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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

Before this house Damnation halted, and stood staring up at its upper windows. Across the road and with a field between them, Abigail couldn’t see the woman’s face. But she did see her walk back and forth before the house, and partway around both sides, looking.

Muldoon touched Abigail’s arm, pointed. By the door, Abigail saw, were three little piles of cut wood, as if someone had been assigned to bring an armload to the place, and had simply dumped their burden and gone away.

Abigail said, “That’s it.”

Thirty-one

Thirty-one

032

A oman came out of the house nearest the one that had attracted Damnation’s attention—which lay nearly fifty feet away—aproned and wrapped in a heavy shawl. Though the servant woman’s brown dress was the plainest serge obtainable in town, still it looked modish and new against the villager’s crude homespun. The village woman caught Damnation’s arm, explained something to her, with gestures and shakings of her head. As she led Damnation away, back toward the main village crossroad, the servant looked back over her shoulder at the empty house.

“A closer inspection, Sergeant?”

To avoid crossing the road under the eyes of possible watchers in the two nearest houses, Abigail and her escort had to work their way for nearly thirty minutes along the edge of the woods, past the last house in the village (which was occupied, Abigail noted—What half-believing heart had settled thus far from his neighbors?) and so back to the rear of that closed-up former blockhouse. Even so, nearly a hundred feet of open ground lay between the woods and the rear of the house. Its original defensive purpose was clearest on that side, for there were no windows at all on the ground floor, and only rifle-slits above, facing the fields.

It was so wholly and indisputably a prison that Abigail shivered, and wondered, Is his Word so paramount to them, that they’ll follow him even in that? Incarcerating someone only because he says they should?

Fifteen centuries of religious histories in her father’s books, and John’s, snickered up their sleeves at her: You think that’s odd? The Salem witches shook their heads at her naïveté.

She’s a born liar and a conniver, the wicked Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela had said to the other servants, don’t believe a word that she says. Or had the Hand of the Lord chosen Mrs. Tillet’s justification? I know more about this than you do . . .

Dark as it had been when she and Thaxter had come out of the evening service, she doubted she’d even been able to see this house.

Yet still, unreasonably, she felt, I should have known . . .

The more closely she observed the house, the more certain she was.