“I believe it was on my behalf,” Catherine said.

Already, Catherine Durant could not be kept from him or he from her. They had an unspoken pact that they would never be parted, two spellbound people who left together for Catherine’s farm on the Bowery without looking back.

Maria narrowed her eyes. It had been too long since she had really looked at her daughter. Now she saw the edge of darkness inside. “You haven’t enough practice for such things.”

Faith shrugged. “It’s only love.”

“You think love is so simple?” Maria thought of the day she saw John Hathorne in the blue dining room in Curaçao and the morning Samuel had brought the magnolia tree to Salem so she thought that snow was falling. “Take my advice,” she told Faith. “Stay away from it.”

“If that’s how you feel about love, why are you still wearing Gogo’s ring?”

Maria had tried everything to remove the gold band from her finger, but the wedding ring wouldn’t come off. It was likely the reason she thought of Samuel Dias so often. She wondered if Abraham had known that would happen and why such rings were worn, to make you think of the one who had given it to you.

“You’re the one that played with love,” Faith said to her mother. “You called down a curse on us. You didn’t care what I thought or what I wanted.”

Try to do what’s best for your children, and still it could all go wrong. What you knew today, you didn’t know yesterday. What you wished for then, you might come to regret.

“You never told me what happens if someone falls in love with us.”

“We ruin their lives,” Maria told her daughter.

“It seems you’ve already ruined the Goat’s life,” Faith told her mother that day. “You might as well love him.”

PART FIVE The Remedy

1693 I.