Hester(93)

After they’re gone I spread my saffron silk on the ground. As I’ve done before, I lay myself atop the cloth and make a circle with my arms and legs—this is how I measure the fabric that I will need. It is as if I am making my own shroud.

I lie there for a very long time before I can pick up the scissors and begin.

When I’ve cut out both sides into a shape like the wings of a moth, I use the verdigris—true green, like Nell herself—of my torn ball gown to make shamrocks and Celtic stars. I want to tell the story of her life in pictures, but Nell has told me little about her history. It was always about Mrs. Silas and Charlotte, then Stephen and his cows and their milk. Her story has been about everyone else’s, and now her own is over.

I find my old gray dress, the one I wore on the crossing, and rip open the stitching at the waist. There I sew in a new panel of gray-and-white calico from one of the farm ladies’ dresses. This is what I will wear until the child is born.

Two days until Nat’s carriage comes. And I am in mourning now.



* * *



NOVEMBER IS A month of death. My garden is full of lifeless vines and beanstalks bent like broken men. The ground is iced with frost at dawn on Sunday morning as I go to the well, and I am steadying myself so that I don’t slip, when a rough man steps into the yard.

I panic, thinking it’s already Tuesday and that Nat has sent the coachman to find me.

But this is no coachman. It is the devil in the forest, just as the widow warned me: unkempt and dirty, gray beard down his neck and an angry red slash across his face.

“Stay back,” I shout. My father never told me what to do if the faeries or the Devil came for me. “I am a Christian woman.”

He comes toward me, arms raised like the pope’s Christ on a cross.

“Do you not know me?” His voice and brogue are familiar but colorless, like a ghost. “Wife, it’s your husband. See here, I wear the vest you made.”

The filthy white vest is tattered beyond recognition, but the jeweled canister on a chain around his neck is the very one that Edward once promised he would fill with our fortune. His eyes are larger in a gaunt face, but it is him, returned as if from the dead.

I turn toward my cottage door. One foot, one spin, one lunge.

Edward is quicker. He catches my arm and puts a hand across my neck. It all happens so fast I have no chance to cry out. His eyes are close and shot with red; his calloused hands are lined with dirt. He smells of sweat and rum as he presses a thumb at my windpipe and pushes me backward into the cottage.

Inside, he thrusts me into a chair.

“Sit.”

He puts the board across the door and latches the shutters, hangs his coat from a hook, and unbuckles a long, thick leather belt. The belt is hung with herb pouches. He lays it across my legs and steps his boot onto the stool beside my chair.

“Whose bastard child is it?”

I say nothing.

Without a sound, he raises a hand and slaps me. The blow is a hard, bright red. Now deep pain has the same color as Nat’s voice.

“Did you think I wouldn’t come back?” He pulls my hand away from my cheek and shouts, “Answer me!”

I speak to the ground at his feet.

“I had a letter from the captain. He said you refused to return to the ship.”

“Lies—” Edward grabs my chin, forces me to look at him. Everything about him is clear like ice, and dark gray like a blade. His words, the air behind him, his very breath is frost and steel.

“Dirty bastard is a liar.” He gestures to my lap, to the child I have felt move in me. “Is this his doing?”

Abigail told me to say the child is Edward’s—to insist upon it. But Edward will know better.

“I’m sorry, Edward.” I don’t say it is the captain’s, and I don’t say it isn’t. “I thought you abandoned me.”

“Whore—you believed his lies? I didn’t refuse anything—he locked me up and put me off the ship in Bermuda. And do you know why?” Edward’s question is rhetorical. “He’s catching slaves for the reward. Him and the African. I found them out.”

I do not believe what he’s saying, but I dare not speak.

“I thought they were bringing slaves across from Liverpool hidden in the hold.” His words are slurred fast, long and ropy. “I saw blood in a barrel and chains down in the hold, heard the captain and Ingo talking about slaves in America.”

Edward pulls a crumpled paper from his pack.

“I followed Darling when we got to Baltimore and saw him tear down this flyer—then I got the right idea.” He thrusts the paper at me. “Go on, read it—that’s right, you can see it plain and clear.”




Runaway Negro Male Age 39

Suspected in BOSTON (Or thereabouts)

Slave Name Atlas // Property of J. MacGreggor

May be in company of Freckled Negro Boy Age 9

$$$$$ REWARD $$$$$

See J. MacGreggor at Wayland Plantation



“Small print’s not here, but I got everything I needed to know off MacGreggor himself.”

Abraham is a nine-year-old boy with freckles. I make a strangled sound and Edward leers at me.

“That’s right, I went to see MacGreggor for myself. He’s an honest Scotsman with a face full of freckles, just like it says on the notice. Those Black bastard children up the hill behind you are MacGreggor’s own, that’s why they got the freckles—you don’t need more proof than that. Told me the woman ran off five years ago and she was with child.”