Hester(6)

“An order has come from America,” I whispered. The girls looked at me with shifty eyes.

“What did you give him that he’d tell you that?” It was the roughest girl who spoke, and it would take a good number of years before I would understand what she’d meant.

“Told what?” Master Dwyer picked up the note and glared at me. “You can read, eh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“See that you don’t do it again,” he snapped, and the girls tittered. “Reading brings the Devil into a girl’s mind too easily.”

Master Dwyer’s arm had been crushed in the fabric mill and he was generally dour. But that day he called us to join him with cider and biscuits and he was almost jolly.

“An American merchant needs five hundred robes and baptism gowns for women and children in Salem. If they sell, more work will follow. If new orders come, there will be more cider and biscuits, and a bag of oranges for each of you girls.”

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard America spoken of as a place of riches, but it was the first its good tidings had come my way.

“The New World must be a wonderful place,” my new needling partner said as we rolled out the linen. Anne stamped the pattern in blue chalk dust, and we both blew off the excess powder to collect in a small drop sheet. She was the third daughter of a poor coal man. Her lips were chapped and her fingertips calloused.

“I’ll go there one day,” Anne added. She coughed a tiny splatter of scarlet blood onto the rose vine pattern she was tapping out. It had happened before, and she was quick with a bit of water and baking soda in the tin cup at her feet.

I’d seen my mother cough that way; a month later she was dead. I didn’t want Anne to die, but even more, I did not want to catch her sickness and die myself. I told her to sleep with a garlic clove beneath her pillow, as my mother had done, and prayed it would work for her.

That night, while we ate our bread and gravy, I asked Pap if he believed my mother was in heaven watching over us.

“Dunno,” he said. “Maybe. Or maybe not.”

In Abington we’d spent our Sundays in church and at supper with our whole clan. But in Glasgow, Pap and I stopped going to church. If the weather was pleasant on a Sunday we went walking along the sea, and if it was not, we rested and drank tea in our rooms.

“If Mam is watching and I pray to her, do you think I’ll have what I want?”

Pap turned his eyes to me, and I thought I saw a glint of tears.

“What is it that you want?”

“I want to go to America and make beautiful things with my needle.”

I didn’t say that I was still sad and that I thought this would cure me. I didn’t even know how to say such a thing. But I knew that my world had once been full of magic and color and that it wasn’t beautiful anymore.

“Muslin white on white is your work, Isobel. Your mam gave it to you before she went to her grave.”

My mother had told me that some people could see the enchanted world better than others. I wanted to ask my father to speak of selkies and kelpies and the faeries that lived beneath the May trees as he once had. But he’d stopped telling those stories after my mother died, at about the same time that my colors had left.

“Then I want to be a pattern-maker and a dressmaker.” I started to describe a new embroidery pattern to my father, but he raised an ink-stained hand and stopped me.

“Pattern-making is men’s work,” Pap said. “It is best for a girl not to want anything grand.”

My mother had said the same, and all around me I saw it was true. Wanting brought pain, and women who desired and complained the least seemed the most contented. But I wanted the freedom to desire—and to seek after what I desired. I wanted color in all its forms, for I missed the beauty it had brought to my dreams and waking hours.

“I can learn it.” I had notebooks full of fledgling designs. I wanted freedom and beauty and the power of the needle.

“No one will hire a girl to be a pattern-maker. Your best hope is to marry well,” Pap said. These were words of love, the best my father could offer. “Marry well and you’ll never have to work again.”

To marry well, I understood, I would have to marry a man with money and means; a man who did not see that I was different or—perhaps even better—a man who saw it and would keep me safe. I was on the lookout for just this kind of husband and knew it would be a very tall task. Meanwhile, I kept to myself and poured everything into my needle.





Scotland, 1662


The marshal nails the parchment onto the kirk door.

“Hear ye, hear ye—by order of the Laird of Park and Loch Loy under the jurisdictions of our majesty King Charles, Isobel Gowdie shall stand trial for the charges of witchcraft, enchantment, and malfeasances, and all others who have fallen into evil shall be called to confess and repent their coven with the Devil.”

The villagers look to one another in quiet trepidation, for who among them has not spoken with the wee folk or left an offering for the bean-nighe? And who among them has not called at night through cracks in the shuttered window for spirits who might offer relief for misfortunes, illness, an empty cradle, or a broken heart?

“As King James has declared and written that all witches shall be forced to confess the names of others in their coven and shall be otherwise punished unto death, so the Laird of Park and Loch Loy decrees before his people and his God that every witch shall be routed out.”