Faithless

View from the top of the Wrekin in Shropshire, UK.

On September 6th, 1620 the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth harbour in England, to change the course of history. Of course. That’s common knowledge. What is less well-known is that on board were four young children, stolen away from their mama in landlocked Shropshire, to slake their father’s jealousy and desire for vengeance. Aged between 4 and 8 years old, three of the four siblings would be dead within months, possibly before they ever set foot on American soil. You can read the true story of the More children of the Mayflower here: https://www.visitshropshirehills.co.uk/morechildren/

This story is a reminder that real life has always held horrors worse than the imagination of any writer.

The ocean is wide, the journey perilous, so it is long months before the news reaches England. Samuel More reads the letter as he stares across his lands, the green plains of Shropshire stretching away to a horizon where the Welsh hills roll like waves. Three of the four dead — one bastard still living. Well, much good may the boy’s tenacity do him, there on the other side of the world, without a father’s name to cover him in the barest shred of dignity. Samuel will not tell Katherine yet, he decides. He will hoard the news, the better to savour it. Besides, he has a marriage to annul.

Ten Years Before

The church is silent, but for the occasional scraping of polished shoes on the worn stone flags, and somewhere, the slow drip of water. He can hear Katherine’s breath, tight and measured, feel her glare. When the minister asks, “Do you take this man?” she spits her answer. But it is “I do.”

In the vestry after the ceremony, their fathers smile with satisfaction at each other, their pens scratching scars in the white parchment of the marriage register. The same signatures are already dry on the deeds that transfer Jasper’s thousand-acre estate to Samuel’s father for the princely sum of six hundred pounds.

Samuel, at seventeen, understands that marriage is more business than pleasure. Next to him, her face set colder than a marble saint, his new bride, his cousin Katherine, surely knows the same. Seven years his senior, she is now his property, just as much as the titles to her father’s land, and bought with the same pen stroke. She holds her body rigid with the shame of it, of being sold to this boy, this stranger. Something stirs in Samuel’s belly at the realisation of her helplessness, his new power. Perhaps, after all, there is pleasure to be had from the business.

Later, in the master bedroom of her parents’ manor house, he takes possession of his rights.

“I suppose we must do this,” says Katherine, and it is a statement, not a question, but her voice quavers with the last breath of a dying hope.

“Indeed, we must, my love,” he says, and tilts her chin so that her eyes meet his, their blue icier than the rime on the windowpane. Behind her, a good fire has been lit, so that the chamber is warm. With deliberate gentleness, Samuel leans in and kisses her. Her lips remain clamped tight against him.

“Come, sweet,” he murmurs. “My father has bought you at a dear price. I would inspect the bargain he has got me.” His voice is soft as velvet, but there’s steel under it, so that Katherine glances sharply up at him, the contempt in her face giving way to uncertainty, and the merest flicker of fear. Samuel feels an ember kindle inside him.

Bolder now, he continues. “Shall I call the maid to undress you, or shall I help you myself?” When she doesn’t answer, he says, “Very well then,” and takes the ivory silk of the wedding gown between his fingers. Slowly, deliberately, he tears it from nape to waist. Katherine’s skin is pale as milk. She is trembling, he notes, pleased, though he cannot tell whether she is angry or afraid. No matter. She does not resist as the silk slithers to the floor, and he pulls her to the bed. I shall be master here, he thinks, and the ember blazes into flame.

Years later, in the stews of London, when he learns more about the ways of the bedchamber, he will realise that his cousin-bride was not a virgin, and something will stir inside him, like the first green tendrils of a dark-born seed.

Then his father comes to him, his face grim, and it is as if his words were already there, in Samuel’s thoughts, waiting to spring to life.

“You’re sure?”

“She does not deny it. A previous betrothal, she says.”

“Who?”

“A neighbour. A nobody. Low-born. And Samuel, the children. I have seen him, this Blakely. The likeness is remarkable.”

Samuel’s fingers stray to the little pen-knife he keeps on his desk, and he runs a fingernail along the sharp blade.

His father’s shrewd eyes catch the motion. “Nay, lad,” he says, “here’s the surer way,” and lifts the quill from the inkpot.

Its point scratches out his plan, black and stark on the milk white page, and Samuel smiles.

____

“My children, damn you!” Katherine screams, half out of her wits, so that he clutches her wrists to prevent her injuring them both. “Give me my children, I beg you!”

It’s what he’s longed for, since he learned the truth of her faithlessness, to see her weak and broken and utterly in his power. Where is he now, this other man, this Blakeley? Katherine’s wrists twist feebly in his grip, and he feels long-dead ashes blaze into life as she murmurs, “please, please,” like a prayer.

He pulls her close against him, and whispers, softly as a lover, “They are somewhere you will never see them again.”

____

After it is done, and they are gone, she fights on. She does not give up, not until he gives her the news that they are dead. Even then, she does not believe him. She drags him through the courts, until it’s laid before her in black and white. "Katherine Mores Petition to the Lord Chief Justice ...the disposing of her children to Virginia dated 1622."

Katherine cannot sleep for thinking of it, cannot eat. Falls half mad with the torment of it, her babes, her dear ones, helpless on a vast ocean, with strangers. Done with. Gone where she can never follow.

From across the courtroom, Samuel sees the light flicker out in her eyes, and it gives him more pleasure than his second wedding night, three years later, to a wife who is as pliant and obedient to him as a wife should be. When Elizabeth, née Worsely, the relative of his powerful patron, bears him a son, there is no doubt in his mind, this time, that the child is his own.

Katherine More stands at the top of a hill so high she can see far beyond the lands where she grew up, lands that now belong to the man she called her husband. The man she called the father of her children. The gentle fields of Shropshire spread out beneath her like a green ocean, and the hollow pain that has knifed her through since he took her children from her carves deeper. He took them so far. So far she could not reach them, no matter how she tried. And then they passed still further from her, into death. Katherine calls out her torment to the broad, rolling skies above her, calls out for vengeance, calls the souls of her lost children home.

In the moonlight, the crib is swathed in shadows so deep that at first he sees only the living child, sleeping peacefully. Just as he turns to leave the nursery, it flickers into sight. A small, pale shade, its knees tucked up under its chin, sitting in vigil in the cradle, leaning over the newborn as if fascinated. It is so slight that it can be no more than four years old.

Mary. He thought he had put her, all Katherine’s bastards, out of his mind. Had thought this new beginning with Elizabeth had wiped the slate clean. He tries to blink the guilt away, but the little huddled figure remains.

The child, the ghost child, not the one sleeping in ignorance of its peril, stares at him with eyes wide and blue.

“Dada,” it says.

“I’m not your Dada,” he croaks, horror clutching at his heart.

“Dada,” it says again, and a tiny crab scuttles from its open mouth, sea-green, green as jealousy.

“Dada,” and it lifts a chubby hand. Around it, the cradle begins to fill with water, seeping in cold and grey, and the smell of brine washes through the bedchamber, sharp as guilt.

Seawater laps around both babes, living and dead, and he starts toward his breathing infant, but the ghost child holds out a plump, grey-pink hand, and in its eyes he sees the mockery of its mother’s smile. He cannot move a muscle, as the crib fills, water creeping up about the newborn’s swaddling cloth, creeping over its tiny, pursed lips, filling its nostrils, and still it doesn’t wake as bubbles rise above its submerged face. They rise and rise while he watches, helpless, immobile under the ghost-child’s imperious stare. Then, they slow to a trickle, and stop.

After, when he kneels by the crib to say final prayers for the small, unchristened soul, he finds his eyes will not move from its tiny, closed face. Next to it, as though it were still there, vivid as the night before, he sees the features of the phantom child, the one he cast away, denied. He cannot shake it.

It will haunt his sleep for the rest of his days, the resemblance between the two.