It was close to dark when they finally stumbled into a village optimistically called Gilead, barely a hamlet clustered around a dilapidated log church, and begged shelter for the night. Hospitality was freely offered by the town’s minister, but it had to be paid for, Abigail learned, by attendance at the evening sermon: penance enough to one raised in the dual tradition of old-style predestinarianism and well-written doctrinal argument. The Right Reverend Atonement Bargest was a firm believer in the contention that no one could be Saved who did not tremble before the Altar of the Lord, and Abigail and Thaxter spent three hours on the hard, narrow meetinghouse bench (“The House of Repentance, we call it,” confided the Reverend as he escorted them to the front and center seats) while all around them the two hundred or so souls of the congregation trembled, wept, and cried out in terror at apparitions of devils that the preacher pointed to in the candlelit shadows. Thaxter quite frankly dozed off, but Abigail was sorely tried with the effort not to get to her feet in protest as the Reverend pointed and shrieked at the appearance (visible only to himself) of the Nine Daughters of Eve, emerging from Hell to prey on the souls of Righteous Men: the serpent, the nightmare, the witch, the succubus, the harlot, the Priestess of Idols, Jezebel the Queen, the dishonest handmaiden, and most iniquitous of all, the inquisitive woman whose feet are never still.

Women jauntering about the countryside instead of staying home to care for their husbands and children, he implied, would come to no good end. Shivering in her damp cloak, her feet freezing and her thighs cut by the narrowness of the bench on which she sat, Abigail was much inclined to agree with him.

After the sermon was done—it was now pouring rain—the Reverend Bargest arbitrarily assigned a member of his congregation to offer the travelers hospitality, and released them to supper and a bed. As they followed their host to one of the two dozen or so log-built houses within the town’s old palisade—like disused barracks, most of them, their upper floors shuttered and dark—Abigail could feel the disapproving gazes of the congregation on her back. “Have you not a husband nor a home?” one of the littler girls of her host’s family asked her, as the cold supper of corn pudding and molasses was set on the table—and her elder sister swept her away with a hissed admonition and a glance of sullen dread.

Evidently only the word of “the Hand of the Lord,” as they reverently termed their minister, kept Abigail and her escort from being ejected supperless into the road.