Only once in the course of the short, fading afternoon did anyone go near the place. The same woman who had drawn Damnation away returned some hours later, a basket on her arm. Going in, she reemerged almost at once—without the basket—and fetched in a few sticks of the firewood. A few moments later, Abigail saw the white puffs of new smoke rise from the chimney. Good Heavens, it must be like an icehouse in there—!

She came out again to bring in a pail of water, and to empty a chamber pot, which she rinsed briefly with another splash of water drawn from the well, but didn’t wash. This she carried back inside, then reemerged, picked up her empty basket, and hastened away down the darkening street toward the groups gathered outside the house of the Chosen of the Lord.

By that time, the wintry daylight was almost gone. At times Abigail barely noticed that she was shivering, so violent was her rage, shock, horror; at other times she felt a kind of bone-deep exhaustion coming over her and thought, I’m going to get sick if I’m not careful. But there was nothing to be done about that. She and Muldoon worked their way along the edge of the woods, observing every house in the town, but they all appeared to be normal—

“Or as normal as this place can be, under the command of a hypocritical madman!” whispered Abigail, when they returned to their post among a thicket of young hazel, opposite the old blockhouse.

“Who may be dying,” breathed back Muldoon. Men came in from the woods—some with wood, others carrying braces of dead squirrels or groundhogs—and the anxious groups keeping watch around that handsome house coalesced into a crowd. Though at that distance it was difficult to be sure, Abigail thought the watchers kept turning, looking in the direction of the blockhouse. Several pointed.

“You don’t think she had the smallpox, and has give it to him?”

“If she had, the Tillets would have it as well,” Abigail whispered back. “As would Mr. Hazlitt, and I myself.”

“Did she bite him, d’you think, and it’s mortifyin’?”

“Serve him right if it were.” But her chuckle swiftly died. “They would kill her.”

“T’cha!”

“If she were responsible for his death, or his illness? For robbing them of his counsel? Of course they would.” As she spoke the words a cold suspicion took her heart, as to what was actually going on in the village.

John—Where was John? Or—though she could not imagine that John wouldn’t come to aid her himself, and be damned to the Provost Marshal’s thirty-pound bond—where were those he would, he must, send? She had listened all day for them, consumed with dread lest they ride straight into Gilead and let themselves be talked into leaving, having given the game away . . .