Hester(95)

“Mercy, I need your help with the needle.”

I feel Edward but a breath away, hidden out of sight. I’ve grabbed my red cape and slipped my longest needle into the small pocket beside the tambour hook. I take the cloth with the thread that I have tangled and stick it into the shroud right at the place where I have hidden the letter R in RUN.

Mercy is shrewd. Her face shows nothing, yet I know instantly she’s seen it.

“Poor Isobel,” she says. “Do you want to come inside? Or shall I come to you in a bit?”

I shake my head. Edward isn’t far behind me. I don’t know what he’d do if I stepped into the house with Mercy.

“Please come to me very soon.” I speak loudly so that Edward will hear, but not too loudly so that he is suspicious. “I don’t want to be delayed.”

“I’ll be done with my chores in half of an hour or so,” Mercy says. Her words are plum and deep, with no shades of yellow. “Then I’ll come down with my needle.”

I have not said the word run aloud, yet I have spoken and she has heard me.



* * *



BACK AT THE cottage Edward talks and talks. While we wait, I pick at the tangled bits of the shroud and stitch Nell’s name over and over. Nell’s voice, a shamrock green. A pure spirit, generous and loving.

Every few minutes he grabs me by the arm or the chin and threatens to strike me. He has a coil of rope, ready for Mercy.

Perhaps thirty, then forty minutes go by. The sun moves toward noon. Edward becomes restless.

“Where is she? What’s she up to?”

I don’t look up from my work, for I don’t trust myself. I’m expecting something to happen, although I don’t know what. Perhaps Zeke will check on me. Perhaps Mercy will run and no one will come. It is Sunday and my ladies never come on meeting day.

“Shall I go up and ask again?” I ask.

“You wait here.”

It seems Edward learned something at sea—he learned to tie knots. He ties my hands around the table leg, wraps a longer rope around my shoulder and arm, bolts the shutters, and shuts the door.

When his footsteps are gone, I wait only a moment, then struggle to get loose. The ropes tighten at my wrists. I drag myself and the table across the floor, but even when I kick up the latch the door opens only an inch. Edward will be reaching Mercy’s place by now. It won’t be long before he finds her or finds that she’s already gone. I must get out. For if I die now, so will my child.

Once I put the scrimshaw button on a scrap of cloth and Nat came. Perhaps it’s in my power to summon him again.

“Please come to me,” I say into the empty room. Am I calling God? Nat? The captain? I don’t know. I am again in the doorway between life and death, where I have seen my mother and waited for Nat and where I fell when I learned that Nell was dead. “Please send help,” I cry.



* * *



THE GENTLE VOICE outside my cottage is amethyst and silver yellow.

“Mrs. Gamble? It’s Eveline, the undertaker’s wife. He sent me to you.”

I listen for some false note or trap, but I know amethyst is good and that she is good, too.

“Are you alone?” I ask.

“I come only with God,” she says.

So it is God who answered my plea.

“Come in, and hurry, please.”

Soon she has untied me.

“My husband did this—he’s dangerous,” I say. “I fear he’ll be back soon.” I strain to hear a sound from up high, but all I hear are dogs in the wind. “We have to get away.”

I turn my cloak inside out so the bright red won’t be easily visible through the dull forest. Eveline is small and wiry and effortlessly keeps my pace.

“You shouldn’t run in your state. I’ll go ahead and get my husband’s cart,” she says.

She sprints up the path and out of sight, and for a moment I am lost. It’s cold and everything is shadowed in the November mist. I long for any color at all, any light in the gray autumn air.

Then soft voices the color of ferns seem to come out of the forest, rising through the bare tree limbs. They call my name: “Isobel.”

I clutch my cape around me. The tambour hook and long needle are in the narrow pocket hidden at the clasp.

“Isobel, run down the path,” the voices tell me.

The tree branches are bare. Brown leaves are thick underfoot. I remember running through the dark toward home on summer evenings when my mother’s voice was calling me through the twilight. This is the same silver sound, but the woods are not leading me home this time, they’re leading me into the unknown.

The cold air is wet on my face and the voices seem to rise up in silver-yellow and amethyst—they flood the path ahead as if it is strewn with hundreds of bright irises. Their voices are clear—

“Run, Isobel.”

I run around a bend and stumble, but a hand catches me before I fall, grabs my shoulder, and twists me around.

“Eveline!” I cry.

But it’s Edward, his face contorted in hatred and fury.

“Where is Mercy? Where did she go? What did you tell her?”

He throws me to the ground and beats at my face. My fingers find the needle hidden in my cape.

Trust the needle.

He is the weight of all the fear I felt the night they tore apart our home in Glasgow. He is the weight of a body on top of mine, reeking of rum. He is the weight of my stolen gold and the dreams that went with it.