I was back there, back at the river Goose, which appeared not as a river but as a wide black mass stretching out across the land. I walked toward that mass until I could hear the river lapping gently up against its banks. It was cloudy out, so that there was no moon to illuminate anything. But there at the banks, I held up my hand, the same hand in which I held the wooden horse, and I saw the blue light of Conduction glowing out. And when I looked back at the river, I saw the now familiar mist rolling toward me.
No one had to teach me what came next. I did it almost by animal instinct—it was the simplest of motions, a firm squeeze that I now applied to the wooden horse—and having done this I saw the new mist over the river reach out, like the white tendrils of some mythical beast, and snatch me into its maw.
31
THE SUMMONING OF A story, the water, and the object that made memory real as brick: that was Conduction. What I might do with such a power was not my immediate concern, so much as making it through that day. The fatigue fell on me hard, the same fatigue I’d felt before and the same that I had seen on Harriet. Somehow I struggled through my duties, but when they were over I slept through supper until the next day, when I awoke to dress Howell, serve his morning meal, and assist him through the light rigors of his day. And when supper came, there was a part of me then that glowed bright as Conduction itself, for I knew that I would see Sophia there. And when I did, that evening, I felt myself walking in some other world. I wondered if I had dreamt it all. But she was right there, with Thena, and with Caroline, and when she saw me, she smiled and simply said, “You came back.”
We spent the next few weeks happily together. At first, we tried to hide the new developments from them. After supper, after Sophia made a show of leaving with Caroline, and after I had taken my father his cider, sat with him, and put him to bed, I would walk down to the Street. Early in those smallest hours, I would make my way back up to my own bed, lie there for a half an hour or so, and then begin my labors. It was not as strange as it sounds. For many a tasking man at Lockless, with wife and children on other manses, this had long been the ritual. But my version was bizarre because it seemed to pin itself on the blindness of Thena. And she was not blind. So it should have been a surprise when she said, one evening, after supper, while holding Caroline, “I am happy for you.” No more was said of it.
But there was not just Thena to worry after. Nathaniel Walker still held a known and particular title to Sophia and Caroline, and I well knew what happened to tasking folk found to have interfered with such claims. Corrine may have saved us once, but nothing would save either of us from his prideful wrath. It was a beautiful time, one of the best of my long life, but still it was built upon the shifting ground of the Task, and we knew that sooner or later the ground must shift again.
Early in December we heard of Nathaniel Walker’s return and, a week later, of Sophia’s inevitable summons. My father, still unwise to what was happening around him, told me to deliver Sophia. I cannot say that I found this pleasing. But I had now well absorbed the lesson—for Sophia to be mine, she must never be mine. And what was between us was not ownership, but a promise to be in the company of each other, by any means, for as long we could. And preserving the illusion was our means that wintery day when I drove her out to Nathaniel Walker’s place.
We left early. Sophia slept for the first leg. We talked for the second.
“So what was the daily with Corrine?” she asked. “A clawfoot tub? Five white maids, each one naked as the day?”
We laughed.
“I do not hear you denying it.”
“I don’t deny nothing, Sophia.”
“ ’Cept intelligence on your time away,” she said. “Boy, what in God’s name did they do to you?”