A Measure of Light (26 page)

“Why?” Mary asked. “What was their offence?”

The man beside her turned, spoke quietly.

“The Friends would not pay the fine for coming into court with their hats on and for setting their hands to a paper against the magistrates.”

Something of George Fox, Mary reflected, already characterized Friends, for in this white-haired man’s face was sweetness, patience.

“The jailor hath used them cruelly. He withholds their food and if they ask for water will offer a bowl of piss.”

His wife leaned forward, earnest. “He did say he would hang them all if he could. So we watch day and night and smuggle what food we can.”

“Sometimes we hear them singing,” the man said. “Then a cracking and a pounding and we do fear for them but the singing will come again and so we do stand in silence without.”

“We will go to the jail and visit them,” said Dafeny.

“Aye,” Mary said. “We can bring them comfort in the tales of those we have opened. We can read them our copy of a letter George Fox hath sent to all who spread the truth.”

Mary and Dafeny and many of the Friends stood in the street before the jail, surrounded by jeering men, women, children.

“Quakers!”

“Ye ranting sluts.”

“Come to visit yer proud friends?”

A clot of dirt flew. The sound of singing drifted from an open window in the jail. Another missile—frozen horseshit.

“We want no more of you northern vermin in this town!”

The crowd shoved the Friends, tore the men’s hats from their heads, pulled the women’s hair. Mary and Dafeny stood together, slightly apart. A constable arrived, accompanied by a man who identified himself as the town’s mayor.

“Ye’ll not be from here,” the constable said, pointing at Mary and Dafeny. “We have laws about vagrants.”

Dafeny stepped towards the man.

“Aye, we are travellers. But we do come in peace and will pass away soon. We come to spread the truth of the Lord, as we were taught by George Fox. We believe that there is rising a new and living
way out of the north, from whence we come.” She drew a breath, so deep that her chest rose. Her eyes were wide, unblinking. “The days of virtue, love and peace are coming. So doth our founder tell us. We believe that there is that of God in every one. We live in peace one with another, and dwell in the seed of—”

“I’ll give you seed,” a man called out. Laughter.

Snow began to sift from the sky. The singing continued in the jail.

“Come away,” the mayor said, taking Mary’s arm. He spoke in a low voice, glancing at the constable. “’Tis not safe for you here.”

He led her down the street. The constable followed, leading Dafeny.

Behind them, Friends began to sing along with the voices in the prison. The mayor turned.

“Stop that singing!” he roared. “Stop that singing!”

The Friends pressed close, still singing. Mary pulled against the man’s grasp.

“Calm yourself,” he said, tightening his grip. He lowered his voice, spoke kindly. “We do wish to hear your message. I have heard much of George Fox. A good man, they say, a good man.”

They came out in the town square.

“Ye’ll stand up there, they can gather round and better hear,” the mayor said, pointing to a platform with stocks. He turned to the people who had crowded up behind. “Come along, these good women are going to speak.”

Dafeny went first, led by the constable. The mayor turned to give Mary a hand up the steps. She slipped on the frosty wood, went down on one knee. She rose to see a confusion of skirts, the soles of Dafeny’s shoes, the constable bending, clamping her ankles into the stocks. Then the mayor’s hands, hard on her own wrists as she tried to stand, shoving her, too, into a seated position.

Dafeny began to sing.

“Ye’ll stay here all night. If you don’t shut that singing, your hands will be put in as well as your feet. Tomorrow you’ll be whipped for vagrants and sent with a pass to your own countryside.”

I will sing, I will sing
.

Mary lifted her voice along with Dafeny’s. She kept her eyes on the falling snow as the men forced her to lean forward and clamped her wrists. She sank into the peace of acceptance, like the snowflakes, wending their way, sent this way and that by the wandering air.

The next morning, Mary and Dafeny were so cold they could not move when released but tumbled sideways. The constable nudged them with the toe of his boot.

“Be gone with no more jabber and jangle, and I’ll not whip ye.” They lay still—exhausted, shivering. The sun rose, touching the branches of ice-silvered oaks.

They walked southwards, towards London.

MARY AND DAFENY RAN THROUGH
the streets. Weaving, stumbling. Skirts in hand, faces wrapped in scarves. Snow coated horses’ backs, lined the sills of shop windows.

Bridewell Prison dominated the surrounding houses. Four storeys high, flags flying from towers, it had been the palace of Henry VIII.

All the people of Kettlesing could live here with room left over
.

They passed beneath a vaulted stone doorway and showed their loaf of bread to a guard, satisfying him that they carried only sustenance.

“We are going to Elizabeth Swale,” Mary said.

They followed a matron. Tall and broad-shouldered, she walked rapidly despite a limp, manacles jingling from one hand. They passed a high-ceilinged, pillared room where women stood row on row, positioned before tree stumps, swinging short-handled wooden mallets against slabs of hemp. Children sat at their mother’s skirts or roamed, distraught, in the dusty air. A man wearing a white apron prowled the room, prodding rumps with a cane. The women talked, sang, shrieked.

“Harlots, they be,” the matron remarked, moving on. “Vagabonds, thieves and murderers.”

She led them farther—up stone stairs lit by draught-flared charcoal braziers, past rooms lit only by snow’s shadowless light. Inside the rooms, women sat slumped against walls, sewing; or huddled on flock beds.

“They are starving,” Mary breathed into Dafeny’s hair. “Twenty did die here last month.”

The matron left them at a low door and limped away, manacles clanking.

They stepped into a room that stank of ripening piss. Its floor was strewn with clots of hemp, half-chewed cabbage leaves, rat droppings. Beneath a small window overlooking the River Fleet, a pallet lay on the floor—a spill of blonde hair, a motionless body face down. Three men in greatcoats and high leather boots clustered around it.

Mary and Dafeny paused until a short man with a swollen, bruised lip and close-cropped hair nodded; they slipped between the men and knelt by the pallet.

“The jailor will be reprimanded,” he said, slurring from the injury. “I told him to stop, the punishment did not meet the crime. But I see that he continued.”

“She provoked him,” one of the men murmured into his fist.

“She
sang
,” the first man snapped. “She sang while he whipped her.”

The young woman was half-naked, her back a jelly. She cried out, suddenly, and threw out her arms as if fleeing sleep-terror. Mary and Dafeny soothed her, rearranged the thin blanket.

“We will take her,” Mary said. “Provide us a carriage. Else thee shall have the costs of burial.”

“You are family?”

“Friends,” Mary answered. She looked into the eyes of the short man. “We are Children of Light, as is she.”

Into his face came the expression—disdain, scorn, alarm—to which Mary had become accustomed.

“We will take her,” she insisted.

“Take her, then.” The man turned away, speaking as he stepped into the hall. “I will order a conveyance.”

—

At the gates of Whitehall, they helped the young woman down from the hackney coach. The day was darkening to dusk, torch-light quivering in the swirling snow.

“We came to stay with my cousin Dyota,” Mary explained. “She did once live here, but her husband hath died and now she hides in a stable with others who once served the king.”

The palace was quiet, its courtyards strewn with rubbish. They turned into the dunghill yard, a cobbled square surrounded by long, low buildings. Smoke wisped from crumbling chimneys. One window was propped open; behind another, they glimpsed a hand pulling a curtain shut. Inside, no horses drowsed or paced in the stalls; no saddles or harnesses filled rooms where once had been a frenzy of polishing.

They supported Elizabeth up a staircase and manoeuvred her down a listing hallway, passing a room in which women gathered around a hearth. Steam rose from a kettle, stoneware pipkins stood in the coals. Hunger scooped the women’s cheeks and evidenced itself in the children’s listlessness.

Elizabeth’s knees buckled, she staggered. They shuffled down the hall to Dyota’s room, once a groom’s lodging. Candlelight gathered the dried-blood red of a Turkey carpet, the black wood of an oak chest. Dyota lay on a curtained bedstead. Her eyes were closed, her breath was halting, raspy.

They helped Elizabeth to a pallet, eased her onto her belly.

“I felt the Lord’s hands,” she murmured into the pillow. “So vast they were. So warm. As if I were a kitten and he did lift me from harm.”

“Aye,” Mary said. Women clustered at the door, whispering, but did not enter. “Almost, Elizabeth, thee entered the Kingdom. But he did send thee back.”

Dafeny went out through the group of women, who took her leaving as an excuse to enter and ask after Elizabeth’s misfortune.
They clucked, stroked her hair. After a long while, Dafeny returned with a bowl of paste and strips of linen.

“Walkmill powder,” she muttered, kneeling. “Had to go to the apothecary’s.”

She knelt, worked a strip of linen into the paste, handed it to Mary. They worked until half the girl’s back was bandaged.

“Prithee, more linen,” Mary said. Two of the women left. The others made way; coalesced, like duckweed. There was a sound of tearing.

Mary pressed a strip against the last seeping welt. Hands passed her a sheet, clean and folded, and she draped it over the plastered back.

Might have been her shroud
.

She pictured the jailor who had whipped this young woman. How, afterwards, he would have gone to his home and sat before a fire, eating savoury pie. How he would have turned into a warm bed, feeling he had done his duty.

“They turned us from our home,” Dyota moaned.

Two months had passed. The dregs of winter hovered over the city, their breath smoked on the air.

“’Twas a bitter cold day in January. My Ralf and I knelt in prayer.”

In her palm, Dyota held a blood-stained chip of wood. It was a relic from the king’s beheading, a remnant of scaffold the size of a banty egg, worn from handling.

She was propped against a bolster, shivering, sweat dripping from her temples. She suffered pain in her joints, faintness, fever, night sweats. Weekly, a physician came to administer bloodlettings and emetics. Her condition did not improve. On sunny days, Mary bundled the sweat-soaked bedding and hung it out the window.

“They took the king to his own bedchamber therein to await his
death. Oh, and the groan that went up when the blow fell and severed his lovely head. The great groan! ’Twas the end of my Ralf. His heart brake asunder. Not three days later the Puritans turned us out. Into the snow. ‘Take what you can carry,’ they said. ‘Take what you can carry.’ We went from pillar to post until Ralf died. Then I crept back here like a rat. ‘Oh, England!’ my Ralf would cry out. In his great agony of mind. ‘Oh, England!’ ”

She held the piece of wood to her cheek. Her voice lowered.

“That great beast and murderer.” She turned fever-glazed eyes in the direction of the Cockpit Lodgings where Cromwell lived with his wife and children. “And now he is king in all but name.”

Mary nodded. Only that morning, she had seen graffiti, crude portrayals of Cromwell and his cronies, scrawled on walls by those weary of the Puritan reign.

Cromwell and his wife and children were in the process of moving into the sumptuous apartments once inhabited by the royal family. The royal possessions had been salvaged—bedsteads, crates of silver, rolls of tapestries, retrieved artwork. And in the past two days, carpenters had begun refurbishing these stables. When discovered, the squatters had been granted time to find new accommodation. Some had already left to seek family amidst ruined country estates, but Dyota was too ill to move. And despite the grace period, Mary feared taking her into the armed camp London had become—twelve hundred troops recalled from Ireland, the Tower garrison increased, even a cannon placed before the palace walls.

“Oh, and we are to call him
Your Highness,”
Dyota murmured. “May our dear king come back soon and cast out the beast.”

Mary, Dafeny and Elizabeth listened to Dyota’s complaints and said nothing. No cool cloth, no soothing words could ease her distress. After a time, their own silence spread like lulling music and stopped the parched, fevered lips.

Quiet
.

Mary leaned against the wall, sewing. Tenderness loosened her palms. Ah, should she spread her fingers as George Fox had done in the Kettlesing churchyard—
life would quiver there, distilled to a single drop
.