The Letter Unburned: A Lost Epilogue of the Scaffold

On a certain field, in that burial-ground beside which King's Chapel has since been built, there remained the grave upon which no joyful passer-by would willingly tread. Yet there was one who came, in the failing light of autumn, when the elms shook their last leaves upon the headstones, and stood before that dark point of relief which bore the device of a letter — an engraving upon the tombstone so sombre that it seemed as though the very stone had absorbed all the grief that the soil beneath it held.

Pearl Prynne — for she had long since ceased to bear the strange, elfin wildness of her childhood — arrived in Boston harbour on a vessel from England, a woman of thirty years and more, her face still possessing that remarkable beauty which had once caused the Puritan elders to wonder whether so fair a creature could truly be the offspring of sin. She wore garments of a dark but rich material, and upon her bosom there was no scarlet letter, nor any device whatsoever — only the smooth fabric of a gentlewoman of means and standing. And yet, as she walked through the narrow streets of the town, she felt upon her breast a phantom warmth, as if the embroidered symbol her mother had worn still radiated its ancient fire through the very blood that connected them.

The town had changed, and had not changed. The scaffold in the market-place had been taken down some years past, the timber rotted and replaced with a modest well, around which goodwives now gathered to draw water and exchange their measured gossip. But the memory of what had stood there — of who had stood there — lingered in the air like the smell of old smoke. Pearl fancied she could see, in the slant of afternoon light across the cobblestones, the very shadow of that platform upon which her mother had been displayed, a living sermon, a breathing emblem of transgression.

"You seek the burial ground, madam?" asked a young minister who had noticed her standing at the crossroads, her eyes searching the town as one searches the face of an aged parent for the features one remembers from childhood.

"I do," said Pearl. "I seek two graves, if they may be found. One for a woman who wore upon her breast the mark of her own honesty — for such I have come to understand it. And one for a man who concealed his mark until the concealment itself became a greater torment than any scaffold could provide."

The young minister — a man of perhaps five-and-twenty, pale and earnest, who had heard the old story only as a whispered legend, a cautionary tale that the elder clergy spoke of in darkened rooms — regarded Pearl with a mixture of curiosity and something approaching reverence. He had been educated at the college in Cambridge, and had read much of sin and suffering in his theological studies, but never before had he stood in the presence of one who had been, as it were, the living fruit of so notorious a chapter in the colony's history.

"I know the graves," he said quietly. "They share a single headstone, though the two were not buried side by side. There is a space between them — as there was, I am told, a space between them in life that could never quite be crossed, save in secret and in shadow."

Pearl nodded, and a strange expression crossed her face — not grief, precisely, nor bitterness, but something older and deeper than either. It was the look of one who has spent a lifetime constructing, piece by careful piece, an understanding of a mystery that was planted in her soul before she had the language to name it.

They walked together to the burial ground. The young minister, whose name was Eliphalet Hobson, spoke little, sensing that the woman beside him carried within her a silence that was not to be broken by trivial speech. The path wound between leaning headstones, their inscriptions worn by decades of New England weather into a kind of grey illegibility, as though time itself conspired to erase the petty distinctions of virtue and vice that the living had carved upon them.

And there it was.

The tombstone stood somewhat apart from its neighbours, as if even in death the occupants of the graves beneath it were set aside from the common fellowship of the departed. The heraldic device was as it had been described — a simple escutcheon, bearing only the letter "A," rendered in a style that might have been sable upon gules, darkness relieved only by the sombre redness of the single character. Pearl stood before it for a long while, and the young minister withdrew a few paces, leaving her to her communion with the dead.

"Mother," Pearl said at last, and her voice, though quiet, carried in the stillness of the autumn air with a clarity that seemed almost supernatural. "I have come back. I have crossed the ocean that you sent me across when I was yet a child, and I have lived the life you wished for me — a life unencumbered by the letter, by the scaffold, by the pointing fingers and the hissing whispers of those who made themselves your judges. I married well. I have children of my own, and they know nothing of the scarlet letter, nothing of the midnight vigils on the scaffold, nothing of the physician who wore kindness as a mask over his revenge."

She paused, and drew from within her cloak a small parcel wrapped in faded silk. With careful hands she unwound the fabric, and there, in the fading light, the scarlet letter itself lay revealed — that extraordinary piece of needlework, the golden thread still gleaming faintly, the elaborate embroidery still vivid against the worn red cloth. It was smaller than Pearl had remembered it, for she had last seen it through a child's eyes, and to a child it had seemed as vast as the world.

"I kept it," she said. "They would have buried it with you, or burned it, but I kept it. I have carried it across the sea and back again, folded in silk, locked in a box of cedar-wood. I have never worn it. I have never shown it to my husband, nor to my children. And yet I could not destroy it. For what is it, in the end, but a testament to the truth of your heart — a truth that the colony could not bear to look upon, and so they made you wear it as a punishment, when it ought to have been an honour?"

The wind stirred the bare branches of the elms, and somewhere a bird called out — a single, clear note that hung in the air like a question without answer.

"And you, Father," Pearl continued, turning her gaze to the other side of the stone, where the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale lay in his portion of the earth. "You, who could not speak until it was too late. You, who stood in your pulpit and thundered against sin while your own sin ate you alive from within, like a worm in the heart of a rose. I have forgiven you. It took me many years — more years than I care to number — but I have forgiven you. Not because your silence was justified, but because I have come to understand that your silence was its own punishment, more terrible than any letter, more cruel than any scaffold. You suffered, Father. God knows you suffered. And in the end, you spoke. In the end, you stood upon the scaffold in the light of day and claimed us — Mother and me — before the eyes of all the world."

She knelt upon the ground and placed the scarlet letter upon the headstone, where it lay like a wound against the grey granite. And then Pearl Prynne did something that would have astonished the elders of that stern Puritan community, had any of them remained alive to witness it. She wept. Not the wild, tempestuous tears of the sprite-child she had once been, but the deep, quiet weeping of a woman who has carried a grief so long that its release feels less like sorrow and more like the breaking of a fever — painful, yes, but also cleansing, also necessary.

Eliphalet Hobson, watching from his respectful distance, felt the tears upon his own cheeks before he was aware of them. He had read much of redemption in his books, but here, before this grey stone in the autumn light, he witnessed it — not as a doctrine, but as a living act. The daughter of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale had returned to the place of their suffering, bearing with her the very emblem of their transgression, and had laid it down. Not in anger, not in shame, but in a love that transcended the harsh categories of sin and virtue by which the colony had sought to order its world.

Pearl rose, and dried her eyes, and looked upon the letter one last time. Then she turned to the young minister.

"Let it remain," she said. "Let the rain wash it, and the snow cover it, and the sun fade it. Let it become part of the stone, as it was part of her. It has done its work. It has told its story. And the story, I think, is not one of sin — not truly. It is a story of what happens when love is forced to wear a mask, and what happens when, at last, the mask is removed."

She walked away from the burial ground, and the young minister walked beside her, and neither of them looked back. Behind them, upon the grey headstone, the scarlet letter lay in the gathering dusk, its golden thread catching the last rays of a sun that was already below the horizon, glowing with a light that seemed to come not from without but from within — the final, imperishable illumination of a truth that no darkness, however deep, however long, could ever entirely extinguish.

And in the years that followed, those who visited that quiet corner of the burial ground would sometimes find, upon the old headstone, a scattering of wildflowers — left, it was supposed, by some unknown hand, in honour of a love that had outlasted its punishment, and a letter that had outlasted its shame.