Purchase he could not help but go off again after Mary Josepha, as he had those days in the past when she still had another man and he chased after her. Both of them like the original Fools, or else original Lament and Heartache.
Rennton took the child inside his little house and asked his wife to feed him from their pot. While the child ate he unpinned the note from his coat and went out to his neighbor’s place to have it read. He did not need anyone to tell him that something was amiss with the boy and that in likelihood he had been abandoned. It seemed too important a thing to guess at, though, and not be entirely certain. What if they only wanted to leave the child for a little while and then come back? But leaving him out there in the cold, Rennton knew, was the same as giving him away.
He apologized to his neighbor for coming at such an hour, but when he showed him the note the man marveled at the audacity of it. “Imagine them not just leaving the boy free and clear but leaving him with a lien they want you to pay off.” Rennton thanked him for reading the note and went back to his own house, puzzling more how Purchase could do something like that than the inconvenience it would cause him.
When he returned he told his wife what Purchase and Mary Josepha had done, and she argued with him that it was Purchase who had done more wrong, because Mary Josepha only left the child with its father, as you would if going to the market or away for a visit to relatives.
Rennton did not argue with her — he never argued with her — but said he would take up the task Purchase had left to him — as it was good friendship, and someone had to take up responsibility for the little creature — and try, beginning the day after next, to deliver the boy safely to the place in the note. The boy, Caleum he was called, felt very safe in that house for the two days he was there and seldom cried for missing his parents. He was a manual of composure, and no one watching him would have known any of this, especially as he held his tongue and did not speak.
When they set out for Stonehouses, though, the boy was at first upset by the voyage and the life of the sea. He was almost as disturbed by the journey from Providence to Edenton as he had been when he finally realized for himself that his parents were gone away without him and what his condition was. Rennton, when he addressed him, always started out calling him Caleum, but in the end found himself saying poor boy or pitiful orphan.
It was on this voyage that Caleum began to speak again and ask his fate, as the sounds of the ship and its other passengers had unsettled him so he did not know what would become of him. Looking over the side of the vessel as they rounded Cape Lookout, the ink-dark water seemed lit from underneath by a strange, ominous light that would show itself if only the waves could part far enough. He looked at this mystery, hoping the water would leap higher and show the bottom of the ocean, but soon the waves began to toss the ship and make it creak with a horrible sound that seemed to him like an old person screaming. He ran back from the rail and sought out Rennton in the excitement of the sailors trying to fasten down the ship for the storm they had entered. When he found his caretaker, he could only think to ask him if they were going to hell. He asked this very calmly, as if he were prepared should that be their ultimate destination.
Rennton told the boy they were going to no such place but were only caught in a squall such is normal at sea in that season. Caleum went back to the rail of the ship and looked out again. This time he spied another boat on the horizon that was sailing under calm winds, and a young couple stood at the rail holding hands. The woman, seeing the boy, kissed her hand with great intensity then blew the kiss to him. Although she looked very different, and he had never seen her before, he felt when he received it that he had been kissed by his own mother. He waved back to the other ship, until they were nearly gone from sight, and the wind in the sails of his boat forced him to seek shelter below.
Rennton, when the boy came back, tried his best to console him, but he could not help worrying aloud what they were thinking to leave him in such a state of safety. He did not judge them though, and while not one man in a hundred thousand would have done what he did, he was good as the trust Purchase placed in him. When the boat docked in Carolina they disembarked, and the two continued overland together toward Stonehouses.
nine
In the end it was Sanne who made a way for Adelia in Magnus’s affections, years after the start of the affair and even then under the most terrible of circumstances.
The night after she saw him riding away in the snow, Adelia knew Magnus was lost to her. While he sat in the tavern, she allowed her desire for him to seize and run rampant in her imagination. When he stood and, instead of coming to beg her forgiveness, went away, her heart clinched inside her chest and she lost her breath briefly. While he sat out on the horse in the snow, she was aware of him watching her and still thought it only a matter of time before he came back and they were together. When he rode off into the darkness, though, Content had to close the tavern, so distraught was she to see him ride away.
Nor would she come down from her room upstairs in the days that followed, and whenever Dorthea brought her food she sat at the edge of the bed and shoved it away, asking, “What have I done to be treated like this?”
All the sympathy and outrage shown to her, though, did nothing to move Magnus. Sanne, seeing how he behaved, knew it was not how he wished to be. Still, when she prayed at night, she began to wonder whether he was not hardening heaven against himself.
That was in the days immediately before illness took her, and life at Stonehouses changed forever.
When she first noticed it, one day in early spring, the crab on her chest was already livid, and extended out over her breast like a lover’s jealous hand. When she gazed upon it she thought of her former husband, and how, when they were still a young couple, he would sometimes clutch her with maddening force as he swore his love. She guarded the crab as a secret for months then, as she had once guarded his affection for her.
When its limbs spread and began grasping for the other side of her body, though, she could no longer bear it. “This much will always be yours. All the rest belongs here to Jasper Merian and Stonehouses,” she told her first man, unhappy to have him reaching for so much from where he was.
After breakfast she sent her new girl into town with a note, which the girl left at the doctor’s place at lunchtime. He came round to Stonehouses before supper. After the examination he told her she could be happy that they now had hemlock, which was much better than previous medicines to treat such things, and that this procedure was not known even two years before in London, let alone in the colonies.
She thanked him and, in the months that followed, consumed a potion of hemlock twice a day, increasing the amount of the herb bit by bit, until what she ate in the third month would have been enough to murder a bull. There was no effect on her, but neither did her condition worsen. The doctor, when he came around, said recovery was only just around the corner.
When the crab began to grow again and turn scirrhous, he recommended to then a treatment of mercury and poultices. Sanne felt her strength beginning to depart around this time, and the afternoon walks she took to breathe of the deep pine air began to grow shorter, until she could barely make a full turn through her garden. This is when she sent to town to get Adelia back from Content’s. The girl came to her immediately, not thinking of Magnus but only that Sanne, that soul of piety, needed her aid.
She nursed her for six months, giving her her medicines and applying a poultice twice a day, the first made from bark, the second from mercury. When the symptoms failed to go away the doctor began to let her blood with leeches, saying such diseases were caused by malign humors that needed only to be released. He prescribed a new poultice of nightshade and told Sanne she must have her daily walk no matter how short it was.