A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2015 Powning Designs Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2015 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Powning, Beth, author

  A measure of light / Beth Powning.

  ISBN 978-0-345-80847-9

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80848-6

  1. Dyer, Mary, –1660—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8631.O86M43 2015 C813′.6 C2014-906378-4

  Cover design by Five Seventeen

  Cover image: © John Foley / Arcangel Images

  Mary Dyer’s 1659 letter to the General Court, written from the Boston jail

  v3.1

  To

  my mother

  Alison Brown Davis

  with love

  I have laboured carefully, not to mock, lament, or execrate, but to understand human actions …

  SPINOZA

  Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 1677

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Map

  Epigraph

  ONE — LONDON 1 Martyr’s Blood 1634

  2 Linseed and Lettuce 1634

  3 Truelove 1635

  TWO — BOSTON 4 Visible Kingdom 1635

  5 First Winter 1636

  6 Whangs and Other Happenings 1636

  7 Unravellings 1637

  8 Signs and Wonders 1637

  9 Sedition 1637–1638

  10 Anathema Maranatha 1638

  11 Wolves and Geese 1638

  THREE — AQUIDNECK 12 Pocasset 1638–1643

  13 Massacre 1643

  14 Indian Summer 1650

  15 Decision 1650–1651

  FOUR — ENGLAND 16 Between Worlds 1651–1652

  17 The Man in Leathern Breeches 1652

  18 Travelling 1652–1653

  19 London 1654–1655

  FIVE — NEW ENGLAND 20 The House on the Point 1657

  21 Persecution 1657–1659

  22 Anguish and Wrath 1659

  23 Deerskin Bags 1659

  24 Shelter Island 1659–1660

  25 Blowing Grasses 1660

  26 New Day 1660

  EPILOGUE These Things Are True

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  I.

  LONDON

  1634

  We die and rise the same, and prove

  Mysterious by this love.

  “The Canonization”

  JOHN DONNE

  ONE

  Martyr’s Blood - 1634

  SNOWFLAKES BLEW UP THE THAMES on an east wind. Mary picked her way along the narrow streets, heading to the market. It was the day before Christmas. Ropes of holly and ivy sprigged with rosemary looped across wood-and-plaster houses; the air was filled with the yeasty scent of baking, sweetening the stench that rose from gutters. She stepped quickly around a dead dog that lay in half-frozen mud, maggots teeming in its entrails.

  Mary heard the screams and shouts of a crowd. The sounds grew louder, rising over London’s din of bells, wheels, hammers, shrill-voiced vendors. Like a fish in a weir, she could not resist the press of bodies and was funnelled into a square where people massed before a wooden platform. Three men stood upon it with heads and arms thrust through pillories. Women and children leaned from windows studying the gallants, ladies, merchants, apprentices, beggars, thieves, prostitutes. Breath hung before mouths like the morning webs of spiders.

  Mary found herself shoulder to shoulder with a small man. He held a rag to bleeding gum.

  “What was their crime?” she shouted, leaning close.

  “Puritans,” he slurred. Fresh blood seeped into the fabric’s weave. “Who did naught but write pamphlets against the king’s new …” He paused to spit. “Archbishop.”

  A flash of metal—on the platform, the hangman drew his knife and stepped towards one of the three prisoners. Over the crowd’s excitement and protest, a howl rose, broke into a scream. The hangman dropped one of the prisoner’s ears into a bucket. Blood spurted from the mutilated scalp. People rushed to the platform holding up bowls, shreds of cloth, sticks.

  Martyr’s blood. People held such blood in reverence—a purifier of souls, like the waters of baptism.

  The hangman stretched out the man’s other ear tight as a hen’s neck. A fresh roar erupted from the crowd. The knife rose again, sliced down.

  Why torment a man so old? Perhaps fifty.

  His skin was yellow as spring parsnip; he twisted against his restraints, his mouth a cave. Blood poured down his neck. The hangman pinched one of the prisoner’s nostrils, snagged his knife to its edge, made a jagged upward cut.

  Mary heard blood rush in her own ears, suffered a drastic dimming of vision. She fought her way from the crowd, stopped against a recessed door in the relative calm of a nearby street.

  She had sought nothing more than the ingredients for a Christmas pudding.

  Walk, and you will not faint.

  Her Aunt Urith’s voice came to her, stern, practical, and so Mary took a breath and set forth again. Between the snow and coal smoke, the streets were dark by three in the afternoon; already, people followed link-boys who carried torches, their quivering light reflecting in diamond-shaped windowpanes.

  Mary purchased veal, mutton, raisins, nutmeg and cloves. Abstracted, she neither chose nor bargained wisely and then turned southwards, towards home, a small house just down-river from Whitehall, the king’s palace.

  The walk steadied her. She shifted her bundles, waited for a cart to pass, went down a short street. At its end, she could see the masts of riverboats crossing in the snowy dusk. She pushed open the oak door and set her bundles on the table. Only then, as she removed her scarf and hung her cape, did her hands begin to shake.

  Upstairs in the bedchamber her breath steamed on the cold air. She stirred the coals, wound a wolverine fur around her neck and pulled a chair close to the hearth. She took up her Bible but could not read, so pressed it to her breast. Her heart beat fast and light.

  The ear, falling through the air like a scrap of meat.

  William was a birthright Puritan. She herself was a convert.

  The door opened below and she heard her husband’s voice. His steps came, eager on the stairs. He burst into the room, smelling of snow and leather, pulling off his gloves. He held a small box.

  “I have a gift for—”

  “William, I came upon three men in pillories. Puritans. Perhaps they were clergy, I do not know.” She hugged the Bible closer, took a long breath. “The hangman did slice off two ears and slit a nostril.”

  He was not much taller than she, sleek as a ferret. He set the box down, held her face; she smelled the sweetness of jasmine and roses. He was a haberdasher and had a shop in the New Exchange; he washed his hands daily, for he must be gentle with the palms of great ladies, even those of the queen herself, introducing fingers into pearled gloves, delicately tugging gauntlets up plump arms.

  “You were not hurt?”

  “Nay, William.” Her voice held the broadened vowels of Yorkshire.

  His lips tightened. His hands fell fro
m her face and he sat, bleak, forgetting the gift. For awhile they did not speak, as if the danger they faced was like shame, whose contemplation was ugly.

  “Must be they were clergy,” he said. “Archbishop Laud has his spies, now. They sit quietly in churches and report those preachers who refuse the new rules.”

  “They are required to wear the surplice.”

  “Aye, and must bow at the name of Christ, and must follow the Book of Common Prayer to the letter and …” He spread his hands. “All the rest of it.”

  Aye, the rest.

  “Many are leaving,” William continued. “I hear another ship hath sailed for New England. ’Tis rumoured that Archbishop Laud may close the borders.”

  “Do you think we should go, William?”

  He reached for a pamphlet they had been reading aloud to one another. He turned the pages, frowning.

  “Boston …” he murmured. “Its bay is ‘free of cockling seas’ with ‘high cliffs that shoulder out the boisterous seas.’ Every family hath a well of sweet water. ‘Those that drink it be as healthful, fresh and lusty as those that drink beer.’ ”

  Mary held out her hand for the pamphlet.

  “ ‘Wolves, ravenous rangers, frequent English habitations,’ ” she read. “ ‘Big-boned, lank-paunched, deep-breasted, prick-eared, dangerous teeth, great bush tails … they set up their howlings and call their companies together at night to hunt, at morning to sleep.’ ” She closed the book, handed it back. “You have your lease, William, your customers.”

  She crossed her arms to snug the fur closer around her neck. Brown curls, flattened by a linen cap drawn by a string at the base of her neck, framed her forehead; sensing her own doubt, she bit the lips of a mouth so wide, so sensitive, that its tender half-smile, should she catch sight of it in windowglass, bore no relationship to her feelings.

  “In Massachusetts, they are free,” he said, as if reasoning with himself.

  The scene swept over her like a wave of nausea. How delicately the hangman had pinched the nostril between his fingers. How carefully he had positioned the knife.

  —

  Propped against the bolster, naked, she stared up at the ceiling cloth. Beneath the coverlet, William lay sprawled on his back, one leg thrown over hers. He slept.

  As I cannot …

  She felt herself to be poised between two places of equal, but different, terrors. Here, in England, persecution. There, in New England—wolves, forests, fierce winters.

  In either place, however, she would have William.

  She had met him at the church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Sensing eyes upon her, she had looked across the aisle and seen a young man, narrow face framed by short-cropped hair, green eyes long as willow leaves. He had worked his way through the crowd, afterwards, so they would pass through the door together. In the tumult of the street, she could not move for the intensity of his gaze. He lifted her hand and for the first time she smelled the perfume of his gloves. Then he bowed, spoke: “William Dyer.” “Mary Barrett,” she answered. They exchanged what information was needful, and he came to her cousin’s apartment, where Mary resided, and they went about the city throughout the summer, and married in the fall.

  Love for the young man mingled with another joy—the ecstasy of conversion.

  A journey.

  So the lecturer called it. Some, he warned, would be unwilling to “loose” themselves from all they would leave behind. Yet others, who shed all regrets and desires, might “join the company of saints,” a way that was not taken up by the “shell of religion,” as he called it, but the “one true way that leadeth unto Life.”

  She turned on her side, relaxed by memory, and ran a finger along William’s collarbone and over the curve of his waist. She felt the stir of his soft prick in her hand, heard his changed breath. He rolled over, tugged at the sheet and tossed it away. Tongues—muscular, agile—while his hand slid to what was no longer hers alone but a shared secret. His fingers, making her mind fly and shatter. Journey. Join. Loose myself. Loose myself. Pain as he entered her, and then the conjoining, surprising in its ease. Their mingled cries, the shudder of seed. Child, make a child.

  On Christmas morning, they made their way through the palace of Whitehall, a vast warren of buildings jumbled on the north bank of the Thames. The scent of roasting meat oiled the air; servants laden with linens and steaming platters choked its alleys. Snowflakes drifted, wide-spaced, wavering, as if threaded on invisible strings.

  They entered an apartment overlooking the jousting yard.

  “Your coif, Mary, always tipped. There.” Mary endured her cousin’s possessive touch as Dyota, childless, adjusted the black silk, popping finger to mouth, slicking the curls on Mary’s forehead. Cousin Ralf, the king’s Master of Robes, appeared in a high-crowned hat, a mustache waxed at the tips, long hair hanging in curls. In the window’s cold light, he bent sternly to inspect the yellow leather of William’s gloves. The men stood, then, looking out over the quintain and its sandbag, capped with snow.

  “Business is good?” Ralf spoke with delicate respect. With two fingertips, he stroked a mole on his cheek.

  “The queen hath visited my stall. I have ordered a half-dozen gloves.”

  “A gift?”

  “Nay, for herself. One pair is of white leather, with satin gauntlets.” William sketched curves on the air. “Silk arches on the tabs surrounding sea monsters and serpents. And a band of tulips, carnations and lilies.”

  Only sixteen, I was, Mary thought, handing a Christmas pudding to the serving girl and unhooking her cape, when Urith sent me to London. “Dyota will find you a husband,” Urith had said, with love and regret, placing her hands on Mary’s shoulders as if to reassure herself of the girl’s strength.

  They took their places at a long table. Dyota fussed with her napkin, her lace collars, her garnet necklace.

  Hard to believe Urith is her mother.

  Urith was not only a midwife but a specialist in the healing of eyes, so skilled that a surgeon in York sent her his difficult cases. Her words were direct and honest; her hands, when not needed, took their rest.

  Ralf spoke the prayer. Mary glanced at her young husband. He gave her the shadow of a wry smile before bending his head. They were seated opposite one another, close enough to touch feet. Ralf and Dyota sat far apart at the table’s ends, like royalty.

  “Amen.”

  Dyota rang a bronze bell for the serving girl.

  Waiting, hands in lap, Mary remembered the day she and her older brother had gone to stay with Aunt Urith. Galfrid, her father, had bent to her, explaining that he had been called away from his surgery to perform an amputation and that he wished to take her mother, Sisley, to see the bluebells. “Only three days,” he had said, “and we shall be home.” Bluebells. Fields of them, spreading to the horizon.

  “The king hath brought a European painter to make portraits of the family,” Ralf said, lifting his spoon. He took a bite, chewed. His eyebrows lifted with a sorrowful expression, masking pride. “Van Dyck.” His long fingers were particular from days spent rubbing gold buttons with a chamois cloth.

  “We heard about it at last night’s masque.” Dyota shaped her mouth busily around the words. “Oh, ’twas brilliant. Inigo Jones did make the set and a man named Ben Jonson wrote the words. The queen herself acted.”

  Words flew between Dyota and Ralf, spoken rapidly, as if to exclude William and Mary. Vatican envoys. Spanish diplomats. Such a frail foundation for a life, Mary thought, eyes on her plate.

  “I spoke with the queen’s adorable dwarf!” Dyota said. A line of powder crusted the ledge of her double chin. The words of a lecture came to Mary’s mind.

  “… a dead fly is but a small thing, yet it corrupts the most precious ointment of the apothecary and makes it stink …”

  Mary and William glanced at one another again, knowing they served as audience.

  “Yesterday, Mary witnessed the mutilation of three Puritan clergymen,” Willi
am said.

  Burnings rose on Ralf’s cheeks, his eyes watered.

  “Do you know,” William continued, holding his spoon with both hands as if to snap it with his thumbs, “’tis said that Archbishop Laud keeps a list of clergymen? He pens an ‘O’ beside those who are Orthodox. And a ‘P’ against those who are Puritans.”

  “I did not know,” Ralf said, offended. “Where do you hear such things?”

  “The Puritans of Lincolnshire have asked me to visit our people thrown in prison. Did you not know that the Tower begins to burst with clergy?”

  Mary nudged his foot beneath the table, feeling that he displayed his information like wares on a table.

  “You must not,” Dyota breathed. “’Twould put Mary in danger. Perhaps even us.”

  With her vow of obedience, Mary had accepted her place in the hierarchy: the creatures of the earth, plants and animals, the lowliest; then children; then women. Then men. Above them all, God. She bore like a wooden collar knowledge of what was seemly or possible for a wife.

  She drew breath, determined to voice her opinion.

  “I would go myself, cousin,” Mary said. She spoke calmly, cooling William’s heat yet buttressing his indignation. “They have done no harm. Some of them were required to answer the Visitation Articles. Nine hundred questions and every one must be answered correctly. Who could manage such a task? No one. Not even those who pose the questions.”

  Ralf raised a hand, flicking away Mary’s words. He leaned towards William.

  “I do not know who is in the Tower, or why,” he said. His lips quivered. “But keep your nose out of it, William. Those who put them there know the why and wherefore of it, and are better placed than you to have their reasons.”

  William pushed back his chair. He glared at Ralf. “Gold, silver, lace, stained glass, they would put in our churches. Papistry.”

  “I heard the queen brought her own confessor,” Mary said. “And her Capuchin monks.”