Martha Chase believed in evil. She was absolutely certain that it walked alongside them every day, on the road and in the fields, tempting them to leave the grace of the Lord. Witchery was a brand of wickedness Martha had hoped they’d escaped when they left Massachusetts, for in that colony witches were born and bred. She would have been stunned to know that Faith climbed out her window at night to go to the graveyard. Faith had set up a kettle in order to make the black soap her mother had been known for. She bought or pilfered ingredients that she remembered as useful from the time when she’d watched Maria practice the Nameless Art. Ginger, lemon, salt, the bark of the elm, chokeberries, cherry pits, white candles and black candles, black fabric, red thread, blue beads, feathers, wild belladonna which was dangerous and agitated the spirit, bright yellow-green ferns, for lightning never strikes where ferns grow. She’d begun to trade her soap for books and herbs, and Finney, the peddler, said every woman who bought a bar of the fragrant black soap had returned to beg for more.

On Saturdays, Faith sat with Martha to read from the Geneva Bible, the Scriptures that formed all Puritan beliefs. She always washed her hands and face before they read, so as not to smudge the pages. In Martha’s eyes, Brooklyn was a land of disbelievers, where all denominations other than Quakers were welcome to own land; there were Dutch Reform Protestants and some Catholics, and even, some people said, a few Jewish families from Amsterdam. It was a free and wild place compared to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and one had to keep watch at all times to remain on the narrow path.