Hester(66)

Abigail has hit upon my exact plan, of course. Felicity won’t like it, but the banquet night will be my coming out among Salem society. I can imagine it clearly: Nat will watch from across the room as I loop my shawl with Adam and Eve and the bit of red apple around my shoulders. The ladies will circle around me and admire my dress—so many, so quickly, that Felicity will have no time to stop them or speak against me.

I believe that Nat is right—the Infantry celebration will be the eve of my triumph. And Edward won’t be there to ruin it or take it from me.



* * *



I GLANCE AT Nat lying beside me in the dark, his profile noble, his lips perfectly smooth. His eyes are closed, and he’s so still that I’m startled when he speaks.

“Do you know, Isobel, that there are days when I put a dishcloth or handkerchief over my face and lie alone on my bed for hours?”

I nearly laugh aloud. “Why would you do that?”

He allows a laugh at himself, but it’s more strained than joyful. “I imagine myself a man imprisoned.”

“Imprisoned by what?” For a moment, I think he might say he’s imprisoned by me. Imprisoned by love.

“By the things I can’t escape.”

“What things?”

“The past. Our ghosts. My own worst darkness.”

Yes, I want to say: I have watched you do this to yourself and I wish that you would stop.

He fishes for his handkerchief by the bedside. It is a plain one, the kind he uses to mop his brow. He brushes his fingers across my eyes and bids I close them, then places the cloth gently across my face.

“Now open your eyes.”

I do as he says. The cloth is white, the room is dim and warm. I smell the salty essence of him on my face and in the air.

“What do you see?”

I see his words, but they’re faint, fading.

“Nothing.”

He puts his lips to my ear. The world beneath the blindfold is white and shadowed.

“Look past nothing. See what’s visible beneath the mask.”

The handkerchief rises and falls like a curtain that opens and closes with the wind.

“Your breath and mine, moving together,” I whisper.

He trails his fingers across my bare shoulder and I shiver in the warm evening.

“Plato tells a story of shadows and caves,” he says. “The shadows aren’t truth, but the people in the cave believe they are. They believe what they see and they fear it.”

At my waist, the brush of his fingers.

“In the cave beneath my handkerchief I look into the truth of my own soul. Into the darkness.”

At my thigh, the trail of a jagged fingernail. I see a tunnel of fire, a red opening in the sky.

“What do you see?” I ask.

“What I desire,” he whispers.

His leg presses against mine beneath the blanket. I lift a hand to take away the cloth, but he catches my wrist and pins it.

“And what do you desire?”

“You.”

He rolls on top of me and presses his mouth on mine and I surrender everything and everyone I’ve ever known to the hard grip of his hands around my wrists, his weight pinning me to the bed, the taste of blood when he bites my lip.



* * *



HE TAKES THE handkerchief and blots at my lip when we’re finished. His face is right above mine. It looks pure and purged, naked and vulnerable.

“Your work is magical, Isobel.” He traces a finger along my collarbone. “How do you do it?”

He’s told me that he looks for ghosts in shadows and that he finds me there. I am sure now that I love him and that he loves me.

“It’s you,” I say quietly. “When you touch me, there are”—I search for the right word—“explosions of color.”

His whole face curls into something like envy or covetousness. I close my eyes and narrate the colors as best I can—persimmon, cinnamon, India-ink blue, lemon yellow, poppy red, tangerine.

I try to describe what I see, but it’s only when I fetch my sketchbook and show him the drawings that he begins to understand.

“Has it always been this way?”

I dare not look at him, for I have always known that to speak of my colors was forbidden.

Yet everything we’ve done is forbidden and it’s only brought him closer.

“When I was a little girl my mother’s words were sapphire and emerald, my pap’s were caramel taffy.” I tell him about my first sampler and Mam’s painful warnings. “Voices faded to gray when she died and didn’t come back until I crossed the ocean. I’ve never spoken of it to anyone.”

“I know what it is when the world goes gray from grief,” he says. He reaches for his notebook, wets his finger, and turns to a blank page. “Now tell me from the beginning—slowly.”

The beginning was the sound of my parents’ voices, or it was the wind. Or maybe it was the sampler.

I start there.

“The letter A is red,” I say.

“Red like an apple?” He scribbles something in his notebook.

“No,” I say. “A is a scarlet letter.”

“Like the one you left for me at the boulder.”

“Yes.”

He asks more. “Do you see the colors when you sleep? Do you see the colors when you speak? And what color are my words right now?”