Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese
For Kirk, Melissa, John, Claudia—
I see the past and the future in your beautiful faces
She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom!
—Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
A NOTE TO THE READER
Synesthesia is a unique sensory phenomenon that affects less than ten percent of the world’s population. A person with synesthesia—or “joined perception”—often experiences multiple sensory responses when only one sense has been stimulated. Many creative people experience this comingling of senses: the painter Kandinsky saw colors when he listened to music, and the musician Billie Eilish reports a wide array of synesthetic experiences that include color, sound, texture, and temperature.
Two types of synesthesia are experienced in Hester. These are grapheme-color synesthesia, in which letters are associated with colors, and chromesthesia, in which sound evokes experiences of color, shape, and texture. Synesthesia was not widely known or researched until the early nineteenth century. Therefore, to the characters in this story, episodes of synesthesia are mystifying and inexplicable.
ONE
Salem was meant to be a new beginning, a place where the sharp scent of cinnamon and tea perfumed the air with hope; a place where the colors could be safe and alive in me. I was nineteen years old and Nathaniel Hathorne was twenty-four when we met on those bricked streets. His fingers were ink-stained; he was shy but handsome. The year was 1829, and we were each in our own way struggling to be free—he with his notebooks, I with my needle.
Some people will tell you that Nat spent the better part of a decade after Bowdoin College alone in his room learning how to write. But that is a fabrication meant for the ages.
The true story of how he found his scarlet letter—and then made it larger than life—begins when I was a child in Scotland and he was a fatherless boy writing poetry that yearned and mourned.
Sometimes I still picture him in my mind, a lonely nine-year-old boy with a bad limp and a mop of dark hair standing at the edge of the Massachusetts Bay waiting for a ship. He knows that his father has died of yellow fever somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, yet the boy is waiting with pencil at the ready. Something in him knows—I believe this, even after all this time—that although his father will never return, a story just as powerful is coming toward him. It is me, bent into the wind, fleeing home with my colors and my needle and my own set of needs and dreams.
It is me with my red letter secreted away.
* * *
LIKE ALL THE women in my family, I was born in a stone cottage in the town of Abington beside the River Clyde. I had red hair and green-blue eyes and was named Isobel for my grandmother, just as my mother was named Margaret for her grandmother. “For hundreds of years we’ve been Isobel, Margaret, Isobel, Margaret—a chain of women going back and back through time,” Mam said, and I liked the way it sounded: all of us red-haired girls stitched together like paper dolls.
I lived in a world of magic and color then—my mother’s voice a sapphire stream flecked with emeralds, my father’s a soft caramel. In summer I ran barefoot through the valleys with my cousins and kin and saw their voices rise up in vibrant wisps of yellow and gold. The wind was sometimes fierce pink, and the sound of the waterfall on rocks glistened silver.
I didn’t know my colors were unusual and so I never thought to speak of them, just as I never remarked on the air, or the feel of a blanket at night, or the bark of my father’s laugh that I loved so well.
Every year at the summer solstice we burned a bonfire and danced around the maypole, and in winter we hung mistletoe in the cottage. Pap spoke of faeries who lived beneath the May trees, of selkie seals that swam ashore and enchanted the lovelorn, and of brave clansmen who’d died fighting the English.
“A horse with a shining wet mane is a kelpie come to take you away.” Pap’s voice spooled like caramel as he shook a warning finger at me. “And if you swim in the river and leave your clothes out for the bean-nighe she’ll steal your soul and that will be the end of you.”
“Don’t frighten her,” Mam scolded, and Pap put up a finger as if to warn me this was our secret.
But when we walked together looking for mushrooms in the spring, he spoke of sprites in white dresses who sat beside the river to wash the clothes of the dead, and of an unlucky lad who’d stumbled upon one and drowned the following day.
Mam grew tight-lipped when Pap spoke of magical creatures and mysteries beyond God, but I knew by the gentle way my mother trimmed his beard, and by the way Pap held her at the waist when they danced round the bonfire, that theirs was a love bond and that it would protect me. Their stories protected me, too.
* * *
I WAS MY mother’s first child. Five years later my brother, Jamie, came. While she was caring for him, Mam said it was time for my first sampler. She showed me how to make my letters first on a slate with chalk, then with needle and thread.
“One day you’ll learn to read.” Mam squinted at a line of letters she’d made and the rougher ones I’d traced out beneath them. “I didn’t get far, but you, Isobel, will read books.”
I’d heard it whispered that one of Mam’s aunts had been locked away in a madhouse and never seen again. She’d left behind a rainbow sampler that hung behind my mother’s sewing chair. I’d studied it for hints of madness but found none; I looked at it that day and vowed I would make one even more beautiful in my time.