Hester(78)

“Isobel.” The voice is real. I know that voice. “Ship’s come in and Captain Darling’s asking for you.”

My throat is afire.

“I’m here.” I clear away the juniper twigs that rip at my windpipe and say it again, louder. “Mercy—I’m here.”

Mercy puts her face against the window glass. Her eyes roll toward me with her mouth wide.

“Open the door,” she orders.

I pull myself across the floor and push away the bar at the door. Mercy sees the vial and smells the sick and right away she knows. She takes my chin and twists my face up so she can see my eyes and I can see hers.

“When did you drink it?”

Was Nat here yesterday? Two nights ago? Have I missed work at the dress shop? Has Felicity sent someone for me? I don’t know.

Mercy lifts my skirts and I’m far from my body, somewhere in the realm between life and death. I wish Mercy were a witch. I wish I were a witch. Because if we were witches, we would be stronger.

“There’s no blood,” she hisses. “How far are you?”

“A month and maybe some weeks,” I say. “Not far.”

She takes off my soiled bloomers. She is close and warm and smells like hay and gingersnaps.

“I saw a lady die this way, damn you—damn you.”

She puts her hands under my arms and heaves me onto the bed.

“Mercy, please—I can’t have this child.”

She’s stronger than I expected. I can’t see her face, but I feel her fingers probe me and her hands roll across my stomach.

“Please help me, Mercy, you know what to do.”

I haven’t left the cottage as tidy as I thought. The mortar and pestle are on the table, the small jars of essence and tinctures beside them. Mercy lifts one, then the next.

“Savin powder, pennyroyal, and juniper berry together? Lucky you didn’t die, much less the baby.”

She turns through Edward’s book, leaves me for a while, then brings back a vile-smelling brew.

“Drink,” she says.

I heave until I’m turned inside out. I wail and cry and beg her to take the child, and all the while she says, “Hush now, this baby doesn’t want to be shook out, and I’m not letting you die.”



* * *



MERCY IS HERE when I wake. There’s sun in the room and the top of the door is open to the yard. I hear birds. Mercy is humming softly. Without the turban her hair is big and loose, the round shape of a wildflower turned to seed. Her needle is flashing through fabric like a hummingbird drinking water from a flower cone. The days and nights of sickness, the heavy sadness, all of it is awake in me now.

Mercy fetches my clean bloomers from the line in the yard. She’s tidied the cottage, cleared away the jars, swept up the herbs, and rinsed away my sick. Even the bed linen is washed and hanging in the sun. My red cloak hangs on a hook near the door, with the story I have told there folded away.

“Your color is better,” she says. She brings me a cup of warm nettle broth and watches me drink it.

“Isobel, you listen. Folks are weak or blind or just have no sense.” She takes my chin and lifts my face to hers. I blink away tears. “Folks fail you even when you love them—leave you when you need them. But you’ve got to be strong even with all that—you hear me?”

“I thought he loved me.”

Her eyes and lips narrow.

“He called me—” A witch. I cannot speak the word. “He said I bewitched him.”

She’s nodding now.

“That’s what they say when they want to get free of you or when they’re afraid,” she says. “Hush now, don’t think about him. You need your strength—I told you, the ship’s come in.”

Her words are meant to soothe me but they are steely gray knives.

“And Edward’s not on it; otherwise he would be here and drunk by now,” I say.

“Captain didn’t say anything about your husband.”

I struggle to sit up, but fatigue keeps me down.

“Did the captain come here?” I don’t want him to see me this way.

Mercy puts a soothing hand to my wrist.

“He sent Ingo.”

“His first mate?” I slump back onto the bed. “Why?”

Deep emotion crosses her face.

“Ingo, he’s my man.”

Her words are brown and thick like Ingo himself.

“Ingo is your man?” I had no idea, yet it seems right and true.

“That’s right.” She stares at me hard as she says it.

Ingo and Mercy. Mercy and Ingo. My mind stretches around this like a long band reaching across the globe to connect two far-off cities. All of the things that have never added up seem to stand like rungs in a ladder in my mind: Ingo and Mercy are lovers. Ingo and Captain Darling have been together for a long time.

I pull myself up by the elbows until I’m sitting. The room stays steady. Mercy’s dark sack of goods is set against my bed. The cat is on the window ledge licking her paws.

“Ingo’s coming now to bring my wares to the docks.”

I have forgotten what day it is.

“Is it market day?”

She shrugs away my question as if she hasn’t heard it.