“Mrs. Hazlitt, she’s near to crazy weeping over it. She says, she knows he’s run off and left her, the way he did before.”

And small blame to him. “Oh, I’m sure he’ll be back before nightfall.”

“Yes, m’am.” The girl dipped her cleaning rag into a little basin of sand that had been reused so frequently that the sand was nearly the color of the soot it was intended to eradicate, and continued to rub doggedly at the nearly coal black surface of the brass. “He’d have told me, if he’d gone back off to Gilead.”

“Gilead?” Having set her basket on the corner of the table, Abigail paused on her way to the door.

“Yes, m’am. The Hand of the Lord, he’s wrote to Mr. Hazlitt two and three times to come. He grows main angry, when I bring him letters from Mr. Hazlitt saying as how he can’t.” She went to the sideboard, produced from among the litter of papers there half a dozen ragged sheets, clearly endpapers torn from the backs of books, decorated with the same virulent scrawl Abigail recognized at once from the sermons Rebecca was preparing for print. Words leaped out at her—further excuses . . . turn thy face for the work of the Lord . . . scorn his Chosen One and set up idols before thee . . .

Heaven forbid, reflected Abigail sourly, that even the fate of English justice and English liberties should come before the sacred cogitations of the Hand of the Lord.

A hundred things Orion had said to her about the conditions under which he’d grown up now returned, with the recollection of those shut-up, weathered buildings, of the hysterical atmosphere in the “House of Repentance” where sinners trembled and shrieked before the Chosen One’s version of the Lord. Rather smugly, Damnation added, “I was a bride of the Chosen One,” and Abigail didn’t even feel surprise. Only a kind of outraged disgust.

“Are you indeed?” she asked in what she hoped was a polite voice.

“Oh, not no more, m’am. The Lord became displeased with me, and told Reverend Bargest to put me aside, because my spirit used to walk abroad in the night and pinch the babies in their cradles, and let the mice into the kitchens. I tried not to let it,” she added worriedly. “Nights I’d lie awake, trying to hold my bad spirit in.” She clenched her sooty fists illustratively, pressed them together against her breast. “But it always did get away, the Reverend said, and walked about the world doing evil. He saw it, he said, and others did, too. So he had to put me aside.”