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“Confounde
them that apply
And seek to make my shame
And at my harme do laugh and crye
So So there goeth their game!’

Elizabeth could not resist turning in her pew to see how Mrs. Hutchinson took it. The lady, her dark eyes flashing, stood still and straight and, immediately raising her own voice, sang all the words of the psalm right back at the minister, who reddened with anger. By this time the whole colony knew that at her afternoon meetings Mrs. Hutchinson had called Mr. Wilson unsanctified, a benighted adherent to the Covenant of Works, like all the other ministers at the Bay except Mr. Cotton and her brother-in-law. But the battle had never come into the open like this and there was an irrepressible gasp when Mrs. Hutchinson, instead of seating herself for the sermon, walked majestically down the aisle, followed by her meek little husband and their older children. The street door shut behind them and Wilson, turning purple, clenched his fist on the Bible.

How brave Mrs. Hutchinson was! Elizabeth thought Fancy defying Mr. Wilson and Uncle John like that, and yet there was such dignity about her. She had an almost tangible magnetism and real beauty despite her iron-grey hair and plain, big-boned face; a shining secret look that made Elizabeth long to know her.

The ripple of excitement gradually died down. Mr. Wilson controlled himself and, having apparently decided to avoid further conflict, fashioned his two-hour sermon around some obscure test from Deuteronomy to which Elizabeth did not bother to listen. She clasped her cold, gloved hands tight in her muff and allowed her mind to wander. The women sat on the hard, unpainted benches to the left of the aisle, the men on the right, and all arranged according to rank. The Winthrop ladies shared the first pew, but the new young Governor Harry Vane held the corresponding seat of honour across the aisle-Elizabeth therefore had a good view of the handsome aristocrat. His blond hair fell to his shoulders over an elegant green mantle. He had extremely regular features and a full, sensuous mouth, slightly petulant A pretty boy, she thought, and not a very wise one. Winthrop, and indeed all the colony, had been immensely flattered last year at the arrival of this newly converted Puritan whose father, Sir Henry Vane, was actually Secretary of State to King Charles. They had fawned on the young man, despite tie fact that he set out at once to reform the colony, and had even taken Winthrop and Dudley to task publicly for their many disagreements. Then he had been elected Governor and horrified Winthrop, who had been elected Deputy, by siding with Anne Hutchinson, and passionately maintaining that he
did
have a personal union with the Holy Ghost and believed in the Covenant of Grace, In the ensuing fuss Vane tried to resign, and finally burst into tears before the whole court, They had persuaded him to remain until May, when his term was up, chiefly because Winthrop was afraid of what might be said in London if he went home like that. But Vane looked, Elizabeth thought, like an unhappy lad, and she knew that he and her uncle had ceased to speak to each other in private no matter their public courtesies.

How many mistakes in judgment Uncle John had made, Elizabeth thought, remembering how delighted he had been with Vane at first, and with Mrs. Hutchinson too! Or were they mistakes, exactly, since all his actions sprang from his consuming desire for the colony’s survival, and she had not forgotten the respect she had felt for his ideal on the day they had journeyed to Ipswich. If only he weren’t so deadly serious always. She glanced back to the. next pew behind Governor Vane.

John Winthrop sat there gravely listening to the sermon with his two eldest boys, Deane and Sammy were stuffed in the gallery with other lads where, if they misbehaved, the tithing man could bang them on the head with the knob of his tipstaff.

Jack was in Ipswich, but between Elizabeth and Margaret sat Jack’s new wife. “The intruder,” as Elizabeth always called her to herself, nor had she been able quite to conquer her shock and resentment when Jack returned from a long voyage to England, the year after Martha’s death, bringing with him a strapping fair-haired girl of nineteen called Elizabeth, who had been a Miss Reade of Wickford in Essex, and was stepdaughter to Salem’s vociferous new minister, Hugh Peter.

There had been a bitter scene with Jack on the October night of the reception in Boston for his new wife. The Feakes, of course, had been invited and Elizabeth had stood stiffly in a corner gazing at the “intruder” when Jack came up and, taking her hand, pulled her out the door into the chilly garden.

“Bess,” he said, smiling uneasily as she snatched her hand away. “You were staring at my wife as though she were an adder - don’t!”

Elizabeth backed against the house wall, and raised her chin. “You lost no time in replacing my poor Matt, did you, Jack?”

“Why - ” he said, still smiling into her angry eyes, “You couldn’t expect me to remain a widower? A man needs a wife and children.”

“Ah, to be sure,” she said grimly. “This one looks very healthy too, and I see she has already started breeding. She should suit you well.”

His smile faded, and he responded in a sharper tone. “Elizabeth suits me very well, and I marvel that you seem so shrewish.”

Her eyes blazed green, and she could not stop herself from crying, “And she
would
bear my own name, of course! Not even that is left to me for myself.”

It took Jack a moment to understand this speech, yet because of all that had been between them, and which could never entirely die, he finally did. He looked with attention at the flushed face, framed by dark curls, at the red, trembling mouth, and said quietly. “She cannot help her name, Bess. There is nothing taken from you, or Martha . . . but what must be ...” His voice trailed off.

There were leaves burning in the High Street side of the garden, near a clump of frost-bitten marigolds. The fragrant blue smoke drifted around them, and they both thought of a London garden where they had stood facing each other like this, nine years ago, before Jack had sailed for the Levant. Then they heard a babel of voices from inside the house, and the high-pitched assured laugh of Jack’s new wife.

“I’m off for Saybrook - ” he said abruptly, “for the Connecticut country - on the business My Lords Say and Brooke entrusted to me in London.”

“Ah . . .” she said with malice, “so even this fair, suitable young wife cannot keep you at her side. She will be desolate.”

This time he ignored her tone and looked deep into her eyes, seeing there the desolation she imputed to another, and said, “Bess, I wish to God you were happy - if ever I can - ” He dropped his voice and flushed, “You still have my glover”

“Aye - ” she said on a long breath, the jealous hurt dissolving a little. She slowly raised her face to his with an almost soundless murmur of longing, and in return he whispered something while he bent and kissed her on the mouth. A timeless instant that yet included time enough for the door to be flung open, and the other Elizabeth to step out and give a sharp cry “John!”

They sprang apart, and Elizabeth leaned against the house wall, trying to still the pounding of her heart, but Jack, from guilt and confusion, spoke in anger to his wife. “Well, what is it, that you gape like a hooked fish?”

“You were kissing her,” gasped the fair-haired girl, her handsome, rather bovine face turning pink.

“And if I was?” said Jack. “She is my sister, as you well know. And we had been speaking of Martha.”

His wife drew back. Into her calm blue eyes there came a glint, “You wish to pain me with mention of your first wife? To remind me of all your life in which I’ve had no share? I’d no notion you were so fond of this
‘sister’
!” Her large white hand pointed to Elizabeth, who had recovered, and was now wavering between pleasure at the intruder’s discomfiture and sympathy for Jack, who looked as miserable as did all men when caught between two women.

Elizabeth finally spoke quietly. “Cousin,” she said, “Jack and I have indeed known each other all our lives. We have the same Winthrop grandparents, he married my sister and I his brother; in view of this, I think you need hardly question our relationship.”

The other Elizabeth looked uncertain while she considered this slowly. She had a well-bred, usually complacent nature unsuited for delving into motive. In England she had loved long walks and hunting and dog-breeding, and she loved her husband in the same forthright way. She was willing to be reassured, especially as Jack took her hand and said, “You see, my dear, you are making a pother about naught. Come, we must go in to our guests.”

However, since that time there had been constraint between the two Elizabeths, who seldom saw each other, since the younger Winthrops had their own house in Boston, and now in the meetinghouse, as Mr. Wilson droned on and turned his hourglass yet again, the two women sat far apart, so that their fur-lined capes did not even touch.

It had started to snow outside and it turned bitter cold in the meetinghouse. Margaret had a charcoal foot-warmer but the other women had not. Elizabeth managed to tuck her feet up under her long concealing skirts, while watching her breath float out in vapour. There had been a moment of diversion when Mrs. William Coddington, a buxom matron, fell asleep in the corner of her pew, and the watchful tithing man came down the aisle and tickled her awake with the foxtails on his staff. Mrs. Coddington sneezed violently, and Elizabeth would have giggled as hard as the boys in the gallery had she dared. She did steal a look back at the lady’s husband, Elizabeth’s erstwhile suitor, who was now the Colony Treasurer, She saw Coddington send his wife an outraged glare and amused herself for some minutes by remembering the night at Groton when she had so thoroughly disenchanted him. Thank God at least for that, she thought. What a husband
he
would have been - and wondered what Robert was doing in Dedham, poor soul. An uncomfortable recognition came to her that some such faintly contemptuous pity always accompanied thoughts of Robert, and she sighed, easing her cramped legs into a new position.

She was stupefied when the service finally ended at noon and, convinced that she could not possibly endure the next one, and yet she was ashamed of her weakness. The rest of the congregation obviously derived enjoyment from sermons and prayers that she never did; even Margaret had been interested in some of Mr. Wilson’s points and discussed them at the exceedingly scanty dinner, where nobody mentioned Mrs. Hutchinson’s behaviour. Elizabeth, eating boiled salt cod in silence, suddenly felt a surge of loneliness and exile. These aren’t really my people, she thought - I don’t belong to them - even Margaret. At twenty-seven Elizabeth was too old for indulgence in the changeling fancy which came to many children, and yet, on that dreary January day, she first consciously felt herself an alien to the thoughts and wishes of all her family, and saw no means of breaking through the suffocating grey veil into any brightness where she might feel at home.

It was in a rare mood of bleak depression that she trailed through the snow with the rest of them to the afternoon service, which was, however, sufficiently lively to startle her out of introspection.

Mr. Cotton, Boston’s “Teacher” and co-minister, was now in the pulpit, while his colleague, Wilson, sat in a chair behind the Communion table, chewing his lips and glowering at Mrs. Hutchinson’s pew, where she had arrived early and was now reinforced by her brother-in-law, Wheelwright, who had ridden over from his own little parish at Mount Wollaston. In view of the snowstorm, Wheelwright’s presence here was startling. John Winthrop and Mr. Wilson exchanged a foreboding glance, while Margaret whispered to Elizabeth, “Oh dear, I feel there’s going to be some sort of trouble.”

Jack’s wife had not come to the afternoon service, having sent a message that she had been seized with a sudden chill. And whether it were really a chill, or avoidance of herself, Elizabeth cared not at all, buoyed up like the rest of the congregation by cross currents of tension and expectancy. She found herself really listening to Mr. Cotton.

Even Elizabeth, who understood little of the controversy, knew that Cotton had jumped into the middle of the fray when he announced his text as verses from the forty-eighth chapter of Isaiah, which declaimed the intent of prophecy and was obviously aimed at convincing Mrs. Hutchinson’s enemies. The cherubic face, crowned with fluffy white hair, was illumined, the organ-toned voice, which had so moved the citizens of old Boston, had lost none of its power as he cried out to them, “I have shewed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them!”

Before he had spoken many words, Elizabeth heard a stir in the pew behind her and Mrs. Hutchinson’s unmistakably exultant voice, “Aye, Aye,
he
is sealed with Grace, Mr. Cotton is of God’s elect, the spirit hath told me so.”

It was a powerful sermon, clothed in poetic language, nor was it inflammatory, since Cotton, using all the force of his golden persuasiveness, endeavoured, while expounding the Doctrine of Grace, to spare the feelings of those ministers who still adhered to the plodding, uninspired Doctrine of Works. But his opponents were not appeased. Wilson’s foot soon began to tap on the floorboards, his jowls quivered with indignation as he saw his brilliant colleague sway the meeting as he himself never could.

John Winthrop listened in gloomy quiet. That female has bewitched Cotton, he thought, That virago, that false unwomanly prophetess who had set herself up as judge of salvation and its secrets. He saw that the young Governor’s face was afire with excitement, and that Vane even forgot all decorum by turning and sharing with Mrs. Hutchinson looks of triumphant delight. And why is Wheelwright here? Winthrop thought. What are they plotting? What new threat is this to our unity? Surely they don’t hope to oust Wilson from his own church and undermine all the other ministers! His worst suspicions were soon confirmed.

Cotton finished his sermon, then, instead of lining out the final psalm for them, he held up his hand, and, smiling somewhat anxiously in Winthrop’s direction, said, “Mr. Wheelwright, our reverend brother from Mount Wollaston, is here today. And I have invited him to exercise for you, so you may better understand these matters.”