Martha wore her rope of pale hair pinned beneath a white bonnet, which she removed only once a month, to wash her hair in a basin in a locked room. She’d had a husband, but he died of the spotted fever, and she had to dig his grave herself and had been quarantined for three months after his death. It didn’t really bother her to be rid of him. He had been a cruel and distant man and she would not miss him for a minute. If the truth be told, she’d had a fierce distaste for her husband and had never approved of his lust and the desires that coiled and uncoiled depending on how much rum he had to drink. What tore at her was that her future seemed to die on the day of his funeral, for his absence on earth meant she would not have a child of her own.

She did her best to have no pride, to follow the Scriptures, and to never veer from the righteous path. But she, too, had a desire, one that flamed so brightly there were times when a hole burned through her dress and singed the fabric at her chest, as if her heart could not contain what it wanted more than patience, more than obedience, more than honor, more than deliverance. She wanted a daughter. Her marriage had lasted years and she had tried every remedy. Now she stood in the woods, lurking in the dark as she watched the red-haired girl climb around the shore of the lake or collect vegetables in the overgrown garden, and she thought it so unfair that a witch should have what she herself wanted most in the world.

Martha Chase was at the shop buying fabric for a new gray dress, for her own dresses had been washed and pressed so many times they were threadbare, when she spied the child near the bins of flour and arrowroot and loaf sugar. For an instant she believed the Lord had heard her prayers and had delivered her heart’s desire, this angel of a child she had been watching from afar as she slunk through the woods in her nightdress, for this time the girl seemed to be there all alone. She was about to go speak with her when quite suddenly the dark-haired woman, the one people said was a witch, came down the aisle to take the child’s hand.