by Beth Powning
“Come, Mary,” the woman urged. “Only forty-eight more hours in this place, and then—”
“Take hands from me.”
My voice? They step back, frightened.
“I wish neither food, nor warmth, nor sleep. Give me quill and paper.”
No one moved.
“Mother …”
She pointed at her son, finger shaking. “Fetch me ink, paper, quill.” She took a step towards him and he clutched the tongs to his chest. “They shed their innocent blood and I will not be silenced. I will not be silenced. I will not be silenced …”
October 28 1659
… my life not availeth me in comparison to the liberty of the truth …
… I rather choose to die than to live: … therefore, seeing my request is hindered, I leave you to the righteous judge and searcher of all hearts …
… verily the Night cometh on you apace …
She laid down her pen. It was as if an earthquake rocked the stone walls of the prison. She put both hands to the pallet to stop the shuddering.
TWENTY-THREE
Deerskin Bags - 1659
MARY AND WILLIAM WENT STRAIGHT to the parlour. In the lengthening shadows of late afternoon, she had arrived from Boston—alone, as she had been fierce in her refusal of accompaniment.
“I saw no other way,” William said. He had closed the door behind them. He did not sit but stood with one hand on a chair’s back, addressing Mary, who stood in the middle of the room. “They could not deny a son’s plea.”
“Before leaving Boston, I wrote to them,” Mary answered. Her words came swift upon his, dismissively. Her clothing reeked of sweat and horse. “I told them my life availeth me not as a gift from the murderers of innocents.”
“You are the mother of children.”
“Aye, and they are the same men who did ruin me for a mother. The same who sent pamphlets to England so that even in Yorkshire they did name me mother of a monster. Now they show their magnanimity in releasing me back to the yearning arms of my children.”
She stood so rigidly that she put a hand on the table for balance.
“Do you not see this house, Mary? Do you not see all that I have …” He threw up a hand. His face was drawn tight with hurt.
“Tables, yes, I see. Bedsteads, draperies, porcelain, silver.”
Suddenly she bent forward, hands across her stomach. She pulled back a chair, slid into it. He stepped towards her, hand hovering.
“Oh, William. I am sorry. Oh, I am sorry.” She rocked, cradling pain. “Oh, that I were there with them. With Marmaduke and William Robinson and my dear ones. Oh, William. I was almost there and ’twas more beautiful than thee could imagine. A meadow of light. I did not wish to return. I did not wish to return.”
He straightened.
“I am sorry, as well,” he said.
She looked up at his harsh tone.
“But I will say to you, Mary, whether you care or not. I have been in agony of spirits, fearing your death. I am sorry you do not care to be here with me. I am sorry you will not suffer my touch. I am sorry that my comfort is as an insult.”
She closed her eyes.
Layer upon layer of words, flooding.
Yes, love. Yes, suffering. Yes, life. Yes, death.
William’s neck cloth was pressed with salt and slickstone, imported waistcoat embroidered with a pattern of vines and flowers. His red stockings matched the heels of his shoes.
“Did she eat?” he asked Sinnie, a week after Mary’s return.
“A bit more than yesterday, sir.”
The boys glanced at one another. Charles cleaned his bowl with the side of his finger.
“Your mother has been ill,” William snapped, noticing the boys’ exchange. Ill. It was as he chose to see it, Sinnie thought, and he had told her to explain it to the children as such—an inconvenient madness—from which Mary would recover if well fed and housed.
After breakfast, William and the boys collected their satchels.
Their horses stood against the breaking sky. Before them, mist wreathed the fields. Clouds like loosening rolls of wool became golden in the sunrise. William sat easy on his horse, the young boys rode together on a pony.
Sinnie shut the door and turned back to the great hall where Littlemary was clearing away the breakfast bowls. Still the two youngest boys went to grammar school; Maher had gone to sea, and young William, too, had returned to sea immediately after attending the hanging. Littlemary had finished her book learning. She studied, now, how to boil the heads of pigs, make cheese, hackle flax, set a warp, pluck geese. Every day, she walked miles at her spinning wheel—one step forwards, one step back—and waited for a husband.
“What is she doing?” Littlemary murmured, looking at the ceiling. There was no sound from above, save the creak of Mary’s rocking chair.
“She be sitting with her hands on her Bible. She does naught but stare at tree or sky. She watches the branches when they do bend and the clouds as they sail past. ’Tis all her eyes can bear to see.”
Sickle-blades of frost on the windowpanes shimmered, their edges dissolving in sunshine.
“Does she read, Sinnie?”
“Nay, Littlemary. Sometimes I wonder if she even thinks.”
“’Tis as if …” Littlemary began, and then bit back the words.
As if her mother wished for death. Cared only about the dead. Be what the child is thinking.
Sinnie sighed. “Your father did say wait, Littlemary. She will recover from this … illness.”
Littlemary took a sudden step and dropped the crock she was holding. It smashed on the hearth, splattering oatmeal. She hissed with fury, her hands flinging as if to shed work, house, crazed mother. She flew to the wall and pressed her forehead against it. Sinnie knelt and began picking up the pieces.
—
Ah, a friend. May be she will be comforted …
Celia Grymston had come to visit, bringing a basket of apples—Rhode Island Greenings—and a geranium in a pot. For several hours, Littlemary and Sinnie could hear the sound of voices coming from Mary’s room, a music whose cadence rose, quickened and then fell to a minor key. Then there was no sound of footstep or rocking chair, only a stillness so profound that both Sinnie and Littlemary paused.
“Should I stop?” Littlemary whispered, staying the spinning wheel with her right hand, the left holding high the drawn yarn.
Sinnie resumed kneading. “They be listening for the Lord. If he do come here, he will not mind our purposeful noise.”
On First Day, Mary came downstairs. She had scrubbed her face with cold water and soap. The family were seated at table in the great hall. A servant had just brought in the morning’s milk and the bright smell of frozen soil lingered.
“I am going to Meeting in Newport,” Mary said. She spoke to William, did not look at the children. Her voice was so empty as to be crystalline, unbearable.
There be nothing betwix’ them but fear, Sinnie thought, lifting a steaming bowl.
“You should eat,” William said. He looked at her, shifty, his words more suggestion than order. “Sinnie has oatmeal ready.”
Mary’s voice warmed, a trace. “Thank thee, William, but I am not hungry. I shall take the mare. I do not know at what hour I shall return. I will have much to discuss with the other Friends.”
That evening, Mary joined the family at the supper table. The November sun had set. Sinnie worked at the hearth, making busy sounds—the nick of ladle against iron kettle, the shuffle of peel over stone as she slid corn bread from the oven. Mary, she observed, was as an interruption in the family’s flow, like a tree fallen across a stream—she scooped succotash onto her spoon and then did not carry it to her mouth; she attempted to converse with William but her words trailed away.
Littlemary raised reluctant eyes, made rapid pattings at her stew with the back of her spoon. They need one another. So many burdens mother and daughter should share: caring for the men, running the household, bea
ring babies, instructing the children. Henry and Charles seemed easier in Mary’s presence, in the way of people who suffer a stranger knowing that they themselves are soon to leave.
After the meal, Mary asked the boys to tell her of their day. She complimented Littlemary on her embroidery and the skeins of wool she had spun. Sinnie watched from the corners of her eyes. Unassuaged emotion tightened the skin around Mary’s eyes and warped her mouth even as it curved into a smile.
My bonnie mistress. How they have ruined you.
The house was quiet; even William had gone to bed. Mary and Sinnie heard no creak of branch nor wind’s moan, since winter’s first, tentative flakes fell from the darkness.
Mary held a wooden darning egg beneath the frayed edges of a sock heel; a needle, threaded with yarn.
“I cannot find my tenderness. It hath gone from me.” Her voice faltered. “As, too, hath my closeness to paradise. I see it, still, but it hath faded, like a buttercup laid in the sun.”
Sinnie’s hands worked wooden knitting needles. On the firedogs, a birch log was burned to a gridwork of pulsing squares. Yarn rolled from Sinnie’s lap and disappeared under a blanket chest.
“I should stay here and learn to love my children,” Mary whispered. She put down her work.
Sinnie’s fingers fell still on the needles. “Mistress,” she said. She cast a brave look at Mary, and then looked back, quickly, at the half-knit mitten. “I do not know how to help you.”
They listened to the shift and crumble of the fire.
“Last night I dreamt of George Fox. He drew open my curtains and the light of a summer’s morning flooded in. Then he directed my gaze to a line of people who crossed the moors carrying dead bodies. He told me to return to my work, what I did do in England.”
She picked up her needle but did not prick the sock. “Ah, if only I had my friend Dafeny here now. We travelled together, spreading the truth.”
So dangerous, Sinnie thought, watching Mary’s face, drawn and inward, the firelight warming her face yet settling shadows into the pouches beneath her eyes. Wolves, Indians, blizzards. But she will go, there be no stopping her.
“Where would you go?”
“Sylvester Manor where Grizzell Sylvester and her husband, Nathaniel, provide haven to Friends arriving from Barbados or England; and nursing, for those who have been brutalized. ’Tis at the tip of Long Island, on a place called Shelter Island. I will make my way there. I will preach as I go. They do tell me that there have been many convincements on Long Island and that many there are as dry seed in drought, waiting for rain.”
“How will you go?” Sinnie set aside her needles. She leaned forward and reached for Mary’s hands.
“On foot. I cannot deprive William of another horse. I have told a few people at the Newport meeting, begging secrecy. They have supplied me with money and I have accepted it, for it doth come from a common treasury supporting the Ministers of the Truth.”
“And when, Mistress? When shall you go?” Sinnie fought to keep anguish from her voice.
“Soon, my Sinnie. Soon, before the winter storms. Do not tell William. I will depart in the night and shall leave a letter for him.”
Long after Mary had tiptoed upstairs Sinnie remained by the fire, her needles sliding as her finger lifted the yarn: looped, linked, looped. Tears fattened, fell. Were absorbed by the grey wool.
In the hall dresser, below the racks of pewter, Sinnie began to hide food—a leather bag filled with nookick, maize bread studded with dried huckleberries, rusk biscuits, johnny-cakes, salted cod. Together, they prepared clothing. They sewed new larger pockets to tie around Mary’s waist. She would need five petticoats and an extra pair of woollen stockings. A kerchief for her head and a wool scarf to pull over nose and mouth. Two pairs of mittens. A belt. A long, hooded cape. A basket, a pack.
“I deceive him,” Mary said, once, glancing at Sinnie.
She hears my thoughts, clear as if I spoke them.
Mary’s eyebrows drew into an anguished warp. She stared at the floor, the snippets of cloth.
Two in the morning.
Sinnie listened at the bottom of the stairs, holding a candle. The door-latch rattled; a snick as its pin dropped. Mary appeared at the top of the stairs. She floated down soundlessly on stockinged feet.
“I did leave the letter on the bed,” she whispered as they went into the great hall.
—
“Cloak, basket, the deerskin bag, mittens. Sinnie, dost remember the night long ago when we packed bags with nookick and bacon?”
Mary tied her hat strings.
“’Twas a snowy night in Boston and Samuel was but a tiny babe. I stood in the door and watched the men trudging away to find a new life in Rhode Island. ‘I will find us a place where we will live as we wish,’ William said.”
Sinnie turned and picked up the lantern. She lit the candle and handed it to Mary. She adjusted the straps of Mary’s packs, fussed at her cloak.
They stood facing one another, overwhelmed by the succession of memories that flooded between them.
TWENTY-FOUR
Shelter Island - 1659–1660
SHE CROSSED THE PETTAQUAMSCOTT RIVER in a dugout canoe paddled by a Narragansett Indian. She sat loose and balanced, holding the sides of the tippy boat, watching as snowflakes starred and dissolved against his deerskin cloak.
On the bank, she dug in her bag for coins, laid them in the man’s palm. The weathered skin of his face was furrowed, folds running downward beside his mouth; his eyes held hers, so acute that she was reminded of the moment she had met Anne Hutchinson and had felt a sear of fright. He said nothing, but pointed in the direction she was to go and turned back to his canoe.
She followed a track that ran uphill through close-set beeches, hickories and maples. The snow came more heavily. At the top of the hill, the sky opened before her and she could see that the track wound downwards into a valley of cleared land, where cows clustered by a barn and smoke drifted from the chimney of a farmhouse. She made her way down the rutted track, knocked at the door. A woman opened it; her features were puddled in a chinless face, her eyes pale and puzzled. Mary held out coins.
“I am travelling to visit friends,” she said.
“Aye, you may come in,” the woman said. “’Tis coming on for snow so you’d perish otherwise.”
She showed Mary to an attic room. Cobwebs looped the timbers of a slanted ceiling, on the floor were baskets of dried beans, and in a corner was a flock bed covered with wolfskins.
Darkness fell early and the wind rose.
In the kitchen, the woman set out hare pie, pumpkin bread and applesauce. A candle guttered on the trestle table. Mary was given the only pewter plate. Their hired man, a young Irishman, sat at the table’s end. The children—three boys, two girls—waited silently behind their father. After the blessing, the children took their trenchers and filed to a tall-backed settle by the fire.
As they ate, no one spoke. Mary felt their curiosity, yet to her surprise, no questions were asked.
“I can tell you my business since I am still in Rhode Island,” she said. “I am a Quaker bound for Long Island.”
The woman slid her eyes to her husband, who looked up sharply.
“Ye’ll not be going into New Haven Colony, then,” he said. “No Quakers allowed in the colony unless you can prove you’re on lawful business.”
Mary saw the children’s shoulders stiffen in the effort not to look at her.
“They’ll brand you with an ‘H.’ Or throw you in jail. You’d not like that, hey? Being in jail? They’ll fine you just for having pamphlets. Nay, you’d best stay here where people are civil.”
“I thank thee for thy advice,” Mary said. Her grave voice fell into the room’s scant comfort. The man looked at her. He resumed eating more quickly and without seeing his food.
In the light of her candle, she read Psalm 63:
O God, thou are my god, I seek thee,
my soul thirsts for th
ee …
I think of thee upon my bed,
and meditate on thee in the
watches of the night;
for thou hast been my help,
and in the shadow of thy wings I
sing for joy …
She lay beneath the wolfskins listening to the storm.
Wind, snow, branches. God’s thought at the end of the stars. She lay on her back with her arms spread to the cold, apple-scented air.
The next morning, there was a foot of snow on the ground and the road stretched as a white stream between the fields.
“I will go on,” she said at breakfast. “Can I find passage from Rhode Island so that I need not step into New Haven Colony? A boat, to take me?”
She listened carefully as the man gave her directions. She thanked the couple, slid a coin onto the table, and stepped outside. The sky had cleared and the snow glittered.
Sylvester Manor was like a palace, with eight large rooms, a red-tiled roof, cobblestones laid in a diamond pattern before a two-storey vestibule. Built in the shape of a cross, it stood alone on its own island, surrounded by oaks.
Mary was given a sleeping chamber filled with three bedsteads, trunks, baskets. She would be obliged to share both room and bedstead with whoever might be passing through—newly arrived Friends from England or Barbados, or ill and injured refugees from Massachusetts, but for now the room was hers alone.
On the first morning, she woke to a sighing roar. She went to the window, breath smoking, hands tucked in her armpits.
Heavy oak boughs lifted and fell in a gale-force wind. She watched a brown leaf twirling on its frail stem.
By day’s end, it will be gone.
Below, a group of Manhanset Indians clustered around Nathaniel Sylvester—he made arm gestures, drew lines in the blowing snow with a stick. Beyond the cobblestone yard was a sloping hill on which sheds ran down to the water. She glimpsed the masts of a ship anchored in deep water, saw two rowing boats bucking over waves, falling into troughs, approaching the cove.