Hester(49)

“If you want courage, stitch courage,” he says slowly. “If you want love, you should stitch love. You should make your leopard, Mrs. Gamble. Your leopard, and Adam and Eve, too.”

His hands are still, but I almost feel him reach for me. I almost hear him whisper my name. Isobel. Soft red and gold.





Boston, 1692


Tituba will never forget the thorned branches that seemed to reach for them as she trudged out of Salem behind the magistrate’s cart with Sarah Good and Widow Osborne. Now the widow is dead.

Tituba looks to where John and Elizabeth Proctor sleep entwined on the jailhouse floor while Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Cloyce, Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, and George Burroughs huddle alone.

“If we were witches we’d get out of here.” Goodwife Martin speaks to no one and to everyone, to the darkness and to the cracks of light that pierce the stone walls.

Tituba is cold. None of the other Salem slaves spoke in her defense. Not even John Indian came to her aid. She was forced to make a pact with the devil Parris, who promised to pay her bail if she confessed. Now she can do nothing but curl her hands around her own hunger and wait for Parris to keep his word.

“Your man has been afflicted.” Goodwife Martin is talking to her now. “I saw John Indian twitch and howl like one of the little girls. How long before they come for you, Black Witch? How long before we all hang because of you?”

Tituba turns away. She doesn’t look around even when the jailhouse door opens and four more women are shoved into the darkness.

“Ye can kill each other, witches. No one will stop you,” the warden says before he locks the door.

Tituba closes her eyes.

“I am not a witch,” she hears Sarah Good whisper. “I am not a witch.”





FIFTEEN





“The Silas family’s a slaving family.” Mercy’s face is stubborn and hard. “I told you to sell your gloves to them, not to go in the house and make friends.”

No one is supposed to know I’ve done work for the family. But Zeke brought me home in his carriage last week, so he knows—and so does Mercy.

“But there are no slaves here in Salem.” I’m standing in a patch of sunlight beside her garden early Thursday morning. “I thought slaves are only in the South.”

“Slaves built our wharves.” Mercy squares off her jaw, which makes her cheekbones stand high. “Slaves were only set free in the Commonwealth about a minute ago. Just ’cause you don’t hear about them doesn’t mean they weren’t here. It doesn’t mean their ghosts aren’t still walking about.

“Captain Silas’s grandfather ran a slave ship,” Mercy goes on. “The uncle, too. They got two nephews running a sugar plantation in Jamaica right now—it’s the meanest life you’ve ever seen down there.”

Ivy and Abraham are in the chicken coops scattering corn, the sound of their voices blue like gentle rain. The secrets of Salem don’t seem to weigh on the children, and I’m glad when I hear Abraham’s bright laugh.

“Mercy—” I hold out a bit of beeswax that I found at Blackwell’s, but she doesn’t look at it.

“Sugar, rum, cotton, cod—back and forth to the islands.” Mercy spits on the ground. I recall the captain said something similar on our voyage. “Those slaves are dead, but their blood and toil is in this very dirt.”

Anger and something deeper flashes in her eyes. Keep watch over our closest neighbors, Edward wrote.

“A slave catcher brought my grandmother from Africa in leg irons.” Mercy keeps going. It’s as if she wants something from me and won’t stop until she gets it. “She was a strong woman with a long, strong spine. Proud, too. Would have been beat to death in the sugar fields for that pride, but a white man took a liking to her and brought her north for a comfort woman.”

“A Silas man bought your grandmother and brought her here?” I want her to know I am listening, but I worry I am missing her meaning.

“Not Silas,” she says. “Man by the name of Kyle Fellowship. He called my grandma Circe and kept her in a room at the back of his house in Bristol. My mama was born in that room.”

“Mercy, I don’t have anything to do with Captain Silas.” My words are strained. “I’ve only taken one job with the Silas family. Did they do something awful to your grandmother?”

Mercy stares past me, just as she did the first day we met.

“A slave man is a slave man, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” she says. “Fellowship sold my ma to a neighbor who used her the same way. Ma was about to birth me when the man gave her fifty dollars and sent her away.”

Mercy points her finger for emphasis, lest I misunderstand the man’s intentions.

“Only because he had to, mind you. New law said a man couldn’t buy or sell a slave here anymore, and he’d have to vouch for Ma and for me, too, if she stayed in town. So he gave her the money and sent her away.”

Mercy shakes her head.

“Ma was lucky the man gave her money so she’d get good and gone. Most weren’t so lucky—most had to stay in place and work for wages too low to live on. But Ma came to Salem and bought this bit of land from Widow Higgins’s husband.”