Hester(8)

“An apothecary case from Italy,” Edward said. “It’s yours to use as a sewing kit.”

Edward spoke not of the elixir of life but of his own father and the Rebellion that had propelled his family out of Ireland and back to the Scottish Lowlands they’d left a hundred years before.

“Do you love him, Isobel?” Pap asked as we walked home that afternoon. My father had loved my mother very much and suffered greatly when she died.

“I don’t know.” I was glad it didn’t hurt me to say it.

“Perhaps that’s for the best,” Pap said. “Gamble is a widower, and he’ll be grateful for a young, pretty wife. You can leave the mills before they break you down. It is what your mam wanted for you.”

I was approaching my eighteenth year. I’d seen girls become fools for love and knew that kind of passion was dangerous. It was best for a motherless girl to marry a man for other reasons, and I had mine. Pap’s new wife was with child and had made it clear the babe would sleep with me and that I would be its caretaker through the night. “Unless you get yourself married,” she’d said.

My friend Noreen’s husband was a Glasgow printer, newly released from his apprenticeship and established in his own shop. When I went to visit, her girl served us tea on white china plates.

“Marry him,” Noreen said. “The sooner the better, while you still have your bloom. A man with his own shop is a good match.”

I’d grown up beside a river that tinkled silver when the water hit rocks. I missed that world and had ever longed to return to it. Edward seemed to live in a singular place between fact and fantasy, between science and magic. I thought if he was my husband, I would be free and safe at the same time—that I would not have to sacrifice one for the other. And so I made what we all believed was a wise choice: I married him.



* * *



ON OUR WEDDING night I put on a fresh white muslin nightdress and waited. Edward climbed on top of me and put a hand under my skirt.

“Hold still and it won’t hurt,” Edward said. It was a lie. It hurt very much. I bit my lip and closed my eyes and felt my tenderness toward him break. But I had my own soft pillow, soft white sheets, and a pearly washbasin. The next night Edward was gentle, and it didn’t hurt as much. Noreen had whispered of warm pleasures in her marital bed, but I was happy just to be away from Pap’s new wife and to have a good and prosperous husband.

To Edward’s home I brought the iris tea towel my mother had embroidered years ago, a basket of prized fabrics, and a romance by Walter Scott that I’d spent years working my way through, page by page. I was proud that I could read, and it pleased my husband. Edward kept his books on a shelf in his shop and often spent the evenings in our parlor reading over chemical formulas or struggling to decipher the alchemy and chemistry books his father had bequeathed to him.

It was understood that we would have a family, for Edward had told me that was what he wanted. I pictured red-haired daughters, proud sons, six of us walking two by two on Sunday mornings. The kitchen maid taught me how to make the stews and fruits my husband craved. Edward was particularly fond of plum-and-apricot compote perfumed with anise. I found the orange star spice in the market and collected it in a glass jar beside the stove. The eight-pointed star seemed a symbol of good luck, and I fashioned that shape into the white work I stitched onto my petticoats and chemise.

Right away I set up my sewing room in the yellow attic and began to design a banner for Edward’s shop. Once I’d dreamt of making colorful needlework as magnificent as the grand murals in the Queen’s Hall, of hours lost in a rainbow of silk threads that poured like rich oil paint upon the cloth. I’d been discouraged in these ambitions—lack of time and resources, myself being a mere girl, the need to keep my fingers working as fast as I could.

Now I worked with the windows open and the sun shining down on the patchwork of colors and threads. If Edward came upstairs at unexpected hours with red-rimmed eyes and an aching head, I did not pay it much mind. I knew men had different troubles than women and that they managed them in different ways; I had learned long ago in Master Dwyer’s shop to dodge a man’s moods with a clean swatch of cloth and a neat line of thread.

When the ice cart caught Edward’s leg and tore up his ankle three months after we were wed, I nursed my husband tenderly and followed his every instruction. He read the Ripley book and told me to bring him vinegar and silver mercury, a candle, beeswax, and the blood of a tortoise that had been put into a corked glass tube.

“I knew from the start that you would make a fine caretaker,” Edward said when I did as he asked. “Someone who doesn’t ask too many questions.”

He told me he would be better in no time. I believed him and kept at my needle, jumping up to help if I heard him struggling but also keeping a safe distance so that I would not offend his manhood. It seemed to work, and soon he stopped grimacing or crying out in pain.



* * *



I PRESENTED MY finished banner to Edward on a sunny afternoon, pleased and proud of the way the cloth and thread had come together.

Edward praised the elegant scrolled border and the red velvet I’d used for the word APOTHECARY. He put the banner on a pole and hung it from the window above the shop that very day, and as we stood in the street to admire it, the shoemaker and his wife asked if I might make one for his shop, too.