Read Chapter 15: The Locket's Secret

The jailer’s wife came at dusk, when the corridor was quiet and the other prisoners had fallen into their fevered sleep. She moved like a shadow, slippered feet whispering on the stone, and she did not look at Mercy when she pressed the small, cold object into her palm.

“I should have given this back when they brought you in,” the woman muttered, her voice tight with shame. “I kept it for the shine of it, God forgive me. My husband says you’ll hang, and I won’t have your mother’s face on my conscience.”

Mercy closed her fingers around the locket before the woman could snatch her hand away. The silver was warm from the jailer’s wife’s pocket, worn smooth at the edges from years of handling. Mercy had not seen it since the night of her arrest—the night she had been dragged from her cottage, her herbs scattered like green tears across the floor, and the locket ripped from her neck by a rough hand that smelled of ale and fear.

She did not speak. The jailer’s wife shuffled away, and the door clanked shut, and Mercy was alone with the dead.

Her mother’s face. She almost did not dare to open it. Ruth’s testimony, Nathaniel’s ledger, the child’s death certificate—these were things of ink and paper, distant horrors. But this locket held Mary Hart’s smile, and Mercy had spent many nights in this cell convincing herself she could bear the weight of the world if only she did not have to look upon that smile and remember what had been taken.

She opened it.

The miniature was still there—her mother at twenty, dark-haired and bright-eyed, a hint of mischief at the corner of her mouth that Mercy had always thought of as her own. But the locket was heavier than it should have been, and when Mercy turned it over, she saw that the back panel had shifted. The jailer’s wife, in her fumbling guilt, had pressed on a hinge that Mercy herself had never found.

Inside the hidden cavity, small as a fingernail, lay a key.

Mercy stared at it. The metal was dark, almost black, tarnished with age. It was delicate, ornate, the kind of key that opened something small and precious—not a door, not a chest. A jewelry box. A case. A—

*The Bible.*

Her mother’s voice came to her as if from across a kitchen table, warm and low and full of secrets. *When you are older, Mercy, I will show you where I keep the things that matter. Not the things the world wants. The things the world fears. There is a lock in your father’s Bible, and this key—* she had touched Mercy’s chest, over her heart, where the locket used to rest— *this key will open it, when the time comes.*

Mercy had been twelve, too young to understand, too curious to forget. Her father’s Bible. The great leather volume that sat on the shelf in the parlor, its pages thin as bird wings, its spine cracked with use. She had thought her mother meant the passages within—some secret of faith, perhaps, handed down from mother to daughter. She had looked for underlined verses, for pressed flowers, for anything hidden between the testaments.

She had found nothing. And then her mother had died of the fever, and the locket had gone to Mercy’s neck, and the Bible had passed to Patience when the family had divided their small inheritance.

Patience. Who was in a cell not far from this one, accused of the very crime Mercy was accused of. Patience, who did not know half of what Mercy knew. Patience, who had held their father’s Bible when he died, who had kept it safe through years of hard winters and lean harvests.

The key grew warm in Mercy’s palm. She thought of Dr. Willard. She thought of his pale eyes and his soft hands and his hunger—the hunger that had followed her mother through the streets of Salem, that had shadowed her in the meetinghouse, that had pressed her for the recipe of the fever tonic until the very week she died.

*He coveted it,* Mercy thought. *He coveted it and she would not give it, and now I am here and he is there and he thinks he has won.*

But her mother had kept a secret. Her mother had kept a lock. And in her father’s Bible, hidden between the pages of a holy book, there was something that Dr. Samuel Willard did not know existed.

Mercy pressed the locket to her chest. The silver was cold against her skin, and her mother’s painted eyes seemed to watch her through the dimness of the cell.

She needed that Bible.

Nathaniel came to her two hours later, or perhaps three—time moved strangely in the hold, marked only by the changing of the guard and the slow crawl of moonlight across the floor. He was pale, his jaw tight, and there was a bruise blooming on his temple that he did not explain.

“Hathorne,” he said, when she asked. “He grows tired of my questions.”

“He grows tired of the truth,” Mercy said. She did not greet him. She held out the locket, the tiny key still nested in its cavity. “Look.”

Nathaniel took it carefully, turning it toward the guttering candle he had brought. His fingers were steady, but she saw the way they tightened around the silver. “What is this?”

“A key,” she said. “My mother told me—years ago—that it opens a lock in my father’s Bible. I never found the lock. I thought she was speaking in riddles, the way she sometimes did.”

Nathaniel looked up at her, his dark eyes sharp despite his exhaustion. “You think it opens something that can hurt Willard.”

“I think my mother was not a woman who kept keys for no reason.” Mercy leaned forward, her voice low and urgent. “She knew Willard wanted her remedy. She knew he would not stop at asking. And she kept this from me—from everyone—until the moment of her death she said nothing of it. Why would she hide a key unless the thing it opened was worth hiding?”

Nathaniel was silent for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Where is the Bible?”

“With Patience.” Mercy’s throat tightened. “When we divided the house, she took it. She treasures it. She would not part with it for love or money.”

“I can get to her,” Nathaniel said. “The guard on her cell is a man I grew up with. He owes my father a debt. But if I take the Bible, and Willard learns of it—”

“Do not take it. Ask her.” Mercy’s eyes burned. “Tell her that I have remembered something Mother said. Tell her to open the book and look for the lock. Tell her—” Her voice cracked. “Tell her I love her, and I will see her soon.”

Nathaniel looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded, and the key seemed to catch the candlelight like a single dark eye.

“I will be back before dawn,” he said. He did not say goodbye. He never did.

When he was gone, Mercy sat alone in the dark, the locket still warm in her hand. Her mother’s smile seemed to have sharpened, the mischief in her painted eyes grown sly and knowing.

*You thought you had won, Dr. Willard. But my mother was cleverer than you. She was cleverer than all of you.*

She closed her eyes. Somewhere in the town, a bell struck the hour. Six days until the trial. Six days until she would stand before the magistrates and the crowd and the man who had killed her father’s patient and dosed Abigail Proctor with poison to send her to the gallows.

Six days. And in her father’s Bible, hidden between the testaments, her mother’s final secret waited.