A Measure of Light (32 page)

“He stays in Barnstable. He fears the bloody laws and will not return to Boston.”

“Christopher Holder?”

“Still in prison.”

They reached the Town House. The constable herded them up the staircase, ushered them into the court. The room echoed with the scrape of chair legs, the din of voices as dozens of deputies took their seats.

Mary sank onto a bench between the two young men. She glanced behind her. Lace collars, wool socks, boot buckles; the ugliness of
the men’s faces with their rotting teeth and fleshy noses; resin-bleeding knots in the walls and the oily scent of grain coming from the storeroom on the floor below.

William and Marmaduke refused to remove their hats. A constable snatched them from their heads, sailed them into a corner.

Governor Endicott and the other magistrates took their seats at a table. Endicott’s goatish face, elongated by a narrow beard, was barren of expression save for disdainful eyebrows. Moisture glistened along the sagging lower lid of one eye.

He laid a hand on his square collar.

“Why did you come again into our jurisdiction, being banished upon pain of death?”

“My coming was at the bidding of the Lord and in obedience to him,” Marmaduke answered. William answered the same.

Mary heard her own voice next, so low that it caused an intensified hush.

“I did come at the bidding of my Lord and in obedience to his command.”

Endicott looked at a paper on the table before him. He pushed it with the tips of his fingers. He opened his mouth and then shut it. When finally he spoke, his voice had changed. It was faint and urgent.

“We have tried and endeavoured by several ways to keep you from among us. And neither whipping, nor imprisoning, nor cutting off ears, nor banishing upon pain of death hath kept you away.”

There was a silence into which came the distant creak of a swinging sign.

“I do not desire the death of any of you.” His voice was barely audible.

The room stirred as the deputies leaned forward. Marmaduke’s chest rose with a sudden breath. William’s hands clenched. Mary’s heart beat—thick, buttery.

“Give ear,” Endicott said. Then he stopped. His words were almost a whisper. “Give ear and hearken now to your sentence of death.”

William Robinson rose to his feet before the reverberation of the words had had their desired effect.

“I desire to read a paper,” he said. His voice was firm, matter-of-fact. “’Tis a declaration of my call, wherein is declared the reason and causes of my staying in thy jurisdiction after banishment upon death.”

He waved the document, which he had pulled from his sleeve.

His words were to Endicott as a dash of water in the face.

“You will not read it,” the governor snapped, his voice returning to his former strength. He stood, both hands on the table, eyes wide and wild. A flush burned his cheeks.

“’Tis my right to read it before sentence of death be pronounced.”

“You will not read it. It
shall not
be read!”

William Robinson remained standing. “If I cannot read it, nor have it be read, then I shall leave it with thee.”

He stepped forward. The constable started up, but William only tossed his document onto the table where it slid into the hands of one of the magistrates. Endicott sat, slowly, and reached for the papers with shaking hands. He glanced at one page. His mouth worked and then he stood again and pointed at Robinson. His words rapped, without pause or reflection.

“William Robinson, hearken unto your sentence of death. You shall be had back from the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, to be hanged on the gallows till you are dead.”

Mary’s vision narrowed and was filled with Endicott’s face. She saw that his fear had been replaced with injudicious recklessness.

The jailor came and took William from the room. The same sentence was passed on Marmaduke. Then he, too, was led away.

She sat alone on the bench, facing Endicott—behind her, a roomful of silent men.

Endicott looked at her and she saw that he was aware of her advanced age and the man to whom she was married and the circles in which he moved.

“Mary Dyer,” he began. “Please to stand.”

The rustle of her skirt and knock of her heels sounded as she stood.

His voice quivered, then settled. “You shall go to the place whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and be hanged there until you are dead.”

There was not a sound in the courtroom. She looked directly at the governor.

“The will of the Lord be done,” she said.

“Take her away, Marshal,” he said. Blood had drained from Endicott’s face. He was spent, beyond exasperation. He lifted his pen, looked blindly at his papers.

The marshal came but she did not move. She stood straight-backed, facing the row of men.

Look at me
.

Endicott raised his eyes. She stared at him, so fiercely focused that her gaze might slice his flesh, should she desire it. Her lips barely moved.

“And joyfully I go.”

The jailor lingered. He was enjoying the attention centred upon his prison and seemed more interested in Mary now that she was sentenced to death.

He told her the news:

Thomas Temple, governor of Acadia and Nova Scotia, had written to Governor Endicott. He had pleaded that the three Quakers be spared. He offered to pay for their passage out of Massachusetts. He promised to give them homes and land.

Governor John Winthrop, Junior, of Connecticut, too, had written, asking for the prisoners.

“He would crawl on his bare knees, he did say. He would crawl all the way from New Haven, if need be, to plead for your lives. What do you think of that?”

All across New England, the jailor said, they were being talked about. “Three Quakers, and one a woman. To be hanged in Boston. Big news.”

He squinted at her in the candlelight.

“They put twelve men on the night watch. They be marching round the jail. Just for you and them others …”

“I thank thee,” Mary said, quietly, respecting every glimpse into the man’s humanity, even if she saw only pride, hate.

Mary was given candles, paper, a board and writing materials.

She was not told the date of the execution. Since her conviction, she had added five straws to the wall.

Sunlight slanting through a barn door, warming the neck feathers of a rooster and the red-tasselled broom corn. Her mother’s needle, glinting silver, silken strands composing grasshoppers on satin. Candle-lanterns swinging from the hands of villagers, casting their patterned lights. The moors beneath a star-sprinkled sky.

A blueberry pie cooling on the windowsill. The smell of lilies.

The children’s skin with its flush of blood. Hunger, in their bellies, in their hearts.

Life
.

Oh, life
.

She took up her pen but could not begin to write of the particulars of the world she must leave behind. She wept for the first and only time.

He came with a bowl of hotchpot and a chunk of salted cod. He grunted, placing them on the floor. The cell filled with the smell of hot vegetables: carrots, kale, turnip.

“I do not know whether ’tis worth the effort to eat,” she said. “Yet my body bids me take comfort.”

He paused in the doorway, watching her.

“Thine eye,” she said. “’Tis healed.”

“Aye. ’Twas a syrup made of sow bugs drowned in white wine.”
I must tell Sinnie
. Then her mind tipped, dizzy. Sinnie. Lilting voice, hands reaching for hers. She would never see her again. The soil vanished from beneath her, she swung by the neck. Her hands were bound to her sides so she could not reach up.

Keep close to the light
.

“The other prisoners. Please tell me of them.”

He looked at her, considering. She took up her bowl and tasted the hotchpot. It was flavoured with savory and she wondered who had cooked it and whether kindness was in her heart.

“All the women are together.”

“Good.”

“They moved them two men that is to die. One of them was a-shouting out of his window so we put ’em down deep, in irons. There’s a few other men. They be just there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder.

“I heard hammering,” she said.

“They called for a fence to be built. Too many people are coming round.”

“Jailor,” she said. “Will thee tell me? Will thee tell me the night before I am to die? I needs must have a night to prepare my soul.”

He did not answer. The door shut behind him and she was in darkness.

Eight straws, now.

She held the candle close to the tiny letters of her Bible.

O God, whose might is over all, hear the voice of the despairing, and save us from the hands of evildoers. And save me from my fear!

“Save me from my fear,” she said aloud, her eyes fixed on the four lines of light high in the wall.

The tiny spring which became a river, and there was light and sun and abundant water—the river is Esther
.

“The river is Esther,” she murmured. “The river is Esther.”

—

Nine days had passed.

The door cracked open.

The jailor lifted a fist, tipped it towards her.

“Tomorrow.”

Her heart leapt.

“What is the time now?”

“’Tis just past five in the afternoon.” He closed the door.

They rose before her, all the men. The night in the vale of Worcester when she and Dafeny had sat in the stocks. Bent double, freezing. Men, warm in their houses, laughing, talking of the foolish Quaker women as they ate stew, drank beer, went to their feather ticks. She imagined the Boston magistrates, bringing up the dirt-caked bundle. Groaning, peeling back the cloth. She thought of how they had looked at her—the English constables, the Boston magistrates—and did not see Kettlesing, nor her soft childhood hair, nor her mother’s fingers on the strings of a harp, nor bees and moors, nor London streets and a young husband’s caress.

No. They saw a creation of their own making, to serve their own ends.

She remembered the moment on the moor when George Fox had looked into her eyes.

She prayed to still the rage in her heart but it remained, and grew, and so she supposed the Lord had left it to her as a gift.

One night.

One night left here on earth.

She would not regret the minutes as they passed.

She would think, rather, of the future that unfolded before her.

It lay on the other side of her suffering.

Rage would be with her even when they thrust her from the ladder. Rage, like light, increasing in proportion to her passion. Without it, she could not continue. Rage was neither anger nor hate, and this, she thought, the magistrates did not understand.

She struck the tinder, held spark to linen, flame to wick. She set the candle next to her, leaned against the wall with the board on her lap. She dipped her quill into the ink and began to write.

Her letters were square and even.

She wrote all night, until she saw the lines of light and knew the day of death had come.

She finished, hastily:

A knock at her door.

The jailor never knocked.

“Come,” she said. She laid down her board, clambered stiffly to her feet.

The door opened wider than the meagre gap the jailor allowed himself; torchlight revealed the stone floor, the lidded chamber pot, her straw-flecked skirt. The jailor stood back to admit the Reverends John Norton and Zachariah Simmes.

“I do not wish to speak to you,” Mary said.

Both had preached incendiary sermons concerning the Quakers. John Norton had spoken out firmly for the passage of the laws
inflicting the death penalty. Zachariah Simmes had come over on the
Griffin
with the Hutchinsons and had been one of Anne Hutchinson’s most bitter accusers.

“Mrs. Dyer,” said Reverend Norton. His accent was of Cambridgeshire; his words key-holed his nostrils. He held a hand up to forestall her speech. “There is no need for your death. I say this to you with every hope that you will believe me and trust me. There is no need for your death, I repeat—and indeed, if you will depart from this city quietly and promptly, never to return without prior permission, we shall grant you your freedom.”

Mary watched the man closely. His eyes met hers and then shied away to the straw on her skirt.

“Thee hath said the same to Marmaduke Stephenson and William Robinson,” she said. “I see by thine eyes that thee had from them the same answer I shall give.”

“How shall you answer?” Norton said.

“That I
scorn
thy offer unless ’tis proved to me that the General Court hath repealed its bloody laws and shall release all ‘Quakers,’ as thee calls us, now in this prison. And that thee never more shall cut ears, whip, trammel, murder or otherwise persecute those who do no evil but to come amongst you.”