“Was your mother also the Chosen One’s bride?”

He sighed, and looked away. “Can you doubt it?”

“And that was why you fled?”

“Who can tell why one does what one does?” He made a helpless gesture. “I had to get out—had to get away. From her, from him . . . She said she would kill herself, if I ever left her. I knew she wouldn’t—” A wry grin twisted his mouth. “She loves herself far too well. But it was like cutting off my own arm, to leave her, even knowing her the way I do. And in the end I had to sneak away like a thief. I knew Bargest would look after her. It was almost a year, before one of his people here in town saw me, and wrote to him—to them—where I was.”

“His people?”

He sighed again. “Like Damnation. Like me. People who lived on Gilead, whom he can still command.” And seeing her raised brows, he asked more gently, “How do you think I could look after Mother, without his ordering Damnation to live here and help me? Say what you will about him, for better or for worse, he never leaves one of his people to make their way in the world unaided and alone.”

Not even Lucretia Hazlitt, reflected Abigail sadly. Even though her craziness had probably gone beyond what even the Gilead Congregation would put up with. She recalled those boarded-up houses, those shuttered upper stories. The place must have been much bigger, when little Orion and his mother—how old had he been then?—had come there, Lucretia afire with the words of the Chosen One, her “little King” dragged along by the hand. How many others, like Orion, had fled the community there? How many could the Hand of the Lord still call upon for service, here in Boston or in the communities along the bay?

Was it by his command that Orion had opened his house to his mother, despite what he knew it would cost him? Or had it been simply because she was his mother—because of that entangling love?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, and he shook his head again, and made a gesture of pushing some unseen thing away.

“ ’Tis all right. There’s naught to be done, and I’m used to her now. I can’t—” He rubbed his hand over his face, breathed in deep, and made a smile. “I keep thinking there was something else I could have done, but I don’t see what it is. Please don’t think ill of her.”

“No, of course not.”

“Tell Mr. Sam Adams that I’ll have his pamphlets done for him, right enough.” He bowed to her again, lifted his hat. “Now I must get back to her. She doesn’t do well alone.”