On these nights, Faith sat on her bed in the dark, with Keeper beside her, and her favorite old poppet close by as she listened to the voices in the kitchen. She quickly came to understand that her mother’s visitors often came to deal with illness, and when it came to the matter of love, there were only certain kinds that Maria would approach. Love that made a woman willing to walk through the brambles late at night and beg for a remedy. As for herself, Maria never spoke John Hathorne’s name; all the same Faith knew that her mother had been betrayed by a man who was a judge. When they went to town on market days and passed the courthouse, Faith would linger behind, close her eyes, and imagine her father at his desk. John always felt a chill when she did this, and he would go to look out the window. Each time he spied her standing in the cobbled streets, he closed the shutters and turned away.

“What’s keeping you?” her mother would call.

“Not a thing,” Faith would say. But each time she grew more convinced, and by her next birthday, when she turned six, Faith Owens had already made a vow that she would never fall in love.

III.

There was a woman who came through the fields at night, but unlike Maria’s customers, she never once knocked on the door. Martha Chase didn’t believe in magic, and yet she was drawn here, made to get out of her bed and walk through the fields in her nightdress. She had spied Faith Owens by the lake, running on the rocks without stockings or shoes as if she were a wild child. She had often returned to watch Faith play, hiding behind the inkberry bushes, crying hot, salty tears.

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.