Oh little bird!
Your father bursts into the room at the sound of my giddy relief—was I laughing? He startles at the sight of you naked and trembling in Mrs. B’s hands.
“Is it—”
“Breathing, sir, she is.”
“Oh, darling,” he says, coming to my side. “A little girl.” He half sits on the bed and presses his forehead to mine—his joyful tears, my ragged hair matted against my forehead—as Mrs. B cuts the umbilical cord and washes you with all the ceremony of scrubbing a turnip just plucked from the ground.
“Made us wait for you a good long time, yes you did,” she says, sponging your tiny face and chest.
But I know I have waited for you—for this—all my life.
“Let’s give your limbs some liberty, shall we?” Mrs. B wraps you loosely in cotton cloth and delivers you into my arms. I free the blanket even more, to survey the whole of you, count your fingers, your toes. I can see in your father’s eyes that you aren’t what he expected, or what our gentle confederacy of perfections rarely admits: A child at birth is a shocking thing. Your skin is coated, as if with wax the color of jaundice, so thin it bares the atlas of dark veins beneath. Instead of feathers you have fine white down, barely visible, all over your body; instead of wings, arms like spindles, held tight to your heaving rib cage, not much bigger than your father’s palm, which he holds against your quick-beating heart.
The love, instantaneous!
Mrs. B tells me to hold you to my breast, but with your eyelids too swollen to open, your lips unaccustomed to the ways of sucking, your little beak searches but cannot find me. I see the worry in her eyes; she needn’t say so. You’re too small, your lungs work too hard, each breath a jagged try. But I would tell her I will not let you die, my own life force now inextricably tied to yours, a thousand times knotted together. And though we cannot choose which day we are born, into what time or place, a day chooses us. Never forget, little bird, that the day that chose you comes at the end of a month when a comet blazed across London’s skies, heralding your arrival.
Another girl, in this world!
And so I will tell you the story to fill you up and bind you to this wondrous vale, if you stay with us, little bird. Please stay. I will tell you the moments that begin and end me—because we are made of them all, strung like pearls in time, searching always for where the new circle begins its turn, the place of our next becoming. Where the line becomes an arc, and curves.
Mrs. B
August 31, 1797
“Mary W safe delivered at 11 hours 20 minutes last Evenin of a daughter after a long travail. Placenta not yet delivered,” Mrs. Blenkinsop wrote in her pocket diary when the patient finally slept for a few moments. Mr. Godwin refused to set down the child, but sat in a chair pulled up close to the bed with their “little bird” tight in his arms. Mrs. B thought she ought to rethink him, after her first impression last night when he’d knocked on the door to inquire whether they ought not call a doctor, given the unexpected length of the labor. He’d been told by friends at dinner, and could confirm, having once read in a book, that it is the fashion to call a doctor or at least a male accoucheur to assist, to have the benefit of those with real medical training.
“Not at all necessary, sir. I prefer to trust in Nature,” said Mrs. B. “Great and marvelous is the goodness of Providence.”
“I am an atheist, Mrs. Blenkinsop. That is of no use to me.”
Mrs. B had never met an atheist, but she had encountered nervous men. In her experience, the bigger the brain, the greater the worry. She judged, by the way Mr. Godwin wrung his hands as he spoke, that this was his first birth. He seemed an awkward man, like a stiff chair that hadn’t been sat on enough—the opposite of her own husband, whose life force had always pulsed in his large, rugged hands. Mr. Blenkinsop, whom she’d tried to put out of her mind these last days.
Still, Mr. Godwin was right that it was the custom nowadays, this sending for men, even when it might be no more than a common labor. It would be one thing if they were as old as she, with as much practical experience. Instead Mrs. B saw mostly boyish pretenders who, having attended an anatomy course and seen one or two dissections of female bodies, believed themselves experts in the field, as if they’d invented it themselves. Nothing filled her with more dread than the sight of a chamois leather bag opened to reveal its forceps, perforators, blunt hook, and a pair of bone cutters. She had yet to meet a doctor who believed that doing nothing was the best approach.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blenkinsop,” said Mr. Godwin, patting his glistening forehead with a cambric handkerchief. “I meant nothing by it.”
“Nothing taken, sir. The waiting’s hard, I know, but there’s no cause for worry. None at all.”
She’d seen the way he burst into the room immediately after the birth and sat at the edge of his wife’s bed, right up against her hip, how they pressed their foreheads together, knit their fingers. While she’d attended to the just-born child—scrubbed away the scurf with warm water and wine and put a flannel cap on her head—she couldn’t help hearing Mr. Godwin speak to his wife of a joy he’d never known, how sheltered he’d been before knowing her, and how wrong to let a Miss Pinkerton pursue him of late, how sorry he was for any pain he’d caused her because she must never doubt his love for her, and here was proof of their love, this little girl. As if a child had never been born on this good earth.
Mrs. B was reluctant to ask him to leave his post by his wife’s bed, but Mary looked to be in the afterthroes, which she took to mean that the placenta was soon to follow.
“It’s not finished, then? She’s not out of danger?” Mr. Godwin asked in a furtive whisper.
“There’s no danger, sir, just Nature, taking its time.”
He suggested, more gingerly than before, and with more respect, that they might call a doctor at any point she thought it necessary. She squinched her eyes in agreement, which seemed to satisfy him, but he only consented to leave the room when Mrs. B allowed him to take the child with him. Just for a little while.
“Watch over her, darling,” Mary said with a weak turn of her head.
“I promise,” he said, and forced himself from the room, their eyes not leaving each other’s until the last possible moment.
* * *
Despite two hours of effort, the afterbirth refused to budge. Mrs. B tried her old recipe of hyssop, wild mint, pennyroyal, and balm, good for easing gripes in the belly and cleansing impurities from the womb. Hyssop could even bring away a dead child, but mostly it helped beckon the soft, warm placenta, whole and unto itself, to slide into the midwife’s waiting hands. The less she intervened, the less blood would be lost, she knew, but there was a boundary of time, and they were near it.
When the herbs failed to move things along, Mrs. B gave the cord a gentle tug, then rubbed and pressed on Mary’s belly.
The patient, at the start, was uncomplaining, even cheerful. Never mind her long and arduous labor, Mary now radiated elation at being delivered of her daughter—she was enthralled with her “little bird,” and couldn’t wait for Fanny to meet her new sister. The matter of the placenta seemed an inconvenience she was anxious to have behind her, so she might hold her new babe in her arms, and urge her to suck. This, she’d told Mrs. B, she believed in above all things—that the best sustenance for a newborn child was its mother’s own milk, and the love that flowered between them. But Mary began to tire, and the boundary of time drew closer.
“Will it come on its own?” she asked Mrs. B. “Why isn’t it coming?”
“I think your placenta’s a bit shy.”
“That would be the only thing shy about me.”
“It’s not just yours, it’s hers too. Belonged to both of you.” Mrs. B thought that talking was the best way to ease Mary’s mind. “It’s like a tree, I think,” she said. “How the placenta makes the roots, and the cord is the trunk that grows from the roots, and your little girl is the fruits and flowers of all that.”
“Why shouldn’t she be, then?”
“You have a poetic soul, Mrs. B.” Mary squeezed out a smile and laid her head on the pillow with a sigh.
Mrs. Blenkinsop told her to have a little rest, said they’d take it up again when she woke. She knew she must alert Mr. Godwin to the risk of infection, however unlikely, given that he’d not stopped pacing the hall, and every twenty minutes asked for news through the door. She still believed, by faith and experience, that Nature would take its course, given time.
“It’s hard to think clearly,” Mr. Godwin said, rubbing his temple.
“We could wait till morning, sir.” She was careful not to mention God again.
“But waiting has its own dangers, yes?”
The swaddled child chirped low in her cradle. She seemed to grow weaker by the hour. Mrs. B could tell that her little cries nearly broke Mr. Godwin.
“We’ve a French Dr. Poignand, from the hospital. Maybe it’s for the best.”
Mr. Godwin looked from the cradle to his sleeping wife, his tall forehead collapsing into folds. Mrs. B had seen it before, a husband wrestling with his helplessness. Men believed in action above all.
“What would the missus want? Maybe think of that.”
“Yes,” he said, pressing his kerchief three times across his brow. “What would Mary do?” Mrs. B could see him thinking it through, never taking his eyes off his wife. “To think that not much more than a year ago I believed in my solitariness with the greatest vehemence. There was not a woman in the world worth giving up the life I kept very much for myself, to do and think and write and dine and sleep exactly as I wanted. Marriage, I believed an intolerable oppression, a prison, a compromise I would never make. I was … delineated, and I liked it that way. And now? I can hardly find the line between us. Her thoughts are mine. Her feelings, mine. Our difficulties, ours. I am a different man because of her, Mrs. Blenkinsop.” He looked squarely at the midwife in a way men rarely did. “My love for Mary has freed me from the prison that was my life. And I cannot comprehend going on without her. What man I would then be.”
Mrs. B nodded. There were words he’d said that she didn’t know, but she had the sense of the thing, and was touched by him telling her. In the hundreds of births she’d attended, she could not remember a single man baring his whole soul. Pray, yes. Weep, yes. Punch a wall, she’d seen that too. But never this. She tried to imagine her own husband, what he might say, in far fewer words.
No, she told herself, don’t think of that. She must keep in the room.
Mr. Godwin held the handkerchief to his lips and regarded his wife with a look of despair.
“She would want to live, Mrs. Blenkinsop. For her daughters. But I need her to live … for me.”
* * *
Mrs. B kept both hands bearing down on the missus’s belly, at Dr. Poignand’s instruction. Mary moaned and writhed, her hair stringy with sweat. In moments she fainted altogether, which the midwife counted as a blessing. When conscious, she tried to lift her head to look between her legs. Mrs. B was determined that Mary not see the horror down below, the bloody mess, the doctor up to his elbow inside her, peeling the placenta, piece by piece, from her womb. The pain, she knew, was worse than childbirth itself.
Mrs. B knew a good deal about pain. She was childless herself, not for lack of trying, but that was long ago, so long she hardly remembered what trying was like, though she never forgot the wanting. In the early years, as apprentice to a country midwife, she found herself jealous of the pain that childbirth brought, though she never told a soul. How willing she would have been to suffer it, had she a child to show for it in the end, just one, that’s all she’d asked of Him. Instead, over time she convinced herself that God had spared her from her own travail that she might serve other women in theirs, and with that, her desire gave way to duty, her jealousy, to joy observed. But to pain, she became obedient mistress. To her way of thinking, it wasn’t enough to call a birth “lying-in,” or “groaning,” or “crying-out,” as if a woman could be measured by the amount of noise she made. No, pain had a thousand likenesses, each as different as rough weather, every variation and never two days the same. She had seen women claw at their bedclothes, beat their own thighs, and try to climb the walls in hopes of escape.
But this was pain of another reach.
“Look at me,” said Mrs. B, pointing to her chin. The midwife disapproved of Poignand’s method—of doctors who believed if there was room enough for a child in the womb, surely there was room for a hand. But she had sympathized with Mr. Godwin wanting to do something, anything, that might turn the tide in his wife’s favor. She’d watched him from the window, frantic at being unable to find a carriage in the middle of the night, set off almost at a run for Parliament Street where the doctor lived. She wondered if she’d been too tired to press her point, but it was out of her hands now. Mr. Godwin’d returned shortly before dawn with Poignand, who sprung to action, refusing even almond oil to cleanse his hands.
Mrs. B found it hard to look herself. “Keep your eyes right here,” she said to Mary, tapping the round button of her chin.
Mary, in a delirium, tried again to lift her head, to form her parched lips into words, but couldn’t. It was as if she’d lost her voice altogether, Mrs. B thought, with everyone else talking for her. She squeezed some drops of water from a cloth into Mary’s mouth.
“What is it, dear? Tell me.”
“I want to die, truly,” Mary whispered, “but I cannot leave her.… I am determined.”
Mrs. B pressed the cool cloth to Mary’s brow and clutched her hand. “Then don’t leave her,” she said.
“Both hands on the belly, Blenkinsop,” said Poignand. “And can we not give the poor woman some laudanum?” By now he was sweating too.
“I promised her, Doctor. No laudanum.”
Mrs. B thought she felt Mary squeeze her hand back. She leaned down to her ear. “It’ll soon be over, Mary, God willing. Think of your new little girl.”
But Mary had faded away again, and couldn’t hear. Mrs. B had seen it before. The pain with no name, no sound, neither screams nor breath. A prayer no more use than the tip of a chin.
Mary W
Little bird.
My true life begins not with my birth, but with a death, the shock of which will draw a line in my life that separates everything that’s gone before from all that lies ahead. I was thirteen years old, fiery but unformed, feared the wrath of my parents, hated my brother and my life, loved the countryside and my sweet spaniel, Betsy, who feared nothing, knew only joy.
We’d moved to the little village of Walkington, which, compared with the stink of Spitalfields, I was sure must be Paradise, or as close to it as I’d ever come. Best of all, I’d met a girl, in nearby Beverley, who I was quite sure had all one should ever want in life, and was all anyone should want to be. This day was Jane Arden’s birthday, and the hope that’d sustained me was that I’d be invited to her party. I’d had my one good dress, such as it was, washed and pressed for a week, hanging on a nail at the back of my door, with my pinchbeck quizzing glass, dangling from its velvet ribbon, looped around its collar, my single accoutrement. I’d waited every day for a letter to come, been on my best behavior, not argued, and done my chores in hopes Mama would let me go should the longed-for invitation come. But it hadn’t.
Then my brother crossed me again, and I couldn’t help myself. He was the oldest, best-loved, do-no-wrong Ned, but I knew his secret. My fingers clenched the gathered corners of the kerchief I took from his room and now I stole past the village gates, Betsy cantering beside me. When the bare kiss of spring grazed my cheek, I set down the tied kerchief, pried off my boots, and peeled away my worsted stockings. I knotted them twice around my waist, wondering why all clothing was cumbersome to me, my chemise like a winding-sheet, never mind my practice corset, my skirts. My spaniel crouched, then lunged at my feet, beckoning me to kee
p walking. Papa had tried for a year to make her his hunting dog, but she’d yelp at the blast of gunshots, bury her nose in the hedgerow, and run away when he raised his boot. Betsy was mine now, as loyal a friend as I had (perhaps my only friend, if Jane didn’t prove true), and freed from the necessity of recovering dead birds, she’d become an enthusiast in all things, even tromping on the year’s first columbine, worried about nothing at all.
I started off again, my rage at Ned propelling me, and counted my steps, which is how I measured whether my legs had grown, because there was talk in town of a desirable height for a woman, and I was sure I’d end up too short or too tall, but never just right. My body changed like a brewing storm, every day something new and unwelcome. Not so Jane Arden, whose skin had not a mark on it, where I was a map of imperfections: knobby knees, great white knuckles, freckles all over. She was the open, rolling countryside of those Yorkshire Wolds; I, the bulbous rocks and uneven ground beneath my feet. I imagined her parlor the best in all of Beverley. Even her French was impeccable, her grammar irreproachable, and I, a pretender, with dull pens my brother Ned refused to fix for me.
I confess I even wished her father were my father, for I couldn’t separate Jane from John Arden, with their noble noses and keen gray eyes. For weeks I’d secreted myself in the back row at his scientific lectures, pretending to be a Beverley girl. He spoke of things beyond all my knowing, of electricity and gravity, of “animalcules,” invisible to the eye, that are borne by the air and reach all the way inside of us. I could see she was his daughter by the way she looked at him with pride from the front row, only occasionally staring out the window, when I could see her long neck and regal profile. Finally, with jangling nerves, I introduced myself to her, Jane of the fine manners. Wanting to impress, I pretended to know things I’d only just learned. But she smiled as she took my cold hand in her gloved one. Here was a buzzing electrical current; here, gravitational pull. This, then, was the science of my heart. I had a sudden determination to overcome any obstacle to possess her friendship. I wrote her my first letter that night, and one every day after, with a third as many replies from her, polite enough. She didn’t know that it burned like a bonfire—a bone fire—inside me, the desperate wishing for her life to be mine, or for some sign of returned and equal affection, some inkling that she found me worthwhile.
Love and Fury Page 2