A Measure of Light (5 page)

Making a better world for the glory of God …

William and other men sat on the floor, filling the aisle. The lanterns creaked, swayed. The men bent, low voices augmenting the ship’s complaints so that the women could not hear their words.

“What be they doing?”

“Drawing our houses.”

Silence fell as the women mused upon this. They heard a man’s voice rise as he read from a pamphlet.

“…  
killed within a stone’s throw of our house, above four score Snakes, some of them as big as the small of my leg, black of colour, and three yards long, with sharp horn on the tip of their tail …”

Mary resumed reading, quickly. The two voices merged in a curious poetry.

“…  
tinsel-winged grasshoppers …”

“He who receives you receives me …”

“…  efts …”

“What did you go out into the wilderness to behold?”

“…  chopped off with hatchet … purple blood …”

William bore a new distraction when he returned to the berth, like a man privy to confidences.

—

Sinnie shook Mary’s shoulder.

“They say they can smell land,” she whispered.

“What is the hour?”

“Nearly daybreak.”

A lantern creaked, regular as a clock, marking the waves. It threw shadows on William’s sleeping body. Mary slid her arm over his shoulder, smelled his smoky, oily hair. She moved her lips against his ear.

“Land, William.” She felt a sudden exhilaration, almost unbearable. To whisper, when she wanted to empty her lungs on the sound of joy. “Land!”

He woke, instantly. “Can you see it?”

“Nay,” Sinnie said. “They can smell it.”

The swells grew longer, drawing the bow deep, carrying swash higher on the hull.

One by one, eager faces appeared in the companionway door. Drowsy, tousled, eyes like startled ponies.

Light rimmed the eastern horizon and then the sun rose—the sails steamed and around them the sea sprang into its full palette of greens and blues.

The ship slipped into warmer air. Like relief from pain, it washed over them.

Sinnie pressed against Mary, shivering with excitement. William slid his arm around Mary’s waist. Behind them stood Jurden, tall, silent.

All around them, people lifted their chins, flared their nostrils.

“Like new cider.”

“Leaves, there be a smell of leaves.”

Mary took deep breaths of the delicious scent—a braid of smoke, forest loam, sweet fern, resin.

Small women stood on tiptoe, balancing against their men. “Canst see trees? Canst see trees?”

Trees
. They had discussed them, over and over; how, in the New World, trees could be the property of common men, who would not be hanged for felling one. Taller than St. Paul’s, Mary pictured them.

Land broke from the sea in a series of blue humps.

One after another, people fell to their knees and bowed their heads, until the sailors, hanging in the rigging, looked down upon an entirely silent ship, with a black-frocked clergyman speaking for all, arms spread.

By nine o’clock, the ship had turned southwards. The blue mounds resolved into hills—indigo, violet, velvety black—and then the passengers could distinguish cliffs and the surf that broke against their rocky feet.

God hath called to us to establish a peaceful kingdom, since his purpose has been destroyed in the old country. In this land, beneath these trees, upon these rocks
.

As the land passed, the reasons for their coming clarified in Mary’s mind. A simple life, built upon righteousness. Within the churches, nothing but benches and Bibles, rigour of thought and practice. A new society, openly Puritan in all its workings.

The vision filled her, corresponding with the rugged landscape, so clear in the harsh light that mica chips sparked from the cliffs and the wings of birds were as glass shards.

To begin! We shall rise on the Sabbath and go unmolested to our worship
.

“What do you think, Sinnie?”

“’Tis bonnie, Mistress,” the girl said. Her voice was wondering. “So many trees!” She stood grasping her sleeves, folded arms pulled tight across her chest.

So slight, so sturdy, a repository of remarkable abilities
.

“Shall you like it here, do you think?”

“If there are no wolves, Mistress. And if we are not attacked by de’il salvages.”

“William has his gun,” Mary said. “We shall be within a village.”

A plume of smoke rose over the forest, causing an outburst of speculation.

“’Tis as they said. The natives do set fire to the undergrowth.”

“Why would they do such a thing?”

“Clear it for hunting.”

Mary could make out trees already leafless. From this distance, they were but a grey cloud upon the land, yet here and there were clumps of scarlet, orange or yellow. Blue-black spires pricked through the roil of soft-toned hues.

The smoke thickened and rose higher, unwinding against the sky.

“A settlement! People! Look, look!”

Spyglasses were passed from hand to hand. One reached Mary.

“Salem,” a man said.

“Nay, it cannot be. Salem is a city. Must be ’tis some small outpost or other.”

A sailor called out. “’Tis Salem!”

Silence.

Mary’s glass revealed not houses but rude huts, plastered with mud, thatch-roofed. Trees still bearing their bark lay butt to tip, and behind the makeshift fence a few cows grazed. People clustered, like dabs of paint, watching the ship.

These are their homes?

Murmurs.

“Surely ’twill not be such in Boston!”

The settlement fell aft. The supper hour came but no meal was served. In early evening,
Truelove
’s crew swarmed in the rigging, reefing and furling the sails and the ship began a slow navigation
through islands. The sky turned fiery and the islands became featureless, drifting black upon red water. High overhead, gulls flashed in the remnants of light. The air exuded the smell of cold soil. Rowboats appeared. Men in loose-sleeved linen shirts wrestled ropes upwards, the ship was attached, and the little boats inched them forward—past forested cliffs, past small islands, and into Boston Harbour.

Boston lay jumbled upon a low hill, smoke rising from chimneys, thatched roofs pale in the October dusk. The harbour was silent, save for the lap of water against the ship’s hull.

Then a solitary cry rose—
“All’s well!”

The mate sent them below.

“Ye’ll disembark tomorrow.”

Cook prepared a soup made of the last of the salt beef.

The ship rocked, rocked.

They ate sparingly, mindful of tomorrow’s fresh provisions, stunned by the quiet.

In the night, Mary wakened. She lifted her head. Over the chuck and chatter of water, she heard the howling of wolves.

GOLDEN BEADS OF PITCH STUDDED
the rungs. Mary’s palms were sticky, smelled raw, wild. She took a step onto the pier and staggered from the stillness. William, behind her on the ladder, turned to help Sinnie from the rowboat. Jurden handed up their bundles.

They walked uphill on cobblestones that pressed the thin soles of Mary’s shoes, passing into the shade of close-set shops with overhanging gables. Signs creaked in the morning breeze, hung so low that Jurden ducked to pass beneath. Glass windows reflected their passage.

At the top of the street, a shirtless man was collapsed forward in stocks. His head was locked between two boards, his hands hung clamped, arms spread like wings. Two men stood behind him—bent, busy.

Mary reached back, took Sinnie’s hand and pulled her close. Sunrise warmed their shoulders; their shadows stretched long and black. The men at the stocks seemed reduced by the clarity of light. One raised a whip, slashed it down. The prisoner’s cry mingled with the shriek of sea birds.

God’s visible kingdom …

She obscured the tide of dismay by quickening her pace, even as William walked faster, too, and placed himself between the women and the scene of punishment.

—

Anne Hutchinson led Mary and Sinnie upstairs to a large chamber at the back of her house. Since their brief meeting in London, two years earlier, Anne’s blonde hair had faded. She seemed burdened, her eyes like the needle of a compass, a weighted distinction quickly shifting.

Straw-packed pallets covered in cloth ticking lined the walls. Sweat had browned the casings of misshapen pillows. Bunches of savory, sage, lavender, rue, pennyroyal hung from the rafters—their astringent scent ameliorated the stink of urine.

The women dropped their bundles on the pallets.

“You’ll be near your time,” Anne declared. She stood with arms folded, examining Mary, half-smiling.

“Aye.”

“Settle yourselves and come down,” she said. She left swiftly, pausing to nudge an empty chamber pot closer to its pallet.

After she had gone, they looked at each other. Mary shook her head, dazed.

“We be in
America,”
Sinnie whispered.

They began to laugh, covering their mouths. Sinnie collapsed on a pallet and buried her face in a goose-feather pillow. They laughed for the voyage, ended, and for the ship not having gone down in the storm; for the sight of the wooden houses, so crude and strangely forbidding; for the man in the stocks; for Anne’s self-importance. They laughed for the sleep they had not had the night before—terrified, first, by the quavering wolf song; and then by the day that would dawn.

“Oh, Sinnie.” Mary wiped her eyes. “Are we laughing or crying? Hush, now.”

They straightened their coifs, brushed down their skirts, and went quietly down the stairs, emerging in a hallway. Through an open door, they found a room in which pallets were stacked beside piles of blankets and pillows. A fire burned on a hearth. Sunlight striped the scratched leather of a Bible.

They heard the high voices of little girls mingled with the murmurs
of women and followed the sound into a long, crowded kitchen. Children, elderly women and servants were all industriously engaged. Anne lifted bread on a peel from a beehive oven at the side of a hearth. A tiny girl turned a crisp-skinned goose, hanging on a string before the fire. Bloody gut-smell stung Mary’s nose—white hen feathers stippled the floor.

“’Tis the day before Sabbath, you see,” Anne explained. She scooped two handfuls of dough from a bowl and began to knead, while her eyes studied Mary as if examining a project she must undertake. “We do no work tomorrow, so all meals must be in readiness by sundown.”

Mary met Anne’s bold stare, offended by her tone. A silence fell. Anne lifted a wrist to rub her cheek, flour drifting from limp hand.

“We have many ways of living the Lord’s commandments,” she added.

“I shall have to learn them.”

“Indeed you must, Mary, for punishments are severe and are visited upon us all equally, women and men, servants and children. Transgression of any of the Ten Commandments is punishable. In some cases, by death.”

Anne spoke equably but Mary heard a quiver beneath the brisk tone.

“We did see a man in the stocks,” Mary said, yielding to her curiosity. “Being whipped.”

Anne set the kneaded dough onto a cabbage leaf, heeled and palmed it into an oval. “He did not attend church,” she said. “He went hunting instead.”

Mary glanced at Sinnie, who stood behind her, so compressed by bowed shoulders, folded hands and downcast eyes she was as a reflection.

“I have resumed my meetings, such as I kept in Alford,” Anne continued. “My teacher, Reverend Cotton, is here. As you have
heard? Yes? I do explicate his sermons for they are too complex for most and I do have much experience in his way of thinking.”

I shall not attend, Mary thought, with a sear of resentment.