THEY NAMED HIM SAMUEL.
Two weeks after his birth, a blizzard swept down from the northeast. Fires roared on both hearths, snowflakes were dashed down the flue and hissed in the flames. Mary lay with her back to William; he pulled her close for warmth. She reached a hand into the icy darkness, rocked the high-sided cradle.
William slept deeply, exhausted. The men had begun to build a fort on the point. Every man must work for two weeks—William having closed his shop in the market during the time—for the ministers told them that if they worked as one to obey God, then God would give them prosperity. From sunrise to dusk, he spent the days in a saw pit, or wielding a draw shave, or driving tenon into mortise. He had been made clerk of the enterprise.
The wind retreated, muttered, rose again in hollow whistles.
Along the coast, adrift in the darkness of winter, were other settlements—Salem, Plymouth, Providence. Mary wondered if other English people lay in their beds listening to the storm. If they, like her, felt an occasional, appalled sense of regret at what they had done.
… they will not adventure much, they will not sell all, part with all, they will not loose their Hold …
She reminded herself of John Everard’s sermon that had set her upon her path. Of why they had come. Vanity, excess, the sullied church.
Against the paper window, snow made a crackling spit, like blown sand.
In the austerity of conviction, finally, she slept.
The next morning, they woke to knee-deep snow. Mary stood in the door lifting the baby’s hand to wave goodbye to William. The thatched-roofed houses on the hillside above the marsh seemed to her like boulders, grey humps amidst the cresting drifts.
Snow whirled into their faces and Samuel began to cry.
“Hush, my love.”
She lowered him into the cradle, tucked the quilt close. The ministers on Truelove had lectured that women must produce children continuously in order to populate the New Jerusalem.
She and Sinnie stood gazing down at the baby, whose eyelids thickened as he drifted into sleep.
“Mr. Cotton says that babies are born sprawling in wickedness.” Mary spoke as if to herself. “He says they must be led from the evil to which they are naturally prone. He says we must keep them at a distance, nor show too great an affection lest they cease to revere us as they must.”
She did not say that she harboured a secret sin, fearing she obeyed Mr. Cotton’s second edict by nature rather than by design, for she found herself shielding her heart against its breaking. Every day she woke expecting that Samuel would have died in his sleep; or would be infected with some deadly sickness; or would be killed in an accident by day’s end.
“Ah, Mistress. I can see no more wickedness in that child’s eyes than I see in a kitten’s.”
Sinnie dropped to her knees by the cradle, ran the back of her finger over the baby’s cheek. She loved to rock him to sleep, whispering of her rocky island, of Finnigirt Dyke, of wild birds’ eggs and sheep dogs. Now, beneath her breath, as if to nullify Mr. Cotton’s nonsense, she recited the Lord’s Prayer in Norn—“Fy vor or er I Chimeri, Halaght vara nam dit …”
Mary listened, transfixed by the soft rush of words. When the prayer ended, she took a deep breath. “Well, Sinnie. Let’s begin.”
She watched from the doorstep as Sinnie, bundled in cloak and scarves, trudged away through the snow, buckets swinging from a yoke. On the air, glittering with icy flakes, came the bawling of cows, shouts from the fort. She went back inside, set salt cod to soak, scooped hominy from a basket. The morning’s milk steamed—Jurden had set it by the shed door. She heard the chock-chunk of his axe, splitting wood. She paused to consider that everywhere her eyes landed she saw only further work. William’s wadmore stockings, their heels worn thin. The lye pot, needing to be emptied. The corn, coming to a boil. Even as she thought this, Samuel’s mouth opened in a wet shuddering wail.
At sunset, Mary sat in a low chair by the fire holding the baby to her breast. The room was close from smoke blown back down the flue; messy with wet clothing, sewing baskets, cornmeal spilled on the poplar-wood table. Along the crack under the door, snow lay in a white curve.
William’s lantern came swinging through the blue dusk. He entered through the front door, carrying a chunk of knotty pitch pine—candlewood, it was called, since light was cast by burning its resinous splints. A dead duck was flung over one shoulder and his greatcoat was sprinkled with sawdust. He dropped wood and duck on the hearth by her chair. She smiled up at him and felt her mood lift as the oppressive sense of unfinished work was leavened by his presence.
They sat together at the trestle table—William, Mary, Jurden and Sinnie.
Jurden was courting a young woman he had met on the ship. Even so, Sinnie would not raise her eyes to his, kept her elbows pinned to her sides.
William read the prayer and they lifted their spoons.
“Your hand, Miss,” Jurden exclaimed, surprised; then he gentled his tone. “What did happen?”
“A burn,” Sinnie murmured to her bowl. “I did touch my hand to the brick.”
“Sliding this good cornbread from the oven,” Mary said. She looked at the two young people, saddened by the formality Sinnie’s fear imposed. “You must put more grease on it tonight.”
The wind moaned and the clavicle of snow by the doorsill changed shape.
“Roger Williams will not keep quiet,” William remarked. “They may send him back to England sooner than spring.”
“Who is Roger Williams?”
“A young English minister. A man of strong opinions. He hath been preaching of soul liberty.”
Steam from the succotash swirled in the candlelight. Mary repeated the words, to feel them in her mouth.
“ ‘Soul liberty.’ What does he mean by it?”
“He feels that every man must form his own opinion on the subject of religion. He hath cried foul to the magistrates for enforcing belief. But that is not the worst of it.”
Soul liberty.
“He hath defamed their authority. He says they should not have taken land from the Indians. They say he is entertaining company in his house at Salem and preaching of this.”
Their spoons scraped, clattered.
You arrive at a place you have long imagined. And once there, again you look outwards.
Until William was made a freeman by the General Court, he could not vote or buy land. So he must wait, work, keep his counsel. He did not speak about the ministers, the harsh laws.
There is much that I, too, ponder and dare not speak of.
Her breasts were swollen, hot. She saw the drying mush on the wooden trenchers.
Floors to sweep, bowls to scour, the baby to feed.
Her hands ached, her hips and back and legs felt heavy, her eyes were dry. She was so tired as not to be sleepy.
As she poured hot water into the washing-up bucket, William leaned on his elbows, staring into the fire.
Parts of him have vanished, others have grown.
Samuel woke, hungry, and Sinnie was at the cradle, swift as a swallow, soothing the child with Norn words. She handed him to Mary, who tucked herself onto a rush-seated chair and unbuttoned her tunic. The baby’s lips found the nipple, began their powerful suck. Mary felt William’s gaze and raised her eyes to his.
Undue attachment—not only of parent to child, but of husband to wife—must be guarded against.
Lest ye place the creature before the creator.
This William did not obey. Ambition and worry, like a cloud of sediment, slowly cleared as his eyes rested on her. Were Sinnie and Jurden not in the room, Mary saw, he would come to her, kneel, take her face in his hands. A soft kiss, not to disturb the baby.
“My love,” he would say.
Mary wrote to Aunt Urith. The letter would not be sent until the next ship came into harbour and so she kept the paper in a cupboard drawer, taking it out after the day’s work was done. It became grease-spattered, redolent of cinnamon and the drawer’s pine boards.
My beloved Aunt Urith,
I take up my pen in a place so dissimilar from your abode that words do fail me to put it to a description save to say that I have heard the howling of wolves only dimmed by an augmentation of the ever-present and lamenting wind. Baby Samuel groweth fair and lusty and as for William, the Queen whose gloves he once chose would now quail before him, so rugged and rough-skinned hath he become.
She paused. That morning she had passed the whipping post. Blood and the knotted rope seemed a transference, so quickly did the red beads leap from the flesh of the man bound to it. He screamed as the whip fell. Four hours later when she went to Anne Hutchinson’s house, she had seen him again, slumped in the stocks. Dark fluids oozed from the wounds upon his naked back.
No. She would not write of it.
I am oft worried at myself, for I find my heart closing against this child. I fear losing him, as I lost the first—and so I dare not love. Dost thou have knowledge of this in others, my aunt? God spared thee from childbirth for your skills in such matters. Sinnie is like a mother to my babe and for this I am grateful to the good providence of God. Her heart yearns for children, yet I doubt she will ever have them, so feared is she of men. The good God hath surely sent her to me, for she is a treasure beyond compare, and thanks to her ministerings, Samuel is full-cheeked, perfect in form, and blesseth us with his childish pratings.
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 father 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.”