OCTOBER 1670, HADLEY, NEW ENGLAND

Ned with a basket of produce foraged from the woods walked down the broad common lane into the village, shouting his goods as he walked: “Mushrooms! Groundnuts! Berries! Nuts of all kind!”

He stopped at every door where he was called until he reached the house at the junction of the middle way to the woods, and went through the minister’s handsome gate and round to the back.

The kitchen door stood half-open. Ned tapped. “Come in!” Mrs. Rose shouted from the interior. Ned entered to find the kitchen smelling sweet and Mrs. Rose hot and flushed stirring a kettle of cranberry jam. “You can see, I can’t show you in.”

“I came to see you, as well as them,” he said awkwardly. “I have some nuts for you, chestnuts and hickory.”

“Thank you,” she said, not stopping her work. “Just tip them there, on the side.”

He obeyed her and stood awkwardly before her as she dropped a drip of jam on a cold plate to see if it would set.

“I won’t be able to come to town very often when the snows come,” he said.

She glanced up at him. “Of course,” she said. “You’ll stay in your ferry-house all through the winter?”

“Aye,” Ned said. “I’ve made it weatherproof and winter-tight.”

“Wouldn’t suit me,” she said bluntly. “Will you be snowed in?”

Ned nodded. “For some days,” he said. “I’ll dig a track round the house to feed the beasts, but I can’t dig out as far as the common lane. I’ll have to climb out through the snowdrifts when I want to come to town.”

She returned the kettle to the heat. “I couldn’t live out there,” she told him. “Not all the year round. If the minister gives me a plot, as he’s promised, at the end of my indentures, I’d tell him, I don’t want one that far out. I’d rather be nearer the village center, near the meetinghouse so I can pray every Sunday, winter and summer. I’d be too afraid, on the very edge, halfway into the forest, with savages strolling past my door as if they owned it. I came here to live among my people, to make a new England; not live in the woods like an animal.”

“I understand,” Ned said. “You do get used to it, you know. I’ve never had neighbors. If you’re a ferryman you’re always on the water’s edge. Your house is on the land but your living’s on the water. It was like that for me in England too. And of course, back then, during the war, I was for the people, the common people, when everyone around me on the island or in the town of Chichester was for the king. I feel like I’ve always been out of step.”

“You can’t be for the People now!” she said jokingly, using the name that some of the tribes used for themselves.

Ned did not answer to the joke. “I don’t know who I’m for anymore.”

“For us,” she told him, as if it were obvious. She looked up from her work, earnestly. “For the elect who make a new world here, for those who oppose the tyranny of the king, for this village, where we all have to do our work to keep the settlement safe, and strong, for Mr. Russell’s congregation. For your wife if you get one, for your family if you have one, for yourself.”

“Yes,” Ned agreed. “Yes. Of course. Yes.”

“You can’t have doubts, Mr. Ferryman,” she said flatly. “We can’t build a new country without being sure that we are God’s chosen people. I wouldn’t marry a man who had doubts.”

“Yes,” Ned repeated. “Of course. Yes.”