A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  I wish I could be on deck, watching England slip away.

  She sat quietly, thinking that this would be one of many desires that would go unfulfilled.

  “Puts me in mind of my home,” Sinnie whispered and Mary saw that her face had flushed, as if she were excited. “The croft did feel like this, Mistress, just like this. I did sleep beneath the table with my brothers and sisters, all a-tangle.”

  A child began a quavery wail. Sinnie wrapped her hands around her knees, buried her head in her lap.

  Mary felt the first qualms of seasickness. She lay on the damp straw mattress and brought to mind anything that did not rock, sway, tip, slide. The moors, Aunt Urith’s house with its buttery stones, her first child, his gravestone a grey speck in London’s reeking din.

  They were like the ship’s wash, her memories: purling white and crisp, then spreading into the moment.

  Dear Lord, we beg of you, be with us now in our peril on the sea, for we do thy bidding.

  The wind blew them southwest.

  On fine days, families were allowed to gather on deck. The men stood along the railing. The girls lifted strings of cat’s cradle from each other’s fingers or dressed their Bartholomew dolls; boys flew makeshift kites. The women clustered in the lee of a deckhouse, shoulder to shoulder for warmth—sewing, knitting. Groups of young men—indentured servants—kept to themselves, Jurden Cooth among them.

  On all sides was the blue furrowed emptiness.

  Mary befriended a young woman from Lincolnshire. Thin, with a stretched, eager smile, she had three children, two girls and a boy. Her husband, a wool merchant, had left a fertile farm and a business built up over generations.

  “Our minister was ejected and lost his living,” the woman said. “After that we could not bear to go to church. We could not abide by the changes.”

  She raised her knitting close to her face, needle probing for a dropped stitch.

  “We feared the Lord’s wrath,” she said. “We had a fine big brick house. But my Henry will build again. They say the land is rich.”

  “We lived in London where my husband had a business,” Mary said. “He has brought goods to open a shop in Boston.”

  Three oak chests sat in the hold. One was filled with gloves, caps, needles, everything needed to start a business. Another held guns, shot and powder and all the farming tools that William had learned would be unattainable. Her own was packed with silver spoons, kettles, dresses. Bolts of linsey-woolsey, skeins of yarn, Irish stockings. Woollen capes, blankets.

  The woman put down her knitting.

  “I brought the seeds of my hollyhock,” she said, wistfully. “Tall, it was, a lovely pink. I’ll give you some. It grew beneath my kitchen window.”

  She looked at the shining waters for a long time.

  “Are you frightened?” Mary asked. Her own hands were spread over her belly, receiving the baby’s kicks, like a gift.

  The woman started. “Aye, but I’ve told no one. I am ashamed to say so, for ’tis God’s will we follow.”

  “God’s commands are fearsome,” Mary said. Her lips softened into a sad smile. “We are all frightened, surely.”

  She be beautiful, Sinnie thought. She curled on a pallet, watching as Mary prepared for bed. She longed to comfort her, for she saw that Mary grieved many things: her family, her tiny son, the people and hills of childhood. Sinnie’s own lost world hung in her mind like a locket the size of a fingernail. Sheep, surf and wind splined with the cry of gannets, horsehair fishing lines laid to dry. Brothers and sisters. A mother with gaunt face, eyes drained of pity. Exhausted, Mother were. She had to send me. A feeling came, twisted, confused. Father, too, had sent her. Her parents had embraced her. She had ridden away on a pony, at the side of her new master. Sent to a better life. Her neck, jolting as she looked back, watching as they waved; she saw them turn away. Bitter, her heart. And that, too, was bad. They could not have known.

  William bent to enter the berth. Sinnie pulled the blanket farther across her face, leaving one eye exposed. So handsome. Eyes like almonds, hands of a gentleman. Of a size, they were, William and Mary, when they stood side by side at the railing of the ship.

  She with that baby growing big in her …

  —

  On a Sabbath, warmed by winds from the south, one of several ministers aboard took his turn holding worship in the open air. Afterwards, men gathered around the capstan to discuss his sermon. William and Mary stood at the edge of the group.

  “He doth say that it killeth souls to be preached to by ordained ministers who are uneducated,” a man said. “I agree that we must have men of highest education in our churches.”

  “Aye,” Mary called out. She remembered the words of the Puritan lecturer in London. “But I have heard John Everard say that God is in you ‘although you know it not.’ That if you are born of the Spirit, you are Spirit. So I cannot see it is of such significance that a man be educated, for he may be educated and yet be hollow within, following rituals without Spirit.”

  Men turned, in their leather jerkins and hats—startled, eyes narrowed with affront. William’s arm slid through hers. She felt a gentle tug.

  “Aye, she has a point,” a man said, mollifying, forestalling censure. He looked at her belly, exchanged a sympathetic glance with William.

  Mary turned away. She bit her lips, felt the heat of blood risen from an agitated heart. William snugged her close as they walked the narrow, canting deck.

  “Had you been born a man, Mary,” William said, “I believe you would have been a minister. Or a magistrate.” He smiled as if picturing the preposterousness of this.

  “I have spent years making the same observation.” She looked out over the surrounding glitter. Beneath the fierce Atlantic sun, she felt a shift in her feelings. After the death of their parents, Uncle Colyn, a lawyer, had begun teaching her brother, and had allowed her to study alongside. Scripture, logic, mathematics, Greek, Latin, history. You have a brilliant mind, he had told her. Almost like unto a man’s. She had listened, appalled, to her uncle’s accounts of injustice, had heard enraged voices coming from behind his study door. Since Aunt Urith was surgeon as well as midwife, Mary had stood at her side and accepted pus-soaked bandages, or bloody bits of amputations—fingers, eyelids. She had helped bathe bodies: women dead in the throes of childbirth; babies; old people. There had been no time for considerations about what a woman could or could not do in the teeming world of her aunt’s surgery; or bent over in Uncle Colyn’s study, dipping pen in ink, drying the page with cuttlefish powder from her pounce pot.

  William was watching her—curious, unsure of her mood.

  She did not return his look.

  One week, two weeks. Three, four, five, six. Seven.

  The king, the queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Whitehall, Dyota and Ralf, the tumbling bells, rattle of wheels, heads on pikes, crowd-jaunty hanging days, rats nuzzling entrails, falling ear and gaping wound and blood-soaked hair, martyr’s blood: it all fell back. Day after day. Fell back. Dream-small and as nonsensical.

  Watery soup, bearing maggots. Cheese hard as leather.

  Truelove’s bow rose, swivelled, fell.

  Smiling, a smile not for her. He made a soft tomcat sound. Almost laughing, his eyes fixed upon her. He tugged Sinnie’s ribbons. At night, when she closed her eyes for sleep, she saw the salt crusted in the corners of his mouth—his lips, caked with dead skin. Remembered his deliberate stumble, pressing up against her. Excuse me, Miss. Dreaded the coming day.

  No man, ever. Ever.

  —

  From the bed, Mary and Sinnie could see the helmsman standing at the whipstaff, squinting up through a shaft of light to watch the sails.

  “I will speak to William, Sinnie. He will not bother you again.”

  “Thank you, Mistress.” A whisper. Too upset to talk. Wiping tears with the back of her sleeve. Mary gazed at her. No wonder. Half the crew yearns to hear the burr of Shetland in her voice.

 
“How did you come to leave your home, Sinnie?”

  “’Twas what I dreamed. To go into service,” Sinnie murmured. Her wet eyelashes were pointed, starry. “’Twas a man visiting the Earl. I was hanging fish in the skeo.”

  The girl’s English was difficult. Mary raised her eyebrows, not wishing to interrupt, for she glimpsed truth like the corner of an envelope slipped beneath a door.

  “A wee hut of stone. He asked my name and I did tell him. He said nothing but did ride away up the brae. Later, the Earl asked my father and my father asked me and I said aye. I said aye, I would go with the man to London to be his lady’s maid. I was … I was …”

  She bent as if struck with pain in her belly. Then a wail came from her and she snatched up a pillow and buried her face.

  Mary sat, gripping her hands, witness to grief’s loneliness. But Sinnie cried out only once and then stifled herself—rocking, rocking. The ship rolled and they slid together, pressed close, arms, hair.

  “He were at me,” she whispered, struggling up. “Agane and agane. I had …” Her mouth warped, her eyes touched Mary’s belly and sheered away.

  “Ah, no, Sinnie.”

  “Aye. He took me to a woman, rid me of it. Left me on that garret floor bleeding.”

  Tears brimmed and spilled. Mary eased them away with the back of her hand. Sinnie took Mary’s hand, held it tightly.

  “I will never marry, Mistress. I will never have babes.”

  —

  A storm raged for two days. Their family bedstead, a slat with belongings tucked beneath, became like a nursery or a schoolroom, as the children flocked to Sinnie. Sinnie moved from berth to berth, holding bowls for vomit, bathing foreheads, feeding babies. Mary’s mattress was soaked from wind-lashed water seeping through cracks. She was violently ill. She slept, exhausted; woke to find herself holding a basin of pottage, spoon in her own hand partway to her mouth. The ship rolled, the basin tilted and Sinnie snatched it, wiped her forehead with a cloth, murmured soothing words. Mary grew accustomed to the face so often close to her own, a fairy face whose blonde-lashed eyes bore a merriness notwithstanding their grief dark as the sea’s blue.

  One of the few literate women, Mary read aloud from the Bible. At first she read to the children and then others came to listen: mothers, aunts, grandmothers and older sisters. They gathered on the mattress, sat on the floor. The women awaited teaching or opinions, and Mary was surprised to find herself voicing them.

  “I do wonder about the passage in Matthew 10.34, where Jesus says to his disciples: ‘Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.’ Have you …”

  She remembered how Uncle Colyn taught by questioning. How he led her into thickets of contradiction, helped her tease solutions.

  “… ’tis difficult, is it not? Down a bit he says, ‘He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for my sake will find it …’ ”

  Their eager eyes revealed puzzlement, pondering. Suddenly comprehending, they exclaimed. The men, in their own cluster, heard bursts of laughter, saw the women’s heads nested like petals of a chrysanthemum in the Dyers’ berth.

  “You do us proud, Mary.” A grandmother spoke, hoarse-voiced. “A woman with an education.”

  No, I cannot be minister or magistrate. But there may be other ways to use what I have been taught.

  Mary looked down the dark, stable-like space. Some blankets were secured, tied tightly; others billowed as the ship rolled, exposing shoes scattered from neat rows, Bibles fallen from makeshift shelves. She wondered how, in the New World, she would be called upon. She felt the pleasure of a new status, imagined herself starting a dame school, or holding conventicles after sermons, as Anne Hutchinson had done.

  Making a better world for the glory of God …

  William and other men sat on the floor, filling the aisle. The lanterns creaked, swayed. The men bent, low voices augmenting the ship’s complaints so that the women could not hear their words.

  “What be they doing?”

  “Drawing our houses.”

  Silence fell as the women mused upon this. They heard a man’s voice rise as he read from a pamphlet.

  “… killed within a stone’s throw of our house, above four score Snakes, some of them as big as the small of my leg, black of colour, and three yards long, with sharp horn on the tip of their tail …”

  Mary resumed reading, quickly. The two voices merged in a curious poetry.

  “… tinsel-winged grasshoppers …”

  “He who receives you receives me …”

  “… efts …”

  “What did you go out into the wilderness to behold?”

  “… chopped off with hatchet … purple blood …”

  William bore a new distraction when he returned to the berth, like a man privy to confidences.

  —

  Sinnie shook Mary’s shoulder.

  “They say they can smell land,” she whispered.

  “What is the hour?”

  “Nearly daybreak.”

  A lantern creaked, regular as a clock, marking the waves. It threw shadows on William’s sleeping body. Mary slid her arm over his shoulder, smelled his smoky, oily hair. She moved her lips against his ear.

  “Land, William.” She felt a sudden exhilaration, almost unbearable. To whisper, when she wanted to empty her lungs on the sound of joy. “Land!”

  He woke, instantly. “Can you see it?”

  “Nay,” Sinnie said. “They can smell it.”

  The swells grew longer, drawing the bow deep, carrying swash higher on the hull.

  One by one, eager faces appeared in the companionway door. Drowsy, tousled, eyes like startled ponies.

  Light rimmed the eastern horizon and then the sun rose—the sails steamed and around them the sea sprang into its full palette of greens and blues.

  The ship slipped into warmer air. Like relief from pain, it washed over them.

  Sinnie pressed against Mary, shivering with excitement. William slid his arm around Mary’s waist. Behind them stood Jurden, tall, silent.

  All around them, people lifted their chins, flared their nostrils.

  “Like new cider.”

  “Leaves, there be a smell of leaves.”

  Mary took deep breaths of the delicious scent—a braid of smoke, forest loam, sweet fern, resin.

  Small women stood on tiptoe, balancing against their men. “Canst see trees? Canst see trees?”

  Trees. They had discussed them, over and over; how, in the New World, trees could be the property of common men, who would not be hanged for felling one. Taller than St. Paul’s, Mary pictured them.

  Land broke from the sea in a series of blue humps.

  One after another, people fell to their knees and bowed their heads, until the sailors, hanging in the rigging, looked down upon an entirely silent ship, with a black-frocked clergyman speaking for all, arms spread.

  By nine o’clock, the ship had turned southwards. The blue mounds resolved into hills—indigo, violet, velvety black—and then the passengers could distinguish cliffs and the surf that broke against their rocky feet.

  God hath called to us to establish a peaceful kingdom, since his purpose has been destroyed in the old country. In this land, beneath these trees, upon these rocks.

  As the land passed, the reasons for their coming clarified in Mary’s mind. A simple life, built upon righteousness. Within the churches, nothing but benches and Bibles, rigour of thought and practice. A new society, openly Puritan in all its workings.

  The vision filled her, corresponding with the rugged landscape, so clear in the harsh light that mica chips sparked from the cliffs and the wings of birds were as glass shards.

  To begin! We shall rise on the Sabbath and go unmolested to our worship.

  “What do you think, Sinnie?”

  “’Tis bonnie, Mistress,” the girl said. Her voice was wondering. “So many trees!” She stood grasping her sleeves, fol
ded arms pulled tight across her chest.

  So slight, so sturdy, a repository of remarkable abilities.

  “Shall you like it here, do you think?”

  “If there are no wolves, Mistress. And if we are not attacked by de’il salvages.”

  “William has his gun,” Mary said. “We shall be within a village.”

  A plume of smoke rose over the forest, causing an outburst of speculation.

  “’Tis as they said. The natives do set fire to the undergrowth.”

  “Why would they do such a thing?”

  “Clear it for hunting.”

  Mary could make out trees already leafless. From this distance, they were but a grey cloud upon the land, yet here and there were clumps of scarlet, orange or yellow. Blue-black spires pricked through the roil of soft-toned hues.

  The smoke thickened and rose higher, unwinding against the sky.

  “A settlement! People! Look, look!”

  Spyglasses were passed from hand to hand. One reached Mary.

  “Salem,” a man said.

  “Nay, it cannot be. Salem is a city. Must be ’tis some small outpost or other.”

  A sailor called out. “’Tis Salem!”

  Silence.

  Mary’s glass revealed not houses but rude huts, plastered with mud, thatch-roofed. Trees still bearing their bark lay butt to tip, and behind the makeshift fence a few cows grazed. People clustered, like dabs of paint, watching the ship.

  These are their homes?

  Murmurs.

  “Surely ’twill not be such in Boston!”

  The settlement fell aft. The supper hour came but no meal was served. In early evening, Truelove’s crew swarmed in the rigging, reefing and furling the sails and the ship began a slow navigation through islands. The sky turned fiery and the islands became featureless, drifting black upon red water. High overhead, gulls flashed in the remnants of light. The air exuded the smell of cold soil. Rowboats appeared. Men in loose-sleeved linen shirts wrestled ropes upwards, the ship was attached, and the little boats inched them forward—past forested cliffs, past small islands, and into Boston Harbour.