disposed of the body as well?
Would a madman take Rebecca’s “housekeeping” book of codes? Or had Rebecca done that herself when she’d fled, to keep it from falling into the murderer’s hands?
Am I looking at madness here? Or treason? Or something else?
At this point Goodman Moore came in, shaking the morning dampness from his hat and glaring suspiciously at his sister and her guest. Both women rose, and Catherine said, “Kem, this is Mrs. Adams, from Boston, a dear friend to my Mrs. Malvern—”
“And is she a Papist, too?”
Exasperated, Abigail said, “Does not anyone in Massachusetts believe that a conversion can be sincere? Mrs. Malvern took instruction and satisfied the elders of the Brattle Street congregation, in order to be confirmed. I am honestly curious as to what a woman—or a man, for that matter,” she added, thinking as well of Orion Hazlitt, “must do, to convince people that she or he has indeed changed faith.”
Catherine’s brother regarded both women before him with a kind of chilly contempt, as if confronted with the idiot child of someone he didn’t like. “Faith a’nt something you change. If this woman were truly one of the Saints, she would have been born into a family of the Congregation, where her earliest steps would have been put on the path. She wasn’t.”
“Now, you can’t say—” began Abigail indignantly, and Goodman Moore reared his head back slightly, as if shocked that any woman would contradict him with his thought not yet fully revealed in all its glory.
Abigail bit her underlip and reminded herself that this man had sweated to grow the corn and cut the wood that went to make the bread she had just eaten; heaved fodder and mucked out cowsheds, that she might have milk.
“Conversion—” He shook his head heavily, like a bear with a fly in its ear. “Conversion, all you get is those Godless heathens over Gilead way, with all their nonsense about knowing God—as if that’s going to do a body a single jot of good!—and working toward salvation . . . Working? Pah! Salvation must be given a man, through no strength of his own . . . And laying claim to old Sellars’s fields that should rightfully have gone to the Townsend Congregation! Even so did King Ahab conspire to seize the vineyard of Naboth, and seek to do harm unto the Prophet of the Lord who spake against his conspiring—!”
By which Abigail deduced that—as in so much of Massachusetts politics—the disputed fields loomed a good deal larger in her host’s mind than the Gilead congregation’s doctrinal divagations.
Both Catherine and her brother pressed Abigail to remain and share their early, farm-style dinner, but neither were surprised or offended when she declined. Though it was only midmorning, Abigail well knew that last night’s rain would have rendered the roads nearly impassable, and the going would be slow. She had no desire to spend a second night from home, and John, she knew, would worry if she weren’t back by the time the town gates were shut and the ferry ceased to run.
Despite their prompt departure, this almost came to pass in any case. The rain had been worse toward the coast, and as she and Thaxter slogged their way toward the main Danvers road the half-frozen morass grew deeper, the horses’ hooves sliding in it and the clerk dismounting half a dozen times to scrape the balls of half-frozen clay from the beasts’ feet. Icy wind blew into their faces as they reached Salem in time for an early dinner, and though the main road was a little better, it was still closing in on evening when the travelers sighted Winnisimmet’s roofs through the trees. “If the ferry’s closed down for the night, I’ll hang myself,” muttered her escort gloomily, as he dismounted once again on the last slope of Chelsea Hill to clear what seemed like monstrous clay boots from his horse’s feet. “There isn’t an inn on this side of the water that I’d spend a night in.” Which wasn’t entirely fair, reflected Abigail—but she could sympathize. Across the bay, she could see Boston’s tall hills, and the dark spread of houses around their feet. Closer, the British cruiser Cumberland moved among the little islands, silent as a dark bird. Allegedly it had been sent to “defend” the town, but everyone knew that like the British regiments on Castle Island, the ship was truly there to put down the kind of insurrection that had shaken the city