A Measure of Light (35 page)

Darkness fell early and the wind rose.

In the kitchen, the woman set out hare pie, pumpkin bread and applesauce. A candle guttered on the trestle table. Mary was given the only pewter plate. Their hired man, a young Irishman, sat at the table’s end. The children—three boys, two girls—waited silently behind their father. After the blessing, the children took their trenchers and filed to a tall-backed settle by the fire.

As they ate, no one spoke. Mary felt their curiosity, yet to her surprise, no questions were asked.

“I can tell you my business since I am still in Rhode Island,” she said. “I am a Quaker bound for Long Island.”

The woman slid her eyes to her husband, who looked up sharply.

“Ye’ll not be going into New Haven Colony, then,” he said. “No Quakers allowed in the colony unless you can prove you’re on lawful business.”

Mary saw the children’s shoulders stiffen in the effort not to look at her.

“They’ll brand you with an ‘H.’ Or throw you in jail. You’d not like that, hey? Being in jail? They’ll fine you just for having pamphlets. Nay, you’d best stay here where people are civil.”

“I thank thee for thy advice,” Mary said. Her grave voice fell into the room’s scant comfort. The man looked at her. He resumed eating more quickly and without seeing his food.

In the light of her candle, she read Psalm 63:

She lay beneath the wolfskins listening to the storm.

Wind, snow, branches. God’s thought at the end of the stars. She lay on her back with her arms spread to the cold, apple-scented air.

The next morning, there was a foot of snow on the ground and the road stretched as a white stream between the fields.

“I will go on,” she said at breakfast. “Can I find passage from Rhode Island so that I need not step into New Haven Colony? A boat, to take me?”

She listened carefully as the man gave her directions. She thanked the couple, slid a coin onto the table, and stepped outside. The sky had cleared and the snow glittered.

Sylvester Manor was like a palace, with eight large rooms, a red-tiled roof, cobblestones laid in a diamond pattern before a two-storey vestibule. Built in the shape of a cross, it stood alone on its own island, surrounded by oaks.

Mary was given a sleeping chamber filled with three bedsteads, trunks, baskets. She would be obliged to share both room and bedstead with whoever might be passing through—newly arrived Friends from England or Barbados, or ill and injured refugees from Massachusetts, but for now the room was hers alone.

On the first morning, she woke to a sighing roar. She went to the window, breath smoking, hands tucked in her armpits.

Heavy oak boughs lifted and fell in a gale-force wind. She watched a brown leaf twirling on its frail stem.

By day’s end, it will be gone
.

Below, a group of Manhanset Indians clustered around Nathaniel Sylvester—he made arm gestures, drew lines in the blowing snow with a stick. Beyond the cobblestone yard was a sloping hill on which sheds ran down to the water. She glimpsed the masts of a ship anchored in deep water, saw two rowing boats bucking over waves, falling into troughs, approaching the cove.

Shivering, she lifted her chamber pot and carried it down the stairs.

In the great hall, the stink of unwashed bodies lay sharp and sour beneath the smell of Indian bannock, browning on a sloping board. Firelight quivered on the floor’s red tiles. Three African slave women worked at a vast fireplace hung with hams and bacon. They spoke to one another in Creole, and the soft rhythm swept her to Barbados and the hilltop plantation owned by Quakers where she and Anne Burden had stayed. Whistling frogs, in the hot nights, and wood-smoke from the sugar factory. Rattle of palmetto leaves. A slave who had dug an insect from beneath her toenail, where it had laid eggs. Drums from the slave quarters. Barbados—the “nursery of the truth,” Friends called it, for so many had been convinced there.

And become wealthy, as had the Sylvesters, from sugar.

She set down her chamber pot to thaw by the others.

Grizzell put a hand to her spinning wheel, stopping its roll. She stepped light-footed across the crowded room, skirting chairs, baskets, chests. She was Mary’s height, her eyes serene. Motherly, Mary thought, taking Grizzell’s strong hands.

As if she is amazed and delighted at the very sight of me. Ah, that Littlemary could look at me so
.

“Didst sleep well?”

“I did, thank thee. Though I fear I did oversleep.”

Two children played on the bedstead—Giles gnawed the coral stem of a teething toy; Little Grizzell played with a wooden doll.

“Aye, we ate long ago. Thee must be hungry. Hannah?”

Mary sat at the table. Hannah set a bowl of porridge before her. Her arms were thick, purple-black. She smelled of ginger, smiled wryly at Mary’s murmured thanks.

Grizzell returned to her spinning wheel. She gave it an absent stroke, setting it in motion, still gazing at Mary as if reluctant to return to her work.

“Where are you …?” She broke off, looked down as if distracted by a larger tuft of wool that she must coax onto her spindle.

Where am I going to go next, she doth wonder. What shall I say?

For the moment, she was content to be here, in the home of Friends, waiting for news brought by travellers. She blew on her spoonful of steaming samp.

Grizzell spoke quickly. “It is our hope that thee will stay as long as thee wishes, Mary. ’Tis a joy to me to have thee here. Someone who remembers London!”

Yes, Mary thought, looking at the young woman, whose belly showed the slight swelling of another pregnancy. Grizzell would be happy to have another Englishwoman here, for it was clear that Nathaniel Sylvester was busy; and when there were no visiting Friends, this young woman who had grown up in the court of Charles I would have no like-minded companion: only the children, and the slave families sleeping in corners, and the Shinnecock, Manhansets and Montauks arriving in canoes, through veils of snow.

Every day, Mary dressed in many layers—long wool stockings secured around her thighs, neck cloth, mittens, hooded cape. She stepped out into snow-refracted light.

Wolves had been exterminated on the island, and cattle, horses
and pigs wandered unfenced; the land was riddled with their trails, crisscrossing meadows, ribboning down to the shore. She followed a trail into the woods where branches stirred with dry creaks, shifting the prisms within ice-coated twigs. She walked slowly, dazed by the brilliance and by her own tenuous presence within it.

Sometimes she could not bear the sound of voice or tool. Crying, laughter, the creak of spinning wheel; raw, excruciating, it was the sound of time—slow, so slow.

All of life’s minutes …

At the edge of the cove, she stood watching the sea birds. She remembered the scaffold’s threshold, the moment when her foot had lifted to step forward. Still she could feel that brush of tissuey sweetness, like a poppy’s heart. And the joy she had glimpsed of which earthly happiness was but a remnant.

An elderly couple arrived from Salem—Lawrence and Cassandra Southwick, recently released from prison and driven from Massachusetts under pain of death.

They were given chairs close to the fire. Cassandra’s lips were blue; Lawrence bore yellowing bruises beneath his eyes.

“Mary Dyer!” Cassandra exclaimed. Mary took the mouse-boned hand.
The cruelty, the savagery
. Cassandra was small, soft, her cheeks pouched like pudding-bags within a square face whose eyes bore the wrinkles of kindness. Men had stripped her to the waist and whipped her for carrying Quaker pamphlets.

Lawrence bent forward, face in hands.

“’Tis Provided and Daniel we fear for,” he said into his hands. “Our youngest children. We heard that they have been imprisoned for not attending church.”

His woollen mittens were unravelling at the cuffs. Melting ice dripped from his beard.

Nathaniel and Grizzell stood together, the children half-hidden within Grizzell’s skirts. Low afternoon light rubied bunches of seed corn dangling from the beams.

An African girl came with a bowl of soup. She handed it to Cassandra; returned with another bowl for Lawrence. He sat upright to take the bowl and held it so loosely that it tipped forward, slopped onto his boots. He looked around the room, his face clearing.

“The Lord is here,” he said.

“He is wherever a heart welcomes him,” said Cassandra.

More Friends arrived on a ship, seven weeks out from England, men or women who had been called to leave home and family.

They wore plain clothing and were spare of language. Out-of-doors they walked in silence, engaged in sober reflection.

Sometimes Mary accompanied them as they travelled through the forests on foot, guided by Indians, crossing streams and coves in dugouts, seeking those who might be glad to receive the “blessed truth.” In villages, they stayed at the homes of those who would receive them kindly. They held their meetings in houses whose unpainted lintels oozed sap, whose walls smelled of plaster, whose windows framed the stumps of cleared fields. The air in such rooms was as the air of forest or sea, unpeopled by history. Into such clarity, the Friends’ message crept—kindled, blazed.

After one such expedition, Mary returned to Sylvester Manor to find Lawrence Southwick lying in the hall bedstead where the children played. The curtains were drawn back so that firelight would touch his face. He had died on the previous night.

Three days later, Cassandra lay in the same bed.

Mary, at her side, slit open a letter from William. It had been delivered to the Manor by an Indian runner.

Inconsiderable
. Her heart raced. However manipulated, was the request of a son to spare the life of his mother
inconsiderable
?

She could hear distant shouting as men ferried lighters filled with barrels of salted meat out to a Barbados-bound ship lying at anchor in the deep water.

We desire their lives absent
.

Again, they used her.
Mary Dyer, mother of a monster
. Read by mariners, at sea. By purveyors of meat, in Southwick Market.
Mary Dyer, cursed by the devil
. By milliners, cobblers, and powdered London ladies.
Mary Dyer, irresponsible mother, heretic
. Read by innkeepers, farmers, wheelwrights, teachers. And now:
See our graciousness. We have been so kind as to spare her
.

She felt violent energy lift her scalp. Her thoughts honed.

He says—this is thy path, walk it and thee shall find me
.

She laid the letter on her lap. Rather than Cassandra’s pouched, pale cheeks, she saw the Massachusetts General Court, with its magistrates and elders, its pine walls and dusty air. Court met twice yearly, once in autumn and once in spring.

They had promised to hang her if she returned.

She would offer Governor Endicott two choices.

Repeal the bloody laws, or hang me
.

If they repealed the laws, she would live and the prisoners would
go free. But Endicott and his government would appear to have lost their war against the Quakers.

If they hanged her. Already, people were sickened by the brutality. If they executed an innocent woman—fifty years old, wife of a prominent Rhode Island merchant, mother of six children—the news would be taken to London, would spread to the continent. It was rumoured that soon, within months, Charles II would ascend to the throne. He would take note of the brutality, carried out by the same Puritans who had murdered his father.

She smoothed her hand over Cassandra’s forehead, bony and box-like as a turtle’s shell, thinking of the dream that came night after night. The bluebell meadow. Where they sat; Mother, Father—

Cassandra Southwick jolted from sleep. She sat with sudden strength, arms reaching. She cried out, full-throated.

“Lawrence? Josiah? Provided! My Daniel!”

Grizzell dropped her spindle; toys startled from the children’s hands. Hurrying footsteps sounded from the stairwell.

Mary ran her hand up Cassandra’s back, her fingers rising and falling over the scars of the jailor’s whip. Cassandra fell back on the pillow. Her face cleared as breath left her body and did not return.

In April, a group of Friends sat in the Sylvesters’ parlour. A woman read out the names of thirteen people now held in the Boston jail.

Mary Trask. Margaret and John Smith. Edward Wharton. Robert and Deborah Harper. Wenlock Christison. William King. Martha Standley. Mary Wright. William Leddra. Joseph and Jane Nicholson
.

One need, only. It was less need than impetus. One step forward into the heart of time.

—

Sinnie was in the great hall, stirring laundry in a wooden tub. William stood rigid in the front door, silhouetted against the spring sunshine, reading a letter.

She laid the stick against the side of the bucket, carefully, so as not to make a sound. She heard the tick-tock of hoofs as the messenger rode back down the lane.

He came into the room.

“Mary hath been sighted riding to Boston.”

Littlemary came up the path carrying a basket filled with chives and dandelion greens. She stepped into a patch of light.

“Father?”

“Do you tell her, Sinnie,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “I am going to the parlour to write a letter. Tell Jurden to be ready to ride for Boston within the hour.”