A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  Sinnie stood stock still, so distressed that her urgings found voice.

  “My mistress hath skill in herbs.” She felt the burn of a blush, saw the women lower their mugs and look between Sinnie and Mary.

  “Sinnie, Sinnie!”

  Sinnie set down the plate, ran to the door. Charlie burst into the house holding his wrist, hand in a fist. She put an arm around his shoulders, eased open his bloody palm.

  “Ah, not so bad, my pet.”

  Mary had risen from her chair, came swiftly, put out her hand.

  “Go to your mother,” Sinnie whispered. “She is a healer.”

  Charlie buried fist and face in Sinnie’s apron. Forehead, hard against her breastbone.

  I am sorry, Mistress, oh, I am sorry.

  Mary stepped back, stood watching them—eyes tender, the smile that had quivered finding focus: acceptance. She turned back to the women.

  Sinnie took Charlie to the kitchen and knelt on the hearth, dipping a cloth in the kettle. She murmured to the boy, while her mind apologized, explained. You see, Mistress … Still the boys and Littlemary turned to her with their questions, complaints, requests—and behind their masked eyes were the tear-swollen faces that Sinnie had seen. And Mary had not.

  It was a sweltering evening. Sinnie’s door was cracked open to encourage the passage of air from her window. Mary and William’s door, too, stood half-open, and she heard their voices across the hall, a familiar night sound from all the small houses they had inhabited. Mary’s. Agitated. Not bothering to whisper.

  “She had no one to post bond for her, William. She had no husband nor influential friends.”

  “I did enough, Mary. It would not have reflected well on me if I had intervened.”

  Outside Sinnie’s window, teeming of insects; surf, with its regular accents—roar and sigh of a vast wave.

  “Well. ’Tis done.” Mary’s voice, again. Harsh. “I received word that they compelled the master of the ship that brought us from Barbados to take her directly back to England. She was allowed nothing, nothing. No goods, no money. Only sixpence did she have. ’Twas the hangman who rowed her out to the ship. They are not subtle.”

  Baby swallows chattered. In the crepuscular light, shadows were slowly absorbing the knobs of Sinnie’s chest of drawers, six chestnut circles.

  William, whispering. She could not hear the words.

  Mary, pleading, her voice lower, dark.

  “… never again,” Mary said. “I could not bear it.”

  “No more children,” William said. “I will …” A lower voice. “… my pull-back …”

  Sinnie clapped hands to ears, slid from her bedstead. Her shift fell down one shoulder, her hair was twisted and pinned, sweat beaded along her collarbones. She held her breath and raised a hand to her door.

  Will it creak.

  The voices in the next room fell silent. She heard the slight squeal of wood, the groan of a mattress rope. She eased her door shut.

  Littlemary sat in a low chair by the door, bent over a bowl of wild strawberries. Shoulders raised, drawn into herself.

  Sinnie glanced at Mary, gutting a fresh-plucked chicken at the table. She is still a good worker. Only she would rather let Sinnie or William organize, supervise. Most days, before William rode to Newport, he allotted the day’s work, murmuring to Mary that she might help Sinnie should she desire. He treats her like the sick lady she was before she went away.

  Mary caught Sinnie’s eyes.

  “Three more,” she said. “Then I shall cut them.” Pimpled pink carcasses sprawled beside a plate of viscera. She waved a hand—flies rose, a spinning iridescence. Deftly, she disengaged the crop.

  “I would have thought this a feast beyond imagining when I was on the road with Dafeny.” She worked her hand wrist-deep into the next carcass. “We were accustomed to walk miles on empty stomachs. To ask food of strangers and passers-by. To break ice from ponds, kneel to drink.” She pulled out her hand, flicked kidneys onto a plate. Her voice sharpened, as if she realized her words were unwelcome and sullied the summer day. “Strange to say, but after a time I did not hanker after food, nor sleep, nor a soft bed. ’Tis good to strip away worldly possessions and walk in the light of the Lord.”

  Sinnie glanced at Littlemary, who bent lower over her bowl. Mary resumed her work—tugging, scooping, flicking. She wished to say more, Sinnie saw, but a muted insularity had come over her when neither she nor Littlemary had questioned or encouraged.

  Silence, the ticking fire and the calls of men in the field.

  Littlemary looked up.

  Her chin crept forward, her eyes darkened. Sinnie remembered the angry thoughts that Littlemary had whispered to her. Why had her mother undertaken such hardships? Why had she bothered to return, if she did care so for her new friends?

  Sinnie turned back to the fire, wool apron protecting her from the flames, sweat staining her cap and collar. She stirred the strawberries, boiling them down into a thick preserve. Charlie and Henry arrived at the door, mosquito-bitten, fingers stained red. They emptied their baskets into the one on Littlemary’s lap. They went to the water butt, drank from the ladle, and were gone.

  Littlemary sighed, pausing to contemplate the fresh supply of bleeding berries with their minuscule hulls.

  No one was idle, ever. Maher was in a shed making a broom with last summer’s broom corn, for Sinnie’s old one was worn to a point. She could see Willie out in the fields working along with the hired men. They hoed weeds from long rows of cabbages, corn, beans.

  She tries to love the children, especially Littlemary, but …

  Sinnie paused, wiping sweat from her forehead. Mary stood with one hand resting on the last carcass. She gazed out the door, watching the travelling clouds, her mouth bent in a slight smile.

  What do she think of? Who?

  The children were afraid of her, this woman who had been in prison for an outlawed belief.

  Perhaps, Sinnie thought, turning back to the strawberries. Perhaps William, too, is afraid, but for different reasons.

  In August, William set men to scything the grass. A day later, when clouds covered the sun and the smell of coming rain sweetened the house, every person, from Charlie to Mary, was called to the fields to rake. Sinnie, Mary and Littlemary left twists of green wool hanging over a steaming kettle of indigo, goldenrod and alum. They pulled the iron spider, filled with biscuits, onto spent ashes; swung forward the simmering stew.

  The sea was wind-scudded and shore birds flew low, skimming the beach. Sinnie worked beside Mary, shaking grass from the wooden tines onto a pile. The meadow was dotted with tall green hillocks, like beaver lodges.

  “Look,” Sinnie said.

  Two horses and riders were coming up the lane. The men dismounted, rushed to take up rakes.

  The first drops came. Men continued flinging hay onto a cart but then the skies opened and William signalled to desist. Sinnie saw Mary hurry over the stubble, animation in her shoulders as she took the men’s hands. She watched as they walked together, crossed the lane and were dwarfed by the great house with its rain-darkened clapboards. The cart moved past them, mounded with rain-jewelled hay.

  Sinnie slippered around the table, pouring cider, setting down trenchers of stew. The young men, Friends, were newly arrived from England. They had survived a stormy crossing on a small ship, the Woodhouse; they had stopped briefly in New Amsterdam, then had sailed up Narragansett Bay to Providence. They were sunburned, ecstatic.

  “’Twas by divine leading, for not one of us knew any navigation,” Christopher Holder said. He spoke with a high-born accent. He held his spoon delicately, as if it were silver rather than pewter and he gazed around the table with enthusiasm, then turned his attention to the stew poised before his lips. His hair, cut short over the forehead, fell thick and blond over his shoulders.

  “Aye, and a dear leaky little vessel she was, too,” remarked the other young man. He was shorter, with a strong jaw and gentle mouth, equally w
ell-spoken.

  “Where are the other Friends?” Mary asked. She had not picked up her spoon nor sipped her cider.

  “Providence. At the home of Catherine and Richard Scott.”

  “Catherine! Has she become a Friend? She is the sister of my old friend Anne Hutchinson.”

  Sinnie set a plate of biscuits on the table. William sat with down-turned mouth, annoyed by the visitors and the ruined hay. The children, silent, were seated at their own smaller table. Mary asked questions, gave opinions. She was eager, flushed from the heat of the fire and the room’s summer damp.

  After supper, William shook the men’s hands and excused himself. He offered them all the hospitality Dyer Farm had to offer and smiled at Mary, eyebrows raised so slightly that only wife, or servant, might notice.

  Mary rose from the table, bid the children good night and went into the parlour with the men. The door closed behind them.

  Sinnie stood for a moment, absorbing the changed character of the day. The wool twists still hung, dripping, over the kettle. Darkness came early and the night was filled with the patter of rain and the shrilling frogs.

  She took a pot of catnip tea to the parlour.

  “Thank thee, Sinnie,” Mary said. Sinnie lingered, setting down the pot, pretending a need to adjust the table rug, for they were reminiscing of gatherings held out-of-doors on Yorkshire’s fells. Langstrothdale, Pardshaw Crag—the wild, northern words came so fervently and with such longing that Sinnie, too, was caught by the illusion that should she look out the windows she would see bracken-backed moors.

  As she closed the door, she heard Mary’s voice.

  “Once I did meet George Fox. I followed him into the moors after …”

  Ah, she be happy. Happy.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Persecution - 1657–1659

  “BOSTON,” MARY SAID. She sat on a ladder-backed chair, furious. William stood at the parlour window, hands clasped behind his back, looking out over fields of stooked corn.

  “The same men who excommunicated Anne. They do think it is their God-given duty to extirpate blasphemy. They have made more laws against us whom they call Quakers. Fines, imprisonments, mutilations, whippings. For no more than holding beliefs with which they do not agree.”

  He turned, opened his mouth.

  “They fear us because we do not defer to temporal authority.” Her voice was thick with anger. “Because we oppose oath-taking. Because we believe that men and women are equal and so women, too, may publish the truth.”

  Mary did not notice his intention to speak but continued the diatribe that had poured from her ever since she had returned from the new Friends Meeting in Newport.

  “It maddens me to think that they remember perfectly well their own persecution, yet are content to visit a reign of terror upon us. Do attend to this, William. One of the Woodhouse Friends is a young woman from London—who came away from husband and children.”

  She allowed one heartbeat of silence.

  “She was given thirty lashes with a three-cord knotted rope and then imprisoned. For some slight offence, I am not certain what it was. Speaking to the minister after a meeting, perhaps, questioning him on some point of doctrine. Christopher Holder—does thee remember that young man who came here last summer, the day it rained on the hay? He was nearly killed when a church-member gagged him with his own gloves and handkerchief. And the Boston jailor, oh, my old friend, William, thee remembers him from when thee fetched me. He hath become infamous for the severity of his punishments. He fetches his strokes with such cruelty that ’tis said women, watching, fall in dead faints.”

  The windows were open and the warm air carried birdsong and the faint roar of surf. Mary’s pulse was racing; she breathed rapidly, fists pressing her knees.

  “I do not love you any less,” William said. “But I wonder if you do still love me.”

  Of the children, and her feelings towards them, they had had many discussions. But not this. She spoke without reflection, to dispel the question’s import.

  “We are both as drops of water in the sea,” she said. “I feel I am but one drop, as thee is but one drop, and we are all of the One.”

  “That is not an answer.”

  He is right.

  No single thing in her life was as it had been before. She dreamed of light, sheeting, shimmering; she dissipated into the shining motes. She did not wonder or worry about the children’s future nor imagined herself growing old at William’s side. Her only desire was to be with the Friends, in whose eyes she saw the same light of which she dreamed.

  “Thee is right. My love is changed. Yes, it is changed.”

  He picked a dead fly from the window sill, examining it before crushing it to powder.

  “Well,” he said. His voice shook, his mouth warped. “Well.”

  “William. I do not love thee less, I love thee differently.”

  “I love you, Mary. I fear for you. I bid you take care.”

  She could have arrested the moment in which he rose and stepped towards her. She could have attempted to smooth the edges of her explanation, but she took too long—hands folded, watching the play of light and shadow on the plaster wall—and so he turned, violently, and strode from the house into the calm of the First Day afternoon. He did not see her come to the doorway. She did not call him back, for she thought it best to let the gulf widen.

  He was gone when they arrived—Humphrey Norton, who had had a large iron key bound over his mouth to stop his words while a minister read out his sentence. He had been judged, publicly whipped, branded in the hand with the letter ‘H’ for heretic and sent from the town.

  It was a cold week in March, and Mary had ridden to New Haven with three other Friends—another woman, two young men—to bear witness, since one of the Woodhouse travellers had been arrested. It had been a long journey through wind, rain and sleet and they arrived too late.

  They put up in a tavern. A storm had come up the coast and rain drummed the windows. Mary huddled in a threadbare blanket, shivering with chills, her face flaming.

  “We must go to Salem,” the woman said. “I hear there are great troubles there.”

  “First we must see Mary safely home.” One of the men laid a hand on Mary’s forehead.

  They determined to ride together as far as Providence but the next morning they found Mary’s horse standing with lowered head and cocked hoof, lame. The constables came to the inn, insisting they leave the town, and would yield neither to Mary’s illness nor her horse’s condition. They fetched a bony mare with burrs in her tail.

  “I cannot leave my husband’s horse here,” Mary said.

  “Shall we pick you up, then, and set you upon this nag?”

  The constables waited, mounted, until the Friends were ready. They escorted them to the town limits, a crossroads on a hilltop. As far as eye could see was a misty landscape of low, wooded hills, black-branched. Two crows flew overhead.

  Mary leaned from her saddle.

  “Woe be unto you, for Humphrey Norton’s sake.” She spoke in a low voice looking the nearest man in the eyes. “Woe be unto you, because of the cruelty done to him.”

  “Witch,” the man breathed, stepping back. Then he roared. “Be gone from here!”

  The Friends heeled their horses. On the bony mare, Mary rode towards Rhode Island.

  Fever turned to pneumonia. Mary lay between flaxen sheets in a canopy bed, comparing this room to the dark bedchamber on the Shawmut Peninsula with its hanging herbs, its oiled paper windows.

  Oh, William. Her eyes touched one thing, and then another, and she thought of his studied choices and her heart ached. Light silvered the canopy’s silk fringe, sleeked the fine white curtains, and lay bright upon the mantelpiece with its imported clock, silver bowl, framed map.

  And other things. She lay propped half-upright, breath crackling in her lungs. Red bedclothes. An imported Turkey carpet. The six-board chest ordered from Newport’s best cabinetmaker. She had seen Sinnie gazin
g at the clock, fascinated.

  Farther back, then, her mind went. London. William, running up the stairs. Hands on her face, his perfumed gloves. You were not hurt? What had it been. Ah. The men, the stocks. Ears, sliced from their heads.

  She heard Sinnie and Littlemary’s steps as they came up the stairs, lugging hot water, a tray of food. Mary had asked to be moved downstairs into the parlour for their sakes, but William would not hear of it.

  “You need quiet,” he had said. “I will have the children come up every evening to tell you of the day’s doings.”

  Sinnie poured hot water into a bowl. Littlemary set down the tray.

  “Thank you,” Mary said but her voice caught on phlegm and she saw that Littlemary was thinking of some other project—butter, perhaps, left in the churn—and did not answer but turned to lay a log on the fire. Sinnie, on tiptoe, adjusted the curtains to keep sunlight from Mary’s face.

  Celia Grymston came to visit. Small, tidy, she was a Friend from Newport.

  “What dost thee hear, Celia Grymston?” Mary asked. She sat straight up against her bolster; her breath was clearing. “I see by thy face that thee bears bad news. Thee fears to disturb me but ’tis …” She gestured toward her bedside table, where lay her Bible and a slew of letters, pamphlets, and epistles. “My work. My life.”

  Although William would call it otherwise.

  “’Tis about doings in Salem,” Celia said. “Despite the fines, their gatherings have been growing. Last week, eight people were taken from Salem to the Boston jail. They were whipped in the public square, men and women alike. One man of forty years was deprived of food for five days and locked in neck-to-foot irons for sixteen hours.”

  She went to the window, looked out at the day of watery April sunshine.

  “And there is more, Mary. Terrible sufferings. Hored Gardner travelled to Boston to bear witness, with her suckling baby and a girl to help care for it. They were dragged before Governor Endicott, who spoke to them abusively and sent them to jail. They, too, were whipped and afterwards travelled sixty miles through the wilderness. Arrived home, half-dead …”