When the pie was done, Maria let it cool on the windowsill. It sat there, red as a heart, the crust brown, perfectly done. From then on she baked a pie each and every week, with apples that turned from white to red. People passing by sniffed the fragrant air and were reminded of home, and many longed to find their way back to their loved ones. That was all Maria wished for. That was all she wanted in the world. To look out her window and see her darling girl, to have her walk up the stone path and fling open the door.

II.

In a place called Kings County, originally called Breuckelen by the first Dutch settlers, newcomers arrived to find a land of marshes dotted by snow-white clouds where the horizon reached out in bands of blue until at last it met with the sea. This low land had reminded the Dutch of home, and many had sunk to their knees and wept upon their arrival in this wild place where the sky was filled with ducks and geese, and fish jumped in the streams. Rough workingmen, both farmers and fishermen, established the original villages on land where the native Lenape people had once lived, before they were slaughtered and driven out, first by the Dutch, then by the British who replaced the original invaders. In a world that had begun with murder, there was always cruelty, despite the beauty of the shore and the sea.

There were five towns originated by the Dutch in the county, and the sixth, Gravesend, was populated by those who wished to disappear from their previous lives. It was built in 1645 on a parcel of land originally belonging to Lady Deborah Moody and her son, Sir Henry, both of whom had fled from the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in search of religious freedom. Lady Moody had been fortunate enough to have the Crown grant her a small wedge of Kings County. She’d begun her life in England, close to royal life, and had happily ended her time on earth in Brooklyn, where she’d been free to do as she pleased and had been buried in the one cemetery, at the end of an Indian path. Her son had disappeared. Some people said he’d been buried beside his mother, others vowed he’d left for the unknown territories in the West, and that he preferred native people to Englishmen.