The Second Heartbeat

Chapter One: The Sleet

The bleeding started at half past three in the morning, though Mercy Aldenn would not know the hour until later, when she found the clock in the downstairs hall had stopped at precisely that time, its pendulum hanging still as a dead man's tongue.

She woke to wetness. Not the slow seep she had learned to expect—the body's small betrayals that attended pregnancy like unwanted guests—but a sudden warm rush that soaked through her shift and into the mattress ticking beneath her. She lay rigid in the dark, one hand pressed flat against the mound of her belly, the other gripping the edge of the rope bed until the hemp bit into her palm.

The room was black. Sleet struck the windowpanes in fitful handfuls, and the fire in the hearth had burned down to a dull orange eye that watched her from across the chamber.

Six months. She was six months along.

Too early to bleed like this. Too early and too much.

Mercy drew a breath through her teeth and sat up slowly. The wetness spread beneath her, warm at first, then cooling fast in the January air. She could smell it: copper and salt, the smell of a butcher's block, the smell she had learned twice before in this same bed, in this same dark.

Not again.

Please, God. Not again.

She swung her legs over the side of the bed. Her bare feet found the floorboards and she stood, swaying, one hand braced on the bedpost. The shift clung to her thighs. She could feel the blood running now, a thin hot trail down her inner leg, and her stomach clenched with a terror so old and so familiar it was almost like greeting an acquaintance.

Josiah's side of the bed was empty. He was in Salem Town for the court, had been gone three days, would be gone three more. His pillow lay undented, his Bible squared neatly on the nightstand beside it, its leather cover gleaming faintly in the hearthlight like something alive.

Mercy crossed the room to the chest beneath the window and found a cloth. She pressed it between her legs and held it there, bent double, breathing.

The cramp came like a fist closing.

She bit down on the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood there too, and waited for it to pass. When it did, she straightened, trembling, and looked down at the cloth.

Dark. Too dark for spotting. Too much for anything that might resolve itself with rest and prayer.

She thought of Temperance Bixby, the housekeeper, asleep in the room below. Temperance was sixty years old, iron-spined, devout as a fence post was straight, and about as warm. She would tell Mercy to lie flat and pray. She would bring a candle and a Bible and sit in the corner chair with her lips moving and her eyes closed, and if the baby died she would say it was God's will, and if Mercy died she would say the same thing with the same face.

Mercy did not go downstairs.

Instead she pulled her wool cloak from the peg by the door, drew it over her bloody shift, and pushed her feet into the leather shoes she kept beneath the bed. She took the back stairs, the ones that led through the buttery to the kitchen door, moving slowly, one hand on the wall, the other pressed to her belly.

The kitchen was cold. The fire had been banked hours ago and the room smelled of ash and the boiled mutton Temperance had served for supper. Mercy lifted the latch and stepped out into the storm.

The sleet hit her face like a slap from a dead hand.

She gasped, staggered, caught herself on the doorframe. The yard was a sheet of mud and ice, the fence posts barely visible in the dark, the barn a black shape hunched against the sky like something waiting. Beyond the fence, the road to the village ran north through bare elms whose branches clattered together like bones.

Mercy did not take the road.

She turned south, toward the marsh.

The path was narrow and treacherous in daylight, a ribbon of packed earth that wound through dead grass and frozen puddles to the edge of the wetland where the reeds grew higher than a man's shoulder and the fog, even in winter, moved with a slow deliberation that made you think it was deciding something. In the dark, in a sleet storm, it was suicide.

Mercy walked it anyway.

She walked because she had buried two daughters in the churchyard on the hill, two small graves side by side beneath a single stone that read only ALDENN because Josiah said naming dead infants invited sentiment and sentiment invited weakness. She walked because the first had lived nine hours and the second had lived four and this one, this desperate stubborn creature inside her, had been alive for six months and she would not lose it in a dark room with Temperance Bixby praying over her like a crow on a fencepost.

She walked because Tabitha Noyes lived at the end of this path, and Tabitha Noyes had hands that knew things no prayer book could teach.

The marsh opened around her like a mouth. The reeds hissed in the sleet, leaning and straightening, leaning and straightening, and the ground went soft beneath her shoes. She could hear water moving somewhere to her left, slow and black. The path narrowed to a thread.

Twice she stumbled. Once she went to her knees in mud that sucked at her skirts, and the cramp came again, harder this time, and she bent over in the dark with her forehead nearly touching the ground and made a sound that was not a word and not a prayer but something older than both.

Then she saw the light.

Tabitha's cottage sat on a hummock of dry ground at the marsh's edge, a low stone building with a turf roof and a chimney that leaned slightly east, as though the house itself were listening to the wind. The windows glowed amber. Blue glass bottles hung in the nearest one, catching the firelight and throwing it back in cold fragments that looked like eyes.

Mercy reached the door and knocked.

No answer.

She knocked again, harder, and heard movement inside: a chair scraping, a soft voice, a sound like claws on stone.

The door opened.

Tabitha Noyes stood in the doorway in a linen shift and a shawl the color of dried blood. She was perhaps fifty, perhaps older—she had one of those faces that settled into age early and then refused to move further, as though time had lost interest. Her hair was loose, iron-gray, hanging past her shoulders. Her eyes were dark and quick and missed nothing.

She looked at Mercy's face. Then she looked at the cloak, at the dark stain spreading down the front of it.

"Inside," Tabitha said. Not a question.

Mercy stepped over the threshold and the warmth hit her like a wall. The cottage was a single room: hearth, table, bed, shelves lined with jars and bundles of dried things that hung from the rafters like small hanged men. The fire was high and hot. Beneath the table, something moved.

Pin.

The hare was large for its kind, brown and ragged, with one eye white as milk and the other dark as a well. It sat beneath the table and watched Mercy come in with the unblinking attention of a magistrate.

"On the bed," Tabitha said, already moving to the shelves. "Cloak off. Shift up. Let me see."

Mercy obeyed. The bed was narrow, the mattress stuffed with marsh grass that crackled when she lay back. She pulled her shift above her belly and looked down at herself in the firelight.

Her belly was a tight pale dome, traced with blue veins. The blood was bright against her thighs, shockingly red, and it was still coming.

Tabitha knelt beside the bed with a clay bowl and a cloth. She pressed the cloth between Mercy's legs, gentle but firm, and held it there. With her other hand she touched Mercy's belly, fingers spread wide, pressing in small circles from the navel outward.

"How long?" Tabitha asked.

"I woke to it. An hour ago. Perhaps less."

"Cramping?"

"Yes."

"Steady or coming and going?"

"Coming and going."

Tabitha nodded. She removed the cloth, looked at it, set it aside. Then she reached for the bowl. It held a poultice, thick and dark green, that smelled of iron and crushed growing things—not flowers, not herbs exactly, but something rawer, something that smelled the way the marsh smelled in spring when everything was pushing up through the mud at once.

Tabitha packed the poultice against Mercy's body with steady hands. Then she leaned forward and pressed her mouth close to Mercy's navel.

Mercy felt the words more than heard them. They vibrated through her skin, through the wall of muscle and fat and blood beneath, down into the dark wet space where her child floated. The words were not English. They were not Latin. They were not anything Mercy had heard in church or out of it, and they made the hair on her arms stand straight.

Tabitha whispered for a long time.

Then the bleeding stopped.

Mercy felt it happen: a tightening, a closing, as though something inside her had been a door left ajar and was now firmly shut. The cramp eased. The warmth of fresh blood ceased its slow crawl down her thighs.

She let out a breath she had been holding since she left the house.

"Thank you," she whispered.

Tabitha did not answer.

Because at that moment, the baby moved.

Not a flutter. Not the gentle rolling Mercy had grown used to over the past weeks, the slow turning of a creature still learning the boundaries of its small dark world.

A blow.

It struck from inside with a force that made Mercy's whole belly jump. She saw it—the skin distending sharply to the left, as though something had punched outward with a fist, or a foot, or something that was neither.

The pain was blinding. Mercy gasped, arched her back, gripped the edges of the mattress. It came again: another blow, harder, and this time she felt something she had never felt before.

A bruise forming from the inside.

Not pressure. Not movement.

Impact.

As though the child inside her was trying to break out. Or as though something else inside her was trying to make room.

Tabitha had gone pale. In the firelight her face was the color of tallow, her lips pressed into a line so tight they disappeared. She still had one hand on Mercy's belly and Mercy could feel the older woman's fingers trembling.

Beneath the table, Pin the hare pressed itself flat against the floor, its one white eye fixed on Mercy's midsection.

"What is it?" Mercy said. Her voice came out high and strange. "What is wrong?"

Tabitha withdrew her hand. She stood slowly, as though her knees had gone stiff, and turned away to the fire. She stood there for a long moment, her back to Mercy, her shoulders rising and falling with breaths that were too careful, too measured.

Then she turned back.

"Do not let him put his hand there," she said.

"Who?"

"Your husband."

Mercy stared at her. "Why?"

But Tabitha shook her head and would say nothing more. She cleaned Mercy up, gave her a fresh cloth for the walk home, and pressed a bundle of dried herbs into her hand with instructions to brew them into tea and drink a cup at dawn and dusk.

At the door, Mercy turned back. "Tabitha. Please. Tell me what you felt."

The midwife's face was carved from something harder than wood. Her eyes were wet, but her voice was steady.

"Walk home quickly," she said. "Do not stop on the path. And Mercy—" She paused. "If you hear something following you, do not turn around."

Mercy walked home through the sleet.

She did not hear anything following her.

But twice, she felt the ground tremble beneath her feet, as though something large was moving just below the surface of the frozen mud.

She reached the house, climbed the back stairs, stripped off her bloody shift, and buried it in the bottom of the laundry basket. She washed herself with water from the pitcher, pulled on a clean shift, and climbed into bed.

She lay in the dark with both hands on her belly.

The baby moved again. Gently this time. A slow roll, a turn, a settling.

Normal.

But beneath it—or was it beside it?—Mercy felt something else. A second presence. Not moving. Not kicking.

Waiting.

She closed her eyes and dreamed.

In the dream, she was lying in this same bed, in this same room, but the walls were gone. The bed stood in the middle of the marsh, surrounded by black water and dead reeds, and the sky was the color of a bruise. She could feel the baby inside her, warm and turning, but she could also feel something else: something curled beneath her heart, tucked into the space between her ribs and her spine, folded in on itself like a newborn animal in a sack.

It was wet. Black-furred. Its limbs were jointed wrong—too many angles, too many bends—and its face was pressed against the inside of her, as though listening to her blood.

In the dream, it opened its eyes.

They were Josiah's eyes.

Mercy woke before dawn, gasping, her shift soaked with sweat. The fire had gone out. The room was gray with the first thin light of morning, and the sleet had stopped.

She lay still, breathing, waiting for her heart to slow.

Then she looked at the floor.

Footprints.

Small. Muddy. Leading from the hearth to the bed.

Three-toed.

Mercy stared at them for a very long time. Then she got up, fetched a rag, and scrubbed them away before Temperance could see.

She told no one.