Hester(94)

“No, no…” I say it low, to drown out Edward’s ranting.

“Yes.” Edward grabs my chin and snaps it up, shoves the flyer flat against my face, blinding me like Nat’s handkerchief. When the veil is lifted, will I see the hard truth about the captain? Will I see the truth even about myself—that I have misjudged Darling as I misjudged Edward and Nat? That I have trusted in yet another man who does harm instead of good?

“Mercy ran off from MacGreggor five years back. She was carrying his bastard—that’s the girl Ivy; you’ve seen her freckles, too. The man is offering a generous reward—three hundred for the boy, five hundred for the slave named Atlas, another two for the mother, and two for the young one.”

Edward keeps rambling—he talks of alleys and skulls and black magic, but I can hardly hear him because my mind is racing. What is my husband suggesting? Is the captain chasing runaway slaves for the reward? How could Ingo be helping him when he is Mercy’s lover? I try to focus on Edward’s words instead of on my fear or the smell of rum.

“I was keeping the flyer in my cabin, but Ingo found it—those no-good bastards came in and took it from me. ‘Well, what the hell do you think I’m going to do?’ I told them. ‘I’m going to return that man his property and share the reward with you.’”

“Mercy’s not a slave,” I manage to say.

“Shut your hole.”

Edward is pacing the cottage now, his dirty boots dropping sludge on the clean floor.

“That prick Darling had the African lock me up and feed me drink and poppy until I couldn’t stand or see straight. Next thing I know I’m in a jailhouse in the islands.”

In a flash I understand that Captain Darling is much more than simply a good sailor and a good man.

“Mercy’s not a slave,” I repeat. “Her mother was set free, she told me herself. Mercy was born right here in this clearing—”

He raises a hand to silence me.

“I’ve been watching her,” he goes on. “I got a simple plan. She knows you, and you’re going to help me. When I get what I want, I’ll leave you to your shame—you can do what you like with your ruined life.”

He sets his herb pouches on the table and begins mixing a sleeping potion.

“You get Mercy to drink this brew and I’ll take her easy. Her and the little girl. Nobody will get hurt.”

“Take them where?”

His face is a ragged, ugly sneer.

“Did you listen, Isobel? She’s a slave; the girl and boy are MacGreggor’s slave children. I’ll get four hundred for the two of them, twelve hundred dollars for the lot of them—a fortune, Isobel—a fortune. And once I have the mother and daughter, she’ll tell me where to find the other Negro runaways.”

While the brew steeps, Edward opens the yellow wood cabinet and pushes aside the cups and plates the ladies have given me.

“How did you get back to Salem?” I ask.

“I got ways and secrets like you—I got work on a ship, how do you think?”

He paws through my things, shoves the blue glass cups onto the floor, where they shatter. With one hand he grabs my face. His thumb presses hard on my hollowed cheek.

“I know you hide money here,” he says. “Where’d you hide it?”

I shake my head. He squeezes harder.

“I’m paid in food.” I manage to whistle out the words through the tiny space of air, and he pushes me away.

“The hell with those scraps—I want the real reward,” he growls. “I’ll be damned if I’ll let the captain get it from me now. Whatever lies Mercy told you, forget them. You’ll go up there and get her to come to the cottage—ask her for some kind of help and tell her you’ll pay—she’ll come for money.”

I think fast. I cannot refuse outright, not with the baby vulnerable inside me. And even if I did refuse, Edward would find another way. He escaped his jailers and made it back to Salem—it would be easy enough for him to kill Mercy and take Ivy, and I fear that Edward would do it, for his mind is taken by the drink and poppy and God knows what else. Whatever was good in him is long gone.

“I’ll have to ask her for help with the needle,” I tell him. “If it’s not something difficult she’ll put me off—she’s done it before.”

I pick up a strip of Nell’s shroud where I’ve been working the green stars and shamrocks into the saffron.

Edward stands above me and watches. There are the shamrocks, the sheep, the pretty pink clover that Nell wove in her hair the day of Charlotte’s wedding. With shaking hands, I take the pliers from my chatelaine to undo the work and make a tangle of the threads, green and pink together. I stitch the word RUN inside the shroud in floating letters the same color as the shamrocks and clover and hope that Mercy will see it as I once saw the word SAFE in her work.

“Hurry up,” Edward says. I turn the shroud and make a few errant stitches in the seams.

When I’m finished and he’s inspected the piece—“for your tricks, I know you have them”—we go up to Mercy’s place. I lead the way and listen to his footsteps behind me like the devil in the forest.

Mercy is in her yard. What would he do if I cried out to her? I cannot take the risk. Mercy once spoke about the power of animals—where are they now? I wish for the birds, the chicks, something or someone in the woods to intervene. How can I not have noticed that the cat is gone, like a seal-woman selkie returned to the sea? I never told that myth to Nat, and now I see why. Because he was the seal-man who came to me and broke my heart. He was my selkie and I was the girl in his poison garden.