Now, I just stood and looked longingly at that forbidden path. The storm had stripped the leaves from the bronzed beeches and the yellow-splashed birch. They lay, slicked with snowmelt, darkened and moldering in deep wind drifts at the path’s edges. At the stone, the mason, Martin Milne, was at work drilling out holes for the conducting of our strange new way of commerce. It was a still morning and the ringing of sledge on graver carried like a bell, all the way back to the village. Several folk, drawn by the sound, came to watch the work. Far down ,the dell we could see the carter waiting, his mule’s head down and grazing. The rector’s letters apparently had done their work, for the carter would not approach until he received the signal. Mr. Mompellion, too, was there, directing Mr. Milne, and when he deemed the holes sufficiently deep he filled each with vinegar and placed the coins inside. That first delivery was of standard stuffs; flour and salt and such staple goods. The next would add those items especially requested by villagers and written down by the rector upon a list to be placed beside the stone. There was to be a separate list, also: a list that named those who had died. For the nearby villages held many who were friends and kin and ached for news of how we did. There were three names on that first day’s list: Martha Bandy, the innkeeper’s daughter, and Jude and Faith Hamilton, brother and sister, the latest of the Gowdies’ tormentors to be placed alongside them in the ground.
When all was accomplished, Mr. Mompellion waved down to the carter and then we all backed off to a safe distance as the man led his pack mule up the slope. He unloaded as swiftly as he might, took the money and the lists, and then waved back to us. “Our prayers and our blessings be upon all of ye!” he shouted. “God have mercy on your goodness!” And then he turned the mule’s head down the slope and mounted. We stood and watched as the beast trod a careful path out to where the spur dipped suddenly. The clink of harness grew fainter, until the beast reached the place where the way flattens and becomes easy. There, he picked up his pace and trotted on, until the gray buildings of Stoney Middleton rose up and hid him from our sight.
Beside me, Michael Mompellion sighed. Then, noticing that we all around him looked downcast, he rallied himself, smiled, and raised his voice so that all might hear. “You see? That simple man gave us his blessing and you may be sure that like prayers are on the lips of all those in our surrounding towns. You are becoming a byword for goodness, dear friends! And with all these prayers, surely God will hear, and grant us His mercy!” The faces that turned to him all looked pinched and serious. For all of us had had the time to reflect on the gravity of our decision, and we well knew what it might bode for us. Mr. Mompellion, to give him credit, was quite aware of this. As we each made our way back along the path to the village, to the various tasks that beckoned us, he moved from one small group of persons to the next, offering words of support. Most seemed to pick up their spirits a little as they spoke with him.
And so we reached the village’s main street, and I saw that some of those who had been at the Boundary Stone had paused for speech with those who had not, relating the way in which we would now conduct our dealings with the world. I was due to begin my morning’s work at the rectory, so I walked on with Mr. Mompellion. He had retreated into his own thoughts, and I kept my peace so as not to trouble him.
Elinor Mompellion greeted us at the door, her shawl upon her, anxious to be out. She had, she said, been waiting for me, because she had a task elsewhere that would require my help. She took my arm impatiently and almost pushed me down the path before the rector could gather himself to ask what it was or where we were going.
Mrs. Mompellion always walked with a brisk step, but today she was almost running. “Randoll Daniel was here this morning,” she said. “His wife is in labor and, with the Gowdies gone, he knew not where to look for help for her. I told him we would be there directly.”
I turned pale at this. My own mother died in her childbed when I was four years old. The baby lay crosswise and she labored four days as Mem Gowdie tried in vain to manipulate its position. In the end, with my mother unconscious from exhaustion, my father had ridden to Sheffield and returned at last with a barber-surgeon he’d shipped with as a boy. The man, wind-burned and salt-scoured, looked terrifying to me, and I could not believe that his hard hands were to be allowed near the tender body of my mother.
He used a thatcher’s hook. My father had taken so much grog to damp his own fear that he did not have the wit to keep me from the room. I ran in there as my mother came to consciousness, bellowing. Mem grabbed me up and carried me away. But not before I saw the tiny, torn-off arm of my stillborn sister. I see it yet: the pale, folded flesh, the tiny, perfect fingers open like a little flower, reaching out to me. Even now I can smell the blood and shit that stained that terrible bed, and the terror of it was with me at my own confinements.
I started to tell Mrs. Mompellion that I could not go with her, that I knew nothing of midwifery, but she cut me off. “However little you know, it’s more than I do, who never has labored myself nor even birthed any livestock. But you have, Anna. You will know what to do, and I will assist you as best I can.”
“Mrs. Mompellion! Giving birth is one thing! Midwifing is altogether another gate’s business. And neither is a lamb a living human soul. You do not know what you are asking me. Poor Mary Daniel deserves better than us!”
“That is no doubt true, Anna, but we are all she has. Oh, perhaps Mrs. Hancock with seven lying-ins behind her might know a thing or two more, but yesterday the second of her sons sickened and I do not think that she can be asked to leave off tending him, nor do I think it wise to risk carrying fresh Plague seeds into the room of a confinement. So we will do the best we can by Mary Daniel, who is a young fit woman and by the grace of God will have an easy time of it.” She patted the whisket at her side. “I have here some poppy if her pain is great.”
I shook my head at that. “Mrs. Mompellion, I do not think we should give her poppy, for labor is not called labor by chance. A woman must do much real work to get her baby born. We would be sore pressed if she were fallen into a poppy stupor.”
“See, Anna! You have already helped me, and Mrs. Daniels. You know a very great deal more than you think you do.” We were approaching the Daniels’ cottage. Randoll Daniel, anxious for our arrival, opened the door before we had even knocked upon it. Mary was alone on a pallet that had been brought down from their sleeping loft. The shutters were closed and a blanket had been hung over the entryway, so that the room was very dim. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust, before I could see that Mary was sitting on the pallet with her back braced against the wall and her knees drawn up to her chest. She was very quiet, but the beads of sweat that stood out on her brow and the veins roping in her young neck made me realize that we had found her in the midst of a strong surge.
Randoll had laid a good fire, the day being chill, and Mrs. Mompellion asked him to set some water to heat on it. I asked him, also, for some fresh, churned butter. I remembered the smell of the butter from my own first confinement. The second time, when we had none, Mem Gowdie had called for some rendered chicken fat. After Tom’s birth, both he and I reeked of chicken for a week, for she used the grease to massage and soften my opening and ease his large head through without tearing me. I hoped that in the dim light Mary would not see that my hands were trembling, but as I approached her she closed her eyes and turned even more inward. Elinor Mompellion did note my fear, and she laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder as I knelt down and lifted the sheet from Mary’s knees. Very gently I lay a palm on each one, and Mary, sensing my aim, let them fall open. I muttered Anys’s chant, even though I didn’t understand it. “May the seven directions guide this work.” Elinor Mompellion shot me a strange look, but I ignored it. “May it be pleasing to my grandmothers, the ancient ones. So mote it be.”
Mary Daniel was a small, vigorous woman of about twenty, and her flesh felt firm and healthful under my hands. It is, as I have said, one thing to reach inside a birt
hing ewe and quite another to invade the body of a living woman. But I tried to quiet that part of my mind hammering away about modesty and violation, I breathed deeply and thought instead how thankful I’d been for the touch of women’s hands in my own birthing room, and how important it had been to me then that Mem and Anys seemed so calm and certain of their own skill. I was not calm, nor certain, and I had no skill, but as my fingers reached inside Mary, it seemed that her flesh felt as familiar to me as my own. Mrs. Mompellion held a candle for me, but it was by feel, not sight, that I was working. The news my fingers brought me, was first good, and then bad. I could feel but a tiny edge of the rigid door to the womb at the top of Mary’s passage, and I cooed to her happily that the worst of her work was behind her. At that, she moaned, the first sound we had heard from her, and a slow smile lightened her face, then immediately turned to a frown as the next surge gathered. I stilled my hands then, and Elinor Mompellion stroked her until it passed.
It was what lay beyond the lip of contracting flesh that troubled me, for I knew that I should be able to feel the hardness of skull there. Instead, the part of the baby presenting itself for birth was soft flesh, and I knew not at first if I felt a buttock or a back or part of a face. I withdrew my hands and spoke softly to Mary, encouraging her to try to walk, if she could. I thought if we could get her moving, then the baby might, move, too, into a better lie. Mrs. Mompellion became the prop for her right side, while I took the left, and as we walked up and down that little room, Mrs. Mompellion began to croon a rhythmic song in a language I did not know. “It’s Cornish,” she said. “My nurse was a Cornish-woman, and she always sang to me when I was a child.”
Time passed. An hour, maybe two or three. In that dim room there was no sense of noontime brightness or morning easing gently into afternoon. The only time that mattered was measured in Mary’s ever-increasing intervals of pain. When she finally sank back, exhausted, upon the pallet, I waited for a surge to pass. As soon as it did I insinuated my fingers quickly inside her. The lip was gone. The womb stood wide. There was no doubt now; the baby lay crosswise. A black panic started to rise in me. I remembered the bloody thatcher’s hook.
But then a strange thing happened. It was as if truculent Anys was beside me, whispering impatiently in my ear. “That man was a ship’s barber; he pulled teeth and amputated limbs. He knew nothing of women’s bodies. But you do know. You can do this, Anna. Use your mother-hands.”
Gently then, so gently, I explored the tiny body of that unborn baby, fingering the knobs and curves to see if I could make sense of them. It seemed to me that what I needed was a foot. If I could manipulate the feet, surely the buttocks would slip into place, and on buttocks one could get a good grip. I found something that felt like a foot, but I worried that it might be a hand instead. A hand was the last thing I wanted. If I pulled a hand by mistake, the shoulder would never be delivered unless it was shattered, the bones sliding broken across one another. I couldn’t bear the thought of that. But how could I be sure that what I felt was a foot? There’s not much difference between a newborn’s stubby little fingers and the flesh buds of its tiny toes. Elinor Mompellion could see my frown and sensed my hesitation.
“What is it, Anna?” she asked in a low voice. I explained my dilemma. “What you have under your hand—feel for the fifth digit,” she said. “Now, try to flex it. Does it oppose, like a thumb, or no?”
“No!” I said, almost shouting. “It’s a toe!” Confident now, I pulled. The baby moved, a little. Slowly, working with the surges of Mary’s body, I eased and tugged, eased and tugged. Mary was strong and stood up well to the pain that came at her now unrelentingly. When the little feet dangled at last through the womb opening, the pace changed, and everything became urgent. I knew that the pulsing cord must on no account get crushed, and so with the greatest difficulty, I forced a hand past the buttocks and pushed it back. Mary screamed and shook with the agony, and I felt scalding sweat running down my own back. The baby would be born within the next few minutes, I felt sure of it. I was terrified that the head would tilt backward and be trapped inside, so I felt for the tiny mouth and gently forced a finger inside, to hold the chin down and the head flexed for the next surge. Mary writhed and yelled. I yelled back at her, urging her to push, and push harder, desperate when she surrendered just short of the ultimate effort, and I felt the baby slip back again. Finally, in a slick of blood and brown matter, there he was—a small, slippery boy. And a moment later, he was yelling, too.
Randoll burst through the blanket-door when he heard his lusty son, and his big miner’s hand fluttered like a moth from the damp head of the babe to his wife’s flushed cheek and back again, as if he didn’t know which of them he most wanted to touch. Elinor threw open the shutters as I gathered up the stained cloths, and it was only as the fading light entered the room that I realized we hadn’t cut the navel cord. We sent Randoll for a knife and a piece of thread while Mary expelled the glistening afterbirth. Mrs. Mompellion made the cut and bound it up. I looked at her, all disheveled, spattered with blood, and imagined myself looking worse. We laughed. And, for an hour, in that season of death, we celebrated a life.
But even in the midst of that joy, I knew that I would have to leave the babe nursing at his mother’s breast and return to my own cottage, silent and empty, where the only sound that would greet me would be the phantom echoes of my own boys’ infant cries. And so, before we took our leave of the Daniels, I found the phial of poppy in Mrs. Mompellion’s whisket. I closed my hand upon it, stealthy as a practiced thief, and plunged it, deep, into the sleeve of my dress.
So Soon to Be Dust
MAGGIE CANTWELL CAME BACK to us in a handcart. It was a chill morning, and a moist fog hung low in the valley, so it was difficult to descry exactly what was in the cart edging its slow way up the hill, with a slight figure behind, bent double, toiling under the load.
Jakob Merrill, the widower who lived nearest the Boundary Stone, ran out of his dwelling to wave the carter away, thinking that perchance he was some peddler, a poor soul from a far town who had blundered toward us ignorant of the perils of this place. But the boy trudged on, and eventually Jakob saw that the bundle in the cart was a human form, all slumped, and finally he recognized the carter. It was hard to make out his features, even as he drew clear of the fog, for he was spattered from head to foot with the damp brown debris of rotten fruit. But as he toiled closer, Jakob recognized him as young Brand, the pantry boy from Bradford Hall.
Brand all but collapsed when he reached the stone, his legs folding up under him. Jakob, quickly comprehending the extremity of their state, dispatched his boy, Seth, to carry the news to the rector, while he set a cauldron of water to heat and told his elder daughter to bring cloths so Brand could clean himself. I was at the rectory when the child arrived with the news. As I helped the rector with his hat and coat, I asked if I might ride back with him to see if I could comfort poor Maggie. When we drew up, Maggie still lay in the cart, it being beyond Jakob Merrill’s strength to remove her. He had thrown a horse blanket across her, to give her warmth, but when he removed it, my first thought was that it had but covered a corpse, so blue was she with the cold, and so odd was the arrangement of her limbs. The small cart was insufficient to contain her big body, so her beefy calves and heavy arms spilled out over the sideboards. One of her stockings had a large rip, and the flesh had rushed to the hole, pushing out like sausage meat from a split casing. But it was her face that was most shocking.
When I was a girl, it had pleased me to make poppets for Aphra’s little ones. I would form the bodies of plaited grainstalks and then fashion faces from the yellow clay that lay at the base of the sillions. Sometimes, if my effort did not satisfy me, I would drag my hand across the face and begin again, trying for a more humanlike effect. The right side of Maggie Cantwell’s face looked like a smear of clay that an impatient potter had likewise disfigured. While the left side, under the mess of dried-on fruit pulp, looked as vivid as e
ver, the right was a blur, the eye all but closed and seeping, the cheek drooped and the mouth a drooling sneer. Maggie strained to turn her head to take us in with her one good eye, and when she recognized me she gave a sound that was half moan, half shudder and reached for me with a flailing left arm. I clasped her hand, kissed it, and told her all would be well, although I knew that very likely it would not.
Mr. Mompellion did not waste time on words but went quickly to work with Jakob Merrill to get poor Maggie from the cart into the cottage. It took all their strength to accomplish this in a seemly way, for though Maggie was conscious, she was barely so, nor did she have command of her limbs. Mr. Mompellion squatted down behind and wrapped his arms around her chest while Jakob gripped her fleshy legs. The rector did speak then, soothingly, to poor Maggie, to try to blunt the indignity as he and Merrill heaved her into the croft. Inside, young Brand, clean now, sat wrapped in a rough blanket before the fire. Jakob Merrill’s daughter, Charity, handed him a steaming mug of mutton broth, and he gripped it so tightly in his two hands that I thought the thing might shatter. Charity held up a blanket for a screen as I stripped off Maggie’s befouled garments and bathed her, while Mr. Mompellion crouched beside Brand and inquired gently as to what had happened.
It seemed they had had an uneventful journey through Stoney Middleton; the people there, while keeping a distance, had called out their good wishes as they passed through and had left a parcel of oatcake and a flask of ale for them at the milestone. Farther along the road, a farmer had allowed them to sleep the night amongst his cows in their warm shippon. The trouble had come in the larger town of Bakewell. It was market day when they arrived there nigh on noon, and the streets were crowded. Suddenly, someone had recognized Maggie and raised a shout: “A woman from the Plague village! Beware! Beware!”