She was going to be alone.
She was about to face, alone, an inquisition as undeserved as any. As Mercy prepared herself for her fathers passing, all she knew was that she would soon be alone. She thought it was only grief and loneliness that awaited her.
That seemed terribly unfair as I saved the document and powered down the computer for the day. Mercy thought the worst thing that could happen was that her father would leave her.
I’d grown envious of Mercy’s relationship with her father. They seemed so in sync with each other. It was inconceivable to me that Mercy could have hidden anything about herself from Eli Hayworth, or that she would have wanted to. Mercy’s bond with her father seemed the kind shared by kindred minds. The kind that makes someone look at a parent and child and say, “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” or, “They’re peas in a pod, those two.”
Or “like father like son.”
I pushed myself away from the diary, moody and contemplative. Abigail and I had eaten early, a light Florentine omelet that was very good, but it was after seven and I was hungry again. All I had in my dorm room was a package of stale Oreos—stale because Clarissa had gotten into them and hadn’t bothered to seal up the package after her rampage. I wondered if Esperanza had left out any of the oatmeal cookies she’d made earlier in the day. I wanted one for the ride home.
I stepped out of the library and into the tiled entry, intent on heading to the kitchen, but the sitting room doors were open across from me, and I could see a fire blazing in the fireplace on the far wall. Surprised, I tiptoed in, fully expecting to see Abigail sipping a cup of tea and at last enjoying a room that needed to be enjoyed.
But it was Esperanza I found kneeling by the hearth, feeding handtorn scraps of paper into the snapping flames.
She looked up at me. “Are you leaving? Do you want me to turn on the porch light for you?” She started to get up.
“No. I know where the light switch is. I was just … I was wondering where Abigail was.”
“Do you need something?”
“No. I just saw the fire and thought she was in here.”
Esperanza turned back to her task. She thrust a handful of torn paper into the blaze. “She’s upstairs, on the phone.”
“Oh.”
“If you must speak to her, I can interrupt, but I’d rather not if I don’t have to. It’s a long-distance call. She didn’t want to be disturbed.”
My eyes flew instinctively to the photograph of Dorothea and her baby. “You don’t have to disturb her,” I said.
“Good,” Esperanza said, “because I really don’t want to.” Then she added to herself, “Not when she’s talking to him.”
I don’t think she realized I’d heard her.
“Is it Graham?” I asked
Esperanza swiveled her head to face me. “What do you know about Graham?” Her dark eyebrows crinkled to curious angles.
“Um. Not much.”
“Has she told you about him?” Esperanza looked dubious. No, more accusatory. I shouldn’t have said anything.
I felt my face color. “No, not exactly.”
“What you mean, not exactly?”
I decided tell the truth. I am not a very good liar. “I’ve only guessed at who he is.”
Esperanza blinked at me and waited.
“She mentioned to me once that she has just one living relative, a man in Maine.” I continued. “That’s Graham, isn’t it?”
Esperanza looked away. “We should not be discussing this.”
“Why not?” I took a step toward her.
“Because I work for her and so do you. She may not pay all your bills, but she pays mine.” Esperanza tossed the rest of the paper shreds into the fire and stood as the flames welcomed them greedily.
“Why is no one allowed to talk about him?” I asked as gently as I could.
Esperanza waited a moment before answering. “Because that’s the way Abigail wants it. If it makes her happy not to talk about it, then fine with me. She hasn’t had much happiness.”
I knew this already about Abigail. I knew she had lived a thwarted life, and I itched to know what had happened to her. I wanted to know what she had chosen, I think, deep down, I wanted to avoid making the same mistakes.
“What happened between her and the man she wishes she’d married?” I asked. “Do you know?”
Esperanza exhaled deeply, watching me as she contemplated my question. She might have shared at least part of the answer had we not at that moment heard footfalls on the carpeted stairs beyond the sitting room.
Abigail.
Esperanza said nothing. Neither did I.
We waited in silence as Abigail closed the distance between us and then stepped into the sitting room. I turned to face her.
“All done for the evening, Lauren?” She looked tired. Pale.
“Yes.”
“And you are finished with those papers, Esperanza?”
“Sí. They are all burned.”
“Thank you, Esperanza. I’ll take my sherry now. Then you may go home.”
Esperanza left the room, and Abigail nodded toward the fireplace and the smoldering scraps of paper.
“Someone might try to steal my identity,” she said.
“Okay.”
Abigail grinned wryly. “I’m only kidding, Lauren. My shredder is broken.”
A weak smile formed on my lips.
Abigail turned to lead me out of the room. “Who’d want to steal this life?” she quipped.
My tepid smile vanished.
Abigail walked me to the front door. As I stood on the threshold, I saw Esperanza carry a tiny bell-shaped glass on a tray into the library. The liquid inside the glass was a bronzy autumn color. Esperanza’s eyes met mine just before she disappeared into the library with Abigail’s sherry.
Abigail and I said good-bye. As I walked to my car in the circular drive, I thought about waiting for Esperanza to come out. Her car was parked just ahead of mine. Perhaps she could tell me in a few short sentences what had happened between Abigail and the man she loved.
But Abigail chose that day to stand at the door and wave to me as I left. There was nothing I could do except drive away and wave back.
It wasn’t until hours later, when I was in bed, listening for Clarissa’s footfalls down the hall, that I realized Mercy couldn’t have been completely alone when her destiny became clear. Not completely alone.
John Peter had to be there.
Raul’s face filled my mind as John Peter’s name rushed to the forefront of my thoughts.
John Peter was there.
Twenty-Five
10 July 1692
I have been too busy and distressed to write. Goody Trumball brings us meals, though Papa cannot eat but a bite or two. John Peter still comes every afternoon to care for the animals and muck out the barn. Today he stayed to weed the garden and tend to my apple trees.
Papa asked me in a whisper to read him the story I wrote about a ship that sailed to the end of the world and found that it was really the beginning.
I read it to him twice.
19 July 1692
John Peter came to take care of the animals and brought us the latest news from the Village. Five women were hanged. Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Goode, and three others. Their bodies were thrown off Gallows Hill among the rocks. They were not even buried. Papa took my hand and asked me, if the same fate should fall to Rev. Burroughs, that I attend the execution and pray it would go quickly for his friend. He said it as if he would not be waiting at home for me afterward.
Then he asked me to burn his letter.
I asked him why, but he would not answer.
28 July 1692
Papa is with the angels. With Mama and Thomas.
He was borne away to Heaven as I slept at his side, and I did not hear him leave. When I gave in to exhaustion sometime in the middle of the night, he was with me. When I woke up at dawn, he was gone.
John Peter found me
stretched out over my papa’s frail body as I cried. He stayed with me until I was able to ride back with him to his mother’s house. Then he and Goodman Trumball attended to my father’s body. I do not remember being at his house. I remember a summer rain began to fall as I rode with John Peter on his horse. I remember laying my head against the wide expanse of his back and that his muscles moved beneath my cheek as he led his horse through the rain. I remember sitting in a chair and someone drying my wet hands with a soft cloth. It might have been John Peter who did that. I think his mother brought me a cup of cider.
I do not remember anything else of that day.
Papa was buried the same evening. An angry sun came out after the rain and set the earth to steaming. He could not stay above ground.
I do not remember that, either.
I have written to my cousin Samuel, but he is at sea. I do not know how long it will be before he learns my papa is dead. Papa told me before he died that Samuel must come with his new bride to live at the cottage so I will not be alone. It is not proper for an unmarried girl to live alone. But I do not wish to share the cottage with anyone else, not even Samuel. Not yet. I only want to grieve in solitude.
I am glad Papa is breathing the air of Heaven with lungs that are not diseased. But I miss him. He has been gone from me five days.
29 July 1692
I laid out table settings for two tonight.
I laughed at first.
Then I wept.
I pushed my chair away from the diary, blinking back tears that I didn’t want to fall on pages already smudged from long-ago grief.
Abigail had returned to the library at some point while I worked, and she moved toward me. In her hands she held a tissue. “Here,” she said.
I took it and dabbed at my eyes. “Guess where I’m at in the diary today?” I said. My voice cracked.
“I know where you are.” Abigail took a chair across from me at the writing table instead of her usual one behind me.
“And I even knew it was coming.” I laughed, but fresh tears tumbled down my cheeks. I mopped at them, surprised and angry that they refused to stop.
Abigail said nothing. Her face revealed nothing. It was as if she felt nothing.
“So how did you know I’d need this?” I waved the wet tissue.
“Because I needed one the first time I read it.” Her voice was flat.
I looked up at her. “When was the first time you read it?”
“The day my mother gave it to me. I was thirteen.”
“Thirteen?”
“You think that’s too young.”
“Well, sort of. She just handed it to you one day?”
Abigail’s features softened. “I had to wash the chocolate off my hands first.”
I dabbed at the last stray tear and smiled. “I’m serious.”
Abigail inhaled, as if to grab a remnant of oxygen from that long-ago day when she first saw Mercy’s diary.
“It was my birthday. My mother invited me to her bedroom. She had a little safe in her closet. She told me was going to give me something special for my birthday. I thought it was going to be one of her diamond necklaces, or maybe the ruby ring I liked, or the sapphire earrings her parents had given her. But it was the diary she handed me.”
Abigail stopped and I waited.
“I was disappointed,” she continued. “Not terribly so, because I loved books and was taken with the idea that the diary had been written by an ancestor of mine during colonial times. But still, I wasn’t overjoyed.”
“You wanted the ruby ring instead?”
“No, not exactly. I was just frustrated at the reason my mother gave it to me then. She told me she was supposed to wait until I was nineteen, like she had been when her mother gave it to her.”
“Mercy’s age?”
“Mercy died a month before her nineteenth birthday.”
“So why didn’t she wait?”
Abigail blinked slowly and then locked her eyes on mine. “Because she was dying.”
My voice hung useless in my throat.
“So I was mad,” she continued. “Ticked, I think your generation would say. I ended up with all those jewels anyway. She didn’t bother to give them to me ahead of time, like she did the diary. The diary was the only thing of hers she actually handed to me before she died, so I saw it as proof that life isn’t fair. And then, of course, I read it that day and was sure of it.”
“You read it in one day?”
“I wasn’t as patient as you. If I got to a part I couldn’t decipher, I skipped it and went on to the next part I could read. I stayed up most of the night.”
I imagined Abigail as an adolescent, reading the saddest parts of the diary alone in her darkened bedroom. What had run through her young mind as she read of ghostly apparitions, screaming girls, and swinging bodies?
“Did you know before you began reading what happened to Mercy?” I asked. “Did your mother tell you?”
Abigail looked at her withered hands folded in her lap. “She told me …” Abigail’s voice fell away and she chewed on her lower lip, obviously deep in thought. I didn’t think she was trying to remember what her mother said. She was trying to decide how to tell me.
Or how much.
“What did she say, Abigail?”
Abigail raised her eyes to look at me. “She … she said the diary would make me sad, but that I was to remember that underneath all the sadness, the diary told a love story. That was the part I was to remember, and that’s what I was to tell my daughter, if I had a daughter, when I gave her the diary.”
I blinked. “A love story.”
“Yes.”
A love story? I saw no hope for Mercy and John Peter’s love for each other. None. I had two months of Mercy’s entries left to transcribe, and I knew in that time she’d be accused, tried, and hanged.
She’d be dead.
That didn’t seem like a love story to be remembered.
“Is that what you think it is? A love story?”
Abigail looked past me, into the room across the hall, whose doors stood open that day.
“Yes, I do,” she said. “I think, when you are done, you will too.”
I let my eyes wander down to Mercy’s aging words. There weren’t that many pages left to transcribe. August and September, just two months. I suddenly wanted nothing more than to finish it.
I wanted to stay up all night and finish it, as Abigail had done.
I was about to ask if I could rearrange my work hours so I could spend the weekend at her house and finish the transcription, when her voice broke the silence.
“Lauren, I need to go away for a couple days. I need to take care of a few things.”
“Oh.” I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. I didn’t try.
“This doesn’t need to interfere with your work on the diary. You can either not come the next few days, or if you wish, I will give you a key and you can work your normal hours. Esperanza will only be here a few hours a day. I’m giving her most of the week off, so she won’t be cooking meals. She deserves some time to herself.”
“Oh. That’s okay,” I said, my mind already whirring with how easily I could finish the diary if I could stay as long as I wanted.
“I hope this doesn’t cause problems for you.”
“No. Not at all. I’ll be fine, I’m sure.”
She studied me for a moment. I was too eager for her to go and it showed. I attempted to back-pedal a bit. “I’ll do what I can while you’re away and just save any questions I have until you return.”
Another long moment passed between us where she simply studied me.
“Lauren, I want you to know that I trust you. And I’m glad I can trust you. I know you won’t let the laptop or the diary leave this house while I’m away if I ask that they not. And I am indeed asking you. Being able to trust you means more to me than I can say.”
It was my turn to be silent. It had never occurred to me to remove the diary f
rom the house. I would never have taken a chance with such a priceless relic. But taking the laptop out? I might have thought of that. It annoyed me that Abigail had thought of it first and was forbidding it.
“I know you’re anxious to finish the diary,” she continued. “I don’t blame you. But you’ll have questions when you’re finished, and I ask that you wait until I return to find out the answers. I assure you everything will be perfectly clear in the end. I would like you to trust me on this as I trust you.”
We sat and stared at each other as she waited for me to seal our covenant of trust.
“Why will I have questions?” I said. “I don’t understand.”
She ignored my question. “When you finish the diary, wait for me. Anything unclear to you I will make clear. I promise.”
“How long will you be gone?” I asked.
“Three days. Maybe four. I plan to return on Monday. Tuesday at the latest.”
“All right.”
“All right to everything?” she said.
“Yes.” I sighed. “I’ll wait for you.”
She rose from her chair, placed her hand in her pocket, and withdrew a key. She placed it on the writing table next to the diary.
“You may stay in the guest room at the top of the stairs if you wish.”
I closed my hand over the key. “Thank you.”
Abigail started to walk away. I wondered if she was heading to Maine. To Graham. To bail him out of some kind of trouble, perhaps?
I called her name and she turned.
“Is everything all right? Do you need help with anything?”
The corners of Abigail’s mouth rose slightly. “No. Everything’s not all right. But it’s my problem to deal with. Thanks for asking, though. I’ll see you when I return.”
“Good-bye, Abigail.”
As soon as Abigail was gone, I stood, covered the open diary with a plastic sheet, and gathered my things, including Abigail’s key. I tossed the wet tissue into the trash and ran my hand lightly and lovingly across the diary as I stepped away from the table.
The Shape of Mercy Page 15