Free The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel by Katy Simpson Smith

throats in sleep. His wife had been a neighbor, and he was more pleased when he stretched his log fence around her lands than when he first felt her warmth in their marriage bed. He never loved her as he should’ve till she was gone. But both acres and woman contributed to a singular image that Asa continues to pursue.
    Weekdays he sends his daughter to pretty Miss Kingston, who teaches her letters and ciphering. Helen brings these skills back to Long Ridge to practice on the slaves. She is also learning the harpsichord, which shows off the length of her neck. Her education will be a stamp of status, and Asa sees enough of the old world in the new to recognize that the appearance of wealth can be as valuable as wealth itself. In her exuberance and opinion Helen is nothing like her mother, who was exactly the sort to be married well and loved calmly. Perhaps she would have taught her some of this passivity. But Helen’s only mothers have been substitutes: the teacher, the cook, the slave. If she can’t have a woman to hold her and love her, she should have a woman to order around. Moll, at least, will give her the pride and responsibility of stewardship. His daughter must be tamed enough to bring a husband and heir to the land, but otherwise her whims are of little concern to him.
    Helen gets the chicken pox a few days before Christmas. When her skin turns rosy, Asa is at the meeting house in town, discussing taxes with the elders. The colonial delegate from Beaufort has recently died, his body lost in a shipwreck and nothing for his wife to bury, and the elders ask Asa, as the next wealthiest landholder, to take his place in a room in New Bern and uphold their interests. Asa is in the business of empire building, though his vision is narrow. He is training his daughter to one day raise his grandson well, to be an image the grandson will recall, as a man, with satisfaction. He has no doubts that there will be a grandson. He accepts the elders’ offer.
    Home again, he finds his daughter ablaze with fever on the sofa, idly stretching her arms out while Moll dances close and spins away, just shy of being caught.
    “What is this?” he asks, reaching a hand toward her forehead but pulling it back again before touching her.
    “Moll says conjure,” Helen says. Moll is now straight and still by the fireplace, head down.
    “We’ll send for Stevens.” He looks around for a blanket to put over his daughter. “Mrs. Randolph?”
    “She’s washing,” Helen says.
    Mrs. Randolph has a family of her own, all yellow haired, behind the fields where the townspeople grow their rice. She rolls her sleeves up past her elbows when she works, and when she is sitting with her skirts bunched, bent over some pot or board, Asa has seen her calves above the limp collapse of her stockings. She is only a woman to keep Helen fed and scrubbed, not a replacement for his wife.
    He finds her behind the house, kneeling over a soapy bucket in the small garden that is decaying in winter, her hands thrashing a pair of breeches in the water. His breeches. She describes the measures she’s taken—some brandy and a little willow bark—and says she’s had children with just the like and they’re all alive yet. “Except for Betsy, and little Andrew, but they hadn’t chicken pox, sir.”
    Asa twists his hands behind his back and nods. “I’ll send Moll for Stevens.” There is no sense in having so many women on his property.
    Mrs. Randolph smiles at him again in that simple, maternal way that stings him. He leaves her, her wet arms red with the chafing cold.
    When Stevens arrives in the evening, Moll, tired from her jog to town, is curled on the parlor floor, her head resting on Helen’s blanketed legs. Both girls are asleep. The two men consult in whispers by the fire, which sends coughing sparks into the room. The doctor shakes his head to reassure; little danger here. He prescribes rest and alternating heat and cold to confuse the illness and