It was harder to speak softly enough for safety, and still be heard. She whispered, “Gilead’s about ten miles from Townsend, but we must stick close to the Salem road. John and others will be coming. I know they’ll be coming.”

“Well, if we start wanderin’ about in the woods we’ve had it for sure,” remarked Muldoon matter-of-factly.

The fence became a stone wall, and they followed the wall in the blackness. The harsh wind carried the smell of open fields and smoke. Behind them, Gilead was a cluster of coals around the dimming ruby of the blockhouse. The trees on their right muttered like live things disturbed in their sleep. Abigail said, “They can’t let us escape.”

And Muldoon said, “Aye. That they can’t.”

“Pentyre owns most of the land under the Gilead fields,” she explained softly, as the young sergeant helped her over the wall. “Bargest was swindled when he bought the place, it sounds like. The case has been in the courts for years—”

“I know. Half those sermons were about how the Chosen of the Lord is being persecuted for his beliefs—”

“For his belief that he can do whatever he likes, maybe—including bigamy and fornication, which Pentyre had him up for as well. Perdita was her husband’s heir, of course. The next heir would never come back to this country to straighten things out. Bargest sent Pentyre a letter, threatening him and Perdita with murder by the Sons of Liberty. Signed with one of John’s names, which he must have got off a pamphlet.”

“Fly old duck,” muttered Muldoon. “You got to admit, ’tis clever.”

“If he’s so clever,” murmured Rebecca, “will he have his men waiting for us at the road?”

Abigail felt as if she were eight years old again, and that her brother had struck her in the wind with a chunk of firewood. Sick, and cold, and suddenly too tired to move another foot. “They’ll have found the horses—”

“That shanty’s a bit off the track,” said the sergeant, as they moved on. “Watch it here, m’am—” A hand groped for her elbow in the dark, supported her where the ground turned to a morass whose surface ice crunched sharply underfoot. “As I said, we can’t leave the road. And if we don’t get ’em, sure they’ll catch us by daylight come mornin’. I been watchin’ for torches coming this way from the village, and seen none, but that doesn’t mean they’re not usin’ a dark-lantern. We’ll just have to take a sharp listen, ’fore we go in for the beasts.”