BEHIND THE SCARLET LETTER
SALEM,
MASSACHUSETTS
1849
PROLOGUE
It wasn’t the rain that woke him this time.
“What is it?” Sophia Hawthorne asked.
“I am fine,” Nathaniel said, stroking his wife’s lean body. “Go back to sleep.”
He didn’t feel brilliant tonight. This story, this time, was different. Things weren’t quite right. All of it bothered him. Was it a pure romance? A murder mystery, as the judge and the prosecutor believed? A tale of morality, perhaps? He despised them all, every single last one of them. And as he struggled to come to some reasonable explanation for their actions, he passed judgment on them.
Despicable, he thought. Yes, that was the correct descriptor.
It had been decades since he’d thought about her—the beautiful Asenath Caroline Smith—the woman with two given names who broke hearts and told half-truths. It had also been years since he’d thought of Judge Asa Chapman’s dripping words:
With the bloom of the plum, still unbroken on her cheeks, and with the damask rose tint of morning in her every feature, she invited the attention of men, when least capable of resisting it. Why else would so many men have seduced her? Why else would the lion hold communion with the lamb, and the man who should have been her protector become her pioneer to infamy? With no father to shelter her from the interesting approaches of seduction, she was vulnerable.
That was how Chapman saw it and how he’d portrayed her, and that is how the public viewed their relationship—an adulterous affair between a vulnerable young woman and an Episcopal minister. Every single word ever written about their affair in every major newspaper in New England—and beyond—had been poured over and gossiped about and never changed through time. But as Nathaniel lay there alongside his gentle wife, repeating all of the details in his mind, racing through the facts, trying to make sense of it all, something about it—about their stories—made no sense.
Yes, he reasoned, every family told lies, embellished the truth, hid some fact or detail about their life’s story. Even the Hawthorne family, his own family—or, quite properly, the Hathorne family—had its own dark secrets. His grandfather, Salem Magistrate John Hathorne, had presided over the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 and never once repented his actions, compelling Nathaniel to hide from the shame of his Hathorne descent by expanding his surname to Hawthorne. So it was that even he hid the whole truth.
Looking up at the low ceiling, and back toward his sleeping wife, he recalled that his fascination with Asenath Caroline Smith had all begun in the fall of 1829. On a trip to New Haven to buy horses for the family stagecoach business, he ran into Horace Conolly. Over cigars and too much rum, his fellow Salemite had amused Nathaniel with the recounting of the trial of the century, the one that had torn through New England like a wildfire from a bolt of summer lightening. But it was only when he had suggested Nathaniel meet the young woman that his curiosity became aroused.
“She’s right here—in New Haven, visiting friends! I know someone who can arrange it. Oh, come on, old fellow, do it,” Conolly had proposed like a naughty adolescent.
Nathaniel remembered too how Asenath Caroline Smith had toyed with him.
Without looking up from her sewing that day she had said with a light laugh, “How will such a fictionalized story help me, Mr. Hawthorne?”
He had wanted her to feel his sincerity, to believe him. No longer in the bloom of her life, as Chapman had once described, she was still a beautiful woman, with her deep rich auburn hair and white porcelain features, which she presented to her best advantage.
He’d sensed she wasn’t quite able to absorb everything he told her, or understand that his unbridled enthusiasm was sincere, or that he wanted to help her. But then, he imagined every man she had ever met wanted to help her. She had just that right combination of beauty and vulnerability. She was the kind of woman every man wanted to ravage, and then protect.
But from what, he thought? How was that even possible? How was it that the urge to protect and seduce should exist side by side?
“I will protect you. I swear,” he remembered saying to her, as he’d made the sign of the cross against his heart, like a schoolboy. “I will set the story in the town of Boston.”
“Boston?” she had repeated, a dull boredom settling into her voice.
“In Puritan Boston, during the mid-seventeenth century,” he’d said with a bright smile, trying to keep her interest alive. “It’s important to explore sin and guilt in the modern age.”
“Is it?” she had said, looking over at him, placing her sewing down in her lap. “You know, you look like a ridiculous young man with that high-standing collar and that large black bow tie. Come here. Let me fix things for you.”
My God, she’s beautiful, he recalled thinking, as she came over to him. He could smell something faintly sweet, like rosewater. And when she’d adjusted his collar, her cool hands brushed his cheeks, sending a thrill down his body. He’d wanted right then to press her to his lips, to his body. “I am hopeless,” he’d found himself saying. “And I have this limp.”
She had smiled. “I never noticed. I only see your striking features and those beautiful, piercing, dark eyes.”
He remembered feeling his face flush with embarrassment and how he’d quickly changed tack. “People need to know that the body may be fallen,” he had said earnestly, “but the spirit can be redeemed.”
“Won’t such a story expose me to even more ridicule and loathing? People think things up when they don’t have all of the facts. Their minds fill up the blank spaces with details that they imagine,” she had said, returning to stitching an elaborate embroidery of a heart pierced by arrows. She had held up her needle work. “This is how I occupy my time now—with busy hands. Takes my mind off of the past.”
He had taken the embroidery in his hands and examined the small delicate heart pierced by two small black arrows. “A scarlet heart?” he had asked, with interest. “Do you intend to affix it to a pillow?”
“No, to a garment.”
“A dress?” he had asked with genuine surprise.
“Here, like so.” She had placed the fine needlework over her left breast and reached for his hand. “I have just the black dress that will set it off beautifully,” she had said as she moved his hand over her heart.
He hadn’t thought of that moment in years.
And now, as he looked over at his angelic wife, he was wracked with guilt, because he had allowed himself to be taken under her spell—just as every man before him had.
But what of her story? How should he cast her?
His wife stirred.
“Nathaniel?” she asked, turning over in bed. “What troubles you so?”
“Ammi Rogers and Caroline Smith,” he confessed. “I cannot quite get the proper pitch.”
She sat up in bed. “That is not like you, husband.”
“I realize only now that I dislike each and every one of them, the reason I have yet to write their story. I must complete it all in one tone.”
She reached out a hand to him and drew him in close. “Remember, darling, you don’t have to like the real people behind the story, but you must always love the characters you imagine them to be—just envision a better ending for them.” She looked into his eyes. “Do you have a working title?”
“Yes,” he replied. “The Scarlet Letter.”
And as he fell back to sleep, the story drifted over him in a new way.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
1849