A Measure of Light (14 page)

He put his arms out, gathered her up. She spoke into his chest.

“She told me that Mr. Cotton said God intended it as an instruction for the parents.”

His arms loosened, blood rushed to his face. He rose.

“Damn Mr. Cotton to hell.”

“William. Remember …”

Her voice thickened, her tears fell.

“The Lord did take our first child. Then he gave us Samuel.”

Her chest lifted with a sob. Her words were gasped, torn, choked.
“But now he doth send some … some warning. I do believe he hath … hath damned me. Or that I was damned at birth. Why, I know not. I have searched my heart.”

He sat back on the bed but did not gather her. She pushed herself upright.

“’Tis
not you
, William. ’Tis me. Only me.”

He lifted her hands.

“I do not believe any such thing,” William said. “You have committed no sin. You do what is required of a wife and mother. You attend church, you work, you—”

“I attend Anne’s meetings.”

“As do many other people, Mary. Why would God punish only you?”

“I … we cannot know his reasons. I am filled with dread and darkness. I feel my punishment.”

That night, Mary slipped from bed, lifted her cape from a hook, slid hands into mittens.

She eased open the front door.

Over the sea, slivers of cloud shimmered like minnows. The moon was full, and the house cast a black shadow. She heard the surf breaking on frozen sand.

A single wolf trotted across the marsh.

Purposeful, she thought, watching its steady progress. It went up a rise. It sat in the numinous light, its back to Boston.

A howl rose, its tremulous descent dying into silence.

Baby, marked. A sign. Come from her womb.

I try, I try, I try. I cannot understand
.

—

He left the house before breakfast. When he returned, his eyes were puzzled, grim.

“What did she tell you?”

“No more than she told you.”

He spoke with sudden vehemence, and she saw both his love for her and his rage at the men of higher education.

“You are not to blame, Mary. I do not believe God sent punishment to either you or me.
Do you understand
?”

She nodded, knowing acquiescence was her gift to him, for she did not believe his words, nor understood, nor thought that his own understanding was complete. Yet she would not say more, for he glanced at his musket.

He longs to be away from this
.

“Go,” she said. “The sky is filled with birds.”

Men and women almost overwhelmed Anne’s next meeting. All bore the dazed and frustrated mien of having left one kind of urgency for another. Men stamped snow from their boots, removed hats and gloves. William stood amongst them along the wall; Mary sat in her usual place by the fire, clutching her Bible like a wrapped, warmed stone. People cast assessing glances, gauging one another’s anger.

Anne waited for silence and for the door to be shut tight. She glanced at the window where Governor Winthrop’s house could be seen through the warped glass—icicles glittering, curtains drawn.

“As you know, they have come to me,” Anne announced. “They have told me that I may no longer hold these meetings. They say …”

She broke off, searched not through the pages of her Bible but amongst her papers.

“Here, let me read it to you: ‘Though women might meet (some few together) to pray and edify one another, yet such a set assembly (as is now in practice in Boston) where sixty or more do meet every
week, and one woman (in a prophetical way, by resolving questions of doctrine and expounding Scripture) takes upon her the whole exercise, it is agreed to be disorderly and without rule.’ ”

An angry murmur rose from the room.

“They do choose to ignore that this is a gathering of women and men, and that we do all agree on many matters. Shall we continue these meetings?”

“Aye. Aye.”

“What care we for their …”

“’Tis a campaign of persecution …”

Anne held up her hands for quiet but it was some time before the voices subsided.

I will follow her, Mary thought. Still she looked down when other women spoke kindly of her miscarriage, fearing what her eyes might reveal; but she had resumed her work with Anne, accompanying her to births and illnesses. They did not speak of what had occurred.

William returned home one evening carrying a dead grey goose. He dropped the goose onto the hearth, hung his musket on its pegs over the mantel and shrugged from his snow-laden greatcoat.

“Do you remember that remonstrance that I signed? About Wheelwright, stating our belief in his innocence?”

“Aye, I remember.”

“Wheelwright hath been disenfranchised and banished. Aspinwall, he who drew the petition, is the same. Others are disenfranchised, including me.”

Sinnie froze, laden trencher lifted. Her eyes touched Mary’s.

“They have sent for Anne Hutchinson. We shall see what they do make of her case.”

They assembled at the narrow trestle table as was their custom and ate in silence—William, Mary, Sinnie, Jurden—Samuel in his
high-legged chair. There was no sound but the drag of spoons against wood.
Disenfranchised
. Mary’s shock was offset by the room’s settled peace. She left the last scrapings in their trencher for William and sat watching Sinnie and Jurden, seated side by side, each with a bowl. Jurden’s kindness towards Samuel had won him a loosening of Sinnie’s shoulders and the occasional nervous glance.

We are, truly, as a family. Knit together
.

William, seeing that all spoons were still, began the prayer.

Knocking—loud, insistent. William broke off. His face darkened, he strode to the door. Two men stood on the step, carrying muskets.

“You did not turn in your weapons as ordered, William Dyer.”

“Of course I did not. How am I to hunt? Protect my family?”

Mary dropped her napkin, stood.

He did not tell me of this
.

The two men came in without being invited. One man walked to the hearth, kicking aside a basket of onions with his snowy boot. He lifted down William’s musket.

“’Tis ordered. Where are the rest? Pistols, sword, knives.”

Wax brimmed in the candle, reached its breaking point and poured onto the table. Jurden had half-risen from his chair.

“You have come to take them, then you will have to find them,” William said.

Slowly, Jurden resumed his seat, fists set beside his bowl. Sinnie untied the sash holding Samuel in the highchair and carried him into the bedchamber.

Mary stood watching the obscene intimacy of William’s unmanning.

London. The day he returned with musket, shot, wadding. His soft hands caressing the stock
.

The men rummaged through chests, pulling out clothing and linens, leaving them heaped on the floor. They went into the bedchamber. Sinnie screamed and ran out clutching the weeping child.
She stood trembling, Mary’s arms around her, while the men returned and climbed the ladder into her attic. Mary heard the scrape and thud of skidding chamber pot, overturned pallet. They climbed down, kicked open the back door, went through to search the sheds. They returned, bearing a collection of two pistols, hunting knives, and three muskets. One paused to aim a kick at a long-legged trivet on the hearth. It flew, taking with it gridiron, bake kettle, broiler.

The door slammed shut.

William took one violent step, then turned back to the room. He looked at the dead goose, dusted in ash. His eyes were hard. Unrepentant. Seeking loopholes.

Another Christmas came and went, unmarked, save that Mary gave herself one gift. She took the letters she had received from Urith. She sat by the window and read them. One word—all she needed to evoke an entire epoch and the people she held in her heart.

Yorkshire
.

Mary and William set out before dawn, trudging westwards out of Boston. There was no sunrise, only a gradual lightening that revealed storm-bearing clouds over a black January sea; meadows buried beneath drifts; and an Indian village, where rotting cattail mats hung from decayed wigwams and scavenged human skeletons lay exposed by the wind.

They stopped. Stared.

“Last summer … unspeakable,” Mary said, hands to mouth.

In Connecticut, they had been told, the Pequot tribe “was no more.”

William’s eyes were grim. He nodded but said nothing in reply. He was friendly with many of the Englishmen who had gone with the militia. Only by chance had he not gone himself. In public he kept his counsel, although in the privacy of their home he had listened to Mary’s diatribe against the violence; had agreed not to accept a slave into their home; and had voiced the opinion that he was unsure whether they were now safer or in greater danger.

At the narrowest point of Boston Neck, near the gallows, William swept snow from a stone and they sat to wait for low tide. They ate maize bread studded with dried huckleberries, sipped water from a leather bottle.

At noon, they crossed over the sand. The road wound up an incline to the mainland. In the distance, Roxbury broke grey from snowy fields, a cluster of buildings set around a meeting house. They kept to the road until they saw the house that they recognized by its situation as Joseph Weld’s. The smoke of a banked fire was a desultory breath from the great chimney.

They made for a boulder surrounded by wild cherry trees. William squatted on one heel. A few snowflakes tipped from the sky.

“Be quick,” William said. He had procured a musket from a friend, carried it slung over one shoulder.

Mary stepped out into the field, stumbling, since her toes were frozen within her shoes. She lifted her skirts, eyes on the window she had been told was Anne’s. She carried a pack in which were letters from the silenced women.

Roger Williams’s phrase burned like a beacon.
Soul liberty
. The reason they had left England—for the right to worship as they wished.

She thought of the Indian camp.

It was not for Winthrop’s God that she began to run across the open ground, her heart racing.

As Mary crouched against the house, hands pushed the quarels and the window above her swung open. She fumbled the papers from her pack, pushed them over the sill. Anne slid her hand out, Mary pulled off her own icy mitten. Their flesh touched, a quick clasp.

Through the harsh winter of 1638, wolf heads nailed to the fence surrounding the meeting house bore tilted crowns of snow; inside the building, the cold was so intense that dogs were brought to lie on their masters’ feet.

On an evening in early March, the disenfranchised men gathered at the Coddingtons’ house. They had been given licence by the general court to remove themselves and their families from the Massachusetts Bay Colony before the next court, else they would be called to account. Anne herself was ordered to re-locate by the end of March, no matter the outcome of her church trial. Already, John Wheelwright and his family had fled to New Hampshire.

William had not returned for supper. Mary put the house to rights for the night, took her candle to the bedchamber, where Jurden had lit the fire. She lay watching the pulse of shadow, wondering what was transpiring in the Coddingtons’ parlour. The logs had burned to embers by the time William returned. He eased the bedchamber door open.

“I am awake,” Mary said.

She smelled tobacco and snow, sharp as the scent of newly turned soil.

“We have decided,” he said. He unfastened his lace collar, slung it onto the chest of drawers. “Tonight we incorporated ourselves and drew up a compact. We have elected our town officers. Coddington is to be the judge, I am to be clerk.”

He worked at his buttons with a haberdasher’s efficiency, infused with new energy, empowered.

“Where are we to go?”

“Providence. Next week we will begin loading a vessel with building materials. A few of us will go overland to Roger Williams. We will determine where to settle—whether near by Providence, or on one of the islands.”

“Will you go, William?”

“Aye. As clerk, I will be needed. And I would like to help choose where we shall live.”

He slid into the bed, gathered her with icy hands. He wedged cold feet between her warm ones. They lay heart to heart.