Hester(37)

“You’re very skilled,” I try again.

Mercy shrugs and looks over my shoulder toward the pier.

I see no words or letters rise up from her work this time, but perhaps I’m too tired to catch them. Perhaps the month at sea wrecked my eyes when I first landed. Or perhaps there are no secrets, no words, no meaning in the shapes and colors she’s worked with her needle. Perhaps it’s just as I fear: the colors are some crack in my sanity, some indication of bad witchery or madness.

“You planning to steal my designs?” Her words startle me.

“Of course not,” I fib, though it is nearly what I am hoping to do. “I need your help and I have something to give in exchange.” Yes, everyone wants an exchange, just as I saw with the captain and Edward. “The pennyroyal has taken root in my yard and I’ll be making the ointments when I can buy the beeswax.”

Mercy nods.

“Good. I can sell that here, too. Sailors got lots of cuts and bug bites and sun blisters that need curing, if that ointment is all that you say it is.”

I pick up a small purse that she’s stitched with a scene of two boys fishing.

“I’d like to learn how to make scenes in miniature,” I say. “For a pair of gloves, for example.”

She takes the purse from my hands before I can examine it further.

“You’re keeping my customers away,” she says sharply. She is taller than me, strong and wiry in the open air.

“Mercy, I am in a bind.” I hate to admit weakness again, but it seems I have no choice. “I’ve promised something I haven’t yet mastered.”

She sucks her teeth. Her glance bounces off me.

“What do you need?”

“To make a pair of gloves.”

“Why gloves?” she asks.

“Gloves are small and I thought they would be fast and simple, but they’re not.”

“You got a glove form?”

“I don’t. Is it necessary?”

“I can show you.” She looks across the wharf to the place where the ships are coming and going. Several seamen are heading our way, and some ladies are walking behind Zeke and a few others carrying travel trunks. Last month I was the one arriving full of hope for good fortune in the New World. I was innocent of what troubles lay ahead, still ignorant of the fading prince of Salem who would see me as a girl who’d stepped from one of his stories. Still ignorant about the depths of Edward’s depravity.

“Don’t crowd around me now,” Mercy says, waving me away. I see two men stagger under the weight of a lady’s heavy trunk. Zeke tips his head toward me, but nothing more. “Go on home—I’ll help you later.”

I do as she says and head back home. On the way I pass by the Manning stagecoach offices, but there is no sight of Nat, only the thumping of two drummers and a row of old fellows in uniforms practicing a marching tune near the Common.



* * *



IT’S LATE AFTERNOON when Mercy comes to my cottage. Behind her in the yard is a tabby cat I’ve never seen before. The cat is black and gold, the colors of the leopard haunting my thoughts.

“Did she follow you?” It seems strange that a cat with leopard markings would appear on just this day.

“Hope not,” Mercy says. “Cats and chickens don’t mix. Give it some scraps so she don’t follow me home.”

I do as she instructs and lead Mercy into the cottage, where she casts an arched eye at my failed gloves.

“Why you making something so grand as a leopard?”

“The gloves have to be special,” I say. “I have to make a fair and good wage to make up for what was stolen.”

“Got to be what folks want,” she says. “First lesson.”

From a black sack she takes a hollow form made of wicker and straw. The form has five fingers so that a glove can be slipped upon it and a needle passed beneath and inside.

“Zeke made it,” Mercy says. “You can use it now, but you got to get your own.”

I slide a fresh glove over the form and see that it makes a generous space at the wrist so that the work will go more easily, and it even allows for repairs and whipstitches along the fingers.

Mercy turns the pages of my open sketchbook.

“This here.” She points to an iris my mother drew a long time ago. It is long and elegant, set in a swirl of lovely green leaves. “Salem folk will like it. Iris flower means courage and protection.”

I use my charcoal to draw an iris up the length of a glove and the long leaves as trim along the edges. Filling the space with the flower seems something new and different.

“What do you think of it?” I ask Mercy.

She gives a nod, and it is enough.

I expect she’ll be on her way once my stitching goes well. But she takes out a sash and picks up her own needle. Side by side with her, I feel a ghost of the camaraderie I had once with my mother. She looks at my thread and I look at her needle.

“You got a quick hand,” she tells me. “Quick is good. Just as important as pretty, if you want to make a living on it.”

She has put a trim of lavender flowers along the edge of her sash.

“Why don’t you sell your wares at a dry goods shop or a dressmaker?” I ask.

“White folks don’t much like to buy from Black folks,” she says. “Anyway, I like the wharves. Men looking for something to bring a lady or a son, and my price is right. I see new things there,” she adds. “Arabs and Spaniards come with fringes and colors like we never dare. Gives me ideas.”