Synopsis
“Mary Dyer was a courageous woman who lived during the important early years of our country’s settlement… Where dates and facts conflicted, I have used those which seemed to fit the story… A few times I have used what seem to have been the actual words of certain people.”
The novel starts in Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony, New England 1635 shortly after landing after a fearsome six weeks of sea in the voyage from England. Mary contemplates leaving their spacious estate at Glastonbury and an elegant town house at Charing Cross in London and settling in this primitive, somber village. Yet her reasons were the widespread prevalence of poverty, disease, and crime due to increased taxation for the support of an extravagant monarch and the cruel, ruthless persecution of religious dissenters by that fanatical Archbishop Laud.
Her husband’s older brother had been imprisoned for advising the local priest to dispense with unnecessary litanies and masses. When they secured his release, they fled to America where she hoped to deliver their first child in a free land, an infant who may well be the sole heir to the name, fame, and fortune of the Somerset Dyers.
