He did not leave the ship after it docked. He told his father they should turn toward Newport as soon as their trading in Boston was done. There was no reason to stay. Maria looked back and saw him at his maps. Perhaps he was too busy to say his good-byes; he was meant to study the seas and stars and there was nothing for him here on land. A man who talked as much as he did knew when he’d reached the end of a story, even though there are those who insist that once you save a life, that person is tied to you eternally. Maria might have gone to him and asked for him to explain himself and tell her what he wanted of her, but it was too late. There was the city of Boston and beyond were the green hills of the second Essex County.

This was where fate had led her.

PART TWO Talisman

1680 I.

Summertime in Massachusetts was sticky with heat and plagued by thunderstorms, and August was the worst of it. Even a weather witch could do little here when faced with the oddities of nature. Occasionally, hailstones as big as a man’s hand would fall with a noisy splatter, pelting against roofs and cobbled walkways. The streets ran with waste, and temperatures rose until people were unable to sleep at night. Overheated men roamed the city, courting trouble; proper women slept without a stitch of clothing and dreamed of lakes and streams, often waking with their hair wringing wet and pools of water mysteriously appearing on the wooden floor beneath their beds.

Yet, despite the troubles the season brought, every soul in the colony agreed that summer was far too short. No one wished for a New England winter. Winter was severe in every acre of this region, bleak and much more fierce than winters in England, so cold that harbors froze solid. There were those who believed this new country was too frigid for Englishmen, many of whom perished in blizzards, freezing in their own beds. The native people vowed that every ten years there was no winter, but that the years in between made up for that blessed time. It was a land of extremes and there seemed to be more of everything here, both disaster and promise, and mothers whispered that was the cause that there were so many twins in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, for all here was doubled, even human life.