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or the goal of social structure. The familiar stocks and pillory and lash post no longer aroused the same dread and inner accounting. As offenses to common morality grew less punishable, the gibbet took on greater natural force. According to Thomas Fitch, the true and faithful, though still numerically preponderant, were losing control by the month of the Holy Covenant that had bound their colony in the New World to Almighty God. Losing by the day to the carriage owners, the stone-fronted-house builders, the rising aristocracy who doubted a young man’s loss of both legs to King Philip was the result of a blood encounter with the archfiend Prince of Darkness.
    Fitch, out one day on an errand, had watched an old man ridiculed for wearing a wide-brimmed bonnet on a humid summer’s day, and young Latin School buffoons tossing stones at it, until he turned, doffed his hat, and revealed the hairless, fleshless bony carapace of a fellow survivor of King Philip’s raids, a man who had survived the partial ripping of his crowning glory, and the Latinist cowards had fled his addled curses. The sight of some grimy, disreputable fellow with one of several possible letters of the sinner’s alphabet—Adulterer, Blasphemer, Thief, Incest breeder—branded to his forehead, or an Indian patch sewn to a woman’s sleeve for miscegenation, no longer excited the intended pity or fear; evidence of outrageous sin sometimes earned the wretch a farthing and a snicker. From his chair behind the upper window, Thomas would watch the boats unloading, calling out to his father the multiple offenses of unregulated greed, the blocks of marble for stone facades, the fine-grained imported hardwoods for palatial fireplaces—imagine, importing wood to the colonies!—the bales of Scottish wool.
    Their world was ripping apart, thieves and cutthroats walking the street in open defiance of common decency; crafty, devious merchants without a ha’penny of godfear piling up ducats and doubloons and pleading too great a poverty to contribute to the Sunday offering.
    ROBERT AND THOMAS took up cabinetmaking; Susannah and Hannah, sewing.
    Hannah discovered in herself an obsessive love of needlework, which was, she suspected, an overflow of a nascent fascination with—or failing for—finer things. A stray sunbeam on her workbasket, kindling the weakest combustion of colors among twisted skeins of colored thread, could raise indecent palpitations in her heart. Temptation dogged the sensuous Hannah everywhere: in rich clients’ halls as she delivered her handiwork of velvet gowns and quilted underskirts, coats flirty with ladders of bowknots and lingerie undersleeves, and caps of sheerest white muslin; at the baker’s as she passed by shelves of German fried and sugared breads; at the wharf, as sweaty laborers wheeled and rolled cargoes smelling of figs and raisins and spices she couldn’t name and hadn’t yet tasted.
    Her embroidery gave away the conflict she tried so hard to deny or suppress. She knew she must deny all she’d seen the night of her mother’s disappearance and all she felt, for she, worthless sinner and daughter of Satan’s lover, had been taken in and raised by decent souls. Instead, her needle spoke; it celebrated the trees, flowers, birds, fish of her infant days. Nostalgia, all the more forceful because it was unacknowledged, was augmented with fancy. Flora and fauna grew wild on fecund and voluptuous terrain.
    Even at twelve, Hannah Easton’s work was known, and families that would not have admitted her stepparents to their parlors insisted on showing her inside, offering her cakes and tiny tokens of additional payment. She would accept no extra money or sweets. She wanted only additional threads, sheer spools of color that the wealthy hoarded and were happy to share.
    Susannah praised her needlework skill, but feared the wantonness of spirit it betrayed. She had the girl work exclusively on bonnets and farthingales. Hannah sewed