He wished for the woman who had run away from him, after they were there last, and tried to channel that desire into a game of tarok, but the cards were unable to siphon his mood and he eyed the door expectantly whenever someone entered.

Magnus, surveying the crowd, began to think Purchase had only gotten himself wound up over something he was not to have. Still, as the night wore on he sat there in order to watch over his brother if he could.

When he had lost as much at the cards as he could stand, Purchase rose from the table, walked around the room, picked up one of the girls’ hand, and let her lead him to the back. She was not an attractive woman, and he had looked past her a hundred nights without seeing her. Tonight he wanted her in the ambiguous manner of wanting everything and nothing specific at all.

In the back room a lantern burned very low at the wick and he pulled his pants down, and pushed the woman to the mattress. He mounted on top of her without ceremony, letting her guide him inside, then began thrusting until he had finished.

The woman she lay there neither damning nor redeeming him but simply giving off a few moans for surprise and pleasure and doing what she had been paid for, which was to bear his weight in the darkness for a spell.

It was very quick satisfaction, and when he finished he pulled his pants back up and left the room with the feeling of having done a low thing. His sex and wanting, though, were sated, no longer gnawing at the inside of his brain like a untamed animal.

For the first time he noticed just how dingy the entire establishment was, and wondered how many hours of his life had passed there without finding the satisfaction he came in search of. What he also asked himself, and did not know, was whether it was more satisfaction than he would otherwise have known.

As they rode back home he felt a whistling emptiness and did not know whether it was caused by missing the one he sought or lying down with one he ought not have had. He was surprised that this last thing should occur to him, for it was something he had gotten away with a hundred times in the past.

Magnus rode alongside Purchase with a half smile on his face but tried hard to suppress it when he saw how the other was feeling. “If she is a preacher now, you’ll be hard pressed to find her in a place like that,” he said finally.

“You might be right, but I wish you had said something before,” Purchase replied.

“Don’t throw salt on me,” Magnus returned. “It was your notion.”

“Do you think I’m mean for what I did?”

“It is a funny sort of reckoning that takes one woman to get over another. It might work, but no one will ever explain how.”

“Well, it seemed like the natural place to look.”

“To look for a preacher?”

“That is where they were before. Where else do you think we should have gone?”

“You might have tried the church.”

In the end they did find her in church, though not the one in town but rather in an outdoor tent that had been set up in a field outside of Berkeley, on the road that ran past Stonehouses. It was Sanne who suggested they go, saying it would do them all good to hear some new voices mixed in with the old ones they had been hearing their whole lives. As she grew older she had become increasingly concerned with the keep of her family’s salvation, and she liked to believe that praying for people made up part of the way for them who did not pray enough themselves. Still, she knew this only made a small difference, so if she could get Merian and Purchase to pray any kind of way she would be happy. As for Magnus, she had no idea what condition his soul was in but would bet it needed upkeep as well.

On top of these other reasons she had never heard of a woman preacher before and was keen to know what she would have to say that might be different from what the other preachers promised and claimed about the state of the world.

Merian had never had much use for any of them and told her it would be the same as the rest, only set in a woman’s mouth instead of a man’s. “You might think its something different on account of the novelty, but I wager there won’t be anything new in it.”

“Since when have you been listening to so many preachers as to be an expert?” Sanne challenged. “Anyway, what’s different is that it is a woman. That itself is something new, in my mouth anyhow.”

In the end it was this that compelled all of them to get out of bed before the sun that Sunday, to get good seats under the tent, which had been pitched in the middle of a muddy field for what had been promoted in the area as a Revival and Awakening.

As the four Merians looked around, they were surprised both by the number of people who had come out for the event and the general number that lived within walking or riding distance of Stonehouses. It was perhaps a hundred fifty souls, but all gathered together they seemed legion. Their own seats were midway back, and they could see very clearly when the first preacher, the Englishman Magnus and Purchase had played cards with at the roadhouse, came onstage. He was dressed smartly in a purple robe, with golden thread at the sleeves and a red sash he wore over his neck, along with a great golden cross.

“I want to talk to all of you today about the Knowledge and Love of God,” he said, “and how it belongs to all of us in equal measure. It is a message that will not be popular with some, so let me first give you my background and how I came to be here today.”

The tent was silent as they listened, for he spoke with intense care for his words, but also with a strange accent.

“I am what is known as an Episcopi Vagantes, which means I have been fully invested with the sacraments of the one original church. I received my ordination first as a priest, while still in my youth, and was raised still young to bishop — I was twenty-six at the time — by no less a vassal of God than the Pope of Antioch.

“None can undo what a Pope has done without undoing the ancient communion of the church itself, so I remain now a high bishop but have had an argument with the other churches on your behalf.

“I can see some of you are saying, He is still the Pope’s man, and what do you mean with this lowercase and uppercase pope business? Isn’t there only one? The truth is there are five popes, all equally entitled to the claim, and the Roman pope is little more than a bishop who has gotten pretensions to be master of the world. The more haughty he has got, the more he has separated all of us from the works of Jesus and His apostles.

“Why he does this is because there are things in the Gospels that the Church in Rome would rather bar all of us from knowing. But all of it belongs ever to the flock of the faithful.

“‘Now what is this Knowledge he keeps talking about?’ I can see you asking. ‘Isn’t Jesus the perfection of Love and all of Love?’ Yes, He is, but also other things besides.

“You see, the seventh seal has long been breeched, and it is silent in Heaven as They watch.”

The residents of the town were baffled by much that the preacher was saying, but he put up such a show with that great purple robe billowing out on the wind under the perfect cerulean autumn sky, along with the red coronation stole, that they decided to let him finish his sermon before making up their minds.

“Today I wish to read to you from one of the Hidden Books of Christ, which the popes and high bishops have all conspired among themselves to keep out of your knowing, certain Knowledge they would like to keep hidden in order to elevate their own earthly kingdom. I am here to tell you that you can know the True Heart of Christ, as intimately as those apostles who sat down with Him in Communion, and not go supplicating to any interdicting authority other than your own hearts.”

He opened a gigantic old tome, turned to a well-marked page, and began reading.