Fiona never discovered who had received the first of them. Or even—in the beginning—what had caused the coldness toward her. It seemed over the course of the month that one by one the women who were her neighbors found excuses not to hang out their laundry or weed their gardens when she worked in the inn yard. The friendly greetings across the fence, the occasional offer of flowers for the bar parlor or a treat for the child, stopped. Soon people no longer nodded to her on the street. And failed to speak in the shops. Custom fell off at the bar. Men who often came in for a pint in the long summer evenings avoided her eyes now and hurried past the inn door. The coldness frightened her. She didn’t know how to fight it because there was no one to tell her what lay at the bottom of it. She wished, for the hundredth time, that her aunt were still alive.

Even Alistair McKinstry, the young constable, shook his head in bewilderment when she asked him what she had done to offend. “For it must be that,” she told him. “Someone’s taken a word wrong, or I neglected to do something I’d promised. But what? I’ve tried and tried to think of anything!”

He had seen the looks cast her way behind her back. “I don’t know. Nothing’s been said in my hearing. It’s as if I’m shut out as well.”

He smiled wryly. Half the town must know how he felt about her. “It may be a small thing, Fiona. I’d not take it to heart.” Which was no comfort at all. She had already taken it to heart, and wondered if that was the intent, to give her pain. But why?

On the first Sunday in July, the old woman who invariably sat in the back of the church hissed at her as she came in with the little boy, leading him to their accustomed place. The single word was lost in the first hymn, but she knew what it was. Wanton. It made her flush, and the woman grinned toothlessly in grim satisfaction. She had meant to hurt.

The shunning had been supplanted by attack.

The sermon that morning was on Ruth and Mary Magdalen. The good, faithful woman who had kept her place at her mother-in-law’s side and the wanton whose sins Christ had forgiven.

The Scottish minister, Mr. Elliot, made no bones about which he’d have favored, in Christ’s stead. His harsh, loud voice made it clear that good women were jewels in the sight of God. Humility was their shibboleth—such women knew their place and kept their hearts clean of sin. It would take Christ Himself to forgive a sinful woman—they were beyond redemption, in his personal view.