A Measure of Light

SNOWFLAKES BLEW UP THE THAMES
on an east wind. Mary picked her way along the narrow streets, heading to the market. It was the day before Christmas. Ropes of holly and ivy sprigged with rosemary looped across wood-and-plaster houses; the air was filled with the yeasty scent of baking, sweetening the stench that rose from gutters. She stepped quickly around a dead dog that lay in half-frozen mud, maggots teeming in its entrails.

Mary heard the screams and shouts of a crowd. The sounds grew louder, rising over London’s din of bells, wheels, hammers, shrill-voiced vendors. Like a fish in a weir, she could not resist the press of bodies and was funnelled into a square where people massed before a wooden platform. Three men stood upon it with heads and arms thrust through pillories. Women and children leaned from windows studying the gallants, ladies, merchants, apprentices, beggars, thieves, prostitutes. Breath hung before mouths like the morning webs of spiders.

Mary found herself shoulder to shoulder with a small man. He held a rag to bleeding gum.

“What was their crime?” she shouted, leaning close.

“Puritans,” he slurred. Fresh blood seeped into the fabric’s weave. “Who did naught but write pamphlets against the king’s new …” He paused to spit. “Archbishop.”

A flash of metal—on the platform, the hangman drew his knife and stepped towards one of the three prisoners. Over the crowd’s
excitement and protest, a howl rose, broke into a scream. The hangman dropped one of the prisoner’s ears into a bucket. Blood spurted from the mutilated scalp. People rushed to the platform holding up bowls, shreds of cloth, sticks.

Martyr’s blood
. People held such blood in reverence—a purifier of souls, like the waters of baptism.

The hangman stretched out the man’s other ear tight as a hen’s neck. A fresh roar erupted from the crowd. The knife rose again, sliced down.

Why torment a man so old? Perhaps fifty
.

His skin was yellow as spring parsnip; he twisted against his restraints, his mouth a cave. Blood poured down his neck. The hangman pinched one of the prisoner’s nostrils, snagged his knife to its edge, made a jagged upward cut.

Mary heard blood rush in her own ears, suffered a drastic dimming of vision. She fought her way from the crowd, stopped against a recessed door in the relative calm of a nearby street.

She had sought nothing more than the ingredients for a Christmas pudding.

Walk, and you will not faint
.

Her Aunt Urith’s voice came to her, stern, practical, and so Mary took a breath and set forth again. Between the snow and coal smoke, the streets were dark by three in the afternoon; already, people followed link-boys who carried torches, their quivering light reflecting in diamond-shaped windowpanes.

Mary purchased veal, mutton, raisins, nutmeg and cloves. Abstracted, she neither chose nor bargained wisely and then turned southwards, towards home, a small house just down-river from Whitehall, the king’s palace.

The walk steadied her. She shifted her bundles, waited for a cart to pass, went down a short street. At its end, she could see the masts of riverboats crossing in the snowy dusk. She pushed open the oak
door and set her bundles on the table. Only then, as she removed her scarf and hung her cape, did her hands begin to shake.

Upstairs in the bedchamber her breath steamed on the cold air. She stirred the coals, wound a wolverine fur around her neck and pulled a chair close to the hearth. She took up her Bible but could not read, so pressed it to her breast. Her heart beat fast and light.

The ear, falling through the air like a scrap of meat
.

William was a birthright Puritan. She herself was a convert.

The door opened below and she heard her husband’s voice. His steps came, eager on the stairs. He burst into the room, smelling of snow and leather, pulling off his gloves. He held a small box.

“I have a gift for—”

“William, I came upon three men in pillories. Puritans. Perhaps they were clergy, I do not know.” She hugged the Bible closer, took a long breath. “The hangman did slice off two ears and slit a nostril.”

He was not much taller than she, sleek as a ferret. He set the box down, held her face; she smelled the sweetness of jasmine and roses. He was a haberdasher and had a shop in the New Exchange; he washed his hands daily, for he must be gentle with the palms of great ladies, even those of the queen herself, introducing fingers into pearled gloves, delicately tugging gauntlets up plump arms.