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Alice looked around the rest of the room; she spied the stuffed chair by the fire and saw that it had kept the imprint of the man; she crossed the room and sat down in it, the arms of the chair enclosing her. She stared, again, at the shelves. The man of law, who had read all these books, who had
bought
all these books, who had freed her from the gallows, surely, surely, such a man could free her from Verley as well. In the courtroom, after the verdict, after the news of the second trial, she had thought of the word
betrayal
, and so she had felt it then, but she wondered if she could use that word now, having seen the man’s house, having seen his books. He wasn’t a man to bend to trickery. Indeed, as Alice thought, she remembered that during her sickness in the gaol there had been some talk of Suffolk, talk of another case she hadn’t dreamed could be her own. If Freeman had indeed explained the risk to her then, if he believed Alice to have understood him then, if Alice had in fact made no objection, how could she accuse Freeman of betraying her now?

But what if Alice
had
objected? What would Freeman have done? The same? Alice couldn’t know. She might stare at the man’s face until it blurred and she couldn’t know.

Alice made her way back to the keeping room, snuffed the candle, returned it to the table, and fumbled her way to the stairs. Freeman’s door sat tightly closed. She entered the room opposite and slipped quietly between the sheets; the widow’s breathing changed, but she didn’t move or speak.

Alice lay quiet, trying to pull up some kind of waking dream, any kind of dream, to lull her into sleep, but the old one of Freeman saving her from the fire wouldn’t work with the widow so near. She came closest with the image of the widow’s house, but the three smiles that wouldn’t meet disrupted her again.

By morning Alice could count for certain only one brief moment of sleep, from the first quail song to the first real fingers of sun, but Verley had managed to camp even there. He and Alice stood at the bar in a courtroom much like the courtroom Alice had just left. Freeman stood between. Verley’s hands reached for Alice, as they usually did in her dreams, and Freeman said, “I don’t want you to touch her!” But Verley towered over Freeman, his arm span wider than Freeman’s; Freeman couldn’t stop the hands from coming across.

T
he 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.”

T
he next day Alice understood what the widow had meant when she’d called Alice famous. It had seemed odd when the widow insisted she accompany Alice on her first trip to Sears’s store, but when they met up with the Myrick sisters Alice understood something better. The widow shoved Alice ahead toward the store and lingered behind to talk to the sisters; Alice walked as far as the first screen of trees and stopped to listen.

“My goodness, Widow Berry, what an ordeal for you!”

“’Twas Alice’s ordeal.”

“But your courage, Widow Berry! To have kept her here! And to take her back now, after everything! What she owes you!”

“She’s allowed me to make my way; I feel the debt well balanced.”

“Well, you may say so…Tell me, Widow Berry, when do you expect Mr. Freeman back? You must tell him we stand in awe of such a wondrous achievement.”

“I shall tell him.”

“And such generosity of spirit! The whole village remarks on it! All the long hours, why I don’t think we saw him in the village for the three months altogether.” A pause. “I understand the girl’s master is being blamed for her condition?”

“As he caused it, yes.”

“But one can’t blame him for the murder charge. What do you say of it, widow, the murder charge? I must say the evidence did little to change Granny Hall’s opinion.”

“Then Granny Hall’s hearing must be failing. I must get on. Good day.”

Alice leaped ahead and gained Sears’s store a respectable distance before the widow. Mrs. Sears stood behind the counter, in apparent confusion as to what to say to Alice; when the widow came she greeted her in an unaccustomed wave of spirit. Alice decided to try the previous exercise in reverse; she said to the widow, “Excuse me, I’ve picked up a stone,” and stepped just outside the door to listen. Mrs. Sears at once commiserated with the widow over the problem of engaging honest help. Alice heard no sound from the widow whatever. But as they made their way home Alice found she couldn’t in fairness argue with any of the ladies’ assessments of her. The murder charge hadn’t been proved, but it hadn’t been disproved either. And as to honest help, how many times had Alice lied to the widow? Too many to remember.

SHIPMASTER HOPKINS CAME
by in the afternoon, and the widow left off pulling the flax to take him inside for a cup of tea. Alice left off pulling flax as well and crept near the window to listen, thinking to discover another perception of events, but it appeared the shipmaster had no perception whatever. He’d not once suspected Alice’s condition, but once he’d heard the charge he’d taken it for the fact as it was presented until he’d heard the jury’s verdict, and there he’d taken her innocence as fact as well. He said “quite the surprise, quite the surprise” several times, and “Girl’s come through all right, has she?” twice over, but in neither case did he wait for the widow to answer.

At the end of their first day back in Satucket, Alice felt she could say in fairness that the widow went to her bed more worn down from it than Alice.

SO THEY WENT
on, Alice feeling the widow’s fatigue as great as her own as she faced the villagers’ talk, as if walking into a constant stiff wind. In the long months in gaol Alice hadn’t pictured her return to the widow’s home as requiring such stretching and straining; nor had she pictured the growing weight of obligation that caused her footsteps to drag across the room.

Nate didn’t come. Alice heard of him only through the shipmaster, who had seen him at the tannery, where his father had put him back to work until he returned to the college in the fall. Nate had spoken rudely to his father, the shipmaster said, and had been soundly cuffed for it; the lad had been rude and sullen ever since to all.

FREEMAN RETURNED AT
the first of August, bringing an oppressive damp heat with him and more of the great weight of obligation that already dragged at Alice, but debt aside, Suffolk aside, Alice discovered in herself the same pleasure at the sight of him that she’d experienced in the gaol at Barnstable. He seemed, again, to have forgiven her sins against him, treating her with the same kindness he’d shown her at Barnstable; it appeared to Alice that the smile he turned on the widow held nothing warmer than the one he reserved for her. Alice watched the widow closely for signs of her own pleasure at the sight of him, but if she felt it she kept it well tamped down.

The men of the village appeared more openly glad to see Freeman. They came as before and could barely wait to accost Freeman over the state of affairs at Boston, but they took time to stare at Alice as before. Or not as before. Alice read a new question in their looks now: innocent or guilty? She also saw the question was twofold; they would know if the death of her child had been murder or accident, and they would know if the act that had got the child had indeed been forced on her or engaged in with a free will.

Freeman collected his own share of new attention, Cobb giving him a quiet congratulation on a “fair job at Barnstable, sir,” Winslow adding, “Good that’s over, then,” and Myrick summing up, “Lucky girl to have had
you
, sir,” but they wasted little more time on it. All went back to politics, with Freeman reporting Otis’s latest contention put about in town, reflecting the Otis of old, that no Englishman could be rightfully taxed without his own consent or the consent of those chosen by himself to represent him. To that the table cheered, and in the few seconds before she remembered Suffolk, Alice might have believed that the older, happier days had come back full circle.

To further prove it, as soon as the men dispersed and Alice and the widow had cleaned away the remains of the meal, Alice returned to her old position on the stairs. The talk began as it usually began, with Freeman reporting on his Boston trip, then moved to the state of affairs in the village, the weather, the crops, then back to Barnstable and some of Freeman’s recent pleadings: a case of trespass, a broken covenant, an action for scandalous words, until at length Freeman said, as if it were the subject all along, “How does she fare?”

“Not poorly. Not well. She hears the talk. She worries over Suffolk. Is there a date?”

“The fourteenth of August.”

“You continue confident of the outcome?”

“Unless this Verley has some unforeseen trick in mind, I’ve not the least doubt of it. No man can listen to her story unmoved. You saw them at Barnstable. But I confess to you my puzzlement at how little the outcome at Barnstable seemed to move
her
.”

“I believe it takes her more now. It will take her more after Suffolk. You must consider what she’s endured. What she yet fears.”

“She’s a brave child. If you’d but seen her those first days in gaol. And what it cost her to lay out her ordeal to me! I’ll never forget how she looked at me as she spoke, her very life in her eyes…. I declare, I’d have seen those eyes in my sleep till I died if I’d let them hang her. Hang her! Can you imagine it, hanging such a girl?”

“You’ve seen it done, sir.”

Silence. After a time Freeman said, “I’ve not told you something I should have told you before. The girl knows what goes between us. She made hint of it some time ago here at Satucket, but as it came to naught I saw no need to trouble you. She accosted me with it flat out at Barnstable.”

“Did she!”

“She accused me of shaming you.” A pause. “I’m afraid I didn’t answer as I should have. It would appear old wounds lie fallow just waiting for the turn of the plow. I as much as admitted the situation by laying the blame on you for not agreeing to make our relation a lawful one.”

More silence. Alice counted: one, two, three, four, five, before the widow said, “Perhaps ’tis just as well she knows. Considering.”

“Yes. Well.”

“After all, she’s not likely to run about the village shouting it.”

“You believe this village lies in ignorance?”

“They may suspect, but how can they accuse without some proof?”

“And what comprises proof in such situations? A rumor twice-told?”

Another pause. “Perhaps you’d prefer to take your old room at your brother Shubael’s.”

“This is your best suggestion?”

“You have a better one?”

“Indeed, I believe at one time I did have a better one. But no lawyer enjoys arguing the same point twice, least of all absent new evidence.”

Silence again. Alice counted again, to three this time. “Were you to argue so now, it might appear you think of naught but Alice’s tongue. Of course, were you not to argue so, it might appear you do so out of another kind of thought entirely.”

A chair scraped. “You would have made a fine lawyer, Widow Berry. You box me completely. You leave me nothing to say but good night.”

Alice heard no answering good night; she heard nothing but the scrape of another chair and the sound of doors opening and closing. She counted them: one, two.