“He knew the lagoon?” Alinor asked. “He knew it well?”

“Oh yes. He could have found his way blindfolded. He was always out on it.”

OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

It was a bitterly cold morning and Ned thought it unlikely that anyone from Hatfield, on the opposite bank of the river, would risk the ferry journey on the icy water even to attend the Sunday church service at Hadley meetinghouse. He heaped the embers of the fire under an earthenware cover and, smiling at himself for folly, he drew the little signs in the ashes that his mother had always made, to keep the house safe from an accidental fire in her absence. She had taught them to him and Alinor, and Alinor had taught them to Alys and Rob. He had no doubt that Sarah and Johnnie knew them too, and he wondered how far back in time the tradition stretched among the Ferryman family, and how many children, yet unborn, would be told that they—like the Pokanoket—could teach fire when to blaze, and when to lie quiet.

He glanced round the sparse cottage, pulled on his thick winter coat, and gave his well-worn shoes a quick rub with his sleeve. He left his dog on the chain in the kennel. “No, you can’t come,” he told Red. “It’s too cold for you to wait outside, and happen I’ll visit Mrs. Rose after the service.”

Red’s ears drooped and he went back into his kennel.

“Back soon,” Ned told him as he turned up his collar and pulled his hat down over his ears and strode through the north gate and down the common lane to the meetinghouse. From every front gate and front door men and women and their children were walking towards the church, greeting each other, and calling children to order, quieter and more thoughtful on the Sabbath.

Ned found himself alongside one of Hadley’s other single men, Tom Carpenter.

“Good day to you,” Ned said. “Cold.”

“Aye,” he returned.

They walked in silence for a moment. “Will you not take the ferry out till spring?” Tom Carpenter suggested. “You won’t take a penny in fees.”

“No,” Ned agreed. “It’s a fair-weather trade.”

“Never going to make a fortune on that,” the man observed.

“I know,” Ned said. “But I don’t need a fortune, I just want a living.”

They were outside the meetinghouse; mothers were gathering their children. John Russell the minister came from his gate followed by his wife and children, Mrs. Rose, his housekeeper, behind them, and the three slaves behind her.

“She’ll never have you with nothing to offer but a half plot and a half-year ferry,” Tom Carpenter said, his gaze resting on Mrs. Rose. She nodded a greeting to them both, and her color rose slightly, as if she knew they were talking about her as she walked past them, following her master.

“How would you know?” Ned asked curiously.

Tom grinned at him. “This town!” he said. “Everyone knows everything. Everyone knows you visit her, that she walked down with your letter in the summer. And everyone knows that she wants a full plot, and a life as far from service as possible. She wants her own servants, that one. She wants her own slaves!”

“I know,” Ned said. “But I can’t see how to change my ways.”

“That’s the very thing we came here for!” Tom Carpenter exclaimed. “Came here to change our ways. To be in one communion, one people before God. To make a good living, not scrape a wage. To marry and found a family, to build a town and make a country. For me, this is the greatest chance at a new life, in a new country, and make it better than the old one!”

“God bless you,” Ned said as they turned and followed the minister’s family into the cold shade of the church, from the icy brightness outside. “It’s a great ambition.”

“But you don’t share it?” his neighbor suggested, lowering his voice as the two of them took their place, as single men with only a half plot, at the back of the church, ahead of the servants and apprentices, but behind the masters and planters.

“I want a new life,” Ned agreed, lowering his voice too. “I want a communion and a town and a new country just like you. I thought this would be an earthly Paradise, a place without sin. I didn’t expect to jostle my neighbors for a living. I just don’t know what I’d have to give up, if I wanted to truly belong here.”

“What d’you give up?” Tom Carpenter whispered as John Russell took his place at the front of the congregation and opened his Prayer Book.

Ned shrugged. “Being a law to myself,” he muttered. “Living of my own. Being no one’s bane.”

“Aye, Ned, you’re a funny one,” Tom said, and turned his attention to the service as John Russell started the opening prayers.

The service was winter-short; the meetinghouse, even with the little stove at one end, was too cold for a long sermon, and those whose homes were at the far end of the town were conscious that they would have a hard walk home with the cold wind against them. As soon as prayers were finished the congregation agreed the names of the selectman and the different town officers who would be appointed at the town meeting, and someone mentioned there was a cow in the town pound that must be claimed at once. A young father announced the birth of his child who would be baptized at home, with none of the papist trappings which had been reintroduced to the church in England.

As the congregation filed out, Ned fell into step beside Mrs. Rose.

“Is it cold enough for you?” she asked him, smiling. “Out on that cold riverbank beside that cold river?”

“It is,” he said. “But I think it will be worse before it’s better.”

“You can be sure of that,” she said. She hesitated. “Would you take a glass of mulled ale before you walk home?”

There was something about her self-consciousness as she invited him, something about the way that Tom Carpenter watched them, the way that the whole town seemed to pause as they spilled out of the meetinghouse into the lane, that turned Ned away.

“I have to get back to the Quinnehtukqut,” he heard himself say.

“Connecticut,” she corrected him, her voice hard, “Remember, we say Connecticut,” and Ned bowed his head in farewell.

OCTOBER 1670, LONDON

Johnnie and Sarah followed their mother, Livia, and the two maidservants up the muddy lane to St. Olave’s Church.

“Time served!” he congratulated her. “Senior milliner.”

“A few pennies more a week,” she pointed out. “Maybe a customer of my own if she’s lowly and poor. A higher seat up the table at dinner and served after the older girls instead of at the very last. Nothing else. It’s not much.”

“Steady work,” Johnnie advised. “A wage paid on time once a quarter, and your mistress makes no deductions, now that you don’t have to live in. What would you rather do? Run the wharf?”

The girl put her hand on his arm. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, but it’s a secret,” she said.

“What?” He glanced up the lane to where their mother, Livia, Carlotta, and Tabs were entering the church. “What? We can’t be late for church.”