Abigail sighed. “They exist a good deal closer to Boston than Essex County. They’ve been feuding in Braintree for years over who got chosen for minister—families who used to be friends not speaking a civil word to one another—and there isn’t a county in New England, where a town hasn’t split itself off from its parent settlement, because part of the congregation doesn’t believe in precisely how the other part conceives salvation. Now with these new preachers coming through, these Evangelists, as they call them—this Awakening they speak of—it’s as if all the old arguments over who shall be saved and who damned are all being argued again.

“It wasn’t so long ago—I’ve talked to people who were children at the time—that grown men in Salem, leaders of the community, let themselves be scared like medieval peasants into killing twenty people, on the strength of accusations by a pack of spiteful girls. We think we’ve come so far toward Enlightenment and Reason, yet even in Boston, rational men who read the newspapers still think a Catholic woman is some kind of devil-worshiper, who would steal her husband’s money to give over to the Jesuits.”

The young man looked startled. “Well, with Catholics, that’s different,” he said. “I mean, they do have to do as their Pope tells them, whatever it is, don’t they?”

Abigail remembered Catherine Moore as a large, calm, good-looking woman in her late thirties whom she had met several times at the Brattle Street Meeting, walking behind Rebecca and Charles Malvern. Rebecca, Abigail recalled, had never asked her maid to carry either her cloak or her Bible, as so many wealthy ladies did. Odd, she thought, in one who had been waited on by slaves every day of her life. In the early days of the friendship Rebecca would always speak of Catherine’s unwavering loyalty in the gathering nightmare of spying and distrust that her marriage had become. Unless the friendship is extraordinary, Lisette Droux had said, it is too easy for confidence to turn into anger. And, I would rather be a good maid than a good friend. Catherine Moore, Abigail guessed, in the three years she had served Rebecca Malvern, had managed both.

The woman who came out of the dairy when Abigail and her escort rode into the yard at the Moore farm seemed to her, at first glimpse, to be the elder sister, or an aunt, of the woman she had known in those days. She stooped a little, and her face was weather-beaten; the few strands of hair visible beneath her cap were cinder gray. Only at second look did Abigail recognize her as Rebecca’s maid, by her soft little half smile. “Can I help you?” she asked, and the voice—which Abigail had only heard once or twice—was the same.