Sarah said, ‘We’re going west. You can start again. Your faith will come back. Just wait and see. Think about my hat.’ But it was the curve of her back and the way her hair hung in the braid that convinced him. If preaching was what it took to get them, then preaching was what he’d do.

Before the wedding, he hired a horse and rode out through the frozen landscape to the old Stoke homestead. Nothing remained of it; it had disappeared as surely as Mogul had and even more thoroughly. Acres of corn-land – dark, tilled earth showing in scrubby patches through a largely evaporated layer of snow – stretched from horizon to horizon: not even the slightest change in the contour of the land indicated where all those passions had taken place. Jonathan spent hours with Benbow Wikin. It was in fact from Benbow that he bought that first horsehide-bound volume, a ledger rather than a diary, that sits on my desk this very day; he made up the code (a simple rearrangement of the alphabet) as he made the purchase itself, and with the information Benbow gave him, he wrote in the first entries about the Stokes and about himself. ‘Wify and Alvah got the fever,’ Benbow told him. ‘Dead within a week of each other. Alyoshus sold up. Went west. Cathern married Garley Ashton. Remember him? Skinny kid. Bookkeeper. They went west, too. Out California way—’

‘Red pigtails and all?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Red pigtails and all,’ Benbow said.

Jonathan and Sarah hardly spoke to each other on their honeymoon trip to Washington state. She stared out the window of the train as though she were afraid to look at him. At night she slept perched on the far edge of the bed while he held himself rigid on the opposite side. Like the old fairy tale about the man who experienced fear only in love despite all the terrors that had preceded it, Jonathan was afraid now, too – afraid of her fear and even more afraid of the intensity of his own feelings. He’d survived slavery. He’d survived friendship and its betrayal by death. He’d survived George dead and George alive again. He’d survived God, education and malaria. But this? Already – because of her – he’d committed himself to the life of an impostor, which is to say that already – because of her – he’d given up a crucial part of his search for whatever bedrock it is that he and I share a passion for: truth or meaning or first causes: it doesn’t matter what you call it. Already, though he didn’t know it himself, didn’t even suspect it, already an element of him hated her for these things and for the mortal weakness of the flank she’d exposed in him. By the time they arrived in Seattle, both of them were exhausted.

Seattle’s Western Star Hotel gave them a double room that looked out to sea; they fell asleep that night because they were too tired not to. About midnight Jonathan woke abruptly to find his hands plucking at the quilt. He sat upright in the moonlight and Sarah threw her arms around him.