them. And then one night she knew the answer to her own question. This wasn’t love.
* * *
Maria Owens turned eighteen during her first winter in the second Essex County, the coldest winter in more than forty years. Harbors froze solid and the snow was so deep that horses in the pastures drowned in drifts that were eight feet tall. People who lived on farms far from town would not be seen until the following spring. Time was passing more quickly all the time. Faith was growing up here, just as Maria had grown up in the woods of the first Essex County, in England. This was where they lived, with or without John Hathorne, and Maria hung Hannah’s brass bell just outside the door; when the wind came up the sound of the bell comforted her. She made the best of what she had. She chopped wood every day, and was lucky to have potatoes and onions and winter apples stored. When she ran out, she began to frequent Hatch’s General Store, where she traded dried herbs for provisions. Anne Hatch, the grocer’s wife, often added something special for Faith, a bit of molasses candy or a packet of sugar to help teething. As always Cadin followed along, but he waited for Maria in the tallest trees, for unlike his mistress he had never made this place his home.
* * *
The sky was black and pricked with stars when Maria went to the lake to chop ice for their drinking water. As she knelt, she spied the future written in the black ice. She saw herself tied to a chair, and John walking away in his black coat, and diamonds falling from her hands. She saw a tree with huge white flowers, each one the size of the moon.
Try as she might she could not tie these images together. Hannah would have said that women often didn’t understand what they didn’t truly wish to know, and perhaps Maria knew the truth already, for she wasn’t surprised when one night she trekked to the harbor only to find the door to John’s warehouse locked. She waited, but he never appeared. Each night she listened for his steps, but when the brass bell outside her door rang, it was only sounding for the wind.
When March came around, Maria celebrated Faith’s second birthday alone with the baby, fixing a pie from apples she had stored in a barrel, adding the last of the cinnamon she’d brought along in her herb box from Curaçao. Faith was a wonder. She could hold full conversations, and was well behaved, a true helper in gathering herbs, a darling who listened to Maria’s retelling of Samuel Dias’s stories about a cat and a wolf and a child who had been lost in the woods.
Know who you are, Hannah had told her. Know what you are, Rebecca had said.
By now she knew exactly who she was. She was the woman who decided to walk to town on the day the snow melted, even though Hathorne had warned her not to come.
“People will not understand you,” he’d told her. “The way you look, the clothes you wear, what we are to each other.”
“What are we?” she had said, her face hot.
“We are what God will allow us to be,” he’d said, which was not the answer she’d wanted.
It was spring, with the world suddenly alive and green, magicked back to life. Maria walked quickly, for it was mud season as well, and she didn’t wish the muck to stain her red boots. On Washington Street, Cadin dove down from the sky, pulling out strands of her hair until she waved him away. Clearly he disapproved of the path she took. But a crow was a crow, and a woman a woman, and there were some things she believed he couldn’t understand. She had written a letter with ink made from her own blood. It was a last attempt to see if John would do the right thing.
The house with the black shutters was only steps away. The black elms were festooned with a thousand dark buds that would soon unfurl into heart-shaped leaves. Maria was standing beneath the tree when she spied a woman and a young boy on the other side of the fence, there in the warm spring sun. Ruth Gardner Hathorne and her boy, three-year-old John, were seeing to the garden. Ruth wore a white cap, her blond hair hidden, her fair skin blotchy from hours