A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  The inheritance went to the oldest son. He had come to review his property. Before leaving, he had bid his cousin Mary stay as long as necessary. Then, a letter from William, asking when she would return. She had written back—I must delay. There is much still to be settled. She had prevaricated, and it gnawed at her.

  She rolled over and lay face down on her bedstead. Then she thrashed back up, pulled her covers to her shoulders. Mixed with the patter of rain came a sound like the faint, irregular creaking of timbers.

  Ah. Snoring!

  The next morning, Dafeny’s ankle was swollen, purple and throbbing.

  “Fat as a suckling pig,” she said, sitting in the bedstead, rueful.

  Mary provided the others with bundles of cold meat and cheat rye bread. She stood in the doorway watching as they made their way down the street, encumbered by the swaying corpses. Then she helped Dafeny down the stairs and to a chair by the fire; plastered the ankle with a paste of vinegar, bread crumbs, honey and figs.

  “My aunt taught me many things,” Mary said, kneeling to tuck up the ends of the cloth.

  “Tell me of her,” Dafeny said. “Tell me of thy life.”

  Two weeks later, Dafeny’s ankle was healed, but still she stayed with Mary.

  At the hiring market in Kettlesing, smoke rose from braziers, carrying the smell of mutton through the cold air. Scarlet pennants snapping in the moorland wind, the green wheels of a gypsy’s wagon—their colours were so bold in the clarity that they appeared less objects than strokes of light.

  Dafeny clutched Mary’s arm. “That be him.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “George Fox. There, by the market cross.”

  They stood shoulder to shoulder with tradespeople and servants, who clustered, waiting their turn to step up onto the auction block to offer their services and skills. Thatchers held tufts of golden reeds; dairy-maids clutched stools. Sun made a pocket of warmth, releasing the smell of unwashed clothing, smoke-befouled hair.

  Fox rose over the crowd, sturdy in a leather doublet. Unlike the close-cropped Puritans, hair spread from beneath a broad-brimmed hat, lay across his shoulders. His hands were large as a labourer’s, and scarred, like his leather trousers.

  He called out suddenly, as if announcing a matter of extreme urgency.

  “I declare that the Lord has come with the Word of Life!”

  The auctioneer glared and then continued his bawling cries. Fox paid no attention. He held up one arm. He was flushed with health, face ruddied from days spent out-of-doors.

  “The Lord God hath sent me to preach the everlasting gospel and Word of Life, and to bring you from all these temples …” He pointed at the church tower. “… tithes, priests and rudiments of the word. They have been instituted since the apostles’ days, and have been set up by such as hath erred from the Spirit. I come to save the church from deadness and formalism.”

  Mary put a hand to Dafeny’s shoulder in order to rise up on her toes. The young man’s eyes were stern, compassionate.

  “Quench not the Spirit …” he called out.

  “Shut yer cakehole!”

  The crowd milled. Some turned towards the auctioneer, others to Fox. Those who shouted were shouted at by those who wished to hear one or the other. Fox’s voice soared over the discord.

  “… and live that ye may feel and see to the beginning, before the world and its foundation was; and that nothing may reign but the life and power amongst you. And live that ye may answer that of God in every man …”

  “Out of me way.”

  Mary was pushed from her toes as a goose herder shoved past, leading hooded birds attached to one another by a rope. The herder flailed with her stick, hissed.

  Fox’s words unfurled upon the fatty scent of roasting mutton, the jingling of farthing boxes, the bawling of cattle. Mary was dimly aware that Dafeny had asked her a question, but Fox’s words were such that she felt if she did not attend them, a gulf would yawn and all would slither to perdition, the world rendered into nonsense and rubble.

  He is so young! His lips had not yet acquired the bitter down-turn of age. She pulled herself up, again, hand on Dafeny’s shoulder. He turned away. Broken phrases came and those around Mary also craned to see, shushing one another, seizing the words like grains spewed from a passing cart.

  “… go forth … in the sun of God’s power … you will see where the lost sheep are. And such as have been driven away …”

  She lost his next words as cattle filled the street, their driver shouting, cracking his whip. She cupped hands behind her ears, straining to hear. Such as have been driven away.

  A man roared, rushed towards Fox and knocked him down. Fox rose, calm, and placed one hand against the man’s chest, keeping him at arm’s length. Still he preached, although now his words were intensified by intimacy, as if he addressed the man alone and thus, by implication, each separate listener.

  “… you will see the bright morning star appear, which will expel the night of darkness that hath been in your hearts …”

  My heart.

  “… by which—”

  He wavered again as he was seized by two men. Mary could hear his voice. “… by which morning star you will come to the everlasting day, which was before night was. So everyone feel this bright morning star in your hearts, there to expel the darkness …”

  “Where did he go?”

  “Like an angel, he were …”

  The crowd surged to follow. Mary put out her arm to keep herself from falling, heard a shriek, felt a blow on the side of her head. Her hat slid over one eye as she struggled amidst legs, shoulders, baskets and dogs.

  “Come,” Dafeny said, pulling her up by the arm. “He will make for the church.”

  They were jostled along a street, past the tavern, up a lane. At its end was a lych-gate; beyond, the square-sided church tower. Two men dressed like Fox were setting a wooden placard in front of the roofed gateway.

  Dafeny brushed red curls from her face, stood on tiptoe, squinting at the scrawled letters. “What do it say?”

  “ ‘God is not worshipped here,’ ” Mary read, raising her voice as people gathered round her. “ ‘This is a temple made with hands: neither is this a church, for the church is in God. This building is not in God, neither are you in Him, who meet here.’ ”

  A woman carrying a basket of onions clapped hand to mouth, too horrified for speech. Mary saw a farmer repress a smile, eyes bearing sly delight. A small man ripped cap from head, waved it in a frenzy of outrage.

  “Call the constables!” he shrieked.

  Other men picked up the placard and began to hustle it away but were restrained by officers wearing the yellow-cuffed red wool coats, grey breeches and felt hats of the New Model Army.

  “Put it down,” one of the officers snapped. “Let others see what it do say.”

  People pushed through the lych gate and entered the church to see if Fox had invaded the sanctuary. Mary and Dafeny followed those who went around to the churchyard.

  Fox stood on a carved bible box beneath an oak tree. Sunlight sparked on the tree’s yellow leaves and on the alchemy buttons of his doublet. He stood with fingers spread, as if holding a nest of sticks.

  “You will think it strange to see a man preach under the sky; yet the fell side is as holy as any other ground …”

  The heathery wind snatched at his words.

  “Ye may come to see that which was in the beginning, before the word was, where there is no shadow or darkness …”

  He spoke for over an hour. He described “the tender thing” that was in them all. He told of his spiritual journey, how he had left his apprenticeship and wandered in despair.

  “Then hope underneath held me, as an anchor on the bottom of the sea …”

  As Mary listened, she forgot that the words came from the lips of a young man with black fingernails and sunburned face. They were thoughts like her own, released from long immersion. She did not so much remember as becom
e the earnest young woman she had been in London when she had listened to John Everard, the Puritan preacher; or the young mother she had been in those first days in Boston, hearing Anne Hutchinson speak of “grace”—and in both instances had felt the vitality of hope.

  This time, the constables themselves came.

  A short, walnut-faced man, one eye squinted by a thick scar, wended his way through the crowd, walking like a sailor on a tipping deck. He was followed by a younger constable whose skin was pitted by smallpox. Both held carriage whips. Fox stepped down from the bible box. The constables shoved his shoulders while kicking his feet from under him. One snatched his hat and sent it flying.

  The nut-faced constable mounted the box. “How is it that you have stood by and allowed this filth on our sacred grounds?”

  People stirred, recovered themselves.

  Some began to shout at George Fox, as if their entranced listening had been not of their own volition.

  “Aye, off with you, foul face.”

  “Be gone, puddinghead! … blockish grutnol … doddi-pol-jolt-head!”

  They shouted at each other.

  “You did not call him such earlier! Listened to him, you did. He hath spoken sense …”

  Fox and the two young men who had placed the placard began to make their way to the gate. One of the constables cracked his whip. It fell across Fox’s cheek, raising a line of blood. Mary was jostled to the ground, felt a boot tread upon the back of her hand, saw her basket fly away. She struggled up in time to see village men seize Fox by the shoulders and force him to his knees. They dragged him face-downwards from the churchyard and up the street, the young Friends following close, and the two constables in the rear.

  People turned away—shame-faced or satisfied.

  Mary and Dafeny hurried up the street; saw, at the top of the village, the men clustered in a field garth. Fox was rising from his knees, brushing off his coat. He began walking towards the moor, the young men at his side. The village men turned back, but the constables toiled behind, shouting, their whips slashing Fox.

  The five men became as flies, dwarfed by the hills.

  “I know that path,” Mary said.

  They stepped onto the hoof-hardened trail. On the breeze came the scent of furze—fresh, wild.

  The constables, coming down, passed Mary and Dafeny. They trudged with whips against their shoulders, tilt-faced, like children who have broken some essential tool.

  “Where are you going, women?”

  Neither woman spoke.

  “Keep away from them crazy folk. See there, the sky’s gone grouty.”

  Clouds had come up from the west. The constables paused, as if to dissuade them, but Mary quickened her pace, hand to a stitch in her side. Rounding a boulder, they encountered the Friends. George Fox sat, slouched forward, head in his hands, blood oozing between his fingers.

  “The final time they struck him, he fell unconscious,” one of the young men told them. “He hath just now revived.”

  The other kneeled, arm around Fox’s shoulders.

  “George,” he urged. “Can thee speak?”

  “Aye.” Fox tried to stand, stumbled and sat back again. He sat brushing soil from his sleeves, looking at the sky. “Storm.”

  “Are thee thyself, George?”

  The big man sighed. Then he smiled.

  “Aye. ’Tis of no account, just a smash.”

  “You may come to my house,” Mary offered. “I can make a poultice.”

  She held herself still and did not look away, even as his eyes lingered upon hers, travelling through her closed doors, her wrapped secrets. He gathered her into himself, like a pebble that he might lift, and think beautiful, and tuck into a pocket.

  “Thank thee,” he said. “But I must needs travel onward to York.”

  His voice was firm, as if what had occurred needed no contemplation. He tipped his head to probe the wound, examined his bloody hand.

  “Hast thee a rag, Richard Farnsworth?”

  He scrambled onto his feet and stood looking down at the church bell rising over the village on its tower, like the eye of a snail.

  “But I’ll pass once again through Kettlesing. I must find my hat. ’Tis in the yard of that steeple house.”

  Mary knelt by the bedstead and pressed her face to the prickly wool. She did not pray, but saw George Fox’s eyes. They became the world—houses, trees, fire, lavender, birds, water—and yet held something more, as wondrous and searing as the pressure in her heart.

  Mary wrote to her cousin, advising him that she would be shutting up the house. She and Dafeny rolled carpets, sheeted furniture, gave away cellared cheese, ale and apples. They baked a quantity of biscuit bread, filling the house with the scents of aniseed and coriander. In the evenings, they stitched wool petticoats or lined their cloaks with heavy blanketing. They knit mittens, darned socks. Mary wrote to William:

  November 1652

  My dearest William,

  I booked passage on the Chapman for the spring sailing but find I must advise you not to expect me, for I shall not be able to come.

  She laid her quill down for so long that Dafeny looked up from her knitting.

  “What shall I tell him?” Mary said, glancing at her friend.

  “The truth,” Dafeny said, surprised.

  Mary turned her eyes to the fire. Within her was all that the truth entailed and she did not see how she could distill it. Her friend’s resolute green eyes. The tender, fierce, stalwart Friends. England like a finely detailed tapestry, its red-coated army, the looted churches, Royalists in hiding, Oliver Cromwell the Protector. George Fox, who had sprung from this, his message a thread of the tapestry, a part of the mind like the ticking of Uncle Colyn’s clock or the wisps of smoke sent sideways by the draughts of Aunt Urith’s ancient house.

  Nor did she see how she could convey to William the truth of her heart—that within it lived still the young man who had run up the stairs, bringing gifts. He and she sat in the little house by the Thames, alert and happy, waiting for a different future.

  I have become a Friend or what they do call a Quaker. It has brought me comfort. I have a companion, a married woman named Dafeny Hardcastle, and we set forth this day week to publish the truth. Please tell the children that I do think of them every day, as I do you, my love,

  Your,

  Mary Dyer

  They set out in grey cloaks that anticipated colder days to come. Their packs were laden with biscuit bread, dried meat, flagons of cider. Buried at the bottom of Mary’s was a drawstring bag filled with coins.

  They crossed the humpback bridge and walked away from the village, heading north.

  They did not know where they would arrive at nightfall, nor whether they would sleep in tavern, barn, house or propped against one another at the roadside.

  “I do not care,” Mary said, when Dafeny pointed this out to her. She felt buoyant, eager. They strode side by side, their ankles wrenched by frozen mud. Wind chased clouds over the dale heads, the moors pulsed with waves of light and shadow. Nothing lay ahead but the narrow track, cutting deep into the soil, glinting beneath the mid-December sky.

  —

  All winter, and the following spring, summer and autumn, they passed from village to village, telling of George Fox and repeating his message to whoever would listen. We do not remove our hats to those of superior status, for we believe all are equal before God, rich and poor, male and female … nor use “you” but equally address all with “thee” or “thou” … nor need ministers to intercede on our behalf … nor need churches with their appurtenances … for there is that of God within us and all have within the inner light …

  They posted papers on church doors, advising of the time and place where they would hold their meetings—on street corners, in haylofts, parlours, farm kitchens, commons.

  By word of mouth or letters sent to other Friends, they heard of the persecutions of Fox’s followers, called by other Friends “The Valiant Sixt
y.” Many were run out of towns. Others had been thrown in jail—for vagrancy, or for blasphemy, or for disturbing the peace. Women had preached to the students at Cambridge and been stripped to the waist and whipped. One excessively fat man, who wandered the streets dressed in sackcloth, barefoot and barelegged, holding sweet flowers in his right hand and stinking weeds in his left, had been forced into a hole in the Chester prison named “Little Ease,” so tight that blood came from his mouth and nose. Two women passed a winter imprisoned in a dank cell infested with frogs and toads. Meetings for worship were disrupted, doors broken down, hogs released into rooms, beards cut half-off, windows shattered. Friends were called whores, bitches, toads, dogs, rebels.

  George Fox was hauled before magistrates, and thrown into prison, and then released, and then thrown in again. He wrote a letter, which was copied and found its way to those who were abroad. Mary read it aloud to Dafeny.

  … spare no tongue or pen, but be obedient to the Lord God … be valiant for the Truth upon earth; be a pattern to others … that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people … walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in every one …

  Mary slept on floors strewn with rye straw. Her stomach churned with hunger. Her clothing was greasy, lice tickled her scalp, her body itched, her lips were chapped, her hands bore the white spots of frostbite. She lay, at night, with knees drawn, hands cradling her chilblained feet.

  She had no fear of those who might mock her, suffering pain and humiliation with gladness, since they had been reduced in proportion to her joy and became as the prick of brambles or the sting of an insect.

  In Underbarrow, they were directed to the home of a woman whose husband was travelling with the Valiant Sixty. Her house was a way station where food, rest and mail might be obtained. They arrived at the long, white-washed house in late afternoon. At their knock, the woman came to the door—small, bright-faced.

  “I heard you were coming. And I am glad, for I have been holding a letter for thee, Mary Dyer.”

  She showed them to a bedroom, with the promise of bath and supper.