Hester(52)

“You did not need to confess if you are not possessed by Satan,” he tells the girl. “Do you understand?”

Dorcas nods. Her stomach is empty and sour.

“Are you a witch?”

She holds herself hand to wrist, and scratches at the marks she made sucking on her arm.

Hathorne puts a finger to the row of red marks.

“Did you do this to yourself?”

The girl recoils and shakes her head. Her father has told her it’s nasty and unnatural to suck at herself this way.

“Then what did it?”

“A snake,” she whispers.

“Where is the snake?”

Dorcas wants her mother.

“Mama,” the little girl whispers.

“Is the snake here now?”

Dorcas shakes her head and puts a dirty thumb into her mouth.

Hathorne and Mather sigh with a heavy resolve. A snake in Sarah Good’s home is surely a spirit familiar or an incarnation of the Black Man. It’s all they need to go ahead with the mother’s sentence.

As for the child, her sentence will come later, when they have time to pray upon it.

“We need to take the girl now,” they say to the father. And William Good releases his daughter without a word.



* * *



Sarah Good keeps her eyes on the blue sky as the wardens take her by the elbows and push her up onto the gallows. She is remembering the child she birthed on the jailhouse floor, the way it took one breath and succumbed without a sound.

At least little Dorcas is still alive. It is her one consolation and the reason Sarah Good summons her voice now.

“I am not a witch,” she whispers. “I am not a witch, and my daughter is not a witch.” No one seems to hear. She must summon more strength.

A magistrate is standing at the foot of the gallows in a tall black hat. Is it John Hathorne or Cotton Mathers or the devil Nicholas Noyes? She cannot make out if it is one man or three. Her eyes have lost all focus; there’s only the blue sky now and the chance to say one final thing to these accursed men.

“I am no more a witch than you are a warlock,” Sarah shouts to the black hat and to the blue heavens. “I am not a witch, and if you kill me, God will give you blood to drink.”

The floor beneath her opens. She holds out her arms to God. The sky swallows her.





SIXTEEN





Nat’s rose and hawthorn flowers are still on my table when I am called to the Silas house to finish sprigging Charlotte’s veil.

I find the back door open and slip into the empty kitchen, where embers still warm the hearth and the smell of bread fills the air. There are footsteps on the stair and Mrs. Silas appears in her white house gown and robe. I think of Mercy’s hard words about the Silas family and their slave money, and remember the first time I heard Mrs. Silas’s imperious voice speaking to a dressmaker. She was lying then, talking about her daughter Charlotte visiting the Great Lakes when the girl was hidden at home.

“The dress is perfect, Mrs. Gamble. You’re a gifted seamstress,” she says now. She hands me the veiled hat and I begin to secure the pink flowers on it. “Best of all, you’ve made my daughter happy. And I care very much for her happiness.”

She looks tired but otherwise unbowed as she sits like a queen and watches me work.

“Do you mind living out where you do?” she asks after a while.

I bite off the edge of a pink thread and thread a needle with white.

“I have neighbors nearby,” I say. “I don’t feel alone there.”

“Zeke and Mercy.” She nods. “How do you find them?”

“Find them?”

“Are they reasonable enough? They should be happy now that they’re getting their own Negro church, but you never know what any of them are thinking.”

I feel Mercy’s anger rise in me, and am reminded of the slave catcher and his purpose.

“They’re a fine family,” I say. “Zeke has a wife in Lynn, and Ivy and Abraham are good children.”

“You don’t know what they’re truly like.” I see that imperial tilt to Mrs. Silas’s chin. “We gave them their freedom and they still refuse to move out of my way on the street right here in Salem.”

I didn’t assume that Mrs. Silas was evil just for marrying a man whose father brought slaves across the ocean. But I have a different feeling about her now. While she goes on about how Black folks should show more gratitude, I remember Mercy’s gentle hands as she rubbed the beeswax into Ivy’s temples. I want to tell her that Mercy loves her daughter the same way she loves Charlotte.

“Charlotte needs petticoats and other lady’s items,” Mrs. Silas says, one thought running right into the next. “We’d like you to make them with the same attention to detail that you’ve brought to everything you’ve done for her.”

“I hate to rush my stitching,” I demure. Mrs. Silas may have left behind the subject of Mercy and Zeke, but I’m still stuck on her words. “I have much to do for Mrs. Adams at the shop. You might want to take your order to someone who can put two or three girls to the task.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Silas says, and her words become visible, silver and black and shaped like an iron fence. “You have almost two months. I will pay you double.”