A Measure of Light (19 page)

“I come to bid you farewell,” Mary said. She clasped her hands to hide agitation. “We sail tomorrow.”

They walked to a bench overlooking the cove. Beneath the hard blue sky, shadows defined each house, shed and barn—adding stripes to clapboards, edging each bundle of thatch.

“Much hath changed in one year.” Anne spoke evenly, as if withholding different words.

Distance, Mary thought—fifteen miles—would preclude the small, necessary stitches to knit the torn edges of friendship.

“Despite this remove,” Mary began. She gazed southwards at the haze where land bled into sky. “Despite the differences between us, Anne, I wish you to know that you opened me to many things and that I am grateful. You did teach me that I might have my own thoughts, my own understanding, my own … communion.”

“With the Holy Spirit, do you mean?”

“Aye.”

Anne turned on the bench and took Mary by the elbows.

“Which I see you have lost.” She studied Mary, sternly, as if searching for unvoiced symptoms.

Mary smelled her odour of smoke and lavender; saw how her skin was dry, sunken in pockets, quilled with fine lines.

“If these are my last words to you, Mary Dyer, you must believe them to be true. You are a lily in the sight of God. You must pray, listen and wait.” Her words came weighted, now, as Mary had heard her speak to dying women. “The Holy Spirit will return to you.”

She put out her arms and Mary, yielding, leaned forward.

Heartbeat. And the body’s warmth.

Anne stood, brushed down her skirts. Mary took a breath. What words she would say, she did not know, only felt that such tangled threads as had wrapped them should not be so easily broken; and then Anne turned and walked back towards her daughters and the steaming linens.

THE GRAPES HUNG IN CLUSTERS
, dusted, translucent. Mary extracted one and laid it on her blue-stained palm, the pearly seeds just visible.

“Is it not beautiful?”

“’Tis beautiful to me that you say so, Mistress,” Sinnie said.

Faint, startling lines on Sinnie’s face. Twenty-five, she must be. Her freckles, larger, no longer like pepper.

Yet still so tidy, so tender
.

“I wonder if I will always be afraid during my pregnancies,” Mary murmured, so that the children would not hear.

With every stirring in her womb, she had imagined horns, talons. The fight to dispel such imaginings had had an effect opposite to its intention. “A perfect baby,” the midwife had said, handing over the new child; and Mary had begun to weep, and could neither hold nor behold the infant.

Her darkness remained for ten months.

William had grown frustrated.

“God hath blessed our enterprise,” he had said. He’d stood before her down-turned face, hectoring. Had he not sent them a perfect baby boy? Samuel had suffered no childhood illnesses. The land bore incomparable fruits, vegetables, grains and grasses. His various businesses prospered. These remonstrances had burst from him when he could no longer suffer her silence, her slow movements, or the days when she would not leave the house.

Forsaken, she thought, gazing at the grape. Abandoned by God.

She looked southwestward over the water, towards what she pictured as infinite forest, amidst which was Dutch territory—where Anne and her family had gone. Before leaving, she had written Mary to say that she had had a revelation from God to take her family—servants, children, even animals—away from the reach of
the cursed English
. “Winthrop doth write me,” Anne had written, “Telling me of his plans to annex Aquidneck: if he is successful, I am certain he will not tolerate me.”

Mary planned a letter to Anne in her mind.
I see in those around me that they are destined for paradise. I have felt that I was not so destined, nor ever would be, since it seemed that God had so removed himself from me that I was filled with darkness. And yet lately the light hath returned to the world, in my eyes, and I dare to hope that …
Yet she would not write the letter, for she did not know where, or by what means, to send it.

“William wants a large family,” she explained, seeing that Sinnie watched her. “To fill a big house.”

Samuel followed one-year-old William along the vine-laden fence. Jurden and other men had built it the summer of their arrival, when William had decided to settle on these eighty-seven rich acres a mile north of Newport’s harbour.

Nearby stood the new house with its massive stone chimney. Apple orchards and pastures filled with horses, cattle and sheep ran out into a broad point, surrounded by the waters of Narragansett Bay.

“William says he shall build a larger house out there,” Mary said, studying the point.

Sinnie, kneeling before her basket, followed Mary’s gaze.

“’Twill be a goodly place,” she said.

Samuel, eight years old, raised hands to just under Sinnie’s nose. He fanned them open and a cricket sprang into her face. Baby William, crawling in the summer-dried grass, paddled back at their laughter.
Samuel dropped onto hands and knees and he and the baby swarmed away into the meadow, seeking more crickets, other treasures. Sinnie reached up, snapped stems, set bunches of sweet-smelling grapes into her basket.

“I do think the next baby will be easier,” she said.

Mary looked at her.

She speaks with too much reassurance
.

Sinnie reddened. Neither spoke, conscious of the pause. Then Sinnie proffered her basket. “I think ’tis enough for our winter jam?”

Mary nodded. She acquiesced in this small matter, as in larger ones. Sinnie had begun to run the house, as Jurden, now married, ran the farm. William came home each night from his mounting civic and business duties, gathered the boys on his lap. He looked over their soft-haired heads at Mary, perplexed, as if she had ceased to speak or understand their common language.

Knocking. It was a rainy night in early October, and William set down his clay pipe, went to the door. Mary glimpsed a neighbour’s long, cautious face, heard a mutter pass between the men.

“…  from me, first … news …”

Rain streamed from his greatcoat and wide-brimmed hat. William bid him enter.

“What news?” Mary said, as the man sat. He did not answer at once but rummaged for his pipe.

“I thought to tell you before you should hear it from anyone else, wrongly told in its particulars. You know that Anne Hutchinson took family, goods and servants and went to the Dutch territory.”

“Aye, I did receive one letter from her.”

He sipped at the pipe, breathed out the pungent smoke.

“The governor of New Netherland ordered a massacre of the Siwanoy Indians. Eighty men, women and children were killed.”

Mary laid her hand flat against her chest.

“So the warriors set out for vengeance. A raiding party came to Anne’s home. We surmise she did not hide, as did her neighbours who told us the tale.”

“She is not Dutch,” William said. “She would not have felt culpable.”

“Indeed. Nor, knowing Anne Hutchinson, would she have had fear.”

The man glanced at Mary.

“The family was murdered. Cattle, hens, dogs … every living thing was put into the house and the house was burned to the ground.”

The moment froze, pipe smoke, the man’s red hands.

“I have heard reports of what they are saying in Boston,” he continued. “They say that the Indians of those parts have never committed the like outrage on any one family. They are saying that the Lord heard our groans to heaven—and so picked her and her family out to be an example of Indian cruelty. Above all others. They say ’twas her final punishment.”

William made an exclamation of disgust. He stood, thrust a log into the fire. Sparks showered upwards.

Mary stared at the man.

“That makes no sense. You do not think such?” she said.

“Nay, this is more of their …” Disgust, like William’s. And shock. He looked kindly at Mary. “I am sorry. I know you did love her.”

Her forehead was pressed against the cold windowpane.

… a warm day, crickets feasting on fallen apples. Her neighbours, warning her and her family to beware,
nonsense
, she would have retorted,
I have always had friendly relations with the natives on Aquidneck. Besides, we are not Dutch. The Lord will provide
. Men in animal skins. Stepping up the path.
Tie up your dogs
, they would
have said, and perhaps one of Anne’s boys—Francis? Zuriel?—did so. Did she die first? Was she spared the sight of her family being butchered? Or did she see them pile the bloody bodies on the Turkey rug that had travelled from Alford? Watch them smash the glass-windowed sideboard, hurl the Chinese vase into the fireplace? Lie bleeding, scalped, when the fire kindled and raced up her skirt? Did she watch a warrior grasp her son’s soft hair and slice a knife to …

William threw off the bedclothes. “Mary, Mary.”

He rose and went to her. She turned, let him gather her like a child. She wept, gasped.

“Oh, Anne. Oh, Anne.”

They stood holding each other, listening to the patter of rain.

THE DOOR STOOD OPEN
, framing a dirt path lined with marigolds. At its end was a granite hitching post; beyond, the patchwork of fields and pastures running down to the sea.

Sinnie set down a bowl of mashed turnips on the table between Mary and William. Steam spiralled, blue in the dusty September sunshine.

Littlemary, five, retched. She slipped from the bench at the children’s table and fell to her hands and knees, where she vomited violently. She took a breath and broke into a wail until choked by another paroxysm of retching.

The boys were on their feet.

“Samuel, ride for Dr. Clark,” William rapped. He lifted the little girl in his arms, carried her up the stairs.

Mary stood by the table, one hand clutching a napkin. The other hand fell slowly to her side.

“Sit,” she said to the boys—William, Maher and Henry. They returned to the long bench. Baby Charles sat in an arrow-back high chair. “Sinnie, will you see that the meal is served and eaten?”

Her heart raced.

Dr. Clark bade William tighten a tourniquet around Littlemary’s forearm. He was a tall, sunken-chested man, spectacles perched on the
bridge of his nose. The seams of his kersey doublet were filled with dust and crumbs.

“I am sorry,” Littlemary whispered to her father. “I could not stop it.”

She stiffened, fixed her eyes on the ceiling. The child had been taught to stifle complaints, protests, fears.

They heard the patter of blood in the bowl.

The physician straightened, wiped the lancet. “Good lass,” he said. “Now. Pain in the belly? Yes? Headache?”

To his questions, Littlemary whispered yes or no. Her eyes swivelled from the doctor to the ceiling.

“Now I will tell you how to treat this,” the physician said, turning to Mary. “You must—”

“Wait,” William said. He called down the stairs to Sinnie who was poised at the bottom, watching the boys while straining to hear the doctor’s words.

“Ah, my poor bairn!” Sinnie entered, quick and dry as a sparrow. She knelt by the bed, stroking Littlemary’s forehead.

When Sinnie’s indenture date had come and gone and still she was unmarried, William had declared that she need never leave their care. “As long as she wishes, I will pay her wages and provide for her.”

The doctor glanced between servant and mistress. He spoke to Mary, but his eyes returned to Sinnie.

“Have you a syringe? Yes? Good. Once a day, beet juice in each nostril.” He squeezed his fist before his nose. “I want you to take an egg, prick it with a large needle. Pour salt and rum into the hole. Bake it in the ashes. Give her that egg to eat when ’tis hard. Follow it with mint and fennel tea, steeped strong.”

“How much rum?” Sinnie asked.

The physician glanced at Mary. She saw that his respect was but a formality. She held out her hand, palm upward; fanned her fingers towards Sinnie.

“She hath a better mind for these things,” she said.