Hester(40)

“Do you know which flowers and fruits are most fashionable? Surely not the May flower,” I joke. “Is it cherries and grapes, or apples, or perhaps peaches—”

He laughs and shifts the books under one arm.

“I’ll ask Louise if I see her at supper this evening. But we don’t often dine together,” he says. “I prefer to dine alone.”

“I’d never dine alone if I didn’t have to.” I’m sorry as soon as the words leave my mouth, because it sounds as if I am lonely.

“I’m a solitary man,” he says. “Does that surprise you?”

There it is, lament and desire, retreat and appeal.

“More solemn than solitary, I think. And more solemn than you need be.”

The look on his face, as if I have laid bare a secret, thrills me.

“Perhaps I see myself in you, and you in me,” I add more gently. “We’re both solitary in our work. But solitude isn’t necessarily our finest state.”

He looks at me over the edge of his nose.

“There you go again, Mrs. Gamble.” His words are hammered gold, and for a moment I am blinded. “Intriguing me as you do.”

If I ask him to say more, I believe he will.

“I’ve changed the end of my story because of you.” He steps closer. “It was meant to be a ghastly story about cruel death meted out against a child, but I can’t do it. Not now that I’ve met you in the flesh.”

“I’m not the girl in your story.” I try to sound easy, but there’s a tremor in my voice and I hear it, and so must he.

“But to me, you and she are the same.” He tilts his head and looks at me closely. “From the first time I saw you on the wharf, I felt I’d summoned you with my own mind.”

I step away from him. “Imagination can’t conjure a true and living person.”

“And yet here you are, with magic of your own and witch marks sewn into your red cape.”

My throat goes dry. I am glad I left the cape at home.

“You can’t deny it. There’s something in your needlecraft I’ve never seen before.”

“You make too much of it.”

“I insulted you when we spoke last, and I’m sorry for it.” He drops his voice. “Let me help you, Mrs. Gamble.”

“Help how?”

My emotions with him skitter and scatter. First I’m nervous, then I’m frightened, and now I’m flooded with gratitude as he talks about what I might stitch and where I might have my work seen.

“The Light Infantry banquet is the most important event of the fall season, as you’ve surely heard,” he says. “You must embroider a stunning camel hair shawl and wear it that night. I’ll do what I can to make sure your work is noticed without giving myself away. And that’s not something I promise lightly, for I hate going out to such things.”

“My husband will be back by then,” I murmur.

“That won’t change your work,” he says, hardly blinking at the mention of Edward. “Besides, I know about Salem seamen: they come and go and the women are left to make their way. My mother was one of those women, and she did not fare well. I would not like to see the same happen to you, not with so much skill as you have.”

We stand for several moments together, and I recall what my father told me: enchanted beings live beside the sea. They rise and look beautiful, but they keep their powers hidden from sight, much as the placid sea is always brewing a storm somewhere unseen.

“I will make something glorious,” I tell him. “It will be our secret until then.”





Salem, 1692


A raging blizzard blocks the roads to Salem Village, keeping horses and carts and even the most determined worshippers at home on Sunday morning.

In the nearly empty meetinghouse, the Reverend Samuel Parris pounds at the pulpit. It has now been four months since the congregation paid his salary.

“I warn you there is terror and destruction coming,” he shouts.

Days later his daughter and niece collapse onto their pallets, twisting and shrieking and slapping at invisible demons.

“Make it stop, Papa, make it stop,” nine-year-old Betty cries.

For three cold, frightful days and nights the girls shiver and scream and show him scratches, marks, and bites that neither Parris nor the good Dr. Griggs can explain but for the most diabolical reasons.

“I fear the girls are under an Evil Hand,” Dr. Griggs pronounces.

Parris falls to his knees and calls upon the Lord, for what he fears has come to pass. He fasts and his household does the same: wife, daughters, and niece—even the slaves Tituba and John Indian—go without food. But the girls keep screaming.

“You must send for help,” Elizabeth Parris begs her husband. “Please, Samuel, I fear the worst.”



* * *



Reverend John Hale and John Hathorne arrive at the parsonage in a flourish of heavy robes, spouting Testament and passages from William Perkins’s book on witchcraft. With fingers blue from cold, they point at writhing, moaning Betty Parris and her cousin and they shout, “Out, Satan, be gone before the Lord.”

Then they, too, fall on their knees to pray and fast.

Yet the girls’ agonies go on. Terror and gossip overtake Salem Village. Neighbors stay in their homes keeping close watch upon their own daughters and wives for signs of demonic possession. The souls and bodies of every villager are in danger when Goodwife Mary Sibley decides that she must help.