A Marked Man Read Online Free

transform us into the Servants of Ill? Will mark us, ourselves, with the Mark of the Beast that considers naught but the urgency of his own desires and claims them as good only because they seem good to him?
    “ I had planted thee a noble vine , saith the Lord, wholly a right seed: how then art thou turned into the degenerate plant of a strange vine unto me? ”
    “Mama,” asked Johnny, as they retreated up the aisle at last, “if the Lord put the Israelites into the hand of the Midianites because they sinned, why did the Lord then help the Israelites slaughter the Midianites later? Weren’t the Midianites doing just what the Lord told them to do?”
    “We can’t know what the Lord asked the Midianites to do,” explained Abigail, who had never been quite comfortable with this particular aspect of Predestination herself, “or how to do it.” She tucked Johnny’s scarf more tightly around his throat and over his head, thankful that both her children took after John in their sturdy strength. Poor Arabella Butler next door had just lost her three-year-old son, a fragile child she had vainly nursed through measles, fevers, sweats, and croup, and whose loss had left her desolate. “Perhaps the Midianites overstepped their instructions.” That’s what came of letting a critical, too-intelligent six-year-old get his hands on the Holy Writ.
    “Yes, but if God knows everything from the beginning of Time, wouldn’t He have known the Midianites would oppress the Children of Israel that cruelly—?”
    “Mrs. Adams—”
    Abigail turned gratefully to meet the three women silhouetted against the queer snow-light of the doors that led from the vestibule to Brattle Street outside. The one who had spoken stepped forward, pushing back her cardinal red hood to reveal herself not a woman but a girl of sixteen: black-haired, blue-eyed, stout, and dressed in a vivid and stylish polonaise of mustard-colored silk that made her stand out among the sober dark garments of the congregation like a macaw in a chicken-run. “You may not remember me, m’am, but I’m Lucy Fluckner—”
    “Of course I remember you.” Abigail smiled at the girl and held out her hand. “And Philomela—?”
    Miss Fluckner’s maidservant curtseyed: slender as Miss Fluckner was buxom, quiet as Miss Fluckner was bossy, she had been, some three months before, the target of a religious madman whom Abigail had been instrumental in trapping. The third woman, older than either of the others, was still gazing about her with the precise expression of a schoolgirl at a raree-show, as if she couldn’t quite believe the Spartan plainness of the church vestibule or the somber garb of its inhabitants. When Lucy Fluckner introduced her—“Mrs. Sandhayes, Mrs. Adams”—she propped one of her canes against her wide, whaleboned panniers and extended two fingers only, in the manner of English ladies. “ Well , I wouldn’t have believed it, m’am! Do this many people really come out on a morning like this to be told they’re all going to Hell ?”
    Abigail opened her mouth to snap a retort, but recalled that that was the deserved destination predicted by the Reverend Cooper for at least seven-eighths of the world’s population, past and present, if not more. So she merely gestured about her, at her neighbors crowding to shake the pastor’s hand, and replied, “As you see, m’am. I understand that in England, those who aren’t destined for Heaven don’t wish to know it,” and Mrs. Sandhayes laughed, a light, cheerful sound like shaken silver bells, which caused the grimmer stalwarts of the congregation like Fearful Perkins and old Mr. Gilbert to turn their heads and glare.
    “Mrs. Adams, I came to beg your help.” Lucy drew back from the group around the outer door and back into the sanctuary, where the minimal heat from the small fire-boxes of coals brought by each family on so bitter a morning had managed to raise the temperature a degree or two during the