“People will not understand you,” he’d told her. “The way you look, the clothes you wear, what we are to each other.”

“What are we?” she had said, her face hot.

“We are what God will allow us to be,” he’d said, which was not the answer she’d wanted.

It was spring, with the world suddenly alive and green, magicked back to life. Maria walked quickly, for it was mud season as well, and she didn’t wish the muck to stain her red boots. On Washington Street, Cadin dove down from the sky, pulling out strands of her hair until she waved him away. Clearly he disapproved of the path she took. But a crow was a crow, and a woman a woman, and there were some things she believed he couldn’t understand. She had written a letter with ink made from her own blood. It was a last attempt to see if John would do the right thing.

The house with the black shutters was only steps away. The black elms were festooned with a thousand dark buds that would soon unfurl into heart-shaped leaves. Maria was standing beneath the tree when she spied a woman and a young boy on the other side of the fence, there in the warm spring sun. Ruth Gardner Hathorne and her boy, three-year-old John, were seeing to the garden. Ruth wore a white cap, her blond hair hidden, her fair skin blotchy from hours of gardening. It was then that the new black leaves began to fall. The elms could not abide Maria, nor she them. A wet gust of wind came up and blew the fallen leaves away. She had seen Hathorne walk away from her in a vision where there was black water and a black heart lying broken in the grass. She’d discovered the reason he could never stay with her, why he kept her on the outskirts of the city, why he had begun to avoid her. All along he’d had a wife. Even a woman with the sight can be taken for a fool in matters of love.

Maria could not take her eyes off Ruth Gardner Hathorne, whose parents had been Quakers, persecuted for their religious beliefs by the Puritan magistrates of Salem. They had been forced to leave Massachusetts and had followed Ann Hutchinson to Rhode Island, leaving behind their fourteen-year-old daughter, Ruth. Thirty-three-year-old Hathorne had taken the girl in, then had married her. Ruth was now nineteen and her son meant all the world to her. Hathorne had betrayed them both, on Curaçao and now again, and there was reason to burn with anger. The leaves around Maria’s boots caught fire and turned to cinders, and the sparks flew down chimneys all over town, so that women had to drench their fireplaces with pitchers of water.