A Measure of Light (17 page)

“Sinnie heard the women gossiping. She said they know more about my baby than I do.”

Anne sat straight, hands in their customary position, overlapped on her belly atop another growing child. She spoke in her usual fashion, without hesitation.

“Ah, Mary. I thought to spare you the picture you would thereafter carry in your mind.”

Mary’s heart raced, her voice sharpened.

“’Twas
my
baby, Anne. You treat me like a child.”

Anne faltered. She raised a hand, tipped the palm towards Mary. “Nay.” Now her voice, too, wavered. “I would have done the same for … for the Queen of England.”

“Tell me.”

They heard the house make its settlings. Anne was silent.

“Tell me,”
Mary repeated, more loudly.

Anne looked away.

“’Tis no use, Anne,” Mary insisted. She heard her voice take on new tone, harsh.
“Part fowl, part fish, part beast
. This is what Sinnie
told me the women were saying. Spread by the men who dug … it … up. I have heard these words and
they cannot be unheard
.”

She crossed her arms, her eyes remorseless upon Anne’s face.

“They do exaggerate,” Anne said, at last. “’Twould have been greatly decomposed. But …” She sighed. “I will tell you.”

She spoke rapidly, staring at the floor. “As I told you, there was no head.”

Mary pressed hands to cheeks.

“The face was strangely distributed low on the torso. Atop the face were ridges and other fleshy bits, curved, so that one might interpret them as fish-like …”

Mary slid one hand down, clasped her mouth.

“The eyes were exaggerated …” She paused, glanced at Mary. “Set on either side and bulbous …”

“Enough,” Mary murmured, raising her hand.

“But there were no horns, as he is saying, Mary. No pricks and scales. No claws, no talons.”

Mary’s heart had thickened, as if too large for her chest, sending the taste of blood to her mouth and a roaring in her ears.

“Winthrop uses it for his own ends, Mary. He doth gloat in the discredit this casts upon us both. Upon my doctrine. As we knew he would.”

Why she tried to keep it secret … for all of our sakes …

They sat in silence. Mary’s fingertips were cold.

“How was it discovered?” she said, finally.

“Goody Hawkins might have told only one person, Mary. Only one, who confided in the next … and so it goes, like fire to curtains.”

She wishes for my forgiveness
.

“I had no choice.” Anne’s voice had returned to its normal strength and clarity, as if she addressed the women at her meeting. “As I understand it, Mary,
I had no choice
.”

She leaned forward and took Mary’s hands. Mary met her gaze; saw that Anne was perplexed, grieving. Tender.

“I believe you to be a fragrant and pure flower in the sight of God,” Anne whispered.

Ah, spoken with fervour, with fear
.

For the first time, she did not believe her friend.

Three days later, William returned ahead of the others, walking through the night to bring his news of purchased land.

It came from her in a torrent.

Everywhere in the town, like the spring snow that had begun to fall, words hissed and expired and were replaced and repeated. All that William had brought to tell her shattered in the rage she could not contain.

“They dug up our child.”

He took hold of her fists, removed them from her temples.

“Who?”

“Winthrop and his men. He hath been spreading a horrible description. He … hath … he hath called for a public day of humiliation. Tomorrow.”

William could not speak. His lips quivered, he stroked her wet cheeks with the back of his hand. He pulled her to his chest, rocked her.

“They shun me,” she said into his doublet. “They shun me. They shun …”

She heard a choking sob, felt a shudder. William turned away from her, face in hands. He lashed out, punched the wall.

He sat, then, nursing his fist. She put her arms around his shaking shoulders.

—

Sinnie lay on the floor, looking through the crack.

They wept.

Oh, help them. Help them
.

She did not know to whom she sent her plea.

William’s weapons were returned.

On an April morning, Mary stood at the railing of a pinnace. They were sailing towards the Hutchinsons’ farm at Mount Wollaston, a few hours down the coast, where those leaving for Providence were to gather.

From the sea, Boston was reduced to a mere concretion upon the land. Mary turned her back upon the place, took Samuel by the hand and went to the ship’s bow. Light snow fell, but the sky was like old cloth and sun broke through, rendering the flakes as particles of light. The sails filled and the small boat settled into a steady rise and fall, heading southwards.

She was reminded of the day they left England and of how she had taken a long, last look at Plymouth’s stone houses. How she had felt she obeyed God’s calling, going to Boston, the New Jerusalem.

That night, the snow continued to fall as they laid down pallet beds in the Hutchinsons’ Wollaston house. Mary dreamt that the house was buried, only the chimney visible like a gravestone in a white waste. In the morning, the snow had ceased. They wrapped their legs and feet in leggings of wool or leather and set out in a long line: five banished families—parents, children, servants, dogs, packhorses—like a bright moving quilt against the white landscape. A smudge of trees edged the meadow.

“No fear,” Wil Hutchinson called out, sensing the group’s unease as the trees grew closer. “These salvages are friendly. ’Tis a praying town.”

They entered the forest. Snow slid from hemlock boughs with sudden wet thumps. Samuel rode on William’s shoulders. Babies were slung to parents’ backs, their fretful crying lulled into sleep by the sound of stretching leather and the crunch of footsteps. Roots and frozen puddles lay, treacherous, beneath the snow. They passed swamps whose bushes were tipped with the red buds of spring and came to streams too large to cross, where they struggled along banks, seeking fords.

Wil called a halt at a boulder the size of a small house. Trees sprouted from its crevices. Men gathered stones to make fire pits, women and children scavenged dead branches and twigs. They made nests of baggage and bedding against the boulder’s rocky wall. They set iron pots over the flames, shook cornmeal into brook water.

Mary squatted beside a pot of bubbling porridge, stirring. She felt excluded from the people moving beyond the fire’s glare who shared words with one another, for she could not hear what they said and could barely speak herself, even to Sinnie or Samuel or William. She had insisted, finally, upon knowing exactly what Winthrop was telling everyone. A neighbour woman had told every detail of what was being spread about. She could not—and would never—speak the words that had reached her ears. So terrible, Winthrop’s lurid description, going so much further than what Anne had told her that she did not dare imagine the creature that he proudly proclaimed to have seen, a sign from the Lord sent to show displeasure to the Puritans of Massachusetts for allowing heretics in their midst. For the first moments after the words had poured into her ears like Shakespeare’s
cursed hebenon
, she had considered how she might do away with a body that had created such a thing.

She glanced over to where Anne sat by another fire, instructing a child who poked the burning branches with a stick and knelt to blow the coals.

No. It was only meant for me, God’s message. Only for me
.

When prayers and the meal were ended, the company settled for sleep against the boulder. In the darkness, the patch of humped and twitching wool was broken by the firelit shine of child’s hair or man’s eye or woman’s glistening teeth. A child’s whimper, shushed, came again and broke into a wavering wail. It was a sound of such pure misery that Anne unwound herself from her blanket and stood before them like a preacher.

“Listen,” she said. “The Lord is with us. Remember Psalm 71—‘Be thou to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress, to save me, for thou art my rock and my—’ ”

The words were cut short by a passionless animal shriek. She looked over her shoulder into the black night, cleared her throat, finished the verse.

Curled between William and Sinnie, Mary lay awake listening to random crepitations—an acorn’s fall, shiver of twigs. The eerie shriek came closer; then she heard the first notes of the wolves’ chorus.

Dear Lord
, she began, and could not continue, as if forbidden. If she had not been pressed between husband and servant, she would have risen and walked into the darkness, towards the alluring, mournful song.

After seven days’ march—filthy, irritable with fatigue—they straggled into Providence, a collection of houses wedged between a river and a high hill. Roger Williams answered their knock, stood with a broad smile, wiping food from his mouth with a cloth. Some stayed at his home, others were billeted with families or went to the tavern. They bathed their raw, calloused feet, ate mutton stew, and slept indoors between sheets smelling of lavender.

—

On a fine April day, they set sail down Narragansett Bay, travelling past wooded shores and small islands. At sunset, their boat drifted into a channel that snaked through tall, nest-rich grasses. They embarked on a soggy bank.

“Pocasset,” William said. “As it is called by the Narragansett.” The island had been purchased from the natives. The chief sachems, Canonicus and Miantonomi, had received forty fathom of white beads and the other inhabitants had been given ten coats and forty hoes—as part of the purchase, they had been required to leave.

There were no houses. Felled trees were strewn about burned stumps.

The women were silent. Mary had imagined it as a Yorkshire valley, with a village of thatched cottages.

They stood listening to the throb of tree frogs, the rustle of reeds.

In warm morning rain, Mary and Sinnie and the other women and their children gathered rocks. They lugged them in baskets, clattered them in heaps. Over the next days, hearths and chimneys sprouted from the muddy soil. The men cut green saplings and drove them into the earth, bent them around the hearths in the shape of bread loaves. They lashed bark or sailcloth over the frames.

Inside their English wigwam, Mary and Sinnie spread reeds on the ground, put their packs and bundles along the walls, set a cooking pot on the crude hearth.

Mary went to bed with aching back, her hands curled like an old woman’s in the shape of stones.

All night long, the wolf howls rose, quavered, faded away into silence and then recommenced.

William sat, listened, lay back down. Mary buried her head in his armpit. Vinegar, damp wool.

“We shall destroy them,” he murmured into her ear. “Sleep, you are safe.”

A FLOCK OF RED-WINGED BLACKBIRDS
swept down like a wind-tossed shawl, bending the rushes with their slight weight.

Mary stood in the doorway of their new house.
Spring
. Its energy in the kindly light, its buds and birds; so simple, it seemed. The green slopes around the cove were cut and torn by the wheels of oxcarts; her eye was drawn less to the land than to the square shapes enforced upon it, where the village of Pocasset grew. The air rang with the thud of mallets, the creak of wheels and whinnying of horses. Behind her, the settled state of their own house—a fire on the hearth and a quilt-mounded bedstead—made her wish that it were not finished; its construction had crowded her daytime mind and graced her with the sleep of exhaustion. She had peeled bark, dug postholes, lugged water. And she had been wearied by the gruelling walk from Boston; the exigencies of their first crude hut; the wolf slaughter, when they had been so beset that the Narragansett had come to their assistance, hurling an injured doe into a pit, bidding the men corral the wolves and the women to cower in their hovels.