A Measure of Light (8 page)

Until William was made a freeman by the General Court, he could not vote or buy land. So he must wait, work, keep his counsel. He did not speak about the ministers, the harsh laws.

There is much that I, too, ponder and dare not speak of
.

Her breasts were swollen, hot. She saw the drying mush on the wooden trenchers.

Floors to sweep, bowls to scour, the baby to feed
.

Her hands ached, her hips and back and legs felt heavy, her eyes were dry. She was so tired as not to be sleepy.

As she poured hot water into the washing-up bucket, William leaned on his elbows, staring into the fire.

Parts of him have vanished, others have grown
.

Samuel woke, hungry, and Sinnie was at the cradle, swift as a swallow, soothing the child with Norn words. She handed him to Mary, who tucked herself onto a rush-seated chair and unbuttoned her tunic. The baby’s lips found the nipple, began their powerful suck. Mary felt William’s gaze and raised her eyes to his.

Undue attachment—not only of parent to child, but of husband to wife—must be guarded against.

Lest ye place the creature before the creator
.

This William did not obey. Ambition and worry, like a cloud of sediment, slowly cleared as his eyes rested on her. Were Sinnie and Jurden not in the room, Mary saw, he would come to her, kneel, take her face in his hands. A soft kiss, not to disturb the baby.

“My love,” he would say.

Mary wrote to Aunt Urith. The letter would not be sent until the next ship came into harbour and so she kept the paper in a cupboard drawer, taking it out after the day’s work was done. It became grease-spattered, redolent of cinnamon and the drawer’s pine boards.

She paused. That morning she had passed the whipping post. Blood and the knotted rope seemed a transference, so quickly did the red beads leap from the flesh of the man bound to it. He screamed as the whip fell. Four hours later when she went to Anne Hutchinson’s house, she had seen him again, slumped in the stocks. Dark fluids oozed from the wounds upon his naked back.

No. She would not write of it.

Mary turned onto Corn Hill Road. She saw other women, veiled by slanting snow, walking singly or in twos. Cowled against the winter wind, they clutched Bibles—capes swirled, skirts kicked by leather boots, the white coifs upon their heads like so many pinpoints of brilliance.

The Hutchinson parlour was warmed by a fire on the hearth. The room smelled of feverfew, lemon balm, tansy, hung to dry on hooks. Anne sat at a table; behind her, a window framed the frozen marsh. Her eyes travelled the group, the muscles at the corners of her mouth cording as she listened to questions. Her voice thickened, infused with conviction.

“The Holy Spirit dwells within each of us. We are as we are born, and within ourselves we may apprehend him. We do not need the intervention of ministers,” she told them.

The meeting lasted until the sky had darkened. Leaving Anne’s house, Mary strode fast, one hand gathering her hood, the other holding a lantern. Dusk wove between the houses, a charcoal density gathering into oblivion roofs, chimneys, upper storeys. Her mind filled with Anne’s face, like a canvas stretched tight, corner to corner, beyond which she could see light and warmth.

She cut down an alley. A dim glow of candlelight came from a window, spinning with flakes. She passed a wall, sheltering a midden; heard the sound of pigs—a scuffle, the sound of open-mouthed chewing. Then—silence. A low, evolving growl, joined by a second.

Not pigs
.

She quickened her steps, pulled her hood forward, torn by instincts both to run and to freeze. She stopped, turned. Held up her lantern. A broken place in the wall. A snout. She saw the glint of teeth, heard a snarl. A wolf leapt through.

Has not seen me
.

A second followed, smaller. She could see grey fur in the candlelight. The animals touched snouts. Then the larger one looked in her direction.

Samuel, William, Sinnie, Urith. God, God, please, O Lord
. Her own heart, present in a wild pounding. She pressed fist to chest. Where they would land first, the paws. Then teeth to throat.

I will not die here. I will not
.

“Get away!” she screamed. “Get away from me!”

She stepped forward, waving her arms. “BEGONE!”

For an instant they hesitated—and in the next moment, they streaked down the alley, vanished.

A door opened, a man stood silhouetted against the light.

“Who is there?”

Mary ran forward.

“What …” he began.

“Wolves,” she panted. “In your midden …”

He stepped back, pulling her beside him. Crashed the door shut. She collapsed on a chair in the cidery warmth. A woman and two children rose from the table. Mary could not bring herself to say where she had been, or why she had been walking alone at such an hour.

Anne’s ideas were openly discussed—at the barber shop, on the Charleston ferry, around tavern tables. Men, now, came to her meeting. So many people crowded her parlour—sixty, then seventy, then eighty—that she added a second.

“Who attends?” William asked Mary, in February. They sat at the trestle table, leaning close, speaking in low voices since Jurden was perched on the settle, elbows on knees in stoic contemplation of the fire, clay pipe in hand. In these coldest months, he no longer slept beneath English wool and deerskin in the back shed, but waited for them to go to their bedchamber so he could spread his pallet on the floor. Sinnie had whispered her Norn prayer to the baby and slipped up the ladder to the icy attic.

“Sir Henry Vane,” Mary whispered. “Anne’s William, of course. John Coggeshall, William Coddington.” These latter three were the colony’s most prosperous merchants.

William took up his smoking-tongs, pressed tobacco into the bowl of a white clay pipe. His lips made soft poppings as he sipped at the stem. He looked across into the fire and she saw that he probed a new idea.

“I have noticed a change in you,” he said.

He handed the pipe to Mary, who filled her mouth with the sweet smoke. She blew it out through pursed lips and smiled at him. “I have noticed a change in you, as well.”

“What are you thinking? About …” He made a surreptitious motion with his fingers, indicating their circumstances.

“I find myself questioning,” she murmured. “I am not certain about many things.”

William’s eyes narrowed against the spiralling smoke.

“I will come to her meetings,” he said.

She handed the pipe back across the table. He caressed her wrist with the tips of his fingers.

“Good,” she whispered, glancing at Jurden. She pressed her own fingers against her lips, smiling, and blew the kiss towards William, like seed from a dandelion.

—

In early winter, the Massachusetts Bay Colony sent militia up the coast to Salem in order to seize Roger Williams, for he had not left the colony, as he had been ordered, nor would recant his strewn, profligate words, nor would be silent.

The captain and his men pounded on the door of Roger Williams’s house. It was opened by his wife, who stood holding a newborn baby.

“My husband hath been gone these three days,” she said.

She did not know where he was.

The pinnace sailed back to Boston carrying the news that the young minister had vanished into the wilderness.

Sinnie, in her bedchamber, stood on tiptoe to reach down a bunch of savory.

’Tis not as they hoped. They wished for freedom but perhaps ’tis not so different here after all
.

They had told her that they wished to go to the New World because their ministers were being tortured, forced to flee, or thrown into the Tower.

They be scunnered
. She wanted Mary and William to be as happy as they had been in London, when she had first come to work for them and they had gone out, of an evening, hand in hand.

She listened to their quiet talk below, the floor cracks so wide she could see their heads. They talked of things that would have them terribly punished should anyone hear—how the ministers were wrong in their thinking, and terrified the children, and were cruel, and told the magistrates how to rule.

Sinnie could not understand it, for all that was said in the sermons and lectures was as a language utterly incomprehensible and she longed only for them to be over so she could return to eggs, in a bowl, for flour and her small, quick hands, and the sourdough, and the crust, butter-browned, and the joy of watching their faces.

She glanced at her pallet, considering how sleep came to her easily, for she loved the moment of waking to a life whose tasks were as gifts, whose people were her own.

Crumbs of dried herbs sprinkled down, smelling of summer. Sprigs in hand, she knelt to slip backwards through the trapdoor, one foot on the first rung, thinking of the garret in London where she had dreaded the Earl’s nightly visits and how she had splayed herself against a window to glimpse the birds flying northwards.

Oh, I be so lucky. I do wish they could know of it
. She thought of her good parents and her brothers and sisters. How she could stand in the doorway of this little house and watch the birds spilling past and have no envy of them.

At Anne’s next meeting, Mary sat on a bench beside the fire. Other women perched on low stools or curled on the floor. William and the men stood against the walls, snow-melt dripping from beards and hat brims.

Anne took a sip of cider and passed the cup to a long-haired young man, Sir Henry Vane, who sat beside her at the table.

Sir Henry’s father is privy councillor, Mary thought, advisor, and comptroller of the king’s household. The young man had refused to crop his blonde curls nor would give up his lace cuffs, although he was so ardent a Puritan that he had convinced his father to send him to New England. There was much that Anne told Mary in confidence. How it was the young aristocrat’s presence that had attracted men to her meetings. How Henry Vane planned to run for governor in the spring elections; and if he won, Anne and her followers—so numerous that those opposed to her ideas had coined a phrase, calling them “Hutchinsonians”—would rule the colony.

Mary folded her hands. They were red from a morning spent
washing the hemmed rags she tied around Samuel’s bottom—first, walking through the snow to the spring, returning with icy fingers and wet cuffs, buckets swinging and sloshing from a neck yoke. Then: the soaked clouts, the filthed water, wringing, rinsing, hanging the cloths on a wooden rack. As Anne began to speak, Mary closed her eyes and drew a deep calming breath.

“I do not agree with his interpretation of Jeremiah, verses 23 through 33,” Anne resumed, arguing her own understanding of the Scriptures, probing the meanings laid upon them by Reverend Wilson. She sliced the air with her hand, pointing, thumb raised.

In time, she closed the Bible; her discourse veered from the sermon.

“The ministers substitute outward form for inward faith. They call themselves ‘Visible Saints’ and believe themselves sanctified by evidence of their good works. They believe, like Abraham, that obedience not only of oneself but enforced upon others is proof of election.
And thus of salvation.”

The room stilled with the effort of attention, hand-smoothed coifs and men’s hats motionless within the winter light. A fly’s frenzy grew loud against the windowpane.

This is the crux of the issue that divides Anne Hutchinson from the Bay clergy
.

“This substitution of form for faith and its imposition upon others is the very reason we left England.”

A murmur, a growl.

Yes, Mary thought. ’Tis so clear.

“Our salvation will come neither from obedience nor ritual but from
the intuition of grace
. Consider the Apostle Paul, Ephesians 2:8–9; ‘For by grace are ye saved, through faith …’ and ‘… not by works, lest any man should boast.’ ”

Anne paused, watching the fly’s random attack upon the glass. She took breath, resumed.

“As I do understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. He who has God’s grace in his heart cannot go astray.”

The room filled with voices.

No need of ministers
. As people stood to voice their opinions, Anne sat quietly, watching the uproar, hands flat upon her Bible, an oat straw to mark her page standing upright between two fingers. And Mary saw how Anne Hutchinson caused, controlled, even manipulated the consternation—then evaluated the results keenly, the same way she peered at blood-soaked flesh and the eyes of the dying.