Hester(76)

“But I have a name.” His voice is both defiant and resigned. “And it is known. It’s one of Salem’s first and finest. Without my name I’d be nothing.”

In this moment, I see a thread begin to unravel. The black around the letters breaks apart, and his words become invisible.

“What we have is consecrated here in Salem, where I found you.” He speaks slowly, as if to make his words impeccably clear. “Here we have unblemished passion, Isobel, a union that needs no notice or approval of society or community—”

I try to speak, but like a preacher in the pulpit, he keeps going.

“Isobel, you’re an enchantress.” He puts a hand to his heart, and for a second I am hopeful. “I found the scarlet letter you stitched inside my jacket pocket. I even found the whirled pieces of your hair in my vest that first night. You wanted me to come to you and I did. You sewed temptation and temptation arrived.”

Once he said, I invented you and you came. Now he’s saying the opposite: that I am the conjurer, and he is the conjured.

“What if there’s a child?” I blurt out the question.

He stiffens.

“There is no child. I’ve watched you when you thought I was sleeping; you’re wise in these ways.”

“My bleeding is late, Nat.”

He shakes his head.

“Isobel, you know that everything is upon me. It’s my obligation to make the Hathorne name great again.”

“I saw you in the graveyard.” I can hardly breathe. “With blood on your shirt. Kicking at a tombstone with your family name etched in it. Is that the family you’d choose over me?”

“Then you’ve seen the Devil in me—you’ve seen what the curse has done to me.” His eyes burn. “How it tears at my soul.”

“And I don’t mind it. That’s what I’m telling you.” I’m weeping quietly now. “I can soothe it. You’ve said you want to be free of your burdens, to ease the suffering and the guilt. Let me do that for you.”

“I can’t be soothed. I don’t want to be soothed.” I hear his agitation growing. “The hand must be here—” He presses his hand flat against the tip of his nose. “When I covered your face with the handkerchief I was trying to show you the truth of my darkness. I don’t want to lift it—I don’t want to be soothed. To take away the anguish would be to take away everything I want to put down on paper. I wouldn’t know myself without it.”

“That makes no sense, Nat.”

“My family has educated me at great expense,” he nearly shouts. “It doesn’t have to make sense to you.”

He is shaking, as if stunned by his own words.

“This is our child. Your child.” I say it because I must. “If Edward doesn’t return I’ll be free after a time to marry again.”

He takes a step away from me.

“You’re another man’s wife—you aren’t a widow.”

“We can go someplace where they’ve never heard of Edward Gamble or John Hathorne.” I’m pleading now. “We’d be free of them both.”

“Free?”

“Yes, free of your ancestors and of Edward—free to be your own man and a father to our child.”

“I’d lose everything if I left here.”

“You’d be leaving behind the people you hate and the name that crushes you.”

He looks toward the trees at the edge of my yard.

“If there was no child, maybe in time … If it required just one single act of courage, then I would do it. But you’re asking for a lifetime, year after year—the shame and weight of it would kill me.”

“And what will it do to me? Will you not help me?”

I grab at his hands, but he pulls away.

“You bewitched me with your red hair and herbs and your stories of your ancestress—I can’t give up my name for that.”

“Bewitched you?” Now I am the one shaking. “What do you mean, bewitched you?”

“I am not a fool, Isobel. The colors you see, the things you told me. If it isn’t a form of bewitched alchemy, then you must be mad.”

“That isn’t true, Nat. None of it is true.”

He steps back into the yard.

“I told you—I found the red letter you sewed into my coat.” His voice comes from the shadows, disembodied and haunted. “The same one you left for me by the boulder.”

“I am not a witch, nor have I bewitched you—I only ask for your help, Nat. Will you not help me?”

I’m speaking not to his face anymore but to his ghost.

“I won’t be trapped by you,” he says from the dark. “I must have time to think.”





Scotland, 1815


It is a cold and rainy day when Margaret MacAllister gives her daughter a needle, thread, and linen for her first sampler. The boy has gummed her breast raw, and even with the tea-and-comfrey salve, Margaret is irritable and exhausted. But five-year-old Isobel is never a burden—loving, obedient, thoughtful, and attentive, the child mimics her mother’s every move, carefully marking her letters on the slate until they are neat and straight.

“You put the thread in your lips to wet it and then you pull it through like this.” She smiles when Isobel’s lips purse like a tiny rosebud as the child works the black thread through the eye of the needle.