Martha had fallen into a deep sleep and dreamed she was tied to a chair and drowned in a lake. She was turning blue, struggling for one more breath. When she awoke she was drenched. Pools of water had formed on the floor around her bed. Some dreams connect to the past, some to the future, some to the very moment you are in. Martha went to Faith’s chamber to find that the window was shattered. She peered outside to spy footprints in the sandy earth. They disappeared halfway down the road. Perhaps a wind had come up, or perhaps it was what occurred when a witch’s foot wasn’t nailed to the ground: she managed to escape. It was then Martha heard a clacking sound. It was somewhere in the wall, and when she put her ear to the plaster the clatter was so loud she felt deafened. She went downstairs and the clacking followed her, mocking her it seemed, tracking her like a dog though it was nothing more than a black beetle that had come out from the walls.

Martha grabbed her cape and left the house, the door swinging open behind her as she took off running. She wore the white bonnet she’d sewn years ago, in Essex County, and she spoke to the Lord as she raced up the lane, for she considered herself to be doing His work on earth. She refused to lose what she had gained and was ready to fight evil with everything she had. When she got to the Indian path, she saw the treads of the wagon and followed. Her breath rattled inside her. She had not come to the end of the earth here in Brooklyn to lose what she wanted most in the world, whether or not it rightly belonged to her.

By now it was early morning and the air was pale but growing brighter, throwing down bands of shadows and light. The peddler had stopped in the village to deliver an order of several bolts of cloth on his way out of town, for he would likely not be back to Gravesend for a long time, and the transaction—how much the fabric was worth was at issue—had slowed down their departure. Faith was anxious, her stomach a nest of nerves. As she waited, she bit off her fingernails, but knowing a person’s nails and hair could be used in a spell, she swallowed the bits of her nails, then felt them scratching inside her.