For this reason I have commandeered Sergeant Muldoon—who is under the impression that he is obeying his commanding officer’s orders—and am on my way to Gilead even now. I beg of you, send reinforcements after us at once, for should Bargest discover that he has been implicated in this crime, I do not put it past him to incite violence against us, to protect his own position.

Likewise I have warned Thaxter, Gomer, and Pattie to keep the children close to home, and to let no one see them until you have given them word.

I trust that you (and suitable assistance) will catch us up on the road.

Your own,
Portia

They spent the night in Salem. The modern seaport town had had little to do with the witchcraft trials that had spread over Essex County like a poison-rash not quite eighty years before. “They weren’t in this town at all, then?” Sergeant Muldoon sounded disappointed.

Rain rattled the darkening casements of Purley’s Tavern, as Mrs. Purley—who always reminded Abigail of a dried apple-doll—set before them a dish of stew and a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Wind shrieked around the eaves. Abigail gratefully drank the landlady’s excellent cider, feeling that she would never get warm again.

“There may have been one or two here, once the accusations were started,” she said. “When people found they could accuse their personal enemies of sending out their spirits to do evil, when the accused themselves were demonstrably elsewhere, a great many found they knew people who must be witches . . . But the accusations themselves began in Salem Village, about eight miles west of here. They changed the name of that settlement to Danvers.”

“I can see why they’d do.” The young man shook his head, and mopped busily at the gravy. The men at the other table—clerks and supercargoes, they looked like, from one of the many ships at anchor—burst into talk and laughter over some witticism, their voices loud in the ordinary-room that had no other customers. After a time he asked, “ ’Tis what this Hand of the Lord told this Hazlitt, then, isn’t it? That Mrs. Pentyre was a witch, and had sent her spirit to do some wicked thing?”

“I think he must have. Or something very like it.” Abigail glanced at the window as the wind shook it again, praying at every moment that each sound was John—with a suitable troop of Sons of Liberty at his back—coming to her assistance. “Mrs. Pentyre and her husband, who evilly contested God’s will that had given the land to the Gilead Congregation. How could such ill-intentioned people not be in league with the Devil?”