Hester(43)

“You’ll have a basket of flowers to hold just beneath your bosom,” I say to Charlotte. I try to estimate how much larger she will be by July. “As long as no one takes them from you, you will be fine.”



* * *



THE LIGHT IN the sewing room is high and bright, the window shuttered. I cannot see the evening pour from gray to black, but I feel the day fade as I work. I must watch each stitch to be sure that it is the same length as the ones before; I must be sure that I do not lapse into my own split stitch—which is stronger, of course, but not what was used by the original seamstress.

When Nat enters my mind, when I think of Felicity or Edward, when I wonder if I will ever be free of my secrets and fears, I push them all away. After Sunday meeting and on every subsequent night that week, I work on the pink flowers and then the yellow. If I have some magic in my needle, there will be an enchantment in the dress that will enhance the bride’s delicate beauty, the shimmer of pink silk and netting, the spray of flowers.



* * *



CHARLOTTE IS READING with her head bent toward the lantern when I climb the stairs to her room the following week. Her hair falls across the page when she looks up.

Captain and Mrs. Silas have gone out and the two of us are alone for the first time. I ask what she’s reading, and she shows me a cover with a floral design.

“The Ladies’ Magazine.” She opens to a list of the contents. “It’s a smart book with poems and stories.”

Without her mother the girl is vibrant.

“Mrs. Sarah Hale is the only lady editor I’ve ever heard of.” She thrusts the magazine into my hand. “You may borrow it if you like—you’ll enjoy it, and I have so much to read.”

Beside Charlotte’s bed is a stack of four books, fresh from the bookseller. I don’t see the harm in borrowing a magazine and so I thank her and tuck it into my basket.

“We can try the dress now,” I offer.

Charlotte nearly hops out of bed.

“Mother insists I stay off my feet all day—I was a sickly girl and she hasn’t forgotten it. But I’m not sickly anymore.”

The dress is beautiful on her, the fit generous with room for her to grow, the new flowers and stitching indiscernible from the old.

“It’s beautiful,” she says.

“You are beautiful in it.”

“But you’re the one who made it so, and I’m grateful—truly. Mother gave me permission to order new petticoats and dressing gowns for the baby, too. She said if you come next week, she’ll pay you generously for everything.”



* * *



THE SILASES’ STABLE boy has always taken me in his cart when I’ve traveled home from here after dark, but tonight I’m delighted to find Zeke waiting outside the kitchen door.

“Mrs. Silas told me to take you home,” he says with a flourish of his cap. “Glad to be of service on such a lovely night.”

I step up beside him and pull my shawl around my face. I put the basket at my feet and make sure the magazine is tucked away.

The center of Salem is dark, the storefronts and shops closed up for the evening. But on the waterfront, where the ships sit like gods or mountains against the blue-ink sea, there are lanterns and bonfires and groups of men passing bottles. Beside a ship, two ladies with long dark hair and red skirts dance for a circle of men.

“You’re safe with me, so take a good look, Mrs. Gamble,” Zeke says. “This is the world right here come to Salem.”

It is like a dream of a circus, or what I imagine a circus might be, a tableau from every corner of the globe. At the end of the wharf, men from China squat in a line along the water and talk quietly among themselves.

“Chinamen bring silks and lanterns and take cotton, tobacco, and shoes,” Zeke says. His words are like a string of orange threads stretching across my lap. “It’s luxury they’re after, and so they buy up linens and dresses from France and England, pottery and glass, Italian crystal.”

On and on Zeke talks as he drives me the length of the wharf and then back north again. “If you don’t mind another turn in the night air, I’m happy to oblige,” he says. I nod, taking in the dancing, the smell of what the men are smoking in their pipes, all of it lulling me into a state of happy wooziness, as if I have taken a long drink of rum punch, and then another.

We are on our second trip along the wharf when a Colored man in a cap and soiled shirt steps up to Zeke’s side of the carriage.

“Do you know where I can find Mrs. Remond’s cake house?” he asks.

“You head that way, look for the large lantern sign in Higginson Square,” Zeke tells him with a brisk nod.

There it is again, the feeling that something is happening at the cake house; that the lantern sign is for more than just cakes.

“The cake house will be closed,” I say when the man has gone. “What would he find there now?”

Zeke keeps his eyes ahead and takes a drink from his flask.

“It’s no business of mine what a man is looking for.”

“I suppose not,” I say. But I am almost certain now there is something Zeke and Mercy and the Remonds are doing in secret together, and I hope it is not a smuggling ring that will bring them ruin. I have seen what greed and hunger can do to a man and woman. Only a family as rich as the Silases can successfully guard against secrets that destroy.