Wendell collapsed to the ground and didn't get back up. "I can't go any farther," he said. "You go on ahead."
"I'm not going to leave you out here," Prudence said. She swung Wendell onto her shoulders, surprised by how little he weighed. She pressed on with his legs wrapped around her neck.
She chugged on deeper into the forest, calling Rodney's name once again. They'd been searching the woods for what seemed like hours now without any sign of Rodney and his party. We're not going to find him, she thought. We're too late.
As she continued to run, she tried to think of why Reverend Crane wanted to kill her husband. Even with her knowledge about the future, she didn't know. There was a gap in her and Wendell's memories of over three hundred years. Somewhere in that gap had to be a memory of what happened to Rodney. Try as she might, she couldn't remember anything. She only knew that in three hundred fifty years when Samantha arrived in Eternity, no one named Rodney existed.
"Why is he doing this?" she asked.
"He wants to keep us under his thumb," Wendell said. "What better way than to make us children dependent on him?"
"But he's a man of God. How can he do this?"
"No one is incorruptible, not even a reverend."
Prudence thought back to her conversation with Reverend Crane in the church. He had persuaded her to come to the New World so that he could use Rodney's fortune to mount the expedition. "This is my fault," she said.
"It's not," Wendell said.
"But it is. I'm the one who told Rodney to come here. Without his money the Primrose never would have left port."
Wendell touched her hair, reminding her both of nights spent with him in Seabrooke and with Rodney in Wessenshire. Should Rodney survive and they stop Reverend Crane, she didn't know what to do about Wendell. She couldn't love him like in the future and the thought of raising him as her own child with Rodney gave her a cold shiver. "He would have found another way," Wendell said. "Nothing would have stopped him."
"But now we have to," she said. She continued on in silence, turning left and right at random in the hopes of finding some sign of Rodney. How far could they have gotten already? She considered asking Wendell, but heard his soft breathing in her ear; he had fallen asleep.
She grimaced at the thought of ending up like him, a helpless child, for the next three centuries. Three centuries without ever knowing a love like she had with Rodney. Three centuries without ever having children of her own. A dark, lonely, miserable three centuries loomed ahead of her.