Valentine Michael Smith—Jill Boardman

Valentine Michael Smith—Jill Boardman is a marriage and water-brother relationship whose defining bond is not limited to a legal ceremony or exclusive couplehood. For Jill and Smith, sharing water establishes trust, partnership, and a closeness they regard as permanent; the relationship’s meaning becomes clearest as they extend that bond to others and as Smith learns to understand human love in words as well as action.

A Bond Founded on Shared Water

Jill explains the water-sharing rite to Patricia Paiwonski as both baptism and marriage, but also as something more: a serious, enduring partnership in which the participants trust one another and may speak openly. She emphasizes that accepting the water is voluntary, and that it does not depend on belonging to a particular church. The invitation makes their relationship’s terms explicit: intimacy rests on freely chosen trust, not on pressure or religious conformity.

Smith confirms that the rite means everything marriage means and more, while warning Patricia not to drink if faith or conscience gives her any reason to refuse. Patricia chooses to accept. Jill drinks first and passes the glass to Smith; he then offers Patricia the water of life, and Patricia drinks with affection and gratitude. The sequence shows Jill and Smith acting together as partners: they share their bond with another person, while making clear that the invitation must remain a genuine choice.

Marriage Beyond the License

Later, when Jill wistfully chooses a blue dress, Smith senses that she wants something he cannot quite identify and asks whether she wants to stop and get married. Jill points out that they cannot obtain a license that Sunday. Smith offers to remember and do it the next day, taking her preference seriously even though he does not yet fully grasp what the ceremony would add.

Jill declines. They cannot become closer through a marriage ceremony, she reasons, because they already share water. She also does not want Anne, Miriam, Dorcas, or Patty to feel that she is trying to crowd them out. Her decision holds together two distinct claims: their existing bond is already complete in the sense that matters most to her, and its completeness does not entitle her to displace the other women in Smith’s community. Jill then describes herself as having married Smith long before, in a hospital room, because of the way he was. The legal ceremony would name a commitment she already recognizes rather than create it.

At the same time, Jill asks for an ordinary sign of affection: she wants Smith to call her pet names sometimes, as she does him. The request makes visible a difference between their ways of expressing intimacy. A bond that is already profound does not automatically supply every familiar human gesture; Jill can tell Smith what she wants, and their closeness leaves room for such requests without making them a test of whether the relationship is real.

Smith Learns to Name Love

The relationship also develops through Smith’s changing understanding of human beings. After Jill reassures him that she too was frightened the first time she heard laughter, he tells her that he now understands people. He playfully addresses her as his darling and speaks of her body and desire in exuberant, teasing language. Jill responds with amused surprise, calling him Michael, and Smith explains that he had known the words without knowing when or why to use them—or why Jill wanted him to. He now understands love, too.

Jill tells him that he has always loved her, even before he could explain it, and answers his teasing with affectionate teasing of her own. The exchange marks a change in expression rather than a sudden creation of feeling: the attachment Jill has recognized all along becomes something Smith can consciously articulate and play with. Their ease with erotic and comic language makes love part of their shared conversation, not merely an abstract spiritual principle.

An Intimacy That Extends Outward

The couple’s bond is intimate but not exclusive. Jill’s refusal to obtain a license partly reflects her concern for Anne, Miriam, Dorcas, and Patty; her place beside Smith is secure enough that she does not need a ceremony to distinguish herself from them. This is not presented as a weakening of their commitment. Instead, Jill measures their closeness by the trust already established and considers how a public marital gesture might affect others in their circle.

The same outward movement appears when Jill and Smith invite Patricia to share water. It continues in the Nest’s rites, where Smith may recognize a person or couple as ready for the bond before they reach the usual stages of advancement. He has selected Sam and Ruth for water when they had only entered the Third Circle; later they become a priest and priestess. The account presents the couple’s own partnership as part of a broader practice of chosen kinship, in which closeness can be shared and extended rather than guarded as a private possession.

The Nest’s Ritual and the Meaning of Belonging

At the Nest, ordinary water-sharing throughout the day is distinguished from the formal Sharing-Water service. The formal rite welcomes new brothers—usually a couple—into the community, with the whole Nest attending. After the Eighth Circle comes the Ninth Circle and the Nest itself; the service marks a lasting change in belonging. Smith’s and Jill’s relationship therefore stands both as a personal union and as a pattern through which others may be welcomed.

When Ben Caxton visits the Nest, Patricia shows him the Innermost Temple: a large, circular room with a soft floor and a central pool. She explains that new brothers are received there and offers Ben the choice of sharing water or simply swimming. His hesitation is accepted without reproach; she answers that waiting is part of the process. Her response echoes Jill and Smith’s earlier insistence that an invitation must not become coercion. The rite’s power depends on readiness and choice, not on forcing an outsider across the threshold.

Jill and Smith are also visible in the ceremony for advancement to the Eighth Circle. Caxton sees Jill as Mother Eve in a vision of a garden, beside a great serpent; she smooths the serpent’s head and opens her arms to the candidates. Smith embraces and kisses the first woman in line, and Jill kisses the first male candidate. The candidates’ robes vanish at each kiss, while Caxton is led away so the proceedings can continue without interruption. The scene places the couple at the center of a communal rite, but their role is not simply ceremonial: their gestures help make intimacy and transformation legible within the Nest’s shared religious practice.

Ruth’s account of her own path with Sam clarifies how Smith’s and Jill’s relationship can serve as support for others. Smith and Jill offer Sam and Ruth water after noticing their progress in the Third Circle. Ruth initially struggles with jealousy and with the implications of the Nest’s communal intimacy, even though she wants to be received. As the couple and the other members help them through the inner circles, she gradually becomes ready for the formal service. In the Innermost Temple, the robes are whisked away, the community calls them into the pool, and Ruth enters; she describes herself as never having come up from that immersion. The episode gives institutional and emotional consequence to the water-bonding practice that defines Jill and Smith’s own relationship: welcome is a process of learning and assistance, culminating in a freely entered community.