A part of her longed to be saved from the path she had taken, so that she could become the person she might have been if she hadn’t been a stolen child, if she hadn’t learned early on that there was evil in the world. What plunged her further into the dark was an ordinary day when she was cleaning out the barn after Finney moved out. She stumbled upon an old satchel, one that belonged to Samuel Dias. Inside was a rope, a book of maps, and a letter from Maria Owens, left for him when the Queen Esther docked in Boston after their trip together from Curaçao. He had kept it all this time, though he could only tolerate reading it once, for once was more than enough.

I don’t know what might have happened between us. I am in search of a man named John Hathorne, he is my fate and the father of my child.

Faith sat back on her heels, her heart pounding. She had never known her father’s name. To her eyes the letters were sharp as glass. She could hear her mother calling to her from the garden, where she was planting rosemary and mint. Instead of answering, Faith lay in the straw. She paged through the book of maps until she reached Essex County. Navigators can never touch a map without plotting the journey ahead, and Samuel had marked the path with spots of ink. Faith thought of the unfurled paper that told her future, and how vengeance had settled inside her like a bird in a nest, fitted close to her heart. From the start, she had been ready to seek revenge.

That evening she had supper with her mother, a cod baked with spring onions and cream, then Faith went up to her room under the eaves. She had been trained to keep her feelings to herself. She set the lock and burned a black candle. Her father was the magistrate who had judged the women who stood before him with their wrists in iron chains and their legs bound by ropes. If she reached back inside of herself she could recall his appearance, a tall man who had stared as if willing her to disappear. When your father doesn’t love you, a stone forms inside of you, hard and sharp enough to pierce through bone. The dark was rising in her soul and she was glad of it. She was at the age when innocence seems like a flaw. Do what you must or do what you will. Adhere to the rules or break them in two. Faith would not be thirteen forever, but that’s what she was now. She had picked up her red boots at the cobbler and they fitted her perfectly. Before she left she wrote a note to her mother, folded it, and placed it upon her bedside table.