Hester(64)

He takes the handful of my hair and pulls back my head.

“Show me,” he whispers, his voice the rough red of a tongue. “Show me that temper of yours.”

I sink my fingernails into his shoulder and smell blood. He puts a hand to my mouth, presses me into the bed. His eyes lock on mine—a dare, a dare, a dare. Pain and pleasure, quiet and wild, gentle and insistent.



* * *



MY LEGS ARE weak when I light the candle and pull on my dressing gown. I am silent, for I know there are few words between what’s forbidden and what’s shameful, and that silence should not be breached.

After a while Nat tugs on his white shirt and trousers and opens the book to the place where I left off.

“Shall I read to you?”

I clap, the sound like small orange stars of flesh on flesh.

Nat reads to me like a man telling a tale upon the stage. He speaks Catherine’s lines in falsetto whispers and the evil suitors’ lines with a booming baritone, and I feel the Scottish hills and rivers in his voice.

“I had it in mind to write my own story about a lovely Scottish needlewoman,” Nat says when he’s reached the end of the chapter. “But of course I can’t write it now.”

“You’ll write something better and publish it with your own name.” He frowns, but I go on. “I still don’t understand why anyone would spend years writing a book and not put his name on it.”

Nat’s been light, even giddy. Now he grows serious.

“Ladies can scribble their poetry by the fireside and no one cares as long as they’ve done their chores. But writing is suspect activity for a strong and able man.”

The book is in his lap, pointer finger holding the place. I still have Catherine’s suitors in my mind: the rogue who is too rough, the lover who is too timid.

“Could it be that you’re too sensitive to the judgment of others?”

“No.” He pushes back the hair that’s fallen over his brow. “Last month I was walking out of the Gazette offices when a farmer strode right up to me and said, ‘Nathaniel Hathorne, better men than you work on the docks while you do nothing but groom horses and lay about reading books all day.’”

Although Nat does his best to sound indignant, it’s clear the public dress-down shamed him.

“What did you say?”

“I asked how he supposes I might better spend my time and he said, ‘Doing an honest day’s work, and then another and another.’” Nat gives a tight smile. “So I asked, ‘Are you offering me a good wage, sir?’ and at that he sputtered a few choice words and stalked away.”

Nat curls his fingers through mine, his fist clenched.

“One day you’ll be known, Nat. Your name and your work.”

He raises my hand to his lips.

“I hope one day my name and writing will be known and admired. But for now I’m thankful that I’m not known. So long as you’ll have me, Isobel, I’m thankful for my obscurity—and for yours.”



* * *



HE COMES AFTER dark, arriving and retreating in shadows as the first weeks of June slip away. I sleep little but have the energy of a dozen children—working the gloves at odd hours, transferring the Adam and Eve scene onto the shawl, using the turquoise beads for a rim of sky and tiny spots of red for the apple tree.

I return to the East India Marine Society Hall one day to study the leopard tapestry and sketch out tall orange flowers and an exotic row of spiny red coral. Later, Nat tells me he’s spent his days reading through old Salem documents and records.

“Searching dusty old court records in search of stories. Battles and brutality, shipwrecks and landings, landslides and storms. Yesterday I found a book with the names of all the Salem families who were loyal to the English during the war.”

He sits in Edward’s chair and tells me about men who crossed the ocean in search of paradise almost two hundred years ago.

“But it wasn’t a paradise here.” He presses his feet on the floor and tips the chair back so that it is balancing on the rear legs. “There were hatchet battles and Indians and the Puritans with their harsh sermons, hard-backed church benches, and cat-o’-nine-tails. What were they looking for? This is what I want to know—what were they looking for here in the squalor and mud?”

He leans across the table to run a hand along my arm. “What kind of hunger drives a man into the perils of the unknown?”

I fear he is going to ask why Edward and I came to America, and I am relieved when he doesn’t.

“There’s no New World anywhere on earth,” he says. It seems he is working out questions that have weighed upon him for years. “No matter what we tell ourselves, men are all the same everywhere. We imagine a utopia, settle a new land, and declare that we’re making something new and better. But it’s folly, Isobel. Man’s nature is full of shadows and dark desires. In every man’s heart there is a coffin and a grave, that is what I know.”

As he talks, I begin to understand that Nat Hathorne is looking for more than stories and fame; he’s searching for answers from dead men who cannot give them—from his father and his grandfather before him, through lost time and vanished fortunes.

I think of the expression I have heard from both Nat and Mercy: true American. Why do men bind themselves to a flag and a nation when women bind themselves to passion and love? Why do men fixate on the past when every woman I have ever known is trying to remedy the present while she builds hope for what is to come?