tapped the side of his nose with an expression of wisdom. “The one that treated that poor girl so scaly: I misremember his name. But we’ll have to step pretty lively, I’m thinkin’. Night’s fallin’ fast.”
It was, in fact, about the hour that Abigail and Thaxter had entered the village before, when she and Muldoon came opposite its main crossroad again. Lights had been kindled in the House of Repentance, but—as Abigail had feared—few were going inside. Instead they lingered around its doors in the twilight, or gathered, thicker and thicker, before the big and handsome house, whose windows also began to glow. She recognized Damnation among them, by her height and by the relatively stronger color of her dress. She was one of the ones gesturing, talking, passionately it seemed, and pointing back toward the blockhouse.
“Mr. Hazlitt must have sent her away Wednesday evening, just before the town gates were shut,” Abigail whispered, now shivering in earnest as she stood beside the sergeant’s comforting bulk. “I can’t see how she could have come into town much before this morning, even with a few hours’ start on us. I don’t know where she would obtain a horse. What’s going on now?”
The house door opened. Six men emerged, carrying a sort of bier between them, as if for a dead man. But the Reverend Atonement Bargest, the Hand of the Lord, was far from dead. On the bier he writhed, arms threshing, head rolling, and even across the distance Abigail could hear him moan and cry out, though his words were lost to her.
“What the divil—?”
“The divil indeed,” murmured Abigail. “He’s being tormented by witches—invisible, of course—even as those girls were in Salem Village, all those years ago.” She glanced up at Muldoon. “Or your Aunt Bridget. Something tells me we’re here just in time.”
Men, women, a few children and adolescents came hurrying from the houses to join the little procession that crowded around the bier and followed it to the church. A few bore lanterns. Most carried pine-knot torches, the light yellow and wild on their faces, like an uneasy whirlpool of flame. Muldoon signed to Abigail, and the two made their way farther up the edge of the woods, finally breaking cover at a small house that stood a little distance from the old palisade, one of the few in the village which they had observed included no dog. Muldoon led the way across the fallow garden, circled on the side away from the street, and yanked the latchstring to let them in. The downstairs keeping room was a chasm of almost total dark, save for the glow of the banked fire, at which Abigail lighted her lantern’s candle. She’d already guessed what Muldoon sought.
“Good for her, she’s spun a fair bundle of it.” He dug through the willow basket beside the spinning wheel, pulled out hanks of thick yarn, for stockings or scarves rather than the finer thread that would feed the great loom that crouched in the far corner. So the old Greek he had in mind was Theseus, following the thread-clue to the labyrinth’s heart . . . as she had followed first one clue, and then another, to lead her here. “Is there a shed for laundry?”
Abigail shook her head. “She’ll have her clothes-rope strung upstairs in the attic, this time of year. Will we need rope?” She glanced toward the window, her heart beginning to pound with the sense of panic, of time running out, that had driven her from Boston the moment she had seen Bargest’s handwriting on the threat to Pentyre. Orion killed his mother because he knew he would not be returning to care for her . . . because he was going to make his attack on Pentyre last night. She shuddered at the thought: Had he meant only to cut her throat? Was it that blood that triggered his madness, as it triggered his outrages on Perdita Pentyre’s body?
Was that the message he’d sent here with Damnation? To tell the Hand of the Lord that his Will would be done?
Then Bargest would know that his tool—his human weapon—would either not be returning here at all—that he would be killed—or that he would return, and demand Rebecca’s release. Either way, Rebecca would be no longer of use.
The attic was crammed with supplies—sacks of corn, barrels of apples, smoke-black hams hanging from the rafters to keep them away from mice—but no clothesline. By the attenuated glimmer of the single gable window,