Alice Bradford

I sat back in the rocking chair and nursed Joseph.

William tied his boots and said, Pay a visit to Mistress Billington? See to it that she understands the severity of her husband’s transgression.

I nodded, but I was in turmoil. How little I knew when first I agreed to be a governor’s wife.

I was to warn Mistress Billington that her husband’s letter to the colony’s investors, complaining of his ill treatment, was known to my husband, and in the future her husband would be punished. Master Billington, the Judas amongst us, the elder of the most profane family, as William often said, had told our investors that more than half those aboard the Mayflower had perished that first winter—a fact known—but also wrote that the land was barren, and that the beaver had moved farther north at our scent. His letter claimed that our one hired soldier, Myles Standish, was cruel and ill suited, and created unnecessary tension with the Indians. That more men were sick than working. That Weston, the liaison betwixt ourselves and the investors, was a thief and a liar, and had taken his family to Plymouth on false pretenses.

We were to be in Virginia, Billington railed. And he knowingly took us north, outside of jurisdiction. It was their plan all along. These hypocrites are thieves.

I confess that William’s earlier report of the land here being an embarrassment of riches was a bit of speculation. He began writing before he’d arrived ashore. Nevertheless, we were presently thriving.

Beaver pelts, more fish than one can net, and if you have harpooning equipment, whale oil to live your life on, William wrote, advertising our colony in a pamphlet distributed throughout England, hoping for more colonists to join us.

Billington signed his letter to the investors as The Ill-Treated Servant.

What is this? the investors had asked William in a recent letter, about Billington’s claims.

William’s letter back to investors—now sitting on his desk, to be sent with this incoming ship’s departure—assured them of Plymouth’s fecundity and reminded them of the trouble Master Billington had caused us since first he stepped aboard the Mayflower with his wife and two ill-behaved boys, toothless and shoving their hands in the casks of gunpowder.

God tests, I’d say, when Billington interrupted my husband’s dinner speech with complaints.

But William always replied, And, so, too, doth God punish.

The Billington boys had shot their father’s musket and nearly set fire to the Mayflower ten years ago, and when John the younger had wandered off into the woods and was returned a month later by the Nauset, I am not the only mother who wished he would have stayed away. His mother slapped his face and called him an ungrateful twit. I imagine the Indians were glad to be rid of him.

Of all the regrets William had about his negotiations with the investors, at the top of his list was that John Billington was allowed to sign up as an indentured servant, bring his family, and board the Mayflower.

My husband did not want Master Billington at tonight’s dinner and had taken an approach on two fronts. Captain Standish would tell him there was no room, and I would warn his wife. He would be squeezed from both sides, until he was forced to change his ways, or leave. That was the plan, anyway.

The letter from our investors—to whom we still owed a significant sum—said a representative was on the Gifte, that ship out at sea. They were coming to celebrate our great harvest.

What wonderful news, I had said.

But William scowled.

No businessman says what he means. They are coming to oversee us because Billington has stirred in them doubt about my ability to lead.

There was still so much for me to learn. William was learning, too, as he went along. Almost nine years into his role as governor was mere infancy in politics.

To be a successful colony, to pay off our debts, to be free of England, we needed a good reputation. If Master Billington’s letter got out, if someone published it as a pamphlet—and oh, how the lascivious, gossip-mongering Londoners would revel in our failure, the hypocrites, the puritans, as they would say, mocking us—at stake could be our colony, our future, our children’s lives, our freedom.

How to contain the fire of Master Billington so we would not lose good colonists and how to present our colony to the newcomers in a good light were the main tasks for William and me on the day the new colonists arrived. Of course, it would not be hard, I had thought. We were a colony fashioned in God’s favor.

William stood behind me and placed his hand atop my head. I looked up at him. He smiled at Joseph.

He kissed my neck. I felt the warmth of his lips, his breath on my earlobe. A soft kiss at my collarbone. He slipped his hand upon my bosom. I did not welcome this as much as God would wish it. As desirous of him as I was, I never was when the children were close.

But other times, yes. My husband’s mouth betwixt my legs last evening.

If Eleanor presses you, prithee tell her I have done all that I can. But I might not be so generous in the future.

I was not accustomed yet to using this kind of persuasion. It was unspoken of my role, but I knew it: to tell William what the people felt and to persuade the other half of the colony’s citizens—the women—that my husband made the right decisions. Amongst my kind, I liked this work. It gave me purpose. But to go to one of our former servants and try to convince her of something? I did not want that task, nor did I think I could achieve it.

I will, I said. It was the quickest way to assure him I would speak with Eleanor. Saying more might further reveal my turmoil.

Joseph slept against my chest, a warm dumpling. I relaxed and thought of all we women still needed to do to get ready for the new colonists’ dinner: more pies to bake, more bread to finish, more stew to cook, tables to set, and so forth. I could hear William the younger following his father up the hill, the goat’s bell jingling alongside him, on his way to the field. The same field that would be made bloody by the day’s later violence.

Until the ship docked, my husband would count beaver pelts, hammer fences, and curse at inanimate objects, as was his way. The children would try to get out of the work it was their duty to do. I cajoled them with threats—God is watching!—but that often failed. Instead, I’d make a game of it. Who can find the most stones? I’d say to get them to prepare the ground for crops. I’d toss a cow’s knucklebone in the garden and ask them to hunt for treasures. But games only go so far. For the rest, there was the guidance of Scripture: He that spareth his rod hateth his son; But he that loveth him chasteneth him betime.

I stepped outside.

The two women I called my friends were already in their gardens, pulling weeds and plucking herbs. Our home was where the two main roads of our colony intersected, making an elongated cross. Broad Street ran down a gentle hill east to the sea and west up the hill to the meetinghouse. Our second street ran north and south, the entire length of our walled-in colony. The palisade—a wooden fence with sharpened pales around the interior of the colony—was eight feet high and kept our colony safe. To step into the outer fields, one had to pass the guards.

A breeze blew in light and cool. I watched the wind flutter the leaves and make mottled shadows on the houses. The birds flew overhead, their sounds loud and chattery. All, I affirmed, would be as God intended.

I glanced at my neighbor, Susanna, round at the belly, nearing the end of her pregnancy, and across from her, Elizabeth, hands in the dirt. Both women had survived the Mayflower’s journey. They were the only two women left from that ship aside from Eleanor Billington. My husband’s first wife, Dorothy, my own dearest consort, was on the Mayflower, but she did not survive it, and I was beckoned by William one year later. She slipped, the ship’s second mate said. I have long wondered otherwise. My husband and I do not speak of it.

Where our fences met, Susanna leaned.

And I told her help was needed at home, first.

That was Susanna, always Susanna, complaining about her servants. She was a fair woman, blond hair, with freckles on her cheeks you could see only if you were close enough to kiss her.

I wondered who it was they were talking about, but then I remembered that I did not really care. Rather, I was feeling the care from the group, which always conspires to swirl others up into its persuasions. But since I’d become the governor’s wife, the women told me less. I was the earpiece to authority. Despite our community’s higher plans, every place has rank. The world swings back to it, because no man or woman is as good or godly as he or she wishes to be.

Who’s that? I asked, tempted.

Susanna opened her mouth to say it, when the three of us heard a front door slam. We turned.

Susanna, what is this?

It was her husband calling from the threshold, pointing to a wreath of flowers on their door. Susanna was nine years into her marriage with Edward Winslow, an elder of the colony.

Daisies, Good Husband, Susanna said and turned back toward her friends.

Master Winslow was testy when there were newcomers. Though it was he and my husband who advertised the fertility and abundance of New Plymouth, there were always newcomers who asked for more than what God granted. Before each new arrival Susanna’s husband reminded us of the new colonists’ false beliefs, saying, They come here expecting beer to flow from the brook, the woods to be a butcher shop, and the lake to be a fishmonger’s stall. It was true. Bring us not your butter-fingered, your sweet-toothed, your faint-hearted, I thought. When a new ship docked, I was quick to assess who might give cause for concern. And I often guessed correctly.

Master Winslow admonished Susanna for puncturing the wood of the door and wasting the metal of a nail. He continued grumbling as he walked up the hill to the men working on two half-built roofs. He spoke loud enough for his wife to register the grumbling, but not loud enough to elevate his annoyance into an argument, as is common with husbands.

Adornment is a vanity, Susanna said to us with a smile.

It was the familiar refrain our husbands sang against our homemaking.

Elizabeth raised her eyebrows.

What? He has his gold tassels. I have my wreaths.

The arrival of a ship of new colonists had us looking more often in puddles, glancing at our own image, wondering what the newcomers would see. It had been a whole season since we had expected new people. In all of us, I saw, there was a slightly turned or upright posture, the awareness that soon, someone new would see us. How would we look?

The cuts of our clothing were practical, efficient, and unadorned, but in color we were never modest. Susanna wore a dress the color of corn silk. Elizabeth wore russet. I favored green, to complement my eyes.

But I was a plain woman. Even as a child I had dark fine hair on my face, for which other girls teased, but I did not pluck, following my mother’s warning.

Italian as a fork, one shopkeeper in Leiden always said when I walked by, despite my many times of saying, I am English, sir, in Dutch.

In Amsterdam, you could be from anywhere. The older I got the more vain I became, consumed by it before marriage, regretful of it by motherhood. I would not become a woman worried about appearances, staring too long at her reflection. We were trying to be in God’s good favor, and whatever was fashionable was lowly and earthly. Beauty was a vanity, an earthly vanity, which is why the royalty spent their time upon it. That was not us, I kept telling myself, but privately I believed it was far easier to be less vain when you were beautiful. As Dorothy was.

I felt a pinch, lifted up my skirt, and slapped my calf. The first fat mosquito of the day, black and dead against my leg, with my own blood oozing out. A welt already forming. There was nothing like this in Holland, nor in my birthplace of Wrington, England, two places mostly free of anything that would bite or sting, except the people.

When colonists made the mistake of complaining of the humming bloodsuckers aloud, my husband said, If you cannot tolerate a small insect, you do not deserve what God has given us. People who cannot endure the bite of a mosquito are too delicate and unfit to begin new plantations and colonies.

William expected from others the austerity and work ethic he imposed on himself. It was one of many signs that he was of God’s chosen, that he would be saved in the most perilous of situations. Whether encountering the Indians for the first time or making his own path from orphan to governor. And because he felt chosen to me, he also felt prescient. As if any lie I were to tell, or half-truth, would be immediately seen by God and William. I was not as austere as he was, and each time I wished for more than he did, I tried to redouble my efforts. I wanted more, often.

Nearly everything had flourished that summer except peas, which every year we blamed on poor timing of the planting, but nothing seemed to work. I missed peas. This season had been better than the last six that I was privy to, but no one knew what the investors would say. Investors always wanted more.

My sister lived in Plymouth, which was a comfort, but she had traveled to Salem with her husband.

We heard another door and looked outward. Across the way, Eleanor Billington had stepped out of her house.

Eleanor Billington, black curly hair loosely tied back and falling forward onto her shoulders. She wore a bosom-bursting dress, free at the waist but tight at the chest. She darted to her firewood. An urgency, there was, not to stare, for the U-shaped cut that revealed her bosom. She picked up wood and went back inside before Susanna could give commentary.

Susanna nodded her head, as if to say, See, this is the woman who is not doing her share. As if God was making now her presence known.

What do you think will happen first? Her husband killed or kicked out of the colony? said Susanna.

I told her that was a terrible thing to say. Her son, who had passed just two years prior. But God doth punish.

So many people died that first winter in Plymouth, but like the most pernicious weeds, the Billingtons had survived. Why did God spare them? Thrice William had threatened to kick the Billingtons out of the colony and thrice Eleanor saved her family from her husband’s belligerence.

I bit my forefinger. Again it bled and again I admonished myself. We never intended to have Eleanor Billington’s kind amongst us. The murmur was they were the sign of Satan’s presence.

And yet, there was something about her I liked, something I could not name that drew my interest, despite how publicly I stood beside my husband.

Of the devil’s presence? Methinks not, said Susanna.

She scurries like a rat, dothn’t she? Elizabeth said.

A scrawny little rat, said Susanna.

Behind our backs, our servants whispered, too. When they thought we could not hear them, at the trough, milking cows, at the ovens, they called us puritans and hypocrites, they called us sticklers and precisionists. We wanted to reduce the clergy’s hold on the Bible and they said we wanted to take the merry out of Merry England. But this was not England, this was Plymouth, a land designed in God’s good favor. I had not anticipated that to be amongst our Anglican servants—most of whom were commoners from England—was to be again amongst those who hated us.

But we had nearly gained self-sufficiency. There were only a few more payments left to the London bankers. We could lead in the ways God preferred. No icons of God, whose face no one had ever seen. No alms paid for misdeeds, no unnecessary celebrations, like Christmas, which had no scriptural history. Free, we would be, from most earthly trappings.