“Would he be ill, then?”

“What, he?” Despite her uneasiness, Abigail couldn’t keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Surely he can cure himself of anything with a touch? Perhaps his most recent Bride has gone into labor.” But the sight filled her with dismay. She had counted on three solid hours of the Chosen One’s evening sermon, to allow her to get in, release Rebecca, and make good an escape before total darkness set in. The possibility that the Reverend would be ill and unable to preach had never crossed her mind.

“Well, let’s get in a smitch closer, and sit and watch a spell. ‘Mostly you don’t need to ask questions,’ me mother always says, ‘if you’ll just hold your peace and keep your eyes open.’ ”

“She sounds like a wise woman, your mother.”

“Ach.” He shook his head. “When I’d tell her so, she’d roll up her eyes at the rafters an’ say, ‘I’m scarcely that, boy-o; I married your Da’, didn’t I?’ Yet she always did give me the best advice.” He fell silent, as they moved closer yet to the buildings. There were perhaps forty houses, not counting cowsheds and outbuildings, straggling along a single rutted lane which perished in the yard of the last dwelling in the town. Another lane crossed it, joining the Reverend’s house (as Abigail surmised it) with the House of Repentance. Nearly half of these dwellings clustered within the ruined quadrangle of the old palisade, and three appeared to have been part of its curtain wall.

As she watched the inhabitants of the village moved about their circumscribed winter chores—cutting kindling or hauling in sledges of wood from the surrounding wilderness; feeding chickens in their coops or tending boiling pots where by the stink of it soap was being rendered. Most, Abigail knew, would be laboring at indoor winter tasks: spinning, weaving, carding, sharpening tools, and mending harness. Orion grew up here.

She could almost see him, toddling adoringly at his mother’s heels down that muddy street. Beautiful, like her, with her raven hair and green eyes. And she’d thought nothing of dragging him along with her to live under the domination of her monomaniacal lover. And he, who had only his love to use, to draw her back to him, had been trapped in the sticky webs of neediness and domination.

I’ve tried to act for the best, but I can’t be two people!

Would things have been different, if he had been brought up in anything approaching normal circumstances?

Or with madness, did it make a difference?

Yet while her mind ran on all this, Abigail’s gaze moved over the squalid little settlement, picked out details. Who went into which doors, who came out, how long they remained. Which houses had the look of habitation—cows, chickens, dogs, gardens harvested recently, smoke in the chimneys, outhouses that smelled of use—and which did not. She and Muldoon shifted their position several times in the course of the afternoon, watching patiently as hunters, not even knowing quite what they looked for.