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Thus did the deirls, all bright and skinny and eager to grow up, nes could teach The deht have ith relief and the peculiar joy of devils She took theathered them round her black hearth like a wreath of still-closed flowers—and she opened theirls spun wool that became silk in their hands They baked bread so sweet the body lost all taste for huh Sister Agnes’s Bible seeer and heavier than either Father Audrien’s or Pastor Pole’s, full of books the girls had never head of—the Gospel of St Thodalen, the Apocryphon of James, the Pistis Sophia, the Trier ones still: the Book of the Two Thieves, the Book of Glass, the Book of the Evening Star When they had tired of these, they read decadent and thrilling novels that Sister Agnes just happened to have on hand

You ot careless You could say that—but a deirls seated around her table like Grand Dukes, like seals on a frozen beach,us can resist a feeling like that? Not er talent for resisting temptation

Sébastienne Sazarin did not like Sister Agnes one bit Oh, she sent her daughter Basile to learn lace frouerite le Clerq’s brats would outshine a Sazarin at anything, and if Reforhter irl, she’d just have to lie down dead in the street from the sha in a secretive sort of way, her cheeks flushed, her breath quick and delighted She did her work so quickly and well that there was hardly anything left of the household industries for Sébastienne to do She conceived her fourth child, she would always say, out of sheer boredom

“Well, isn’t that what you sent her for?” her husband Hieroslad for ease, for it comes but seldom”

“It’s unwholeso alone out there I wish Father Audrien would put a stop to it”

But Father Simon had confided to his successor before he passed into a peaceful death that he felt Sauve-Majeure harbored a saint When she died, and the inevitable writ of veneration arrived froht finally have the funds it needed—and if perhaps St Geraud, who didn’t havein particular, had to be replaced with St Agnes in order to secure financing fro dreanon of the New World A cathedral required more in the way of coin and tied with this celestialhimself to censure the hermit woman on which it all depended

Pastor Pole had no such hesitation Though the left side of Schisht it unsavory to hold the pastorship in one family, Lamentation Pole had raised his only son Troth to know only discipline and abstinence, and no other boy could begin to compete with him in devotion or self-denial Pastor Pole’s ser House (which he would renaregation that certain young girls had been known to faint away at his roaring words He conderess outside the bonds of e, woman’s essential nature, and the ridiculous names the Sazarins and other Papist decadents saddled the God with that nonsense

Yet still, the gru wet summer of ’09 and the endless, bestial winter that followed If it had not been bad enough that the crops rotted on the vine and sagged on the stalk, cows and sheep froze where they stood come December, and in February, Martha Chedderley discovered franticher thin, precious stores of flour

Yet the de bright green in the rain, in June she had bushels of rhubarb and knuckle-sized cherries, and in that ust she sent each of her students hoes, apples, squash, and beans When Basile Sazarin showed her aze could have set fire to a block of ice When Weep-Not Dryland showed her father, Wr

estling’s eldest and meanest child, Elected Dryland, her winter’s store, his bile could have soured a barrel of honey

Schis her husband and her priest before her, walked out halfway across the muddy, contested earth Pastor Pole met her, joined by Elected Dryland and his randson of the great judge John Cabot may God rest his soul On the one side of them stood the perpetually unfinished Cathedral of St Geraud and St Adelard, its ancient clerestory,pane, and foundation stones standing lonely beside the humble chapel that everyone called the Cathedral anyhow On the other the clean steeple and ash of the Free Gathered Church

She’s a witch She’s a succubus Why should we starve when she has the devil’s own plenty?

You know this song It’s a classic, with an old workhorse of a chorus

My girl Basile says she waters her oats with menstrual blood and reads over them from some Gospel I’ve never heard of My ive ot any fingernails She holds Sabbats up there and the girls all dance naked in a circle of pine My Bess says on the fullup on the s the Black Vespers If I ask my poor child, ill I hear then?

The demon heard them down in the valley She heard the heat of their whispers, and knew they would come for her She waited, as she had alaited It wasn’t long Jaot burly young Robert Mom the witch out of her house and install her in the new jail, which was the Dryland barn, quite recently outfitted with chains forged in Denis Minouflet’s shop and a stout hickory chair donated out of the Sazarin parlor