The pattern of Alice’s life grew fixed; the homespun cloth continued to sell at Sears’s store, and the widow treated Alice as if she were become a permanent fixture at her wheel, but Alice felt only perched there like a migrating goose, watching, listening, waiting to be sent on her way with the next change in the weather.

Freeman had been in place at the widow’s for a solid spell, and the evening chatter had increased again; Alice listened each night on the stairs, expecting to hear some suspicion of her condition, but she heard nothing relating to herself at all. They talked of non-importation, and Otis, and this ship in and this one out, and the rising price of everything, until one night Freeman announced that the Verley advertisement had disappeared from the paper.

“So he found his Alice,” the widow said, “and ours is safe, then.”

The word safe floated up the stairs like a cruel joke. What could be safe for Alice now? Verley would ruin her life just the same whether she was returned to him or she wasn’t. The thought enraged her. Sparked her. Shook her out of a monthlong dullness. She hadn’t risked so much, traveled so far, just to crumble into ruin because of a thing not her making. Verley might yet hold the right to her labor, but he held no right to her womb, nor did his foul seed. She could, she would, do something, and she knew what to do.

Alice hadn’t spent all her fifteen years of life in ignorance. She’d heard talk, she’d seen advertisements in the papers, she knew there were ways to free herself of the thing festering in her belly; she knew about the medicines that could bring on a woman’s courses. And not only did she know of such medicines, she also knew where to get them in Satucket village. Alice had heard talk of a midwife named Granny Hall who lived along the south-side road in a cottage climbed all over with honeysuckle; with such direction, Alice believed she could find her. She must find her. She would do.

ALICE WAITED THREE more days until the widow sent her to the smith with a broken ladle in need of repair. The day was as the days were in August, the sun hot, the road dry, the air wet, and a fine layer of dust had coated Alice’s moist skin by the time she reached the meetinghouse. The road Alice looked for stretched south from the meetinghouse, but the smith lay just beyond; Alice forced herself to push past the turn she wanted in favor of the task with which she’d been entrusted.

Alice had been to the smith before and disliked the place, not just for all the noise and soot but also for the look the smith gave her, and she disliked it more now, the pulsing fires and hot metal pushing the trapped August air to scorching. She further disliked the look of the black metal hanging everywhere: hooks, spades, hoes. Pokers. The smith was working the bellows chain as she walked in, and the roused flames lit his face as if he held the fire inside him. He looked at Alice and she thought she saw something new in the look, as if he might have guessed her condition; she left off the ladle and hurried as fast as the heat would let her back to the south-side road.

Alice hadn’t traveled the road before, and she took her time along it, pausing at every honeysuckle vine, straining her eyes for the midwife’s house as she’d heard it described. She’d walked a long way and determined she must have missed it, was already struggling to tamp the panic down, when she rounded a turn and got blinded by the gleam of sunlight off a large pond. She looked away from the glare, and there it sat across the road, a pretty little half-house nearly buried in the delicate, thickly sweet blooms. She allowed herself no pause but went straight to the door and knocked.

Everything about the woman who answered spoke of advanced age: the yellowed hair, the clawed hands, the clouded eyes. Part of Alice wanted to run away as she might run from a death ghost; part of her saw in the old woman her own life. She made her request as she had practiced. Pennyroyal. For worm. The woman too looked at her as if she knew her condition, but she turned away, retreated to a small pantry, and came back with a small cloth pouch.

She said, “Sixpence.”

Alice picked out three of the coins Freeman had given her and dropped them into the waiting hand, which closed around the money like one of the vines outside the door.

“The whole of it in the one teapot, steeped a quarter hour, no more. A cup three times a day for a week, hot or cold, and you’ll expel what ails you in a fortnight. Take it any longer than a week and you’ll start bleeding from every opening, blow up like an udder, and go comatose. Do you hear me, girl?”

Alice nodded.

The woman turned away, leaving Alice to step outside and shut the door on herself, as if she were the ghost. A sign? Alice didn’t care. She held her first hope in many months in her hand.

ALICE BREWED UP her tea the first chance she found herself alone at the fire and drank one cup down in long, hot gulps; the rest she poured into a borrowed jug and took it cold and slimy where she could in the privacy of her room. She dosed herself just as instructed, three times a day every day for the week, and then she waited. Over the next several weeks she experienced a few days of sharp cramps, but there appeared no sign on her sheets or shift.

OFTEN WHEN ALICE woke, before her condition left its own sleep state, before her stomach had begun to unsettle, she forgot the thing that grew in her. She smelled the rough salt air and heard the chuckling water and the old joy filled her; then her bile rose, and as she remembered, her spirits fell like an overtipped scale. The breakfast bread eased her; dinner unsettled her again; by supper she felt near to fine and might think the pennyroyal had at last set to work in her. She would go to bed and press and pound on her belly in hope of dislodging what grew there; in the morning she went out to the necessary house and jumped violently up and down. Nothing happened. To Alice’s amazement, life went on around her as before. Or almost as before.

One day the boy came to return the Otis pamphlet and surprised Alice by opening it up and reading back a passage to Freeman.

“Otis says here, sir, ‘Let Parliament lay what burdens they please on us, it is our duty to submit and patiently bear them, till they will be pleased to relieve us.’”

“Well, now, yes, they may make such laws as they please, but they may not tax us without our being represented in that body. Nor can Parliament alter a law of God, or one of human conscience, or logic.”

The logic of this escaped Alice, as she believed it escaped the boy; his eyes lifted and met hers in matching puzzlement, although he nodded at Freeman in agreement and accepted another book in exchange for the pamphlet: The History of the Pleas of the Crown by Matthew Hale.

Some time after the boy had left with his book Alice went outside to bring in a piece of shirting that had been bleaching in the sun and was startled when the boy stepped silently out of the woodlot like one of the foxes that lived there. He came up and helped her collect the cloth but said nothing, as usual.

“Do you make out all these books Mr. Freeman gives you?” Alice asked by way of easing him, and was startled a second time by his laugh: deep, like a man’s; boisterous, like a boy’s.

“Not by half,” he said. “Do you think I might take it as flattery that he thinks I should?”

“Oh, yes, indeed.”

He grinned, still holding his end of cloth. After a time he said, “Do you like living with my grandmother?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I liked it when I lived with her.”

Alice looked anew at the boy. Was it possible that here lay the answers to the questions Alice hadn’t dared to ask the widow? She said, “You lived with your grandmother?”

The boy began to talk, slowly at first, picking his way, growing more sure-footed as he went, the tale a patchy thing one person told another when he thought the biggest puzzle pieces were already laid down. A time or two Alice asked a question, but she didn’t risk too many; the boy seemed to think her in a certain degree of confidence, which she didn’t like to disprove. Out of the jumble Alice learned that the widow’s husband had drowned trying to drive a pod of whales onto the shore in a storm, that the widow had lived with the boy’s father and stepmother, the widow’s daughter, until a disagreement drove the widow to claim her dower right and return to her husband’s home, where she now lived. While making candles one day her dress had caught fire, and she would have died, the boy said, if there had been no one at hand to beat out the flaming cloth and carry her to safety. There he stopped, as if contemplating the way life turned, or didn’t turn.

“My father doesn’t allow any of us to visit here,” the boy said after a time, his face coloring in what Alice took to be half-embarrassment at the behavior of his relations, and half-pride at his own courage in defying them, but it also seemed to remind him of a limit beyond which he dared not travel. He stepped in to push his end of the cloth into Alice’s arms, stepped back. “I must go.”

Alice was so intent on folding up the cloth, so sure the boy had made the turn for home, that when he changed direction and lurched at her, reached for her, she cried out in alarm.

The boy stopped as he was, eyes wide.

The door to the house opened; Freeman stepped out into the yard. “Here, now, what goes on there?”

Alice turned and dashed past him into the house, all of her—knees, stomach, heart, hands—trembling.

THAT NIGHT ALICE lay awake in a new kind of turmoil. She couldn’t close her eyes without seeing the boy’s hands reaching for her, couldn’t see the hands without seeing Verley, smiling behind them. But the boy hadn’t been smiling, and he had looked so shocked at her outcry. But what did it matter how he’d looked? It would be with him as it was with Verley; he would look at her as he pleased, and he would have done with her as he pleased if Freeman hadn’t come out and disrupted them.

Freeman.

How quickly, now, he had gone from supposed enemy to proven savior! In truth, how unfair she had been to think he ever meant any harm to her. Hadn’t he come to her aid at Boston? Hadn’t he admitted he no longer wished to send her to the constable? She must add to his credit too the story the boy had told her. Alice imagined the widow in flames and crying out as Alice had cried out; she imagined Freeman leaping up from his chair and beating out the flames with a blanket or bed rug or perhaps even his own jacket. Yes, it would be his own jacket, Alice decided. He would beat out the flames and wrap the widow gently in a clean, white sheet, as clean and white as the handkerchief he’d handed Alice at Boston, and gently, gently, carry her to safety.