“I hope that involves supper daily.”
“It does indeed! And breakfast and dinner besides. Now—leave your bags and I will show you the special project I mentioned in my letters.”
Lyman stiffened. “Why should I leave my bags here at this house? I imagined I would take up residency immediately in the other.”
Grosvenor shook his head. “You have not seen that house, Mr. Lyman. It requires significant work before it is livable.”
“But I thought you said there wasn’t room elsewhere? That all the beds here in the main house and in the cabins were spoken for.” Lyman suddenly suspected Grosvenor meant for him to sleep in a hay loft.
“That’s true. But as I told you, our intent is for the stone house to ultimately function as a men’s dormitory. When it is restored, the unmarried women of the farm—they sleep upstairs in this house, several to a bed—will emigrate to the cabins, which are currently populated by the farm’s bachelors.”
“Where will I sleep in the meantime?”
“Until then I’m sorry to say the best we can offer is a couch and a blanket in the parlor. But! Having read in your letters of your considerable skill in carpentry, I imagine the restoration will take a few weeks at most, upon which the ladies will migrate to their new homes and you can join the men in the stone house.”
An unease stirred Lyman’s abdomen and he regarded Grosvenor, who in that moment resembled another in his mind’s eye, with a strange and near-malicious light. The thought of living with a bunch of uncouth and smelly farm hands revolted him; he would have to use whatever influence he could accrue to move in with Grosvenor and his family in the main house. “If it’s all the same to you,” he said, “allow me to look over the house before passing judgment. Perhaps the assessment of my experienced eye won’t be as dire as yours? Assuming so, I may even sleep there tonight.”
Grosvenor shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Lyman’s host—now his coworker and comrade—led him through the kitchen, and after a brief introduction to his wife, out the back door and between the barn and various sheds and outbuildings to a double-rutted road. They set off along this following a horse fence, and as they walked, Grosvenor the tour guide pointed out the contents of various fields, green and full in the late summer, where men hoed and weeded. The most common of these plantings were potatoes and corn and onions, the latter grown mostly as a cash crop in support of their community.
“Though I do hope you like onions,” said Grosvenor, “because the corn has been terribly wormy this year and by February, I assure you, another plate of potatoes on the table will be an almost unbearable sight.”
Lyman indicated a pen and shed opposite the fields. “And the hogs?”
“Again, largely for market. Though we eat what bacon we can spare.”
“All this food and yet you sound as if you starve.”
“We do not starve, Mr. Lyman. It is just that the cost of operations has—well.” He stopped himself. “In any event, I will be glad to see the old stone house be put right so that we can invite more young women to join our experiment. We have had a great imbalance of male applicants who seem attracted to Bonaventure mainly by some of, ah, Monsieur Fourier’s more French ideas, shall we say. Mrs. Grosvenor has been adamant since day one that for Bonaventure to shine as an example to the world, the labor and contributions of both men and women must be perceived as equally worthy—but in order to do so, we must have equal numbers of men and women themselves. Otherwise any success we achieve will be attributed to that imbalance.”
A spur led off from the main road. On either side of this cul-de-sac, eight single-room cabins faced each other beneath leafy branches, the maple logs of their walls blond and bright.
“We had the cabins built with capital leftover from the sum used to buy the property. Alas for you, room in neither inn nor manger there.”
“I take it those are the bachelors’ quarters.”
“Seven of them. The last is inhabited by the Albys, a married couple and their young daughter.”
“You had money remaining after the sale? So the cost was less than expected?”
“I was able to negotiate a lower price, yes. The farm had been abandoned for more than half a century. The estate was eager to sell. With the remaining difference we were able to make repairs to the main house—which we call the Consulate, by the way—and to build the cabins and buy some equipment.”
“Estate?”
“The estate of the Garrick family. They were the original settlers of the area, sometime in the late sixteen-hundreds during the Restoration era. They came over from Dunwich—the old Dunwich, in England. A rather large city at one time, I believe, until it fell into the sea, or the sea fell onto it, I suppose. An ancient family much reduced. There was some scandal, so the stories say, some accusation of witchcraft or paganism centering around the familial patriarch—you know how it must have been in those days, Charles the Second back on the throne and all the knives unsheathed, settling grievances real or otherwise. So the Garricks had to flee their ancestral homeland for more salubrious shores. The stone house where I am taking you was their original dwelling until later, when the younger generations built other houses around the property and left the first to the grandfather. He lived to a ripe old age and then some. But their misfortune followed the family from Britain, it seems; the members expired one by one, or moved away, and finally the last Garrick died out west somewhere and the attorneys had to wait
