I was happy. Nine months into our marriage, Constant was born.
Dorothy wanted to be a mother, too, and here is where things went wrong. A few months, and her stomach was not warmer to the touch. A year, and still nothing, and the women of the congregation murmured. Was William not performing his husbandly duties?
The midwife gave her a tincture. She gave her a tea. She told her to put a tail feather in William’s morning porridge. Dorothy did what she was told. Months later, her breasts grew tender. Then blood.
Finding her in the kitchen, kneading bread to hide her eyes, I offered: This must be the way God intended.
I saw immediately that it was the worst thing I could have said, but it was what I had been taught to think.
God gave her more blood.
Please, God, she said.
Begging God was never God’s way. Upon seeing her at church on Sunday, she told me what happened, both the blood and how she asked God for what He had not yet granted her.
She looked down and said, I should have told Him nothing.
To ask for anything earthly was to bring God’s wrath. I could have cautioned her but I did not.
When I labored, Dorothy was kind to stay by my side, to never mention her own desire for a child. Though I wanted to ask, to speak of her sadness, I did not know how.
But in spring, her stomach blossomed. Everyone predicted a girl by the way she carried her, how gentle the baby was inside of her, not kicking like my second was inside of me, not banging against her ribs. A quiet one, a thoughtful one, as a girl can be. The labor was fast, which rarely happens with a first. She was born into the midwife’s arms, unbreathing.
What’s wrong? Dorothy asked.
I could not speak it.
What is it? she asked again.
She looked betwixt her legs.
The midwife put the infant in her arms. Dorothy’s face showed recognition, then turned resolute.
There, there, she whispered to the newborn, kissing her purple forehead, her tiny nail beds, wiping away the white vellum that babies arrive in.
I stood back and watched her love her daughter, but did not leave the room, because my presence would incite the others to run in, cheer, speak too soon.
Dorothy insisted on wringing out her own bloody sheets.
Please, let me, I said.
No, she said, and walked in the slow aching way of a new mother.
Her family in Amsterdam did not yet have a plot to bury in. William chose one in Leiden, the closest to their home on Stincksteeg. It was a warm spring day at her daughter’s burial. I tried to hide my stomach—it seemed a personal affront to grow another child in her presence. There was a large meadow and a small grave. We covered her with tulips.
Afterward, Dorothy stayed indoors for longer than William deemed appropriate. Dorothy said she feared that her own moral errors had caused her child to be punished.
William said: This must be the way God intended.
But I did not believe this any longer.
I put her cold hands in mine and said, No grief is deeper than this.
But still, she stayed indoors. Her husband called a doctor, who prescribed a spoonful from a bottle twice a day. He prescribed resting. Then she could lie in bed freely. I worried about her, but my days were full of two young sons. If there were a doctor on the Mayflower Dorothy might have been prescribed something, when it was her son she longed for.
One morning William came to my house. He knocked on the back door. I heard it creak open. I was in the kitchen rolling dough. At the sight of him, I felt a flush. I hoped my cheeks were not red, that there was not a creeping rash rising from my chest and up my neck.
Body, I thought, please do not betray me.
We had not been alone since I bid him good night one evening after church, when I was fourteen and we had found ourselves the only two left lingering. We would not have been alone in the kitchen, but my husband had left for the silk mill early that morning. There was a debt to pay to the butcher along the way. Our two sons were, miraculously, working quietly together in the other room, preparing kindling.
Could you call on her, today? he asked me. She’s not well, I fear.
I tried to think of what he was saying and not the way he glimmered—His eyes? His smile? What was this?
I was to come this afternoon, but I will come early and bring pottage.
He thanked me, smiled, turned, and as quickly as he’d come, he was back out the door and down the alley.
When I went to visit Dorothy, she said William had asked her to go to the New World. She had been crying. I had Thomas on my hip and Constant was running toward the fireplace. I grabbed Constant by the arm and tried to sustain my attention to Dorothy as best I could. She did not have children yet and though she was sympathetic, I worried my attention to my children—that change to our friendship—was to her a laceration.
Where? I asked.
He said Guiana, maybe, or the Virginia Colony.
Nothing then was settled. They considered Guiana and Florida, but Guiana was too hot for our English bodies and Florida was too close to the Spanish. The elders said they were men of the north and they would stay north.
Why does he want to leave?
He said the Spanish could attack Holland at any moment. He said our children are becoming too Dutch.
Now that the peace treaty was nearly over, many in Holland were fearing the Spanish. And the younger people were losing their English manners.
He says that. But it’s money, too, Dorothy said.
Being a fustian weaver in Leiden was not going to give him his autonomy. He tried once to sell his textiles directly to merchants. But the Dutch government required all textiles to have official approval—a seal—and in so doing took a tax. And the tax was too steep for William to make a profit.
Therefore, his investment in the textile company failed.
William believed that to succeed as God intended, he had to go elsewhere. It could have seemed then as improbable as once thinking the world was round, to leave our community in Leiden to go halfway around the world.
Going where? Dorothy had asked him.
And when he said a colony in the New World, she asked, With the Savages nearby? And you think the King who outlawed us will now give us a charter?
William could convince. He believed his childhood vision was God’s way of telling him to follow a more difficult but higher path.
Dorothy told William, finally, the reason that lacked all argument, the reason that was a feeling, that was the truth: She did not wish to be so far away from her daughter.
Plenty of women had lost children. Her aunt had died in childbirth. Every woman knew that preparing for labor was preparing for death, both their own and their child’s. We planned our will and rehearsed our last testament.
Perhaps the losses are God’s way of saying He has other plans for us, he said.
He said this gently, but Dorothy said, No. A final No, lacking emotion, a No that would not be persuaded.
Scripture could be used for any claim.
William, imbalanced in humors and out of argument said, Our daughter is dead. That body in the grave is not her.
This was more than Dorothy could bear, but she bore it.
In recalling the discussion with me, Dorothy stood and concluded, as if talking to herself, I cannot be the wife who does not give him what he needs.
She wiped away her tears.
She said he asked for so little, that she needed to give him this. I did not agree, exactly. It seemed to me, as was often with her, that she could not see how much he was asking for. To leave your family and your friends for what?
I readied myself to tell her I would not let her go alone.
I stood, because I knew I should get home and prepare dinner for my husband. But the conversation was in its careful place. As women, we rarely talked this way, so freely as we once did as girls.
Seeing Dorothy and knowing what it would be like w
ithout her, I said, We’ll do this together, you and I. I should not have said this without my husband’s approval. But I did. It was her I loved. We would live next to one another, in the old world or the new one.
I wondered if William was planning this, in part, for her, too, to help lift her from her grief. That perhaps she needed to leave that tiny body in the grave. If she was to go, I would go, too. But I had to persuade my husband, without it seeming as if I was persuading him. All afternoon I thought on it. When he came home from the mill that evening, he whistled through the front door. I was thankful he was in a boisterous mood.
Good Wife, he said. I’ve been with William Bradford.
God was granting me such good fortune. What blessing that God wished for us to be together.
And what did he say?
He wants to make a colony in God’s likeness.
And you said?
I told him we will go.
But the plans to leave Holland faltered. No one wished to fund our journey to the New World, except the Dutch, who offered to take us to New Netherlands for free, but then we would still be living in a Dutch colony, only this time along the Hudson River. To do so would be to move ourselves halfway around the world to be again among their permissiveness. As William noted, nothing was free, and to be taken by the Dutch would mean we would be beholden to them in some regard, with an agreement of indentured servitude, perhaps, or at the least, beneath them always in standing. What we wanted was the King’s charter and English financiers’ investments so we could hire our own indentured servants and retain our English ways.
A year went by. Dorothy was pregnant. Her John was born. We smiled upon our children’s play. Two more years passed. Our flowers were perennial, our gardens flourishing, our Dutch fluent. It seemed we would never leave Holland. I cannot say I was disappointed by this, but I do wonder how I am looking upon it now, with a more lavender hue than how it felt then.
Finally, the contracts were arranged, English financial backers secured, and the date for departure set.
This time, Dorothy’s wish not to leave was even stronger. She had a full life—her friends, John’s friends, the walks along the canal, the trips to the market, the farmer who performed for John a magic trick each time he saw him. Her loyalty to her husband outweighed her own desires, but now there was John. William said they would send for him once the colony was settled. It was too dangerous to risk his life to the seamen’s illness, or worse. We both agreed to leave our children behind.
We planned our sons’ lives in Amsterdam, with our parents, while we made homes for them in the Virginia Colony. We thought it would be a few months until we saw them, maybe a season, but no longer. The ache of leaving them behind was more rooted in the body than our husbands could understand. We confirmed with one another, time and again, this was for our sons’ safety, this was the very best decision. We had to love our children enough to leave them behind.
That was the plan, then, Virginia, though the Mayflower drifted much farther north. The elders chose Virginia because anything farther south was too close to the Spanish, and anything farther north was too close to the Dutch.
Once we got to the Virginia Colony, there would be indentured servants to manage, houses to build, fences to make, fields to tend, a whole community to establish. A woman cannot work quickly with three children at her feet, tugging on her dress, calling, Mum. And there was the seamen’s illness, which weakened adults and not much was known of what it did to children—we were to be one of the first group of English families to journey across the Atlantic. But even if the illness did not claim our sons and the servants were companionable and the strangers left us to our worship, as long as we kept quiet about it, as the King assured us we should, there were the Indians beyond the colony’s fences, the stories of bloody battles.
I had seen an Indian once, displayed by the King in the courtyard of the Tower of London. There, betwixt the peacocks and flamingoes, past the birds of paradise, and a caged lion, the Indian stood, chains around both ankles, his hair pulled back behind him. The headdress they had him wearing fell sideways over his eyes, and his hands were somehow inaccessible, but how I could not tell. He was the tallest person I had ever seen. His eyes looked frightened, and then, as curious pale-skinned people got closer to him, his expression moved out past the English garden, past the peacocks, past it all, a stare that seemed to travel continents. He did not look ferocious. People said ungodly things to him, speaking as if he were more animal than human. I was struck by how the stories I’d heard of the Savages did not match his presence. It was like the one time I saw the Queen passing through our village, in her carriage, and I thought, She is so small and ordinary. Often things are more devious in our imagination by their distance to us.
But though I had seen that one Indian, that did not mean I was not scared of them. I heard there were thousands, this was a land of them, and how far they stretched and what pathways they made through forests were expansive. Later, once settled in Plymouth, I came to be thankful for the kindness of the Wampanoag Indians, for it was on their land we built.
We were to leave for Virginia in June in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and twenty. We had our homes to sell, our heifers and bulls to disperse, possessions to evaluate. Bring only the essential, we were told, but Susanna White commissioned a wicker bassinet for her child that was not born yet. How hopeful it was, some women thought, and others, like me, thought it was inviting God’s wrath to be that presumptuous.
I wonder what a difference it would have made to Dorothy if John had been on the Mayflower.
I remember her face on the day we were to leave for the Virginia Colony. Dorothy, on a rented horse, watching my sons emerge from the boardinghouse behind me. Her kind, dutiful face registering that though I said I would leave Constant and Thomas, though I gossiped with her in church about the women—including Mary and Susanna—who did not love their children enough to leave them behind, here I was, walking toward the carriage, bringing my sons with me, too. I could not do what I had promised, while she had left John that morning with her mother.
No room, I thought I saw Dorothy mouth to William.
He gave her a look, turned to me, and said, Good morning.
When I asked if this was possible, when I looked at him through my wobbly eyes—the tears—he said we would find a way, that there would be room for them.
Constant and Thomas trailed behind me, hands full with their belongings. I could not look her in the eyes. As we climbed in the back of the carriage I felt the heat of her stare like a heavy blanket I had not strength enough to lift. I deserved that look. The horses kicked up dirt and galloped down toward the dock.
At the dock, we stood together staring at the ship before us. Me with Constant and Thomas, Dorothy with her trunk and her husband’s hand. Every person is a mystery and she was no exception. I thought she would miss John and say so, but if she grieved, the only sign was in the stiffness of her posture. Our friendship was shifting.
We watched a man step out of the Master’s quarters. Bony, with oil-slick hair and large teeth, scowling at either the ship or the passengers below it. As unkempt as the least reputable.
Dorothy said, Please, God, let this man not be the ship’s Master.
But he was the ship’s Master.
I was hopeful Dorothy had forgiven me. I put my arm around her. Constant ran toward the edge, Thomas hung on Dorothy’s hem, and before we knew it, without the reverence of ceremony, we were guided like cattle down into the dark tween deck, with the other women and children. We were not tall women, but still we had to bend our heads low to make our way across the closed-up space betwixt the storage below and the top deck above, a cabin of wood on all sides. We were the first human cargo to ride this Speedwell, which still smelled sweetly of the wine it had last imported. The journey from Delfshaven to London would take three days. Our Speedwell would meet with another ship, the Mayflower, in England, full of the strangers we needed to make the
colony run—servants, carpenters, blacksmiths, farmers.
William could be heard ashore, giving a speech.
Do you want to go listen? I asked, pointing toward the ladder.
Dorothy smiled and said, I heard it twice last night.
I strained to hear William’s words.
All the great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courages … In our hearts we are pilgrims.
Our gathered brethren cheered.
It was light then, this future, because it was still new. I wanted to apologize, to acknowledge my advantage—Thomas and Constant—but I did not. I did not know how to say I was sorry. I did not want to press a bruise. That is what I told myself, but I see now I was too cowardly.
I had a cabin and so did Dorothy. They were called cabins by our husbands, and when we first inquired of the sleeping quarters and they said cabins, we imagined walls. We imagined privacy. Our cabin was a bed lifted off the floor, as high as our knees. We would fashion a little curtain with some scraps, but that was all. The chamber pot went beneath.
We watched a goat piss in front of us. The urine rolled along the grooved boards, cascaded over our belongings in the deck below.
Well, Dorothy said.
But it was just us congregates then, thirty-five of us combined in language and belief, where our similarities were a shorthand for comfort. The chickens and the children squawked. My sons inched closer to the barrels of gunpowder. I scanned the room and thought of all the ways I would be saying no to them for weeks.
We were half a day out of Holland when the ship’s Master called down, She leaks. We both looked to the walls. They perspired. He said we would dock in Southampton that afternoon and might need to stay longer for repairs.
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