Hester(10)

“Here’s your new palace.” The warden pointed us to a dark room with straw for a bed.

Edward fell into a heap while I took inventory of what I’d salvaged. I knew there were needleworkers even in the poorhouse, and I’d do whatever I must to work my way free.

“I’m sorry, lass.” My husband’s eyes were glassy, but he was not beyond shame. “Truly, Isobel, I didn’t mean for it to come to this.”





Scotland, 1662


The examiner leans over Isobel Gowdie in the dark courthouse.

“What did you do in the kirk of Auldearn? Is that where Satan gave you his commands?” His questions are quick and hard, with breath full of sausage and beer. “How did you kill the cows? Who helped you in your devilish ways?”

Onlookers clutch at their necks and Isobel cannot breathe. She has not had anything to drink for days.

“Water—” she cries into the courthouse. Her fingernails have turned yellow and now she is standing and her arms are raised and her throat is sore.

“Is water the instrument you used to kill the cows?” The examiner’s spit flies onto her face, his brown-sausage words sicken her. “With spectral water you smothered the animals to fall and die breathless in the reverend’s barn?”

At the smell of yeast and sausage, Isobel recalls Forbes’s wife squatting away the unwanted child.

“Spare the child,” she moans. “Do not suffer the little children.”

The examiner is upon her and Isobel is in a fever.

“Isobel Gowdie, you admit that Satan orders you to hurt the children. Do you admit that you are a witch?”

Frenzied now with thirst and heat and the examiner’s spittle on her cheek, she raises her arms and shrieks, “The child—” The words flash and she remembers the reverend’s bare legs beneath his cassock and the hands that pushed needles into her flesh. “I have lain with the Devil’s forked prick inside me,” she moans. The examiner motions for the recorder to take up his quill and begin transcribing the woman’s confessions. “And if you kill me hell will reign on earth.”



* * *



Later, five village women stand in a tight cluster beside the well and shake their heads.

“Gowdie is no witch,” one says.

“That ain’t what she said.” An apron flaps, a fly is swatted. The woman looks over her shoulder to be sure they are alone. “You heard her with your own ears.”

Another makes the sign of the cross and blinks at the cloudy-eyed crone who stands at the edge of the circle. “The colors, you surely heard her speak of it.”

“I heard her say purple for lavender and yellow for yarrow.”

“She said more than that,” says the first. “I tell you she woke the faeries, I seen ’em myself.”

“Dunna say it again, Mary, or they mayt come after you next.”





FOUR





Rats woke me in the poorhouse, drudging under my skirts. It was our third morning on the cold, hard floor and I was hungry and weak.

“Young and pretty.” A man with a twisted spine and keys jangling at his side kicked at my foot with his own. “Get up—let’s go.”

I rubbed the dirt off my face with the hem of my dress and followed the man down the hall.

In the lord provost’s office, I found Pap waiting with his hat still firmly on his head.

“It’s done.” Pap stood straight. “I sold what I could salvage at Edward’s shop, and added some of my own things to make up the difference.”

Edward came up behind me.

“Is it enough?” my husband asked.

Pap’s face was grim. “Barely.”

I was relieved and grateful as we limped out into the cold morning.

“I swear I’ll repay you.” Edward shook my pap’s hand. He was still sick with needing the poppy, but he’d done what he could to pull himself together, and the days off his foot had done it some good.

“Take care with my girl,” Pap said. “Get her away from here and away from ruin.”

My father pulled me into an embrace.

“Trust the needle, Isobel,” he said in a deep, quiet voice. “Anything is possible in the New World. You must believe it and make it so.”

He secreted a small coin sack into my palm and kissed me goodbye. I clung to him until I was sobbing and he was weeping, too, but there was no suggestion that I might stay behind in Glasgow. Edward was my husband. To have parted from him then would have been to disgrace myself and Pap, too. I would not have done it, even if I had been given the choice.

I’d set my mind on America, where I would not let Edward tell me how I might use my needle and my talents. My mother had told me my time would come—surely it was now. The poorhouse had set something loose in me, and I would not be put aside again.



* * *



ON THE STAGECOACH to Liverpool, Edward kept his head buried in the thick apothecary book murmuring phrases—the pox, calendula, beeswax, candelilla, cowslip—as if to prove that he was serious about making a new and prosperous start.

“I thought you had it all committed to memory,” I said. I could not help myself.

“It is like the Bible,” Edward said. “You can’t know all its mysteries even if you’ve read every word.”