“And you, Minerva? I should think you’d be in receipt of ten proposals a day. Or does your father chase them off?”
“There was one gentleman but when I did not reciprocate his feelings, he quit the farm. He was very earnest, however.” For half a moment, Minerva glanced off into the trees in dreamy reminiscence. “As it is, I see no benefit to marriage for a woman beyond the utilitarian, the economy of sharing resources and income and so forth. The odds of finding a true partner—an equal of mind and soul—are so long that it is hardly worth the bother of courtship.”
“All the same, people do find such companionship.”
“Some people. Maybe so. But right now I’m too busy with Bonaventure, reading and writing and conversing and changing the world, to concern myself with a distant hope. I don’t forsake weddings and children but I do shepherd my efforts closely.”
Neither wanted the picnic to end but clocks and planets turn irrespective of our wishes. They gathered the things into the basket and Lyman snapped the blanket a few times to shake off the leaves and grass before folding it. He started back toward the stone house, then stopped after glancing over his shoulder. Minerva stood frozen by their lunching spot, staring at him.
“Did you feel that?”
Lyman hadn’t noticed anything. “Feel what?”
Minerva remained silent, then shook her head. “For an instant I had the oddest sensation the ground moved.”
Lyman was in no rush to return to his rooftop tumbling and believed it to be the gentlemanly thing to do, new world or no, to escort Minerva on the walk back to the Consulate. For her part Minerva welcomed his company on the pretext of having set aside some foodstuffs in the kitchen—a sack of apples, some cornmeal and salt and other small things—for Lyman to take with him to the stone house so that he might, if hungry and fatigued, have some refreshment between mealtimes, and also at the very least have a few comestibles lying around in case a visitor again came calling. The pair said their adieus at the kitchen door, and Lyman reembarked for the stone house with the sack slung over his shoulder.
As the kitchen of the stone house was the very room that lacked a roof, Lyman had yet to use it as such. Instead he marched the sack up the stairs to his bedroom, the only comfortable chamber in the house, where he sorted and suspended his rations from hooks while reminiscing about the afternoon.
“Someone’s been in the house.”
The effect of those five words, spoken from an indistinct point somewhere behind Lyman’s right shoulder, was dynamic. Lyman managed, cat-like, to both twist and thrust forward in the same motion, slamming himself into the brick of the fireplace while simultaneously upsetting the apples and spilling the water jug and scattering salt across the boards.
There was nothing behind him. Nothing but air and the rest of the room. And yet he had distinctly heard the words, their sibilance fresh in his right ear as if the speaker had leaned in to whisper them. Lyman was not drowsy; he was neither falling asleep nor waking up. Someone had spoken. Some words had been said. Something had told him—what?
It was at that moment as he stood, breathing hard, surveying the chamber with wild eyes, that he noted the bed was unmade; but Lyman, perhaps from his years as a diligent clerk tallying the contents of storerooms and scrutinizing bills of lading, was fastidious in his habits, never failing to pull the covers square upon rising.
An impulse sent him to the chest of drawers; his clothes and sundries, he could tell, had been disturbed, then put back hastily to mask the disturbance. The bed, he realized, the bed—the bed frame, upon closer scrutiny, had been pulled aside, pushed back into place.
Someone had been in the house while he was with Minerva.
His hands fumbled with the lamp wick, his shoes pounded down the basement stairs and swept him through the tunnel. The bag still hung from the top of the ladder; he reeled it up, pulled back its lips. The money was untouched, all of it. It had not been found. Lyman suspected, without any real proof but based upon an odd intuition alone, that the second basement itself had also remained hidden.
Lyman did not go to supper that night at the Consulate. He couldn’t bear the thought of leaving only to return, in twilight or full-blown evening, to the darkened house; the anticipation of passing through the front door, exposing himself to every shadow within, terrified him. Instead he sat on the bed, his back wedged into a corner of the room, and slowly gnawed apples picked off the floor. Somewhere, out there, was an enemy, and somewhere closer by was a friend; but their identities or even their natures Lyman could not fathom. The late August night was hot but he kept the fire high anyway, feeding it with logs and apple cores.
•••
Minerva’s father pursued his studies in natural philosophy in a fallow pasture far behind the cabins, screened from sight by a line of trees. There, hidden amid the waving stalks of wild grass, lay the partial foundation of a building Lyman had heard the other Bonaventurists reference as either a Phalanstery or a Fraternum or sometimes a Lyceum, a structure that once was a focus of their communal labor but which had been since forgotten and therefore lapsed, for unspecified reasons, into a crepuscular state of earthly return.
The original purpose of the edifice was likewise ambiguous, varying by respondent; but in each interview Lyman detected notes of loss or warmhearted remorse, as if he or she recalled a childhood summer, a whimsical period in a lifetime never to be experienced again. In each reply also the farm itself was implicated in the structure’s abandonment, and Lyman was compelled to believe that the two could not coexist.
When the Grosvenors and the initial subscribers settled Bonaventure,
