The Shape of Mercy (4 page)

B
efore I met Mercy on the pages of her diary, I dreamed of her. The night before my first day at Abigail’s, I dreamed of a woman wearing a dress like the one I wore in the Thanksgiving play in fourth grade. Dull wool skirt, muslin apron, and a white cap with puckered edges. She sat at a table, a candle burning beside her, writing. I knew she was Mercy, and I knew she was writing in her diary. She bent over a page, her hand flowing across the paper in swirls and slow flourishes as she spun the words with a feather quill. Her features were soft and unfocused in the dim candlelight, and she seemed deep in thought. I moved toward her and she heard me. Her head lifted and her eyes met mine. With the quill poised over the diary, she stared at me, her eyes kind but sad.

She didn’t ask me who I was or what I was doing there. I wanted her to, but she didn’t.

Instead, she looked past me. I turned my head and saw a woman in a chair in another part of the darkened room, sitting amid a pile of books, the titles of which I couldn’t read in the darkness. The woman was asleep.

Abigail.

I looked back at Mercy.

She was gone. The diary was there and the burning candle, but the chair where she had been sitting was empty. The quill lay on the pages with the feather pointed toward me.

Like an invitation to pick it up.

The candle went out and I awoke.

I felt alone, though Clarissa murmured in her sleep in the bed next to me. It took a while before I fell back asleep, and when I did, I dreamed of nothing.

Abigail’s first question when I returned to her sad house surprised me. We settled at a sturdy wooden table in her suffocating library, and instead of asking if I wanted a cup of tea—I could see she had one—she asked if I talked to God.

“You mean, do I pray?” I said. I might have stuttered.

“What is prayer but talking to God?” She lifted a withered hand and flicked her wrist, as if to wave away a cartload of my naiveté.

This wrinkled dismissal annoyed me. I may not have the Durough drive, but I don’t lack the household dignity. We’ve always been quick to defend our intellect. A second or two ticked by as I debated how to answer her. How does the brand-new employee answer the employer’s arguably inappropriate question? I’d never been an employee before. I
do
talk to God, but I didn’t see how or why that should matter to her.

And what did that have to do with transcribing a three-hundred-year-old diary? Mild irritation gave way to momentary boldness. I looked her straight in the eye.

“Yes. I talk to God.” I said it with such self-assurance. There is a jolt of satisfaction people my age get from answering an elderly know-it-all with confidence.

The corners of Abigail’s mouth rose in slow symmetry. My answer amused her.

Irritation swelled within me. “I don’t see how—”

“And do you believe God talks back to you?” she interrupted.

“What?”

“Do you know what happened to Joan of Arc?” Abigail posed the question as easily as if I had just said,
Sure, I believe God talks to me.

“Joan of Arc?”

“Yes.”

“She was executed. Burned at the stake, I think.” That was all I could remember from high school social studies. I was only a month into my college Western Civ class. We were a ways off from Joan of Arc.

“Yes, she was. Do you know why she was executed?”

I scratched my neck. It didn’t itch. “Well, if I remember right, France was at war with England and she led the French troops. English troops captured her. The charge against her was treason?”

Abigail inclined her head, entertained by my recap, I think. “You don’t remember right.”

“She led troops. She was captured. I’m sure that part is right,” I said, mentally massaging my wounded ego.

“Yes, all that’s true. But she wasn’t executed under a charge of treason.”

I was about to ask what the charge had been when I suddenly remembered why Joan of Arc was executed. “She believed God talked to her.”

Abigail’s eyes seemed to brighten. I had surprised her.

“She was about your age when she died, did you know that? You are nineteen?”

“Twenty.”

“They called her a heretic. A witch. They lit her on fire.”

I shifted in my seat.

“But she wasn’t a witch, of course,” Abigail continued. “Everyone knows that now. She’s a saint. St. Joan.”

“Yes, I remember that,” I muttered.

“Of course, that doesn’t change how she died, how the flames ate her body while she stood tied to a pole.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I said.

Abigail said nothing for a moment, just looked at me. Then she leaned forward. “Do you see all these books?” she asked in a low voice,
as if passing on a secret I should keep close to me. Abigail’s books were everywhere, stuffed into shelves, lying in piles, peeking out from under tables. I’d have to have been blind not to see them. I was in awe and afraid for the same reason—there were so many.

And I didn’t care that she had again made a hairpin turn in the conversation. We were leaving behind the burning body of an innocent woman.

“Yes,” I said, looking about me.

“You love books the way I do. You love to write. I know this. That’s one of the reasons I hired you.”

I nodded and waited.

“Mercy Hayworth loved to write too,” Abigail said, tipping her head. “Stories. The once-upon-a-time kind. The men who demanded her execution said she wrote the devil’s words, that her stories were tales from hell, that she was the devil’s scribe. Her writings were proof she was a witch. They were just stories, Lauren. The kind of stories you and I like to read. The kind you like to write.”

She sat back in her chair. “This is why I want you to tell Mercy’s story,” she said. “Mercy was a beautiful young girl who loved many good things. She was wrongfully accused, convicted, and hanged, and no one remembers her.”

“I see.” I swallowed, keenly aware of the muscles in my neck.

“I wanted you to know why you’re doing this.”

“Okay,” I said.

Across from me, Abigail inhaled and exhaled heavily. A cleansing breath. She was ready to move on.

I barely felt my lungs moving, the ghosts of Joan of Arc and Mercy Hayworth hovering at my shoulders, lamenting their ruin.

“Now, then,” Abigail said. “Perhaps you’d care for a cup of tea before we get started?”

T
he diary’s pages were the color of toast in some places and in others, the color of wet ashes. The ink, made long ago from ground walnut shells mixed with vinegar and salt, was so faint it looked as if I could blow it away if I leaned over it and merely exhaled. The frail letters on the first page were barely legible; they looked like whispers, if whispers had form. I’d never seen a book that old that wasn’t in a museum. I could tell without touching it that Mercy’s diary was too fragile to be held in my hands, too delicate to bear the weight of my fingers. The thought made me sad.

As I stared at the diary’s pages, I felt I was just inches from this woman, a breath away. Three hundred years of time and space seemed to vanish. This was Mercy’s very touch, the last vestige of her existence.

Abigail told me Mercy had penned her stories in a separate volume, a business ledger her father bought at Ingersoll’s Ordinary—the colonists’ version of a public house—which she kept a secret as her father had asked. But Mercy’s accusers found her hiding place when they turned her cottage upside down looking for proof of her alliance with the devil. They found the ledger of stories, and after her trial, they burned it.

They didn’t find the diary.

The only words of Mercy left on this earth lay on paper too fragile to be touched. And I so wanted to touch it.

Abigail showed it to me that first afternoon, after she had finally
handed me a cup of tea. She brought it from another room, inside a box that made a snorting sound when she opened it. An airlock.

“I don’t get it out very often,” she said, as she slipped a pair of thin white gloves on her hands and gingerly lifted the wrapped book out of a foam-covered slot. “I’m afraid it will disintegrate in my hands.”

“I’m surprised you keep it here,” I said. “If there was a fire …” I stopped. It wasn’t any of my business.

“I keep it in a fireproof safe,” Abigail said, apparently unruffled by my comment. She laid the book down in front of me and gently removed its plastic covering. The leather cover looked like a layer of thin chocolate. A musky odor met my nostrils.

“The cover is in remarkable shape,” Abigail said, as she nimbly opened the diary. “The pages, though, are as fragile as a house of cards.”

The first page lay open before me, dated the fourth of January, 1692.

I could see the first few lines. The script was both foreign and familiar. Mercy’s letters bore strokes I didn’t recognize easily. Reading her words would be like deciphering a code, like uncovering buried treasure or peeling back a veil. They beckoned.

The ink grew faint. I couldn’t read the rest of the first page. “Are all the pages like this?” I lifted my head to look at Abigail.

“Many are that way. But not all. Some are better. Some are worse.”

I sat with the diary inches from me, surrounded on all sides by Abigail’s
horde of books. I couldn’t help but ask the obvious. “You’re a lover of stories. Why don’t you just transcribe this yourself?”

Abigail didn’t look at me. “I cannot write what needs to be written. One can appreciate art and yet not have the talent to paint a picture. Besides, I am too old.”

She wasn’t being truthful. I was sure of it. A retired librarian obsessed with books surely had the talent to transcribe a diary. And Abigail’s age didn’t appear to limit her in any other way. She was keeping something from me.

She reached into her pocket and silently handed me a pair of white gloves just like the ones she wore.

I slipped the gloves on my hands and placed my thumb and forefinger on the edge of the first page. My pulse quickened as nervousness swept over me. I had an immediate vision of the page crumbling to dust at my touch. I eased my finger under the page’s lower corner and slowly moved my hand upward, holding my breath as the page rose vertical. The binding made a yawning sound; I had awakened it. I clamped my mouth shut and pursed my lips together—as if this would keep the treasure in one piece—and let gravity ease the page down on the other side. The page creaked to its resting place and lay still. I exhaled.

Page two of Mercy’s diary was legible almost in its entirety. I leaned over the ancient words and a strange love affair began. There is no other way to describe it. I devoured those first few words like I was ravenous.