Hester(46)

“If you feel in all fairness that’s all you can pay for now, Mrs. Adams, then I’ll do the work for the ladies.”

“For me.” Her expression is pure triumph. “Four pair for the Philadelphia ladies, and two more for the shop. You will make the gloves for me, and you’ll do it by next week. Now go home and get to work.”



* * *



I’M FURIOUS. WISHING to make what neither Edward nor Felicity can steal from me, I pack a workbasket and go in the direction where Nat told me he works. The harbor is fresh, and I settle on a gray boulder that looks out to the rocky shore.

I failed at the leopard, but there’s another story I heard in church on a recent Sunday morning. This is the scene I want to put on my shawl for the banquet.

With Felicity’s words ringing in my ears, I put aside her gloves and use the last of my charcoal to draw Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Eve picks an apple and gives it to Adam—this is the story the minister told to teach us that a woman cannot be trusted. But Eve merely offered the fruit to Adam, I wanted to shout from the back of the church. Adam could have said no. He could have tossed the apple deep into the Garden.

He ate it because he wanted its sweetness.

He wanted its sweetness.

I sketch these words into the vines around Adam and Eve and hold my drawing up against the sky.

I draw Adam’s hair curled behind his ears and give Eve my own narrow torso. The sketch is modest yet hints of desire. It’s biblical and decorated with fruit: the ladies of this town will love it.

I’m admiring my composition when a shadow falls over my hand.

“You found the spot.”

Nat puts a leg up on a rock and peers down at me. It’s the first I’ve seen him without his cloak, and I’m struck by the lankness of his frame, the length of leg, and the breadth of his shoulders. We’re alone here. There’s a wide smile on his face. What secrets he has—his ancestor presiding at the witch trials, the gallows curse and its legacy—are not so different from my own. The discovery of his story in the magazine only made me feel closer to him, as if he has invited me to follow him through a strange passageway to his place of enchantment.

And now we are here. He slings off his shoulder bag.

“I saw your gloves in the shop window,” he says when I don’t speak. “But by the time I stopped to inquire, they were gone.”

“The price was very dear.” I find my voice and say it with pride. “No one in Salem paid it. Felicity sold everything to two ladies who have a shop in Philadelphia.”

I tell him I’m decorating new gloves with fruits and wisteria for those ladies.

“You should make the leopard,” he says. “Something strong and striking will surely help them remember your name in Philadelphia.”

“But that’s the problem—they won’t know my name in Philadelphia.”

“This isn’t the time to be modest,” Nat says.

He hitches up his pants and crouches with his back against the rock. We’re almost side by side. The sea stretches out in front of us, gray and green. In all my time with Edward, we never sat together like this on a spring afternoon and gazed out to sea.

“Your work fetched a high price. When the gloves are worn in Philadelphia, other fashionable ladies will want a pair for themselves.”

I’d hoped that he’d advise me how to proceed in the face of Felicity’s deceits, and now he has. Edward takes, and Nat gives.

“Felicity isn’t telling anyone the work is mine,” I say. “She invented a story about a recluse in the countryside who makes the gloves.”

When I’ve told him everything, Nat says, “Felicity Adams should pay you a fair wage and you should insist on it.”

“I don’t believe she will, and so I must make my name in Salem just as you said—at the banquet, with a dress and a shawl so triumphant that she cannot stop me once it is seen.”

When he asks what I have in mind, I uncover my sketchbook and let him study the design.

I’ve hidden Adam’s and Eve’s bodies behind the cluster of vines, but it’s clear they’re undressed in a garden. It’s all I can do to stay so close to him without trembling.

“This is enchanting.” He touches a finger to the leaves, but if he sees the words I’ve hidden there, he says nothing. He turns the sketch one way and the other. “But you’ve forgotten the serpent.”

The minister spoke of Eve as temptation. He said little about the serpent’s interlocution; he blamed not the snake but the woman.

“Temptation is the heart of the story, embodied by the snake,” Nat says. “Desire never comes without some pain. The snake is the instrument of both, bringing first temptation, then the anguish of banishment.”

A bold slice of heat goes through me.

“I read your story in the Ladies’ Magazine,” I say before I can stop myself.

“What story?”

I pull the magazine from my basket.

“This one—about the manuscript and the Salem witchcraft delusion. The story within a story about a Salem doctor. I assume the witchcraft delusion, the witch troubles, and the witch trials in Salem are all the same?”

He slides his back down the rock and gives a nod.

“You’re a careful listener, Mrs. Gamble.”