The wind was less; the rain had ceased. Abigail’s bones ached with the damp.

You will not be sick, she told herself firmly. Descending to the ordinary, she congratulated herself that she’d written a note to John and his reinforcements last night, while she still had candles and the room was still warm enough that she could hold a pen.

Male voices drifted up the stairway, and for one moment her heart gave a leap. But of course it was only Muldoon and the other male guests, consuming bread and cheese and joking one another about who snored and whose names got amorously murmured in sleep.

“—Oh, and Fleurette—who the bloody ’ell is Fleurette . . .”

“My dearest wife—”

“Aargh, ’er and Nan . . . and Margot . . .”

“I have many wives, mes amis; behold, I am a Mohammedan . . .”

All stood as Abigail came down the stairs, and Mrs. Purley brought her corn pudding—as befit her more elevated station—and coffee. The horses are ready like you asked, Mrs. Adams—and a nice bit of bread and cheese for you both, and oats for the beasts—Why, thank you, m’am—Will there be anything else, Mrs. Adams?—Yes, we’ll hand it to him as soon as he arrives . . .

Under a racing cover of cloud, the world was just light enough, at eight, to make out the details of the Danvers road as it turned inland, toward what had once been Salem Village.

“D’you know the place, then, m’am?” asked Muldoon, as Abigail drew rein. From her last visit to Gilead she remembered the old house that lay a little distance down the overgrown track to their right: remembered it because, in the near-darkness in which she and Thaxter had been riding, she hadn’t been able to see the end of the woods some hundred yards ahead, and had hoped to find shelter.

Now in midafternoon, with the woods filled with a sickly rinsed-out light, she could glimpse the ruined walls, the holed and sagging ceiling, in clearer detail. As she had on that first visit, she dismounted, and led Balthazar to the broken door. What had been simply a pitch-black cavern on that night showed up now as a primitive keeping room, the puncheon floor—under its carpet of dead leaves—an assurance that they wouldn’t fall through broken boards into an unsuspected cellar.

She led the horses inside, slipped the bits from their mouths, loosened the saddle cinches, and from the saddlebag poured two little heaps of oats on the floor. Muldoon, who’d lingered in the doorway looking down the road at the fields glimpsed beyond the thinning of the trees, came in to help her: “Is that there Gilead, then, Mrs. A?”