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Charity’s Burden: A Quaker Midwife Mystery © 2019 by Edith Maxwell.
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For Amesbury’s historical museums:
the John Greenleaf Whittier Home Museum,
Amesbury Carriage Museum, and Bartlett Museum.
Thank you for keeping local history alive, and for helping me with nineteenth-century details large and small.
Author’s Note
I came across an article about the infamous Madame Restell before I wrote this manuscript. She was Ann Trow Lohman, a self-trained midwife who also performed surgical abortions and sold abortifacients to women in New York City in the mid-nineteenth century. She opened a boarding house where women could give birth safely, but was much maligned. She was called the Wickedest Woman in New York and the Abortionist of Fifth Avenue. Kate Manning wrote a novel, My Notorious Life, based on Lohman’s life and named the Lohman character Madame DeBeausacq. I then read Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth Century America by Janet Farrell Brodie and decided I had my theme for the fourth Quaker Midwife Mystery, modeling my own Madame Restante on the infamous Restell.
In this book I mention John Greenleaf Whitter’s “The Golden Wedding of Longwood,” although the poet himself does not make an appearance this time.
Many thanks to Patty Hoyt, Education Coordinator at the Lowell’s Boat Shop in Amesbury, who gave me a personalized tour of the working museum. Lowell’s is the oldest continually operating boat shop in the country, and has been making sturdy and graceful wooden boats since 1793. I set several scenes in this book in the shop.
John Douglass was a real physician in Amesbury, but I’m sure he was a much more congenial man than I portrayed him in this book. My apologies to his descendants. Amesbury reference librarian Margie Walker continues to be helpful with whatever I ask her about local history and I thank her.
Nancy A. Pope, Curator/Historian at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum, kindly shared information about post office boxes in the late nineteenth century. I attended an invaluable kitchen-centered presentation in a nineteenth-century mansion in Wiscasset, Maine, presented by Historic New England, and several historic lectures and walking tours sponsored by the Amesbury Carriage Museum. I continue to refer constantly to the Online Etymology Dictionary to make sure the words my characters utter are authentic. Obviously, any remaining errors in historical detail are of my own doing.
The ubiquitous research tool YouTube enabled me to watch videos of equine births. Thanks to fellow authors (and people with horse experience) Annette Riggle Dashofy and Martha Reed for checking my foaling scene.
one
The crimson on the rag Charity Skells removed from between her legs was too bright. Blood soaked the long strip of muslin. The painfully thin woman bent into herself, her arms crossed over her emptying womb.
“Am I dying, Rose?”
I silently prayed she wasn’t. I stroked her hair back off her damp brow. “Of course not. But I need to have a doctor see thee.” I am a skilled and experienced midwife, but this was too much bleeding for an early-term miscarriage. I opened a drawer, looking for more cloths. A pamphlet printed on red paper lay half buried in a stack of neatly folded linens.
I glanced around the threadbare bedroom where a note from my client had summoned me this frigid Second Month morning. “Does thee have a telephone?” I was certain she didn’t. My modest home a mile away had acquired one of the new devices only a month ago.
She shook her head without looking up. “But I’m going to put one in. When I get the money.”
The money? What money? Maybe she meant her husband’s next pay from the boat shop, but surely that would go first to food, clothing for the children, and paying off debts. He had been working for Lowell’s a scant few months.
“I won’t let Ransom say no.” She smiled sadly. “When we first married, he said yes so very often. He was always sweet with me, Rose.”
“I am sure he loves thee very much.” I hadn’t seen him be publicly sweet with her, but one never knew what went on behind closed doors in the life of a married couple.
A moan escaped Charity’s lips.
“I’ll take thee in my buggy. We must move along quickly, though.” I grabbed the last of the rags on the dresser and handed them to her. The small Methodist hospital was only a short distance up Market Street, and my beau, David Dodge, had insisted I accept the loan of a dun-colored gelding named Peaches and a doctor’s buggy for the winter months. I was grateful today I didn’t have to waste time trying to hail a hansom cab.
After I helped her into her coat, wincing at the frayed cuffs and thin fabric, I wrapped a woolen shawl closely over her head and around her neck.
As we made our way down the front steps, I asked, “Where are the younger children today?” Charity was a Quaker like myself, and despite being a scant five years older than my twenty-seven, was the mother of six. The oldest, a friend of my niece Betsy Bailey, was only nine. She and the next three siblings would be at the Whittier Grammar School today.
“Mother took them.” Her voice was barely a whisper.
“Good.” Transporting a toddler and a four-year old to the hospital along with their very ill mother would have been an added burden. In the buggy, I tucked the traveling blanket securely around Charity and clucked to the ever-patient Peaches. The ten o’clock sun struggled to light the day, but an icy cloud cover barely allowed it. I sniffed the damp metallic scent of snow in the air.
It took less than fifteen minutes to arrive at the hospital; much faster than if we’d attempted the trip over the Merrimack River to the larger Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport. Charity didn’t have
that kind of time. This hospital building looked no different on the outside than any other home built by a wealthy merchant or mill owner. A mansard roof covered the square house, with open shutters framing large graceful windows. I handed Peaches off to a waiting stable boy and helped Charity up the wide steps to the front door.
The building’s inside made it clear this was not a private residence. The air smelled of disinfectant and to either side of the foyer I glimpsed wards full of beds. A nurse wearing a starched full-length pinafore glanced up from a desk, where a small metal nameplate identified her as Nurse Jeanne Peele. I kept my arm firmly around Charity’s bony shoulders, afraid she’d fall if I didn’t.
“I am Rose Carroll, midwife, and this is my client Charity Skells, who summoned me an hour ago. I believe she is having a miscarriage, but the bleeding is excessive.”
“I’m Nurse Peele. Welcome.” She blinked and her eyebrows went up when she gazed at Charity’s face, now the color of bleached linen. The nurse stood and hurried to a corner under the stairs, wheeling a wicker chair to Charity.
Charity slumped into the seat, closing her eyes with a faint moan. Her coat fell apart, revealing a dark blossom on the skirt of her light gray dress. I pressed my lips together. The bleeding had worsened during our short ride. I followed the nurse as she pushed the chair through the women’s ward at our left to the only empty bed at the end of the room. A young nurse without stripes on her starched cap hurried over and helped Charity onto the bed.
“I’ll get Doctor,” the nurse said. “Miss Gifford, see that Mrs. Skells is warm. She’ll need fresh rags for the bleeding.”
“Yes, Nurse Peele.” The student curtsied.
“Come with me, Miss Carroll, and give me a history as we go.”
“She’s an impoverished mother of six, Jeanne.” I kept up with her brisk stride through the halls of an addition to the back of the house. “She birthed a premature baby at the end of Eleventh Month—
November—that was too small to survive. Her husband had been out of work and I believe Charity was going hungry so her children would not. I was discouraged to learn she thought she was with child again. I’ve been encouraging her to space her pregnancies, but whatever measures she’s been taking clearly aren’t working.”
The nurse sniffed. “And Mr. Skells likely refuses to use a safe, am I correct?”
A safe, one of the many euphemisms for a male prophylactic sheath. “That is what Charity says, yes.”
Jeanne Peele shook her head. “A man who disregards his wife’s health isn’t worth her affections.”
two
I sat at Charity’s side an hour later, stroking her hand, her cool skin as pale as the pillow slip beneath her head. She lay resting with blankets up to her chin. The doctor had prescribed extract of ergot to contract the uterus, which should stanch the bleeding—a remedy I could have given—but otherwise had no real help for her. The student nurse had cleaned Charity and dressed her in a cotton gown, with plentiful cloths wedged between her legs to absorb the blood. The flow at least now ebbed, but she had lost so much of life’s precious fluid. I closed my eyes and held her in the Light of God that she might survive this onslaught to her health.
Could her bleeding truly be a miscarriage? I thought back to the date she’d birthed her premature baby at the end of Eleventh Month. Surely she couldn’t have ovulated before First Month, in which case this pregnancy would be in its initial phase. On the other hand, she clearly had a healthy fertility or she wouldn’t have had seven pregnancies—maybe eight—in ten years. And if Ransom, her husband, had forced himself on her while she was still recovering from the lost child, it was certainly possible that she was miscarrying today. Still, I was surprised at the extreme way her body was expelling the tiny, tiny fetus. Often women merely thought it was a late and heavy monthly when they lost a pregnancy at this stage.
The life of a hospital ward bustled around us. A woman cried out in pain from the other end of the large room. An older lady with lips pressed together shuffled past gripping a cane, as if each step hurt but she was determined to be active and recover from what ailed her. A nurse brought a syringe to a young woman sitting up two beds away, and a man mopped the hall beyond the open door, bringing a fresh wave of acrid disinfectant. Still, it was better than the scent of disease.
Charity’s eyes fluttered and opened. She turned her head slowly toward me. I leaned in.
“Rose, don’t let Ransom get the money.”
The money again. “What money, Charity?” I asked gently.
She gave a creaking moan. “I am sorry. May God forgive me.” She closed her eyes again, lashes dark against the bruised-looking skin under them.
“For what, Charity? A miscarriage is not thy fault.”
“No. Ask Orpha,” she whispered. “She warned me not to go to …” Her voice trailed off into a murmur I couldn’t understand.
Orpha? Ask my elderly teacher and mentor what? Where had she warned Charity not to go? Of course Charity knew Orpha Perkins, because she had delivered Charity’s first babies, the fifth with me as apprentice. I’d caught babies six and seven after Orpha retired and I took over her business.
As I watched, Charity’s mouth fell open. Her breathing became labored, raspy. My heart filled with the sad certainty that these were her last moments on this earth. I beckoned to Jeanne Peele, who hurried over, but I did not release Charity’s cool hand. The nurse sat on the other side of the bed and we held the death vigil together.
I kept my finger on my client’s barely detectable pulse as I tried to pray for her, but instead my thoughts turned to imaginary remedies. Would that we had a medicine to more effectively stop bleeding, or the means to replace all the blood she had lost. I had read about experiments in England to transfuse blood from a healthy donor to a patient suffering with extreme loss from hemorrhage. So far there were as many deaths from the procedure as lives saved. Perhaps blood from one person was incompatible with blood from another. Regardless, it was too late to take such a risky step with Charity. Had I done all I could to save her? I believed I had, and only wished there was more in my power to do.
She didn’t breathe for a long minute, then gasped in another breath. But this one was her last. Under my fingers her pulse ceased and she became still. The nurse glanced at me and I nodded my head once. I reached over and gentled Charity’s eyes closed as I held her released soul in the Light.
three
Outside some minutes later, I considered my next step. My first obligation was to convey the sad news to Lowell’s Boat Shop, where Ransom Skells was employed. This was the worst part of my job—the rest of which I loved—telling a husband his wife’s life had been extinguished. I always questioned my care—could I have done something differently to save the woman’s life? Certainly not in Charity’s case. Knowing that fact didn’t make it any easier to tell a man his cherished spouse was gone. I also yearned to talk with Orpha and learn about her conversation with Charity, but that would have to wait.
After Peaches was underway reversing our route on Market Street back toward town, I reflected that I hadn’t seen Ransom act as if he particularly cherished Charity. At the time I’d attributed his surly moods to his lack of gainful employment. What was a chandler to do when the world had turned to gas lighting instead of candles? These days electricity seemed poised to take over even for gas. Ransom had finally secured a position as a carpenter at Lowell’s Boat shop. At least now he had work, the money from which he was going to need to feed and care for their children. Charity had said he’d been sweet with her at the beginning of their life as a couple. That implied he might not be so sweet now. Maybe he’d been surly because the marriage had turned sour for him. I might never know.
After I slowly made my way through busy Market Square, I pointed the horse up Main Street and continued where the road turned the corner and headed toward the wide Merrimack River some two miles away
. As I passed frozen Pattens Pond in the hollow, I heard a fast clopping approach from behind. My dear friend Bertie Winslow pulled next to me astride her handsome steed, Grover, and kept even with Peaches’s slow, steady pace.
“What news, Rosetta?” she asked with her trademark grin and stylish hat pinned at a rakish angle.
Only Bertie, our town’s unconventional postmistress, used that nickname for me, and I loved it. “Sad tidings, I’m afraid. I lost a client to bleeding from the womb this morning. I’m off to inform her husband he’s now a widower.”
The grin slid off her face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“With six children at home, too.” I shook my head. “It was strange, Bertie. Charity couldn’t have been more than two months along but the blood was copious. She also mentioned something curious about money, and apologized for not doing what Orpha had advised her to do, or not do. I confess to being puzzled.”
“Puzzled? You, the master mystery solver?”
It was true. I had assisted the police in the investigations of several murders in the past year. I seemed to have a facility for noticing odd behavior, asking the right questions, and pursuing bits of conversation I heard, often from my pregnant clients. I also had an advantage—I could speak with women about subjects they would be reluctant to discuss with the police, and I heard secrets during the throes of labor. I wouldn’t call myself a master, though.
“You’ll figure it out.” Bertie guided Grover around a dip in the paving stones. “But hold on there. Did you say Charity? Charity Skells?”
“Yes. Does thee know her?”
“I had a disagreement with her oddly named husband. Not a pleasant sort, that one.”
Bertie was unfailingly good-natured with me, but she was also a strong-willed public figure who didn’t tolerate nonsense or bad behavior, no matter the source. I had seen her refuse the mayor of the town in an unreasonable request once.
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