Hester(98)

“No law will blame a man for beating a wife who has a bastard child in her belly.” Mercy’s hands are sure and steady. “Law doesn’t care why a woman does what she does, just like the law says a slave can be free here and a slave can be caught here. Don’t try to make sense of it. You just got to keep moving.”

Mercy ends her humming singsong and takes her hands from beneath my dress. She puts her cheek against mine and says, “Your child’s gonna be fine, but you got to rest now, you been through something real hard. You did good.”

She puts her hand on my forehead and I swear I hear her say the word love. Even with my eyes closed I can see the letters, plum and yellow as Mercy’s words are. But when I open my eyes her mouth is closed, her lips are together, and the only sound in the room is the low thrum of Ivy’s breath.



* * *



SOMETIME IN THE night I’m startled awake. My bladder is full and the kick is hard. I feel fear, then relief. The child is moving again.

I use the chamber pot and curl myself around my belly and hum a soft tune, as soft as the one Mercy sang.

Nell is dead. Edward wanted to kill me. Nat broke my heart and the Silas women turned their backs to me. But despite all that I have been through, I am safe and alive. I have done it all with the needle—made my friends and my life here, stood up against death and shame and the fear of my colors.

Since the day my mother told me to hide the colors, I have been afraid. When the girls in the tambour shop spoke quietly, I held myself apart. When Edward asked me to marry him, I accepted because I thought I would be safe with him—I thought that because of what was strange or unusual in him, he would forgive what was strange in me.

Some people, like Nat, spend their days fearing what’s dead and gone because they grow to love the horrors and the shadows of their own mind. I don’t want to be a prisoner of my secrets or of my past any longer. All that matters to me now are the children: Abraham and Ivy, my unborn baby, and all those who live in chains and fear.

I was wrong many times. But I have also done many things right. And I am safe here.



* * *



IN THE MORNING Mercy brings me a cup of tea. I pull her hand onto my belly so she can feel the child stir.

“I saw the words in your work, Mercy—the very first day. You have magic in your hands.”

She shakes her head, even as I describe the S and F linked together.

“Not magic,” she says. “I told you before: if you think you’ve got power, then you got power. And if you think you don’t, then you don’t. That’s how you made those letters in the yellow cloth that saved us.”

“Aren’t you afraid?” I ask.

“Of what?”

I struggle to name all the reasons I’ve feared my colors and letters.

“What if the wrong people see the words?”

Mercy shrugs.

“You be surprised what people don’t see,” she says. “There’s nothing new or wrong with telling stories with needle and thread. Nothing wrong in saying there’s people looking to be free, and people who’ve already found it. It’s not a secret message of codes; it’s not directions or a map. It’s just hope, plain and true. And it’s how Atlas found me when he come to Salem. He saw the word SAFE and found his way to us. He can’t read, but he knew to look for the pattern of the letters and he found them.”

“What if a minister or a preacher saw the words and thought they were witchcraft?”

“They aren’t,” she says. “You did the same as I did with the needle, and it saved all of us. What more do you need to know? The stitching stood against evil and now we’re safe here.”

Keep your powers hidden and use them when it’s your time. Mam could not have known where my life would take me, but she understood that every woman will face peril and hardship—and that it’s best if we keep our strengths and skills close and strong. That way, when we need them, they are powerful enough to carry us to a new beginning.

“What’s going to happen to Ivy now?” I ask.

“We’ll get her north to Canada the same way we got the others there.”

“How is that?”

Mercy points to piles of burlap stacked against the wall, like the parcel I once saw her bring to a house in Lynn.

“You sew up the burlap so it looks like a shroud,” she says. “And then you get inside it, and you get in the undertaker’s cart, and he gets you to a ship heading north.”

I remember the first time I saw the undertaker pulling his cart. He was like a shadow, walking. Another time I saw Zeke on the wharf carrying a burlap sack thrown over his shoulder. All those times, were there people hiding?

“The captain—” I begin.

Mercy smiles. “Captain Darling’s been helping us all these many years, but there are others, too. They started during Madison’s war with England and never stopped.”

I let out a laugh, and the sound is strange here in the sugar house. When I tell Mercy what Edward believes about Captain Darling and Ingo, she laughs, too.

“Best if that’s what that dog thinks—then he can’t give anything away.”



* * *



ALL NIGHT WE talk about the sugar house and how Mercy, Zeke, Widow Higgins, and the captain have helped those who’ve come north in the night.