Hester(51)

My hands ache, my eyes water, and my back and neck are needled with pain, but I do not stop working. I am racing against time.

Dawn is rising when I line up the gloves and step back to admire them. I see the words—LOVE, COURAGE—rise and then fall away. I did not plan them, yet there they are.



* * *



THE SIX PAIR of gloves are wrapped in plain cotton when I bring them to Felicity in the morning. She makes a show of talking while she opens the wrapping, but when the gloves are laid out on the counter she goes silent.

She reaches for a glove with a red rose sewn upon the back. This is the one Nat put on my hand as he traced out Salem’s lineage of accused and accusers.

Felicity brings the gloves to her nose as if she expects to find a fragrance. I see the letters L-O-V-E in the white space between the green leaves, the red petals, and the tiny yellow flecks of pollen. I didn’t draw them out, and yet they rise.

She folds over the edges where I’ve stitched my scarlet A, but doesn’t seem to see it or the letters between the white spaces.

“I won’t ask you what you have done with these gloves, and it’s best that you don’t tell me,” she says.

“What I’ve done?” I can’t look at Felicity without thinking of our common history, each of us descended from a woman accused of witchcraft. “I’ve made them rich with color, just as you asked.”

She counts the coins into my palm without looking at me. Even with the extra twenty cents, it’s far less than what the gloves are worth.

“There’s something strange in the patterns,” she says. “Almost an enchantment.”

She is right and I know it—there is an enchantment in the gloves.

Am I a witch? And if I am, what am I to do with a power I do not understand? And if I do not understand it, how can I keep from revealing it to others? How can I know that it will not harm or betray me, that it will not call into being things I do not want?

And what of what I do want? What of that?



* * *



THAT VERY DAY I buy a new set of green and gold beads for my banquet shawl, then take a stroll through town. It is a warm afternoon and the sun stretches farther than it ever did at home at this hour. As always, I’m alert for a glimpse of Nat as I come upon a small cluster of onlookers watching the Light Infantry band practicing near Hamilton Hall. Their thumping drums mark a beat that one little boy keeps with a stick he waves like a baton, and the colors of the music are red, white, and blue like the stars and stripes of the American flag.

On the board at the Charter Ale House I look, as always, for notices of ships coming and going. I read in the Gazette that Darling’s ship left Charleston for Bermuda the third week of April, but there’s nothing about the New Harmony posted here. I wonder what Edward is doing and imagine a bucket of spiders weaving webs across his small cabin.

Two Colored gentlemen have come up beside me to study the ship lists, and an elderly lady elbows past me with a small handwritten note she’s affixing to the board.

“Mr. Remond, Mr. Woolman,” she greets the men. “You see this here?”

Free Negroes Beware:

A slave catcher has been seen on these Salem streets



“Friends say he’s looking for a mother and child who ran off a Baltimore plantation,” she says. “Man named MacGreggor.”

“I hear it’s an eight-year-old boy they’re hunting.” Mr. Remond drops his voice.

“I don’t think the child is here,” the other gentleman says with a wary glance in my direction. “Things been quiet lately.”

I read the note again. A mother and child must be running from their slave owners and seeking freedom here.

“Why would a slave catcher come here?” I blurt out.

The woman turns her bright eyes on me.

“You’re not from here.” It’s not a question.

“No, I’ve come from Scotland.” I am grateful when she doesn’t say anything cruel.

“Slaves escape north for the freedom they deserve as one of God’s own,” she says, and her voice is kind. “But the law still lets plantation owners come after them and take them back in chains. It’s always worse for them after that—they’re beaten, some have their tongues cut out or get sold farther south where the lash is crueler and it’s near impossible to escape.”

Just before dawn on many days I hear Ivy and Abraham whispering at my well, and in town Zeke always stops to ask how I am faring. Mercy tried to tell me the cruelty is right here, and now I’ve heard it again. I’ve been living in Salem for two months, and all the while there have been people—children—running for their lives.

What else is slipping through the spaces that I don’t see? What other dark secrets is the city hiding?





Salem, 1692


John Hathorne and the Reverend Cotton Mather enter the Goods’ cottage as sunset falls. William Good brings four-year-old Dorcas to stand before them. The girl’s hands are dirty, her braided red hair stuck with bits of straw and twigs.

Dorcas confessed to the court yesterday, but John Hathorne knows himself to be a good man—he will not convict a child of witchcraft without affirmation from the Lord himself.

He bends down now and wills himself to speak gently.