by Anne Groß
“Let me have her a minute.” Elise said, and carefully took the bundle from her mother’s arms. Edwina’s little belly was round and soft; her skin was pink. All good. Her grip reflex wasn’t very strong, however. Elise pressed her ear to the soft baby’s chest to listen for breathing and heart rate. With her nose so near to Edwina’s head, she caught an unwelcome scent. “Is that alcohol? I do NOT smell alcohol, do I? Why is there alcohol on your baby’s breath?”
Amanda’s laugh tinkled. “Oh, Lady Letchfeld was here and brought me a little bottle of the major’s brandy. Wasn’t that kind? She suggested I give Edwina a thimble full. She said it’s the best tonic for a newborn. Can you imagine? I never in my wildest dreams thought anyone like the major’s wife would pay me a visit, much less bring me a gift. Wasn’t that kind of her?”
“Mystery solved,” Elise drawled. “Your kid’s too drunk to suck.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It was just a little nip from the bottle. Nothing more than a thimble-full, a mere tonic. Lady Letchfeld would never suggest Edwina get cut and fuddled. It’s only for quieting her.”
“What does she know? Does Lady Letchfeld have a baby?”
“You’ve no baby neither,” Amanda’s bottom lip jutted stubbornly, “and she’s a Lady.”
“Just because the woman is richer than me, doesn’t make her smarter than me. I swear if I catch you giving that baby any more liquor I will hurt you,” Elise said, looking directly into Amanda’s eyes. “How’s that for the voice of authority? I. Will. Hurt. You. You know what? Just give it to me. Give me the brandy.”
Amanda’s eyes welled with tears. “No! Lady Letchfeld gave it to me as a gift.”
“And my gift to you is taking it away. You’ll kill Edwina with this shit.” Elise held the baby like a football in one arm and used her free hand to work the bottle out of Amanda’s grip. With the bottle safely in Elise’s apron pocket, she gave Amanda an awkward side-hug, which wasn’t well received.
A fat tear dropped onto the baby’s head. “Oh God, don’t do that.” Elise hugged Amanda again, tighter. “Look, nobody cares if Edwina fusses. Everyone on this ship expects it. Babies are supposed to cry.”
Amanda wiped her arm across her eyes.
“And anyway,” Elise continued, “it’s not like you have an instruction manual. You’ll make lots of mistakes, and get a lot of bad advice. That’s ok. I’ll help as much as I can. Has Mrs. Gillihan been around to see you yet?”
Amanda nodded. “She’s been very helpful. She shared her rations with me this morning. She said I have to feed myself to feed the baby.”
“Ok. Good.” Elise nodded, thinking guiltily of the breakfast she’d gobbled down. “Mrs. Gillihan’s had babies. Listen to her, not Lady Letchfeld. She knows what she’s talking about.”
“Is anyone there?” came a loud voice from behind the curtain. “I say, knock, knock.”
From the floor where she was seated, Elise lifted one corner of the brown wool blanket and found herself face to knee with a pair of muscular legs encased in white stockings. Looking up, she saw a red-haired man with a pathetically thin mustache. George Russell was now the picture of health, with pink cheeks instead of green ones and a brocade waistcoat covering most of the vomit stains on his linen shirt. He smiled broadly. “Ah. Mrs. Ferrington, is it not? Your servant, madam.” He bowed formally. “I’m jolly glad to see you here—I was concerned you might have lost your nerve.”
“Nope, I’m here. Still have my nerve,” Elise smiled. “What’s up?”
Russell’s eyes widened and in the ensuing silence, he made a big show of clearing his voice while Amanda elbowed Elise hard.
“Mrs. Peter Collins, I presume?” Russell finally said, giving Elise a meaningful look.
Elise blushed, realizing her mistake. Hastily, and somewhat awkwardly, she made a formal introduction.
“And may I present Mr. Andrew Jenkins, my assistant.” A thin man behind Russell loomed, a consequence of being too tall under the low ceiling. Jenkins barely nodded. “Your servant,” he muttered insincerely before turning to stare blankly at something on the leeward side of the deck.
“And how is the new mother then?” Russell asked.
“Doing well,” Elise announced. “Baby’s heart and bowel sounds are within normal limits. No abdominal distention, feeding well, neural reflexes—”
“The patient is not bound, sir,” Jenkins interrupted as he peered over the surgeon’s shoulder into the enclosure.
“Not bound? Good God! Jenkins, you are correct! My dear Mrs. Collins, why are you not bound?” Russell looked accusingly at Elise. “Why on Earth is she not bound?”
“Bound?” Elise couldn’t imagine what he was talking about.
“Yes. Bound. Bound.” He glared, waiting for the word to explain itself. Finally, when Elise showed no understanding, he explained in a sarcastically slow and steady tone, “One cannot allow bad air to enter the womb, can one?”
“Bad air?”
“Think, Mrs. Ferrington. Think! Details such as these are important. Noting details can make the difference between those that live and those that die.”
“Die?” Amanda sniffed once, quietly, then a second time with more conviction, as if she’d made the decision that yes, an emotional reaction to the situation was indeed warranted. Elise shot a glance at her and narrowed her eyes, waiting. Amanda’s chin trembled hard enough to turn her lower lip into a soft pucker of unhappiness. “Why didn’t you bind me?” The tears finally spilled as she slapped her thighs together. “I am lost. LOST. The vapors will be the death of me.”
“The what?”
Russell shook his head. “I must say, Mrs. Ferrington, I’m quite disappointed in your performance thus far. I was led to believe you were an experienced nurse. I am one assistant short and hoped, despite the obvious disadvantage of your being a member of the fairer sex, you’d be able to aid us. But I see now,” continued Russell, “that Jenkins and I will have to bear the burden ourselves.” His lips were pressed thin as he quickly tied Amanda’s thighs together with a muslin bandage. Then he reached into the cross-body bag he was wearing and handed Jenkins a brass bowl. “There’s nothing for it, I’ll have to bleed her. Let’s hope this will be enough to keep away puerperal fever.” He rummaged again in his bag for a lancet while Amanda compliantly held out her arm.
“Are you nuts?” Elise exploded. “Bleed her? How can that possibly be a good idea?”
Russell froze. His two brows melded into one over his hazel eyes and his mustache twitched. “Might I have a word, Mrs. Ferrington? In private.” He held the corner of the blanket up, indicating that Elise should exit with him.
“My dear Mrs. Ferrington,” he began, stepping well away from the Collins’s corner. “I will not have you questioning my orders. This is very bad business, very bad indeed. Should you do so again in such a shocking manner I will have you flogged and sent back home on the first returning ship.”
“Promise? No really, I’m scared.”
The surgeon’s eyes widened in surprise.
“How old are you anyway, Doc? You seem pretty young to be so dismissive. You think binding her thighs is going to keep away puerperal fever? Show me the clinical research that backs up that idea. No? No research? Is all you have anecdotal evidence?” Elise watched the surgeon’s chest expand as he filled his lungs and opened his mouth to object. Then he seemed to change his mind and the objection never came. Instead he cocked his head, puzzled. He wasn’t very tall, nor was he muscular, but he had nice wide shoulders that widened further when he was mad.
“Save it,” she said as he opened his mouth again. “Bleed her if you want. Tie her up. What do I care? It won’t make any difference. She’s fine, no thanks to you. She’s fine because of me. Because I brought her through the birth. I did. Me.”
“Now see here, madam. I have been in the surgical theatre since I was sixteen years old and never in all my years—”
“All eighteen of them?”
“
How dare you.”
“Whatever, kid,” Elise walked away. “Have at it.”
The air grew lighter as she climbed from the dank deck where the army was quartered to the first gun deck, as though she was rising from thick valley smog into clear mountain air. Elise noted bleakly how the presence of weaponry required a high level of cleanliness, whereas no effort had been made to clean the deck for the foot soldiers. The black cannons with their noses up against closed ports were ready to spit iron out into the ocean. Elise empathized. She seethed over the conversation she’d had with George Russell. How could he possibly believe puerperal fever was due to bad air entering a patient’s uterus? She couldn’t quite believe she’d just been dressed down for not having tied Amanda’s thighs together. The surgeon’s pairing of the words, “fairer” and “sex” did nothing to soothe her rage, either.
Elise ran down the length of the second gun deck, past resting sailors on the first watch who looked up at her in surprise. “Get out of my way,” Elise yelled at a man who happened to be walking towards a coil of rope at the same time she leaped over it. Hitching her skirt above her knees, she rushed to get ahead of a large group of men who were making their way up to the weather deck.
“Oy! What’s the rush? No need for pushing,” the men protested.
She pushed anyway and emerged into the world sucking in sharp ocean air like a drowning woman. Tears began flowing down her cheeks. Everything smelled clean and expansive, like possibility and self-actualization—two things that were now out of reach.
She didn’t bother to drop her skirts as she ran towards the mainmast, loving the way her legs felt as the sun and air hit them for the first time in weeks. Her bare feet slapped against the wet decking and left dirty footprints in her wake.
On the forecastle, two officers on watch pointed towards her when she grabbed the ratlines to stand on the ship’s rail. A wave hit the side of the ship and she held on against the force of the spray, squeezing her eyes shut against the stinging saltwater, curling her toes. Then she began to climb.
“You there! Get down this instant,” called a sailor. She climbed faster. This time, she would climb her way out of the nightmare she’d fallen into.
A MAN’S A MAN
“Prime and load!” shouted Sergeant Taylor.
Thomas pulled a cartridge out of the cartridge box slung over his shoulder and tore the paper cylinder open with his teeth, poured gun powder into the pan of his musket, then dropped the ball and paper into the muzzle. The movements were second nature, given all the mind-numbing, earsplitting drills he’d had to do since joining up. All the men were bored with tossing off musket balls. They could fire three rounds a minute with their eyes closed. But now that the weather was finally clearing, he had to admit it was a nice diversion. He was mostly curious to see if Sergeant Taylor would give the order to fire at an inopportune moment. It was one thing to lob musket balls when the ship was directed down into the trough of a wave, but entirely different when the ship’s bow heaved. He half hoped Taylor would get it wrong.
The strategy of drilling the buggered enlisted men until they all stood on the edge of madness was an ancient gift passed down from his Lordship to his damned Lordship, Thomas was sure of it. How else do you get men to kill each other without provocation? Drill them every day while filling the empty halls of their heads with thoughts of duty and honor. Every day was nothing but endless horizons on the ocean, endless jacket buttons that needed polishing for inspection, endless lines for rations, endless drilling, endless waiting, endless waiting, endless waiting.
The landed classes in England were scared of what had happened in France. They were scared of the ideals of France, of commonality between men, of minds meeting minds without thought of stature or birth. So what to do? It was brilliant, really. Send the common rabble to war against the very nation that rose against hierarchy so none would get any inkling of what the French were actually up to. None would feel the draw of the Revolution if they were too busy spilling revolutionaries’ blood. But I know, Thomas thought. They couldn’t fool him.
Anyway, it was all unnecessary effort. England would never rise up against her King. England wasn’t France. In England, a man like him, a jumped-up street urchin turned barman with no known family, could read a thousand books, entire libraries even, and still not have an opinion that mattered to anyone. In England, only gentlemen were allowed to have opinions, and grown orphans, men from the gutters, kept their heads down. In France, a man was a man, equal, as God intended. But Thomas was an Englishman through and through, so it didn’t matter that France had a new constitution that extolled brotherhood. Just because he didn’t keep Rousseau in his pack didn’t mean he hadn’t read and reread the philosopher by candlelight after closing time at the Quiet Woman. But no one needed to know about it. Ideas could get you killed. Ideas were strange that way.
The salty gunpowder dried Thomas’s mouth as he rammed another musket ball home.
The problem with boredom is it gave a man plenty of time to think. The problem with thinking is that without books, his mind always wandered back to Elise. Elise, who never seemed to know her place. Elise, who looked everyone in the eyes and spoke her mind like her opinion should be counted.
He squeezed the trigger and a spark from the flint hit the pan. The resulting explosion made his ears ring.
“Reload!” shouted Sergeant Taylor, and Thomas tore into another cartridge.
Again and again he replayed the conversation he’d had with Elise that night in the yard of the Quiet Woman, turning over every word, every action, growing by turns angry and regretful with each remembered phrase until it finally ended in the vision of her sprawled on the ground with her mouth bleeding and her eyes wild. Why had he thought hitting her would convince her to stay behind in London? “If you can’t take a slap like that,” he’d told her, “you won’t last two seconds in the army.” What a fool he’d been. You can’t tame a beast with blows. Again and again, night after night he agonized over the miscalculation. Hit a woman once and she’ll come back with soft tears, soft words, and even softer hands. Hit Elise once and you’ll never forget it. You’ll relive it every day of your miserable life.
Maybe she wasn’t a real woman. Maybe she was something else. A man-girl. The memory of that first night, when he’d picked her up out of the mud wearing next to nothing was burned into his mind. He’d brought her into Mrs. P.’s kitchen and helped bathe her on the hearth like she was just another of old Mrs. P’s stray kittens—tiny waist, round breasts, and hard thighs. He’d had no doubts she was all woman then, no doubts at all. His spark hit the pan again.
“Reload!”
He almost believed her story of being a traveler from the future. There did seem to be something otherworldly about Elise. Her strange words and sloppy broad mannerisms should have repulsed him, but instead Thomas found himself transfixed by her legs. He’d seen the way she’d jumped from the packing crate to help Mrs. Collins at childbirth. Thomas had caught a glimpse of her legs before her skirt floated back to the floor—tight calves, fading tan, delicately boned ankles. She was nimble and unafraid to display her strength. She refused help because she didn’t need help. She didn’t mince about in order to garner advantage. She thudded to the floor, loudly, in a way that was both entirely unbecoming and entirely enchanting, like watching a cat leap from an overhead shelf to land hard on the kitchen table before walking away—one paw crossing neatly in front of the other, as though the jam jar hadn’t been knocked to the floor. And it didn’t hurt that her large green eyes, when they weren’t rolling with derision, flashed with intelligence and spirit.
“Reload!”
At this rate they were going to run out of powder before they even got to Portugal, thought Thomas as he reached for another cartridge. He felt something hit the stiff leather stock that encircled his neck as he primed his musket. Without turning, he knew O’Brian had spat his cartridge paper at him. He rammed his musket. That was no accident of proximity
. The damned bastard spat on him.
Their fight may have ended, but it hadn’t been settled, and Thomas knew that until he put O’Brian down and in his place, he’d be putting up with no end of slights. There would have to be a reckoning soon. The last thing he needed was to worry if he’d be killed by the enemy line, or by a musket ball in his back.
He discharged his weapon. The sound of it was a final salute to his foul mood.
“Attention!”
Thomas drew his body taught while his mind flexed over a lifetime of slights. The back of his neck burned from the insult of O’Brian’s paper cartridge.
Lieutenant Mason and Major Letchfeld walked the line, while Sergeant Taylor glared at his men with steely eyes. “Oh dear, oh dear,” tsked the major. He stopped to place the handle of his riding crop underneath the chin of a private. Why he was carrying a riding crop on board a ship in the middle of the ocean was beyond Thomas. “Do you see this man’s cheek, James?”
“Powder burns, sir,” replied Mason. “Probably a hang fire.” He stepped in towards the hapless soldier. “Name.”
“Cox, sir.”
“Show me your weapon, Private Cox.” Mason snatched the musket out of the private’s hands when it was hesitantly offered and handed it to the older officer.
“Oh, I see now,” Major Letchfeld said, squinting at the brown bess. “Private Cox’s touchhole is clogged.”
All the way down at the other end of the line, someone sniggered.
“What’s so funny?” Sergeant Taylor demanded angrily, stepping forward. “Who thinks Cox’s dirty touchhole is funny?”
The loud explosion of air escaping someone’s pinched lips was barely masked by the sound of Bill Stanton’s drum rolling aft along the deck. “Sorry, sirs,” he called as he tripped over himself to recapture the rolling snare. “Won’t happen again, sirs.”
Major Letchfeld sighed as the sergeant rushed to beat Billy back into line, “It’s a good thing that boy wasn’t holding a musket.”
“That’s quite enough, Sergeant,” Lieutenant Mason called. The boy’s cries were making the men restless. “Private Cox, you will clean and present your weapon for inspection to Sergeant Taylor during second watch for the next five days. During first watch, you’re to guard the ship’s bell. If, in that time, I hear of any transgressions in your ability to maintain your firearm, you will be flogged.”