The next morning at breakfast Freeman announced that he would be setting out for Boston, leaving Alice and the widow the loan of his chaise for their return to Satucket. The business of preparation took up half the morning, the good-byes themselves less than a minute. Freeman rode off first, spurring his horse into a lively canter the minute he’d cleared the gate, leaving Alice with a half accusation that she quickly buried. What did it matter that Freeman and the widow together didn’t take her home, as he’d promised they would? Home was home.

The widow and Alice climbed into the carriage, the widow to drive with Alice beside. For a time they rode in silence, but at the outskirts of Barnstable the widow’s thoughts seemed to move ahead; she began to tell Alice of what awaited them at Satucket—a large order for dimity from Hannah Cobb; a treadle in need of repair; a field of flax overdue for pulling. That subject done, she again fell silent.

Left to her own thoughts, Alice’s head filled, of course, with Suffolk, until at the outskirts of Barnstable she happened to glance up and catch the sun on her face. It shone dry and clear out of a bold blue sky with just enough breeze to cut its edge, and Alice thought of all the long days in gaol without the touch of either. Oh, how fine it felt! And oh, how pretty the woods and fields looked, all dressed out in the full flush of summer! This might have been her last day on earth; how foolish she would be to give it over to thoughts of Suffolk! She must put up the old wall, this time around a vague day in August, and again not go beyond, a trick she had by now perfected. At the far side of Yarmouth the widow helped her: she broke out a loaf of chewy brown bread, a wedge of pungent cheese, and a bottle of spicy beer; afterward Alice put her head back and floated into a sleep that required no urging beyond the steady rocking of the carriage.

THE SUN HAD turned from white to gold when Alice opened her eyes and saw that they were approaching the mills at Satucket. She spied Mr. Myrick, his sisters, and Mrs. Thacher in the near distance; their heads turned and followed the chaise as it drew past.

The widow twisted in her seat. “Prepare yourself, Alice,” she said. “You’re now famous.”

WHAT ALICE MIGHT better have prepared herself for was her return to the widow’s house. When they turned down the landing road and the squat walls and high-pitched roof came into view it took her like a dose of salts. The tears she had managed to keep from light and air all the long months in gaol now oozed out beneath her clamped eyelids. She’d hoped for this minute, of course; she’d tried to cling to that hope; but it hadn’t been a solid thing until now.

Alice must have made a sound that hinted at her struggle, for the widow leaned over and patted her knee. “’Tis a fine sight, is it not?”

Oh, so fine a sight! And so different from the one Alice had left in February! No churning gray sea in the distance but a sun-flecked blanket of indigo, no bare-branched trees but softly fanning sprays of green, no empty square of earth but a thick stand of flax, no barren dooryard beds but neat rows of dark leaves splashed with yellow squash, velvety cucumbers, and pink-and-green-striped rhubarb.

The widow pulled the chaise up outside the barn and climbed down to tend Freeman’s horse. Alice went inside at once. There too all had changed since her last look at it, the winter dimness replaced by midsummer light, the usual chill replaced by the heat of a too-long closed-up house. Alice propped open the door and moved around the keeping room, tossing up the windows; as she passed she noticed that the cord on the great wheel had fuzzed with a fine dust. She turned to the fireplace and took up the tinderbox from the cupboard beside it; she set up the kindling and struck the tinder over it, blowing it into a gentle flame, feeding it with more small sticks from the wood box until it took firm hold.

Alice collected the bucket and went outside to the well, taking into her lungs the brew of honeysuckle, pine pitch, salt flats. She drew up the water; in the act of drawing she fell backward through the past year, back to the day she’d first arrived and the widow had sent her to the well. What had she thought on that day of what lay ahead of her? Or had she thought at all? Perhaps she’d just breathed, and looked, and drank, as Alice did now, intent on the minute she lived. But no, Alice remembered it now; she’d stood at the well, crawling with trepidation, not over the unknown events ahead, but over the unknown people with whom she was about to share bread. Well, Alice supposed she knew those people now as well as she ever would; the one she stood unsure of was herself. She peered into the well, waiting for the disturbed surface of the water to settle into a smooth, silver coin. The face it reflected looked shriven and colorless, the eyes too big, the mouth too blurred, but just the same, Alice.

Alive.

Alice picked up her bucket and returned to the house. By the time the widow came in, Alice had the kettle near steaming. She would have given much for an old-fashioned cup of tea, but instead she readied the dried blackberry leaves that filled the widow’s tea canister. The widow set out the usual bread and preserve, and Alice fell back again to another image of that first day, a meal nervously begun and more calmly finished by virtue of a stranger making the effort to chatter a young girl into easiness. She could trust such a man. She must trust him.

The widow and Alice took their supper and afterward worked together for an hour or two to right the house, but both were tired, and a pale gray light still clung to the walls when they said their good nights and parted. Alice climbed the stairs, went straight to her bed, and lay down atop the coverlet, testing not the bed itself but the strength of the memories that had been born in it. The bed had cradled her hopes and her despair alone and together; it had cradled her full heart, her sore flesh, her dead infant.

Her dead infant.

All right, then, this was to be the first, the most insistent. She put out her hand and felt the coverlet, pulling the cloth around her, not from any need for warmth, but to feel the weight of it in her hand, to imagine the weight of it thrown over an infant. Had she suffocated it? Alice closed her eyes and was surprised at the clear picture of the babe that came to her now, where it hadn’t in the gaol or in the courtroom: head thick with dark hair neither hers nor Verley’s, skin as blue-white as milk with the cream skimmed from it. She remembered an open mouth formed by a perfect pair of bow lips, but no sound coming from it, no breath warming her cold fingers. But how odd it was: Alice could now conjure a sound like the keening of a gull at a great distance, the gentlest brush of air on her knuckles, as if they’d been dusted with a feather.

She could feel the weight of the blanket.

Alice got up and went to the far window, the one that looked out across the ocean, seeking comfort in the old view, but instead of looking out she looked down into the landing road. The Indian Sam Cowett had just rounded the turn and stepped into a shadow as long as his own; he came out the other side of it, swinging along the pitted road with the sureness of one who had trod it many times, with the sureness of one who knew where he came from and where he was headed. How did one get such sureness? Alice wondered. She turned around and went to the other window, the one looking over the dooryard, and felt again that odd sense of past into present, a trick kind of certainty that she would look down and see Freeman dismounting from his horse, just come from Barnstable or Boston. She thought of Nate, throwing sand at her window, of looking down and seeing him there in the moonlight. She thought of touching him, kissing him. She thought of what Nate now knew of her, of his silence in the gaol, his silence outside the courtroom.

Alice returned to her bed, undressed, and climbed into it. To be where she was should have been comfort enough to soothe her to sleep, but she found her thoughts pulling away from Satucket to a place she might least expect to find her comfort: the gaol at Barnstable, on one of her walks with Freeman near the end of her illness. They had come upon a muddy patch of ground riddled with potholes, and Freeman had put a hand under her elbow, then slid it down to grip her hand as they came to a particular bad section. When they’d cleared the rough place Alice made some small effort to free herself, but Freeman only tightened his grip. “We’re not done yet, Alice,” he said. “Look ahead of you.”