A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  When Dyota dies …

  A noisome fret began, a finger upon her heart.

  Once her wounds had healed, Elizabeth Swale and another young woman left for Bristol, where they heard convincements had begun.

  Dyota died in August, on a day of insufferable heat. Mary sent for an Anglican priest to administer the Holy Sacrament, for her cousin had remained steadfast to the Church of England.

  In the stables, they heard less the sounds of the remaining squatters, and more the shouts of workers, with their saws and hammers.

  One evening, Dafeny stood at the window, watching birds flying across the reddening sky. She brought the back of her hand to her cheek, ducking her head, and then paused, bent, forgetting to wipe away the tears, which came faster.

  Mary came swiftly, put an arm around her shoulders.

  “My babes,” Dafeny said. “All my dear ones.”

  Mary wrote to William, and sent him the address of a London Friend, to which he could reply.

  August 1655, Aquidneck

  Dear Mary,

  ’Twas a great disappointment to find your letter rather than your person on board Trerise’s vessel and still my heart doth ache. You say that there are those who require your presence and for whom you bear love but sad it is to tell that the children do forget you and it breaketh my heart to tell them of you only in order that they remember that a mother was once theirs. I beg of you that as soon as your cousin dies return to me and to them …

  Mary stood at the window of a small room overlooking the Thames. She and Dafeny had left the stable a year ago.

  The sun rose, a fiery radiance softened by spring mist. Below, in the courtyard, cart horses drowsed, nose-to-nose. Gulls flew low, heading up-river.

  She saw the birds, the mist and the horses as separating particles, vaporizing from the dream that had wakened her. In the dream, a young man put arms around her and she had felt drawn not against a man’s body but into a love so sweet and vast that even in the dream her waking thoughts protested against its loss. He had placed her upon the back of a black goose. Stretching away on all sides were other people on dark-feathered geese. She had lain forward and clasped the bird’s neck as its wings lifted.

  She heard the rustle of Dafeny’s awakening.

  “Ah, such a dream I had,” Mary said, turning from the window. Dafeny rolled to her side; her red hair burned in the light like marigolds. Mary thought of the moment she had first seen Dafeny and the other Friends—how they had loomed in the rain, blurred, indistinct.

  Dafeny sat, leaned against the wall. She shuffled her hair from her face.

  “I have decided,” she said. “I mus’ take to the roads again. I mus’ make my way back north. I am going to go home.”

  She took a long breath.

  “My children, my dear Dougald, my Sibilla. ’Tis too long. I have done my part.”

  Mary said nothing.

  “Will thee come with me? Or …”

  Dafeny’s face. More familiar, now, than any other. The fingers, tracing letters on a page as Mary taught her to read. Chapped lips, murmuring prayer.

  Her dream had forewarned her and now she could not tell it to her friend for the aching of her throat.

  “Could thee not, Mary?”

  She shook her head, pressed her lips tight. She turned back to the window. The carters had arrived to harness their horses. Horses and men moved, thickened and wavery as behind a fall of water.

  V.

  NEW ENGLAND

  1657–1660

  And in the shadow of thy wings I sing for joy …

  PSALM 63

  TWENTY

  The House on the Point - 1657

  SINNIE STOOD IN THE CHICKEN house door, eggs in a basket. The evening air bore the scent of turned soil.

  She heard the slow clopping of hoofs.

  Two horses turned in at the gate and came up the long laneway. A man rode one horse and a woman the other. Both lifted hand to forehead, shielding eyes as sunset cast long rays.

  She ran to the house, heart skittering.

  “They are come,” she called into the entryway, glancing up the stairs. She went into the great hall, set down the round basket. Littlemary was knitting by the fireside.

  “They are come!”

  Sinnie ran back to the entryway, wiping her hands on her apron. Littlemary, she thought. She be terrified.

  She harried the four boys, who came down the stairs, nervous as their sister. Where is she now? they would always ask their father when he received a letter from their mother. Sinnie heard the jeering sarcasm that hid their hurt. Last autumn, they had received word that Mary had left England with another Quaker, Ann Burden; and then that their ship had been blown off course and landed in Barbados, where they had stayed at a plantation owned by Quakers, lingering to do their “work,” whatever that might be.

  Ah, Mistress, you will lose them for sure now, Sinnie had thought, when William had raised angry eyes to announce this further delay.

  And now. William had told them at supper, eyes communing only with his biscuit as he tore it in two. A letter had come from Massachusetts. “Come and get your wife,” the magistrates had written to him. A new law forbade Quakers to enter Boston. Mary and her companion had been searched, arrested and jailed as soon as their ship arrived.

  The children gathered around Sinnie.

  Like chicks. Sensing danger.

  She smoothed hair, straightened collars.

  “There, now, ’tis your own mother who bore you, ’tis your own mother, my loves.”

  They went out onto the granite doorstep. Peepers pulsed and the winnowing of snipes shivered like the sky’s lament. Stars appeared behind the chimney. The new house rose behind them, candlelight feathering tiny windowpanes.

  The sun had set and the horses came dusk darkened past the fenceposts, hugely alive with their blowing breath, steaming flanks, jingling bits. Jurden heard the hoofs and strode from the barn. He took the reins as the horses came to a standstill, champing at their bits, tossing their heads.

  William helped Mary dismount, since her legs were encumbered by stirrup stockings. Her first steps were hitching, stiff.

  Aged, Sinnie thought. Stern.

  Mary wore a grey cloak and a hat with a cock-eyed brim. Her face was weathered. Half-moon bags sorrowed her eyes and she bore a fretted, blind expression, as someone who has recently dwelt in darkness.

  She turned from William, took Jurden’s hand.

  “Jurden, thee has not changed a jot.”

  She be half-starved. Her mouth, even yet so wide and beautiful.

  William came around from behind the horses.

  “This is your mother,” he announced to the children, abruptly, as if abandoning intended words. Sinnie saw that he was baffled and would blunder.

  Not like this, Master. Take care, or …

  Mary turned towards the children. They stood in a line as on the night of her leaving. She spoke to the tallest. “Is this … are thee … young William?”

  She truly does not know. My poor dear Willie, not known by his own mother. Fifteen, he was. Taller than Mary. Like his father, his face was narrow, his eyes predatory. Mary took the boy’s hand and did not shake it but only held it, formally. He chewed a lip, looked down.

  “Maher,” William said, pushing the boy forward. Maher was a year younger, round-faced, with a spray of freckles. He, too, took his mother’s hand, but glanced at his older brother.

  Mary looked at the remaining children.

  “Not Henry?” she said. Ten years old, Henry was sharp-eyed, lithe.

  “Hello, Mother,” he said. He tipped back his head to appraise her.

  “Charlie, now,” said William gently. Charlie had been a baby when she left. Now he was seven. Round-eyed, full-lipped. His hand was soft, sticky.

  “Hello, Mother.” A front tooth was missing; his voice wavered.

  Sinnie nudged Littlemary, who stepped forward with a twisted smile. Black hair wisped around a bro
ad, open forehead; she wore a white cap tied at the chin. Twelve, she was as tall as her mother.

  “My dear Littlemary,” Mary said. Her eyes filled with tears and she held out her arms. “My dear Little—” She drew a breath.

  The one she did love the best.

  “Hello, Mother.” Littlemary’s eyes met her mother’s and slid sideways. She stood stiff within Mary’s embrace and had not lifted her own arms by the time Mary released her.

  “Samuel says he will come visit on the morrow,” William said. Twenty-two, Samuel no longer lived at home.

  William went down on one knee. The children crowded round him. He rummaged in the pocket of his greatcoat, drew out a fistful of chestnut-wood whistles.

  Sinnie stepped forward, uncertain whether to hold out a hand or spread her arms, but Mary came swiftly and caught her up, pressing her against the cold, horsey cloak. Sinnie breathed the stink of prison, felt Mary’s fierce energy.

  “How I missed thee!” Mary whispered.

  William and Mary’s first meeting after five years had been at the door of a cell, under the eyes of a jailor. They had stared at one another, stunned by time’s transformation; their embrace had been perfunctory. During the ride home, they had spoken carefully, feeling their way towards ease. The subject of Mary’s long absence remained unbroached. Her words—George Fox, Dafeny, the stableyard dwelling—had fallen like notes of music in a dead space. William had spoken, ramblingly, of political events incomprehensible to her; and of the children, whose names pierced her with guilt and fear.

  In the bedroom, they undressed, backs to one another. They slid between the sheets.

  Neither extinguished their bedside candle.

  “I came to find you,” William said. “I sent you a letter telling you I was in London. Did you never receive it?”

  Underbarrow. I did not tell Dafeny.

  In the long silence, she knew that he understood the answer to his question.

  “The letter reached me, yes,” she said. “But ’twas too late.”

  “I had already left England?”

  Silence.

  “William.” Her voice hardened. “It was not in truth for me that thee came. It was for the charter. It was a scheme between thee and Clark and Williams, for the sake of Aquidneck.”

  He did not answer, and Mary knew that neither of them had been wholly truthful with the other.

  Air passed over the windowsill, bent the candle flames. He reached for her hand, and she turned her palm upwards. Their fingers closed. Suddenly, it was as if no years had intervened: London, the red-curtained bedstead, their young bodies. Tears sprang to her eyes. She saw that his eyes, too, glimmered in the candlelight.

  He touched her neck, pulled her lips to his. She tasted the salt of his tears, felt the dimension of his hurt.

  Sinnie slept in a four-poster bedstead in a small room on the second floor, across the hall from the master bedchamber.

  She made certain never to go upstairs before William.

  She would tarry, banking the fire, setting sourdough, putting beans to soak; then would slip up the back staircase. She stood by his door, listening for his snores, hand shielding candle flame. Sometimes she could not keep herself from laying a hand on the door, stroking the adzed pine panel with the tips of her fingers.

  A mirror hung on the wall over her dresser, too high. Ten-year-old Henry could stretch to his full height and press his nose against hers. On this night of Mary’s return, she rose to her toes, held the edge of the dresser, peered into the glass. Her job was to teach them to love their mother.

  Sinnie, Sinnie. Where is my hornbook? My buckle? Sinnie, I have cut myself. I am hungry, I am tired, I am …

  She studied her own troubled, blue eyes, wondering how she was to do it.

  —

  The next day, Sinnie watched from her post at the hearth, pained, wishing that work and school had been set aside and the day made one of celebration.

  They show how they do not need her.

  After breakfast, William and young William rode to the Newport office. Charlie, Henry and Maher walked to dame school.

  Mary sat by a window, hands laid palms upward, a random nesting, like fallen leaves. One side of her face was hazed with sunshine. She watched Littlemary, who was busy at the fire, avoiding her mother’s eyes.

  Twelve years old.

  Sinnie set a wooden tub on the hearth, filled it, brought a cake of bayberry soap. Mary undressed and eased herself into the water.

  “Canst tell us of the prison?” Sinnie said, running a cloth over the knobby curve of Mary’s spine.

  Mary ducked face in hands, splashed water, dragged fingers through her scalp. She drew a long breath.

  She has hardly spoken.

  “’Twas dark. Dark, cold, silent. I could hear rats chewing, especially in the night. Yet ’twas nothing as bad as some are enduring now in England.”

  Her voice was low, stark, with no attendant shades to enfold her listeners.

  Littlemary left the room with a bucket. Sinnie watched her cross the yard, heading for the well—saw that her steps were confused, neither going quickly nor turning back, and that her shoulders drooped.

  May on Aquidneck was the loveliest time of year.

  The cows grazed hock-deep in dandelions and star grass. The sheep wandered on the hillsides where junipers exuded the scent of gin and milk-snakes coiled on boulders.

  Sinnie threw open the windows of the big house, let the salt air blow through. She spread linens on the greening grass. She worked in the vegetable garden, watching flocks of birds coming up over the sea, so many that the sky was reduced to a crumpled blue between their fanning wings. She knelt, planting seeds saved in twists of paper. She stood at the trestle table, kneading dough, laughing at the sight of Littlemary who stood outside in a whirling, prickly cloud, stripping feathers from chickens. She scrubbed. Clothes, stone floors, wood floors. Her mind sifted the contents of pantry, root cellar, buttery—scrambled the findings into imagined meals. She proceeded steadily as the migrating birds, knowing by the soil in her fist when to plant, by palm’s memory how to knead or knit, by heart’s instinct how and when to soothe. Aquidneck, finally, was as familiar as Shetland.

  She straightened from planting carrots and gazed at the house. Like a ship, it was—solitary on the point of land, the sea beyond, the fields like smoothed blankets. Beneath its eaves, swallows hovered, shoring up last year’s nests.

  William’s great house, bigger than William Coddington’s or anyone else’s.

  Sinnie loved its shelves of folded quilts, pillowbeers, sheets, linen drawers and stockings, silk caps and dimity waistcoats. She loved the hall and pantry, with its pewter platters, salt cellars, kettles; its store of cheeses and cured hams, its crocks of pickled cabbage and nasturtium buds, applesauce, grape juice.

  Sinnie watched Mary come from the house and stand in the herb garden. She wore sad-coloured clothing without lace. She had politely bidden William return a bolt of pink-flowered dimity and exchange it for plain brown wool.

  “Give me the herb garden to care for,” she had said to Sinnie, on the first morning.

  “But Mistress, the whole household is yours.”

  “Sinnie, for now I am content to leave the running of the house in thy hands. But I do know my herbs, from my aunt’s teachings.”

  Often, on these glorious days, Mary sat in the parlour, studying her Bible, writing letters—to London, she told Sinnie, who asked. To Yorkshire, to Barbados, or to the Boston magistrates, since her friend, Ann Burden, remained in jail. “I seek my friend’s release,” she said. “She hath no husband to rescue her.”

  She studied letters that came to her from other “Friends,” as she called them.

  She does not love the house, Sinnie thought, sorry on William’s behalf.

  “Will she like this valance, these curtains, dost think, Sinnie?” he had asked her, preparing for Mary’s return. The elaborately patterned copper warming pan, brought home fr
om Boston. He showed it to the children, smiling. “’Twill warm her sheets nicely.” In the bedchamber dresser, one day, Sinnie had found a pair of gloves. Lambskin, dressed flesh-side out. They were lined with peach-coloured silk and embroidered with silver thread. Sinnie had slid them onto her hands, remembering the nobleman who had taken her from Fetlar as his serving girl and how proud her parents had been the day she had ridden away on her shaggy pony. Gone into service in London! Sinnie had removed the gloves and closed the drawer, thinking of how she had come to Mary and William, filthed. How she could meet no man’s eye and felt that the sun would never again be as her friend, nor the wind stroke her hair, nor the flowers nod.

  Sinnie dropped back to her knees, scrabbled carrot seeds from the paper and resumed sprinkling the drill. The seeds slithered from her palm, a pile that she nursed into line with a fingertip.

  We be true friends. The poor thing, how she do suffer.

  —

  Sand glinted on the scoured floor. Sinnie offered the women cider, gingersnaps. The windows were open and in the spaces of their conversation came the creaking of a wheeled ox-drawn plough and the screaming of the gulls that followed it.

  “There are two churches in Newport, one Baptist, one independent.”

  “Your husband has not made up his mind? For we glimpse him at both.”

  Three Newport women, visiting Mary.

  Friends for you, Sinnie’s eyes implored. Mary looked at each woman, pondering. A smile quivered at the corners of her mouth but did not spread.

  “Has he not?” Mary inquired. She turned to Sinnie. “Does he not take the children to church?”

  Sinnie started and the gingersnaps slithered on the plate.

  “Sometimes, Mistress. Not always.”

  “Ah.” Mary’s voice, closing the subject.

  So thin. Her eyes, like torches in the dark. She frightens them. She waits for them to speak. Oh, Mistress, talk of …