“It's about the accuser…”

“Who will also be a defendant in her own trial.”

“She'll not be tried,” said Hezekiah. “She's cooperating with Quill. So this can have no compromising effect on an action in court.”

“Don't blame Quill for her. She came up with this accusation on her own.”

“I know, sir. John. But she's not your normal accuser. Her parents were hanged for witches when she was a newborn. Indeed, her father took the drop, as they say, before she was even born, and her mother but weeks afterward. She found it out only a few days ago, and it put her in such a state that–”

“That she brought false accusation against a stranger?” John grimaced. “You have a fleck of yolk on your chin.”

Hezekiah dabbed at it with his napkin. “I think the accusation is not false,” said Hezekiah.

John glared at him. “I'm glad you didn't say anything to compromise this blacksmith's case.”

“I don't mean that it's objectively true, I mean that she's being forthright. Her intent is pure. She believes the charge.”

John rolled his eyes. “So how many should I hang for one girl's superstition?”

Hezekiah looked away. “She's not superstitious, sir. She's a sweet girl, good-hearted, and very bright. She's been studying with me, and sitting in on lectures.”

“Oh, right. The girl and her professors. That's why Harvard got raided by the tithingmen and half the faculty hauled off for questioning.”

“She didn't initiate that, sir. She refuses to accuse any but the original defendants.”

“Till that rope-happy ghoul runs her into the ground.”

“You should have heard the blacksmith's lawyer accuse Quill of using torture. Out on the common in front of everybody.” Hezekiah smiled at the memory. “He held the strings and Quill danced for the crowd.”

John liked the image as much as Hezekiah did, but he was a judge, and the first skill he had perfected was the ability to remain solemn and suppress even so much as a twinkle in his eye. “So you're here to tell me that this girl, this Purity, means well as she tries to get this young man hanged.”

“I mean to say it isn't a case of vengeance for spurned love, or any such thing as are usually at the heart of witch trials.”

“Then what is it? Since we both know…” John glanced around and lowered his voice. “That the one certainty in this trial is that there are no witches.”

“The boy was full of brag about some knack or other. All she knows is what he told her, or someone in his party. But she believed it. She's doing this because she must believe in the law that hanged her parents. If she did not believe that the law was right, then the sheer injustice of it would drive her mad.”

“Oh, now, Hezekiah. 'Drive her mad'? Have you been reading sensational novels?”

“I mean it quite literally. She has a deep faith in the goodness of our Christian community. If she thought her parents were falsely accused and hanged for it–”

“Who were her parents? Is it a case I…” And then, doing the arithmetic in his head– the girl's age, that many years ago– he realized whose daughter she was. “Oh, Hezekiah. That case?”

Tears spilled from Hezekiah's eyes. “What I wanted you to know, John, was that the one who seems to be the accuser is merely the last victim of that wretched affair.”

John answered gently. “New England is a lovely place, Hezekiah. We have our share of hypocrisy, of course, but generally we face up to our sins and the frailty of human nature, and confess our wrongs right smartly. But this one– how did it ever go that far?”

“You didn't see what I saw, John,” said Hezekiah.

“No, don't tell me. You need no excuse, my friend. You stood alone.”

“I couldn't… I could not.”

John laid his hand over Hezekiah's. “Thus we take a good breakfast and render it indigestible,” he said. “Come, now, there's no blame attached to you.”

“Oh, but there is.”

“So you're defending her, to make up for it?”

Hezekiah shook his head. “I've looked after her all her life. It's my penance. To stay here, in obscurity. There's blood on my hands. I won't have more. The young lawyer who's languishing in the jail, he's the one. When you let him out, when he defends his friend, see if he doesn't give you a way to resolve the whole matter. All I ask is that you not bring charges against the accuser.”

“This English barrister can do it, but not you?”

“I took a vow most solemnly before heaven.”

“And deprived the New England bar of an honest man. The bench as well. You should be in robes like mine, my friend.”

Hezekiah brusquely wiped the tears from his cheeks. “Thank you for seeing me, John. And for treating me as a friend.”

“Now and always, Hezekiah. Will I see you at the trial?”

“How could I bear that, John? No. God bless you, John. He brought you here, I know it. Yes, I know you think God is a watchmaker who installed an infinite spring–”

“A quotation I never said, though it's much attributed to me–”

“I heard the words from your lips.”

“Stir your memory, and you'll recall that I was quoting the line in order to refute it! I'm no deist, like Tom Jefferson. That's his line. It's the only God he's willing to worship– one who has closed up shop and gone away so there's no risk of Tom Jefferson being contradicted when he spouts his nonsense about the 'rational man.' Him and his wall of separation between church and state– such claptrap! Such a wall serves only those who want to keep God on the far side of it, so they can divide up the nation without interference.”

“I'm sorry to have brought your old nemesis into this.”

“You didn't,” said John. “I did. Or rather, he did. You'd think that he'd stop getting under my skin, but it galls me that his little country is going to be part of the United States, and mine isn't.”

“Isn't yet,” said Hezekiah.

“Isn't in my lifetime,” said John, “and I'm selfish enough to wish I could have lived to see it. The United States needs this Puritan society as a counter-influence to Tom Jefferson's intolerantly secular one. Mark my words, when a government pretends that it is the highest judge of its own actions, the result is not freedom as Jefferson says, but chaos and oppression. When he shuts religion out of government, when men of faith are not listened to, then all that remains is venality, posturing, and ambition.”

“I hope you're wrong about that, sir,” said Hezekiah. “Many of us look to the United States as the next stage of the American experiment. New England has come this far, but we are stagnant now.”

“As this trial proves.” John sighed. “I wish I were wrong, Hezekiah. But I'm not. Tom Jefferson claims to stand for freedom, and charges me with trying to promote some kind of theocracy or aristocracy. But there is no freedom down his road.”

“How can we know that, sir?” said Hezekiah. “No one has ever been down this road?”

“I have,” said John, and regretted it at once.

Hezekiah looked at him, startled, but then smiled. “No matter how precise your imagination, sir, I doubt it will be accepted as evidence.”

But it wasn't imagination. John had seen. Had seen it as clearly as he saw Hezekiah standing before him now. It was a sort of vision that God had vouchsafed to him all his life, that he could see how power flowed and where it led, in groups of men both large and small. It was a strange and obscure sort of vision, which he could not explain to anyone else and had never tried, not even to Abigail, but it allowed him to chart a course through all the theories and philosophies that swirled and swarmed throughout the British colonies. It had allowed him to see through Tom Jefferson. The man talked freedom, but he could never quite bring himself to free his slaves. Abolitionists criticized him for hypocrisy, but they missed the point. He wasn't a lover of freedom who had neglected to free his slaves; he was a man who loved to control other people, and did it by talking about freedom. Jefferson had stood naked in front of the world when he tried to silence his critics with the Alien and Sedition Acts almost as soon as Appalachee won its freedom from the Crown. So much for his love of freedom– you could have freedom of speech as long as you didn't use it to oppose Jefferson's policies! Yet as soon as the acts were repealed– after years of hounding Jefferson's enemies into silence or exile– people still talked about him as the champion of liberty!