Page 2

W e stepped into the biting January air, our breath crystallizing before us like the ghosts.

Night had fallen completely now, wrapping Exeter, Rhode Island, in a shroud of darkness broken only by scattered windows glowing with lamplight.

Daddy walked on one side of me, his tall frame casting a long shadow across the frost-stiffened ground.

George Brown trudged on my other side, a man visibly collapsing under grief’s weight, yet somehow still standing.

The cold seeped through my woolen coat, but I welcomed it—the sharp bite of winter always felt cleaner than the stifling heat of sickrooms.

The three of us moved in silence down the narrow street.

Our footsteps echoed against the wooden boardwalks, a hollow, empty sound that matched the hollowness inside me.

I’d agreed to something I wasn’t sure I could deliver.

Salvation for a witch? Was that even possible? Was that even my right to attempt?

“It’s not far,” Mr. Brown said, his voice startling in the quiet. “Just past the mercantile.”

I nodded, though I already knew where the Brown house stood. Exeter wasn’t large enough for secrets about locations. But it was large enough for secrets of other kinds, apparently.

A dog barked somewhere in the distance. The sound hung in the frigid air, unanswered.

“You’re very quiet, Alice,” Daddy observed, though his tone suggested he approved of my silence.

“I’m praying.” A half-truth. The noise of my mind largely drowned my prayers out—doubt and fear and curiosity all tangled together like yarn that had fallen to the floor to be batted about by a cat.

“Good girl,” Daddy said. I felt a stab of guilt for the deception.

We turned down a side street where the houses stood closer together, shoulders touching like mourners at a funeral. The Brown home was the third one down—a modest two-story structure with dark windows and a small front porch. Unlike the other houses on the street, no smoke curled from its chimney.

The door creaked open, revealing a dark interior that smelled of wood polish and something else—loneliness, perhaps, if loneliness had a scent.

Mr. Brown struck a match, touching it to an oil lamp that cast wavering light across a narrow hallway. “This way,” he said, leading us toward what I assumed was the parlor.

I followed, noting the heavy Bible on the hall table, the austere cross hanging on the wall. A proper Christian household, by all appearances.

The parlor was cold, but Mr. Brown quickly knelt before the fireplace, arranging kindling and logs with practiced movements. “Please, sit,” he said, gesturing to the chairs arranged in a semi-circle before the hearth.

I perched on the edge of a high-backed chair, my eyes drawn to the bookshelves that lined one wall. Volumes of religious texts dominated—commentaries on scripture, histories of the church, sermons and theological writings from the likes of John Owen. A proper elder’s library.

The family portraits arranged on the mantelpiece told their own story.

George Brown as a younger man, standing stiffly beside a seated woman with hair long, curly and dark as Mercy’s.

A boy who must be Edwin, Mercy’s brother, sitting stiff and straight faced.

And Mercy herself—perhaps fifteen in the photograph—her eyes bright with an intelligence that seemed to challenge the camera itself.

“That was taken three years ago,” Mr. Brown said, noticing my gaze on the portrait. “Before Margaret—my wife—passed.”

“Where’s your son?” I asked. “Surely you didn’t leave him alone in this cold house.”

“With his aunt for the evening,” Mr. Brown confirmed. “I’ll retrieve him in the morning.”

The fire caught, flames licking tentatively at the logs. Mr. Brown remained kneeling before it a moment longer than necessary, as if drawing strength from the growing warmth.

“You have a lovely home.” The politeness was automatic.

“It was,” Mr. Brown agreed as he finally rose and took a seat opposite me. “When it was full.”

Daddy settled into the chair between us, his posture rigid as always. “Perhaps you should tell Alice more about Mercy’s condition,” he prompted. “The physical and the... spiritual aspects.”

Mr. Brown nodded, reaching for the portrait of Mercy. He cradled it in his large hands, thumbs brushing the wooden frame. “The consumption came on suddenly last summer,” he began. “One day she was helping with the church picnic, the next she was coughing blood into her handkerchief.”

I knew that progression all too well. The sudden onset, the rapid decline. I’d watched it take Mama and others.

“The doctors say her lungs are nearly gone,” Mr. Brown continued, his voice flat, as if reciting facts about a stranger. “She’s so thin now. Like a bird with hollow bones.” His facade cracked slightly. “My fiery girl, reduced to this.”

I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry.”

“The physical suffering, that’s...” Mr. Brown shook his head.

“It’s terrible to watch, but it’s natural.

Part of God’s plan, even if we don’t understand it.

But this other matter—“ He set the portrait down carefully and reached into his pocket, withdrawing a wilted flower.

“I brought this back from my last visit three days ago.”

The flower had once been white, but now it was browning at the edges, its petals curling inward like fingers forming a fist.

“She had it on her bedside table,” Mr. Brown explained.

“When I asked about it, she refused to answer. So I brought it to—“ He hesitated a moment. “Other trusted Christian brothers who suggested it accords with an unholy spell. One supposed to grant the damned a kind of protection, undoubtedly by the hand of the devil’s diabolical legions. She’d... enchanted it somehow.” His voice caught on the word.

A chill that had nothing to do with the room’s temperature crawled up my spine.

“She started changing after her mother passed, “Mr. Brown continued, turning the wilted flower in his fingers.

“Asking questions in Sunday service that no God-fearing girl should ask. Disappearing for hours into the woods. Coming home with strange herbs and stones.” He glanced at the portrait again.

“I thought it was just grief for her mother working itself out. I was too lenient, perhaps.”

“Grief takes many forms,” I said softly, thinking of my own after Mama died. The anger, the bargaining, the long nights of prayer that felt like screaming into a void.

“But this goes beyond grief,” Mr. Brown insisted. “This is deliberate turning away from God toward... toward evil.”

I thought of the book he’d shown me in the church, those strange symbols and Latin phrases. “When did you first suspect she was practicing witchcraft?”

Mr. Brown’s eyes flicked to Daddy, then back to me. “Six months ago. I found a book under her mattress—not the one I showed you, another one. Basic spells, it claimed. I burned it immediately and prayed with her. She seemed repentant.”

“But she wasn’t,” Daddy interjected.

“No.” Mr. Brown’s shoulders slumped. “She just became more secretive. By the time the consumption struck, she was too far gone in her... dabblings.”

I remembered my nights sitting with Mama as the consumption ravaged her body. The prayers that seemed to ease her pain, if only for moments. The scripture readings that brought peace to her eyes. “In my experience,” I said carefully, “those facing death often turn toward God, not away from Him.”

“That’s what I’d hoped,” Mr. Brown said.

“That she’d see the fragility of life and turn back to faith.

” He set the wilted flower on the table beside Mercy’s portrait.

“Instead, it’s as though she blamed God for it all, and turned instead to heresy.

Worse than heresy. A heretic might be deceived into clinging to a wolf that appears as a sheep.

It appears my daughter has wholeheartedly embraced the wolf itself. ”

The fire popped loudly, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. In the sudden flare of light, I noticed how deeply lined Mr. Brown’s face was, how the skin under his eyes sagged with exhaustion.

“I’ve spent so many nights,” he said, staring into the flames, “trying to understand where I went wrong. How my daughter could stray so far from the path.”

“The fault isn’t necessarily yours,” Daddy said, his voice gentle for once.

“The devil is cunning, and young women, belonging to the weaker sex, are particularly susceptible to his lures. It was Eve, remember, who the serpent approached first. That is his way. Men are easily seduced to evil by women—thus the devil will regularly corrupt the woman that he might through her afflict righteous men.”

I bristled slightly at that, given I read the Genesis story differently.

After all, it was not good that man was alone—and this before sin came into the world.

It was the only thing God had made that he’d said wasn’t good .

Even a perfect man, it seems, was incomplete without a woman.

Woman might have been the first deceived, but the man was altogether insufficient alone even before the snake whispered its first lies.

Rather than debate the point with my father—who’d surely chastise me for challenging his paternal authority—I kept my face carefully neutral.

“Still,” Mr. Brown said, “a father is responsible for his children’s moral education. I failed her somehow.”

I thought of my long nights of prayer and scripture readings that had seemed to bring comfort to the dying. The strange peace that sometimes came over them as I prayed. Was that truly God working through me? Or just the natural surrender to the inevitable?

“I’ve heard your prayers have healed a few who’ve fallen to consumption,” Mr. Brown said suddenly, his eyes finding mine with an intensity that made me want to look away.

“I don’t heal anyone,” I blurted. “God heals. I’m just... there.”