Hester(102)

I had been there almost a year when two ladies stood in front of the captain’s window one morning and exclaimed over my dresses. It was May, and I caught the fragrance of a May tree blooming on the other side of the neighboring yard.

“The price must be very dear,” one of the ladies said. She spoke the King’s English, but her companion answered in a thick Scottish brogue.

“I’m sure I don’t want anything so fancy,” she said.

Their voices were purple and magenta like my ladies of the forest, and I rushed out the door in my work smock, holding Margaret on my hip.

“Whatever you need, I’ll make it for you,” I called.

Virginia and Clara became my first friends here. I told them I was a widow and the captain had saved me from starvation, which didn’t feel like a lie. I gave my name as Isobel MacAllister and have been known thus ever since.

My new friends brought me broadcloth and showed me the plain and simple fashion of the city. By autumn I had as much business as I could manage. I swept clean the captain’s front parlor and turned the whole room into a dress shop filled with neat stacks of cotton cloth and brocades the captain brought home from his voyages.

“Your shop needs a name,” Clara said. She was wearing a deep blue walking costume I’d made and was twisting in front of the looking glass, trying to see her new self from every angle. Her hand was on her hip and her voice was as green as Nell’s once was.

I knew right away the name would be Lighthouse Dress Shop—everyone agreed it was a grand name—and just as quickly as it came to me I saw a banner with a red-and-white lighthouse, yellow rays of sun, and a row of irises at the base.



* * *



EIGHTEEN YEARS PASSED happily. Margaret and I lived in an apartment above the shop in the house that Darling owned, and the town accepted that arrangement. Halifax was the new home of the British naval fleet in the Americas, and the wealthy naval officers’ wives longed for fashions that mimicked those in Europe. Soon I subscribed to the Godey’s Lady’s Book and used their color plates and patterns to make new and finer dresses with hoop skirts and tightly corseted waists that I could never stand to wear.

Ladies brought me day dresses, work dresses, and collars to embroider. What I heard in their voices I put into their attire in simple ways—a pink whipstitch trim, a sliver of red piping—always in the color each lady inspired. I saved my rich threads for nights when Margaret was asleep and then added them to the tapestry I’d begun on the New Harmony, attaching larger pieces of canvas and adding velvets, beads, and more as it grew like a map of my own life, ever larger, always changing.



* * *



MARGARET WAS A bright and sometimes fiery child: loving, stubborn, and curious about the world. I taught her to sew but the needle was a slippery thing in her fingers, and when the colors had no meaning for her, I was relieved. Although it tried my patience when my daughter was willful about what she did and did not like, I was thankful that she was not a secretive person as her father was. Within the realm of decency I let her dress as she liked, and read what she asked for. I tried always to answer her questions about the city and the people she knew as honestly as possible, with one exception: I told my daughter her father had died during the crossing from Scotland and that he had been buried at sea.

“Uncle Darling took care of us then, and has helped us ever since,” I said. When she asked about her father, I told her the story of my brother Jamie’s life; in this way I brought him back to me again and hoped that he was well and happy wherever he was.

Twice I wrote to Jamie in the hotel where he’d worked, but that had been so long ago, I was not surprised that no word came back to me. It is how the world is, and I tried to teach my daughter this as well: you must love what is close and true; you must look to the present and future and not to the past.



* * *



BOOKS AND READING became my daughter’s passion, as I suppose is no surprise. She became a schoolteacher and at nineteen she married the schoolmaster’s son, who had studied law at university. That same year she came to me with a pile of white pages covered in blue ink.

“I’ve been writing.” She was flushed. Her dark hair fell across her face and she pushed it away with a flick of her wrist, just as her father had done.

“Stories?” I blinked back a sudden rush of tears.

“No. I’m writing about the education of girls.” Her voice quivered with feeling and was so full of colors it almost blinded me. “It’s for Godey’s magazine. I remember, Mother, that you had to leave school and go to work when you were small, and that should never happen.”

When she was twenty, I walked into her cottage to find Margaret bent over a book.

“It’s new.” She flipped the book so I could see the title. “The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

It was all I could do not to grab the book from her and throw it into the fire. The sight of his name brought back all the heartache and pain that I had buried away.

But I did nothing. Perhaps Margaret saw something on my face, for she asked if I was all right, and I nodded even as I let my gaze rest on the w he’d added to his name. Hawthorne instead of Hathorne. Like the enchanted May tree, and the blossoms he once brought to me.



* * *



“DON’T TELL HER,” Darling said. We were standing in the kitchen, having just shared a meal of mutton and bread. In all those years, we’d never spoken of Nat. “I beg of you.”