Hester(35)

AT HOME I sharpen my charcoal stick and draw the first black lines for the leopard to fit a man’s glove. Lamplight flickers across the table where I’ve pinned the gloves upon a piece of cork, and I feel the power of the animal as I sketch across the expanse of two gloves.

I imagine Nat watching me as I work, appraising me, looking at me with that sly smile. Whatever is between us is a secret that neither has yet to say aloud. A brightness with buoyancy and, beneath it, something more … the enchantment that we share—he with words, I with color.

Abigail says there is a curse on Nat’s family, and I know how difficult it is to live with the weight of family shame and secrecy. I imagine saying all this to him, watching his face turn from curiosity to wonder as I reveal my own secret histories—the way Isobel Gowdie stood up to the men who accused her, my mother’s warning, even the enchantments of the colors themselves.

I’ve given him a token of May tree flowers stitched upon his handkerchief, one with a tiny red A concealed in the middle of the flower where the pollen pools.

Perhaps that is witchcraft? But I cannot fathom it, for they say witches have covens and know how to conjure spells, and I would never dare to do such things.

And yet I’m certain that my needlework is more than pleasantry and ornament.

A needle can adorn a bridal cap with silk roses, decorate a child’s dress with bluebells, prepare a gentleman’s gloves for ceremony, and cheer a home with yellow flowers splashed across fresh white sheers. But that’s not all.

My needle saved the captain’s life. A needle can lance a wound. It can keep a babe from falling out of the womb. It can stanch bleeding and hide coins in the hem of a bodice, and it can sew together a thief’s fingers—as I witnessed when an old man was caught too many times with his hands in the till at Marlin’s Tavern.

I was perhaps ten years old and stood in the shadows and watched the barkeep hold down the thief until the dark-clad shroud-maker arrived. They shoved a whiskey bottle into the thief’s mouth and splayed the man’s hand flat on a table. The shroud-maker was calm as he took out a needle laced with horsehair and stuck it through the meat of the man’s thumb.

The thief was screaming when a hand on my shoulder tugged me away.

“Isobel, that’s not for your eyes,” Pap said. But I’d already witnessed the purple back of the thief’s throat and the grim set of the shroud-maker’s jaw. I’d seen there was dark power in a needle, too, more power than my mother had ever revealed.

Now that I think of it, I would like to see someone sew my husband’s fingers together. I would not have to be a witch to do it, either.





ELEVEN





All of Friday and Saturday evening I sew the leopard, using gold and copper silk threads to make the spots. I think of the letters I spied in Mercy’s work and begin to play with the contoured stitches. I zig them, then zag them: I curve bits of letters to spell out S-T-R-E-N-G-T-H in the length of the leopard’s spine, then fill the space around the letters with the same brown thread.

STRENGTH. The word is there, and it is not there. If I look carefully, I can see it; if I blink, it’s gone. I imagine Mercy stitching the word SAFE into the shawl so that the woman who wears it might feel protected when she leaves her home. I want the man who wears these gloves to feel their strength as a deep mystery: present, but invisible.

It takes most of Sunday to sew the rear half of the leopard’s body on the left-hand glove, with a tail curving around the pinky edge and into the palm. When I’m finished, I turn the gloves inside out and snip off all of the thread ends. This is the moment that excites me most, when I slip my creation upon my own body to see how the stitches lie and how the fabric and ornament move when they are worn.

But when I put the glove onto my own hand, the leopard’s legs twist the wrong way and the tail is a slippery snake that slithers across the palm. The work has failed—there’s no magic in it, certainly no witchcraft. I’m a fool to think I have any power beyond what’s modest and mortal. I rip out the stitches and begin again, and by dawn the gloves are so full of holes and charcoal marks that I’ve rendered them useless. I shove them aside, then bend over my table and weep. I’m tired, hungry, and sick with despair. I’ve promised Felicity three magnificent pair of gloves by the end of the week, and that day is fast approaching.



* * *



IT HURTS ME to use the very last of my coins to replace the ruined gloves, and for caution’s sake I go back to the Marine Society Hall with my sketchbook and draw out the leopard again. I make careful note of the scale of legs to body, body to ears, and so on. I won’t make the same mistakes again.

When the sketch is finished, I study a case filled with shells and primitive ornaments from Polynesia, and note a shark’s jawbone brought from the Pacific Ocean by one Capt. N. Hathorne aboard the Nabby in 1803. I discover a showcase of needles, some as tiny as an eyelash, two as long as a man’s arm, in a case labeled Witches’ Needles, Salem 1692. Beside them is a small row of cornhusk dolls labeled Poppets, from the same period in Salem. All of it seems not a repudiation of the witch trials but a further cataloging of them—proof, tucked into a corner of a small hall, that the city still believes witches once lived in Salem.

As the sun beats down through the domed glass ceiling, I can’t help but wonder which of those needles were taken from the poor souls condemned to death by John Hathorne’s judgment.