Hester(103)

Darling’s face was aged by the sea but his eyes were as bright and kind as on the first day we’d met, and I saw in them all the love that he had for Margaret and me.

“You know she doesn’t think you’re her father,” I reminded him. “She thinks her father died on the crossing.”

“Let it be that way,” he said. “Let it stay in the past where it belongs.”

“I don’t know what to do or think,” I said. “I haven’t even read the book myself.”

“Don’t.”

Darling’s face went red, as it does when he is angry. But I knew I would read the book in time. I knew that I had to, for everything that I had felt in Salem had come flooding back to me the moment I saw the title—all the pain and fear and hurt—and yes, the love.

But I had also come to understand that what happened between Nat and me had been the love between an unformed girl held captive by her secrets and a haunted man held captive by his ghosts.

Everything that had hurt me in Salem was behind me now. I was not that girl anymore; I had long ago stopped living in the past or fearing it. Free of it, I could see what was true—what had always been true, in a way.

“William Darling,” I said, “I cannot promise you that I won’t read the book. But I can tell you that I love you.”

“What do you mean?” His voice faltered, but it was the same blue I had always known.

I did not love him the way I had loved Nat, and so I had not understood that love didn’t require pain. That it can also be a comfort, a place of safety and happiness and home, full of hope and affection and admiration.

“I mean I love you as a woman loves a man, and I have waited too long to tell you,” I said.

And when he took me into his bed that night, he was so gentle it was a whisper, and then it was a roar, and when my eyes were closed it felt as if I had never had another lover. As if time had erased everything that it could.



* * *



I BOUGHT MY own copy of Nat’s book, but for a long time couldn’t bring myself to read it. Every old scar and wound seemed to open whenever I thought of it, and so I locked it away in a cabinet in my dress shop and hoped the questions about truth and lies and storytelling and secrets would stop haunting me.

But they did not, nor did he. And so one day when Darling was at sea and my heart was strong, I began to read.

Nat called the story A Romance; it began with a scarlet letter embroidered and hidden away in a scrap of cloth like the button I once slipped into our hiding place at the boulder. Hester Prynne was an outcast, just as Nat had said I would be if I’d stayed. Arthur Dimmesdale was a coward without the courage to claim the woman he loved; their daughter was a strange little sprite without a friend in the world, and I wept tears of gratitude that I’d saved Margaret from such a fate.

Pearl. He called the girl Pearl. How could he have known? Did he see us while he lay in his bed with a cloth across his eyes? Did he ask about me? Did Mercy tell him? I could not—I still cannot—decide if I felt horrified or vindicated. Frightened or liberated.

Like Nat himself, the book was a truth within a lie, and a lie within a truth.

And like everything powerful in this life, it sent me to the needle, where the story I’d been telling since I left Salem started in the blue-green darkness of the secret cove and traveled north into the wide arms of Halifax Harbor.

I’d left an empty circle at the center of the tapestry, as I’d always felt an emptiness in myself.

I knew then how I would fill it.



* * *



MARGARET GAVE BIRTH to twins the following year: a boy with red-yellow hair named Willy for the captain, and a red-haired girl named Isobel, just as we have always been Isobel, Margaret, Isobel, Margaret, going back and back through time.

When the twins were born, Ivy came across the city with her own three children. She lived with her husband among the free Colored people in the Campbell Road Settlement, a place of joy but also of hard poverty made worse by the same neglect and spiteful laws that hurt American Colored people. Still, the citizens in the settlement grew in number over the years, thanks in part to the captain and others who brought runaway slaves to freedom. And Ivy was strong; her children were loved.

She brought a toy boat her husband had carved for Willy and a bonnet for baby Isobel. She put a small package wrapped in cotton into my daughter’s hands, and Margaret unfolded the tiny dress I’d made from my own cloak so many years ago in the sugar house.

“Your mama gave me this before we left Salem,” Ivy said.

Margaret ran her hand along a fragment of the cape that I’d worked as I crossed the ocean from Liverpool. She turned the dress inside out to study the stitching, as the daughter of any seamstress might, and her finger worried at a knot of red thread.

“Look.” Margaret’s face bloomed as she turned the seam inside out. “There’s a scarlet letter hidden here.”

I’d long ago stopped making that mark so that no one in Salem could find me by it, and no one in Halifax could mistake it for an enchantment.

“A for Abington,” I rushed to say. “The little village where I was born. I’ve told you all about it many times, the River Clyde, the waterfalls, the green of the fields.”

But my daughter wasn’t fooled, and when Ivy and her children were gone and the infants were abed, she called me to her.