Fine, she thought. Fine. It would have been too easy to have found proof of the girl’s duplicity—of her collaboration with Goody Howland and Satan—in the bag. That didn’t mean that Mary was not surrounded by a swamp of snakes. She still believed that Catherine was behind the forks in the dooryard and that Catherine had carved the Devil’s mark into the wood in this very house. She still thought it likely that the girl wished her ill, either because she saw in her mistress the cause of her brother’s death or she saw in Thomas something that Mary herself did not—if only as a way up from her
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