Hester(77)

Her own dear aunt taught Margaret to stitch at this same age, long before her own mother thought she was ready. Aunt Eilidh was always singing, always brightly dressed, always making up snatches of songs that no one understood.

“The wind is pink, the river sighs blue, and the sound of chickens is a purple thread pulled through,” Aunt Eilidh sang. “The birds tell me when the rain is coming because their songs go from white to gray.”

Margaret didn’t see how or when Eilidh went from singing to screaming, but she remembers when her uncle tied the woman’s hands behind her back and put her in the carriage kicking and shrieking. All the children were weeping, but Uncle Graeme set his face grim and promised he’d bring his wife home better than before.

“Dr. Cotton’s asylum in St. Albans is the best, and we want to be sure our Eilidh comes home rested and at one with God,” he said before he snapped the reins and drove the cart away.

“The village people say your aunt talks in tongues with the Devil, and I fear she has fallen into the space between this world and the faerie world,” her mother told young Margaret. “Your uncle has used his every penny to take her for help. ’Tis best to let the doctor do what the priest could not.”

But Aunt Eilidh never came home, and Margaret learned that it is better to lie and hide away your truth than to be taken away in a cart kicking and shrieking.



* * *



So when Margaret puts the babe Jamie in his cradle and makes her husband’s tea and bread and folds the washing and finally goes to see how Isobel’s work has come along, her heart stops at the sight of a red letter A and a blue letter B.

“What have you done?” she whispers. “What is it that you see?”





TWENTY-FIVE





I wipe my face and hack the young pennyroyal in my garden.

I’m in such a state I cannot distinguish what I fear from what he said. Did Nat say never, or did he say he needed time to think? Did he say he would come back for me or that he could never be with me?

You bewitched me, he said.

That, I remember. He used the colors against me, the very thing that bedeviled me in his arms.

I must have time.

If there was no child. Yes. If there was no child.

I mash the leaves and stems and set them to brew over the embers.

Women came to Edward in Glasgow for such remedies; if they were married he refused, but if they were unwed he helped them. I admired that about him, the way he’d been generous and passed no judgment on the young ones who’d gotten themselves in trouble.

For a moment I almost wish Edward were here to put the brew in my hands, the way he rubbed the ointment on my burn the day we met. But that man is long gone, and so, too, is the girl I was then.



* * *



WHEN THE BIRDS wake and only the maids and the blacksmiths are out, I go to the apothecary on Washington Street to buy a small bit of black cohosh and a thimble of juniper berry. In the dim shop with a mounted ram’s head above the door, I also ask for a pinch of savin powder for a pain of the lower back.

The elderly man shakes the grains into a tiny tube, but doesn’t hand it over.

“You’re Edward Gamble’s wife,” he says. Why have I not anticipated that he might recognize me? “I invested a bit of my own money in his quest. What word do you have from him?”

Everyone knows what savin is for. I have said I have pain so that he would give it to me without asking questions. But now he knows who I am.

“The ship will be here soon,” I say. “I’m sure you’ll know his outcome almost as soon as I know it myself.”

His eyes dim, but I can see by the way he tilts his head that he has had a good look at me.

“You be sure to tell your husband that Theodore Bartholomew is eager to see him,” he says.



* * *



AT HOME I bar the door shut. The cottage is tidy, my work is stacked neatly.

The bed in daylight is different from the bed where I have been with Nat in the night. I see it now—one way in the dark, another in the light. One way if I’m with child—another if I’m not.

I mix the brew according to the instructions in Edward’s book.

The herbs are bitter. I bite the inside of my cheek to keep them down, but they come up. I drink again, a dark mud to shake the womb and bring on my bleeding.

Then I lie on my bed and wait. If it kills me, too, it is no matter.



* * *



THE CHAIR SLIDES sideways, and the dead rose speaks to me.

Nat bangs at the window—without my name I’d be nothing.

The great-aunt who lost her mind calls to me in bright red letters. Go and dance, she screams, fly with the birds and sing, and the crazy tapestry of her sampler flaps from a flagpole on a tilted tower.

Adam and Eve climb the apple tree.

Maple syrup is the color of blood.

The melon seed is a child. Abraham is calling from the forest. Ivy is at the well. Mercy’s voice comes across the ocean.

“Isobel?”

It’s dawn or dusk, I can’t tell by the light. There’s a stink of blood, dirt, and waste.

“Isobel—open the door.”

The door latch rattles. I open my eyes. I cannot remember if I saw the red star in the sky or if it was in my mind. I’ve been curled up in this corner for hours, perhaps days. My red cape is in a heap on the other side of the cottage. My dress and bloomers are wet.