Faith sat in the back row of the classics seminar at Harvard, allowed only to listen and never to speak. She dressed in boy’s clothing in her everyday life, which she found so much more practical than skirts and capes. At Harvard, she could be seen in a black jacket along with trousers and a white shirt and a black tie, the same uniform as the men, so that she might not call attention to herself and her gender, although she hardly went unnoticed due to the red boots she wore every day.

“Gentlemen,” the professor had told his students on the first day of class when Faith Owens was present. “Keep your eyes on me, if you please.”

Faith had been wrong about many things. She still had the red mark that had arisen in the center of her left palm when Martha Chase drowned; the color had faded, but the blotch was enough to remind her of the bad choices she had made in the past. Every midsummer’s eve a sparrow came into the parlor of the house on Magnolia Street. If it completed a circle around the room three times, bad luck was sure to come. Because of this, Faith never forgot the bird whose life she had taken for her own benefit when she made the Revenge Pie for John Hathorne. Hathorne was a successful trader, but people in town avoided him. There was nothing she wanted from him now, because he had nothing to give her. She always chased the sparrow to the window, then gently urged it out with a broom.

Faith still had a penance to pay and much to set right. For this reason, she went from one farm to another on Saturdays to teach any girl whose parents wouldn’t allow her to take time from the workday and attend school. She walked so many miles, and came home so late at night, that Maria worried she would exhaust herself. One dusky evening, as Faith was crossing a pasture on her way home in the gray light of early winter, a white horse approached her and followed her home. It was the field that had belonged to the Hopwood brothers, and the ground there was still ashy. Faith understood that she was fortunate indeed to be chosen again after Keeper’s death. She called the mare Holly, and people became accustomed to seeing her riding through the fields at night, wearing trousers and carrying a satchel of books, her red hair tucked up under a black hat.