A Measure of Light (21 page)

Sinnie set down pewter platters heaped with baked pumpion, boiled cod, apple pandowdy. The lace on her cuffs was neatly folded and tucked under her sleeves.

Mary dipped her spoon into the hot, molasses-sweetened apple.

William had returned from his office in Newport, angry. He began to talk, looking at no one. Words that he could not keep inside, exploding from him.

“Coddington hath been in England for over a year.” His nostrils were white at the edges. “Now I hear that he is beseeching Cromwell for a separate charter for Aquidneck Island.”

The children, accustomed to his rantings, paid no attention. Sinnie was busy with an iron lid, wrestling it to the hearth.

Nor is he speaking to me
.

He filled his mouth, chewed.

She glanced at him, repelled by the juicy sound. In Boston, it had been she who had returned from Anne’s meetings, keen with new
ideas; and he who had queried her. Now, William spent his evenings at gatherings and returned home so roiled that her health, or thoughts, were as an excess that strained his patience.

“Coddington doth indeed think himself of the aristocracy. He feels himself the fit ruler of Aquidneck.” He scraped at their shared trencher, leaving nothing for Mary. His voice became argumentative. “We should send Roger Williams back again this spring to reaffirm
his
charter. At first we thought ’twas Roger’s bid for authority over us all, but then … well. We saw that ’tis good for Providence, Newport, Warwick and Pocasset to make up one colony. Providence Plantations. There is no need for Aquidneck to split away. For there are merits in unity and …”

At meals, the children were not allowed to speak, or meet each other’s eyes, or slouch, or ask for more food.

“…  now that Massachusetts hankers after our lands, ’twill behoove us to reaffirm of ourselves as a patented colony.”

“Would you go to England with Roger?” Mary asked. She spoke with an edge in her voice.

Startled from his inner rooms, he looked up with habitual affront. Relaxing, then, when he met her eyes.

A scuffle beneath the children’s table—Samuel and young William sent thoughts to one another through the sides of their boots. Maher was holding apple in his mouth, not swallowing. He liked to taste his food for as long as possible. Littlemary sat with her hands tight-folded in her lap, watching a fly whose feet were trapped in a pool of molasses.

“Perhaps. Nay, there is too much for me here. Although …”

He shrugged, folded his napkin, pushed back his chair. In the kitchen shed, the workers were finishing their meal.

Men sail to England. They go and then they return. And then go again. It is not to them a place so remote as to be lost
.

The bay’s sparkle livened the sunlight, illuminating crumbs on the table, making silver cuticles on the apples.

One bayberry candle flickered on the chest of drawers. Wearing only a linen shift, Mary shivered, putting away her coif. The floorboards creaked as William approached.

“I will have a fireplace in our new bedroom,” William said. He slid his arms around her. “Ah, my lovely. Skin and bones. You are starved as a mongrel.”

She slid from his arms and climbed into the high bedstead. She pulled the quilt up to her chin, set her feet on a flannel-wrapped brick.

“’Tis not an illness of the flesh,” she said. She had seen him clasp his hands as if to hide the uselessness of palms that could apply neither knife nor potion to alleviate her pain.

He set his candle beside the Bible on the bedside table, slid in beside her, taking a breath at the linen’s dank chill. Their feet tussled for the brick. She saw that this would make him laugh, then sigh and blow out the candle; and so, forestalling, she relinquished the lovely warmth.

All day long, she had planned how she would tell him what had recently clarified in her mind.

“You cannot know how it is to be ordered by men to ‘eschew the sin of barrenness’ and continuously produce children, even when they have told me my womb is as a malevolent pit, seeded with evil.”

He began to speak but she held up her hand, conviction darkening her voice.

“I have only dread when nausea announces new life. I cry out in terror when my babes slither from my body. ‘Do not cry,’ they say, ‘’tis a perfect child.’ But I am hollow as the vessel they have made me. It is not that I
do not
love them. I
cannot
love them.”

He pushed himself upright against the headboard.

“How can you not love your children?”

“I
cannot
, William. I yearn for the feeling that I have for you, or for Aunt Urith. But it is as if there is a door closed between me and my children. I do not know if they notice. If they do, the boys no longer, nor ever, it seemed, care—but Littlemary … asks of me … and I needs must …”

There were no words for the emptiness where love should be but was not.

They would never be her children. Governor Winthrop, the black-frocked clergymen, the magistrates and their followers had taken them from her when they had dug up her baby and brushed the soil from its body. When they had handed it about, groaning with triumph and disgust.

“I feel myself unworthy to love or to be loved,” she whispered.

He sat so still that she was afraid to glance up at him.

“I must go to England on the spring sailing. I must go see Urith. That, I do believe, is the only cure.”

“Ah, Mary … I would that …”

“Children may have other mothers.” The words came as if spoken without her volition. She was swept with sudden, profound regret and realized that until this moment, she had never truly understood this. “Sinnie knows their every thought. Her life is naught save for them.”

“As you had your aunt,” he said, slowly, surprised by the realization and its implications.

“Aye. Yes, my William. As I had my aunt. And now she is dying.”

He drew a long breath. Then he reached for her hand, studied it. He rolled to his side.

“I remember the first gloves I gave you,” he murmured. His fingers were delicate as the legs of a foraging bee. “They were of lamb skin, dressed flesh-side out. Silk-lined, silver-gilt thread. Your left hand slipped into the glove. A perfect fit … Will you miss us?”

She saw that he struggled against long-withheld grief. She could say
yes, my William, surely you know I will
, but did not, for she knew his question was a wedge and this but the first tap.

“I fear to lose you,” he said.

“You will lose me if I stay, William. If I do not go to England on the spring sailing, I will surely die.”

The quilt rose as he took a breath so deep he must sigh its release. She was touched by a wisp of memory, the essence of what had once been: Mary Barrett from Yorkshire, supple as a lily, seeing love in a young man’s eyes.

They left at dawn. Sinnie had been long awake, stoking the fire, preparing food. The children had been called from their beds and sat on the settle, stupefied with sleep. In the iron pot, cornmeal heaved, emitting puffs of steam.

The latch clanked, the door opened. April air chilled their ankles. Jurden leaned into the room, bearing the smell of barnyard; beyond him, two horses stood saddled, two others laden with packs. Mist ghosted the meadows.

“Ready,” Jurden said. He eased the door shut.

Baby Charles had been carried down from his trundle bed but had not awakened. He lay, now, in the pine cradle that Sinnie had set just beyond the reach of sparks from the fire.

Mary’s eyes burned, dry. She had lain awake all night. She turned to the cradle, knelt, reached to touch the baby’s face. The children rose from the settle, gathered around her.

“Best not wake him,” she whispered.

She stood and gazed at her children, leather travel mask pushed up onto her forehead. The children stood facing their mother—barefoot, wearing linen night-shirts—as if already an ocean separated them. Last November, William had told them of Mary’s “trip.” Her aunt, he’d said, who had been as a mother to her, was ill and had begged her to come.
Your mother has no choice
.

Their eyes winced into hers and slid away. William waited by the door in his greatcoat and boots, gloves in hand. His silence, Mary knew, was maintained with difficulty.

They know. They know. What child does not sense their parents’ deepest inclinations?

She embraced the children, one by one.

“Goodbye, Samuel.”

“Goodbye, mother.” Fifteen. Conscious of his self-control.

“Goodbye, William. Maher. Henry. Littlemary.”

A horse whickered. They heard the jingle of bit, Jurden’s low command. Sinnie stood on the hearth, fists tight against her breast.

Littlemary burst into tears.

Mary knelt, arms spread. The little girl came to her, buried her face in Mary’s shoulder.

“I will write. I will be back. I must go see my auntie before she dies.”

The child’s sobbing caused Henry, aged three, to burst into tears. Maher and William, seven and eight, looked towards their father, frightened. William stepped forward, went down on one knee to gather the little girl into his own arms.

“I am sorry,” Mary said. She stood, stepped back. Her wide mouth crimped at the corners, she pressed hands to cheekbones, distorting her eyes. “I am sorry.”

“Come,” William said. “Say goodbye to Sinnie and then we must leave.”

“Ah, Mistress.”

Sinnie ran forward, Mary spread her arms.

“You are my dearest friend,” Mary whispered into Sinnie’s hair. “You are my dearest friend. Oh, my Sinnie.”

The children and Sinnie clustered in the doorway. Littlemary put her arms around Sinnie’s waist, face half-hidden, tear-wet.

William helped Mary to her saddle, then mounted his own horse. Mary took a breath, but only raised her hand in a wave.

I am led
, she wished to say.
I have no choice
.

At the northern tip of Aquidneck Island, they crossed the narrows of the Sakonnet River on Howland’s ferry and spent the night in Providence with Roger Williams and his family.

At supper, the men spoke of the charter, of the king’s beheading, of England’s civil war. The women compared their children’s ages. No one spoke of Mary’s departure or the reasons for it.

The next morning they rode north along the Great Salt River, passing farmsteads whose fields sloped up steep hillsides. Men walked behind ox-drawn ploughs. Others stood in carts shovelling rotten
fish meal onto the soil. On the riverbanks, waterwheels turned, creaking, water spilling from bucket to bucket; and from the mills came a rhythmic pounding and the smoke of risen dust.

They entered the forest on the Pequot Path.

Mary watched William as he rode before her, gun jutting over his shoulder, shadows running and slipping over his buckskin jacket. Every so often, he leaned over his stirrup, calling her attention to fresh scat, or the prints of deer, moose, wildcat. The light was made tender by its passage through new leaves and the horses’ hoofs fell silently on the red-tasselled catkins of beeches, butternut and hickory.

There were no other travellers on the narrow Indian path, so ancient that it had cut deep into the soil, winding like a watercourse around boulders and rocky outcroppings. The clergymen who had exhumed her child and proclaimed her
the mother of a monster
had preached that God had prepared this land for the English by ridding its forests of the bedevilled salvages. Mary thought of the native mat that had lain beside her bed. The smallpox, she had heard, broke and mattered, oozing, so that when a person rolled, skin would cleave to the rushes and flay away, leaving a mass of gore.

At noontime, they came to a river the colour of dark ale, paling to cinnamon where a sandbar corrugated the water. White pines grew on its banks. They dismounted, hobbled the horses, sat on a rock. They laid out beer, sausage, pickled radish.

The horses drowsed, their lower lips loose and foolish. Once Mary caught William’s eyes on her—loving, worried—and yet she saw how, bit by bit, she had slipped from the centre of his concern.

She watched leaf-stippled shadows play upon a bed of violets. She had grown accustomed to the vast emptiness of this land and of her displacement within it; how it scraped her with its searching light.

So small, she had become. So insignificant.

He will not miss me for long
.

—

They spent three days in Boston waiting for the ship to sail.

Mary did not venture forth from the tavern. She was sickened by the proximity of Governor Winthrop and the clergymen and the meeting house at the top of the street.

She sat at the window and watched men loading hogsheads and casks onto ships, horses standing patient before wagons of timber. Out beyond the harbour, amidst the winking, wave-crinkled water, she could see blue islands, dwindling away down the coast.

“Goodbye, William.”

She felt numb with disbelief at the turnings of their life.

He wept and held her.

“My love,” he said.

“I love you, William.” Her whisper was half-choked. “I will return. Perhaps … healed.”

He helped her into the rowboat. He stood at the edge of the wharf, waving.

Smaller, he grew. Smaller.