On the return trip, the Indian woman Cheeba clung to his back. Her smell of grease and rancid sweat nauseated him even in the open air, and the dark, worn hands – broken fingernails hooked over his vest – filled him with dread. By the time he arrived with her – less than an hour – Sarah’s screams had stopped. He ran up the stairs behind Cheeba, who dropped to her knees beside the bed as he entered the room and laid her greased, black-haired head on Sarah’s breast. Sarah’s face was gray. Eliza stood in front of the window, blocking out the light, holding what looked to Jonathan like a bundle of laundry in her arms.

‘How long she been like this? Still bleeding?’ Cheeba said, not looking up.

‘No bleeding now, but bad from the start of things,’ Eliza told her as she rocked the bundle, which squeaked out a cry. Jonathan looked at it with a wrenching love so tangled that the love itself seemed to him a deadly instrument, something to be feared just as the coupling that had resulted in this hell was to be feared hereafter – and what an evil thing it was, all that gasping, slippery ecstasy, that had made of Sarah’s body an instrument of torture and self-destruction. But he hadn’t known. He hadn’t understood. For ignorance, there is forgiveness. The baby, though: the baby was different. He’d denied the baby to Burgess as surely as Peter had denied Jesus to the maid of the high priest. For this there could be no forgiveness.

‘Will it live?’ he whispered to Eliza.

She nodded.

Sarah swung her head restlessly from side to side on the pillow. ‘Now look away, Preacher,’ Cheeba said. She took one of Sarah’s breasts in both hands and twisted it with all the strength in her muscular arms and fingers. Sarah lifted out of the bed and screamed, her eyes opening wide. Jonathan reeled back and found himself in Burgess’s arms. Cheeba twisted again. The scream was louder this time, fuller.

‘Jesus!’ Burgess whispered.

The Indian woman sat back on her haunches and watched. Sarah panted and gasped. Deep red weals emerged on the skin of her bare breasts.

‘Want water?’ Cheeba said. ‘You get water.’ She turned to Jonathan. ‘Lots of water – with little salt in it and little bit sugar.’

Jonathan ran downstairs, filled the pitcher and ran back up. Sarah’s face already showed the beginnings of color. The Indian woman took water in the palm of her hand and pressed it into Sarah’s mouth. The color grew. Sarah lay silent but she was breathing firmly; Jonathan kept his eyes on the barbaric figure of her savior, on the multi-colored dress, the ragged braids, the rough hands and broken nails, the beads of bear teeth and the glittering stones. Her rancid smell filled the room, and the color was full in Sarah’s face.

‘Thank God,’ Jonathan sighed to himself, hardly aware of the words he spoke and wholly oblivious of their absurdity.