A Measure of Light (24 page)

“Why?”

Mary skimmed the metheglin. The spoon, forgotten in her hand, dripped onto the hearthstone. “I had a child,” she said. “I never saw it, ’twas born two months early. It was dead at birth. They did not wake me to see it, the two midwives. They took it away and buried it.”

“Why?” Dafeny repeated. Her voice was truly innocent, her green eyes fixed on Mary.

“’Twas rumoured that it was a monster. The ministers and magistrates heard of it and dug it up. It was a thing, they said, part beast, part fish, part fowl.”

Dafeny stilled, alert as a cat.

“At first I did not believe it but my friend who had seen it said ’twas in part true. Then I felt it, as if ’twere still in my womb. A scratching, a horror. I prayed for release and found that God had left me. I was dark, within. Damned. Punished for my sin.”

“Sin
. Dost know why George Fox was jailed in Derby and thrown into the dungeon?”

Mary shook her head.

“The magistrate asked him if he dared avow he had no sin. And George Fox, he did say, ‘Sin? I have no sin.’ George Fox doth say that every man or woman hath received from the Lord a measure of light. He tells that if we hearken to that light we shall come into the state Adam was before he fell. Then we do be innocent. Pure.”

Mary sat back and folded her hands. She considered the flames for a long time.

“I wonder,” she said. “I went to the tarn to … I wonder.”

Dafeny ran her fingers over a scar on her cheek. Her clothing smelled of pig manure. Her lips were so chapped that she could not smile.

Mary leaned forward, tugged at a burr on Dafeny’s sleeve. The barbs released reluctantly, with tiny rippings.

“Why?” Mary said. “What maketh you to go abroad in rain and snow, to suffer such violence, to be so scorned? I was sorely abused by those who were my teachers. Now I do not know if I would ever again be disposed to follow any teacher.” She half-turned to the great hall, firelight playing upon the carved dishboard with its wooden trenchers and copper pans. She lifted her hand to include the house beyond. “I have no joy in this place of my childhood. I care not for the smell of mutton, or anticipation of the assuaging of my hunger. I wait not for the arrival of friends, nor for the dawn of spring and the bursting of green leaves. My heart is dry and black as a bat’s wing.”

Dafeny watched the fire and listened without evidencing judgment. Then she turned toward Mary, elbows on knees, hands parallel as if she held a box and all that she wished to say were contained within.

“I go because I do believe that once all have known the inner light, then men and women, servants and kings, priests and drovers will be as equals, and such will put an end to strife, cruelty and suffering. George Fox’s father was a weaver; as a youth, George were put out to a cattle-dealer who was a shoemaker by trade. The Lord’s word hath been revealed to us humble people of the north. We have no choice but to go forth and tell it.”

Her face lit with a sudden thought.

“He is in this region. May be that thee will see him for thyself.”

“I see you are tender,” Mary said. “I see that you and the others do love one another.”

“We are as a family,” Dafeny said. “As much family as our own blood kith and kin.”

She yawned, closed her eyes, dragged them open with difficulty. Mary smiled and took up a candle.

“Come.”

THAT NIGHT, MARY COULD NOT SLEEP
, aware of the Friends in the adjacent bedchambers.

Do you miss your children?
she had wished to ask Dafeny, rather than if the children missed their mother. But she had not dared, for fear the question would be turned.

She tried to pick apart the memory of each child’s birth. The first, she remembered best. Little William, luminous as a new rose, peaceful in his cradle within London’s racket. The next child, Samuel, Boston-born, adored by Sinnie while Mary herself was haunted by dread of his loss and weekly reminders of God’s jealous purview. Then. Pains in the garden. Screams. Anne’s voice.

Move ahead to Aquidneck
.

Babies, babies. Like following waves, one subsuming the next, all clouded by unending grief. Clouts, fevers, squalling, the day’s other duties, her own darkness of mind so heavy that she sought her bed and pulled the coverlet over her head.

In memory, she could not set each child out upon a table like a row of apples.

I should not have fled. For if I had stayed, I would have come to love them
.

She pulled knees to chest, clasped cold hands between her knees. She recalled how, earlier this evening, Dafeny had deepened her voice to imitate a man’s.

Sin? I have no sin
.

Who was this George Fox, who could say such things?

Every man or woman hath received from the Lord a measure of light. He says that if we follow the light we shall come into the state Adam was before he fell. We shall be innocent. Pure
.

She opened her eyes in the darkness. She saw herself parting from Ann Burden in a London inn. She saw herself boarding a stagecoach, arriving in Yorkshire. There was Aunt Urith, arms wide in the doorway, wrinkles riding slack skin. Months passed. Pessaries, ointments, tinctures. In the cooling autumn, she knelt at Urith’s bedside, watching the long departure; collapsed, at the last breath, and flung her arms round the porcelain-still body.

Then, the empty house. No simplers’ feet hurried down the narrow halls nor caused the stair treads to creak. No cooks and maids worked red-armed in the great hall, nor groans came from the surgery, nor clatter in the stables. From Uncle Colyn’s study, she had stared through the rain into the courtyard, where once women had laboured over the copper washing vats, their reed-paddled flails rising and falling, their arms mottled with steam and cold. Her fingers had caused the room’s only sound, lifting books from shelves, settling them back. Herodotus, Livy, Procopius. Froissart. Sir Walter Raleigh’s
History of the World
. Camden’s
Britannia. Purchas His Pilgrims. Antichrist the Pope of Rome
.

And she had begun to hear the whisperings.

You, too, should have been buried with the baby
.

The inheritance went to the oldest son. He had come to review his property. Before leaving, he had bid his cousin Mary stay as long as necessary. Then, a letter from William, asking when she would return. She had written back—
I must delay. There is much still to be settled
. She had prevaricated, and it gnawed at her.

She rolled over and lay face down on her bedstead. Then she thrashed back up, pulled her covers to her shoulders. Mixed with
the patter of rain came a sound like the faint, irregular creaking of timbers.

Ah. Snoring!

The next morning, Dafeny’s ankle was swollen, purple and throbbing.

“Fat as a suckling pig,” she said, sitting in the bedstead, rueful.

Mary provided the others with bundles of cold meat and cheat rye bread. She stood in the doorway watching as they made their way down the street, encumbered by the swaying corpses. Then she helped Dafeny down the stairs and to a chair by the fire; plastered the ankle with a paste of vinegar, bread crumbs, honey and figs.

“My aunt taught me many things,” Mary said, kneeling to tuck up the ends of the cloth.

“Tell me of her,” Dafeny said. “Tell me of thy life.”

Two weeks later, Dafeny’s ankle was healed, but still she stayed with Mary.

At the hiring market in Kettlesing, smoke rose from braziers, carrying the smell of mutton through the cold air. Scarlet pennants snapping in the moorland wind, the green wheels of a gypsy’s wagon—their colours were so bold in the clarity that they appeared less objects than strokes of light.

Dafeny clutched Mary’s arm. “That be him.”

“Who? Where?”

“George Fox. There, by the market cross.”

They stood shoulder to shoulder with tradespeople and servants, who clustered, waiting their turn to step up onto the auction block to offer their services and skills. Thatchers held tufts of golden reeds;
dairy-maids clutched stools. Sun made a pocket of warmth, releasing the smell of unwashed clothing, smoke-befouled hair.

Fox rose over the crowd, sturdy in a leather doublet. Unlike the close-cropped Puritans, hair spread from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, lay across his shoulders. His hands were large as a labourer’s, and scarred, like his leather trousers.

He called out suddenly, as if announcing a matter of extreme urgency.

“I declare that the Lord has come with the Word of Life!”

The auctioneer glared and then continued his bawling cries. Fox paid no attention. He held up one arm. He was flushed with health, face ruddied from days spent out-of-doors.

“The Lord God hath sent me to preach the everlasting gospel and Word of Life, and to bring you from all these temples …” He pointed at the church tower. “…  tithes, priests and rudiments of the word. They have been instituted since the apostles’ days, and have been set up by such as hath erred from the Spirit. I come to save the church from deadness and formalism.”

Mary put a hand to Dafeny’s shoulder in order to rise up on her toes. The young man’s eyes were stern, compassionate.

“Quench not the Spirit …” he called out.

“Shut yer cakehole!”

The crowd milled. Some turned towards the auctioneer, others to Fox. Those who shouted were shouted at by those who wished to hear one or the other. Fox’s voice soared over the discord.

“…  and live that ye may feel and see to the beginning, before the world and its foundation was; and that nothing may reign but the life and power amongst you. And live that ye may answer that of God in every man …”

“Out of me way.”

Mary was pushed from her toes as a goose herder shoved past, leading hooded birds attached to one another by a rope. The herder flailed with her stick, hissed.

Fox’s words unfurled upon the fatty scent of roasting mutton, the jingling of farthing boxes, the bawling of cattle. Mary was dimly aware that Dafeny had asked her a question, but Fox’s words were such that she felt if she did not attend them, a gulf would yawn and all would slither to perdition, the world rendered into nonsense and rubble.

He is so young!
His lips had not yet acquired the bitter down-turn of age. She pulled herself up, again, hand on Dafeny’s shoulder. He turned away. Broken phrases came and those around Mary also craned to see, shushing one another, seizing the words like grains spewed from a passing cart.

“…  go forth … in the sun of God’s power … you will see where the lost sheep are. And such as have been driven away …”

She lost his next words as cattle filled the street, their driver shouting, cracking his whip. She cupped hands behind her ears, straining to hear.
Such as have been driven away
.

A man roared, rushed towards Fox and knocked him down. Fox rose, calm, and placed one hand against the man’s chest, keeping him at arm’s length. Still he preached, although now his words were intensified by intimacy, as if he addressed the man alone and thus, by implication, each separate listener.

“…  you will see the bright morning star appear, which will expel the night of darkness that hath been in your hearts …”

My heart
.

“…  by which—”

He wavered again as he was seized by two men. Mary could hear his voice. “…  by which morning star you will come to the everlasting day, which was before night was. So everyone feel this bright morning star in your hearts, there to expel the darkness …”

“Where did he go?”

“Like an angel, he were …”

The crowd surged to follow. Mary put out her arm to keep herself from falling, heard a shriek, felt a blow on the side of her head. Her
hat slid over one eye as she struggled amidst legs, shoulders, baskets and dogs.

“Come,” Dafeny said, pulling her up by the arm. “He will make for the church.”

They were jostled along a street, past the tavern, up a lane. At its end was a lych-gate; beyond, the square-sided church tower. Two men dressed like Fox were setting a wooden placard in front of the roofed gateway.

Dafeny brushed red curls from her face, stood on tiptoe, squinting at the scrawled letters. “What do it say?”

“ ‘God is not worshipped here,’ ” Mary read, raising her voice as people gathered round her. “ ‘This is a temple made with hands: neither is this a church, for the church is in God. This building is not in God, neither are you in Him, who meet here.’ ”

A woman carrying a basket of onions clapped hand to mouth, too horrified for speech. Mary saw a farmer repress a smile, eyes bearing sly delight. A small man ripped cap from head, waved it in a frenzy of outrage.

“Call the constables!” he shrieked.

Other men picked up the placard and began to hustle it away but were restrained by officers wearing the yellow-cuffed red wool coats, grey breeches and felt hats of the New Model Army.

“Put it down,” one of the officers snapped. “Let others see what it do say.”

People pushed through the lych gate and entered the church to see if Fox had invaded the sanctuary. Mary and Dafeny followed those who went around to the churchyard.