“I know breakbone fever and you either will trust me to do my best, or I can assure you, your girl will not live.”

The minister sat beside Maria and watched the candle flicker. He had one child, and Maria knew what that was like. You carried your heart in your hand.

“You can have me thrown in jail if I fail you,” she told him. “You can have me hanged.”

The minister exhaled a soft, brittle laugh. “I prefer not to do so. I prefer that my daughter lives.”

“Then we’re in agreement. That is what I prefer as well.”

Maria was in the corridor carrying a basin of cool water and vinegar when the minister’s close friend Dr. Joost van der Berg arrived. The doctor was a tall man of huge influence who regularly visited the governors of both New York and Massachusetts and was highly regarded by all. She overheard the doctor speaking with Dekker about the trials in Salem. They were both skeptical that a human being could make contact with the devil, causing death and destruction at that person’s will. The doctor believed there were issues with the accusers rather than the accused. It was clear that both he and Dekker saw the entire process of witch hunts as insanity. Neither believed that any of the accused could hit and bite victims when they had been seen miles or more away at the same exact time as the attacks. It was lunacy to think such acts were possible, with Jonas Dekker stating that the accusers were ill and deprived of their sanity. The two men were not alone in their opinions. There were many who were in power in Massachusetts who had begun to see that the trials were a sort of hysteria, although some would not understand the horror of what had been done until later. Increase Mather, the president of Harvard, had published Cases of Conscience, making an argument against use of spectral evidence in witch trials, in direct opposition to his son Cotton Mather’s The Wonders of the Invisible World, which insisted spectral evidence was valuable in a court of law, with the elder man writing, It is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned. One man among those in power who had not changed his mind at all, however, was the chief examiner of the witchcraft trials, appointed in 1692, John Hathorne.

He had once been a man who had dived into the water fully clothed, who had stood in the moonlight to pick apples from a tree in the courtyard. When she’d asked him why he had abandoned her, he’d merely said, People change. Perhaps he wanted to believe this was true, but you were who you were. A person might be changed by ill fortune or circumstance, as Faith had been, but every individual carried a soul within him, unchanging and eternal, a light, a heart, a breath.