A Measure of Light (18 page)

She leaned against the doorframe. An image filled her mind and she pressed palms to eyes. It hovered, always, sometimes sweeping over her with such force that she cried out, or dropped kettles—
part fowl part fish part beast, holes like mouths, horns, no toes but claws, talons, prickles …

—

Feet, slapping the packed soil. Running.

Anne’s serving girl bent in the doorway, hand to ribs.

“Prithee, Mistress Dyer,” she said, gasping. “Anne’s time has come.”

A young preacher trained in medicine stood at the bedside, bloody hands hanging. Anne lay with bare legs spread, clutching her shift. Eyes closed, she cried out as a quivering, jelly-like mass slipped onto the bedding.

Gooseberries, Mary thought. Numb, she looked on without understanding.

“She hath lost consciousness,” the young man said.

Several weeks later, Mary and Anne sat in a doorway, stripping pinfeathers from mallards. Northwards, they could see the bright timbers of new houses as the settlement grew. Behind them, in the single room of the Hutchinsons’ new house, Anne’s daughters worked at the hearth.

“I have heard,” Anne said.

She had lain near death for days. Now colour bloomed in her cheeks and her prodigious energy had returned.

“They say that the young minister wrote to John Cotton of my miscarriage. Cotton did tell Governor Winthrop. Now, they say the news has spread far and wide. ‘Anne Hutchinson, too, hath birthed a monster.’ Ah, but mine was not
one
, like yours, Mary, but thirty!
‘Each a different shape!’
Winthrop doth proclaim. As I brought forth thirty misshapen opinions, he says, so I must bring forth thirty ‘deformed monsters.’ ”

She secured a feather between thumb and butterknife, gave a violent pull. Then she slapped down the knife.

“I
do not care
,” she snapped.

Mary, startled, looked up. Anne had maintained her equanimity throughout her house arrest and trial; now, it seemed, this final outrage was as the flooding of spring tides.

“I feel the same for myself as I did for you,” Anne said. “I am a lily in the sight of God. I do not feel sullied by what came forth from my womb. ’Tis only that I am too old to be bearing children.”

Mary tugged at a stubborn feather.

“Of course, you are young,” Anne said—considering, amending. “Your next babe will be perfect, I am certain. I do believe you are graced, Mary. Your baby was …” She broke off, brooded. “Perhaps ’twas a message for Mr. Cotton, warning him of his weaknesses. Or for Governor Winthrop himself. God chooses his methods, we cannot understand.”

Mary did not answer. She heard in her teacher’s voice a veiled impatience. With her. With her obdurate grief, darkness, despair. With the entire subject, which sapped time better spent on the building of Pocasset.

“Perhaps ’twas nothing more than a misstep of nature,” Anne added, glancing at Mary. “Such as mine. Such as you see in a pig’s litter.”

Mary bent forward over a basket, shaking feathers from her hands, suddenly furious, thinking that Anne understood theology, but not friendship. She trampled upon the heart’s seeded soil.

“Do you not remember?” Mary said. She heard the harshness that frequently, now, edged her own voice. “I did lose my first boy. In London. My first perfect boy, William, who lived but three days. Then Samuel came, another perfect boy. And then …” She threw up her hand, her mouth warped. “How can I not think that this was intended for me?”

Teach me
, she wanted to cry.
Give me the answer
.

She looked away, out over the bay, where a shallop headed out to the fishing grounds. Anger towards Anne was an unwanted glimpse into vacancy, where once had been trust.

—

Spring yawned into hot summer.

At low tide, Mary and Sinnie picked periwinkles along the shores of the cove. Sinnie—blonde hair like thistledown, pumpkin-yellow petticoats and red stockings revealed in the breeze. Samuel—a pudding cap, quilted. He trailed Sinnie, holding her skirt, then letting it go in order to squat, his tiny fingers plucking. Mary watched them.

I should be happy
.

She lifted a mat of bladderwrack. Beneath, clinging to the rock, were the innocent snails, their tender cream-coloured feet clinging.

William was busy, preoccupied. As clerk, he attended frequent meetings with Coddington, now
Judge
Coddington, and three elders. As surveyor, he allotted plots of land with strokes of his quill. He was appointed to deal with the Indians in the matter of venison procurement. He named men as sergeants or corporals of the train band; he disposed monies from the treasury, made laws and memoranda—all “according to God.”

He feels a kind of exultation, she thought. Power, thinking to improve upon such laws as were imposed in Boston. Freedom.

She watched Sinnie and Samuel, who had moved farther out on the mudflats. Beyond them, small waves quivered, running under the sky, tossing the light. She lowered herself to a rock and sat with arms round her basket, pressing it to her belly.

“I say merely that a person may have direct communion with God. How doth that interfere with the ‘running of this colony’?” Anne sat on a high-backed chair, hands clasped as if for restraint and her eyes hunting the men’s.

Mary sat beside William on a bench beneath the Coddingtons’ parlour window, which was open to the sound of rain on the pond
across the road and the smell of autumn leaves. Across the stippled water, maples drifted in mist, a red cloud.

The men exchanged glances. Wil Hutchinson was no longer so proud of his Anne, Mary thought, seeing his eyes lower. She saw her own William’s fingers drum his knee, knew he wished to be home on this wet day, for there was still work to be done before the coming of cold. Judge Coddington, however, held Anne’s stare. He had been Boston’s wealthiest merchant and had built its only brick house; yet from the time of Anne’s arrival in the colony he had never stopped supporting her.

“We must needs have unity of purpose,” Coddington said, exasperated. “As would any new enterprise, be it colony, business, or church.”

“I am tired of the interference of government in the affairs of people and religion,” Anne snapped. “I am
opposed
to magistrates.”

“How would you have us keep order, then?” Coddington exclaimed. “Punish the riffraff? Control drunkenness, thievery, all the evils to which society is prone? You would set us one against the other.”

Again. Again
.

Anne set her jaw, held his eyes.

Without her, Mary thought, there would have been no rebellion. No diaspora. And thus, no Pocasset. She longed to be buoyed by such passion of conviction, as she had felt long ago in London when she had first beheld Anne’s cool, intransigent eyes. She did not know, now, if she followed Anne from habit, envy, or fear.

“You exhibit arrogance, Mr. Coddington,” Anne snapped. “You hold that you are of the aristocracy and that we are not. You wish for control over my spiritual as well as my temporal life. I have gathered a few families around me. Hereafter, I will hold my own church and will nevermore set foot in yours.”

She rose, sought her work basket. She strode from the room without waiting for her husband.

Wil Hutchinson made a helpless gesture, as if appealing for leniency.

Mary saw Anne pass beneath the window. Into the silence came the voices of children, jumping from rock to rock laid out on the road, taunting when someone missed their footing: “Poison, poison!”

Sinnie curled on a pallet by the hearth. Moonlight cast shadows, the windows were opened to the shrilling of peepers.

They forget that I am here
.

Murmurs, then hisses. Then—loud voices.

“…  my teacher.”

“…  not to go. I am the Clerk, how would it …”

“And she is my friend. We followed her here, William.”

“…  other reasons …”

Sinnie sat upright, pulled the blanket around her shoulders. The lazy-eyed embers warmed her face. Ashes were gritty beneath her bare heel.

Fighting over words. For they do both breathe the same air as one another, eat the same stew. Feel the same sunshine
.

“I believe in direct communication.”

“Do you? Have you received such?”

A crabbit tone. He gets above himself. He asked for me to slickstone his ruff
.

She waited for Mary’s answer. She did not understand the question but realized it had brought the fight to a halt.

Be she weeping? I would go to her, oh, that I could go to her …

“I cannot come anymore.”

They stood beside a rail fence. Cow pies in the lane were crisp, flaky. Corn hung on dried stalks and boys carried armloads of firewood
into sheds.

Mary raised her eyes to Anne’s sun-browned, wry face.

“William forbids it.”

Their eyes met with a rebounding, as arrow striking steel.

William forbids it
.

“Do I fail you, Mary?” Her tone was a plait of threat, sarcasm, wonder.

Yes
, Mary wished to say, but did not.

The word had no place in the clarity of island autumn when each thing—falling apple, migrating birds, passing whales—had its truth and sequence.

William had called them outside, noticing a smudge on the full moon. He held his son, bundled in quilts. Mary put an arm around Sinnie, hugging her close for warmth. Crisp shadows lay across the snow.

The smudge grew, slowly veiling the bright face.

“Now ’tis like bloody egg yolk,” Sinnie whispered.

Trees, houses, boulders faded into the maw of blackness as the snow ceased to shine.

“What does it mean, Mistress?” she whispered.

Mary had grown weary of signs and their interpretation. She turned to William. His eyebrows lifted, relief replacing a new and unpleasant shiftiness in his face, the mask of ambition.

“We will not stay here,” he said. “’Tis clear enough even without this. Coddington has told me he wishes to leave. He has no interest in sharing rule with Anne and her people. He is sick of dissent. As am I.”

In April, William returned from an exploratory trip down the western side of Aquidneck Island. He paced the hearth as he gave his report.

“There is a natural harbour, but around it the land is swampy. We will cut trees, and burn them, and dump the ash and wood on the swampy ground. Then we’ll haul in sand and dirt. And gravel. The Narragansett have offered to help, for payment.”

She sat at the table swirling fiddleheads in a bowl of water, skimming the dried, woolly scales floating on the surface. Although it was their second spring on Aquidneck Island, she did not plant peas, nor set Jurden to manure the gardens, nor bid Sinnie deep-spade the carrot patch.

She felt William’s excitement but was not infected by it. He was invigorated by challenge, whereas she and Sinnie anguished over what to take and what, once again, to leave behind. And in any event, she did not care whether they stayed in Pocasset or moved down-island, and despaired over the fact that William was so intent upon his goals that if he thought of her state of mind, it was only to dismiss it as a phase, transitory as the moon’s warning veil.

She wondered if she would ever again see Anne.

With whom will I share my thoughts? Discuss the Book of Martyrs or Latin grammar? Engage in theology or talk of communion with the Holy Spirit?

That night, William extinguished the candle and lay upright against the bolster.

He is not preparing for sleep
.

He rolled towards her and found her face in the darkness, slid fingers into her hair.

“Many children, Mary,” he whispered. “Sons and daughters. Samuel doth grow lonely.”

Always, his hands described her to herself. Belly, waist, the insides of her thighs. His lips sought her nipples, unleashing need, need, so urgent. His pleasure, still, waited upon hers.

Afterwards, she lay with arms outflung, eyes open, legs spread, savouring the respite from sadness.

Love. So fierce. No words for it
.

Beyond
.

Mary and Sinnie sat on the hearth, knitting.

“You do not wish to go, Sinnie?”

Sinnie quirked her eyebrows at her tipping needles.

“I am tired of moving, mistress.”

Mary laid down her work.

“I am, too,” she said.

Samuel had turned three in December. Today he had a cold and had tired himself playing outside in the crisp air. He lay sleeping in the trundle bed.

“You be like mother to me,” Sinnie observed. “Mother and sister both.”

Mary looked up, acknowledged Sinnie’s intention with a smile.

“My friendship with Anne hath faltered,” she said. “So I feel lonely, for there were things we talked of that I cannot discuss with anyone else. And I do feel … I do feel as if there is no life inside of me. On the brightest day of sunlight, my spirits do not lift.”

“Aye.”

“I feel abandoned by God. If such is true, I see no reason for my life. I am like rock. Or dirt. Or dog.”

“I love rocks and dirt and dogs,” Sinnie protested, and then blushed. She set down her knitting to pluck a twig from the yarn.

“Oh, Sinnie.” The wind rose. Mary looked out the window, saw a shudder run across the waters of the cove.

Sinnie spoke again. “Those that tell of your baby and say you are bad because of it … 
they
are bad,
they
are the cruel ones. Winthrop and those ministers. And those gossiping women. I do believe …”

“What? I truly wish to know, Sinnie, for t’will help.”

“I think you be the best person I know. If a bad thing was within
you, it was not your badness.” She lowered her voice. “Sometimes I feel sorry for the creature. It did not wish to be so formed.”

“’Tis so confusing. So confusing.”

“It will pass,” Sinnie said. “Terrible things do fade away.”

I forget. Her pain
.

Mary studied Sinnie, whose needles moved more quickly.

And still she is a loving person
.

Mary stood before the Hutchinsons’ house. Anne was spreading linens on alder bushes. She straightened, hand to back. Her daughters, elbow-deep in a washtub, looked up. Wind lifted suds from the froth.