I loved and envied her. I did so as a sister does, and when we cut our knees—one of our last times climbing over rocks as unwed women—we touched our blood together.
Dorothy said, Now we are sisters.
William Bradford proposed to Dorothy in the fall of her sixteenth year. I thought they were illuminated by God’s good light and when they married at the Amsterdam courthouse in December, I was the witness. At the courthouse, she shivered. As men and women of God, it was understood we were not to make a fuss of a marriage ceremony’s earthly trappings. William reminded Dorothy of this when she reached for the most fragrant hyacinth bouquet at the market to take with her to be married. They were grown in a greenhouse, where the gardener approximated spring before its time. Therefore, the flowers were not of a modest sum. One was to be modest in all things. William believed that, and we did, too, in principle. But young girls have fancy, which feels like freedom, which maybe is freedom. The fancy fell away for both of us in marriage. Not because of our husbands, exactly, and not even, perhaps, because of marriage, but because of time. We got older.
Meanwhile, my parents arranged more invitations for me. Dinner included my lazy third cousin, who inherited land in England and new congregates with money but suspicious pasts. I enjoyed the meals my mother made for the occasions, but not the dinner conversation nor the looks my parents gave me afterward. My menses had not yet come and, not wanting to be left behind, I was urgent for it to arrive.
One day, Edward Southworth came to dinner. He had a moustache that extended over his top lip and was naturally slender. These two things, like his temperament, never changed. He was at the cusp of old age. His hair was salt and pepper, with two orange strands framing his face, thin and flattened, even in the thick, wet air of Holland, where it rained more often than it did not. But his hands were soft, not cracked and calloused, but well-treated hands, as if he were a person who was kind to himself and that which he touched. Of the men my parents planned for me, he held the most financial promise. It was said he had descended from royalty but gave up that ease to follow God’s higher plan and join us in Holland. With age comes well-worn ways, and thankfully for me, his ways were gentle. This assessment was one of the few I made at fifteen that I was not later embarrassed by.
I was happy. Nine months into our marriage, Constant was born.
Dorothy wanted to be a mother, too, and here is where things went wrong. A few months, and her stomach was not warmer to the touch. A year, and still nothing, and the women of the congregation murmured. Was William not performing his husbandly duties?
The midwife gave her a tincture. She gave her a tea. She told her to put a tail feather in William’s morning porridge. Dorothy did what she was told. Months later, her breasts grew tender. Then blood.
Finding her in the kitchen, kneading bread to hide her eyes, I offered: This must be the way God intended.
I saw immediately that it was the worst thing I could have said, but it was what I had been taught to think.
God gave her more blood.
Please, God, she said.
Begging God was never God’s way. Upon seeing her at church on Sunday, she told me what happened, both the blood and how she asked God for what He had not yet granted her.
She looked down and said, I should have told Him nothing.
To ask for anything earthly was to bring God’s wrath. I could have cautioned her but I did not.
When I labored, Dorothy was kind to stay by my side, to never mention her own desire for a child. Though I wanted to ask, to speak of her sadness, I did not know how.
But in spring, her stomach blossomed. Everyone predicted a girl by the way she carried her, how gentle the baby was inside of her, not kicking like my second was inside of me, not banging against her ribs. A quiet one, a thoughtful one, as a girl can be. The labor was fast, which rarely happens with a first. She was born into the midwife’s arms, unbreathing.
What’s wrong? Dorothy asked.
I could not speak it.
What is it? she asked again.
She looked betwixt her legs.
The midwife put the infant in her arms. Dorothy’s face showed recognition, then turned resolute.
There, there, she whispered to the newborn, kissing her purple forehead, her tiny nail beds, wiping away the white vellum that babies arrive in.
I stood back and watched her love her daughter, but did not leave the room, because my presence would incite the others to run in, cheer, speak too soon.
Dorothy insisted on wringing out her own bloody sheets.
Please, let me, I said.
No, she said, and walked in the slow aching way of a new mother.
Her family in Amsterdam did not yet have a plot to bury in. William chose one in Leiden, the closest to their home on Stincksteeg. It was a warm spring day at her daughter’s burial. I tried to hide my stomach—it seemed a personal affront to grow another child in her presence. There was a large meadow and a small grave. We covered her with tulips.
Afterward, Dorothy stayed indoors for longer than William deemed appropriate. Dorothy said she feared that her own moral errors had caused her child to be punished.
William said: This must be the way God intended.
But I did not believe this any longer.
I put her cold hands in mine and said, No grief is deeper than this.
But still, she stayed indoors. Her husband called a doctor, who prescribed a spoonful from a bottle twice a day. He prescribed resting. Then she could lie in bed freely. I worried about her, but my days were full of two young sons. If there were a doctor on the Mayflower Dorothy might have been prescribed something, when it was her son she longed for.
One morning William came to my house. He knocked on the back door. I heard it creak open. I was in the kitchen rolling dough. At the sight of him, I felt a flush. I hoped my cheeks were not red, that there was not a creeping rash rising from my chest and up my neck.
Body, I thought, please do not betray me.
We had not been alone since I bid him good night one evening after church, when I was fourteen and we had found ourselves the only two left lingering. We would not have been alone in the kitchen, but my husband had left for the silk mill early that morning. There was a debt to pay to the butcher along the way. Our two sons were, miraculously, working quietly together in the other room, preparing kindling.
Could you call on her, today? he asked me. She’s not well, I fear.
I tried to think of what he was saying and not the way he glimmered—His eyes? His smile? What was this?
I was to come this afternoon, but I will come early and bring pottage.
He thanked me, smiled, turned, and as quickly as he’d come, he was back out the door and down the alley.
When I went to visit Dorothy, she said William had asked her to go to the New World. She had been crying. I had Thomas on my hip and Constant was running toward the fireplace. I grabbed Constant by the arm and tried to sustain my attention to Dorothy as best I could. She did not have children yet and though she was sympathetic, I worried my attention to my children—that change to our friendship—was to her a laceration.
Where? I asked.
He said Guiana, maybe, or the Virginia Colony.
Nothing then was settled. They considered Guiana and Florida, but Guiana was too hot for our English bodies and Florida was too close to the Spanish. The elders said they were men of the north and they would stay north.
Why does he want to leave?
He said the Spanish could attack Holland at any moment. He said our children are becoming too Dutch.
Now that the peace treaty was nearly over, many in Holland were fearing the Spanish. And the younger people were losing their English manners.
He says that. But it’s money, too, Dorothy said.
Being a fustian weaver in Leiden was not going to give him his autonomy. He tried once to sell his textiles directly to merchants. But the Dutch government required all textiles to have official approval—a seal—and in so doing took a tax. And the tax was too steep for William to make a profit.
Therefore, his investment in the textile company failed.
William believed that to succeed as God intended, he had to go elsewhere. It could have seemed then as improbable as once thinking the world was round, to leave our community in Leiden to go halfway around the world.
Going where? Dorothy had asked him.
And when he said a colony in the New World, she asked, With the Savages nearby? And you think the King who outlawed us will now give us a charter?
William could convince. He believed his childhood vision was God’s way of telling him to follow a more difficult but higher path.
Dorothy told William, finally, the reason that lacked all argument, the reason that was a feeling, that was the truth: She did not wish to be so far away from her daughter.
Plenty of women had lost children. Her aunt had died in childbirth. Every woman knew that preparing for labor was preparing for death, both their own and their child’s. We planned our will and rehearsed our last testament.
Perhaps the losses are God’s way of saying He has other plans for us, he said.
He said this gently, but Dorothy said, No. A final No, lacking emotion, a No that would not be persuaded.
Scripture could be used for any claim.
William, imbalanced in humors and out of argument said, Our daughter is dead. That body in the grave is not her.
This was more than Dorothy could bear, but she bore it.
In recalling the discussion with me, Dorothy stood and concluded, as if talking to herself, I cannot be the wife who does not give him what he needs.
She wiped away her tears.
She said he asked for so little, that she needed to give him this. I did not agree, exactly. It seemed to me, as was often with her, that she could not see how much he was asking for. To leave your family and your friends for what?
I readied myself to tell her I would not let her go alone.
I stood, because I knew I should get home and prepare dinner for my husband. But the conversation was in its careful place. As women, we rarely talked this way, so freely as we once did as girls.
Seeing Dorothy and knowing what it would be like without her, I said, We’ll do this together, you and I. I should not have said this without my husband’s approval. But I did. It was her I loved. We would live next to one another, in the old world or the new one.
I wondered if William was planning this, in part, for her, too, to help lift her from her grief. That perhaps she needed to leave that tiny body in the grave. If she was to go, I would go, too. But I had to persuade my husband, without it seeming as if I was persuading him. All afternoon I thought on it. When he came home from the mill that evening, he whistled through the front door. I was thankful he was in a boisterous mood.
Good Wife, he said. I’ve been with William Bradford.
God was granting me such good fortune. What blessing that God wished for us to be together.
And what did he say?
He wants to make a colony in God’s likeness.
And you said?
I told him we will go.
But the plans to leave Holland faltered. No one wished to fund our journey to the New World, except the Dutch, who offered to take us to New Netherlands for free, but then we would still be living in a Dutch colony, only this time along the Hudson River. To do so would be to move ourselves halfway around the world to be again among their permissiveness. As William noted, nothing was free, and to be taken by the Dutch would mean we would be beholden to them in some regard, with an agreement of indentured servitude, perhaps, or at the least, beneath them always in standing. What we wanted was the King’s charter and English financiers’ investments so we could hire our own indentured servants and retain our English ways.
A year went by. Dorothy was pregnant. Her John was born. We smiled upon our children’s play. Two more years passed. Our flowers were perennial, our gardens flourishing, our Dutch fluent. It seemed we would never leave Holland. I cannot say I was disappointed by this, but I do wonder how I am looking upon it now, with a more lavender hue than how it felt then.
Finally, the contracts were arranged, English financial backers secured, and the date for departure set.
This time, Dorothy’s wish not to leave was even stronger. She had a full life—her friends, John’s friends, the walks along the canal, the trips to the market, the farmer who performed for John a magic trick each time he saw him. Her loyalty to her husband outweighed her own desires, but now there was John. William said they would send for him once the colony was settled. It was too dangerous to risk his life to the seamen’s illness, or worse. We both agreed to leave our children behind.
We planned our sons’ lives in Amsterdam, with our parents, while we made homes for them in the Virginia Colony. We thought it would be a few months until we saw them, maybe a season, but no longer. The ache of leaving them behind was more rooted in the body than our husbands could understand. We confirmed with one another, time and again, this was for our sons’ safety, this was the very best decision. We had to love our children enough to leave them behind.
That was the plan, then, Virginia, though the Mayflower drifted much farther north. The elders chose Virginia because anything farther south was too close to the Spanish, and anything farther north was too close to the Dutch.
Once we got to the Virginia Colony, there would be indentured servants to manage, houses to build, fences to make, fields to tend, a whole community to establish. A woman cannot work quickly with three children at her feet, tugging on her dress, calling, Mum. And there was the seamen’s illness, which weakened adults and not much was known of what it did to children—we were to be one of the first group of English families to journey across the Atlantic. But even if the illness did not claim our sons and the servants were companionable and the strangers left us to our worship, as long as we kept quiet about it, as the King assured us we should, there were the Indians beyond the colony’s fences, the stories of bloody battles.
I had seen an Indian once, displayed by the King in the courtyard of the Tower of London. There, betwixt the peacocks and flamingoes, past the birds of paradise, and a caged lion, the Indian stood, chains around both ankles, his hair pulled back behind him. The headdress they had him wearing fell sideways over his eyes, and his hands were somehow inaccessible, but how I could not tell. He was the tallest person I had ever seen. His eyes looked frightened, and then, as curious pale-skinned people got closer to him, his expression moved out past the English garden, past the peacocks, past it all, a stare that seemed to travel continents. He did not look ferocious. People said ungodly things to him, speaking as if he were more animal than human. I was struck by how the stories I’d heard of the Savages did not match his presence. It was like the one time I saw the Queen passing through our village, in her carriage, and I thought, She is so small and ordinary. Often things are more devious in our imagination by their distance to us.
But though I had seen that one Indian, that did not mean I was not scared of them. I heard there were thousands, this was a land of them, and how far they stretched and what pathways they made through forests were expansive. Later, once settled in Plymouth, I came to be thankful for the kindness of the Wampanoag Indians, for it was on their land we built.
We were to leave for Virginia in June in the year of our Lord sixteen hundred and twenty. We had our homes to sell, our heifers and bulls to disperse, possessions to evaluate. Bring only the essential, we were told, but Susanna White commissioned a wicker bassinet for her child that was not born yet. How hopeful it was, some women thought, and others, like me, thought it was inviting God’s wrath to be that presumptuous.
I wonder what a difference it would have made to Dorothy if John had been on the Mayflower.
I remember her face on the day we were to leave for the Virginia Colony. Dorothy, on a rented horse, watching my sons emerge from the boardinghouse behind me. Her kind, dutiful face registering that though I said I would leave Constant and Thomas, though I gossiped with her in church about the women—including Mary and Susanna—who did not love their children enough to leave them behind, here I was, walking toward the carriage, bringing my sons with me, too. I could not do what I had promised, while she had left John that morning with her mother.
No room, I thought I saw Dorothy mouth to William.
He gave her a look, turned to me, and said, Good morning.
When I asked if this was possible, when I looked at him through my wobbly eyes—the tears—he said we would find a way, that there would be room for them.
Constant and Thomas trailed behind me, hands full with their belongings. I could not look her in the eyes. As we climbed in the back of the carriage I felt the heat of her stare like a heavy blanket I had not strength enough to lift. I deserved that look. The horses kicked up dirt and galloped down toward the dock.
At the dock, we stood together staring at the ship before us. Me with Constant and Thomas, Dorothy with her trunk and her husband’s hand. Every person is a mystery and she was no exception. I thought she would miss John and say so, but if she grieved, the only sign was in the stiffness of her posture. Our friendship was shifting.
We watched a man step out of the Master’s quarters. Bony, with oil-slick hair and large teeth, scowling at either the ship or the passengers below it. As unkempt as the least reputable.
Dorothy said, Please, God, let this man not be the ship’s Master.
But he was the ship’s Master.
I was hopeful Dorothy had forgiven me. I put my arm around her. Constant ran toward the edge, Thomas hung on Dorothy’s hem, and before we knew it, without the reverence of ceremony, we were guided like cattle down into the dark tween deck, with the other women and children. We were not tall women, but still we had to bend our heads low to make our way across the closed-up space betwixt the storage below and the top deck above, a cabin of wood on all sides. We were the first human cargo to ride this Speedwell, which still smelled sweetly of the wine it had last imported. The journey from Delfshaven to London would take three days. Our Speedwell would meet with another ship, the Mayflower, in England, full of the strangers we needed to make the colony run—servants, carpenters, blacksmiths, farmers.
William could be heard ashore, giving a speech.
Do you want to go listen? I asked, pointing toward the ladder.
Dorothy smiled and said, I heard it twice last night.
I strained to hear William’s words.
All the great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties and must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courages … In our hearts we are pilgrims.
Our gathered brethren cheered.
It was light then, this future, because it was still new. I wanted to apologize, to acknowledge my advantage—Thomas and Constant—but I did not. I did not know how to say I was sorry. I did not want to press a bruise. That is what I told myself, but I see now I was too cowardly.
I had a cabin and so did Dorothy. They were called cabins by our husbands, and when we first inquired of the sleeping quarters and they said cabins, we imagined walls. We imagined privacy. Our cabin was a bed lifted off the floor, as high as our knees. We would fashion a little curtain with some scraps, but that was all. The chamber pot went beneath.
We watched a goat piss in front of us. The urine rolled along the grooved boards, cascaded over our belongings in the deck below.
Well, Dorothy said.
But it was just us congregates then, thirty-five of us combined in language and belief, where our similarities were a shorthand for comfort. The chickens and the children squawked. My sons inched closer to the barrels of gunpowder. I scanned the room and thought of all the ways I would be saying no to them for weeks.
We were half a day out of Holland when the ship’s Master called down, She leaks. We both looked to the walls. They perspired. He said we would dock in Southampton that afternoon and might need to stay longer for repairs.
William thought the ship’s Master was not to be trusted. We all did, but Dorothy said, with faith I could not muster, It will be God’s way. I considered my own children and how to get them up the ladder and off the ship before the others if the ocean water rushed in. If the Speedwell were to sink, I was not willing to leave their lives to God’s way. I apologized to God for this transgression, yet there it was and there I was again, sinning.
When we docked, what I remember of Southampton is the glitter of the sun on a dull sea. The town’s better days had been years ago. As is a monarch’s way, King James called Southampton the finest and sweetest in the kingdom. But when the town declined after losing its monopoly on transporting tin, he quickly sold the castle. The town walls were weedy with elder and yew. Nature asserts where man no longer claims it. On a hill, under the castle keep, a butcher chased after a pig. Another man with a bloody apron ran his hand along a cow’s spine.
Seamen from other ships were in circles on the dock when we arrived, gambling. I smelled dead fish. I heard a lute. Even in this place, the summer conspired toward celebration. Down toward the dock came Thomas Weston to greet us. Where were my sons? One held Dorothy’s hand, one held mine.
We moved closer into town. Darkness grew. There were jeers from the alehouses, seamen moving out into the alleyways, their voices gaining in volume. The glint of knives. Women in doorsteps, with one knee lifted, giving a soft hello to our husbands. We scowled at them. We hooked arms around one another. I picked up Thomas. He grew heavy—God tests!—but the day’s excitement had him asleep before we reached the boardinghouse. My husband outstretched his arms and took him. It was one of the last movements of strength I saw in my husband in this lifetime.
The boardinghouse was not ready for us. We had missed dinner, John Carver said, and William disagreed. Through the hallway we saw guests, portly men dressed for business, wiping their plates clean with biscuits, guests stepping up from their chairs, brushing the crumbs from their laps, and finishing the dregs of the wine. Had the innkeeper eyed us and decided not to feed us because we were exiles?
I understood suspicion. It should have been a relief for us to be in a country that spoke our language, but then, one feels worse for how close it appears we should be but are not. Those English-speakers were not our brethren. Who was against us? Who agreed with the King’s call to rid us—so-called puritans—out of England, or bring back our heads to, as the King said, Punish their traitorous nature?
Puritans, I thought I heard.
Did you hear that? I asked Dorothy.
Yes, she had.
We were back in England’s scorn. I had forgotten what that felt like.
We were wearing the styles of a decade ago, when last we were in England. It was vain to be concerned with these things, but better if one is to be vain, to be vain together with a friend, to share the burden.
Are we not paying guests as the rest? William inquired to the innkeeper.
John Carver, one of the wealthiest amongst us, offered money. The biscuits arrived. We took the children upstairs to sleep. I told Dorothy my husband was not well, had not been in the weeks leading up to this journey. A cough that would not cease, a wakefulness in the night even after a day’s long labor.
He’ll be fine once we get settled into the ship’s distance, she said.
Cold was its comfort.
William knocked on the door, to show Dorothy to their room. She kissed my forehead before leaving. I can still smell the myrrh that perfumed her hair.
That night, I woke to my husband hunched over the side of the bed, trying to get his breath. I moved toward him, put my palm to his back, and felt the bones along his spine. I lightly beat my fists against his back to move the fluid about.
I’m fine, Good Wife, he said, wanting to usher me back to sleep, without worry for him. He was this way, too austere toward himself. It was only a cough, he said. I had not been one to worry too soon, and needlessly, before this, but long after his deep breath of sleep returned, my eyes were open.
I had not thought on it much, his age and, subsequently, his death. That he was a decade and a half older than I and would likely leave this earthly world before me was only an idea. People perished all of the time—whole villages fell to plague—but never did I think of how this death would come for us. How foolish I was.
The day’s matrimonial annoyances—that he kicked our sons’ jacks under the chair rather than pick them up and return them to their place—were not worth the effort I expended on the feeling. Edward Southworth, my Good Husband, might die. I would be a widow with two small children. Where would I go? Who would help me? I tried to conjure there, in that boardinghouse room, everything I loved about Edward. When in the midst of a life with young children, the mind strains to remember our spouses’ goodness, despite how often we address each other as Good Wife and Good Husband. I thought of Edward whistling through the house, of Edward lifting Constant off the ground, of Edward taking my hand unexpectedly while I cooked, stopping me to say, I love you, Good Wife.
I can see now this was God’s warning. He came that night to prepare me. My husband would pass long before me and what would I do?
There I was on that lumpy borrowed bed, crying for my husband, who was right there beside me, breathing, his eyes fluttering in dream.
What we thought would be one night, maybe two, at the boardinghouse, waiting on the ship’s repair, expanded into several weeks without signs of an impending departure. Our tab to the port of Southampton grew. William took morning walks to the dock and found the ship’s Master playing cards, throwing dice, the whiff of evening still on him. Perhaps the Master got a cut of the port fee and that was why he was in no hurry to leave. William had no trust in that ship’s Master. It was no secret William was angry, but when I gave Dorothy the entryway to speak on it—William must be disappointed, I would say—she nodded and kept William’s thoughts to herself.
Each day docked in Southampton added the cost of more rooms for thirty-five people at the boardinghouses, and each afternoon when it was clear we would not depart, William took an item from the larder. We lost several pounds of butter. We lost many salted fish.
William wrote letters back to London, pleading to our debtors.
Dear Sirs, he wrote, We were in such a strait as we were forced to sell sixty pounds of our provisions to clear our debts, and now we are scarce of butter, with no oil to mend a shoe, lacking swords and in want of muskets. But a complaint by William would never turn to self-pity, would it? At the end of each letter he affirmed God’s good grace. And yet, we are willing to expose ourselves to such eminent dangers and put our trust in God … Faith will be the staple food of our journey.
On the Sabbath the women of the congregation left the boardinghouse to sing Psalms in a loud chorus in front of the alehouse, to outshine the raucous. This chorus was led by Susanna White, and with her protruding belly, I imagine even the most ungodly of the seamen subdued their anger at the women’s righteousness.
We had to sell so much butter.
At this rate, we’ll be as thin as poppies, Dorothy said.
I thought of the little bobbing heads of us as girls, in the old days gathering flowers, getting them ready for sale at the market, and when our mothers were not watching, lying around amidst them, brushing the pollen off of one another’s backs.
Two weeks went by this way, us losing butter for our future, seeds for our future, a goat for our future. Dorothy sold her mother’s horn clip. I thought my pregnancy days were over, and sold the wicker bassinet. I did not wish to risk my life in labor once again, and Edward and I were no longer frequent with our intimacies.
But I did not know then what Dorothy did in secret, in the mornings, when no one else was watching. In Southampton, she sent her mother a letter. A short letter paid for on credit, on our congregation’s tab.
Dear Mother. Please. Help me return. William will not be persuaded.
Dorothy’s mother confessed to me she never wrote a reply. I told her it was not her fault, I told her it must have been an accident, I told her all the things that were told to me, because I’m no longer certain one needs to carry the burden of some truths.
We departed Southampton, but within a day we were docked again, this time at Plymouth, the last port before entering the Atlantic. On another dock, on another shore, not even out of the English Channel.
Perhaps this is a sign, I said to Dorothy.
Again she said, He tests.
Was she suffering privately? What did she share with William? I noticed he was gentle with her, coming up behind her saying, My Good Wife, and Good Mother, the highest honors, not stingy with his affection. I wondered if Good Mother caused her to wince, inwardly. John and her unnamed daughter growing farther and farther away.
I looked behind to my husband, who had just stepped above deck. He was getting weaker, I saw, but hadn’t lost his spirit. Though from my husband’s expression—quizzical, questioning of all that surrounded us—I sensed I would betray Dorothy.
What followed were four days more paying port fees, boardinghouse fees, meals for all of us, more debt, more debt. William never slept well, Dorothy said, and I saw him often, walking alone down the cobblestone streets, the first to walk into the wind and rain and the last to leave it.
She leaks, she leaks, is all that the ship’s Master said, or all, at least, that was reported back to us.
Perhaps this was a scheme to make the bill higher, to owe the investors in England even more money and increase their profit.
We congregates gathered around the boardinghouse table, dipping bread into potato soup, the husbands considering our choices. To combine ships or find another Master. Constant would not eat despite—or more likely, because of—my encouragement. I kept trying to keep up my son’s strength as I watched my husband’s lessen. My husband claimed the previous breakfast had still left him quite full and declined more than a bird’s portion.
William said, about the ship’s accountant, I saw him return to the ship this morning with what must be a hundred or more pounds of provisions.
Heads turned, ears cocked. He waited for this attention before he continued.
That’s our money, Standish said.
William continued: I asked him, “What is all this?” and like the scoundrel I’m now convinced he is, he refused to show me the accounting.
We each imagined he had purchased what we longed for most. Goose fat, gimlet, a pick axe, what had the accountant tucked away, unnoticed? Why had he come back with a hundred pounds’ worth of provisions, which he had the seamen put in the berth and refused to discuss the contents or accounting with any of us?
The families began to retire to bed, and I myself was going to lead my sons upstairs, when both the Master of the Speedwell and the Master of the Mayflower entered the boardinghouse. They had conferred, they said, and it was resolved. The Speedwell would not continue across the Atlantic. At this news, Myles Standish stood. William was already standing.
I cannot do more, the Speedwell’s Master said. She leaks.
If we were to go to the Virginia Colony, we would all have to fit on the Mayflower, which was full as it was with our indentured servants and adventurers who were strangers to us. The ship was bursting with four dozen passengers, and there were three dozen more of us. We had to choose amongst ourselves who would go and who would stay behind. A ranking was beginning amongst the elders, of which men brought the most to the colony, an ordering of wealth and ableness.
My husband put his hand on my shoulder.
Good Wife, shall we? he asked.
We went upstairs. Instead of speaking to Dorothy about all of this, I spoke that night to Edward. We waited for our sons to be softly snoring in the bed betwixt us.
It was September. Westerly gales were building across the Atlantic. He was not well, he said. By sunrise it was decided: When the ship departed, my husband and I would step out of line.
Dorothy was not downstairs in the morning. The innkeeper said she and William had since departed. I hurried to gather my sons and get to the dock. My husband shooed us onward, said he would catch up.
Through the boardinghouse’s back garden I went, Constant and Thomas slow behind me, so very slow, stopping to watch a snail, to touch the dewy roses I warned them not to touch. It was in this way, me moving forward, then turning back to urge them onward, that I stepped on something that slithered beneath my right foot. I shrieked. There it was, an iridescent green snake, a sign from God, maintaining its place on the limestone.
What is it? Constant yelled, running in delight toward whatever curious thing had terrified his mother.
Nothing, I said, knowing they would traipse through the ivy to find it and I needed to get to Dorothy.
The serpent moved away, I said, but my sons did not believe me.
I got them to the dock with the threat that I would pinch their ears the entire walk there if I needed to. The serpent had marked me.
At the dock, Dorothy had an upright posture and looked out on the water. The white ribbon of her bonnet blew out to the side, and her aubergine dress blew outward with it. She began to cross onto the ship.
I told the boys not to move an inch. Their father was a few paces behind, close enough, I wagered, to disrupt any mischief they might cause. I hurried up the ramp, onto the Mayflower, and down the ladder into the tween deck. So dark it was and musty. I felt a moment of relief knowing I would not be on this journey.
I found Dorothy setting down her basket. I took her hand in mine. I furrowed my face, preparing my apology, which I knew would be inadequate.
Dorothy stopped me, said, I wish—
What? I asked, but I knew what was happening. Each time she thought of a way to tell William she should turn back she answered with his reply before she spoke it.
So many people were nearby and would have overheard her speaking against her husband. Her placid face, her sweet, unwavering face, took in my apology before I said it, and, I’d like to think, accepted it, hugging me and wishing me well.
We will join one another soon enough, she said.
She gave me her handkerchief. Why had I not thought to bring her anything? I felt myself an inconsiderate friend and said so. I looked in her eyes longer than I had done in years and said we would see one another very soon. But I was not certain.
On the way up, William’s arm brushed against mine. I looked up to see him. I felt aware of the warmth where our arms touched. My husband had spoken to him on the dock, but I did not know that at the time.
You will be missed, he said and looked down to me.
He bent down and embraced me. So close I was to his lips. I gave him a kiss on the cheek and moved quickly back up the ladder, tripping on a rung as I went.
On the dock was my sanguine husband, holding Thomas’s hand.
You will miss your friend, he said, seeing my failed composure.
I nodded.
We waved then to the ship, to all our friends in the tween deck, to the young boys nervous to be at sea, to the older, indifferent sorts, and to the wizened seamen above. Blessings were called and the hope that those below could hear us.
Thus, that common merchant ship, named not for primrose, cuckooflower, marigold, or cowslip, but for anything that could flower in May, pushed out to the sea.
My husband, our sons, and I walked slowly back to the boardinghouse. We intended to return to Holland as soon as passage could be booked. But by the end of the week, my husband was dead.
I won’t speak of my journey back to Holland, a widow with two young sons and no means to care for them. Numb, I was, in spirit. God cares for us by selecting some things for us to forget. I sold most of our possessions—my husband’s boots, a musket, candlesticks, two chairs—which we had intended to take to the New World, in order to pay for our return.
The children and I took up residence with my parents. I woke each morning with two grieving boys. Dorothy, my dearest consort, moved an ocean away and my husband was dead. This was not the life I thought would be mine. In the mornings I set myself in mind to get to my friend as soon as I could, but by afternoon it was all I could do to chase a chicken around the yard as my sons napped, and pluck its feathers before they awoke. I tried to feed them well if nothing else. No food comforted me. My body thinned as only before when I grew rapidly in youth. How does a person live with this weight of sadness? I thought then. The answer, I see now, is simple: One just does. Until one cannot.