Bridget shook her head. “Do you think you’re giving us bad news? I’ve been plagued with horrible thoughts for years, imagining the worst, praying for their salvation, and now you’re telling me they remained faithful and God-fearing until the end.” She placed her hand on her husband’s. “I couldn’t have wished for more.”
After a moment of disbelieving silence, Samuel said, “You’re just like them. A fool beyond teaching.”
“Watch how you speak to my wife,” spat John.
“Listen to what I’m telling you: their mission failed, and they refused to see it. They never saw that their journey was over, because they were too pious to know the proper things to fear!”
John stood up. “Bridget, let’s go. We know the truth now; we don’t have to hear any more insults to our family.”
She remained seated. “It’s his family too.” She looked up at John and explained, “We have lived the pain of not knowing; his was the pain of knowing.”
She offered to hold the napkin for Samuel, but he sharply jerked his head and turned his body away. “What more do you want from me?” he pled. His smooth, childlike face, poignant for a person who had been beaten into growing up, was smeared with blood and tears. “I’ve told you all I know. I’ve bared my life before you, and for no good reason. Why are you here? I’m nothing to you. I’m no longer a Brownist, not even a Christian, and you have no idea how much the Turks tried to make a good Mohammedan out of me. I’m tired of it all!”
His tortured yells stretched his face until the wound reopened. With the heel of his hand he tried to wipe off the blood and instead pushed it into his eye and he felt the floor wobble under him as if he were back on the Mayflower’s deck with Sulayman’s henchmen forcing his legs open for the knife as he cried out futile prayers. No one should have to be so familiar with the smell of his own blood; he tried to blink it away and saw a whirlwind of every year of his captivity: every master who had used the whip on him, every blow, every kick, every court official who had forced him into their pleasure. He grabbed the tablecloth and breathed several times.
“If God lives, He knows I have no stomach for religious disputes. Do you believe our parents followed the true faith? I’ve heard it all, every doctrine, every side in this ridiculous war, every lie that humans are capable of. I’ve learned to pray in the tongue of every nation that sails, and I’m tired. Did you hear Rome has sent missionaries to China? You have to admire the hubris of the whole affair. Preachers! I’m sick of preachers. I’m fed up with their self-satisfaction, their vanity, their claim to plant a flag in other nations’ minds. I won’t help you save our parents’ good name. They don’t deserve it, and I want no part in your quest. Am I clear? They were no heroes. There’s nothing to vindicate.” As he continued speaking, Bridget leaned in, possessed of newfound curiosity for this man. “They were prey to a Quixotic obsession, and I thank heaven that they didn’t live to drag other fools with them. So forget about them and do what they feared to: live a life. At least you have one. I’m no one. I’m stuck here in this swamp, where Turkish ships can show up at any time, where I have to sing praises I don’t believe in because no other country will employ me. Every month I have to sleep with the entire merchant fleet of Venice to complete rent, and don’t ask me what services I had to give the butcher to pay for this paltry supper. That’s my life. That’s what the last Brownist Puritan has come to. So tell me: why should I care what you need?”
Bridget was surprised that the answer came so easily to her. “Because until today you believed you had no one, but that’s not true. And if there are any members of our congregation who remain alive, they deserve to hear the same good news, and to come back as you did. I am sure, as much as you have left the faith, that you don’t wish for them to end their days in captivity, because you didn’t want that for yourself. That’s why you left, isn’t it? Moreover, you are proof that it is possible. The same love of freedom that moved you to find your way out can help us locate every last tripulant of the Mayflower and bring them home.”
Noon, January 5 (Julian), 1637
Amsterdam
There was just enough space inside the carriage for the three of them, yet they succeeded at exchanging no glances for the entire trip. Before arriving at their appointment in Amsterdam, their last, obligatory stop had been Leiden. Samuel had seized the opportunity for an extended walk around their parents’ town, of which he denied having any memories, while the Bradfords met with their coreligionaries without mentioning the specifics of the plan they had devised, the fact that it had been Samuel’s idea, or Samuel’s existence at all. What they intended to do in Amsterdam was too scandalous to admit to and too dangerous to reveal to the wrong ears.
In the carriage, Bridget was quietly praying for mercy. In her eyes every part of the scheme was distasteful, but she kept reminding herself that even Abraham had lied to the king of Egypt for a vital reason, and the man they were going to lie to was among the worldliest lovers of money in Europe. She recalled how her parents had cautioned her generation against learning the greed that was rife in Holland, port to the world, and hoped that the moneymaking trickery she was going to play a part in would not earn their censure. She not only avoided looking at her travel companions and accomplices; she deliberately placed her sight far from the transparent vase that John was holding. It had amazed her how skillfully Samuel had harnessed John’s contacts in the publishing world, her training as a bookbinder and his own storytelling talents to craft an elaborate web of letters of introduction, property deeds, bank statements, shipping manifests, insurance contracts, judicial rulings, and auction records, all of them believable and all of them false, that he had made circulate among selected businessmen in the Dutch Republic, and which built a climate of avid expectation for the item held between John’s hands. That was how they aspired to secure enough money to ransom their family: by exploiting the Dutchmen’s uncontrollable hunger for riches. And Samuel knew there was one product that made every investor in Amsterdam happily part with their money in the hopes of multiplying it later.
They were going to sell a tulip.
In actuality, they were not going to sell a tulip, but that was the whole point of the plan: Samuel’s documents, when put together, created the impression that a tulip existed and was up for sale. What the vase really contained was something Bridget struggled to push out of her mind.
Out of the corner of her eye it seemed to her that Samuel was making an exaggerated smile. He had started doing that to maintain the skin stretched so that the injury she had caused him would not leave a scar, but the habit had stuck and now he smiled continually, well aware of how it made her feel around him. His willingness to help them find a way to rescue their surviving relatives was hard to explain, she opined, coming from a man she had grievously hurt and who professed, by his own admission, no belief in forgiveness. But John saw his change of heart clearly. He had not agreed to join them out of loyalty to family or nation or church; their pleas had first appealed to such feelings, but they did not exist in him. What had won him over was something more fundamental, something truer.
It took them some minutes to realize that the carriage had stopped and they were expected to step out. They sunk their boots in the snow as uniformed servants gestured them up a shoveled path in the direction of a house that appeared less luxurious than they had supposed; this Samuel regarded with great interest, because its shape and decoration heralded something Italy had made grasping motions at, but Holland had embraced in full, a change of times that was as unassuming as it was consequentiaclass="underline" here was growing a new type of aristocracy, one proclaimed not by genealogists, but by accountants.