Blackberry and Wild Rose

by Sonia Velton

  31

  Sara

  “Oh, my eyes,” muttered Moll, as she fumbled with my stays to loosen them. I was just wishing that Madam had not left me alone with her when she flew back into the room. She slammed the door behind her, then wedged the back of a chair under the handle.

  I wanted to ask what she had seen that had made her face flush and her hands tremble, but even if I had tried to speak, I would not have been able to. The only noise that would come out was an animalistic groan. Moll helped me to lie back on the bed and I rested there a while.

  Madam armed herself with a piece of damp linen, then pushed up my skirts. Shame spread through me, hot and searing, like the pain. But I was helpless. I had lost control of my body and mind, and my dignity had disappeared with them.

  There was a dog that used to roam around Spital Square. He belonged to Mr. Proby, a mad old merchant from the house next door. I think he used to forget to feed it, because whenever I emptied the kitchen scraps outside, there that dog would be, panting and slobbering all over them. It was a strange thought to come into my mind then, but I thought of that animal as I lay there panting. I couldn’t stop. The racking pain had abated, and I was left in a strange limbo, the baby neither in nor out, myself neither awake nor unconscious, and strange thoughts of old Mr. Proby’s dog drifting through my mind.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  Madam’s exclamation pulled me out of myself. She would never normally use those words. I raised my head a little and saw her staring down as if the Devil himself was clawing his way out of me.

  “What is it?” Moll asked. Madam just gave a small shake of her head. Moll left off sponging at my forehead and went to stand next to her. She tried to hide it, but I could see horror all over her face.

  “Oh, ma’am,” she breathed. “I’ve seen this before.”

  “Before?” said Madam. “I thought you had never seen a baby born?”

  “No, ma’am, the cows.” She hushed her voice, but I could still hear her—there was nothing wrong with my ears. “Back home, before I ever came to London, one of our cows delivered this way. Nothing but the little mite’s tail hanging out there was. Went on like that for hours until it finally dropped onto the straw in a sticky heap. The cow bent down and tried to lick the life back into it, but it never so much as opened its eyes.”

  All the time Moll was talking, Madam was looking at me. I held her gaze, between the panting and the groaning, and I saw her give that determined little jut of her chin. The one that meant she’d decided something that will happen, no matter what.

  “We need help,” she said.

  Moll rolled her eyes as if she were talking to the village idiot. “Have you clean forgot that there is near every weaver in Spitalfields outside baying for the master’s blood?”

  “Monsieur Finet,” said Madam. “Where is he? He can find someone.”

  “He jumped out of the kitchen window at the first sign of trouble, ma’am. And I’m beginning to wish I’d done the same.” For an instant, the image of Finet heaving his great frame out of the tiny kitchen window filled my mind and, had my body not been racked again with pain, I might have laughed.

  Madam came to the head of the bed and knelt beside me.

  “Sara, who is the father? You must tell me, so I can go and get him. He must help you or find someone who can.”

  I couldn’t have answered her if I had tried. In that moment, I could hardly think myself who the father was. Even the pain had begun to dull, receding like a wave ebbing back from the beach. I was taking leave of my senses. I searched my body for the pain, willing it back. It was the only thing anchoring me to this world.

  Madam turned back to Moll. “You must go and find Bisby Lambert. He will help us, surely.”

  “Go and find him?” squealed Moll. “You cannot mean it, ma’am. I will die out there and no mistake!”

  “And Sara and the child will die if we stay here doing nothing.” I saw Moll’s eyes flick down toward me and, even in my addled state, I knew what lay behind them. She cared not a jot whether I lived or died.

  She leaned in toward Madam. “Would that be such a bad thing? I mean, what hope is there for a babe born to an unwed servant? We could save him, and he will still end in the poorhouse.”

  “Which is exactly where you will be if you don’t fetch help.”

  Moll flinched as if Madam had clipped her ear. She should have known that if there was to be a choice between her and me she did not have a strong hand to play. She gave me a glance as she reached for her shawl. Words were beyond me, but I glared at her with a look that told her I would not forget what she had just said.

  Madam pressed her ear to the door. When she judged that it was as safe as it would ever be, she unlocked it and pushed Moll out onto the landing.

  Esther

  Sara gave a low moan, quite unlike the screams of even a few minutes before. Her whole countenance had changed. She no longer looked as though she was even trying. The fight, like the color in her cheeks, seemed to have leached out of her. I brought a cup of water to her lips and bade her drink, but she shook her head and dropped back onto the pillows.

  As I looked at her I was reminded of the first time I had seen her outside the Wig and Feathers. I heard the same voice in my head telling me to walk away. What would my life have been like if I had done just that? What if I sat on the edge of the bed now and did nothing more to help her? Sara was as cantankerous as a crab, but there was something about her that had always drawn me to her. I went to the pot by the fire and dipped a muslin into the hot water. Then I wiped my hands with the steaming cloth.

  Sara had started to pant again, but her breaths were ragged, coming out as little gasps followed by periods when I thought she had stopped breathing altogether. I looked again at the infant’s foot protruding from her. The other seemed to be tucked beneath him, as if he were scrabbling to climb back inside. In the few minutes that had passed since Moll left, the foot had started to turn gray and waxy. Even if Moll managed to find Bisby, there was no time to get help now.

  “We are going to get him out, Sara.” My voice was firm, the same voice I had used countless times before, telling her which gown I wished to wear or when dinner should be served. She did not respond, but it did not matter: I was telling myself as much as her. I reached up to that crumpled little foot and tried to grab the ankle. Then Sara gave a piercing cry and I could feel her try to expel the infant from her. At the same time there was a frantic rattling at the door. Was it Moll come back, or one of the rioters trying to get in? I waited for Moll to call out if it was her, but then the door handle stopped twisting and everything was quiet, save for Sara’s ragged breaths.

  I worried at the baby’s bent leg again as Sara pushed, and suddenly it came free. I cried out in delight as more of the child slid out, readying myself to catch it. But it stopped halfway out with its little arms still inside. There was no way that the baby’s head could be born with the arms alongside it.

  I felt tears of frustration prick my eyes and I swiped the back of my hand across my face. Sara must not see me cry, I chided myself. I must try harder. When my sister had been in childbed, the midwife had not given up so easily. She had pulled and twisted at the creature inside Anne as if she was uprooting borage from the garden. I was scared to hurt Sara, but when I looked at her clammy face, her gray pallor against the white of my pillows, I took a deep breath and held that tiny body more tightly. Then I twisted it round, hoping to slide the arms away from its ears. Sara cried out, but I kept twisting. I hooked one finger up as far as I could and felt for the little arm. When I found it, I curled my finger around it and pulled it down. Then I twisted the baby in the opposite direction to dislodge the other arm. I felt around for that arm too and managed to slide it out.

  “Sara,” I said, supporting the infant in my hands. “Try again, we are almost there.” But she was silent, so si
lent that I could hear a great clattering of hooves in the square outside and the distant sound of a bugle.

  “Sara,” I said, through the tears now rolling freely down my cheeks, “it’s over. The King’s men must be here—I can hear them.”

  I saw Sara open her eyes, then close them again. I was losing her. I might have been gripping the new life she had produced tight in my hands, but she herself was slipping away from me. In the distance, I heard the bugle sound again. I fancy that Sara might have heard it too, as her body tightened again and then that little child came away from its mother and into my hands.

  It was bloody and greasy as a Christmas bird covered in goose fat. I thought it would slither right out of my hands as I turned it over and slapped it. The baby gave an indignant mewl, proving itself as outraged by the slap as its mother had been earlier that day. I took my fruit knife from its little jeweled case and used it to cut the last rubbery bond connecting Sara to her new child. Then I wrapped the baby in clean linen and handed it to Sara, who was looking around her with almost the same questioning gaze as her newborn.

  I left them for a moment and opened the shutters to see what was going on outside. The square was swarming with mounted cavalrymen and foot soldiers. They were looking around them as if unsure what the fuss had been about. Most of the would-be rioters had disappeared, slipping down the side streets at the first sound of a bugle, no doubt. The soldiers were rounding up anyone left and loading them into carts. And in the center of the square, Elias was mounted on a horse, tugging back on the bridle to quiet the panting animal as its breath clouded in the cold dawn. Then our own front door opened below me and two men came out, each with one arm bent behind his back, marched along by a soldier. The relief curdled in my stomach as I saw one of them was Bisby. When they got near the cart, the soldiers pushed both men up into it and signaled for the driver to move off. I watched them go, their forearms resting on their knees and their bent heads dipping as the cart jolted over the cobblestones.

  32

  Sara

  I stared down at the tufts of matted hair on the baby’s head. The puffy eyelids fused by a line of tiny lashes, the traces of my own blood left from when we were still one person. The little mouth opened to show blunt pink gums and the baby started to mewl.

  “You must feed her, Sara.” Madam was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching me gaze at my newborn. The shutters were wide open behind her and the wintry sunlight flooded into the room, haloing Madam’s reddish-gold hair around her face.

  “Her?”

  Madam smiled. “Yes, her.”

  Balled fists began to battle with the linen as the baby’s cries grew more insistent and she began to root blindly, like a mole. She made me ache for her.

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “A few minutes,” said Madam. “Moll has gone for Mrs. Anstis, but in the meantime we must do what we can on our own.” She leaned forward and loosened the ties of my shift. I sat there mute and passive as a child while she helped me hold the baby to my breast. This was the woman who had seemed unable to lift so much as a powder puff to her own face. This was the woman who had turned from the sight of her own bloodied shifts each month.

  I did my best to feed the baby. She tugged at me in frustrated bursts and pounded me with her little fists until she fell asleep. It was then that the previous night pieced itself together. I looked at Madam and saw the strain etched on her face.

  “What happened last night?” I asked.

  She swallowed hard and turned her face away from me.

  “They took him away,” she said. “The King’s men came and arrested Bisby Lambert and another weaver. I don’t know where they were taken.”

  “And the master? Moll? The house?”

  “Shush, Sara,” she said, placing a hand on my arm. “Rest until Mrs. Anstis gets here.”

  She left then, slipping out of her room as if I were the lady propped up on feather pillows. I allowed myself to sink into them and feel their softness against my back. I wriggled my toes under the downy coverlet and enjoyed the sight of the fine houses of Spital Square out of the window. It was a moment of borrowed time. I was snatching at a life that was not mine. Soon it would be taken from me, like the child pressed against my chest.

  Esther

  I walked through the house as if it belonged to someone else. The parlor was the worst. The window was smashed and the shutters split from the walls. Workmen had already arrived and were busy fitting wood panels over the empty frames to keep out the bitter cold. The room was so altered that it took me a moment to see what was missing. A vase my mother had given me, some silver plate and even an occasional table must have disappeared out of that yawning gap last night. Someone had punched right through Elias’ favorite painting over the hearth so that a flap of canvas now flopped over his ancestor’s face.

  The damage in the rest of the house was not too bad. Once Moll had cleaned everything and the broken windows had been replaced, we would be able to put this behind us. I could not believe that Bisby had been part of this petty looting. Once tempers had calmed, he could help us find who was responsible and then he would be released. I sat down heavily on the stairs. I was feeling the beginning of relief, and with it came a wave of tiredness that made my legs buckle beneath me.

  * * *

  The last place to look was the garret. Nothing could have happened up there and I had decided not to climb the rickety stairs, when I heard footsteps thudding above my head.

  As I lifted the trapdoor, Elias loomed toward me, a sinister shadow against the pale long lights.

  “There you are,” he said. “Where have you been?”

  “Helping Sara Kemp with the baby.”

  Elias drew his lip into a sneer. “Waiting on your own maid? By God, the world really did turn upside down last night. I hope she is out on the street now.”

  “Husband,” I said, putting a hand on his arm, “we cannot do that. They have nowhere to go and it is so cold. I beg you to let them stay a short while.” I searched his face for some flicker of compassion.

  “Did you know about the child?” he asked, accusing.

  “I had thought she would be at the lying-in hospital before it arrived.”

  Elias glared at me. “So you did know. What in God’s name has been going on under my nose these past months?”

  “She will be gone in a few days. The lying-in hospital will take her as soon as she is strong enough to move.”

  I had expected him to glower at even that small inconvenience, but he did not. Instead he said something almost more surprising than anything else that had happened that night. “No,” he said. “Keep her here. Much went on last night and I may yet have a use for her.”

  I had no idea what he meant, but such was my fatigue that I did not probe him further.

  “The damage is not as bad as I feared,” I said, my voice falsely bright.

  “Not bad?” He turned my words into a question, incredulous. “Those journeymen will hang for what they have done to me.”

  “For smashing a window and stealing a vase?” My tiredness was getting the better of me. I had spent the night with Sara as she and her baby hovered between life and death. Everything else now seemed trivial. Elias’ face hardened.

  “No, Mrs. Thorel, not for that. For this.”

  He stood back and I could see the loom behind him. Bisby’s master piece hung in ragged shreds from the heddles, like badly cut hair, and the layers of silk had been cut right through with a single slash running from one end of the roller to the other.

  Elias seemed to be enjoying my reaction. “You see,” he said, nodding at me, as if it were obvious that I must. “Silk cutting is a hanging offense, so he will go to the gallows.”

  “Who did this?”

  Elias smiled. “Your dear friend, of course, Bisby Lambert. He was caught up here by the King
’s men, the cutlass still in his hand.”

  Fatigue clouded my thoughts and made everything seem illusory. I wrapped my arms around myself as if I were cold, but really I sought to protect myself from Elias’ words.

  “Why would he do that? His own master piece!”

  “But it wasn’t, was it? From the moment I turned him out it was never going to be his master piece. It belonged to me, woven on my loom, with all the thread paid for by me. He destroyed it out of vengeance when he knew his chance to be a master was gone!”

  “But another weaver was taken away with Lambert. I saw them. It must have been him.”

  “That would please you, wouldn’t it?” said Elias, stepping closer to me. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help tightening my arms across my chest. “Mrs. Thorel, I don’t care which of them cut my silk, but I care very much which one hangs for it.”

  Then he left, already shouting instructions to the workmen from the top of the stairs. When he had gone I turned slowly toward the back of the room. I hardly dared look at the loom in the corner, but when I did I saw the pale silk stretch undamaged from the warp to the take-up beam, as glorious as it had been the day before. Whatever had gone on last night, my own silk had been left intact, bearing silent witness to whatever else had happened.

  33

  Sara

  Madam put an old cradle in my attic room and banished Moll to the cubbyhole behind the stove. The cradle was made of oak, with delicate scrolls carved around apples, cherries, and flowers. All symbolizing new life and fruitfulness, although perhaps not the fruitfulness of an unwed maid. I wondered whether Madam had ever imagined that the bastard of a whore would lie there instead of her own child. Still, my baby looked bonny in it, swaddled into a little white tube, like the larva of some strange insect. I left her there sleeping and went downstairs to the kitchen to eat.