A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  I am led, she wished to say. I have no choice.

  At the northern tip of Aquidneck Island, they crossed the narrows of the Sakonnet River on Howland’s ferry and spent the night in Providence with Roger Williams and his family.

  At supper, the men spoke of the charter, of the king’s beheading, of England’s civil war. The women compared their children’s ages. No one spoke of Mary’s departure or the reasons for it.

  The next morning they rode north along the Great Salt River, passing farmsteads whose fields sloped up steep hillsides. Men walked behind ox-drawn ploughs. Others stood in carts shovelling rotten fish meal onto the soil. On the riverbanks, waterwheels turned, creaking, water spilling from bucket to bucket; and from the mills came a rhythmic pounding and the smoke of risen dust.

  They entered the forest on the Pequot Path.

  Mary watched William as he rode before her, gun jutting over his shoulder, shadows running and slipping over his buckskin jacket. Every so often, he leaned over his stirrup, calling her attention to fresh scat, or the prints of deer, moose, wildcat. The light was made tender by its passage through new leaves and the horses’ hoofs fell silently on the red-tasselled catkins of beeches, butternut and hickory.

  There were no other travellers on the narrow Indian path, so ancient that it had cut deep into the soil, winding like a watercourse around boulders and rocky outcroppings. The clergymen who had exhumed her child and proclaimed her the mother of a monster had preached that God had prepared this land for the English by ridding its forests of the bedevilled salvages. Mary thought of the native mat that had lain beside her bed. The smallpox, she had heard, broke and mattered, oozing, so that when a person rolled, skin would cleave to the rushes and flay away, leaving a mass of gore.

  At noontime, they came to a river the colour of dark ale, paling to cinnamon where a sandbar corrugated the water. White pines grew on its banks. They dismounted, hobbled the horses, sat on a rock. They laid out beer, sausage, pickled radish.

  The horses drowsed, their lower lips loose and foolish. Once Mary caught William’s eyes on her—loving, worried—and yet she saw how, bit by bit, she had slipped from the centre of his concern.

  She watched leaf-stippled shadows play upon a bed of violets. She had grown accustomed to the vast emptiness of this land and of her displacement within it; how it scraped her with its searching light.

  So small, she had become. So insignificant.

  He will not miss me for long.

  —

  They spent three days in Boston waiting for the ship to sail.

  Mary did not venture forth from the tavern. She was sickened by the proximity of Governor Winthrop and the clergymen and the meeting house at the top of the street.

  She sat at the window and watched men loading hogsheads and casks onto ships, horses standing patient before wagons of timber. Out beyond the harbour, amidst the winking, wave-crinkled water, she could see blue islands, dwindling away down the coast.

  “Goodbye, William.”

  She felt numb with disbelief at the turnings of their life.

  He wept and held her.

  “My love,” he said.

  “I love you, William.” Her whisper was half-choked. “I will return. Perhaps … healed.”

  He helped her into the rowboat. He stood at the edge of the wharf, waving.

  Smaller, he grew. Smaller.

  William? There …? Or …

  Mary stood on the foredeck next to a woman with whom she was to share a berth. She was travelling to England with two young daughters.

  “There,” the woman was saying, pointing. “That be your father. And there’s your brother.”

  The little girls waved. “Papa, papa! Ezekial! Goodbye.”

  Mary could not discern William amongst the crowd, nor, she guessed, could this woman discern son and husband. She went below decks and sat on her bed, a narrow box with a flock mattress. Drained of the energy she had summoned to bring her here, she listened with little interest to the commotion of departure. She had no desire to watch New England become a molten speck upon the western sea.

  IV.

  ENGLAND

  1638–1651

  O thou North of England, who are counted as desolate and barren … out of thee did the branch spring and the star arise …

  “Works”

  EDWARD BURROUGH, QUAKER

  SIXTEEN

  Between Worlds - 1651–2

  “DANGLING LIKE A TURKEY’S WATTLE,” she said. “Not that I do mind. I could bear with some trimming.” Broad-faced, wide-bodied, Ann Burden spoke with the accent of the English north. Over the weeks, she had lost flesh. She pinched the skin beneath her chin.

  They sat cross-legged on their beds, facing one another. Ann had made blanket-nests for her daughters: Elizabeth, four years old, and Hannah, six. When the sea was calm, they were allowed to cook on a tiny brazier in the common area ’tween decks; when it was stormy, they ate what the cook sent from the fo’c’s’le.

  They could hear the dim shout of the navigator down the speaking tube; the helmsman’s response; then the whipstaff’s ponderous creak. And against the ship’s planking, the rush and rustle of water, a cold boil.

  They had lived in Boston at the same time, yet had not known one another well. They told one another the places of their births—Newcastle, Kettlesing—and discussed their husbands—Ann’s was a shoemaker; and the similar reasons for their voyage, ailing relatives. Their fathers—a shoemaker, a physician—and their mothers, children, childbirths. Their lives were like freshets, arising from different springs in the same wood, converging.

  “Lost my first. Thomas,” Ann Burden said. She was knitting a sock.

  “How long did he live?” Having no one to care for but herself, Mary neither knit nor sewed but sat with hands folded. No one waited for her. No child tugged at her.

  Alone. For the first time in …

  “Born and died the same day. The first of April, it was.”

  “Mine was named William. He did live three days.”

  “I lost three more baby sons: Elisha, and twins Joseph and Benjamin. I left my ten-year-old, Ezekial, in the care of my two fine servants—Francis and Johanna,” she said. The girls looked up and Mary felt a stab of longing, seeing in their eyes her own Littlemary’s sweetness. “Aye, my flitter-mice. You love your Johanna.”

  So calmly she speaks of her losses. Mary felt ashamed of her own anguish and resolved not to speak of it.

  Mary was accustomed, if not to aloneness, to loneliness—and kept herself quiet, contained, thinking to allow Ann and her daughters unwalled privacy. Hands thickened by grey fingerless gloves, she bent over her Bible, absorbed.

  “My father did teach me reading and numbers, just for to help in the business,” Ann Burden remarked, watching Mary. “I am not otherwise learned. Not like you and Anne Hutchinson. I were there on that day you walked out with her. I was put in mind of it on the day I was myself excommunicated.”

  Mary laid down the hand-sized book. The woman’s guileless blue eyes, rough-pored skin, and the odour of tannery in her clothing had caused Mary to assume that she was of easy and uneducated mind, taking life as it came.

  “Excommunicated? Why?” She tugged her cloak close around her shoulders.

  “’Twas me and Nicholas Upshall and a few other men,” Ann Burden said. She considered the yarn she jerked, arm-length, from a ball. Drew her hand down its length, checking for weaknesses. “I withdrew from fellowship of the church. I could not abide with some practices. I did not think the church covenant was an ordinance of God. And other differences I had. Last month, it was.”

  Mary listened to the ship’s sawing creaks. Candlelight made a tapestry of Ann Burden’s faded red dress, grey wool, the pine boards.

  “I do hate them,” Mary said with sudden violence. “I hate those men.”

  “Which men?”

  “The ones who dug up my baby.”

  “Ah, Winthrop and them.”


  “Aye.” Mary’s low voice rose, strained, and her eyes filled with tears. “Gloating over what they did find. Filled with vindication, saying ’twas proof of heresy. Anne stood up to them in two courts and fought them with words. But I …”

  Ann looked up from her needles. The little girls broke off their dolls’ whispered conversation.

  “My husband did sign that petition,” Ann Burden remarked, after a silence.

  “As did mine.”

  “Aye, but mine did go two days later and apologize. He said he had been in error. He was fixing to buy a house on the water, with a wharf opposite. He was making a pit for soaking leather.”

  “They sent men to our house.” Removed from the New World, Mary felt, now, the enormous injustice of this. The betrayal, the hypocrisy. “They took away my husband’s weapons.”

  Ann knit and tugged extra-tight three stitches.

  “And we left old England for our freedom,” she muttered.

  “Sometimes, it fears me that I shall find myself with the comforts of home, back in Yorkshire, and I will forget my children and my husband. They will become like unto a dream and I shall never go back.”

  Ann Burden narrowed her eyes. “Ah, well, but you haven’t forgotten your old aunt, have you? She still be real to you, real enough for you to step onto this tub? You’ll not forget.”

  The ship, filled with sleeping creatures, plunged eastwards through the North Atlantic.

  At first, Mary had dreaded hearing Ann’s coarse whisper, coming as soon as the little girls’ breathing grew steady. She had murmured, yawned, or feigned sleep. She was certain that Ann’s interest in her would fade and be replaced by critical evaluation, yielding dislike. Or disgust. Or pity.

  Night after night, however, Ann whispered, calmly. “Mary, be you sleeping? Mary? Mary?”

  “No, I am awake,” Mary said, on this night. She rolled to her back, lay listening to the ship’s creaks, its long groans.

  “Did you ever hear tell of Alice Tilley?” Ann Burden whispered. “Sentenced to die?”

  “No,” Mary whispered, watching a finger of light stroke the ceiling. “I have not heard of her.”

  “She is a midwife of Boston. Something did go awry in the delivery of a child and she was accused of witchcraft. The case was taken before the Court of Assistants. They did cast Alice Tilley into jail.” Her voice dropped a notch, even though it was clear that the little girls were asleep. “Were you ever into that place?”

  “No.”

  They had extinguished their candle-lantern. The hanging blanket that served as a door slid along its pole, bunched, then splayed out. The common room’s candlelight, like another world, was glimpsed, hidden again.

  “I did go to visit Alice. ’Tis a terrible, foul pit. She had a scrap of straw for a bed, ’twas black as night and chill as winter, although out-of-doors the sun was blazing.”

  “What did happen?”

  “We women came together, from hither and yon. Some from Boston, some from Dorchester. We did know Alice Tilley to be an honest midwife and no witch. We drew up a petition. Around the country, six other petitions were drawn up. We took them to the court. Seven petitions, signed by two hundred and seventeen women.”

  Mary pictured the women walking to the court house, their capes wind-billowed, their broad-brimmed hats ribboned beneath their chins.

  “They released her,” Ann whispered.

  “They released her?”

  “They released her. They did not dare to hang her for a witch. She walked from the jail and returned to her practice and no word has ever again been spoken against her.”

  Mary lay with her hands crossed upon her belly.

  She absorbed the story, like music from a foreign country. Parts of it were familiar, parts were entirely alien. It made her breath come quick and shallow. She remembered how she had been moved to rise at the moment of Anne Hutchinson’s sentencing; how she had walked with her from the meeting house, shored by sureness of purpose.

  And at the doorway had faltered, hearing the cruel epithet for the first time.

  Mother of the monster.

  Had Alice Tilley come to think of herself as a witch?

  “You have no right to accuse Mary Dyer …” She imagined women writing such a petition. Then two hundred and seventeen of them, one by one, signing their names.

  She felt a lightening, a release. Gladness? Something new, that she sought to identify.

  —

  They endured spring storms. The ship bucketed, rolled. Rain slashed the deck, wind shredded the sails. Women screamed, children wailed. The minister prayed for deliverance; afterwards, held prayers of thanksgiving.

  Mary and Ann Burden and the girls became as a family in the cramped space. They read, told stories, reminisced, sang. Ann’s blunt fingers scissored, her wrists turned: knitting, sewing, darning. Mary scratched words with a goose quill, the inky letters blotched and motion-skewed.

  Dear William,

  I do miss you. We count the days and are now nearer to England by far than we are to you and the children …

  But she felt the lack of warmth in these letters, for the William to whom she wrote was made abstract by distance, while her immediate affections had been kindled and now flamed for a new friend.

  Friendship. Oh, friendship.

  It was like being offered cinnamon cider when shuddering from cold. It was like returning home after travel, sinking into the shape of one’s own body in a feather ticking. After Anne Hutchinson, she had had only William and Sinnie as friends. No other married woman; no other mother.

  One day they discussed their time of bleeding. On another, how to avoid love-making. They compared their husbands’ farms, business enterprises and vagaries. They laughed at shared annoyances, whispered intimate details.

  They spoke again of their lost babies.

  They debated baptism, the singing of psalms in church, the covenant.

  It became their custom to whisper together, long into the night. Salvation, they spoke of. They recognized in one another the anguish of disaffection with the thing that had once been as a jewel in their hearts.

  Ann Burden scrawled an address on a slip of paper.

  “Here is my sister’s house in Bristol.”

  Mary wrote Aunt Urith’s name. Kettlesing, Yorkshire.

  “Anyone will know her.”

  Land, they’d been told, would be sighted within the next four days.

  The ship sailed up the Thames into London. The vast, sombre concretion of brick houses huddled beneath a pall of smoke. Garbage, offal, and water-logged timbers floated past.

  Mary stood on deck beside Ann Burden and the little girls.

  She felt power, danger. It pulsed from the muscling river, the distant neighing of horses, the barking of dogs; the rumble of wheels, the clang of hammers; the shrieks, sighs, and clatters that comprised the city’s murmurous roar.

  She thought how this was a different London. The persecuted were now the powerful. Puritans, led by Oliver Cromwell, ruled the country. These were the men who had beheaded King Charles, one winter morning in 1649. Their beliefs had been her own.

  Are these Puritans my people?

  She reached for Ann Burden’s hand.

  SEVENTEEN

  The Man in Leathern Breeches - 1652

  MARY LIFTED HER WOOL CLOAK from its hook, chose a flat-brimmed beaver hat. She left Urith’s house. Late autumn, a dark sky. The stone walls exuded a dank, mossy smell; her shoes slipped on the cobblestones.

  In the churchyard, sheep grazed; they lifted their heads, wary, and watched her with rectangular pupils. She went to her parents’ headstone, stood with her hand on its rough surface. Tiny William. Apple blossom cheeks, lonely headstone in London. She sought, then, her brother’s stone, and Uncle Colyn’s, with Aunt Urith’s name freshly inscribed. The soil still bore the marks of spade and boots. She pictured her aunt as she had last seen her, laid in her coffin, a fragile husk surrounded with tansy.

  “
Aunt Urith,” she whispered. “Canst hear me?” Wisps of mist clung to slate roofs. She left the churchyard, followed a path behind a row of houses. Past the sheep dip, she climbed a stile and slipped like a fugitive through the walled field-garths, heading for a small lake in the hills, “the tarn” they had called it when she was a child.

  She turned from the road, followed a footpath that rose and twisted beneath rocky escarpments. Like a beacon, she saw the tarn’s solitary, stunted oak. Rain began as she approached and she stood beneath the scant protection of its branches, watching the blinking silver of rain-struck water.

  The insidious thoughts began. They had started once Urith was gone and she had remained, alone, in the house.

  Massachusetts. Chill air rising from the spaded soil. The bundle coming towards me, a hand moving to pull the shroud from its face. Would I see, then, not a monster but a perfect infant girl? “No, Mary, ’twas true, ’tis a blessing the creature did not live.”

  She looked up towards the fells. She could simply continue walking. Until she succumbed to starvation. She pictured it—a stagger, a fall. Too weak to rise. Palms clasping the earth. Sleep. A scroll of snow between her lips. In spring, rabbits, heedless upon the bones of her fingers.

  Then she remembered the Boston meeting house. Sermons detailing the fates of the damned. Extreme torment. Racking torture. Dreadful grief, groaning and shrieking. For ever and ever.

  Movement, high on the moor, dark in the veiling rain. People. Emerging from the mist.

  They carried long cloth-wrapped bundles by ropes tied at each end. Two women came first, wending their way down a slope. The bundle swung heavily, throwing off their balance. The rope gave a jolt.

  “Sorry, love.”

  The words carried across the emptiness, small and clear.

  Corpses.

  Two men trudged behind them, lugging a second body. Three others, two women and a man, carried packs. All seven wore broad-brimmed hats and sad-coloured clothing.