A Measure of Light by Beth Powning Read Free Book Online Page A

cause the Hedge to burst asunder. Thus, he said, public punishments of those who transgress God’s laws.
    “Misbehaviour of one can bring wrath down upon all.”
    Mary strained to understand. It was a new perspective: evil and goodness as communal endeavours. And the Hedge, a strange image to take into her mind, and the reason for the young woman’s suffering. Mary wondered if the girl needed to piss, if she were thirsty. If the man with whom she had sinned sat now with the others, unpunished.
    Wilson spoke for two hours.
    Mary slumped forward against the pain in her back.
    The tithing man raised his long stick, one end knobbed with a burl, and whacked the shoulders of a squirming boy. The boy squealed, clapped a hand over his mouth. Mr. Wilson broke off. He glared down at the pews. The tithing man resumed his stately walk.
    Straight, sit up straight, or he shall think me asleep …
    At noon, the congregation rose and went to an adjoining building, the Sabba-day house, with horse stalls at one end and a fire burning on a hearth at the other. No one spoke. They ate brown bread, doughnuts or gingerbread. They waited their turn at the outhouses; then they returned to their pews.
    Mr. Cotton began his lesson.
    People sat forward on their seats, earnest and expectant. Cotton’s face was florid, fleshy; his full lips puckered with dignified sorrow; in his eyes, an expression of suffering benignity. Anne nudged Mary’s elbow with her own, slid her eyes at a woman and three children who sat in the pew closest to the pulpit.
    His wife and children, Mary guessed.
    Cotton preached that the elect are justified, or granted salvation, by God’s grace. Then, he said, a person’s actions were good. However, good works could not
buy
God’s grace. It was freely given, and those to whom it was given were as if one with the Holy Spirit.
    He lectured on the sixth chapter of the Song of Solomon.
    “ ‘My beloved is gone down into his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies.’ ”
    At four o’clock, the congregation was allowed briefly to rise.
    At six, Mary suffered pains in her bladder and an intolerable hunger.
    The lecture continued until the room was in total darkness save for one candle on the lectern. At eight o’clock, Cotton turned over his last paper. The people rose to their feet with audible sighs.
    They sang.
    As they left the meeting house, they passed the woman at the mock gallows. They did not look at her.
    The next day, when she went to the well with Anne to gather the day’s water, Mary was surprised not to hear a single complaint about cold, or hunger, or the length of the sermon. Rather, the women argued about the lecture with heated excitement and Anne told them which parts she would elucidate at her Monday meeting.
    Across the square, the mock gallows was gone and the stocks were empty.
    “Nay,” Anne said, following Mary’s glance. “’Twas only a first offence.”
    On a grey day striated with the first snow, they breakfasted with the Hutchinsons one last time and walked to their new home.
    That night, Mary sat up late, absorbing the new space of the little house, turning the pages of her Bible. The baby was due in one week. They wished to baptize it into the church and so they themselves must be accepted into it.
    Tomorrow they would stand before the ministers for examination.
    She thought of Wilson and Cotton—their bald, uncompromising statements. Of how, here in the New Jerusalem, women had no role in church affairs, and were evidently meant to show humility as befitted their place in the order of creation.
    We are above animals, above servants, above children …
    In the fireplace, a log crumbled in a shower of sparks. William had gone to bed.
    “Either I know it or I don’t,” he had said, bending to press a kiss on her forehead. Unsaid was the fact that he was a merchant, young, strong