Hester(9)

In my mind’s eye the shoemaker’s banner appeared in brown and black with gold trim, men’s silver-buckle shoes, a pair of lady’s red boots, and the word SHOEMAKER in pinewood-green velvet with a lavender K the soft hue of foxglove.

This startled me. I had come to believe that Mam had taken the colors with her when she died. Now it seemed possible that Mam approved of my union with Edward and that this faint recollection of my youthful visions was her way of telling me so.

It was as if she’d given me back a small vision of my colors again, the same way she’d given me red hair and green-blue eyes.

“I’d like to do it,” I said.

The shoemaker smiled, but Edward grimaced.

“Perhaps—” the shoemaker began, but my husband cut him off sharply—“No”—and it was done.

There was something in Edward’s expression that cautioned me to be silent. I feared he had seen my secrets, that somehow he knew about the colors, the history of them, perhaps even the tremble of my ancestress as she’d stood on the rooftop and shouted, I have lain with the Devil’s forked prick inside me.

Until that moment I had imagined I might one day speak of my childhood to him. Now I waved off the shoemaker with an apologetic shrug and followed Edward inside.

That evening and the next he worked straight through supper, servicing customers who’d come to him with croup, dropsy, and fever. At the end of the night he limped upstairs to our parlor. His hand shook as he put a flint to his pipe, but as he drew in the smoke his face relaxed slowly.

I served his favorite plum pudding and asked if I might make the shoemaker’s banner “as a neighborly gift.”

“Yurrr my wife.” His rolled r sounded slurry. “You won’t do anything that gives the appearance that yurrr for hire—it would reflect poorly on both of us. I told you from the first.”

But I had already drawn out the red boots for the shoemaker’s sign, the velvet pinewood-green letters, the lavender K. The work had a life of its own; it seemed a gift from someone and somewhere I had not visited in a long time. To let it go felt like letting go of the small bit of my mother and my childhood that had just returned to me. Even if the shoemaker never saw it, I wanted to see what I could create. And so I worked in secret and became accustomed to spending my time at the top of the house in my sewing room while Edward spent his down in the shop.



* * *



I DID NOT know my husband was in trouble until a man in a black cloak banged at our door. Edward struggled to get out of his chair and staggered back as the man waved a fist in his face.

“Keep your hands out of the poppy jar and pay us,” the man shouted.

Edward scrambled to put something of value into the man’s hands and sent him away.

“What does he mean?” I asked.

“The Chinese have made the price of poppy exorbitant.” Edward’s eyes did not sparkle as they had when we met. “I cannot keep up with the payments.”

“Then you must raise your prices,” I called after him. Or let me help with my needle, I wanted to add.

Edward said something about mercury and vinegar turning to gold, and I thought that his mind had been addled by pain and poppy. I began to cry, and Edward pushed away from the table, angry at my tears. He told me not to worry—“Don’t wurrrry”—but I took it upon myself to watch more carefully. While he slept I rummaged through his bills and ledgers and soon understood that the compounds, oils, and tinctures with laudanum, mercury, and opium that had made Edward prosperous had also put a terrible craving in my husband that left him helpless against the pain of his torn leg.

He’d managed to keep his habit a secret and paid for what he consumed with a generous margin of profits. But the Chinese troubles had doubled the price of poppies that year, just as Edward’s injury had made him hunger for it.

We were on the brink of ruin.

“Is there nothing I can do?” I was on my knees, begging Edward to let me use my needle to help pay his debts, when a pair of strongmen came into the shop carrying clubs and an order from the magistrate.

“Ye are hereby banished to the poorhouse, where ye shall be given as ye need until ye can repent and restore thyself,” the constable read.

“It’s my leg,” Edward pleaded. “Have pity on my pain.”

The marshal barged past him. Edward staggered, but my mind went icy clear.

I ran up to our bedroom and put on my finest embroidered dress, then pulled my drab black day dress over it. I turned my red cloak inside out so it would appear worthless, grabbed up a vial of poppy I’d managed to hide away with my mother’s wedding gloves, and the sketchbooks I’d kept since childhood. My chatelaine was around my waist where it always remained; I shoved my needle and tambour hook into a hidden cape pocket and rushed back into the parlor where the men were raiding our shelves.

“That is a very old and valuable book,” Edward cried out. The men paused, and we all looked at the title before they wrapped up Ripley’s Compound of Alchemy in a piece of my prized green velvet and threw it into a sack.



* * *



WE STUMBLED ALONG Ropework Lane behind the constable, gagging at the stink of the pig fields and slaughterhouse. I held on to Edward’s arm, for he was pulling his wounded foot and struggling with the thick apothecary book that he’d managed to carry away. The sky was a cruel, merry blue and the large doors of the poorhouse creaked open like the red-brown maw of a beast.