“You’re not to come here,” he scolded Maria. He knew the neighbors were watching. They were always watching in this town. He stood on the other side of the fence.

“What coward asks his wife to do what he fears to do?”

“We cannot quarrel. No good will come of it.”

“And yet you came to me often enough.” Maria’s words caused the color to flare in his face. “Would you have ever told me you had a wife?”

There were features Maria possessed that he’d never noticed before, suspicious qualities. A black mark in the inner crook of her elbow. Silver-gray eyes that glinted in the dark. Hair that was black as a crow’s feathers. Her arm in a sling. Black leaves falling out of season, gathering at her feet.

“And now you’ve killed him,” Maria said.

“It,” he said. “It was a crow.”

“If only you had shared his qualities, you, sir, would have been a better man.”

Rather than respond, Hathorne reached into his coat and took out a purse. Would he dare to pay her for her heartbreak with a bag of silver? Every woman is a fool at least once in her life, Hannah had told her.

“For my services?” she said in a tone he had not heard before. She was not a weak girl he could command, though he had done his best to control the situation. She was something more than that.

“I have a ship leaving tomorrow,” he told her. “This will pay your way. I gave you the sapphire and the diamonds, and now this silver. Surely that’s enough.” He lowered his voice. “I suggest you do as I say. We are not in Curaçao now, miss.”

Maria nodded to Faith, carried in her arms. “And yet here is the evidence of that time.”

Ruth was at the window, behind the cloudy glass. She forced herself to watch, not through a mirror but with her own eyes. She would not dare to step out of her house without her husband’s permission, having never gone beyond the confines of her own property unless she was on her way to the market or to church. Later, Ruth would not ask John anything about Maria when he at last came to bed. She would say nothing and bite her tongue, but now she gazed out and imagined she was free, a bird, a ship, a woman on the street with her hair uncovered.

“Don’t think I don’t know what you are,” Maria said.

“And what is that?”

“A liar, sir.”

You can always tell a liar, for he will not look at you when he speaks, and often he has white spots on his fingernails, one to mark every lie he’s told. But no man enjoys being called by that title, even if it’s the truth. Hathorne took Maria’s arm, but she pulled away. She was not about to do as she was told, as if she were the one who wore a white cap and stood behind the window, too fearful to leave her own yard.