Free A Measure of Light by Beth Powning

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 thelevel 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