A Measure of Light

by Beth Powning

  She untied the strings of her riding hat. Her hands shook. William rose to his feet, his mouth working to shape words, not finding them.

  “My heart feels delight, in truth,” she repeated in a hard voice, hurling her hat onto the settle.

  Sinnie and Littlemary exchanged a glance.

  Mary went to her bed, too tired to eat. She slept without dreaming.

  The next morning, she sat up and at first could not comprehend the puzzle that surrounded her.

  At breakfast, word arrived that Christopher Holder had passed into Boston on the same day that Mary had left. His intention had been to set sail for England. He had been seized, arrested as a Quaker and thrown into jail.

  Mary insisted on riding to Newport in order to consult with other Friends. William protested.

  “You need rest, Mary, you are …”

  She took up her riding hat that still lay on the settle where she had tossed it. She tied the strings beneath her chin.

  Sinnie folded corn cakes into a cloth, fumbling in her haste and not daring to meet Mary’s eyes. William stood on the hearth, slapping the side of his boot with a poker.

  “This time, they will kill him,” Mary Scott said. She was Christopher’s fiancée, the older sister of Patience. Her voice, Mary noticed, carried her aunt Anne Hutchinson’s cadence—assured, urgent. Her hair made two black slashes on either side of her forehead, like wings. “He was nearly dead after his torment in Barnstable. Three hundred and fifty-seven lashes. He lay for days near death. They have already had his ear. Nay, this time, they will surely kill him.”

  Mary, Hope Clifton and Mary Scott sat in the parlour of the Cliftons’ house overlooking Newport Harbour. Sunlight spooled in dimity curtains. They could hear the slap and creak of ships rocking in their moorings and the voices of men passing beneath the window.

  “They will not dare. He is too well known, his family is too highly placed.”

  In the hall, they heard the African serving girl humming a tune and the splash of a dipper. Hope went to the hearth, took the fire tongs and pushed back a smouldering stick.

  “In old England, Christopher Holder was known to Cromwell and to many others. ’Twould be the undoing of the Boston magistrates if they would kill him. For their laws are unjust. He has done nothing but profess his beliefs.”

  “We must leave this afternoon,” Mary answered. She felt her heart lift.

  “Thee cannot go to Boston, Mary Dyer,” Mary Scott exclaimed. “Thee is banished under pain of death.”

  “Remember thy mother’s words,” Mary said. “ ‘If the Lord asks it, woe be unto us if we do not come.’ ”

  The women sat in silence.

  If the Lord asks it …

  TWENTY-TWO

  Anguish and Wrath - 1659

  CHRISTOPHER LEANED OUT A PRISON WINDOW.

  “Praises be to the Lord,” he called down. “The jailor returns soon with hammer and nails to shut out the light, but ’twill not matter. In this cell is the sweet smiling savour of glory.”

  “Aye,” Mary Scott called back. “But doth thee wish food or any other thing?”

  Frost crunched beneath their feet and the women kept their hands fisted beneath their cloaks.

  “I would wish thee to be gone from this dark place,” he said. “And especially thee, Mary Dyer.”

  “The Lord hath called us,” she said. She stood back from the younger women, watching their fearful faces. She felt alert, neither calm nor afraid. Her eyes quickened to the flick of a rat, scurrying behind a barrel.

  I am where I belong. Assured of the grace of God, I will wait.

  Their hands were not gentle. They came upon them at the door of the tavern, six men carrying knob-tipped staves.

  “Be you Mary Dyer?”

  “She is not,” Hope Clifton cried out at the same instant that Mary said yes.

  The tavern’s sign swung, creaking.

  Wind, the smell of the sea.

  They turned her away from the other women, pushed her up the street.

  “I wish to say goodbye,” Mary said. She turned, but the man placed a hand on the side of her head, forced her forward. She watched the cobblestones as her feet came forward. Wave-rounded. From the sea, from the beach. She saw how each was divided, light on one side and on the other a caul of shadow.

  So fast, it happened. The morning after their arrival.

  On pain of death.

  Outside the jail, Mary turned her face to the sky, took her last breath of salty air.

  The jailor’s eye was swollen, suppurating. The constables handed him a mittimus and he read it, then squinted at Mary.

  “Ye come back, did ye. They telled you they’d have yer life. Your lookout’s but a poor one.” He seemed satisfied, as if seeing a wager won.

  She stumbled as one of the men yanked her closer to the jailor’s desk; she caught herself, straightened.

  “Please to bring me a candle and a tinder box,” she said. “And scorched linen. What you gave me in the summer would not catch.”

  No one deigned answer. They bent around the mittimus, watching the jailor’s laborious signature. His hands were stained with oak gall ink. The goose-feather quill bent in his fingers.

  “And a quill,” she continued. “And ink. And paper. I must write to my husband.”

  She observed the sunlight sprawled across the desk. It paled the wide boards of the table, the pages of a book, a pewter ladle. It sank into the fibre of a worn rug, caressed the jailor’s pitted skin. She followed the slant upwards to the window, whose wooden shutter was half-folded. Dust shone upon the glassblower’s ponty swirl.

  —

  The prison’s air bore the scent of damp, as in a root cellar. Only candlelight, now, flickered on the long, scrolled hinges and iron spikes that covered every door. The jailor put his key in a lock. The door creaked, opened upon darkness. Mary put up a forbidding arm.

  “Do not touch me. I will go forward. I will walk into the light of the Lord.”

  Reverend Symmes. Reverend Norton. Reverend Wilson. Governor Winthrop. Governor Endicott.

  Names tossed like wrecked boats.

  When she awoke in the darkness, her dreams faded like ink in water. She pulled them back into the light of consciousness, read them, listened to them, gazed at them. In the long, empty days—broken only by the exchange of food for chamber pot—she studied.

  Back, she went, walking the roadway the Lord had set her upon. She saw how it led, step by step, to this place.

  Here. In this place of glory.

  Some days, she prepared a room filled with light and then allowed William and the children to enter it. She took their hands as they stepped through the door.

  Why did you go to Boston? they asked.

  I came to be in the Lord’s house.

  What if you are put to death?

  I will come to this place of peace and light.

  Some days she became as analytical as her Uncle Colyn had taught her to be. She wondered if other Friends had heard of her incarceration. They would themselves come to Boston, then. Surely. And if the magistrates were to fulfill their threat and execute them? The Massachusetts Bay Colony’s new laws had no standing in the British courts. Perhaps there would be swift retribution from London. Possibly there would be an end to these heinous laws. Or the weight of the magistrates’ desperate measures would tilt, like a poorly built dung heap, and crush them.

  Morning paled the spaces between the window’s boards, making four threads in the darkness. She plucked a piece of straw from her mattress and worked it into a crack in the wall, counted the other straws with her fingertip. Ten.

  October 18th.

  When the door opened, she sensed a change. The jailor thrust it wider than usual and stood squarely in the middle with no bowl in his hands. His torch cast shadows like black tulips.

  “You’ll be coming out today. Going to court with them other two.”

  “What other two?”

  “Them as were here b
efore. Git up.”

  She waited with her hands folded so that her rising would be of her own volition.

  She followed him down the hall, down the stairs. The door opened to daylight so brilliant that she levelled hand over eyes, squinting. She was startled to see the same arrangement of things in the room, as if the change in her circumstances should be mirrored by the jailor’s office but was not—there, before her, was the same ink horn, pounce pot and quill stand, the same dusty mantelpiece over the same hearth, and the same small, smouldering fire, casting little heat.

  Another door opened. William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson stepped into the light, wrists shackled, chins lifted.

  Their faces registered alarm at the sight of her.

  I have changed? Thin?

  “Dearly beloved,” William Robinson said. His skin was translucent, his temples coiled with blue veins, the pouches under his eyes purple-black.

  “I have met with true peace,” Mary said. Her own voice made unaccustomed vibrations in her ears and she dropped it to a whisper. “And you, my friends?”

  “Also, he hath been with us,” Marmaduke said. His face was haggard. He closed his eyes as if to recall the strength sent to him in the cell—lost, it seemed, in the fearful glare of daylight. Mary remembered what he had told her, how he had been filled with the love and presence of the living God and had been told by a clear inner voice that he had been ordained a prophet.

  Constables crowded into the room and Mary found herself next to William Robinson as the prisoners were swept from the prison into the bright day. Word had preceded their passage and people were gathered on street corners or clustered behind windows. Mary saw a hand drawing a curtain, a woman’s eye, mouth, cap.

  “What hath been happening?” she murmured. Her breath came fast from the pace that was set. She staggered, her legs weak.

  “Marmaduke and I were in Salem, but we came to Boston as soon as we heard of thy plight. Eight other Friends came with us. All are imprisoned.”

  “What of Mary Scott and Hope Clifton?”

  “They, too, are being held in the jail.”

  “Nicholas Davis?”

  “He stays in Barnstable. He fears the bloody laws and will not return to Boston.”

  “Christopher Holder?”

  “Still in prison.”

  They reached the Town House. The constable herded them up the staircase, ushered them into the court. The room echoed with the scrape of chair legs, the din of voices as dozens of deputies took their seats.

  Mary sank onto a bench between the two young men. She glanced behind her. Lace collars, wool socks, boot buckles; the ugliness of the men’s faces with their rotting teeth and fleshy noses; resin-bleeding knots in the walls and the oily scent of grain coming from the storeroom on the floor below.

  William and Marmaduke refused to remove their hats. A constable snatched them from their heads, sailed them into a corner.

  Governor Endicott and the other magistrates took their seats at a table. Endicott’s goatish face, elongated by a narrow beard, was barren of expression save for disdainful eyebrows. Moisture glistened along the sagging lower lid of one eye.

  He laid a hand on his square collar.

  “Why did you come again into our jurisdiction, being banished upon pain of death?”

  “My coming was at the bidding of the Lord and in obedience to him,” Marmaduke answered. William answered the same.

  Mary heard her own voice next, so low that it caused an intensified hush.

  “I did come at the bidding of my Lord and in obedience to his command.”

  Endicott looked at a paper on the table before him. He pushed it with the tips of his fingers. He opened his mouth and then shut it. When finally he spoke, his voice had changed. It was faint and urgent.

  “We have tried and endeavoured by several ways to keep you from among us. And neither whipping, nor imprisoning, nor cutting off ears, nor banishing upon pain of death hath kept you away.”

  There was a silence into which came the distant creak of a swinging sign.

  “I do not desire the death of any of you.” His voice was barely audible.

  The room stirred as the deputies leaned forward. Marmaduke’s chest rose with a sudden breath. William’s hands clenched. Mary’s heart beat—thick, buttery.

  “Give ear,” Endicott said. Then he stopped. His words were almost a whisper. “Give ear and hearken now to your sentence of death.”

  William Robinson rose to his feet before the reverberation of the words had had their desired effect.

  “I desire to read a paper,” he said. His voice was firm, matter-of-fact. “’Tis a declaration of my call, wherein is declared the reason and causes of my staying in thy jurisdiction after banishment upon death.”

  He waved the document, which he had pulled from his sleeve.

  His words were to Endicott as a dash of water in the face.

  “You will not read it,” the governor snapped, his voice returning to his former strength. He stood, both hands on the table, eyes wide and wild. A flush burned his cheeks.

  “’Tis my right to read it before sentence of death be pronounced.”

  “You will not read it. It shall not be read!”

  William Robinson remained standing. “If I cannot read it, nor have it be read, then I shall leave it with thee.”

  He stepped forward. The constable started up, but William only tossed his document onto the table where it slid into the hands of one of the magistrates. Endicott sat, slowly, and reached for the papers with shaking hands. He glanced at one page. His mouth worked and then he stood again and pointed at Robinson. His words rapped, without pause or reflection.

  “William Robinson, hearken unto your sentence of death. You shall be had back from the place from whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, to be hanged on the gallows till you are dead.”

  Mary’s vision narrowed and was filled with Endicott’s face. She saw that his fear had been replaced with injudicious recklessness.

  The jailor came and took William from the room. The same sentence was passed on Marmaduke. Then he, too, was led away.

  She sat alone on the bench, facing Endicott—behind her, a roomful of silent men.

  Endicott looked at her and she saw that he was aware of her advanced age and the man to whom she was married and the circles in which he moved.

  “Mary Dyer,” he began. “Please to stand.”

  The rustle of her skirt and knock of her heels sounded as she stood.

  His voice quivered, then settled. “You shall go to the place whence you came, and from thence to the place of execution, and be hanged there until you are dead.”

  There was not a sound in the courtroom. She looked directly at the governor.

  “The will of the Lord be done,” she said.

  “Take her away, Marshal,” he said. Blood had drained from Endicott’s face. He was spent, beyond exasperation. He lifted his pen, looked blindly at his papers.

  The marshal came but she did not move. She stood straight-backed, facing the row of men.

  Look at me.

  Endicott raised his eyes. She stared at him, so fiercely focused that her gaze might slice his flesh, should she desire it. Her lips barely moved.

  “And joyfully I go.”

  The jailor lingered. He was enjoying the attention centred upon his prison and seemed more interested in Mary now that she was sentenced to death.

  He told her the news:

  Thomas Temple, governor of Acadia and Nova Scotia, had written to Governor Endicott. He had pleaded that the three Quakers be spared. He offered to pay for their passage out of Massachusetts. He promised to give them homes and land.

  Governor John Winthrop, Junior, of Connecticut, too, had written, asking for the prisoners.

  “He would crawl on his bare knees, he did say. He would crawl all the way from New Haven, if need be, to plead for your lives. What do you think of that?”

  All across N
ew England, the jailor said, they were being talked about. “Three Quakers, and one a woman. To be hanged in Boston. Big news.”

  He squinted at her in the candlelight.

  “They put twelve men on the night watch. They be marching round the jail. Just for you and them others …”

  “I thank thee,” Mary said, quietly, respecting every glimpse into the man’s humanity, even if she saw only pride, hate.

  Mary was given candles, paper, a board and writing materials.

  She was not told the date of the execution. Since her conviction, she had added five straws to the wall.

  Sunlight slanting through a barn door, warming the neck feathers of a rooster and the red-tasselled broom corn. Her mother’s needle, glinting silver, silken strands composing grasshoppers on satin. Candle-lanterns swinging from the hands of villagers, casting their patterned lights. The moors beneath a star-sprinkled sky.

  A blueberry pie cooling on the windowsill. The smell of lilies.

  The children’s skin with its flush of blood. Hunger, in their bellies, in their hearts.

  Life.

  Oh, life.

  She took up her pen but could not begin to write of the particulars of the world she must leave behind. She wept for the first and only time.

  October 1659

  My dear William,

  My children,

  The Lord has asked of me to come home to him and so I go. I beg that you hearken to your hearts therein to find him, for there, too, I shall be with you.

  George Fox hath said: “We are not against any man, but desire that the blessing of the Lord may come upon all men, and that which brings the curse may be destroyed; and in patience do we wait for that, and with spiritual weapons against it do we wrestle.”

  So do I go, as I am bidden. I commit my body and soul unto the Lord. Live in peace one with another and keep in the seed of God that you come to know the living truth in your hearts.

  Your loving wife and mother,

  Mary Dyer

  He came with a bowl of hotchpot and a chunk of salted cod. He grunted, placing them on the floor. The cell filled with the smell of hot vegetables: carrots, kale, turnip.