The women in Gravesend took note of the child’s healing. Though Faith was only a girl, they began to seek her out. Perhaps she was too young to be a proper witch, but she seemed to have a natural talent for the Nameless Art. In time, people in need knew where to find her, within the cemetery gates on Friday evenings, the traditional time for working love spells, mirror magic, health tonics, and potions for reconciliation. Faith often suggested castor oil, milk, and sugar, a children’s tonic her mother had fixed in Boston, along with summer savory for colic. She made most use of the recipe for Fever Tea, to nip high temperatures in the bud, made of cinnamon, bayberry, ginger, thyme, and marjoram.

Faith climbed out her window no matter the weather, as soon as Martha Chase was in bed, for she hated to disappoint one of her clients, some of whom waited hours for her to appear and came from the far-off towns of Bushwick and Flatlands. Faith had recently bought a black book from the peddler to use as a journal. Finney had added a small bottle of ink and a pen, and she’d written down all she could remember from the nights when women in need came to her mother’s door. How to end toothache and insomnia and skin rashes, how to cast away bad dreams and regret, how to make amends, how to find happiness.

For her services, Faith was paid whatever a client might have. A bag of apples, forks and spoons, coins, pies, and once she was granted a pair of heavy black stockings. The payment didn’t matter. What mattered most was that Faith was still herself, even though the iron bracelets kept her from using her full talents. She had to trust in what her clients told her, for she was unable to read the lines on their right or left hands, the first of which, she remembered, revealed the future you are given, the other which allowed you to view the future you made for yourself.

By now, Faith Owens had grown into a gawky, tall girl, and the iron cuffs dug into her flesh. She wondered if without them she might be able to fly far from here and find her mother. She knew the map of the sky and could chart the world, north and south. She’d once known a man called Goat who could divine the stars and had pointed them out to her. Faith considered running away, but she didn’t know the name of the place they had come from so that she might return, only that there had been a bottomless lake nearby, and a water serpent who ate bread from her hands, and a wild black dog she’d found in the woods who never left her side.