Or maybe that was just Jane. Her sweet face, heart-shaped because of the widow’s peak to her lustrous dark hair, the deep shade of her skin, the lines of her slim waist sheathed in that beautiful green, the way she smiled at him—above all, the way she smiled at him—
Don’t think of it, he told himself. It can never be.
Jane was not from a family among the Godly, the only group with whom Balthazar’s father wanted him to associate. Though they were not currently members in good standing with the church, due to his mother’s dangerous flirtation with the heresies of Anne Hutchinson, his father knew they could regain that acceptance and respectability. Jane never would. She traveled about with her father, an itinerant merchant who peddled his wares up and down the coasts of the colonies. They certainly were not members of the church, and only a special act by the governor allowed them and their kind to be in Massachusetts at all.
Rumor had it they were papists. Among the Puritans, this was beyond redemption—far worse than the heathenism of the Natives who dwelled nearby.
But Balthazar could not see sin embodied in anyone as good as Jane. Though they had only ever spoken at market days, he knew that he cared for her, and that she thought well of him, too. The way her eyes lit up whenever she saw him made the whole world seem to melt—
It can never be, he reminded himself.
“When I grow up, and Mama doesn’t make my dresses any longer, I’ll wear green, too,” Charity said. “Green dresses, green caps, green aprons, even green shoes. Every day.”
“You’d look like an asparagus.”
His little sister stuck out her tongue. “A beautiful asparagus.” He jokingly swatted at her, so she dashed ahead, beyond his reach.
Charity might have fared better in London, Balthazar thought. There her dreamy, unfocused temperament might have been seen merely as eccentricity, or even creativity. Their mother’s family, a warmhearted, friendly group to judge by their annual letters, might have shown her more acceptance, and that might have made Mama strong enough to stand up to Papa on her daughter’s behalf.
Instead, here she was looked at as peculiar at best, wicked at worst. He’d heard the occasional ominous whisper—witch—but he suspected her troubles would be far more ordinary than any trial for consorting with Satan. Though only fourteen years old, Charity was already widely considered unmarriageable, even in a country where men outnumbered women. The few talents allowed to ladies—cooking and sewing—were too meticulous for her, with her wandering attention, to master. Nobody else saw her as she was now: bounding through the grass, sun painting her fair curls with light as she whipped off her cap, beautiful not in spite of her strangeness but because of it.
I will always have to look out for her, Balthazar thought. It wasn’t a new realization, but the weight of it felt heavier somehow.
As Charity rounded the hill, skipping down faster ahead of him, he stooped to pet his dog. He noticed again the cracking in the leather of his boots; they were worn thin, and really they’d been made for him too early—he’d still had a little growing to do, and so the toes of the boots were too tight. Might his father consider using the extra wampum to buy him some new ones before winter? Unlikely, but it was worth asking.
He heard Charity laughing and saying something—it wasn’t unusual for her to talk to herself.
But this far from the road, it was odd to hear someone else reply.
Balthazar rose to his feet and hurried over the hill, where he saw Charity standing beside a wagon driven by two people—a man and a woman—neither of whom was known to them. They must have come to market, but he hadn’t seen them there; two people like this would have stood out, dressed in brilliant colors, the woman’s hair loose and free like a small child’s. Like Charity’s.
Strangers were rare in this part of the world, the only part Balthazar had ever known; perhaps that was why he became suspicious so quickly. He hurried down to Charity’s side.
“You would look enchanting in green,” said the man holding the reins. He was a handsome man, and Balthazar would’ve known it even without Charity’s adoring gaze to guide him. His hair, his skin, even his eyes all seemed to be touched with gold, and he had a fine, patrician profile. His clothes seemed well made, and the new, uncracked leather of his boots shone. “Ah, and who have we here?”
“My older brother, Balthazar More.” Charity went up on tiptoe to confide, “He’s not as strict with me as my parents.”
“Then perhaps he will not mind an introduction,” said the blond-haired woman, whose locks would have looked lustrous if she had not been sitting next to the strangely dazzling man. Perhaps they were brother and sister as well. She was beautiful in her statuesque way, but there was something avid about the way she looked at Balthazar. It was the way some of the ruder men looked at women whose hair was not partly covered, or girls just leaving childhood whose skirts were not yet fully long. He hadn’t known women could look at men this way, too.
If it had been Jane looking at him so hotly, Balthazar thought he might have liked it. But she wasn’t Jane.
“Good day to you, sir,” Balthazar said, turning his attention to the man. “Forgive my sister. She is eager to make friends.”
“How wise of her,” the man said. “Call me Redgrave. I think we shall be very good friends indeed. Don’t you agree, Constantia?”
“Oh, I do,” Constantia whispered, leaning past Redgrave’s shoulder to peer at Balthazar again, the sunlight catching her hair—