Love is what you make of it, and she had made it into her undoing. As she walked through the farmland ringing Salem, the rows of wheat she passed withered in the fields. Her hair was in knots, her complexion pale. She thoughtlessly tore her flesh on thorn bushes, and the blood that fell scorched the grass she walked upon. In her arms, Faith patted at the tears streaming down her mother’s face, but a witch’s tears were as dangerous as they were rare, and they burned the child’s fingers. Even Faith, whose touch could heal a bird with a broken wing, couldn’t heal her mother’s despair. Nothing could give her back the time she had wasted on a worthless man.

They went to the lake, where Maria knelt to dash water on her face. Surely John would answer her, for a letter written in blood has consequences for both the writer and the reader. You could not forget what you had read. He would have to answer. Faith was his child, after all, and deserved his name and attentions. What his response would be, no one could foretell, for a man’s fate changed every day, depending upon his actions. When Maria gazed into the still, black water, she could see pieces of what was to come. The tree with white flowers, the woman in the lake. Summer would come, and the world would grow greener, and, she could already see, John would disappoint her. She realized it had never been love between them, for you cannot love someone you can never know.

Perhaps his neighbors had told him that a woman with black hair had been seen peering into his garden, speaking with his son, with some insisting that she seemed to rise above the bricks. They said that a black bird had followed her, often a sign of bad luck and a harbinger of death and disaster. Everyone noticed she was not like any other woman in town; she wore blue rather than gray, with no bonnet covering her hair, and her leather boots were red. It was clear she did as she pleased, despite the magistrates’ rules. If indeed she was a witch with bad intentions, she could have easily had her revenge; she might have stolen the Hathorne boy and left a changeling in his place, a faceless poppet made of straw. Even an ordinary woman who had been betrayed might have started a fire in the garden, a flame that would have quickly spread to the roof and the gables. But Maria did no such damage. Revenge was not in her nature. She knew full well that whatever she sent into the world would come back to her threefold, be it vengeance or kindness.