condition, thinking perhaps it was his issue she bore. As soon as the child was born, though, he put them both out in the snow. He himself died very soon afterward, of an affliction either of the nervous system or of the blood. He had two different doctors and on this final diagnosis neither could agree.
That winter and spring husband, wife, and child were all content as could be in the warm little room above the shop, and when summer came they talked of visiting Stonehouses. It was put off because of Purchase’s work, which picked up during the warm months, and on account of the child still being so small, but Mary Josepha gave every impression of being the most diligent of mothers. She seemed to be rid of the wandering that was in her blood before.
When Purchase came upstairs from the workshop she would have a meal waiting for him, and on Sundays they went to the Baptist church together for worship and praying on the things they could find no other answers for, or refuge from, in daily life.
It was here she first felt the need to minister again. Even though Rhode Island was the most liberal of the colonies, there was not yet a significant congregation of people who professed as they did, for Purchase had come to be an adherent of her unorthodox beliefs as well. She expressed her dissatisfaction at first by attending different churches to hear what their ministers had to preach. Usually she went for no more than a week, but sometimes she would maintain interest in a congregation for as long as eighteen months before moving on, until she had been to nearly every church in Providence. In the end she knew it was simply no use. They were none of them as liberal as they preached, all were beholden to an ordering she recognized as false, and none could explain these falsehoods away.
She began to give sermons in the square on her own, but what had been popular among the country people caused a great sensation in the town. There were two principal charges brought against her. The first was that she was uneducated and so could not interpret the Gospels; no one claimed her to be heretical, because heresy requires knowing and they denied her ability in this endeavor. The second was that she was a woman and, on those grounds alone, should stop and desist.
When they brought the complaint, they first spoke to Purchase, but he supported her steadfastly. “If she has it to preach, I don’t see the harm. There’s a thousand churches in Providence.” The response did not endear him to anyone and soon his business began to decline, among both the whites and free Negroes.
Purchase told her it was nothing to cause them worry, and they would withstand the privations of opinion. For Mary Josepha, however, it was more than people talking against her, it was that she could not practice her chosen craft and belief. “It is my calling, and the price of God’s love has always been and ever will be suffering,” she repeated, and he knew this is what she truly believed and that he was in danger of her leaving. “Better a liar with true words than a false prophet and none of it worth telling.”
He did not want to know anything more about that kind of love and told her they would leave the state and return the coming autumn to his people at Stonehouses, where there was always a place for them.
What she wanted foremost was to preach, and to know again the feeling of bringing souls to God on what she thought of as reasonable terms, even if there was theater out in front of that. “I will have the same problem there as here,” she said. “The only way to keep going for me is to move and not rest still.” He told her they should at least try his people first before settling into that kind of life, as he did not think it would be any great bargain for any of them.
He returned from work one day soon after that to find her gone again, as he had all those days in the past. This time, however, he was not frantic in his action but very deliberate. It was northern autumn and already beginning to freeze over during the nights.
He dressed the boy in heavy shoes and a thick warm sweater underneath a heavy coat. His head was covered in a woolen hat. Purchase affixed a bag containing some coins of silver in the pockets of his coat and another of gold inside his sweater. He also wrote two notes, one for the messenger and another for the receiver.
He then took the boy in his arms and carried him out into the night and to the other side of Providence, down near the quays. It was the home of one of his friends and customers, a half-caste sailor named Rennton who belonged to the Antinomian church with his wife and often did business in the farmost reaches of the Crown’s possessions, including the southern colonies.
In his father’s arms the boy felt safe when they left the house, but soon a sense of dizziness overtook him as they bounded over the small hills, which looked enormous from his perspective, and moved toward the fish smell of the docks. He knew something strange was afoot, but when his father set him down on the unfamiliar porch and told him to stay quiet, the child obeyed. He was still quiet an hour later when Rennton came home and found him there, and in fact would not speak for two full days afterward.