Hester(82)

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“Tuesday?”

“I was sick last week—”

“Sick? Sick, you say?” I have never liked the torn autumn colors of Felicity’s words. Now, streaked with brown and black, they are ugly. “I know what you’re doing with the money I gave you—”

Abigail is against the wall behind Felicity, shaking her head and waving her hands as if to shoo me away.

“Yes, sick—”

Felicity advances toward me.

“How dare you sell gloves to the captain?” She looks as if she will slap me.

“The captain came, he put them on…” I try to stammer my explanation, but the force of her anger ties my tongue.

“Four ladies came into the shop asking for your gloves yesterday,” she says. “‘Mrs. Gamble’s gloves,’ they said. I told them you’re a liar and a thief—that you stole the gloves from me and gave them to the captain—”

“The captain knows,” I say.

“Knows what?”

“He knows my work. We came from Liverpool on his ship; I knew him before I worked for you.”

“The captain has gone around Salem and paid your husband’s debts.” Felicity must see surprise on my face, for she shivers like an animal before it attacks. “Are you surprised that I know it? You have very few secrets here, Isobel.”

“My husband works for him—that’s all.”

Felicity continues on as if I have said nothing.

“Adultery is a crime here. Women who succumb to the charms of another man while their husbands are at sea are disgraced and put out.”

Put out. I have heard this expression before.

“Perhaps you didn’t know it, Isobel—a woman can be put out of Salem for adultery.”

I feel a sense of wild fear, as if Felicity is indeed a crow and I a sparrow being pecked to death by her hard, yellow beak.

“It’s not as you say,” I chirp, but it is a mere squeak.

“What do you think the town will say when they know your husband isn’t here and the captain has staked his word and reputation for you? When they know you’re a liar, a thief, and maybe an adulteress—do you think they’ll look kindly on you?”

“I’m sure we can make an agreement,” I manage to sputter. “I won’t mind if you pay me a fair price.”

“Pay you? A fair price?” Her voices rises to a shriek. My work has summoned evil, just as my mother warned. “Are you mad? You came in here like a beggar girl with that filthy brogue of yours and I took you on and trusted you and you betrayed me. Now get out.” She raises her hand. “Get out, you dirty little liar—and don’t you dare go near my Philadelphia ladies!”

Her words burn in my ears—dirty little liar … filthy brogue of yours—as I back out of the shop and turn into the alley, where I nearly trip over a washerwoman crouched beside a wheeled basket.

“Get on with you,” the woman says, and I spin down the street, barely able to see where I am going.





TWENTY-SEVEN





All my life I’ve feared accusations of witchcraft. Now I see my mother was right about hiding my colors and I was foolish not to heed her. Echoes of the loud mills in Glasgow, the faces of pale children near the almshouse, even the cold-cellar memory of Master Dwyer’s Tambour Shop fill me with dread. The washerwoman is singing her song and waiting for me. Felicity is eager to call me an adulteress. The May trees along the Witch Path have spent their flowers and the long-gone shadows of the women hanged here on Gallows Hill seem to mock me.

Ruin, hunger, heartbreak, death, and disgrace—I feel them coming. Before this week I thought my course was clear: I would go to the banquet, show off my dress and shawl, and find customers of my own. I would wait until the time was right and then speak to the Philadelphia ladies when they were next in Salem.

But everything has unraveled, and all that is left is a pile of silks and a shawl with Adam and Eve and a red apple in the middle—the temptation of a woman bedeviled, sewn with my own hands.

I lay the shawl across my bed and know that even with the beaded blue sea, shimmering red crystals, and flower petals covering Eve’s naked bosom, I cannot wear it to the ball when accusations of adulteress and temptress are so close upon my heels. In fact, I don’t know if I dare go to the ball at all.



* * *



IN GLASGOW I worked beside girls who were thin, pale, and quick with their needles. They chattered some days but on most they were silent, each in her own silo of hurt. For Anne it was the red-splattered cough. For others it was a ring of bruises on a wrist, sunken eyes, or an empty lunch sack.

I envied their whispered camaraderie; I was too young to know that each girl held her own sadness—her own auntie, stepfather, or brother who had walked her into the tambour shop as Pap had led me. Or that surely each girl folded into her bed on some nights and wept, quietly and alone.

But I understand now that there is want everywhere.

I’ve met ladies beloved and ladies bereft; ladies who are afraid to walk in the streets for fear that someone will mock their dress or twisted arm, purple scar or red birthmark. Watching them, I have begun to learn how a woman apportions and gathers what she needs to survive; what she sacrifices for beauty, sustenance, health, or children.