A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  Boston lay jumbled upon a low hill, smoke rising from chimneys, thatched roofs pale in the October dusk. The harbour was silent, save for the lap of water against the ship’s hull.

  Then a solitary cry rose—“All’s well!”

  The mate sent them below.

  “Ye’ll disembark tomorrow.”

  Cook prepared a soup made of the last of the salt beef.

  The ship rocked, rocked.

  They ate sparingly, mindful of tomorrow’s fresh provisions, stunned by the quiet.

  In the night, Mary wakened. She lifted her head. Over the chuck and chatter of water, she heard the howling of wolves.

  II.

  BOSTON

  1634–1638

  I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

  Who says my hand a needle better fits …

  ANNE BRADSTREET

  New England poet, 1612–1672

  FOUR

  Visible Kingdom - 1635

  GOLDEN BEADS OF PITCH STUDDED the rungs. Mary’s palms were sticky, smelled raw, wild. She took a step onto the pier and staggered from the stillness. William, behind her on the ladder, turned to help Sinnie from the rowboat. Jurden handed up their bundles.

  They walked uphill on cobblestones that pressed the thin soles of Mary’s shoes, passing into the shade of close-set shops with overhanging gables. Signs creaked in the morning breeze, hung so low that Jurden ducked to pass beneath. Glass windows reflected their passage.

  At the top of the street, a shirtless man was collapsed forward in stocks. His head was locked between two boards, his hands hung clamped, arms spread like wings. Two men stood behind him—bent, busy.

  Mary reached back, took Sinnie’s hand and pulled her close. Sunrise warmed their shoulders; their shadows stretched long and black. The men at the stocks seemed reduced by the clarity of light. One raised a whip, slashed it down. The prisoner’s cry mingled with the shriek of sea birds.

  God’s visible kingdom …

  She obscured the tide of dismay by quickening her pace, even as William walked faster, too, and placed himself between the women and the scene of punishment.

  —

  Anne Hutchinson led Mary and Sinnie upstairs to a large chamber at the back of her house. Since their brief meeting in London, two years earlier, Anne’s blonde hair had faded. She seemed burdened, her eyes like the needle of a compass, a weighted distinction quickly shifting.

  Straw-packed pallets covered in cloth ticking lined the walls. Sweat had browned the casings of misshapen pillows. Bunches of savory, sage, lavender, rue, pennyroyal hung from the rafters—their astringent scent ameliorated the stink of urine.

  The women dropped their bundles on the pallets.

  “You’ll be near your time,” Anne declared. She stood with arms folded, examining Mary, half-smiling.

  “Aye.”

  “Settle yourselves and come down,” she said. She left swiftly, pausing to nudge an empty chamber pot closer to its pallet.

  After she had gone, they looked at each other. Mary shook her head, dazed.

  “We be in America,” Sinnie whispered.

  They began to laugh, covering their mouths. Sinnie collapsed on a pallet and buried her face in a goose-feather pillow. They laughed for the voyage, ended, and for the ship not having gone down in the storm; for the sight of the wooden houses, so crude and strangely forbidding; for the man in the stocks; for Anne’s self-importance. They laughed for the sleep they had not had the night before—terrified, first, by the quavering wolf song; and then by the day that would dawn.

  “Oh, Sinnie.” Mary wiped her eyes. “Are we laughing or crying? Hush, now.”

  They straightened their coifs, brushed down their skirts, and went quietly down the stairs, emerging in a hallway. Through an open door, they found a room in which pallets were stacked beside piles of blankets and pillows. A fire burned on a hearth. Sunlight striped the scratched leather of a Bible.

  They heard the high voices of little girls mingled with the murmurs of women and followed the sound into a long, crowded kitchen. Children, elderly women and servants were all industriously engaged. Anne lifted bread on a peel from a beehive oven at the side of a hearth. A tiny girl turned a crisp-skinned goose, hanging on a string before the fire. Bloody gut-smell stung Mary’s nose—white hen feathers stippled the floor.

  “’Tis the day before Sabbath, you see,” Anne explained. She scooped two handfuls of dough from a bowl and began to knead, while her eyes studied Mary as if examining a project she must undertake. “We do no work tomorrow, so all meals must be in readiness by sundown.”

  Mary met Anne’s bold stare, offended by her tone. A silence fell. Anne lifted a wrist to rub her cheek, flour drifting from limp hand.

  “We have many ways of living the Lord’s commandments,” she added.

  “I shall have to learn them.”

  “Indeed you must, Mary, for punishments are severe and are visited upon us all equally, women and men, servants and children. Transgression of any of the Ten Commandments is punishable. In some cases, by death.”

  Anne spoke equably but Mary heard a quiver beneath the brisk tone.

  “We did see a man in the stocks,” Mary said, yielding to her curiosity. “Being whipped.”

  Anne set the kneaded dough onto a cabbage leaf, heeled and palmed it into an oval. “He did not attend church,” she said. “He went hunting instead.”

  Mary glanced at Sinnie, who stood behind her, so compressed by bowed shoulders, folded hands and downcast eyes she was as a reflection.

  “I have resumed my meetings, such as I kept in Alford,” Anne continued. “My teacher, Reverend Cotton, is here. As you have heard? Yes? I do explicate his sermons for they are too complex for most and I do have much experience in his way of thinking.”

  I shall not attend, Mary thought, with a sear of resentment.

  “You shall be needing me soon,” Anne added in a softer tone, coming close, wiping hands on apron and reaching forward. Without asking permission, she took Mary’s belly in her hands. “You will send your girl to me as soon as you feel your pains. Do you know what to expect?”

  “I have borne a babe,” Mary said. “He died, after three days.” She felt irritation rising. “I have attended at many births. I worked beside my aunt, in Yorkshire. She was a surgeon and a midwife.”

  She did not say, “And I did study with my uncle.” But she would, if—

  Anne’s face opened. Respect, surprise. “Ah,” she said. And smiled.

  After the midday meal, William and Mary, Jurden and Sinnie walked to visit a house that was for sale.

  “May it be as described,” William said, looking eagerly from side to side.

  The roads were broad footpaths snaking out of the town’s core, littered with manure, broken crates, rags, bone fragments and the skulls of pigs. Along the way, smoke rose from chimneys, souring the air; and over wooden palisados, steam wisped from middens heaped in gardens.

  “Good day, Goody,” Mary murmured to passing women, as Anne had advised—you say Goody to those women you do not know. They carried buckets, wore cloaks to their ankles, pinned at the collar. White coifs covered their hair; wide-brimmed felt hats were tied beneath their chins. They did not look at the men but slid their eyes at Mary and Sinnie.

  They are more subdued than at home. They seem … cowed. Furtive.

  She did not want to voice the thought, which clamoured amongst other realizations. Sinnie clutched Mary’s arm.

  “Listen.”

  Together they came to a standstill.

  A many-voiced fluting came from the west. The voices soared, higher, higher—then broke, quavered down to silence.

  “Wolves,” Mary breathed. “Far off, I wager.”

  They stumbled to catch up with William and Jurden.

  From Corn Hill Road, which wound through old Indian fields of charred tree stumps, four square miles of the peninsula spread out below, houses like rilled pebbles running to the sea, thatched roof
s blending with rocky outcroppings.

  “Trimount,” William said, stopping to point at three hills. On Truelove, he had committed to memory the map of the Shawmut Peninsula. “Down there, Windmill Point. And there, they will build the fort. Does it put you in mind of your island, Sinnie?”

  “Aye,” Sinnie said. “Only we have nae trees. Not anywhere. And none such as … that.”

  She glanced westwards where forest rolled to the horizon, so vast that the scent of moss and pine resin coiled beneath the colony’s odours of smoke and manure. Jurden stood behind William. Carrying nothing, his hands were as ornaments and he stuffed them in his pockets, eyes following Sinnie’s gaze.

  They came upon the house at a corner, where a new road branched away—Mylne Street, it had been named—on which only a single dwelling stood. The builders had been prosperous enough to put glass in the front windows, although the roof was thatched with marsh grass. The second storey overhung the first, cast a shadow over a rotting wooden bucket. It seemed forlorn to Mary, abandoned.

  William pulled open the door. Sunlight lay across a floor of pine timbers, hewn flat, strewn with dead flies. A chimney divided the downstairs into halves with a hearth on each side. William and Jurden wrestled with a warped door, found that it opened into a slope-roofed shed built onto the back of the house. They went to view the garden and outbuildings.

  A ladder leaned through a hole in the ceiling. Mary bade Sinnie climb up.

  “There be two big chambers,” Sinnie called down. “There is a frame for hanging herbs.”

  “You can sleep up there, Sinnie. You’ll have the risen heat.”

  The last owners had endured one winter only and left in such haste that they had abandoned many things. A dusty iron kettle hung from a trammel on the charred lug-pole. An earthenware pitcher, its lip broken. Two black leather mugs. Mary pulled a chair from its place at a table and found its seat collapsed, the rushes nibbled away. Through oiled paper in the back windows, Mary could see the shapes of William and Jurden, scooping at the soil with the edges of their boots.

  Who were these people. Why did they leave.

  “Will we put red felt over the windows?” Sinnie whispered. She had come soundlessly down the ladder.

  “Nay, Sinnie, hush!” Mary whirled, put a finger to Sinnie’s lips. “Take care. You must not speak of such superstitions here.”

  She drew a breath. Witch hunters came through Kettlesing in her childhood.

  “There is no need. We are … we are under the special protection of God. And the Reverend Cotton.”

  And the watchmen. At that moment, two passed the front windows. They carried muskets and brass-tipped staves. Mary stepped back deeper into the house, thinking that she must hang curtains.

  William came around to the street and opened the front door.

  “Do you like it, Mary?” He seemed pleased. “I could order our chests to be delivered here tomorrow.”

  Mary felt the baby make a tremendous heave in her womb. “Yes,’tis fine.”

  She ventured to the front window and pressed her face to the glass. As yet, no house had been built across the road and the view was unimpeded—a vista of the marsh, below, and the houses of Boston perched on the hillside above. Truelove’s masts rose over their roofs. The ship was being loaded for its voyage home.

  The shadows of clouds swept over the marsh, leaving light in their wake. She felt its energy and turned to face the dishevelled room.

  Work. Obey. Pray. Remember why we came.

  They returned to School Street where they would stay with the Hutchinsons until the house was ready. At bedtime, Mary followed Anne up the stairs. They carried bayberry candles in pewter holders.

  Anne stopped, turned to address Mary.

  “Tomorrow we do not speak any words that do not pertain to religious matters,” Anne said. Her voice held a shade of intimacy. “Do you be sure to tell your servants. Also, you may know the rules but I shall tell you in case you do not. Women are not to speak inside the church. On any matter. We do not participate in services, save to sing. We do not vote on church membership.”

  Anne continued up the stairs, her age apparent only by the measured energy of her steps.

  Lying on a pallet beside William, Mary remembered the London nights, when no sound of nature could be heard, only a racket of cartwheels, neighing horses, drunken yells, the shriek, perhaps, of a murdered whore. Here, the wind made a restless tugging, causing mournful whistles; she heard no other sound but the howling of the wolves, an eerie ululation, bearing no relationship to the day just past or the one to come. And despite having found themselves a house of their own, she curled against William, burying her face in his neck, feeling the futility of choice.

  —

  A spit of morning rain tapped the windowpanes.

  At the table, the children stood behind the adults waiting to be handed their bowls. They ate their cold cornmeal porridge standing, and did not speak. Husbands and wives and Anne’s two elderly cousins shared maplewood porringers.

  Will Hutchinson gave a lengthy Bible reading. He did not read well and Mary noticed how Anne frowned, exasperated. Mary closed her eyes, comforted by the familiar, ancient words.

  “As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord …”

  The servants listened in silence from their table in a pantry off the kitchen.

  The entire household set forth at the same time to walk to the meeting house. The rattle of drums, not bells, called them to worship. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat. Rat-a-tat.

  Men, women, children, servants; all walked clutching Bibles. People stepped from doors, emerged from alleys, a stream of black hats and cloaks, white collars, red stockings.

  As they turned into the square, Mary saw Anne reach for the hands of her youngest daughters and followed her gaze toward the stocks and whipping post flanking the meeting house.

  A pole had been attached to the stocks so that a rope could dangle from high above, mocking gallows; a young woman stood at the end of the rope, a noose draped around her neck and a sign hung upon her chest.

  “A.”

  Watchmen stood at either side, gripping their staves. Mary dared not lift her head, but passed so close she could have touched the young woman’s boots.

  The seventh commandment. A capital offence. Will they kill her? Is this but a warning?

  The ministers marched through the crowd. They were hunched, as if from excessive study, and wore black skullcaps. Clutching wind-blown papers, cloak billowing, Reverend Cotton led them into the meeting house. Women and girls slipped around to the back of the building, entered through a separate door and filed into square pews with low partition walls, across an aisle from the men.

  Mary settled herself as comfortably as she could. Her distended belly strained the small of her back. She kept her eyes on her knees, like the other women, since one glance had shown her all there was to see. Bare plaster walls. No tapestries, no gold chalices, no stained glass. No rood screens, no statues. No chasubles or surplices. No incense. No hymnals.

  As it should be.

  Elders and deacons faced the congregation.

  People stood and began to sing. They sang from memory, with neither accompaniment nor hymnal nor a given starting note.

  And he shall be like to a tree,

  Planted by river-waters,

  That in his season yields his fruit,

  And in his leaf never withers,

  And all he doth shall prosper well,

  The wicked are not so—

  But they are like unto the chaff,

  Which wind drives to and fro.

  Mary closed her eyes. She did not know the music. It rose around her, strange and eerie, in its way.

  Then Mr. Wilson, the preacher, rose. He spoke of the Hedge.

  Invisible but real, he told them, it stood like a bulwark between them and the wilderness, protecting their godliness, keeping evil at bay. The forces of the anti-Christ dwelt in the forest, he said. Devilish spirits possessed
the salvages—unfortunate humans who existed in darkness, most of them having no possibility of redemption or salvation.

  He spoke of how, should disorder fall upon the colonists by their own wickedness, God’s displeasure would cause the Hedge to burst asunder. Thus, he said, public punishments of those who transgress God’s laws.

  “Misbehaviour of one can bring wrath down upon all.”

  Mary strained to understand. It was a new perspective: evil and goodness as communal endeavours. And the Hedge, a strange image to take into her mind, and the reason for the young woman’s suffering. Mary wondered if the girl needed to piss, if she were thirsty. If the man with whom she had sinned sat now with the others, unpunished.

  Wilson spoke for two hours.

  Mary slumped forward against the pain in her back.

  The tithing man raised his long stick, one end knobbed with a burl, and whacked the shoulders of a squirming boy. The boy squealed, clapped a hand over his mouth. Mr. Wilson broke off. He glared down at the pews. The tithing man resumed his stately walk.

  Straight, sit up straight, or he shall think me asleep …

  At noon, the congregation rose and went to an adjoining building, the Sabba-day house, with horse stalls at one end and a fire burning on a hearth at the other. No one spoke. They ate brown bread, doughnuts or gingerbread. They waited their turn at the outhouses; then they returned to their pews.

  Mr. Cotton began his lesson.

  People sat forward on their seats, earnest and expectant. Cotton’s face was florid, fleshy; his full lips puckered with dignified sorrow; in his eyes, an expression of suffering benignity. Anne nudged Mary’s elbow with her own, slid her eyes at a woman and three children who sat in the pew closest to the pulpit.

  His wife and children, Mary guessed.

  Cotton preached that the elect are justified, or granted salvation, by God’s grace. Then, he said, a person’s actions were good. However, good works could not buy God’s grace. It was freely given, and those to whom it was given were as if one with the Holy Spirit.