She had been in Manhattan for close to two years, and had grown up faster than most. By now she was tall, with a newfound grace, and a cool, distant gaze. She hadn’t left the practice of acting like an obedient girl, but she was anything but mild mannered. Faith climbed out the window on Maiden Lane, just as she had done in Brooklyn. Habits died hard, and she had the habit of doing as she pleased, even if that meant there were those who must be deceived.

She set up her practice near the grove of linden trees beside the Minetta Stream, where indigent men lived in canvas tents and the poor were buried without stones to mark that they had ever walked on this earth. This was where her craft had led her, to a hollow where the ferns were as tall as she and the earth was muddy and damp and vengeance came easily. Faith felt it inside her, spreading out from the red splotch in the center of her left hand that she had never been able to wash away. She was called to dark places, such as this. The birds did not sing here and the frogs did not call, although there were hundreds of peepers on the banks of the stream. If a woman wanted something other than what she could find in Maria Owen’s kitchen, she came here. If she had been mistreated and damaged and betrayed, if she wanted revenge, she came up the path, no matter how perilous it might be to walk alone in the dark woods.

Come to me and I will never judge you. I am just a girl and you can tell me anything, who hurt you, who you wish to defy, who should pay for their acts against you.

The hysteria in Salem began in the winter of 1692, stretching into the spring. Bridget Bishop was the first woman to be arrested, and the first to be hanged, on June 10. By September, twenty people had been executed. When the news about what was occurring reached New York, there was shock, especially among the Dutch community, who did not agree that the devil walked among men, or that it was proper to make use of spectral evidence based exclusively on dreams and visions, with no practical proof. The original Dutch settlers were serious-minded people who believed what they saw with their own eyes, but such was not the case in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.