The barrel lowered.
“A man who brings a book to a gunfight,” Blackstone said, “is either a fool or the first interesting thing to happen to me in three years.” He let the fowling piece hang at his side.
“Come up.
Slowly.
And mind the bull — he shares my opinion of visitors and has less restraint about it.”
They came up.
Thomas kept the herbal in plain sight the whole way, the way you keep your hands visible around a wary dog.
Up close the man was all contradiction.
A gentleman’s hands gone rough with cattle and digging.
A scholar’s stoop under a farmer’s coat.
Grey threading a beard he plainly cut himself, badly.
His eyes moved over Giles once — measured him, filed him as harmless muscle — and settled on Thomas with the flat attention of a man who had spent years with only his own thoughts for company and had grown very good at reading faces because faces were all he had left to read.
“William Blackstone,” he said.
He did not offer a hand.
“Thomas Wright.
Of Plymouth.
This is Giles Hopkins, who rows better than he complains, which is saying a great deal.”
Something almost moved at the corner of Blackstone’s mouth.
Almost.
“Inside, then.
Before we all freeze and the bull gets his wish.”
The house was one long room, and Thomas forgot the cold the instant he crossed the threshold.
Books.
Two walls of them.
Shelved floor to rafter in a wilderness, in defiance of damp and sense and every hardship that should have made a man burn them for warmth years ago.
Near two hundred volumes — more than Thomas had seen in one place since a library four centuries away, in a life he could not speak of.
He stopped just inside the door.
He did not mean to.
His feet simply stopped.
“You may look,” Blackstone said, watching him.
“Most men who come here look at the cattle.”
Latin.
Greek.
English.
Divinity shelved beside husbandry beside a stretch of pure poetry.
He read the spines with his hands clasped behind his back, not touching, and his throat tightened in a way he had not felt in years and could not have explained to a soul in this century.
“You’ve carried these across an ocean,” he said.
“And out here.
Alone.”
“I misliked the lord bishops in England.” Blackstone was building up the fire, watching his guest sidelong.
“I find I mislike the lord brethren of the bay only slightly less.
A man can flee both, it turns out, if he’s willing to flee far enough and keep poor company.” A dry beat.
“The books were the only company I couldn’t leave behind.”
“Nor could I.” Thomas said it before he weighed it.
“There was a time — before Plymouth — I lived in rooms like this.
More of them than I can make you believe.
I’ve spent eleven years in a colony with eleven books to its name, and I built a school around them like a miser guarding coin.” He turned from the shelf.
“You asked on the hill what a man rows through January ice to take.
The honest answer is nothing.
I’d have made the crossing for the hour, sir.
The trade is only my excuse to earn a second one.”
Blackstone straightened from the fire.
For the first time the guardedness in him shifted — not gone, but tilted, the way a door tilts when a bolt draws back somewhere inside it.
“Sit,” he said.
“You’ll eat.
And we’ll see whether you talk as well as you covet.”
They talked for five hours.
Thomas would remember it, long after, as one of the few conversations of his second life he had not managed, steered, or half-invented in advance.
He simply talked.
Cambridge, which Blackstone had left; Leyden, which Thomas claimed and half-knew.
Whether solitude was a vocation or a flight — Blackstone argued flight, of himself, with the merciless honesty of a man who had had three years to cross-examine his own witness and no one to lie to.
They argued orchards.
Blackstone had grafted apple varieties no one else in New England possessed, and when Thomas asked the right question about rootstock the last of the wariness went out of the man’s shoulders entirely.
Giles fell asleep by the fire around the third hour, honestly and without shame, and neither of them woke him.
It was full dark when the talk finally turned to the thing under the talk.
“You know they’re coming,” Thomas said.
“The bay people.
Come spring.”
Blackstone poked the fire and did not pretend to misunderstand.
“I know it.
Their boats have been in my water since autumn, taking soundings, thinking I don’t see.
The spring here decides it — half their company sits sick on bad water while a clean spring runs on my hill.” He said it without heat, the way a man states the weather that will drown him.
“They’ll want the whole neck.
And they’ll come as a colony, with a charter and a hundred signatures, and I’ll be one man with a fowling piece and a bull.
We both know the shape of that bargain.”
“Then let me offer you a different one, before they can.”
“Ah.” Blackstone set down the poker.
And now, at last, the guardedness came back into his face all the way — but sharper this time, edged with something Thomas respected far more than fear: intelligence, fully awake.
“There it is.
The book on the hill.
The five hours.
The right question about rootstock.” He was not smiling, but he was not far from it, and it was not a warm expression.
It was the look of a lonely, clever man who has enjoyed an evening enormously and has just remembered, too late to take the pleasure back, that pleasure is exactly how a clever man is taken.
“You’re good, Master Wright.
I’ll grant you that freely — the best evening I’ve had in three years, and I only now feel the hook in it.” He leaned forward, firelight hard on his face.
“So let’s have it plain, since we’re past pretending.
Winthrop comes in the spring with a whole colony at his back and a king’s charter in his hand.
You come in January with a book and a boatful of tools and a great deal of charm.”
He spread his rough scholar’s hands.
“Give me one reason — one honest reason, and I’ll know at once if it isn’t — why I should sell my ground to you.
Instead of to them.”