A Measure of Light Read online

  I have begun attending the meetings of Anne Hutchinson. She hath re-ignited the light of Christ within me that shone so bright when first I desired to follow the Puritans. Verily I feel a joy to light the darkness that fell upon me at the loss of my dear brother and my first babe. Too, she hath bid me come and learn some of her skills, so that I may help …

  Mary turned onto Corn Hill Road. She saw other women, veiled by slanting snow, walking singly or in twos. Cowled against the winter wind, they clutched Bibles—capes swirled, skirts kicked by leather boots, the white coifs upon their heads like so many pinpoints of brilliance.

  The Hutchinson parlour was warmed by a fire on the hearth. The room smelled of feverfew, lemon balm, tansy, hung to dry on hooks. Anne sat at a table; behind her, a window framed the frozen marsh. Her eyes travelled the group, the muscles at the corners of her mouth cording as she listened to questions. Her voice thickened, infused with conviction.

  “The Holy Spirit dwells within each of us. We are as we are born, and within ourselves we may apprehend him. We do not need the intervention of ministers,” she told them.

  The meeting lasted until the sky had darkened. Leaving Anne’s house, Mary strode fast, one hand gathering her hood, the other holding a lantern. Dusk wove between the houses, a charcoal density gathering into oblivion roofs, chimneys, upper storeys. Her mind filled with Anne’s face, like a canvas stretched tight, corner to corner, beyond which she could see light and warmth.

  She cut down an alley. A dim glow of candlelight came from a window, spinning with flakes. She passed a wall, sheltering a midden; heard the sound of pigs—a scuffle, the sound of open-mouthed chewing. Then—silence. A low, evolving growl, joined by a second.

  Not pigs.

  She quickened her steps, pulled her hood forward, torn by instincts both to run and to freeze. She stopped, turned. Held up her lantern. A broken place in the wall. A snout. She saw the glint of teeth, heard a snarl. A wolf leapt through.

  Has not seen me.

  A second followed, smaller. She could see grey fur in the candlelight. The animals touched snouts. Then the larger one looked in her direction.

  Samuel, William, Sinnie, Urith. God, God, please, O Lord. Her own heart, present in a wild pounding. She pressed fist to chest. Where they would land first, the paws. Then teeth to throat.

  I will not die here. I will not.

  “Get away!” she screamed. “Get away from me!”

  She stepped forward, waving her arms. “BEGONE!”

  For an instant they hesitated—and in the next moment, they streaked down the alley, vanished.

  A door opened, a man stood silhouetted against the light.

  “Who is there?”

  Mary ran forward.

  “What …” he began.

  “Wolves,” she panted. “In your midden …”

  He stepped back, pulling her beside him. Crashed the door shut. She collapsed on a chair in the cidery warmth. A woman and two children rose from the table. Mary could not bring herself to say where she had been, or why she had been walking alone at such an hour.

  Anne’s ideas were openly discussed—at the barber shop, on the Charleston ferry, around tavern tables. Men, now, came to her meeting. So many people crowded her parlour—sixty, then seventy, then eighty—that she added a second.

  “Who attends?” William asked Mary, in February. They sat at the trestle table, leaning close, speaking in low voices since Jurden was perched on the settle, elbows on knees in stoic contemplation of the fire, clay pipe in hand. In these coldest months, he no longer slept beneath English wool and deerskin in the back shed, but waited for them to go to their bedchamber so he could spread his pallet on the floor. Sinnie had whispered her Norn prayer to the baby and slipped up the ladder to the icy attic.

  “Sir Henry Vane,” Mary whispered. “Anne’s William, of course. John Coggeshall, William Coddington.” These latter three were the colony’s most prosperous merchants.

  William took up his smoking-tongs, pressed tobacco into the bowl of a white clay pipe. His lips made soft poppings as he sipped at the stem. He looked across into the fire and she saw that he probed a new idea.

  “I have noticed a change in you,” he said.

  He handed the pipe to Mary, who filled her mouth with the sweet smoke. She blew it out through pursed lips and smiled at him. “I have noticed a change in you, as well.”

  “What are you thinking? About …” He made a surreptitious motion with his fingers, indicating their circumstances.

  “I find myself questioning,” she murmured. “I am not certain about many things.”

  William’s eyes narrowed against the spiralling smoke.

  “I will come to her meetings,” he said.

  She handed the pipe back across the table. He caressed her wrist with the tips of his fingers.

  “Good,” she whispered, glancing at Jurden. She pressed her own fingers against her lips, smiling, and blew the kiss towards William, like seed from a dandelion.

  —

  In early winter, the Massachusetts Bay Colony sent militia up the coast to Salem in order to seize Roger Williams, for he had not left the colony, as he had been ordered, nor would recant his strewn, profligate words, nor would be silent.

  The captain and his men pounded on the door of Roger Williams’s house. It was opened by his wife, who stood holding a newborn baby.

  “My husband hath been gone these three days,” she said.

  She did not know where he was.

  The pinnace sailed back to Boston carrying the news that the young minister had vanished into the wilderness.

  Sinnie, in her bedchamber, stood on tiptoe to reach down a bunch of savory.

  ’Tis not as they hoped. They wished for freedom but perhaps ’tis not so different here after all.

  They had told her that they wished to go to the New World because their ministers were being tortured, forced to flee, or thrown into the Tower.

  They be scunnered. She wanted Mary and William to be as happy as they had been in London, when she had first come to work for them and they had gone out, of an evening, hand in hand.

  She listened to their quiet talk below, the floor cracks so wide she could see their heads. They talked of things that would have them terribly punished should anyone hear—how the ministers were wrong in their thinking, and terrified the children, and were cruel, and told the magistrates how to rule.

  Sinnie could not understand it, for all that was said in the sermons and lectures was as a language utterly incomprehensible and she longed only for them to be over so she could return to eggs, in a bowl, for flour and her small, quick hands, and the sourdough, and the crust, butter-browned, and the joy of watching their faces.

  She glanced at her pallet, considering how sleep came to her easily, for she loved the moment of waking to a life whose tasks were as gifts, whose people were her own.

  Crumbs of dried herbs sprinkled down, smelling of summer. Sprigs in hand, she knelt to slip backwards through the trapdoor, one foot on the first rung, thinking of the garret in London where she had dreaded the Earl’s nightly visits and how she had splayed herself against a window to glimpse the birds flying northwards.

  Oh, I be so lucky. I do wish they could know of it. She thought of her good parents and her brothers and sisters. How she could stand in the doorway of this little house and watch the birds spilling past and have no envy of them.

  At Anne’s next meeting, Mary sat on a bench beside the fire. Other women perched on low stools or curled on the floor. William and the men stood against the walls, snow-melt dripping from beards and hat brims.

  Anne took a sip of cider and passed the cup to a long-haired young man, Sir Henry Vane, who sat beside her at the table.

  Sir Henry’s father is privy councillor, Mary thought, advisor, and comptroller of the king’s household. The young man had refused to crop his blonde curls nor would give up his lace cuffs, although he was so ardent a Puritan that he had convinced his f
ather to send him to New England. There was much that Anne told Mary in confidence. How it was the young aristocrat’s presence that had attracted men to her meetings. How Henry Vane planned to run for governor in the spring elections; and if he won, Anne and her followers—so numerous that those opposed to her ideas had coined a phrase, calling them “Hutchinsonians”—would rule the colony.

  Mary folded her hands. They were red from a morning spent washing the hemmed rags she tied around Samuel’s bottom—first, walking through the snow to the spring, returning with icy fingers and wet cuffs, buckets swinging and sloshing from a neck yoke. Then: the soaked clouts, the filthed water, wringing, rinsing, hanging the cloths on a wooden rack. As Anne began to speak, Mary closed her eyes and drew a deep calming breath.

  “I do not agree with his interpretation of Jeremiah, verses 23 through 33,” Anne resumed, arguing her own understanding of the Scriptures, probing the meanings laid upon them by Reverend Wilson. She sliced the air with her hand, pointing, thumb raised.

  In time, she closed the Bible; her discourse veered from the sermon.

  “The ministers substitute outward form for inward faith. They call themselves ‘Visible Saints’ and believe themselves sanctified by evidence of their good works. They believe, like Abraham, that obedience not only of oneself but enforced upon others is proof of election. And thus of salvation.”

  The room stilled with the effort of attention, hand-smoothed coifs and men’s hats motionless within the winter light. A fly’s frenzy grew loud against the windowpane.

  This is the crux of the issue that divides Anne Hutchinson from the Bay clergy.

  “This substitution of form for faith and its imposition upon others is the very reason we left England.”

  A murmur, a growl.

  Yes, Mary thought. ’Tis so clear.

  “Our salvation will come neither from obedience nor ritual but from the intuition of grace. Consider the Apostle Paul, Ephesians 2:8–9; ‘For by grace are ye saved, through faith …’ and ‘… not by works, lest any man should boast.’ ”

  Anne paused, watching the fly’s random attack upon the glass. She took breath, resumed.

  “As I do understand it, laws, commands, rules and edicts are for those who have not the light which makes plain the pathway. He who has God’s grace in his heart cannot go astray.”

  The room filled with voices.

  No need of ministers. As people stood to voice their opinions, Anne sat quietly, watching the uproar, hands flat upon her Bible, an oat straw to mark her page standing upright between two fingers. And Mary saw how Anne Hutchinson caused, controlled, even manipulated the consternation—then evaluated the results keenly, the same way she peered at blood-soaked flesh and the eyes of the dying.

  It was dark when they stepped out into the street. The light of William’s candle lantern was serrated with driving snow, like finely drawn chalk lines. The governor’s house stood directly across from the Hutchinsons’ and as they passed beneath its windows she saw Governor Winthrop peering out, hand on drawn curtain, head turned to look down the street. Half-lit, his pointed beard was etched against the room’s soft glow. She could not see the expression on his face.

  The mother had been labouring for twenty hours and still the baby would not come. The room was close with hips, linens, skirts. Women bent over the fire, frying Johnny-cakes, heating water, ladling cider into mugs. Others sat on a bench beneath the window, whispering, giddy with fatigue; they laughed or uttered little shrieks, hands clapped to mouths.

  Mary pressed a cup beneath the nipple of a nursing mother.

  “Comes hard at first,” the woman breathed, scissoring fingers down her breast. Mary felt a milky mist on her face, watched the level rise. She went to the bed, drew open the curtains. Anne stood at the bedside, her face masked with visualization as she reached beneath the woman’s shift.

  “Drink,” Mary said, holding the milk to the woman’s panting mouth. “’twill help.” She spoke as if it were an ordinary day and an ordinary cup of milk, not one to accelerate a labour that had gone on far too long.

  A scream came that blossomed, passed beyond agony. Gut, blood, a choke.

  “’Tis turned,” Anne exclaimed. “I have turned the baby! Come, now, come, Mary. Bring me more grease.”

  The baby slipped into Anne’s hands. She cut the cord, wrapped the stump with a belly band and handed the tiny girl to Mary, who lowered the child into a basin of warm wine. A chorus of relieved voices rose; the women came forward to see the infant.

  “Ellen? Ellen! Ah, no.” Anne’s voice. Sudden, furious. “I cannot feel the heartbeat.” She pressed her ear to the woman’s breast. “No,” she panted. “No, no, no.”

  She palmed her hands and looked fiercely towards the rafters. “Lord, in thy steadfast love, in thy wisdom and grace, spare this servant …”

  The women joined in prayer, kneeling, crying out. Their cries died away and they prayed silently, hearing, as if for the first time, the blizzard that seized the house, lashing snow in dry specklings against the paper panes, causing the door to rattle on its hinges.

  A long, harsh breath came from the bed.

  They laid food on the trestle table—Johnny-cakes and the special “groaning” beer prepared for childbirth. They ate by the light of candlewood, a smoky, pitchy flicker; and a candle, guttering on the table. The wind blew like an injured and self-communing beast.

  “I wonder,” a woman said. She laughed, but glanced and lowered her voice. “How the Lord could have heard over that racket.”

  Anne set down her mug. Mary saw how fatigue dragged at her cheeks and the corners of her mouth.

  “Ah, but he did,” she said. She drew a long breath that lifted her striped, blood-stained stomacher.

  Mary heard Anne’s next words in her own mind before Anne spoke them.

  “God hears those he loves …”

  Occasionally, on winter afternoons, Mary visited the Hutchinsons’ home. They sat in Anne’s parlour, close to the fire, and talked of the books they had read—discussed the women in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, especially sixteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for nine days, held in the Tower and beheaded.

  “Which languages did she speak?” Mary asked, wanting to confirm her memory. She held wool-gauntleted hands to the flames.

  “Latin,” Anne said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Greek, Spanish, Italian and French. She did believe in justification by faith. She argued with the men, she had no fear.”

  Mary had been studying the Book of Esther. She imagined the young Jewish woman—perhaps her own age, married to a king who was unaware of her religion—being asked to intercede with him to save her people from slaughter. She opened her Bible, found the passage and read aloud. Finishing, she closed the book, slowly, and gazed into the fire. She felt yearning, a sense of her life stretching before her. Anne, too, was silent.

  “The young queen was so brave,” Mary offered. “So selfless.”

  Anne took up the tongs and poked at the logs. “What did you think of my last discourse?”

  Mary did not answer the question, forgetting it in the light of the larger question that framed it.

  “Do you believe yourself to be in danger?” Mary asked.

  Anne bunched her shawl close across her chest, inching her chair back from the revived fire.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “Perhaps. Yet if so, ’tis not me alone. ’Tis half of Boston and some of the outlying places as well, where people think as I do.”

  “So many,” Mary said. “You have such influence. Surely they will stop you.”

  Anne glanced at Mary. “Do not tempt me with pride. ’Tis not only me, Mary. ’Tis Reverend Cotton, as well, who shares my views, although he keeps them close; and Henry Vane, and other men, too, who have their own reasons for distaste of those who would make the laws without consent and flay the backs of those they call sinners. Do you know, the children wake at night? They scream in terror after some of Reverend Wilson
’s sermons.” She imitated the minister’s nasal intonements. “ ‘These are the sins that terribly provoke the wrath of Almighty God against thee …’ I tell the children to attend only to the Holy Spirit within themselves, but ’tis a mishmash for them, I fear.”

  She paused, considering.

  “I wish only to awaken people’s hearts to the search for grace within themselves, so to maintain the living spirit of our religion. I will argue as does Mr. Cotton, from the truth as given in the Scriptures. For what else did we cross an entire ocean?”

  “Yes,” Mary said. Still she felt like an acolyte, unsure. “I do agree with you.”

  Anne slid her eyes at Mary, smiled, slightly.

  “Then you, too, may be in danger.”

  SIX

  Whangs and Other Happenings— 1636

  MARY RAISED HER FACE TO enjoy the warmth of the sun on her face. She looked out over the bay. Sails came into view, passing the outer islands.

  “Sinnie,” she cried, rising to her feet. They were kneeling by the front door, sorting beet root. Samuel napped on a bed of wildcat pelts. “The ships! The ships have come!”

  The scratch on the windowsill had darkened. Masts and spars rose over the low ridge that rimmed the harbour. By early afternoon, fifteen ships lay at anchor.

  Anne Hutchinson’s twelve-year-old daughter arrived with a message.

  “Mother sends this,” the girl said, handing Mary a cloth bag. “’Tis tea brought from London by the Wheelwrights. She bids you come for supper to make their acquaintance.”

  “Who are they?”

  “My uncle, John Wheelwright. He is a minister, married to my father’s sister. They have five children. And with them …” her voice caught, “… is my grandmother!”

  “Joy for you, indeed,” Mary said, infected by the spring light and the girl’s excitement. “Surely we will come!”