A Measure of Light (31 page)

Their eyes. Filled with hatred
.

“I shall heckle,” William had told them, back when they were still confined in one cell. “I shall argue, rail, speak without cessation.”

Governor Endicott held his pointed beard with one hand. He wore a black silk cap with purple braiding.

“You have interrupted our meetings,” he began. “You have caused disturbances.” He spoke at length, detailing their offences.

When he finished, William Robinson stepped forward.

All summer he nurtured this plan
.

“Is this thy converting of others?” he began. “By compelling of
people to come to your meetings? By imprisoning, whipping, putting in stocks, burning in the hand, and cutting off the ears of those that come to bear witness against your cruelty and idolatry?”

His blue eyes widened, a vein pulsed beneath blanched skin.

“By fining people and taking away their goods? Hath thee no other way nor word to convince those you call heretics and deceivers but to take away their lives?”

“You will BE SILENT or you shall be gagged!” Endicott roared, jumping to his feet. “The child will be sent from here under custody of her uncle. She is under no banishment. However, you and the others are hereby banished from Massachusetts. Should you return, you are under pain of death.”

“Know this,” William Robinson said. “If thee puts us to death when we return, thee will bring innocent blood upon thyself. And this thee will certainly know one day, that the Lord God of heaven and earth, whom we serve, sent us among you—”

Men closed on him, took his arms. The others were seized as well, their shoulders held, their ribs poked with musket stocks. They were hustled through the door, out into the sounds of gull-cry and snapping flags, and marched down the stairs. At the bottom, William Robinson lurched wildly as a man thrust a foot to trip him. He was dragged to the whipping post. Men hauled his hands up, began to bind them. Others stripped away his shirt.

“Look there,” Mary said to Patience. She stepped between the whipping post and the girl, pointed to the piling clouds. “Surely ’twill thunder later on.”

She did not repress a knife edge from sharpening her words, knowing how it would startle the girl and keep her tears from falling.

The following day, Mary returned to the tavern, where her belongings and her horse had been kept safe by the sympathetic owner.

Two nights later, she arrived back at the farm, took her horse to the barn, and walked wearily to the house. She let herself in, for they had not heard her arrival. Sinnie was putting linens in the hall dresser. She turned as the door opened.

“So thin, Mistress!” She reached for Mary’s cloak with both hands.

“Nay,” Mary said, staying Sinnie’s efforts, making her way into the parlour, where the family sat by the fireside. William looked up and his face opened, like a sleeper suddenly wakened. He was teaching the boys how to carve; Littlemary was sewing a quilt piece. “I am only thin, Sinnie. I am strong as trees, my heart feels delight.”

She untied the strings of her riding hat. Her hands shook. William rose to his feet, his mouth working to shape words, not finding them.

“My heart feels delight, in truth,” she repeated in a hard voice, hurling her hat onto the settle.

Sinnie and Littlemary exchanged a glance.

Mary went to her bed, too tired to eat. She slept without dreaming.

The next morning, she sat up and at first could not comprehend the puzzle that surrounded her.

At breakfast, word arrived that Christopher Holder had passed into Boston on the same day that Mary had left. His intention had been to set sail for England. He had been seized, arrested as a Quaker and thrown into jail.

Mary insisted on riding to Newport in order to consult with other Friends. William protested.

“You need rest, Mary, you are …”

She took up her riding hat that still lay on the settle where she had tossed it. She tied the strings beneath her chin.

Sinnie folded corn cakes into a cloth, fumbling in her haste and
not daring to meet Mary’s eyes. William stood on the hearth, slapping the side of his boot with a poker.

“This time, they will kill him,” Mary Scott said. She was Christopher’s fiancée, the older sister of Patience. Her voice, Mary noticed, carried her aunt Anne Hutchinson’s cadence—assured, urgent. Her hair made two black slashes on either side of her forehead, like wings. “He was nearly dead after his torment in Barnstable. Three hundred and fifty-seven lashes. He lay for days near death. They have already had his ear. Nay, this time, they will surely kill him.”

Mary, Hope Clifton and Mary Scott sat in the parlour of the Cliftons’ house overlooking Newport Harbour. Sunlight spooled in dimity curtains. They could hear the slap and creak of ships rocking in their moorings and the voices of men passing beneath the window.

“They will not dare. He is too well known, his family is too highly placed.”

In the hall, they heard the African serving girl humming a tune and the splash of a dipper. Hope went to the hearth, took the fire tongs and pushed back a smouldering stick.

“In old England, Christopher Holder was known to Cromwell and to many others. ’Twould be the undoing of the Boston magistrates if they would kill him. For their laws are unjust. He has done nothing but profess his beliefs.”

“We must leave this afternoon,” Mary answered. She felt her heart lift.

“Thee cannot go to Boston, Mary Dyer,” Mary Scott exclaimed. “Thee is banished under pain of death.”

“Remember thy mother’s words,” Mary said. “ ‘If the Lord asks it, woe be unto us if we do not come.’ ”

The women sat in silence.

If the Lord asks it …

CHRISTOPHER LEANED OUT A PRISON WINDOW
.

“Praises be to the Lord,” he called down. “The jailor returns soon with hammer and nails to shut out the light, but ’twill not matter. In this cell is the sweet smiling savour of glory.”

“Aye,” Mary Scott called back. “But doth thee wish food or any other thing?”

Frost crunched beneath their feet and the women kept their hands fisted beneath their cloaks.

“I would wish thee to be gone from this dark place,” he said. “And especially thee, Mary Dyer.”

“The Lord hath called us,” she said. She stood back from the younger women, watching their fearful faces. She felt alert, neither calm nor afraid. Her eyes quickened to the flick of a rat, scurrying behind a barrel.

I am where I belong. Assured of the grace of God, I will wait
.

Their hands were not gentle. They came upon them at the door of the tavern, six men carrying knob-tipped staves.

“Be you Mary Dyer?”

“She is not,” Hope Clifton cried out at the same instant that Mary said yes.

The tavern’s sign swung, creaking.

Wind, the smell of the sea
.

They turned her away from the other women, pushed her up the street.

“I wish to say goodbye,” Mary said. She turned, but the man placed a hand on the side of her head, forced her forward. She watched the cobblestones as her feet came forward. Wave-rounded. From the sea, from the beach. She saw how each was divided, light on one side and on the other a caul of shadow.

So fast, it happened. The morning after their arrival.

On pain of death
.

Outside the jail, Mary turned her face to the sky, took her last breath of salty air.

The jailor’s eye was swollen, suppurating. The constables handed him a mittimus and he read it, then squinted at Mary.

“Ye come back, did ye. They telled you they’d have yer life. Your lookout’s but a poor one.” He seemed satisfied, as if seeing a wager won.

She stumbled as one of the men yanked her closer to the jailor’s desk; she caught herself, straightened.

“Please to bring me a candle and a tinder box,” she said. “And scorched linen. What you gave me in the summer would not catch.”

No one deigned answer. They bent around the mittimus, watching the jailor’s laborious signature. His hands were stained with oak gall ink. The goose-feather quill bent in his fingers.

“And a quill,” she continued. “And ink. And paper. I must write to my husband.”

She observed the sunlight sprawled across the desk. It paled the wide boards of the table, the pages of a book, a pewter ladle. It sank into the fibre of a worn rug, caressed the jailor’s pitted skin. She followed the slant upwards to the window, whose wooden shutter was half-folded. Dust shone upon the glassblower’s ponty swirl.

—

The prison’s air bore the scent of damp, as in a root cellar. Only candlelight, now, flickered on the long, scrolled hinges and iron spikes that covered every door. The jailor put his key in a lock. The door creaked, opened upon darkness. Mary put up a forbidding arm.

“Do not touch me. I will go forward. I will walk into the light of the Lord.”

Reverend Symmes. Reverend Norton. Reverend Wilson. Governor Winthrop. Governor Endicott.

Names tossed like wrecked boats.

When she awoke in the darkness, her dreams faded like ink in water. She pulled them back into the light of consciousness, read them, listened to them, gazed at them. In the long, empty days—broken only by the exchange of food for chamber pot—she studied.

Back, she went, walking the roadway the Lord had set her upon. She saw how it led, step by step, to this place.

Here. In this place of glory
.

Some days, she prepared a room filled with light and then allowed William and the children to enter it. She took their hands as they stepped through the door.

Why did you go to Boston?
they asked.

I came to be in the Lord’s house
.

What if you are put to death?

I will come to this place of peace and light
.

Some days she became as analytical as her Uncle Colyn had taught her to be. She wondered if other Friends had heard of her incarceration. They would themselves come to Boston, then. Surely. And if the magistrates were to fulfill their threat and execute them? The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s new laws had no standing in the British courts. Perhaps there would be swift retribution from London. Possibly there would be an end to these heinous laws. Or the weight
of the magistrates’ desperate measures would tilt, like a poorly built dung heap, and crush them.

Morning paled the spaces between the window’s boards, making four threads in the darkness. She plucked a piece of straw from her mattress and worked it into a crack in the wall, counted the other straws with her fingertip. Ten.

October 18th
.

When the door opened, she sensed a change. The jailor thrust it wider than usual and stood squarely in the middle with no bowl in his hands. His torch cast shadows like black tulips.

“You’ll be coming out today. Going to court with them other two.”

“What other two?”

“Them as were here before. Git up.”

She waited with her hands folded so that her rising would be of her own volition.

She followed him down the hall, down the stairs. The door opened to daylight so brilliant that she levelled hand over eyes, squinting. She was startled to see the same arrangement of things in the room, as if the change in her circumstances should be mirrored by the jailor’s office but was not—there, before her, was the same ink horn, pounce pot and quill stand, the same dusty mantelpiece over the same hearth, and the same small, smouldering fire, casting little heat.

Another door opened. William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson stepped into the light, wrists shackled, chins lifted.

Their faces registered alarm at the sight of her.

I have changed? Thin?

“Dearly beloved,” William Robinson said. His skin was translucent, his temples coiled with blue veins, the pouches under his eyes purple-black.

“I have met with true peace,” Mary said. Her own voice made unaccustomed vibrations in her ears and she dropped it to a whisper. “And you, my friends?”

“Also, he hath been with us,” Marmaduke said. His face was haggard. He closed his eyes as if to recall the strength sent to him in the cell—lost, it seemed, in the fearful glare of daylight. Mary remembered what he had told her, how he had been filled with the love and presence of the living God and had been told by a clear inner voice that he had been ordained a prophet.

Constables crowded into the room and Mary found herself next to William Robinson as the prisoners were swept from the prison into the bright day. Word had preceded their passage and people were gathered on street corners or clustered behind windows. Mary saw a hand drawing a curtain, a woman’s eye, mouth, cap.

“What hath been happening?” she murmured. Her breath came fast from the pace that was set. She staggered, her legs weak.

“Marmaduke and I were in Salem, but we came to Boston as soon as we heard of thy plight. Eight other Friends came with us. All are imprisoned.”

“What of Mary Scott and Hope Clifton?”

“They, too, are being held in the jail.”

“Nicholas Davis?”