hours. And then one morning Maria saw a beetle in the yard and she felt a chill. Upon examination she found it was not the wretched deathwatch beetle; all the same she feared for Samuel’s safety. She was grieving over Faith and she didn’t think she could survive losing someone else. From then on she locked her door and didn’t answer when she heard Samuel at night. One morning she found that he had slept in the hall. When she woke him, Samuel stood to face her. It was clear that he was stung by her rejection.
“If you want me to leave, say so,” he told Maria. “I’ll go now. Today.”
“This is your house. Are you sure you want me?”
He did, too much, but he didn’t respond.
That night she recited an incantation to send love away. The next morning he packed to leave.
“You shouldn’t go away,” Abraham told his son. “Life is short and getting shorter. I know you want Maria. Stay with her.”
“She won’t let me.” Samuel continued packing his bag. “She says we’re cursed.”
“Everyone is cursed,” the old man assured him. “That’s life.” He shook his head and thought that young people were fools. “You might as well do as you please.”
Samuel did one thing he knew Maria wouldn’t wish him to do. He left a leather pouch on the table. Inside was a sapphire on a silver chain.
This one is real, he’d written in the note he left behind.
Você não pode finger algo real não existe.
You can’t pretend something real doesn’t exist.
* * *
After Samuel left, Maria and Abraham Dias settled into the routine of two people in mourning. They comforted each other, for each knew sorrow. Men who were sailors rarely became accustomed to living on land, and Abraham Dias longed for the life he’d once had. He spent his days waiting for his son, even though Samuel might be gone for months at a time. The old man’s memory had begun to fail more each day, still he knew that he was in New York, and that he lived in his son’s house with a beautiful woman whose name he sometimes forgot, especially in the evenings when Maria returned from searching for Faith and poured him a glass of port. All the same, Abraham shared his stories with her as he sipped his nightly drink. He always remembered these stories, even though he’d often forgotten what he’d had for his supper that very day. He told her about the joy of riding on the back of a whale, the salt spray filling his mouth, and about a land where all the bears were white and it was so cold the earth was covered with ice even in the heart of August, and about the Barbary Coast, where the leopards and lions would eat beef from the palm of your hand if you had the nerve to reach out to them, and where diamonds glittered up through holes in the earth, as if there were stars not only above but below. The stories that she loved best were when Abraham recounted his son’s early days at sea, when the young Samuel was so captivated by the starry heavens above he didn’t sleep at night, but instead lay on his back on the deck memorizing the position of the stars so that he might chart the sky.
Abraham Dias tired easily and went to bed directly after he had his nightly meal, which was just as well. He would have been confused by the women who came to the door in search of remedies once darkness had fallen. He likely would have looked among them for his wife, who had been gone for so long. She had been young and beautiful when he first met her and he had loved her too much, so much that she still appeared in his dreams, although she had been burned to ash long ago. Her name was Regine, but she was called Reina, for to Abraham she was a queen.
Maria had a deep affection for the old man, who had taught her how to make Chocolate Tipsy Cake, and she hated to leave him on his own when she left the house, for he was prone to wander, often finding his way to the rough area of the docks. Once he’d been tied to a post by a gang of unruly boys and left there in the rain, unable to escape from the ropes that bound him until Keeper at last