One honest reason.
And I’ll know at once if it isn’t.
Thomas sat with the question, and the fire cracked, and Giles slept on, and every practiced answer he owned lined up in his head like tools on a bench.
He could flatter.
He could frighten — paint the bay men greedier than they were.
He could charm; the evening proved the charm worked.
And Blackstone, watching him across the fire with those patient, starved-for-company eyes, would smell each one, and the door that had opened over five hours would close forever.
Fairly as if he knew every word you know.
Elizabeth’s hand flat on the table.
So Thomas told the truth.
Not all of it.
But nothing beside it.
“Because Winthrop needs your ground,” he said, “and I need your ground to matter.”
Blackstone’s eyes narrowed.
“Go on.”
“The bay men will buy your whole neck because they must — their people are sick on bad water and your spring is the cure.
To them you’re an obstacle with a deed.
They’ll pay you once, thank God twice, and in ten years no one in their fine new town will remember your name.” Thomas leaned forward.
“I can’t buy your neck.
I haven’t the purse, and if I claimed I did you’d rightly show me the door.
I can buy a piece of it — the harbor side, marked out fair, paid part now and part yearly, recorded before witnesses at Plymouth court.
Our court.
Not theirs.
So the record of what you owned and what you chose sits beyond the reach of the very colony that wants to swallow you.”
“A piece.” Blackstone turned it over.
“And why does a Plymouth schoolmaster want a piece of a peninsula forty miles from his school?”
“Because I think your three hills will carry a great town someday.
The spring, the harbor, the lay of the ground — I’ve an eye for where things want to be built.
It’s the one gift I trust.” True.
All of it true, and the four centuries underneath it silent.
“I may be wrong.
If I’m wrong, I’ve paid you good iron and yearly silver for a sheep run, and you’ll have the better of me, and I’ll deserve it.
That’s the wager, plainly.
You’re not the fool in it either way.”
For a long moment Blackstone said nothing.
Then: “You argue like a man who expects to be believed.”
“I argue like a man whose wife made him swear to deal with you fairly.” Thomas smiled, tired and real.
“She said: fairly as if he knew everything you know.
She’s the conscience of the operation.
And at that — at last — William Blackstone laughed.
A rusty, startled sound, like a gate opening after years.
They spent the next morning walking the ground.
Thomas chose the harbor side, below the easternmost hill: frontage on deep water, the flat behind it wide enough for warehouses and wharves that did not yet exist anywhere but in his head.
He marked the bounds generously against himself — twice, when a line could have been argued either way, he called it for Blackstone, out loud, and watched the hermit notice.
“You bargain badly, Master Wright.”
“I bargain long, Master Blackstone.
There’s a difference.
A man who skins you today buys one field.
A man who deals fair buys every deal you’ll ever make again — and your good word to the bay men when they come asking who I am.”
“Hm.” Blackstone looked out over the water.
“And the payments.
Iron and cloth now, silver yearly.
What surety do I have of the years, if your eye for ground proves wrong and your purse dries?”
“The court record.
And this.” Thomas took the folded sheet from his coat — terms he’d drafted by firelight while the house slept, in his plain careful hand.
“Read it before you sign it.
Read everything before you sign it.
My father’s rule, and the only inheritance he left me that never wore out.”
Blackstone read it.
Twice, slowly, in the cold morning light, the way a Cambridge man reads.
And when he looked up, something in his face had settled.
“There’s a term here I didn’t ask for.
Number six.”
“No.
That one I’m asking for.”
“‘Whensoever Mr.
Blackstone shall remove from Shawmut, if remove he ever should—'” Blackstone read it aloud, slowly, “‘—his library shall have a home at the school in Plymouth: housed, copied, and taught from, in a room bearing his name, for so long as the school shall stand.'” He lowered the paper.
His voice had gone carefully flat, the way a man’s voice does when it’s holding something heavy.
“And if I never remove?
If I die on this hill with my books, an old man no colony managed to swallow?”
“Then the clause costs nothing, and I’ll have lost only the pleasure of naming a room after the second-best conversation I’ve had in eleven years.”
“Second-best.”
“My wife exists,” Thomas said, “and may one day read the minutes.”
The rusty laugh again — easier this time, as if the gate were learning its hinges.
Blackstone looked down at the paper a long moment.
Then he walked to his shelf, took down a small worn volume, and held it out.
“Herbert.
The poems.
You stared at it last night for a full minute and said nothing, which told me more than the five hours.” He pushed it into Thomas’s hands.
“Surety of the years, Master Wright.
A loan, mind — not a gift. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
You’ll have to keep coming back.”
Thomas took the book.
For a moment he could not manage anything at all.
“Then we have terms,” he finally said.
“We have terms.
Fetch your enormous sleeping friend to witness, and let’s sign before I remember I hate people.”
They signed by the window, in Blackstone’s careful Cambridge hand and Thomas’s plain one, Giles witnessing with the round solemnity of a man who had slept through the entire negotiation and would claim credit for it in Plymouth forever.
Thomas paid the first consideration in Pratt’s iron, good cloth, and seed — and then set one thing more on the table, unasked.
The herbal.
His own.
The book Nathaniel had learned sage from.
Blackstone frowned at it.
“That’s not in the terms.”
“No,” Thomas said.
“It’s the part of the price that isn’t business.”
The hermit of Shawmut looked at the little book for a long moment, and then at the man who’d rowed it through January ice, and whatever he concluded he kept to himself.
But he walked them down to the boat, which — Giles observed later, all the way home, at length — was more escort than the bull had ever granted anyone.
The tide was making.
Thomas took his oar.
The signed paper lay wrapped in double oilcloth against his chest, one recorded, defensible, honestly-purchased foothold on the ground that history had promised to somebody else.
Not a theft, he thought, pulling.
A seed.
Planted honest, in front of witnesses.
Now let the centuries argue with the record.
They were clearing the harbor mouth when Giles stopped rowing.
“Thomas.”
He was looking north.
Thomas turned.
A sail.
Small with distance, standing in along the far shore of the bay — not a fishing boat’s rag of canvas but a proper rigged shallop, moving with purpose, straight toward the peninsula they had just left.
Too far to read faces.
Not too far to read the flag of the bay colony at her masthead.
“You said spring,” Giles said quietly.
“You said Winthrop would treat with him in the spring.”
Thomas watched the sail come on, and the cold that went through him had nothing to do with January.
So did the books, he thought.
The books said spring.
The books have been wrong before.