FOUR
The afternoon before the verdict was to be read, Minerva paid a visit. The constable stepped outside, and because the only other resident was a drunkard dead asleep, they had a measure of privacy.
“I hardly know how to address you,” said Minerva through the bars. “Should I call you Tom, or by your other title?”
The briefest of smiles passed across his face. “I would like it very much if you called me by my Bonaventure name.”
“Then I shall. Hello, Tom.”
“Hello, Minerva.”
Visitors were allowed to bring food to prisoners, and having passed inspection by the constable, she now handed the contents of a small basket through to him, hard-boiled eggs and apples and a small wedge of cheese. She explained each item as if he were a foreigner from some land where such produce didn’t exist and Lyman listened carefully, knowing her words were uncontrollable waters that gushed from a broken dam. This was their first meeting since that night.
There then followed some obligatory questions about the conditions—the constable treated him well, he said; a few church ladies had come around from the meeting house to give him a blanket for the cold nights—and where he expected to be sent next. There was no question of how the jury would return. The sentence would be delivered immediately afterward and off he would be taken. A noose wasn’t likely, not after Minerva and a string of Bonaventurists had paraded through the courtroom asking for leniency.
“I wanted to thank you, Tom, for not leaving me.” She stared down at her clasped hands. “I think—I often think that you may not be in that cell if you had simply vanished into the night.”
Lyman said, “It would have hurt you terribly if I did.” He had thought about it, just slipping away. But what then? Where would he find some new Bonaventure to hide himself, to create a fresh repetition of damnation? Instead the local farmer who owned the broken stone wall, responding to the commotion, had found them in the road, Minerva in his arms, standing over a scene of death and ruin. Unlike some monsters, he couldn’t just leave her there.
“That’s true. I would have probably hated you for it. But at least you would be free, somewhere. I often daydream of that other life, and what it would be like, and if it would be better than this one. I feel it’s something out of one of my novelettes.”
When questioned by the judge, Minerva had stuck unerringly to the truth—all of it. And yet when it came to be Lyman’s turn, the ridiculousness of it falling from his lips couldn’t even convince himself. He gave little fight against the version of events delivered in the courtroom: about how he had followed Grosvenor and his daughter as they made their way under cover of deepest night to New London to sell the gold nugget found on the Grosvenor property; only instead of merely waylaying them on some lonely stretch of road without witness or interference, he had engineered their hypothetical wagon to crash into the wall, obliterating it completely, snapping Grosvenor’s spine, and knocking Minerva senseless. Only after completing the job with a stone had Lyman been overcome with remorse at the sight of an addled Minerva spouting nonsense and so surrendered himself to justice.
“I think yours,” said Lyman, “is a common daydream. I often wonder how my life would’ve differed if I’d never entered that first error in Mr. Tallmadge’s ledger and pocketed the difference.”
Minerva said, “I tell myself again and again that any difference in action would likely produce the same result. And yet I cannot but wonder if I hadn’t asked you to come with me, then my father—”
“Your request had nothing to do with the outcome. I would’ve gone anyway—I had already bet the devil my head, remember? It knew what your father planned with its eggs. It protected me from my hunters, and in repayment I was to thwart him. Neither of us could’ve predicted its true motives.”
“It would seem as you stand behind those bars that consequences are what matter most.”
“And yet your intent was laudable.”
“My intent, once you told me what he intended, was to stop my father from returning to Bonaventure with the prizes he coveted. Instead, he failed to return at all.”
Lyman was silent a moment and then said, “Having little else to think of, often I lie at night wondering if we should’ve returned up the hill and smashed them.”
“Doing so would have opened you to vengeance.”
“And I would not have dared any risk to you. As for me—” Lyman shrugged. “How many souls have we damned for the price of mine?”
Minerva said, “Emerson wrote that there are just two things: The Soul, and outside of it, Nature. Even the devil, therefore, is a thing of Nature.”
The court, for reasons of its own, was reluctant to surrender the nugget of gold found in Grosvenor’s pocket; yet eventually, after the grieving widow made several statements to the press that caused them embarrassment, they returned it. It was too little, too late. Upon sorting through Grosvenor’s study, Minerva discovered—beneath books about animal migration and naturalist volumes authored by the likes of Georges Cuvier and Reverend William Conybeare and Charles Bonnet—her father’s accounting ledgers. Bonaventure faced bankruptcy. The farm was subdivided and sold at auction, with the neighbor Whitney smugly picking up several choice acres. Likewise; the equipment, furniture, tools, and the rest, and Grosvenor’s scientific collection of stones and books generated a few dollars, particularly an odd crocodilian skull discovered hidden behind a shelf. Between these proceeds, Minerva and her mother had enough left over to purchase a small home in New London where they lived comfortably, if modestly.
Bonaventure disbanded, each member going his or her own way. The Albys, after the birth of their son, joined a group of Shakers in Maine where Mrs. Alby rose quite high in
