HeartFire Page 0,33

witches to boot.

All these thoughts passed through her mind like a long crackle of lightning, and the boy splashed back down into the water, and then near him another person rose, a grown man, heavily muscled in the shoulders and back and arms, and considerably taller than the boy, so that although he didn't jump, when he stood his bare white buttocks showed almost completely above the water, and when he saw where the Black boy was looking, his mouth agape with love, he turned and...

Purity looked away in time. There was no reason to allow the possibility of impure thoughts into her mind. She might or might not be one of the elect, but there was no need to drag herself closer to the pit, thus requiring a greater atonement by Christ to draw her out.

"So much for a spot where nobody comes!" the man cried out, laughing. She heard a great splashing, which had to be the two of them coming out of the water. "Just a minute and we'll be dressed so you can go on with your walk, ma'am."

"Never mind," she said. "I can go another way."

But at the moment she took her first step to return along the riverbank, a coarse-looking man with heavy muscles and a menacing cast to his face stepped in front of her. She couldn't help gasping and stepping back -

Only to find that she was stepping on a man's boot.

"Ouch," he said mildly.

She whirled around. There were two men, actually, one of them a dapper but smallish man who looked at her with a candor that she found disturbing. But the man she had stepped on was a tall, dignified-looking man who dressed like a professional man. Not in the jet-black costume of a minister, but not in the earthy "sad" colors of the common folk of New England. No, he dressed like nothing so much as...

"An Englishman," she said. "A barrister."

"I confess it, but marvel that you guessed it."

"English visitors come to Cambridge often, sir," she said. "Some are barristers. They seem to have a way of dressing to show that their clothing cost considerable money without ever quite violating the sumptuary laws." She turned around to face the menacing man, unsure whether this Englishman was a match for him.

But then she realized that she had been momentarily deceived by appearances. There was no menace in the rough fellow, no more than in the Englishman. And the other one, the dapper little fellow who was still inspecting her with his eyes, posed no danger, either. It was as if he knew only one way to think of women, and therefore shelved his attitude toward Purity under the heading "objects of lust," but it was a volume that would gather dust before he cared enough to take it down and try to read it.

"We must have frightened you," said the Englishman. "Our friends were determined to bathe, and we were determined to lie on the riverbank and nap, and so you didn't see any of us until you were right among us, and I apologize that you saw two of our company in such a state of deshabille."

"And what, pray, is a state of Jezebel?"

The dapper little fellow laughed aloud, then stopped abruptly and turned away. Why? He was afraid. Of what?

"Pardon my French," said the Englishman. "In London we are not so pure as the gentlefolk of New England. When Napoleon took over France and proceeded to annex the bulk of Europe, there were few places for the displaced aristocracy and royalty to go. London is crawling with French visitors, and suddenly French words are chic. Oops, there I go again."

"You still have not told me what the French word meant. 'Cheek,' however, I understand - it is a characteristic that your whole company here seems to have."

The barrister chuckled. "I would say that it's yourself that takes a cheeky tone with strangers, if it were not such an improper thing to say to a young lady to whom I have not been introduced. I pray you, tell me the name of your father and where he lives so I can inquire after your health."

"My father is dead," she said, and then added, despite her own sense of panic as she did so, "He was hanged as a witch in Netticut."

They fell silent, all of them, and it made her uneasy, for they had nothing like the reaction she expected. Not revulsion at her confession of such