Hester(100)

THIRTY-THREE





All through winter, I stay in the sugar house and sew silk dresses and sing to the unborn child. I stitch and study and sift through my colors until the understanding is firm in me: Red is passion and knowledge, but it’s also a warning of pain. Blue is hope. Yellow is truth, except when it’s part of fire. Orange is joy. Green is goodness and home. Mercy’s voice is plum brown and yellow, like autumn preparing for winter and then a new spring. Jewel tones like my mother’s voice and the amethyst of Eveline and my ladies in the forest—they are the women who help one another in ways that can be seen and also in invisible ways that aren’t always known.

It’s not that we are witches or faeries or that we deny God. It is that we are more beautiful and strong together than apart.



* * *



MERCY AND WIDOW Higgins deliver me of the child when it is my time. The birth is easy, and the babe is born wailing yellow, blue, and soft green like the petals of an iris. Her hair is raven, her eyes the color of stars. She’s not a red-haired girl but she’s beautiful and the sounds of her cries are the colors of hope, truth, and home.

I’ve been in Salem a little more than a year. I’ve spent five months in the sugar house, long enough to make four dresses plus gloves, petticoats, white on white, and more—enough to start a shop of my own.

On an early spring day, I put on a new yellow dress and a matching cap on the babe’s head, and Captain Darling comes to me. We stand in a patch of sun and he puts a thumb on the babe’s cheek and brushes her forehead, almost like a minister offering his blessing.

“She’s named Margaret, for my mother.”

“Margaret,” the captain says, and the word is a pure joy. “Margaret, from the Greek for ‘pearl.’ She can be our pearl of the sea—yours and mine, if you wish it.”

The captain’s hat is in his hand, which he holds at his heart.

“Do you know what I am saying, lass? I would marry you, if you would have me.”

I thought this might come, but not so soon.

“But I have a husband, and I believe he still lives.”

Darling’s face goes red.

“I should have taken him to Liverpool and dumped him where I found him.” He doesn’t hide his anger well, but he controls it the way a sail controls the wind. “It was a terrible mistake.”

“I should have warned you he was prone to the poppy,” I say.

“Well, you needn’t fear him anymore. His eye pussed out and took his sight. He’s blind now, and his mind is gone—I brought him to the almshouse in Boston where they’ll keep him fed and alive. Still, I suppose it’s best for you to go where he or the law can never find you.”

When his eyes meet mine, they are warm and full of affection, steady and true as they have always been. And I think perhaps if my heart had not been broken, I might have turned to him.



* * *



I’M WAITING ON the rock when the blue rig comes for me. I know this cove. I know the water here is deep enough for a good-sized hull, and I know that if I fall into the sea I can swim.

Margaret is in my arms, wrapped in a blanket for traveling. Captain Darling comes down a short ramp and I turn to Mercy, who has dressed in forest greens and browns for this day.

“Are you sure you won’t come with us?”

My friend’s face is pained, lips pursed, her cheekbones the same wonder that they’ve always been.

“I got work to do here,” Mercy says. “’Long as men are cruel and greedy there will be refugees from other worlds, children running to freedom. Folks who need help.”

I put my arms around her and feel the strong sinew of her shoulders.

“Thank you and bless you for everything. I hope I’ll see you again,” I say, but I think she knows that it will never be.

“You take good care of your baby. And look in on my Ivy when you get where you’re going.”

I cry when we say goodbye, but the tears are so full of gratitude and joy that they feel not like weeping but like prayer.



* * *



THE CAPTAIN STEERS his rig toward the wharf where the New Harmony waits in port. I have learned from Mercy that the captain has already brought ten runaway slaves to safety and that he has hopes for many more.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“The place where you and your little Pearl of the Sea will always have a home with me, if you wish it.”

His eyes are the blue of his words, and his words are the blue of the sky, and I feel something I have not felt since I said goodbye to my pap: safe with a man, and full of hope.



* * *



AS WE SET sail in the New Harmony, I stand at the stern to take a last look at Salem. There are the busy wharves, the boats from every land, the shingled rooftops and tall brick houses that line the shore and look out to sea. There are the seamen and cottars and the sailmakers, the merchants and the girl who sells flowers. And there he is—a tall man in a too-long black cloak.

Did he know I would be leaving this morning? Has he been wandering the wharves in search of a woman with red hair?

Before I understood the strength of Mercy and the widow and Ingo and the captain—even Ivy and Abraham, mere children and yet chattel to some—I might have wept at the sight of him standing alone.