The Heretic's Daughter
A Novel
Chapter One
Massachusetts, December 1690
THE DISTANCE BY wagon from Billerica to neighboring Andover is but nine miles.
For myself it was more than a journey away from the only home I had ever known.
It was the ending of a passage from the dark fog of infancy to the sharp
remembrances of childhood. I was nine years of age on that December day and my
entire family was going back to live with my grandmother in the house where my
mother was born. We were six in all, cramped together in an open wagon, carrying
within my mother and father, two of my older brothers, myself, and Hannah,
who was but a baby. We had with us all of our house hold possessions. And we
were bringing, unbeknownst to any of us, the smallpox.
A plague of it had swept across the settlements of Middlesex County, and with
our crossing east over Blanchard's Plain, contagion and death followed with us.
A close neighbor, John Dunkin of Billerica, had died within the space of one
week, leaving a widow and seven children. Another neighbor brought us the news,
and b ... read full excerpt from: The Heretic's Daughter ebook
