Hester(101)
But I will not weep now.
I smell cinnamon and coffee and pepper in the air, the same sweet and bitter scents that first greeted me in this harbor.
Margaret yelps. I have held her too tightly.
I turn her around so that she can see the place where she was born. So that her father can see what he has lost.
Even from this distance, I’m sure that Nat is looking at us.
When I hold her high over my head—like a banner or a flag—he puts out a hand to steady himself. Raises his arms and reaches toward us. His mouth opens, but if he makes a sound, I do not hear it. I will never hear it.
I bite the inside of my cheek so hard that I taste my own blood. All the nights come back to me, the shock and the wonder of it all. The pleasure and the sorrow. The stories he told me, and the ones I will never know.
I loved him. I cannot deny it. I loved him with a pain that cuts me deep, even now.
* * *
IN THE CABIN where I traveled from Liverpool with Edward there’s now a small drawer lined with soft blankets for baby Margaret, and a chest piled with silk cloth in every shade of blue: indigo, midnight, azure, sapphire. Beside it is a large piece of canvas and skeins of fine wool threads, just as I asked.
Outside, I hear the sailors shouting to one another. I feel the ropes pulling, the wind catching the sails. Someone cries out, “North,” and another calls out, “Canada bound.”
My tambour hook and sharp needle were lost on the path where Edward beat me down. But the pliers are in my pocket and the tiny scissors I carried from home tucked into my chatelaine have been sharpened for the journey. Margaret is snug in her makeshift cradle. She watches as I dry my tears, then open the canvas and spread it across the small table.
The sea rocks the boat, but I am steady. I have learned to trust my own eye and my own hand.
We leave the Massachusetts Bay and the sails catch the wind. I see the open water out the round window. I thread the needle with red yarn. I bend to the cloth.
Salem, 1849
The tallow is still burning as Nathaniel begins the final chapter of the novel that has come out of him in a torrent of memory and zeal. The attic room is warm and close, the slanted ceiling so low above his head that he cannot stand without stepping sideways out of his old oak chair.
His hands are blue with ink, his back strained with months hunched at the desk. He neatens the crooked pile of pages and slides the last of his old journals into his canvas pouch.
In the kitchen he prepares a bowl of warm chocolate and bread while Sophia puts the children into their beds, and when she settles on the couch to listen, he begins to read aloud. This has been their custom since their courtship began; no matter how long or short the piece, she listens with her eyes closed, hands folded upon her lap, and does not interrupt.
Hours pass, and husband and wife can hear the rhythm of the sentences, the beauty in his descriptions of Hester Prynne, the horror that seeps onto the page whenever the old doctor lurks around Minister Dimmesdale.
On and on he reads, dropping the pages onto the floor one by one until at last he reaches that final passage when Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale are reunited in the graveyard and the evidence of their twinned souls appears in the embroidered lettering on their tombstones.
When Nathaniel looks up, Sophia is staring back at him, blanched and wide-eyed, mouth agape, tears streaming down her face. And so he knows in an instant the story has done all that he wished it to, and more.
“It is a love story,” she whispers. “You are the reverend. But who is the woman, Nat? For she is not me.”
For three days Sophia lies in bed ravaged by a migraine that tears at the edges of her mind. When she rouses at last, it is to go up into his attic like a ghost, find the notebooks, and turn through the inked pages with a half-blind eye. But Sophia cannot bear to read any of it. She looks out the window at the sound of Nat coming home with the children. And in one motion she runs down the stairs and throws her husband’s journals into the fire.
Halifax Bay, 1852
I left America as I’d arrived, on a ship, by the sea, looking ahead. Behind me was a shattered love, a treasured friend, the ghosts of cruel men and the women who fed them. What lay ahead I did not know, but I knew not to fear it, for fear of the unknown had never done me any good.
When we reached Halifax, I put my new dresses and embroidered fineries in the picture window of Captain Darling’s sturdy white house at the head of the harbor. I made my bed in the kitchen maid’s room behind the hearth and was free to tend my child.
Because the harbor freezes early, the captain and Ingo didn’t stay long. They saw us onto land, brought me to see Ivy and Abraham with their uncle Atlas, and soon sailed south again. Alone with Margaret, I unfurled the work that I’d started on the journey and added to the canvas tapestry bit by bit. Spring and summer passed in a blur of baby and the strange light outside my window that changed each day. The sun this far north is scant in winter, and the days are short. There was plenty of time for sleep as snow and ice laced the world white, and fatigue and sorrow went through me like the tides.
When the frozen city thawed that spring, the seamen’s wives and officers’ ladies came out of their houses, blinking in the balmy light and looking for color in the gray landscape. They put fresh coats of paint on their wooden doors—red, yellow, and a clear blue that bloomed like early flowers as winter melted away.