Hester(83)

I think of Mercy telling me that I must learn to move through the city invisible, so that I might do what I must. It is not unlike what Mam said, that I must hide myself and my colors and yet prepare for the day my time would come.

And I think of the washerwoman in the alley by the shop. Why did I never see her before? Why was she there on the very day I ran from Felicity?

When the evening bells ring nine o’clock and I close my shutters, I swear I hear the bean-nighe’s tuneless song in the distance and the neigh of the kelpies running along the sea. Try as I might, I cannot come up with any course of action that has not already been tainted, warned against, or broken my heart. I’m not Isobel Gowdie standing on a blazing rooftop screaming at the evil men. I am alone and frightened. I have lost my job and perhaps my entire reputation here in Salem.



* * *



I’VE JUST CHOKED down my first food in days—an old roasted potato found on a brick in my hearth—when there’s an ugly scratching on my door.

It’s evening, and the August night is thick. The woods are alive with tiny sounds that throb through the trees. It could be Nat, who heard of my troubles and rushed home to me. It could be Mercy. Or it could be Felicity, come to exact her vengeance.

“Mrs. Gamble?” It is a woman’s voice I don’t recognize. She must sense me there, my bare feet on the floorboards, for she calls again. “Mrs. Gamble—”

“What do you want?”

“You don’t know me, but I admire your work. And I’d like to speak with you, please.”

I unlatch the top of the Dutch door to find a woman only a little older than me, wearing a faded blue dress.

“My name is Ginny,” she says. “I admired the gloves in Felicity Adams’s shop and heard that you’re talented enough to make most anything.”

Ginny has narrow shoulders and a small waist, and I can tell that the skirts of her dress hide strong, wide hips. I have not combed my hair or washed my face in days, but if she notices, she gives no indication.

“Wives in town sometimes trade food for money or needlework. We’re here, you know—looking out for one another.” She holds out a warm loaf wrapped in paper. “I’m terrible with the needle, but my breads and apple cakes are wonderful.”

She pushes the loaf into my hands. “My George is a clerk, but he wants to study law and needs an apprenticeship. He can’t go to the Light Infantry banquet without a proper waistcoat. My mother used to help me, but—” Ginny’s voice goes high and small. “But she’s gone now.”

It takes no more than her grief for me to decide.

“Do you have his measurements and money for broadcloth?” I ask.

“I brought his day coat and the measurements are near the same.” She fumbles in her pocket and pulls out her coin. “And I have this.”

“You take that coin to Chaise and Harness and pick the cloth you want.”

I tell her how many yards and remind her that she’ll need a liner, too.



* * *



THE NEXT DAY, I’m making my way through the tangle in my garden when another woman startles me there.

“I need a dress,” she says. “If I go to the shops, my husband’s mother will think me a spendthrift. But it has to be better than anything I can manage myself, or else she’ll be cruel about it.”

The following morning it’s a mother with her daughter. I know right away that they are poor, for the girl’s face is sallow and the mother’s dress is threadbare.

The girl’s fingers and hands have the evidence of too much time at her needle, and her eyes are pink and strained. She steps forward and I see that she is hunchbacked.

“Please, if you can help me make a cape that will—hide this.”

The mother takes in laundry, she tells me; her daughter does all the mending for her customers.

“She’s not got the skill to do what she wants, but she has an idea,” the mother says.

I bend down so the girl and I are eye to eye. Her voice is sweet and strong, the palest blue of distant stars. “I’m called Lily.”

I promise to make her something that will help, and they leave me with a length of midnight-blue wool that surely must have cost them a great many hours of labor.



* * *



I GROW ACCUSTOMED to women coming at strange hours, and so I am awake and already at my needle when Nell knocks at my cottage early this August morning wearing a crisp white apron and blue-striped smock. Her face is flushed and rosy, and she greets me in a voice as green as a meadow.

“Charlotte’s child was born.” Nell beams.

I am taken aback. Could she truly have been so far along?

“So soon?”

“He’s tiny but healthy.” Neil shrugs away my question. “A boy named Charles for his grandfather. Mrs. Silas is on her way to Philadelphia now.”

I imagine the house where the child was born, the fine pieces I sewed for his first cradle, and the gown for his baptism. I picture Charlotte well loved and safe, tucked into her bed as she was when I first met her. And I am jealous in a way that I do not like and cannot banish.

“You were a great help, and Charlotte hasn’t forgotten,” Nell adds. “She asked me to remember her to you. Also, Isobel, I heard what happened at Felicity’s shop. Tell me how I can help.”