“Yes,” Sarah conceded. “I suppose it’s not worth it.”

“It’s a bad bargain for a woman,” Alinor agreed. “Aside from the sin—if you have a baby or two, it’s a bad start for them, poor little angels—and not their fault.”

“No, I know. I am outstandingly virtuous, you know, Grandma?”

Alinor laughed. “Coming from a house like this and a mother like yours, you could hardly help it. There is no way you could be false.”

“False?” the girl repeated.

“Counterfeit,” her grandmother said. “Appearing as one thing but being another.”

“You think Livia is false?” the girl said acutely.

“Quite the opposite! She never takes a false step, she never strikes a wrong note. She’s never uncertain. It’s as if everything is… practiced… like a performance. And every step is for her own good, whatever she promises your ma.”

“People do strange things. How can we know? If you think she’s up to something, shouldn’t we ask her directly? Put it to her? In all honesty?”

The older woman shook her head. “Better to let her continue as she is—using this house as her home, launching her business and herself, making money from your ma’s wharf, battening on a stranger. Going far from here, and yet coming back every night. Using us, and seeming to love us, promising everything; but taking, taking, taking, all the time.”

Sarah gave a little hiss, and found that her hand was clenched in the old sign to ward off witchcraft, her thumb between her first two fingers. “You make her sound evil.”

“I don’t know what she is.”

“So how will we find out?”

The old woman did not reply.

“How, Grandma? How shall we ever know?”

Slowly Alinor turned away from the window to Sarah, and her face was no longer haunted, but lit with a mischievous smile, as if she were still a wild girl on the edge of the mire, with gifts she dared not use, and a pocket full of valueless tokens. “I’ve been wondering how to answer these questions,” she admitted, her gray eyes dancing. “And I’ve got an idea. I think it’s a good idea. D’you really want to know?”

“Yes! Of course I do. I’ve mistrusted her from the first moment I saw her and now… even more.”

“So, Sarah, why don’t you go to Venice?”

“What?”

“Go to Venice, go to Livia’s warehouse, find her steward, see if he is the trustworthy grandfather that she describes, who loved Rob like his own son? See where they lived, see what family Livia left in the great palace she speaks of. Speak to Rob’s patients, ask what they thought of the young couple.”

Sarah’s lips parted. “Go to Venice?”

“Why not?”

“And find Livia’s true past?”

“Don’t you want to?”

“Yes! Yes I do. But I’m not freed from my apprenticeship.”

“I know. Go when you’re free!”

“I wouldn’t know where…” Slowly her refusal trailed into silence as she thought of the adventure she might undertake. “Of course!” she said simply. “What a chance! What an adventure! Of course, I’ll go!”

Alinor’s smile was as sunny as the girl’s joy. “For the adventure,” she said. “Because there is more to life than hats.”

Sarah laughed despite herself. “More to life than hats?”

“You know that there is.”

“As soon as I complete my apprenticeship,” the girl promised. “At the end of this month, when I get my apprentice papers. I’ll go, and then we’ll know.”

OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned with a basket of produce foraged from the woods walked down the broad common lane into the village, shouting his goods as he walked: “Mushrooms! Groundnuts! Berries! Nuts of all kind!”

He stopped at every door where he was called until he reached the house at the junction of the middle way to the woods, and went through the minister’s handsome gate and round to the back.

The kitchen door stood half-open. Ned tapped. “Come in!” Mrs. Rose shouted from the interior. Ned entered to find the kitchen smelling sweet and Mrs. Rose hot and flushed stirring a kettle of cranberry jam. “You can see, I can’t show you in.”

“I came to see you, as well as them,” he said awkwardly. “I have some nuts for you, chestnuts and hickory.”

“Thank you,” she said, not stopping her work. “Just tip them there, on the side.”

He obeyed her and stood awkwardly before her as she dropped a drip of jam on a cold plate to see if it would set.

“I won’t be able to come to town very often when the snows come,” he said.

She glanced up at him. “Of course,” she said. “You’ll stay in your ferry-house all through the winter?”

“Aye,” Ned said. “I’ve made it weatherproof and winter-tight.”

“Wouldn’t suit me,” she said bluntly. “Will you be snowed in?”

Ned nodded. “For some days,” he said. “I’ll dig a track round the house to feed the beasts, but I can’t dig out as far as the common lane. I’ll have to climb out through the snowdrifts when I want to come to town.”

She returned the kettle to the heat. “I couldn’t live out there,” she told him. “Not all the year round. If the minister gives me a plot, as he’s promised, at the end of my indentures, I’d tell him, I don’t want one that far out. I’d rather be nearer the village center, near the meetinghouse so I can pray every Sunday, winter and summer. I’d be too afraid, on the very edge, halfway into the forest, with savages strolling past my door as if they owned it. I came here to live among my people, to make a new England; not live in the woods like an animal.”

“I understand,” Ned said. “You do get used to it, you know. I’ve never had neighbors. If you’re a ferryman you’re always on the water’s edge. Your house is on the land but your living’s on the water. It was like that for me in England too. And of course, back then, during the war, I was for the people, the common people, when everyone around me on the island or in the town of Chichester was for the king. I feel like I’ve always been out of step.”

“You can’t be for the People now!” she said jokingly, using the name that some of the tribes used for themselves.

Ned did not answer to the joke. “I don’t know who I’m for anymore.”

“For us,” she told him, as if it were obvious. She looked up from her work, earnestly. “For the elect who make a new world here, for those who oppose the tyranny of the king, for this village, where we all have to do our work to keep the settlement safe, and strong, for Mr. Russell’s congregation. For your wife if you get one, for your family if you have one, for yourself.”

“Yes,” Ned agreed. “Yes. Of course. Yes.”

“You can’t have doubts, Mr. Ferryman,” she said flatly. “We can’t build a new country without being sure that we are God’s chosen people. I wouldn’t marry a man who had doubts.”