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Chapters (37)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Twenty-six
  30. Twenty-seven
  31. Twenty-eight
  32. Twenty-nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-one
  35. Thirty-two
  36. Thirty-three
  37. Thirty-four

“Oh, dear, yes.” Mrs. Purley set down her pitcher, dried her hands in her apron as she looked down at Abigail with sorrow and anger in her eyes. “The one from Gilead, we only heard rumor of: Those Gilead folks has always kept their doings to themselves. Purley says, nobody would ever have heard of it at all, except for it being Rose of Sharon Topsford that found the body, and the poor thing has never been quite right after that, seeing what had been done to the girl. But Frankincense Banister—” She shook her head. “It doesn’t do to speak ill of the dead, and whatever the poor girl’s failings—and it was only foolishness, and having her head turned, so pretty as she was—the way she would flirt, and with boys she didn’t know well, we were all afraid she’d find herself in trouble one day, though of course no one expected . . . Is that who you meant?”

“Yes,” said Abigail tonelessly. “I-I knew it was some name of the kind. From a farm, wasn’t she? Near Wenham?”

“A few miles south of Wenham Pond, yes.”

Within a few miles of Gilead.

“And did anyone try bearding that wretch Bargest in his den about it?”

At the mention of the Hand of the Lord, Mrs. Purley’s mouth tightened up. “Well, as I recall it, every single one of his flock was accounted for, the day the poor girl disappeared. But there’s more than one hereabouts, who’ll be pleased when that court case is resolved, and those Boston folks that own that land put the sheriffs onto them and turn them out. Their title’s no good to about three quarters of their fields,” she added, in reply to Abigail’s inquiring look—though in fact Abigail had ascertained nearly as much from Penelope Sellars before leaving Boston. “The case has been dragging on for years, with some Boston merchant whose mother was old Antoninus Sellars’s grand-daughter—and who’s put the sheriffs onto old Bargest’s ‘Chosen Brides.’ A disgrace, the lot of them.” She shook her head.

No other women were traveling abroad that dismal night, so Abigail had the smaller upstairs chamber and its cold—but dry, aired, and bug-free—bed to herself. There was even a small fire in its fireplace. She wrote out the orders from Coldstone to Muldoon, then blew out her candle and lay awake, listening for horses in the court beneath the drumming of the rain.

Though rain, and wind, and the rattling of the window sash were all the sounds that broke the deep stillness, she dreamed of church bells.

Thirty

Thirty

031

In darkness she woke—with the instincts of one who has milked cows for most of her thirty years—and in darkness dressed. Downstairs she heard the small sounds of the inn servants making fires, tidying the ordinary, taking bread from the oven.