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“What use?” said Martha in the same remote and patient toes. “I think all my life I’ve known it would end thus. Bess, don’t cry,” she said in sudden wonder, sitting up and looking at her sister. “Don’t you see - you must always be strong. It’s such as you who’ll go on, and endure, and found this land. To your children it
will
be home.”

“And to yours,” said Elizabeth violently.

Martha shook her head. “I am made of cobweb that tears at a touch. But you, Bess, have fibre like the great seines that seldom break, no matter their burden, yet if they do they can be mended again and again.”

They were silent. Elizabeth bent her head, unable to look at the little sister, who now seemed so far away and wise. A squirrel chattered in the elm. behind them, the sunlight shifted and dappled the blanket on which Martha lay, and she spoke again. “Bess, I’ve done much wrong. I knew it long ago and would not see. I made Jack marry me. I’ve been a drag on him. He always loved you. You and he would have been happy. And now it’s too late.”

Elizabeth jerked up her head. “It was
always
too late! Martha, you shall not talk nonsense. Come, dear!” she cried, jumping up. “Don’t be morbid and fanciful. I’ll call the men, and we’ll go back for you to rest. Soon you’ll have your baby, and be well.”

Martha looked up at her sister with a tired smile. “Aye, call the men,”
she said. Her eyes moved slowly past Elizabeth and rested
on the sea.

That night, as she was settling
to
sleep, Martha had a paroxysm of coughing worse than any before, and at the end blood gushed from her mouth and soaked the pillow. Two days later, Jack came home, and could not help seeing the change in his wife. He grew tight-lipped and silent. He inquired minutely into all the remedies that Elizabeth had used, then took his chest of chirurgery to the barn, and compounded stronger medicines from the contents of his vials. He stayed with Martha now, telling her of what had passed in Boston, and of the loving messages that Margaret sent. She had been safely delivered of a little daughter, christened Sarah, and said she longed to see Martha’s babe and hers together. “She said how strange it was that once she and Bess had babes at the same time, and now ‘tis
you,
Matt, love.”

Martha smiled, squeezing his hand feebly.

Four days later, labour pains began. Jack and Elizabeth worked together to ease the tortured body all they could Amy Gage came to help, and Anne Bradstreet, who had lately arrived in Ipswich. At last they called Mr. Ward, who stood beside the bed praying and reciting psalms in a low compassionate voice, which seemed to soothe Martha. The tiny girl was born, and never breathed. Two hours later Martha opened her eyes, which had been wild as those of a snared beast, but now she raised herself and looked up at her husband and sister. “I longed to leave - ” she said, almost with amusement, “but now I know I shall remain in the new land - God wills it so.” She gasped. The warm blood gushed up in her throat, and she fell back on the pillow.

They buried Martha and her baby on the hillside near her house, the first burial in Ipswich. Elizabeth and Jack knelt together by the grave. “I did love her, Bess,” he whispered, “as much as I could. She is in heaven, and knows it now.”

Elizabeth bowed her head. The grave faced to the east, for Elizabeth had so insisted. She too had suggested the epitaph on the wooden slab, which had been hastily carved by the village carpenter. The headstone read:

Martha Winthrop, b. London 1611, d. Ipswich
in The Massachusetts, 1634.
he Lord hath brought me home again.

On January 19, 1637, Massachusetts proclaimed a day of fasting and humiliation in order to soften God’s wrath. The news from the Old World was bad again. Papists in Europe, Episcopalians in England - both viewed by the colony with equal alarm - were forcing their scarlet ceremonies on the True Believers. Dissenting ministers were being persecuted now as well as silenced. Furthermore there was plague in the colony, and a new Indian menace. The Pequots, having murdered John Oldham, the trader, whom they were supposed to love, were now attacking the infant settlements on the Connecticut River. Nor were these afflictions the worst threat to the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s comfort. A woman was –

A tall, burning-eyed, intractable woman of forty-six named Mistress Anne Hutchinson. “Troublemaker, Jezebel, libertine daughter of Beelzebub” - so John Winthrop thought her, and his opinion was shared by all the ministers in the colony except Mr. Cotton, whom she had so admired in Lincolnshire, and her own brother-in-law, John Wheelwright. But she had much following amongst ordinary folk in Boston, where the women flocked to her afternoon meetings when she expounded the Scriptures in her own way and prophesied at times. They came to her for material help too, domestic and medical, and she gave to them lavishly; of late even men had sought her wisdom and the peculiar comfort her presence evoked. Yet many distrusted and feared her strength. She inspired violent partisanship or violent enmity. She provided the greatest immediate excitement the colony had ever enjoyed and Elizabeth, who had led three dull years at Watertown since Martha’s death, was elated by the furore; an interest all the more stimulating since it must be hidden from her uncle.

On that January Fast Day, when the schism in the colony became obvious to all, Elizabeth and the two little girls were in Boston visiting Margaret, while Robert was at Dedham, the new settlement on the Charles River, whither the Feakes thought of moving. Watertown was now crowded and, with the exception of the Patrick’s, Elizabeth found her neighbours uncongenial. Goody Warren’s malice - now unrestrained because Elizabeth’s uncle was no longer Governor - could usually be ignored, but there were other reasons for moving. Robert had become more moody: feverishly restless at times, depressed and apathetic at others. She had thought a change of scene might be good for him, and welcomed the thought herself. Last year, when many from Watertown, and half of Newtown under the leadership of the Reverend Thomas Hooker, had packed up and left the Bay, Elizabeth had wondered if they too shouldn’t move to the wild but fertile lands along the Connecticut River. Robert had been briefly enthusiastic, and they had got so far as to write to Jack for advice on the matter and send a manservant off to clear land and build some kind of shelter, when Robert suddenly lost interest He took to reading the Bible daily, and finding there apt verses which he said were clear guidance against the move. She also realized the strength of his attachment to Daniel Patrick, and that Robert dreaded going so far from the Captain, She thought this adoration odd, but also touching.

Anyway the matter dropped, and Elizabeth was ultimately relieved when rumours began to filter back indicating that the new Connecticut settlements were even stricter and more godly than those of Massachusetts. Then Winthrop himself, ever jealous for the supremacy of the Bay, and therefore anxious to establish as many towns near Boston as possible, suggested to Robert that he might help settle Dedham. Robert was flattered and set off at once to buy land.

The morning of the January Fast Day was exceedingly cold. A raw east wind blew in from the sea, and there was ice in the ewer of washing water when Elizabeth awoke. She was grateful for the comfort of the Winthrop mansion, where the windows now were glazed and tight, and where there were plenty of servants to draw the bed-curtains and light a fire in her chamber. In Watertown there was no such luxury. Sally was gone. Coincidentally with the expiration of her bond, she had been caught fornicating with one of the Saltonstall servants and haled before the local court, which duly ordered for both culprits twenty stripes at the whipping post, and the wearing of a red letter V for venery upon their backs. Elizabeth had made Robert plead for mercy, but his speech had been so mumbling and indecisive that the town fathers had ignored it. She had then appealed to Daniel Patrick, and was never told what happened, but Sally unaccountably escaped from the gaol on the night before her punishment, and was seen no-more.

When Elizabeth questioned Patrick anxiously he winked and said, “Faith, Bessie, me love, what’s the use o’ being Captain hereabouts if ye can’t juggle a thing or two for your friends? Might be there was a shallop at Medford what would smuggle on a wench as far as Piscataqua where they don’t take sich a gloomy view o’ love-making as we do here.”

So now, though Robert still had his two menservants, there was no female help obtainable except the occasional hire of one of the neighbours’ daughters.

Elizabeth let her two little girls sleep. Joan was a sturdy child of seven, as brown and buxom as the four-year-old Lisbet was delicately fair. Had this been the Sabbath, Elizabeth would have had to arouse them for the morning service, but towards observance of a Fast Day sermon, Elizabeth knew that Margaret would be lenient. Elizabeth herself avoided church whenever she dared in Watertown, but no such slackness was possible at the Windirops’.

She dressed hastily in her warmest gown of heavy blue serge and put on her plain collar and cuffs, for the wearing of any lace was now forbidden by law. She went downstairs to breakfast with the family on dry cornbread and water. After a prayer, John Winthrop asked the blessing in an abstracted manner, then spoke sharply to his young sons, who had been whispering and scuffling their feet.

“You behave yourselves in the meetinghouse, do you hear? I’ll not have it said the tithing man has had to chastize Winthrops,
ever!
” He looked at each one of his boys.

Stephen, now eighteen, was a gravely handsome lad, dark like Jack and their father, and possessing like them the long Winthrop nose. Adam, at seventeen, favoured his mother’s side, and resembled Margaret in plumpness and a naturally contented nature. Sammy was still but a child of nine and his mother’s pet, since the baby, Sarah, had died. He was an exuberant little boy; yet he and his two oldest brothers quieted at once. The fourteen-year-old Deane however looked mutinous to Elizabeth’s secret amusement. The years Deane had stayed behind in England under the genial guardianship of his Uncle Downing had bred in the lad some headstrong opinions which he usually stated, and did so now. “Oh, Father, please, sir, do I
have
to go to church twice
today
as well as on Sundays?”

“You
do,
sir!” said Winthrop. He had spent many hours praying for Deane and for guidance in subduing him, being aware that he was the most like Harry of all Margaret’s brood. “Also,” continued Winthrop, “is it necessary to remind you again that here we say ‘meetinghouse,’ and ‘Sabbath,’ not those Popish terms you used?”

“They were saying in London that New Englanders’ve changed the names of everything to suit themselves - seasons, months, days, churches and taverns - ” said Deane not quite pertly. “I don’t like calling this good old January ‘Eleven month,’ and why can’t I call today ’Friday’?”

“Deane!” interrupted Margaret. “Stop fretting your father! You’ve been told why, We don’t use pagan names or Papist ones, and anyway ‘tis not for you to question. Eat your cornbread!”

“I don’t want it,” said Deane. “It’s like sawdust.”

“It might taste better to you after a good thrashing,” said his father wearily, “which I should certainly administer now if there were time.” He got up and walked out to his study, where his table was littered with notes relative to the dreadful Antinomian behaviour of Mistress Anne Hutchinson and her brother-in-law, Wheelwright, and pages of his own agonized religious experience, with particular reference to the opposed covenants of Grace and Works which were splitting the colony.

“How can you be so thoughtless as to add to your poor father’s grave anxieties?” said Margaret. “He scarce slept last night.”

“I don’t see why he bothers so,” said Deane, unmoved by the thought of a beating, to which he was well accustomed. “ ‘Tisn’t as though
he
was Governor, and why doesn’t he let Harry Vane do as he pleases, and that Mrs. Hutchinson too? I like her and maybe she does hear the Holy Ghost speaking. How does Father know she doesn’t?”

Margaret looked so shocked that her eldest came to her defence. “Oh, stop blabbering, Deane - ” said Stephen. “Get
up and go wash your hands for the meeting, or I’ll give you that thrashing myself.”

Deane made a rude noise, indicative of his disbelief in the threat, for he was as big as Stephen, but he got up and shambled out of the room. The other boys followed, and Margaret said, sighing, to Elizabeth. “I wonder why the Dear Lord wished me to raise only sons. They can be so trying. A daughter would have been a comfort.” Her gentle brown eyes filled with the tears that came easily of late. She had grieved much for little Sarah, and was afflicted with melancholy and physical ailments relative to the age she had reached and the certainty that she would never bear another child. “And it seems that I have nothing
but
daughters,” said Elizabeth, as lightly as she could.

“Oh, you’ll bear a son, dear, I’m sure,” said Margaret, instantly sympathetic. She thought it strange that four years had passed since Lisbet’s birth, and tried not to guess the reason, though she was quite perceptive enough to see Robert’s peculiarities and effeminacy. How sad that God had thought it needful to afflict Bess with unfortunate marriages. The women, in silence, exchanged a look of affection, then jumped as the warning horn blew from the meetinghouse steps and the bell-ringer paused by the corner of School Street, jangling his bell and calling, “Hear ye all! Hear ye all! Come to Meeting!”

Most of the morning service was as excessively dull as Elizabeth had feared. Mr. Wilson had the pulpit and prayed for nearly an hour on the general themes of fasting and humiliation. But then came a more stimulating moment as the minister lined out for them the Seventieth Psalm in the Puritan’s special old psalm book, and the congregation started off in the nasal drone considered appropriate until, at the second verse, Wilson suddenly became impassioned. His thick voice rose to a shout, his bullet head stuck forward, and everyone saw that he was glaring from the pulpit at Mrs. Anne Hutchinson and her family, while he sang: