Hester(48)

The glove is on. He lets go of my hand. Every bit of me longs to snatch him back.

“Felicity Adams?” I ask.

“Her grandmother came down the Parker family line. Alice Parker was hanged, but her sister stayed and married a man from Marblehead.”

My hand is tingling with both desire and apprehension.

“The Silas family?”

“Mrs. Silas’s maternal great-grandmother was one of the very first hanged.”

I told her my secret, and now I know why she did not send me away.

“And yet they stayed in Salem? Why would they?”

He looks pained but not bewildered. I would like to put a hand to that pain, to draw it out from him and soothe my own at the same time.

“The families were poor and broken and there wasn’t anywhere to go,” he says. “In a new town they would have had to present themselves to the minister and ask to be welcomed into the church. If they were refused, they couldn’t stay. And you can well imagine the neighboring villages didn’t want any part of what happened here.”

I wonder, as I always have, who helped Isobel Gowdie and where she went after she escaped.

“It still seems hard to imagine anyone would stay after what happened.”

“And yet they did.” He surprises me with a laugh. “Twenty years after the witch trials, two Hathorne cousins married the granddaughters of Philip and Mary English—a couple that was accused of witchcraft.”

“Were they killed?” I cannot imagine marrying the descendant of someone who accused Isobel Gowdie.

“No,” he says. “Philip and Mary English escaped.”

“How did they do it?” I feel suddenly light-headed, picturing Isobel Gowdie dancing on the roof of her burning cottage.

“Money.” He gives me a rueful smile. “English was one of the wealthiest men in Salem, with a fleet of ships and a storehouse full of imports. They escaped from the Boston jail and later returned to Salem and raised their children here.”

“If they had money and means, why did they come back?”

“Money again,” he says with that same smile. He looks painfully handsome, troubled but also animated. “Most of the accused families had their property seized to pay court fees and penalties. But English was powerful and rich and had enough loyal seamen to keep his fleet going until the witch trials were dissolved and repudiated by the authorities the following year.”

I’m struggling to imagine the families of the dead and the families of the accusers living side by side, going to the same church, walking the same streets.

“The governor shut down the whole proceedings, terminated the court and the trials. And when it was all over, the accusers apologized.” Nat gives that dry cough of a laugh again. “Judges apologized, too. Everyone but John Hathorne, who insisted to the end that he could have done nothing differently, given the evidence that was put before him. Given the power of Satan and his minions.”

Nat recounts at least a dozen village marriages and bloodlines descended from the time of the witchcraft delusion. It’s difficult to follow, for the names changed when women married from one generation to the next. But the essence is clear.

“Life had to go on.” He shrugs. “A hundred years later, my own mother married into the Hathorne family.”

I want to tell him about my ancestress more than ever, but something stops me. The colors and the curse are bound up together, and to keep one hidden I dare not speak of the other.

And yet silence doesn’t protect us from the past, as I well know. When a legacy haunts a family the echoes reverberate even if no one hears them. This is what Nat is saying and I know it’s true. I feel it is true, for Isobel Gowdie’s legacy haunted my mother to the end of her life, even as it haunts me now.

“And what about the curse?” I ask. “The one you said you must repair?”

“The curse of my grandsire’s behavior is its own horror,” he says. “But there was also a curse hurled from the gallows by little Dorcas’s mother.”

He says it now: “‘If you kill me, God will give you blood to drink.’”

I feel my face burn as if stung with tears, although it is dry and hot in the sun.

“If you don’t believe in witches, why would you believe in curses?”

His face twists, and I cannot read it.

“A dark soul can cast a long shadow over the living and the dead,” he says. “Who’s to say that enough hate and anger can’t bring about something terrible?”

“And Dorcas Good?” I must know the fate of this child. “What happened to her?”

He shakes his head.

“I’m still searching. There’s nothing in Felt’s history of Salem, and I haven’t found her fate in the court records. But I won’t give up looking.”

“If hate can bring a curse into being, then what can love do?” I ask. “Perhaps that’s something you can write in one of your stories instead of so much horror.”

I dared to say the word love; now I hold my breath and wait.

“We’re very much the same, you and I,” he says. “You tell stories with your needle, and I tell them with my words. I’m writing for my reasons, and you are stitching for your own.”

He touches a finger to my sketchbook, where the story of Adam and Eve is spread out the length of a shawl.