Ben Stroud - Byzantium - Stories

We paddled on. I tried to distract my mind from the image of the trader’s mute face, from the terrible seeping wound. I could not. As we neared Port Hebron I began to understand the full ramification of what I’d done. Damnation would be upon me. I would be forever locked out of the celestial kingdom. I assumed Josiah had taken Spofford’s place in the canoe to tell me just this. But, as if knowing my inner struggle, at that very moment he told me to ease my mind. “You raised your hand to save me,” he said as we came past Apostle’s Point, “not to take that man’s life. He forfeited it. The punishment falls on his soul.” He paused, and then he said, “Because of what you’ve done, I’m raising you to the Order.”

I ceased paddling.

“The Order?” I asked. I stared at Josiah’s back and waited for him to tell me I had misheard.

“Yes, the Order,” he said. “You’ll be the first.”

I was struck by the pure shock of the honor. The Order! Then, with a jolt, I remembered. My mind thrilled with visions of Dorothea. I saw her, waiting for me in her father’s cabin. Bainbridge’s thundered words the night of my last visit resounded in my head. I had him. One of the greatest sins, according to The Book of Truths, was to break an oath. He couldn’t refuse me now.

Once we returned to Port Hebron, the others, tired from the sortie, drifted back to their cabins and cottages with a few mumbled salutations. But I couldn’t rest. I rushed across the island to the Bainbridge farm and arrived just as dawn broke. I didn’t pause to knock but stepped into the cabin and went straight to Dorothea, who stood at the fire boiling oats. “William!” she said. “You can’t be here. My father.”

Just then Bainbridge emerged from behind one of the hanging blankets, risen to take his breakfast. “Mr. Ames,” he said when he saw me, his voice cold as the gray ice that had covered the island’s roads and paths all through winter, so many forgotten months ago.

“Remember your oath, Mr. Bainbridge,” I burst out.

He drew his face into a blank of confusion.

“The night you forbade me to court Dorothea, you said you would allow me to propose to her the day I was raised to the Order.”

“A figure of conver—”

“You made an oath, Mr. Bainbridge, an oath and a bargain. I have fulfilled my end. This night I was raised to the Order. Now you must let me offer myself to Dorothea.”

Dorothea looked to her father. “Is it true?” she asked.

Bainbridge ignored her. Hoping, I imagine, to trap me in a lie, he asked how I’d accomplished such a feat. I told him the version of the story I and the others had sworn to, then added that he could ask Josiah himself if he doubted me. Bainbridge groaned and sat. He put his hand to his forehead and seemed to be deliberating. “Very well,” he finally said.

I knelt at Dorothea’s feet, and before I could pose the question or even wonder what she might say, she nodded. Her pale cheeks blushed and her dark eyes filled with tears. How strangely the Lord had worked to unite us! Her father stormed out of the cabin, but I was too delighted to pay him any mind. I took hold of Dorothea’s hand and kissed it, saying now it was truly mine I would never let it go.

AS WE CROSSED THE SPINE OF JULY, high summer reached the island. Side-wheelers began putting in each day, taking on the cordwood we sold them for the run east through the Straits or south to Chicago, and fishing boats arrived in our waters to pack their holds with trout and sturgeon. With the demand on barrels I had few hours free from Pickle’s work yard, but those few I spent with Dorothea. Now we were betrothed we were allowed to walk together. Her father absented himself whenever I appeared, and Dorothea and I strolled along the edge of the potato field and sketched our lives, I telling her how someday I would open my violin shop, she telling me how she longed to sail the lakes, to have a boat and explore the wild coasts. In our fantasies we built our house, we named our children, we stood at the rising of the kingdom. Our thoughts were littered with promise. She would close her eyes as we talked and curl her mouth into a grin, resting her cheek on my shoulder. Afterward she would lead me into the wood and let me put my lips to hers, let me touch her cheek and hold her in my arms. My fingertips trembled against her flesh, and I felt again what I had felt the night of my conversion: the island growing within me, the future coming as it should.

Most of my visits passed like this, but on occasion Dorothea would be caught in a dark study. Once I found her sitting in her small flower garden with her arms tight around her skirts, clutching her folded legs to her chest, staring off above the birches. Rather than jump up when she heard me approach, as she usually did, she refused even to turn.

“Dory.”

No answer.

I sat beside her, asked about the garden, tried any number of ways to gain her attention until at last she seemed to rise back to herself. She presented me with a smile, and asked if we could go for a walk. Then we strolled and talked as usual, though she ignored my inquiries about the state in which I had found her.

It was after one of these appearances of her shadow — for that is how I called it to myself — that I was asked to Josiah’s home. His cottage, the finest on the island, sat apart from town, to the north, and was surrounded by a picket fence and flanked by two six-pounder cannons. Despite being raised to the Order, I’d never been asked to the cottage before, and had spoken to Josiah only a few times since the night of the sortie — mostly in the Temple, where, as the Order’s sole member, I performed my one duty, standing guard in a velvet tunic beneath the Arch of the Blood while Josiah prayed.

When I arrived, Josiah’s wife, Celia, showed me into his office and brought us glasses of honeyed milk. She was a gray-faced woman five years his senior and rarely left the cottage. It was said, under breath, that the money from her first husband’s estate had laid the foundation for our colony. Josiah was at work, writing. Uncertain what to do with myself, I sipped from my glass and looked about the room. Behind Josiah hung a map of the island showing Port Hebron as Zion — the completed Temple, the grid of streets stretching across the island to house the 144,000—and below the map stood shelves of plant specimens, which, I’d heard, Josiah regularly sent to a professor at Union College. The study’s window faced onto the harbor, and mounted on its sill was a brass telescope, pointed toward the open lake beyond the bay. The harbor had grown yet busier in the last weeks. Soon, Josiah had told us, the federal gunboat that patrolled the upper lakes was to put in. He was expected to go down and greet her captain.

My eyes had made it as far as a snake coiled in a jar — it sat on the floor, directly beneath the telescope — when the scratching of Josiah’s nib stopped and he looked up and said, without preface, “I’ve learned you are to be married to Dorothea Bainbridge. Is this true?”

I was a trifle surprised, but lost no time in answering. “It is.”

“I take an interest in all my charges,” he said, “and you especially. I owe you my life.”

Josiah drank from his honeyed milk, then proceeded to study me with his gaze. I grew nervous. His eyes pierced mine. The pages of my soul lay open before him. He was testing me somehow, though I wasn’t sure why.

When I thought I could stand this gaze no longer, he rose and gave me his holy blessing. “In The Book of Truths it is written that a man must not become too attached to the things of this world,” he said as he walked me to the door. With that, our meeting was ended, and I left his house as confused over the visit’s purpose as when I had entered.