‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Juno. ‘Please take care, now.’

Hannah clicked her tongue, and the horses trotted ahead. She drove quite briskly towards downtown Sacramento, in the direction of Mrs Weiss’s house on J Street; but once she was out of sight in the twilight, she turned the carriage and headed for the intersection of Eighth and L.

She felt as breathless now as she had on the first occasion when she had visited Mrs Pangborn’s. She felt just as resolved, though, in spite of all the agonies of conscience she had gone through; in spite of the fact that she knew now that she had abandoned her religion forever.

She wondered as she drove along L Street whether her religion had at any time amounted to anything more than a substitute for real love. Had it really all been false? Had all those prayers to the Virgin been hollow? And how did God regard her now? As a lost sheep, whom He would search out and gather in His forgiving arms? Or as a damned soul, guilty of breaking both the sixth and the seventh commandments, and duly earmarked for eternal punishment?

She looked up over the rooftops of the clustered wooden houses, and the sight of the stars made her shiver. Maybe it was growing colder. Maybe she was frightened by the thought of Mrs Pangborn’s shining instruments. Maybe she was disturbed by the way the stars hung all around her like haughty witnesses to her sin.

‘Forgive me,’ she whispered, knowing how false it sounded. One of the horses twitched its ears.

She had made Collis a promise on their wedding day — that his firstborn child would be the railroad. It had to be that way, for Collis ate, drank, breathed, and slept the railroad. Everything he did in the hardware store was directed towards making more money for the railroad. Every book and pamphlet he read was concerned with iron and steel and bridges and railroad locomotives. If they had a child before the Railroad Act was signed, then that child would be nothing to Collis but an interference in his midwifery of a child far more precious. At least, Hannah believed it would, and she couldn’t bear the idea of it. When she and Collis had their first child, their first real child, she wanted that child to be everything.

Last year, she had fallen pregnant in April, the month that war had broken out. She had decided at first that she wanted to keep the baby, but by July Collis’s angry moods about the slow progress of the Railroad Act had at last turned her mind against it. While Collis had spent his time writing furious letters to Theodore in Washington, and fretting about finance, Hannah had been going through a silent self-crucifixion. I am going to have to kill my child, she had thought, one sunny morning in mid-July. It is better for it to return to heaven, and to spend the rest of eternity in innocent happiness, than to be born into a world in which it will be second-best in its father’s affections to a railroad company.