A Measure of Light (3 page)

“Aye,” Sinnie repeated. She took a breath, held the knife palm over knuckles, like holding hands with herself for courage. “I could tell of the greit sky over our croft on a spring morning—and if ’twere my brothers present, they would hear the dogs caaing the sheep or see the ponies with their klibbers and meshies and know what I meant if I said ’twas so clear we could see the far holmes and even the beaches of Hildesay.”

The girl’s longest sentence. She sees we are not so dissimilar
.

“My brother died,” Mary said. “I did learn of it shortly before you came to us. He went to sea. His ship was lost. Now I have lost mother, father and brother. We were orphans, you see. Our parents drowned together. A flash flood caught their carriage.”

At the far end of the hall, a kettle of stew hung from the fire hook, steaming, and three-legged pipkins filled with mussels stood in the coals. Sun had not brightened the room for days. The streets were deep in black mud and the house, sprayed by passing drays, was splattered all the way to the second storey.

Sinnie looked up. Mary saw her eyes lighten with sympathy, and the hint of a sad smile, quickly repressed.

In the ill-lit room, Mary ran fishy hands over her belly. She had dreamed of how she would make for her child goodness and joy such as she had known so briefly, sitting in her mother’s walled garden amidst forget-me-not and daffodils.

And now we are in danger. Here, in the place I thought to make a home
.

“Soon I will feel the baby kicking,” she murmured.

“I am a craft hand with a needle.” Sinnie took a breath, lifted the knife. The catch in her voice betrayed how ardently she longed to be setting stitches in a baby’s cap rather than weeping over onions. “I can make wee caps and curches and sarks.”

The girl bent closer to her work, as if embarrassed by her confession.

Would she come with us?

WILLIAM AND MARY FOUND THE
place, a narrow, tippy house on Blackfriars Street, six storeys high, squeezed by its neighbours like a book on a shelf. William knocked; the door opened a crack and a thin, ginger-haired man peered out. It was Mr. Bartholomew, who, they’d been told, was hiding parishioners from St. Botolph’s, William’s family’s church. Laud had prevented several ships of emigrants from sailing to Massachusetts, so the family had come to London under cover of darkness.

William whispered his connections. The man vanished, reappeared. He opened the door and they slipped inside. The room was crowded. An older woman with wary hazel eyes stood at the hearth, facing the room, baby held over her shoulder, children pressed to her skirts. She watched William and Mary enter, her hand making small circles on the baby’s back. Lines of worry marked her forehead, compassion etched creases beside her eyes. She observed them with an intransigence so strong that Mary felt a stab of fear.

“My name is Anne Hutchinson,” the woman said. “This is my husband, Will. This is—” One by one, she introduced ten children and four adults: her sister, her brother-in-law, and two spinster cousins.

A servant girl brought a plate of aniseed jumbles. Only one window allowed the lingering, evening light of May; candles had been lit, illuminating pewter plates and varnished oak. The room’s ambient rustle of whisper and movement settled.

Anne Hutchinson resumed the tale she had been telling. She recounted how plague had struck their village, Alford, three years earlier, and how they had lost sixteen-year-old Susan and eight-year-old Elizabeth. Devastated, she had withdrawn from friends and neighbours for a twelve-month, seeking solace in religion. Two more babes—her thirteenth and fourteenth—had since followed and she and her husband had made the decision to emigrate. Will had sold business, sheep and the house. They had loaded whatever belongings they would take to America onto carts and made the three-day journey to London.

The baby began to fuss and she settled it to suckle. “’Tis ever my practice to open the Bible at random to see where it pleaseth God to reveal himself. So I closed my eyes and placed my finger upon the page. It fell upon the passage in Isaiah: ‘Thy teachers shall not be removed in a corner any more, but thine eyes shall see thy teachers.’ Now, before my seclusion, I had been in the custom of holding conventicles at my home to elucidate the sermons of my teacher, the Reverend Cotton, for the women of the village. He had emigrated before. And thus it was revealed to me that we should go thither to the New World.”

“The Reverend John Cotton?” said Mr. Bartholomew, amazed.

“Aye. He was forced to flee shortly after his marriage and did not see his wife again until, pregnant, she joined him on the
Griffin
. He is now in Boston and is eager to receive us.”

Mary saw Mr. Bartholomew glance at his wife, eyebrows raised; then he cast a second look at Anne almost as if he could not believe his ears. Anne Hutchinson had spoken of the famous minister as if he were an equal, an associate, the way William would speak of his fellow merchants.

“His church was St. Botolph’s, in Lincolnshire,” Anne explained, as if geography might account for their association, yet Mary heard pride. She watched the woman’s large hand stroking the baby’s head and felt a small, urgent stirring in her womb.

Talk shifted to the voyage. The men spoke of the tools they had been advised to procure. The words—
frows, spades, axes, augers
—were hard in their mouths, making their chins jut and their eyes narrow. The women moved closer to one another, softer words blending.
Kettles, cradles, skillets, blankets
. Everything they owned was packed away in chests; none of these people belonged, anymore, to London or to England.

Sitting at a small table, William paged through the pamphlet, “New England’s Prospect.”

Mary, already in bed, put arms around her knees and studied him.

He opened his mouth as if to read aloud, then checked himself. He tossed down the pamphlet, stood, stretched. He undressed and came to bed.

Both sat against the bolster. Mary held the blanket against her chin, gazing at the window’s pale square. William leaned his head back into clasped hands.

“They call it the ‘New Jerusalem,’ ” he said.

October.

Mary woke to a violent cramp that seized her breath. Hearing her gasp, William laid a hand on her forehead. She opened her eyes as the pain faded and saw his fear.

“Go for them,” she said. “I will pray.”

He dressed, stumbling in his haste. He went to the attic door, called for Sinnie, clattered downstairs.

In thee, O Lord
, she whispered,
do I seek refuge; let me never be put to shame; in thy righteousness deliver me …

—

They named him William.

He glowed like an apple blossom, wrapped in white lambswool blankets. William wrote the glad news to Aunt Urith and Uncle Colyn.

The baby had long, sly eyes, like his father’s. He glanced at Mary as he suckled, a froth of milk in the corners of his lips.

Two days later, his mouth fell slack on Mary’s nipple. His limbs were limp, his tiny chest rose high in laboured breath. They sent for a doctor who applied a poultice of linseed and lettuce. By the end of his third day of life, the baby was dead.

William took the swaddling clothes and bade Sinnie pack them deep in a chest. He carried the cradle to a closet beneath the eaves. Mary broke into a fever and the midwife applied hot paper steeped in sage and vinegar to her swollen breasts; the doctor prescribed a paste of herbs to be bound to her wrists. William brought her a pair of gloves. Beige lambskin lined with peach-coloured silk, their gauntlets decorated with ferns of silver thread. He lifted her poulticed wrists, laid the gloves beneath her hands, stroked her knuckles. He wiped her face with a linen cloth.

“Mary, Mary. There will be another child.”

God was watching her, holding her baby in his arms. She saw herself standing before him, penitent, weeping, although she lay dry-eyed on the flock-stuffed bolster.
Why?
More light than man, a shattering glory emanating warmth, he turned from her without answering. She felt alone in the dimming light, the last remaining member of her family. She wondered if God assumed her gratitude, since he carried her baby to the field of bluebells, sparing him all earthly sufferings. She stirred her head on the hemp sheet as this vision was replaced with another.
Punishment, not mercy
. She had refused a clear call. She had been meant to encourage William toward the New Jerusalem. For her own selfish ends she had not. She feared the voyage, the
wolves, the savage forests. She had wished for a large London house with a garden running down to the Thames.

And God had led her into the presence of Anne Hutchinson. Follow the teachers.

Forgive me
.

O
N A
N
OVEMBER DAY OF
bitter cold, Mary and William walked through driving rain to the house of a Puritan couple. Others joined them, and they sat grouped around the hearth, drinking bastard or muscadine. They shared emigrants’ letters whose pages were softened from perusal, their folds worn thin. They took turns reading aloud.

… 
have built a meeting house …

… the winter safely passed. Now we do begin our planting. Cornfields have been impaled. The land is fat on the nearby islands and hath been brought into good culture …

Building a mill for the grinding of corn. Large timber, marshland and meadow doth give a good prospect … Beaver pelts, in such abundance that …

Trade with the Narragansett. Deerskin, baskets
.

We do put the heads of wolves on pillars …

A woman drew a frightened breath.

“Aye, but we would have muskets,” said a young man. “Think, Margaret! ’Tis the
heads
of wolves they describe. Shot dead. As some should be here.” His voice darkened. “On the past Sabbath, as we were coming from church, we did see men reeling beneath the lattices of an alehouse, five of them. They were falling down, faces red as if parboiled. A woman there was, begging, thin as a starved dog, children at her skirts. The men did rip at her dress, exposing her flesh. Two of her boys did protest and one of the men struck out. We
ran forward, but the ruffians ran, too. The woman was left sobbing. Her child’s cheek was torn and bleeding.”

In silence they contemplated how God’s wrath would gather over England for such crime, for frippery and drunkenness, for excesses of wealth and poverty. They could not imagine this punishment but were certain it would come.

The men began to argue about whether they would be abandoning their church if they fled to New England. They would not, some reasoned, for they carried the flame of truth and would keep alive the pure church in the citadel of God’s chosen people.

Their words were as cloaks masking the nakedness of obsession. They spread their fingers and then clutched emptiness, betraying a desire to hold firearms, oars, or the handles of ploughs.

Women spoke of more practical matters.

Will we have sheep? Make our own cloth?
It seemed from the letters that every woman must be her own tailor, cowherd, malster, baker. They imagined snow falling on the clustered houses of Boston—snow so deep as to buckle paper windows. They dreaded the Narragansett Indians. They wondered if there would be doctors for their infants.

“Nay, Joan,” a man said to his wife who had voiced her fears. He was earnest, urging. “Your
preachers
are there. ’Tis a holy enterprise.”

Mary had regained her health. Her heart had been smoothed like sand with the waters of other women’s assurances—
God took my firstborn; ah, Mary, love, they are angels, gone to Christ; you will have others
. She carried the weight of grief.

“I agree,” she said. She held her elbows tight to her sides, folded her hands. Beneath a black coif, her face bore its first, fine perpetual creases—pained curves beside her generous mouth. “I did hear a woman say that her Bible told her to follow her teachers. I believe the Lord wishes us to go.”