Hester(60)

I hold myself perfectly still. It’s not the children, for they come straight down the hill, their watery voices gently announcing their arrival.

I hear a whistle from the north.

Have the cardplayers followed Nat to Salem? Have they surrounded my cottage?

The sky is blooming pink against a dark violet night when I see two figures—a man and a woman—running in the direction of the sea. Something in the way the woman moves is familiar. As she flashes between the trees, I see the side of her face. It’s Mercy in her turban, running as quiet as could be through the last moment before the morning light.

Then she disappears, as if I imagined her there.

Like everything that’s happened tonight, this too fills me with the dark and light of the past and the present, the spoken and the unspoken, desire and ruin and the sweetness of Nat repeating my name. Isobel. Is-a-bell. Is a bell ringing and ringing and ringing.





Salem, 1701


Tituba is finally free of the howling that comes from Proctor’s Ledge whenever she wakes before first light. For years she could not sleep without seeing the craven branches of the May trees that reached for her along the Witch Path, or hearing the tug of lumber beneath her friends’ feet before the snap of the noose. And there was always, just before summer, the death stench of the May tree blossoms that rotted along the hedgerow.

The long, dark months in the Boston jail are the price she paid for this freedom, for John Parris never looked for her when the trials were over, and she never returned to his empty house. Instead, she has lived in a lean-to behind the thick sycamore in the north wood and eaten what she foraged off land and sea.

It took sixty moons alone in the forest to cleanse away the haunting. She did it with nettle to ward off those who wish her ill, raspberry and lavender for strength and wisdom, chamomile for healing calm, lemon verbena and calendula for courage and health, all of it grown and gathered here where rock meets the sea and the seals come at dusk to swim.

The Parris family is gone now, the Proctors’ farm has passed from hand to hand. John Indian married a slave woman and lives in a clearing this side of Lynn, where he works in the master’s barn for free. Tituba believes the land is like people, and neither should be owned. This is why she is leaving now—going west, where no one will ever own her again.

Before she leaves, Tituba goes to the girl-woman who lost her mind right there alongside her for eight months in the dark prison; the girl-woman who still wanders back and forth on the Witch Path calling for her mama.

“Dorcas,” Tituba whispers. “Your mama sends her love. She says you are a very good girl and you will see her again soon.”

Tituba sees in Dorcas’s eyes that the girl will not live much longer.

Tituba will be long gone when Dorcas takes her last breath. She sees this, too, the horizon opening to her like a candlelit room. John Indian forgotten and Tituba flying along the westward road singing of freedom.





NINETEEN





“Are you ill?” Abigail asks.

We’re pinning up a blue silk dress. There are ruffles and mutton sleeves and a neckline to accommodate the buyer’s ample bosom.

“You’re quiet,” she adds. “More than usual.”

I cannot keep my mind on my tasks, not with the night’s activities roiling in me like a storm: first Nat singing my name and sleeping in my bed, then the vision of Mercy running through the dark.

“I’m tired today.” I try to keep my face natural. Fortunately, it’s easy to set Abigail talking.

“My neighbors are a Black family.” I use the word Mercy uses when she speaks of herself. “Were there many slaves in Salem back in the day?”

“Some.” Abigail holds up the selvage edge of the fabric and measures for the width of the skirt. She’s a silly girl sometimes, but now her face is solemn. “Salem folks like to pretend they had nothing to do with slavery, but it’s not true. Salem captains traded cotton, rum, and slaves. It made them rich—filthy rich, some say. There were more slaves here in Salem than in Newport or Boston.” Abigail rattles off the names of cities that are spoken of with great pride. “The governor freed them before I was born, but I remember a family that came into my pop’s butcher shop for soup bones. The children were free but the mother and father were still slaves. Born and died slaves, that’s what my granny told me.”

I’ve seen downtrodden Black men with bent backs working long days on the docks, and I’ve had time to think on Mercy’s grandmother, kept in the back of a man’s house where she was used to sate his lust.

“I heard the Silases were a slaving family,” I say.

“I’ve heard it, too.” She nods. “The ministers who preach against slavery in Lynn hate the slaving captains. They made money on misery and in Lynn we don’t abide it.”

“Do you think they’re cruel people?”

Abigail tucks a sleeve into place and then straightens, looking at me as if I am the fool.

“Any man who owns or sells another man is cruel, Isobel. Can you imagine it otherwise?”

I think of Mr. Remond and the old woman talking about a runaway slave. Ivy with bits of colorful ribbon in her hair. Mercy running through the dawn. Mrs. Silas and her unkind words.

“Isobel.” Abigail is standing now, pulling at my sleeve. I’ve been lost in thought. “Isobel, the hem is finished. Get up, I think you truly must be ill.”