Hester(24)

Salem is a wonderful, colorful city full of promise. I am grateful for all that you taught me and all that you gave me, Pap. Every night I pray for your health and happiness.

Your devoted daughter, Isobel





Salem, 1689


The Reverend Samuel Parris arrives from Boston with a Bible in one arm and a musket in the other, eager to take on his role as minister of Salem Village. The new meetinghouse with its smell of cut pine cheers Parris, but the refreshment of a new beginning fades as Major William Hathorne strides across sand and shale and welcomes him with grim pronouncements.

“Our Salem Village is under siege,” Hathorne says. “We are fighting battles on two fronts—here, between neighbors, and in the northern territories where our families suffer horrors at the Indians’ cruel hands.”

Parris clutches his Bible as the major warns of savage Indians that perform black magic and voodoo to render the colonists’ gunpowder and muskets impotent.

“My family has just become possessed of six thousand acres of Maine wilderness that the savages refuse to yield,” Hathorne goes on. “We must seize what we’ve claimed and make our village a refuge for those brave families who return in need of respite.”

Tituba, the Sea Island woman whom Parris brought north from Barbados, stands behind the men and listens with her eyes cast down. She hears authority and a tendency toward cruelty in Hathorne’s voice, and she does not look up until a man comes to stand behind the major. This man has strong bare feet in leather sandals, fringed knee breeches made of animal skins. A torso that is naked and strong.

When Tituba looks up, John Indian is staring right at her, his slave sorrow and desire as plain as her own.





EIGHT





At the East India Marine Society Hall on Essex Street, life-size figures of a Chinese man and two foreign merchants greet me inside the entrance. The Chinese man wears a blue gown embroidered with a rich pattern of symbols and flowers, the first merchant wears a camel-hair scarf with fringes the length of a man’s arm, and the second is dressed in a two-button smock and a queer little cap with a green tassel.

The colors are enchanting, the figures inviting. I’ve come in search of exotic inspiration, and it seems I have come to the right place. But then a voice booms, “Members and their guests only, I’m afraid,” and a short man in knee breeches and brass-buckle shoes steps from between the life-size figures, breaking the spell.

“Are you Mr. Saul?”

“I am indeed.” He is friendly, and when I hand him the note Captain Darling gave me only yesterday, he nearly whoops his welcome as he opens a large guest book for me to sign.

“You are in for a great adventure today, Mrs. Gamble,” Mr. Saul says. “We have wonders, artifacts, souvenirs, memorabilia, and relics from around the world. You have the hall to yourself this morning,” he adds, and directs me to a set of stairs.

I climb into a light-filled atrium of soaring windows and rows of glass display cases. The windows face sea and sky, and the air is perfumed like the inside of one of Edward’s most precious apothecary jars: musty, exotic, full of promise and something mysterious waiting to be discovered. It’s been only a day since my husband left, but already I feel the freedom that my gold coins, my scrimshaw buttons, and my needle might bring if I’m careful and clever.

Soon I’m studying an African queen ant as big as a man’s shoe, human skulls decorated with colorful wooden beads, nose bones from the deep Congo, a healer’s mask and a medicine rattle carved with what seem to be erotic symbols.

Each item is displayed with a hand-lettered card that identifies the captain or shipman who delivered it to the collection, along with the date. I find magenta silk lanterns from Shanghai brought by Captain Darling in 1826, a Japanese kimono brought by Captain Henry Silas aboard Cleopatra’s Barge in 1820, and a packet of oversize seeds brought from the West Indies by one Captain Nathaniel Hathorne in 1803, when Hathorne would have been either a mere babe or just a twinkle in his mother’s eye.

It strikes me that both Mr. Hathorne and Captain Darling thought I would like it here among the strange curiosities. They saw something in me—something odd, I suppose, but also something true. Something that longs for unusual and exotic enchantments.

The sun blasts through the windows, and it grows hot inside the hall. Since I’m alone, I take off my cape and drape it over a chair in a corner, loosen my bonnet, and remove my gloves. When that isn’t enough, I open the knot at the top of my shirtwaist so that I might feel the cool air at the base of my throat.

I’m feeling refreshed when I come upon a beautiful canvas from Polynesia embroidered with beads and rope work, patched with bits of unfamiliar cloth in many patterns. A spotted leopard pads across the front of the canvas, large and ominous. In the water is the head of a giant eel—it seems to be poking out from the back edge of the canvas.

I feel the whole scene alive with the sounds of a crashing sea, rolling drums, women and children shouting on the shore, and the purr of the leopard like a song of danger.

The captain told me that banner weavers and embroiderers often design their work to be flown as flags or hung in windows where they’re seen from all sides. This means the work has no secret stitches, not even one place for a mistake to be folded away. I must see for myself if the artist has made the leopard’s body on the back of the canvas as it is on the front, as lifelike as a specimen found in a jungle paradise.