A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

“’Tis nothing!” Dyota shrieked, suddenly, slapping the table with both hands. “’Tis her business. Ralf, make them stop this talk.”

  “Did you not hear?” William said. “Mary saw clergymen in the stocks. Having their ears sliced from their heads.”

  Ralf rose from the table. Love for his king was like a wasting sickness, Mary thought, seeing how shock rendered his skin translucent, like a porcelain glaze.

  “’Tis unseemly talk for Christmas, William. You brought this subject to the table and it has spoiled the pudding. You see, your cousin could not finish.”

  Dyota pressed ringed hand to mouth, tears welling.

  Wants me to go to her but I feel no pity …

  They did not finish their own pudding and Mary did not retrieve the plate on which she had brought it.

  —

  In March, Mary told William. She had missed two months of her flowers.

  When Dyota learned of Mary’s pregnancy, she sent a letter of appeasement, with an invitation to visit.

  Their time together became a matter of politeness—on Dyota’s part, an avid disgorgement of court gossip; on Mary’s, of answering questions about her health, which was of great fascination to her cousin.

  Mary did not tell her that William went once a week to visit prisoners in the Tower; purchased and brought food, paper, and ink for them; wrote letters to his family in Lincolnshire informing them of what he heard or inferred concerning Archbishop Laud’s intentions. She could not tell her of lectures they attended secretly in a Kensington home; or discuss the fact that the countryside was greatly disturbed by Puritans who went to the churches decorated under Laud’s edicts—and smashed stained-glass windows, bludgeoned gold candlesticks, burned Books of Common Prayer. Or that Parliament had been shut down by the king, and that many of its members were Puritans.

  Dyota bade her servant bring jellies and custards, fussed at Mary, urging her to indulge. Her eyes rested eagerly on her cousin’s bosom, which swelled over the lace edging of her dress. Mary tugged at her collar, covering the plump flesh.

  “Ah, Ralf and William,” Dyota said, beseechingly. “Once the baby arrives they will forget their differences. We are family, after all.”

  Dyota gossiped with the wife of an earl, who confessed that her husband had brought a beautiful young serving girl from the Shetland Islands and could not keep his eyes from her. Dyota had bade the woman send the servant to Mary. Seeing the girl’s sweetness and wondering at her terror, Mary hired her.

  Sinnie replied to her mistress in an English filled with peculiar words. She whispered her lilting prayers in Norn, the other language of Shetland. At sixteen, she stood barely taller than a twelve-year-old girl and would not meet William’s eyes. Her skin was the colour of cream, peppered with freckles.

  On a day of cold rain, Mary and Sinnie sat by the fire in the hall of their little house. Mary picked spine and bones from the flesh of a poached carp. Sinnie pressed a coffin of sweet dough. The large room had but one high window and so by afternoon the soot-blackened walls leaned and shrank in firelight and shadow.

  “Memory,” Mary said. “Do you remember the fish? All I need say to my brother Wyl, and in our minds we will be crossing the bridge through the lilacs’ perfume and the scent from the Kettlesing bake houses. And then we stop to watch the trout swimming in the Wharfe. Shadows a-quiver in the green water …”

  Sinnie had set aside the coffin, was peeling onions. The papery skins fluttered to the floor. She glanced up at her mistress, met her eyes and looked away.

  “Do you have brothers, Sinnie?” Mary asked. She was patient with the girl, who seldom spoke and when addressed was seized with fright.

  “Aye,” she whispered. Slices fell from her knife, circinate hoops juicy on the black wood. She blinked, her eyes filled with onion tears. “Two.”

  “And would it be as I said? You would speak a word and they would remember, the same as you?”

  “Aye,” Sinnie repeated. She took a breath, held the knife palm over knuckles, like holding hands with herself for courage. “I could tell of the greit sky over our croft on a spring morning—and if ’twere my brothers present, they would hear the dogs caaing the sheep or see the ponies with their klibbers and meshies and know what I meant if I said ’twas so clear we could see the far holmes and even the beaches of Hildesay.”

  The girl’s longest sentence. She sees we are not so dissimilar.

  “My brother died,” Mary said. “I did learn of it shortly before you came to us. He went to sea. His ship was lost. Now I have lost mother, father and brother. We were orphans, you see. Our parents drowned together. A flash flood caught their carriage.”

  At the far end of the hall, a kettle of stew hung from the fire hook, steaming, and three-legged pipkins filled with mussels stood in the coals. Sun had not brightened the room for days. The streets were deep in black mud and the house, sprayed by passing drays, was splattered all the way to the second storey.

  Sinnie looked up. Mary saw her eyes lighten with sympathy, and the hint of a sad smile, quickly repressed.

  In the ill-lit room, Mary ran fishy hands over her belly. She had dreamed of how she would make for her child goodness and joy such as she had known so briefly, sitting in her mother’s walled garden amidst forget-me-not and daffodils.

  And now we are in danger. Here, in the place I thought to make a home.

  “Soon I will feel the baby kicking,” she murmured.

  “I am a craft hand with a needle.” Sinnie took a breath, lifted the knife. The catch in her voice betrayed how ardently she longed to be setting stitches in a baby’s cap rather than weeping over onions. “I can make wee caps and curches and sarks.”

  The girl bent closer to her work, as if embarrassed by her confession.

  Would she come with us?

  TWO

  Linseed and Lettuce - 1634

  WILLIAM AND MARY FOUND THE place, a narrow, tippy house on Blackfriars Street, six storeys high, squeezed by its neighbours like a book on a shelf. William knocked; the door opened a crack and a thin, ginger-haired man peered out. It was Mr. Bartholomew, who, they’d been told, was hiding parishioners from St. Botolph’s, William’s family’s church. Laud had prevented several ships of emigrants from sailing to Massachusetts, so the family had come to London under cover of darkness.

  William whispered his connections. The man vanished, reappeared. He opened the door and they slipped inside. The room was crowded. An older woman with wary hazel eyes stood at the hearth, facing the room, baby held over her shoulder, children pressed to her skirts. She watched William and Mary enter, her hand making small circles on the baby’s back. Lines of worry marked her forehead, compassion etched creases beside her eyes. She observed them with an intransigence so strong that Mary felt a stab of fear.

  “My name is Anne Hutchinson,” the woman said. “This is my husband, Will. This is—” One by one, she introduced ten children and four adults: her sister, her brother-in-law, and two spinster cousins.

  A servant girl brought a plate of aniseed jumbles. Only one window allowed the lingering, evening light of May; candles had been lit, illuminating pewter plates and varnished oak. The room’s ambient rustle of whisper and movement settled.

  Anne Hutchinson resumed the tale she had been telling. She recounted how plague had struck their village, Alford, three years earlier, and how they had lost sixteen-year-old Susan and eight-year-old Elizabeth. Devastated, she had withdrawn from friends and neighbours for a twelve-month, seeking solace in religion. Two more babes—her thirteenth and fourteenth—had since followed and she and her husband had made the decision to emigrate. Will had sold business, sheep and the house. They had loaded whatever belongings they would take to America onto carts and made the three-day journey to London.

  The baby began to fuss and she settled it to suckle. “’Tis ever my practice to open the Bible at random to see where it pleaseth God to reveal himself. So I closed my eyes and placed my finger upon the page. It fell upon
the passage in Isaiah: ‘Thy teachers shall not be removed in a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers.’ Now, before my seclusion, I had been in the custom of holding conventicles at my home to elucidate the sermons of my teacher, the Reverend Cotton, for the women of the village. He had emigrated before. And thus it was revealed to me that we should go thither to the New World.”

  “The Reverend John Cotton?” said Mr. Bartholomew, amazed.

  “Aye. He was forced to flee shortly after his marriage and did not see his wife again until, pregnant, she joined him on the Griffin. He is now in Boston and is eager to receive us.”

  Mary saw Mr. Bartholomew glance at his wife, eyebrows raised; then he cast a second look at Anne almost as if he could not believe his ears. Anne Hutchinson had spoken of the famous minister as if he were an equal, an associate, the way William would speak of his fellow merchants.

  “His church was St. Botolph’s, in Lincolnshire,” Anne explained, as if geography might account for their association, yet Mary heard pride. She watched the woman’s large hand stroking the baby’s head and felt a small, urgent stirring in her womb.

  Talk shifted to the voyage. The men spoke of the tools they had been advised to procure. The words—frows, spades, axes, augers—were hard in their mouths, making their chins jut and their eyes narrow. The women moved closer to one another, softer words blending. Kettles, cradles, skillets, blankets. Everything they owned was packed away in chests; none of these people belonged, anymore, to London or to England.

  Sitting at a small table, William paged through the pamphlet, “New England’s Prospect.”

  Mary, already in bed, put arms around her knees and studied him.

  He opened his mouth as if to read aloud, then checked himself. He tossed down the pamphlet, stood, stretched. He undressed and came to bed.

  Both sat against the bolster. Mary held the blanket against her chin, gazing at the window’s pale square. William leaned his head back into clasped hands.

  “They call it the ‘New Jerusalem,’ ” he said.

  October.

  Mary woke to a violent cramp that seized her breath. Hearing her gasp, William laid a hand on her forehead. She opened her eyes as the pain faded and saw his fear.

  “Go for them,” she said. “I will pray.”

  He dressed, stumbling in his haste. He went to the attic door, called for Sinnie, clattered downstairs.

  In thee, O Lord, she whispered, do I seek refuge; let me never be put to shame; in thy righteousness deliver me …

  —

  They named him William.

  He glowed like an apple blossom, wrapped in white lambswool blankets. William wrote the glad news to Aunt Urith and Uncle Colyn.

  The baby had long, sly eyes, like his father’s. He glanced at Mary as he suckled, a froth of milk in the corners of his lips.

  Two days later, his mouth fell slack on Mary’s nipple. His limbs were limp, his tiny chest rose high in laboured breath. They sent for a doctor who applied a poultice of linseed and lettuce. By the end of his third day of life, the baby was dead.

  William took the swaddling clothes and bade Sinnie pack them deep in a chest. He carried the cradle to a closet beneath the eaves. Mary broke into a fever and the midwife applied hot paper steeped in sage and vinegar to her swollen breasts; the doctor prescribed a paste of herbs to be bound to her wrists. William brought her a pair of gloves. Beige lambskin lined with peach-coloured silk, their gauntlets decorated with ferns of silver thread. He lifted her poulticed wrists, laid the gloves beneath her hands, stroked her knuckles. He wiped her face with a linen cloth.

  “Mary, Mary. There will be another child.”

  God was watching her, holding her baby in his arms. She saw herself standing before him, penitent, weeping, although she lay dry-eyed on the flock-stuffed bolster. Why? More light than man, a shattering glory emanating warmth, he turned from her without answering. She felt alone in the dimming light, the last remaining member of her family. She wondered if God assumed her gratitude, since he carried her baby to the field of bluebells, sparing him all earthly sufferings. She stirred her head on the hemp sheet as this vision was replaced with another. Punishment, not mercy. She had refused a clear call. She had been meant to encourage William toward the New Jerusalem. For her own selfish ends she had not. She feared the voyage, the wolves, the savage forests. She had wished for a large London house with a garden running down to the Thames.

  And God had led her into the presence of Anne Hutchinson. Follow the teachers.

  Forgive me.

  THREE

  Truelove - 1634–1635

  ON A NOVEMBER DAY OF bitter cold, Mary and William walked through driving rain to the house of a Puritan couple. Others joined them, and they sat grouped around the hearth, drinking bastard or muscadine. They shared emigrants’ letters whose pages were softened from perusal, their folds worn thin. They took turns reading aloud.

  … have built a meeting house …

  … the winter safely passed. Now we do begin our planting. Cornfields have been impaled. The land is fat on the nearby islands and hath been brought into good culture …

  Building a mill for the grinding of corn. Large timber, marshland and meadow doth give a good prospect … Beaver pelts, in such abundance that …

  Trade with the Narragansett. Deerskin, baskets.

  We do put the heads of wolves on pillars …

  A woman drew a frightened breath.

  “Aye, but we would have muskets,” said a young man. “Think, Margaret! ’Tis the heads of wolves they describe. Shot dead. As some should be here.” His voice darkened. “On the past Sabbath, as we were coming from church, we did see men reeling beneath the lattices of an alehouse, five of them. They were falling down, faces red as if parboiled. A woman there was, begging, thin as a starved dog, children at her skirts. The men did rip at her dress, exposing her flesh. Two of her boys did protest and one of the men struck out. We ran forward, but the ruffians ran, too. The woman was left sobbing. Her child’s cheek was torn and bleeding.”

  In silence they contemplated how God’s wrath would gather over England for such crime, for frippery and drunkenness, for excesses of wealth and poverty. They could not imagine this punishment but were certain it would come.

  The men began to argue about whether they would be abandoning their church if they fled to New England. They would not, some reasoned, for they carried the flame of truth and would keep alive the pure church in the citadel of God’s chosen people.

  Their words were as cloaks masking the nakedness of obsession. They spread their fingers and then clutched emptiness, betraying a desire to hold firearms, oars, or the handles of ploughs.

  Women spoke of more practical matters.

  Will we have sheep? Make our own cloth? It seemed from the letters that every woman must be her own tailor, cowherd, malster, baker. They imagined snow falling on the clustered houses of Boston—snow so deep as to buckle paper windows. They dreaded the Narragansett Indians. They wondered if there would be doctors for their infants.

  “Nay, Joan,” a man said to his wife who had voiced her fears. He was earnest, urging. “Your preachers are there. ’Tis a holy enterprise.”

  Mary had regained her health. Her heart had been smoothed like sand with the waters of other women’s assurances—God took my firstborn; ah, Mary, love, they are angels, gone to Christ; you will have others. She carried the weight of grief.

  “I agree,” she said. She held her elbows tight to her sides, folded her hands. Beneath a black coif, her face bore its first, fine perpetual creases—pained curves beside her generous mouth. “I did hear a woman say that her Bible told her to follow her teachers. I believe the Lord wishes us to go.”

  William spoke. “The Massachusetts Bay Colony hath moved both their charter and their place of meeting from England to the colony. A clever move. Charter, governor and General Court are all in Boston. So they make of themselves a self-governing commonwealth. They have r
emoved themselves from the king’s reach.”

  In September 1635, they waited in Plymouth. The inn’s windows drummed with rain. For days, they could catch only glimpses of the small, high-prowed ship, ghostly in the harbour mist.

  Early one morning, Mary lay staring at the low plaster ceiling. Pregnant, she had slept poorly. An urgent knocking on their door raised William from the bedstead.

  The storm had passed. Truelove would sail on the high tide.

  “All hands on deck!”

  Officers ordered the families below as the sailors began preparations to weigh anchor.

  “Do you come, Mary.” William’s pale face was flushed with the sea light. Beside him were Sinnie and Jurden Cooth. Twenty-two, Jurden was taller and broader than William, prematurely balding, an amused light in his eyes yet thin lips down-turned as if to repress comment. He accompanied them as their indentured servant.

  “One minute,” Mary said. “You go.”

  As rowboats hauled the ship out of the harbour, she leaned on the railing, remarking the sudden separation between herself, launched on a voyage of great danger, and the land left behind—stone houses nested below the rocking masts, the sky stippled with birds that wheeled in the autumn sky.

  So it may be just before death. Not knowing what lies ahead. Reaching for God’s hand.

  She felt a pang of regret that the child, six months in her womb, would never know England. Ah, she thought, but it made its own urgent journey.

  The deck rose and tipped beneath her feet like a living thing. As they reached the deeper water, the first sail rose, luffed, wavered, then settled itself—gaining familiarity with the sky, gathering the light.

  Blankets and quilts hung from post to post along the ship’s walls, swaying slightly, marking each family’s berth. Below decks, it was dark even in the daytime, and she saw a confusion of details—a child’s cap, rounds of cheese, red wool. Unbalanced by her belly, Mary grasped one post and then the next, hearing the whimpers of children and mothers’ croons, while sailors’ feet pounded close overhead. She found the blankets of their berth drawn back, Sinnie sitting in the far corner. Mary dropped beside her and leaned her head against the planks, listening to the rush of water against the wall.