In the afternoons, William often read Scripture. He liked to convene with God before taking his daily walk around the colony, then getting back to his labor.
Instead, on the day of the newcomers’ arrival, I found him at his desk writing. A letter, it could have been, but I sensed something else. He stopped with haste at the sound of me kicking the dirt off my boots. He put the quill back as if he had done something wrong, or I had. That he had been immersed and inured to sound. He closed the pages of a book.
Good Husband, I asked. What mischief are you inviting?
He turned, but not with the kindness I knew him to have. Rather, with agitation.
’Tis nothing.
He got up and took his cup out to the front of the house, where I had set up the pails for washing. So many dishes to clean before the newcomers arrived and so many to wash a second time that evening whence they finished. They said fifty were coming, mostly from Leiden, but always the investors seemed to sneak a few in from London, and those few grew our profane lot. Some brought their own bowl and cup, but many owned not even that. I had learned to be prepared for the people who took more than their share of pie and did not offer to help with the dishes. Whatever my husband was writing, I suspected it was intended to uproot the problem colonists.
He came back in, said, Mind me, Good Wife, and dashed his eyes in the direction of his desk.
I’ll be at the water, he said, and shut the door.
Joseph was hungry. I lifted the oiled cloth so I could watch the sky as I nursed. William was going toward the shore. I settled Mercy with a slice of bread and a bucket of blocks and went to the rocking chair. So close to the desk. The book William was writing in, I could see, was beneath pamphlets and maps. It was an untidy desk, whereas when it had been Dorothy’s father’s desk, its surface had gleamed and was nearly empty. More for decoration than use.
In the drawing room, we girls once pulled out the drawers when her father was at the market, or away, anyway, anywhere but near the house. Inside was snuff, letters with red wax seals, and a secret stash of tea. That combination of scents was stirring, and I hadn’t thought to smell it again here in Plymouth. I leaned forward, my left arm cradling Joseph, my right arm long enough to reach the drawer. I pulled it open, inhaled. Still there, that smell, and I was back in the drawing room, back with Dorothy telling me about Johannes. The pink ribbon her mother braided her hair with was highlighting the natural flush of her cheeks, and I begged her to tell me more and more, though she promised it was only one kiss, only that once.
He was Dutch. He wanted to be a painter. She met him at the market. She told her father he was tutoring her in Latin. She liked to press her head against his chest, to sneak his smell in alleyways and shaded corners of the house.
As Dorothy spoke, she pinched some tea from her father’s drawer for us to share.
She said her father would forbid the union. I asked why, naive as I was then about loyalties and lineage.
He’s Dutch, she said, losing patience.
Girls! her father called. He was coming down the hall, closer.
Is my desire delusional or is it good? she whispered.
I told her I did not know.
Johannes was the man Dorothy would have married, I believe, had her parents not forbidden it.
At the doorway her father said, William Bradford is coming to dinner.
Run along, now, Alice, he said to me.
And to Dorothy: Tell Mother to take in her finest dress.
Dorothy had flints of gold in her eyes. It was as if a breeze had blown in through an open window and thrust her life into new relief.
Though older, I was the girl to run along and Dorothy was the woman.
At that time, what we knew of William was what was whispered at church. He was a new arrival from England and had traveled to Holland alone. He had full brown waves of hair and one of the most alluring conversion stories.
He had nearly died after both his parents and sister died, too, and in a fever state he had a vision: that God had higher plans for him. William fell ill for weeks, then months, and was punished with the pleasure of reading books in bed rather than work in the field. One day he awoke with energy as he had not had since his mother was alive. A voice whispered to him, Scrooby. He walked at once—a half day’s journey—to Scrooby, where he came upon the village mailman, William Brewster. Mailman by day, and by night a secret pamphleteer against the King, which Brewster printed on his illegal printing press. He was the host of private, forbidden gatherings, where people studied the Bible in his home. There is no uncorrupted Church of England, the group argued. We must leave. Bradford’s uncles heard of where he went in the evenings and more directly than they were wont to do, said, Do not believe what those puritans say. His uncles’ persistence persuaded William further that he was following the right path.
If William had stayed with his uncles in England, he would have lived a comfortable English life from his inheritance. But with one pair of worn-out boots and a sturdy ploughman’s gait, the young William fled his uncles’ home and followed Brewster’s group to Holland. He came to Holland with no money as we knew it but the promise of his parents’ inheritance. Here he was then, in Amsterdam, now a man of twenty-two, inviting himself over to Dorothy’s house.
Dorothy walked me to the back door, but we stood at the threshold.
He wants to marry you, I said.
Dorothy said, A dinner is hardly a proposal. But she smiled and touched her hair.
I was eager to hear the details, pressing her, a preference for imagining. Happy, in a melancholy way, to watch it unfold while looking from afar.
Her mother called her away. Her mother’s voice was always shriller than it needed to be when she called Dorothy’s name.
The next morning, while laundering, Dorothy told me what had happened.
Her mother took up the sleeves of her own second-best dress for Dorothy to wear for the occasion, and Dorothy felt as if she were her mother. At dinner, William was proper, as he always was before we knew him. She was stiff with all the things she thought but felt she could not say in front of her parents. All her words felt childish. Her mother smelled of sour milk, which she whiffed on the dress while leaning over to pass the peas. She was reluctant to choose a husband, to think of marriage, and the dress further strengthened her reluctance. This spun her, at dinner, inward. She would have an ungrateful daughter and twitter around the house in nervous anticipation for someone else’s future. Her face would show that she had frowned more often than smiled. All of these things I tried to assure her were not true, but she increased the speed of her words.
That evening, after William left, Dorothy warmed her feet at the fire and stitched. She told me she thought of this new despair, growing out of childhood, and as if that weren’t enough, her worry was interrupted by the sensation that she had peed herself. She had not taken off her mother’s dress. She stood in a panic and slipped the dress down her body. The backside of the dress was red.
The marker of womanhood had arrived, but more foreboding than that, she had to tell her mother. She took the dress upstairs and dipped it in the washbasin. Ribbons of blood waved in the water. Despite her scrubbing, the blood could still be seen on the dress. She took it to her mother, held it up, and apologized.
Her mother embraced her. And in her mother’s arms, in her tight hug, she lifted her daughter slightly off the ground, and said, Congratulations.
When her mother inquired about Master Bradford, as we called him then, Dorothy said little. Dorothy told me she felt certain her love was for Johannes.
But her parents found out. Her father came home early and saw a kiss. He shouted Johannes out of the house. Dorothy tried to explain.
He loves me. We shall marry.
Too young, her father said.
And when Dorothy still persisted, he said, Too Dutch.
She was fourteen then, the age when our cousins were planning their betrothals.
I can ride a horse well, I can keep house, I sew, I—
Her father shook his head. He was balding. Betwixt wisps of hair, where, if he were royalty, a crown might reside, was a shiny white skull. He was not royalty, but he was of wealth.
It did not matter what she said.
But, Father, Dorothy said, and her father waved her voice away with his hand.
Her mother was gentler about the subject. She waited until the two of them were outdoors laundering to say to Dorothy, Tell me about him.
What did we know then about love, about marriage?
Nothing.
He gripped her in the drawing room, he gripped her in the alley. She would not know another gripping in this way, because it was her first, but she knew this was not the thing to say to her mother. Dorothy stumbled and said the things she thought her mother would like to hear. About what he could provide—but he could provide little—and when that was clearly a misstep, she spoke of his good deeds, the outer signs that he was chosen by God, part of the Elect.
But that was too much for her mother.
Honestly, Dorothy, her mother said, and took the clothes inside.
She conveyed all of this to me while we sipped her father’s tea.
Am I too vain? she asked me. Is my desire delusional?
In her eyes was the shimmer of tears before they fall. I did not know what to say to her, but I knew whatever I did say, I should be steadfast. I took her hand.
Let it be as God intends, I said.
Dorothy nodded with a wobbly chin.
But no answer had to be given, for what God intended was illness.
The next morning, smallpox seized her. She lay in her mother’s bed. I went to her.
I deserve this, she said. It is my desire.
The pink sores on her face emerged first as faint circles, then ballooned with fluid that tightened her skin. She stared at them in the hand mirror, willing them to pop. But her urge to squeeze them was dampened by the pain it would cause, and her mother’s warning of the deeply embedded pocks that would mark her face forever—if she lived through it—and mar her chances at a suitable husband.
It is my passion, she said.
But when her mother asked her to say more, she said nothing.
God tests, her mother said.
The fever increased the rapidity of her thoughts. Delirium, and she thought she saw Johannes in the doorway and she thought he kissed her in the morning.
Was he here while I slept? she asked me.
I assured her he was not.
She said she saw a woman with long brown hair, in a black mourning dress, standing at the foot of her bed, watching.
I’ll die, she said. I’ll die from my desires.
But she did not die from them, at least not then. Dorothy repeated to me all the family members she knew who had died from smallpox—Henry, Mary, Uncle—and asked me to entertain her, which I felt I did poorly, by telling her what a fool one cousin made of herself in front of a suitor and relaying the new wet nurse’s blunders.
Dorothy spoke of the number of pocks she once saw on the face of her sister Katherine, when she lay in her coffin. Dorothy had half. Queen Elizabeth was rumored to have survived an extreme case and so, too, I reasoned, could she.
One morning, Pastor Robinson paid her a visit. She lay on her bed and confessed to God and to Pastor Robinson, I have been vain. I have been prideful.
If only God would spare me, she said.
Her desires were natural, Pastor Robinson assured her, as well as a test from God. I could not see how she spoke to him so openly, but death had not appeared so close yet on my bosom. Like all good conversion stories, hers was a far better one than my own.
Color began to return to her face. She showed again an appetite.
Did it comfort her to observe her own desire growing fainter and to know that she was one of them now, of the brethren who had confessed and joined again with God? It did not comfort me, because I was too vain to confess, too ashamed to admit my shame.
Before, when we were bored listening to the sermons, we looked at the faces around the church and whispered, What do you think she did to bring her closer to God? And what about him?
She no longer wished to play this game with me. Alone, I imagined the actions and desires of their lust, greed, and envy. In the days before I thought I really needed God, this made the church mornings go by quickly, but not as fast, doing it alone.
But that was years ago, the love of a young person, in vanity, looking for a more beautiful reflection. When Dorothy was well again, she asked if I would help her find Johannes.
But you’ve renounced him, I said.
I must first say goodbye.
Together we looked for Johannes in shop windows, clothiers, and bookstores. We stalled coming home from the market. No one had yet taken an interest in me unless at my father’s urging, and I was happy to be conspiratorial with her, searching for one boy in a town of thousands. Six weeks passed this way and when I asked about him, she finally shrugged and said, I never loved him. But I did not believe that to be true.
One Saturday, at the market, while reaching for an apple, someone took Dorothy’s hand.
We turned.
Johannes said, I’m going to.
His eyes moved back and forth over hers. He had threatened it before, the military. He was searching her face for an expression. He was looking for her to tell him not to do it.
Let go of me, Johannes, Dorothy said.
Her mother was close by, pressing the pears for ripeness. She could look up at any moment. I was standing an arm’s length from her, a presence that could judge, perhaps, after all the days she had said she did not care for him at all.
The light made his face even more golden. She told him that she had confessed and that her love now was for God.
This was Dorothy May, so composed. This was the Dorothy May I knew her to have become, never distempered in public. A good girl, as her mother had praised her to be.
Her mother turned. Dorothy pulled back. He went away. A week passed.
Then one day a blond head poked around an alleyway corner. Johannes appeared at Dorothy’s back door with a new haircut. He knew the trouble his presence would cause if caught. There were bug bites on his arms and legs. He was in new boots and wool socks the color of his grey sheep.
I’m going this afternoon, he said.
He was in front of her, those full lips, those new boots. He had done it.
Dorothy bit her lip.
But the Spanish, she said.
Only a self-murderer, she told me afterward, would enlist in the Dutch military when the truce was ending.
He had wanted to be an artist, but instead he became a soldier.
Dorothy’s mother called for her from the drawing room. Dorothy left him this way. She told me she had wanted him to persist. William would have. William would have said, Dorothy. Look at this! He would have fought hard for her. And by the end of the conversation she would have agreed to be betrothed despite her parents’ concern. All that, though, came later. Dorothy never heard from Johannes again.
William Bradford waited. For Dorothy, he needed more than an orphan’s promise. We never spoke of this—wealth was too embarrassing to discuss—but even at fourteen I knew where I stood. Her parents were amongst the wealthiest. Mine were not. William was a good Englishman, our parents said, but even that was not enough for a family of her parents’ standing. William knew as much. When his inheritance sum arrived, he proposed. In her vow to God, and soon, to William, Dorothy and I no longer drank her father’s tea in secret. As happens, we were no longer one another’s dearest consorts.