The Shape of Mercy (24 page)

I could summon no words. No thoughts. I could scarce imagine myself doing such things. I would have laughed had I not seen so many people hanging from ropes.

“Mercy, did you hear me?”

“I am no witch,” I whispered, though in my head, I screamed it.

“Destroy the book, child!” Goody Trumball inclined her head toward the cooking fire. “Put it into the fire and destroy it!”

I pictured my story book in the flames, glowing, burning, disappearing. All my lovely words gone. I shuddered.

Goody Trumball took my shoulders and shook me. “Mercy! Give me the book. We must throw it into the fire. Do you not see? If there is no book, the charges cannot be proven. They will think Prudence lies. We must destroy the book.”

Papa once told me I should burn every stick of furniture in the house to keep warm before burning a book. I should be willing to sit on stones in an empty house before burning a book.

“Mercy!”

“’Tis not here,” I said. “I left it at my cottage.”

Her eyes grew wide. “Where? Where did you leave it?”

“In the barn. With Henry.”

“Henry?”

“My goat.”

Goody Trumball closed her eyes as if they hurt. “Is it hidden?”

“Yes.”

She opened her eyes again. “When you go there today to feed the chickens and care for the goat, you must take the book out of the barn and bury it away from the cottage. Then when it is safe, you shall bring the book here and we shall burn it. But only when I tell you it is safe. Do you understand?”

I nodded.

“Say nothing of the book to Goodman Trumball unless he asks you, child.”

She said nothing else because Goodman Trumball came inside then and saw us sitting by the fire with no sewing or spinning, and he frowned at his wife. I made leave to muck out the barn but I am here in Remembrance with my quill and diary. I cannot let Goody Trumball know I have them. She does not know about the diary.

I must go. I do not know if I can do what Goody Trumball says. I can bury my book, but I do not know if I can burn it. It is all that I have left of my father. And my mother and Thomas
.

Of me.

Always before, the words would come faster than I could write them. But today I cannot order my thoughts
.

I do not know if God has stepped in to protect me or if evil has stepped in to slay me
.

The book is gone.

I did as Goody Trumball asked of me. I went to the cottage to fetch the book from the barn so I could bury it. But it was not there. Henry was there, and the chickens, but the book was gone.

Did God bend down from Heaven to hide it for me? Did He take it to some hidden place deep in the earth? Or did He burn it Himself with His fiery eye? Are my lovely stories smoke and ash in some holy hearth?

Or did someone take the book?

I do not know. I do not know.

How will I tell Goody Trumball the book is missing?

I am again at the cottage. Goodman Trumball sent me home. Without Papa’s horse. He let me take Lily, though
.

This morning before anyone had broken their fast, Goodman Trumball said aloud, as if to a room of observers, that ’Twas not wise for his growing sons to have a young woman in the house who be not their mother or sister. And so I should return home and await the arrival of my cousin Samuel from England. ’Tis plain as day he wishes me gone. But he wishes not to part with my father’s horse. I care not. I am home
.

Goody Trumball wept when I left, but she did not beg her husband to allow me to stay. The Trumball boys stood as still as statues. I offered my spinning top to the younger one, but he would not stretch out his hand to take it
.

Again I carried the books and the little wooden chest. I put the coverlet on Lily’s back and my winter cloak, too, since Goodman Trumball did not offer to assist me home.

I write by twilight so I form my letters in near darkness. My thoughts are flying every direction, and I know not what to make of them.

John Peter called on me today. He came on his horse, but stayed on his mount a stone’s throw from the cottage and from there he beckoned me.

I came out of the cottage and bade him good day. I was so happy to see him. It was hard to walk out to him, as if he were only a neighbor come to bid me good day. I wanted to run. I offered him a drink from our well, but he just looked at me as if I had said nothing at all.

“Have you any other relatives in the colony, Mercy? Anyone at all?” he asked.

My first thought was that he wished to court me. With Samuel still away, he wanted to know whom he should ask, because he could wait no longer. I smiled at him. I could not help but smile at him. “I have Samuel, my cousin. He is expected home soon from England.”

“There is no one else?” He did not smile back at me.

“I have an aunt in Maine, Samuel’s mother, and three other cousins there.”

“I will take you to them. Can you leave now?”

God forgive me, but I laughed. “I have not seen them in three winters, John Peter.”

He swung down off his horse and walked toward me. I saw so many things in his eyes as he closed the distance. Affection. Hope. Longing And fear.

“Let me take you to them, Mercy. Please.” He reached out to touch my shoulder. His fingers moved in a caress that anyone standing in the clearing beyond us would not see. The breath within me stilled.

I closed my eyes but for a moment, and when I opened them, his head was inclined toward me, his eyes shiny as a brook. “Please let me take you to them,” he whispered.

I raised my hand to touch his fingers as they rested on my shoulder. He took a step closer to me. I sensed his dread, and in that moment, I knew.

God did not have my book of stories. The magistrates did.

“Are they coming for me?” I asked.

He nodded once.

“When?”

“On the morrow.” He placed his other hand on my shoulder and drew me to his chest. His arms enclosed me tight. I leaned into that warm place between a man’s neck and chest where a turned head fits like a glove. I could feel his chest rising and falling beneath my cheek.

Time could have stopped for me then and I would not have railed against it. I knew there would never be another moment like that one, where every hope and longing within me was silenced by one embrace.

’Twas my falling tears that counted off the seconds, reminding me time had not stopped but marched ever forward. If the magistrates found George Burroughs in
Maine, they could surely find me. And they would know who brought me there.

When I sensed John Peter was about to pull away and lift me onto his horse to flee, I spoke. “The magistrates will know I have an aunt in Maine, John. They will know Samuel makes his home there.”

He hesitated only a moment. “Then I will take you somewhere they cannot find you.”

Such wonderful words. Such unattainable words. I leaned heavily into him. “There is no such place.”

“There are other colonies, Mercy. I will find a place.”

“But I am innocent!” I looked up at him.

He cupped my face with his hands. “As was Rebecca Nurse! As was Elizabeth Howe and Susannah Martin! Reason does not reign in Salem, Mercy. Whatever one crazed soul can say about another is believed.”

“Then why cannot I be believed as much as another?”

“Because ’Tis easier to believe ill of someone than good.”

I did not argue. I knew the moment he uttered it, ’Twas true.

“Gather your belongings,” he said in a voice as soft as bare feet on a dirt path. “I will come for you tonight when the moon is high. We will use darkness for cover. I will take you south instead of north. I will find a safe place.” He touched my cheek, his fingertips brushing across wetness. I leaned into his hand.

He moved his palm to rest under my chin and tipped my face toward his own. He leaned over me and bent his
head so that our cheekbones whispered against each other. His lips, warm and soft, met mine.

It lasted only a second, as gentle a kiss as the kind my mother lavished on me when she lived. And all the love I felt in my mother’s kisses I felt in that kiss, and every dream I had ever spun between princes and princesses burst through the confines of story and met me in that moment. This was that divine pairing I saw between my papa and my mama and few others. This was that interlacing of body and soul that spoke of a deeper oneness I had but tasted. I know I will never love another.

John Peter stepped away from me—his hand on my chin the last part of him to leave me—and made for his horse.

“Do not be afraid,” he said as he took to the saddle. “I will come for you.”

“I will be waiting,” said I.

He sped away, and I watched him go until the sound of his horse’s hooves melted into the afternoon.

Even now, as night begins to swallow day, I can still feel his touch on my cheek, his lips on mine. I pray God will go with us tonight. I pray Papa would send me away on John Peter’s horse were he here. I pray there is a place that is not consumed with madness.

I must prepare more ink. The hour grows late.

I
didn’t want to stop reading. I didn’t even want to take the time to transcribe the entries.

I would decipher several paragraphs and then realize I had typed nothing; I’d merely uncovered more of the story and devoured it. Countless times I had to go back and transcribe onto the laptop what I had already moved on from.

Mercy’s penmanship in the diary had been exquisite up to that point. Any trouble I’d had reading her words had been because of age and wear, not from of any lack of skill on her part. But she had been in a rush with the August entries, and they were long, and perhaps she had tried to conserve her ink and paper. The sentences were crammed together, and the script was smaller than in her previous entries. I began working a little after eight on Friday night, but by 3:00 a.m. Saturday, my head ached from eyestrain.

Alone in Abigail’s house, I went into the kitchen to look for Tylenol or Advil, fully intending to climb the stairs in search of the guest room Abigail had offered. But when I had taken something for my headache, I looked up at the dark staircase and the second floor, where Abigail’s long, lonely life seemed to stretch into the next neighborhood, and I changed my mind. I went back into the library and its horde of books. I curled up on a leather sofa by the french doors that led to the patio and covered myself with a throw, hoping to rest for a few minutes.

But I fell asleep.

A hand touched my arm and my eyes flew open.

Esperanza stood over me. It was morning.

“Why didn’t you sleep in the guest room? I changed the sheets for you.

I blinked and sat up, allowing the throw to fall away. “I wasn’t planning on sleeping. I just stopped to take a rest.”

“A rest? A rest from what?”

I looked over at the diary, open to August 25, 1692. Esperanza followed my gaze.

“That?” Her brown eyes widened.

“I’m almost done. I didn’t want to stop.”

Esperanza stared at the diary with something like disgust in her eyes.

“Have you read the diary, Esperanza?”

“No.” Her answer was quick. “I don’t want to read about witches.”

I shifted my weight on the sofa and the leather squeaked. “But Mercy wasn’t a witch.”

“I don’t want to read such a sad thing. Abigail used to read it, and it always made her sad. The world is sad enough. Especially her world.” Esperanza started to walk away.

I jumped up. “Why did she stop reading it?”

“She doesn’t talk to me about the diary, so I don’t ask. Come. I make you breakfast.”

I followed Esperanza out into the tiled entryway. I really wasn’t hungry, but I had Esperanza all to myself. I didn’t want to waste this moment.

“What happened to Abigail? Do you know why she didn’t marry the man she loved?”

Esperanza looked back at me but kept walking toward the kitchen. “Why do you ask? This is the second time you ask me.”

“Do you know?”

“I wasn’t here when it happened, you know. I was just a baby. My parents were still living in Mexico.”

“When what happened?”

“The war.”

I almost skidded to a stop. “The war?”

“Sí.” Esperanza kept walking.

“So was he in the army? Did he die in World War II?” Even as I asked, I knew that couldn’t be the reason Abigail didn’t marry him. She made it clear she’d made a choice. A choice she regretted. But perhaps she chose not to marry him
because
he went away to war. Maybe she was afraid to love a man who might die. So she said no. He left, met someone else, survived the war, and lived happily ever after with a woman who hadn’t been afraid.