Mercy of the Moon

by Jennifer Taylor

  “I don’t know, though I believe she was never dead, but was buried alive.”

  “You do not mean it,” he gasped. “Who would have done this foul thing, and why?”

  “I cannot explain it as yet. I am still learning about the circumstances surrounding her death. It is possible the doctor who delivered her whilst I was gone mistook her for dead.”

  For a moment she felt as if she could unburden herself with this kind man and tell him all.

  He nodded. “That is most unsettling.”

  “I have already heard stories about this man, and they’ve not been favorable. At any rate, I will find out what happened, for I believe with all my heart that Sarah has a soul as innocent as an angel’s, and that only Christ can be resurrected from the dead.” She pulled Sarah’s covers up around her neck and wiped the saliva from her chin.

  “As do I, Mistress Maggie. I will do my utmost to calm their fears and petition for understanding and prayers on your behalf.”

  “Thank you, Vicar.”

  As he hurried on his way, she felt a slight sense of relief at having the understanding of this man. Had he come in answer to her prayers? There were more pressing matters. If Sarah did not eat soon, the circumstances of her premature burial would not matter, for she would be dead in earnest. She set the kettle above the fire for tea and water to heat the pap.

  Upon hearing Ruthie’s footsteps on the landing, she tried to steady her breathing to cleanse herself of the feeling of unease that roiled inside. She put roasted lamb from Ed the butcher on the table and set the table for tea.

  Color bloomed in Ruthie’s cheeks, and her eyes had lost that haunted look. “Aunt Maggie, I received so many treats today! Sweets from Mrs. Robins, a sausage from the butcher, pudding, and I saw Ellen, and we helped her mother with the chickens.”

  The many kindnesses of her neighbors did much to chase the dread away. Maggie grinned at her niece. “Your young charge slept a fair amount this afternoon. You must have worn her out this morning.”

  She nodded, eyes bright. “I shall take this pie to Papa. He will gobble it up, I think.”

  Maggie opened the windows and let in some fresh air to rid the cottage of the smell of clouts. Unlike Sarah, she believed fresh air was beneficial. It is not harmful when one is outside, so why should it not be brought indoors?

  Samuel returned with his arm around Ruthie. He sat at the table, face dark with soot from the forge, and his arms were black up to the elbows. She dared not remind him to wash, for he glared at her. “Ruthie,” he said, his tone belying the ferocity of his stare, “would you run back to the market and fetch another eel pie, and one for yourself, my pet?”

  After the child had left, she said, “Samuel, you have burnt yourself. Let me fetch the ointment.”

  “Never mind that,” he barked, his eyes in slits. “How could you have forgotten yourself so, Maggie? Five people came into the shop just to report your indecent behavior at the market today. I could scarce get a thing done.”

  He looked her up and down in disgust. “They said you had your hands on the apothecary, and that you displayed yourself like a trollop. I am shocked.” He had never spoken to her so harshly before.

  “I fell, Samuel! It is not as if I did a jig with my knickers on display. I tripped over my lame foot. He helped me up.” She blushed and realized the full consequences of her behavior and how ridiculous she sounded. “I don’t know. I merely—he picked me up and I...” she finished, a blush heating her bosom.

  Against her will she thought back on those moments, how those long fingers made her skin hum with warmth and light, as if his skin called to hers and she could not help but answer back.

  He nodded. “Ah.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ah’?”

  “Perhaps it is time you marry,” he said, fighting a grin.

  “What?”

  “Have a husband, children of your own.”

  “I have no need of a husband.”

  He chuckled, the warm light reaching his eyes again. “I think you do, or you would not be blushing.”

  So like Samuel the smithy to hit the nail on the head.

  To cover her embarrassment, she spoke. “Samuel, have I ever given you reason to be ashamed of me in the five years I have lived here?”

  Samuel glanced at Sarah. “This Ian Pierce, he saved her.”

  Sarah had begun to stir restlessly.

  “But I will not have him ruin your reputation. Midwives must be beyond reproach.”

  “Think you I am not aware of that?” She sputtered. “Do you think it fitting that you talk to me as if I am a harbor harlot when all I have done is toil my whole life in the service of others?”

  “Enough talk,” he said. “Just know I will take matters into my own hands if the impropriety continues.”

  She touched his forearm. “Samuel, we have more crucial matters to discuss. Sarah weakens. She must eat and drink, or she will die. I will prepare the bubby pot for her.”

  His mouth fell open. He walked over to Sarah and pulled up the covers that had fallen during her restless period and made no attempt to hide his revulsion. “She suckles her fingers like a babe.” He went over to the basin and scrubbed his face and arms.

  “Yes, exactly. It made me think that if she can suck her thumb she could suck from a nipple.”

  His mouth gaped open. “But why does she do this thing?”

  “It comforts her,” Maggie said. “Perhaps her trial was so frightening she returned to that time of innocence and the comfort of her mother’s breast.”

  She closed the window and curtains and barred the door. No one need be aware of their unusual activities. She readied the nutritious mixture and instructed Samuel to prop Sarah up. She became agitated when Samuel removed her fingers from her mouth. Maggie kneeled on her other side and prayed this would work. If it did not, what were they to do?

  She put her hand on her sister’s shoulder and held the narrow, nipple-like opening of the vessel to her mouth. “Sarah. You must eat, try it.”

  Sarah opened her eyes blankly. Maggie dipped her finger in the container and put a dab on her sister’s tongue. Instinct demanded she swallow, and once again she opened her mouth. She put the lip of the pap boat in Sarah’s mouth again, and her lips closed around it. She began to suck. Maggie let out the breath she’d been holding.

  After a few swallows, Sarah coughed, and the gruel-like liquid seeped out of the corners of her mouth. But soon she settled, and as she sucked steadily, her hand grasped a corner of the blanket and caressed it. Maggie and Samuel exchanged smiles. Sarah could take sustenance—perhaps there was hope she might recover and return to the living.

  Samuel caressed his wife’s forehead. “Well done, my love.”

  Before long, she had consumed the entire contents of the pap boat, and when Maggie removed it from her mouth, her sister whimpered.

  She quickly refilled the mixture from the pot by the fire and gave it to Samuel to continue feeding his wife. As she regarded them, she felt a slender hand upon her shoulder, but there was no one there.

  A voice of infinite gentleness echoed inside of her, “Well done, midwife. We are pleased.” A feeling of well-being warmed Maggie, and she sat at the table, legs trembling.

  Outside, Ruthie’s high, animated voice called out and a lower one answered. She unbolted the door and greeted Ruthie and Ian, and upon meeting his eyes felt a tiny flip, like a fish caught on a hook, in her stomach. She placed her hand upon her middle. How peculiar. A woman with child often describes the first-felt movement of their babe that same way.

  Ian’s hair had come out of his tie, and his normally tan face looked pale and drawn, emphasizing his lean cheeks and the scar below his ear. It made no difference, though; the air crackled like a bonfire when he entered a room.

  He smiled. “How very clever you are, Mistress Maggie, to have found a way to feed your sister. I had not thought of that.”

  “Nor had I, until this afternoon,” she murmure
d.

  He beamed at her, and she realized with another flip in her gut that what she saw on his face was pride. Why he should be proud of her she did not know, but could not stop from smiling back.

  Ruthie ran to her mother and watched her father as Samuel fed her. “Like my sister,” she whispered.

  Samuel paused in his feeding. “Mr. Pierce,” he growled. “You put Maggie in a compromising position today.”

  He bowed. “I apologize most heartily. It was not my intention, and the good people of King’s Harbour have let me know how untoward I was.” Ian held a cloth bundle in one hand and held his other arm crossed at his chest, fingers drumming a rhythm on his upper arm.

  Samuel narrowed his eyes. “Risk her reputation again and you will regret it.”

  The drumming stopped. Ian nodded. “My intentions toward Maggie are honorable, I assure you. It is my energy, you see. I am teeming with it. Sometimes I act without thinking.” His tapping resumed. “That is not to excuse my behavior in any way.”

  “I don’t care about your energy. Promise me it won’t happen again.”

  Why did the man not just promise Samuel and be done with it? But he merely nodded and said, “I hold Maggie in the highest regard.”

  She snorted. “Oh indeed, along with all the ladies in the marketplace.”

  Samuel gave Ian a look that could sharpen a scythe.

  Chapter Nine

  “What?” Samuel snapped. “All the ladies of the marketplace?”

  Maggie’s brother-in-law was quite formidable. He would not want to be at the receiving end of those bandy forearms.

  His lady had a clever tongue behind that practical midwife demeanor. She could hold her own with any courtier in King George’s court. Indeed, Ian would stand on his head and read Shakespeare in Arabic to bring a smile to her face again as he’d done in the market square.

  “Oh, surely you heard about his snake charmer program. He had the ladies eating out of his hand like little tame wrens,” Maggie quipped.

  “Wait now!” Ian cried. “In all fairness, I only thought to sell them some fripperies and beauty aids so I might get to know them. And then they would come to me for their medicinal needs.”

  “He also thought to deflect attention from Sarah’s condition by making a jackass out of himself,” she said, her eyes softening, ever so slightly.

  Oh, the soft look he liked very much. Surely she is soft all over.

  “He made a fool of you.” Yon Samuel looked as if he could throttle him with no effort.

  Ian felt the buzz of blood in his veins, tried to still his trembling hands as he set the carrying case full of medicines upon the table.

  “You have my medicines, then?” She cocked her head and drew her heavy brows together.

  Ian unrolled the packet of medicines upon the table. “I have grouped them according to ailments: for morbid sore throat-licorice root, here; for the stomach-ginger; for pain and swelling-white willow bark and meadowsweet...”

  He made a big show out of unveiling the neatly wrapped packets for her benefit, as if they were rubies or diamonds. Not impressed, she waited for the next packet to appear. He withdrew some calendula, for swelling, felt Samuel’s gimlet eye upon him and grappled with the melody that rose out of his chest, doing his utmost to wrestle it down. But the melody won, a sea shanty, “the Dockside Doxy,” he believed. Sometimes humming slowed the flow of words and melodies, but that antidote proved useless now. He could only open his mouth and release the song.

  “I love my dockside doxy,

  She is very sweet indeed.

  And she supplies the local lads

  With everything they need.”

  He slid a look toward her, simpering like a girl, to see if he could bring a smile to her face, but alas, only a twitch on one side of that stern mouth. Her lips, so full, invited perusal.

  Samuel sat in the rocking chair, leaned over his pipe, and upon hearing the song, made an exasperated sound as if Ian was a fly in need of swatting.

  He continued, sorely wishing he could stop.

  “She’s buxom, gay, and sassy.

  She’s a lady through and through.

  She says that I’m the only one

  So surely she is true.”

  A hint of a smile cast light on Maggie’s grey eyes.

  It was enough to bring him to his knees.

  Dawn to twilight eyes, I cannot conceal my lust. I long to see them twilight to dawn, all I long for...need...I must. Her melody surged within him.

  In his eastern travels, he’d heard music so strange and mesmerizing it echoed within him like a gong even now. In his mind he put the flat of his hands on each side of the gong to silence it, but still it resonated back to him, like all the other music.

  His Maggie suffered from no such weakness; pray God she could not see inside him, for it would repel her. Her impatient glare burned his skin.

  She pressed her lips together. “I said, do you have the womanly herbs I requested?”

  “Yes, yes, chamomile for monthly pains, lemon balm for expelling the afterbirth; sage-salvia—for strength, as you know. And I dropped by the Siren Inn to leave some with Lena for the young girl.”

  She kneeled on the bench across from him, leaned forward with her elbows on the table. Samuel had lit his pipe and turned the rocking chair around so he could keep his eye on them, he guessed. He knew he would be observed if he placed his hands upon hers, so he merely leaned into her scent, like rose petals stroked by the sun.

  “I am doing my utmost to concoct something that will calm your sister, but I have not come upon the right formula yet. It will not be long, I promise,” he said.

  The air around them grew expectant like the air before a lightning strike. He imagined bringing her hands to his lips, kissing their warm softness, and sliding his lips to her shoulders. Would that his fingers could play about her neck and trace the silky thoroughfare of her clavicle down to the rise of her breasts. He longed to run his fingers under the edge of her bodice to see a pink blush stain her creamy skin. What would he not give up to have her secrets revealed to him?

  “Do you have anything else?”

  He nodded, stifling a sigh. “For when there is nothing else...” He lowered his voice. “Something from the Orient.”

  “What is it?” Maggie’s eyes turned falcon fierce with interest.

  He passed her the vial. “It is opium. Pray God you never need to use it.”

  “You brought this from the Orient?”

  “I have sailed to China and trekked from one end to the other, gathering medicines and learning from the masters of medicine more advanced than my mind could comprehend, from the Forbidden City to Mongolia.” Perhaps that little speech would hide his agitation.

  Her eyes widened.

  “I am sure you know,” he added, “that laudanum—opium must be used sparingly and is by no means a cure.” No one knew that better than he.

  “You have been to the Orient? How could you afford such a venture?” She sat at the table and leaned back, arms folded across her breast.

  He grinned. “Many times I sang for my supper. I did whatever was necessary.”

  She studied him with calm expectancy, solemn as an emperor; if only she would wrap him in that strength and calm the storms that plagued him. He rewrapped the herbs with the embroidered silk cloth he had purchased in a village along the Yangtze River, and pushed it across the table to her.

  “Thank you,” she said, and unwrapped the cloth. He put his hands on hers when she tried to return it.

  “You must keep it.”

  “No.”

  He could tell she loved it from the way her fingers caressed the tree branch and circled the pink blossoms. “The embroidery is so fine. The birds look almost real. But I cannot accept it.” His hands still on hers prevented her returning it.

  “Yes, it comes with the medicine. It is medicine for your eyes.”

  “Of course you give these to all of your customers.”

/>   “Only midwives who are as lovely as they are clever.”

  She snorted.

  He turned her palms up. She tried to pull her hands away, glancing at Samuel, who had fallen asleep.

  She lowered her eyes. “I am not in the habit of wearing gloves, for they hinder me. My hands are not soft.”

  “They are lovely hands, priceless hands, for they tell a story. Of their devotion and labor on behalf of everyone but herself. They are strong, competent hands, and there is beauty in every finger, every joint.”

  He felt the lifeblood hum in her hands; every pore sang with the rhythm of the tide, a pulse that became his own.

  Samuel awoke with a start, and she yanked her hands away.

  “How much is the medicine?”

  “I told you. My compliments.”

  “If this is your practice with every woman in town, you will soon be in the poorhouse.”

  “Oh no, only you, my...”

  Samuel grunted and sat down at the table across from him.

  Maggie rose and soon busied herself at the hearth. “Mr. Pierce, would you like some tea?”

  “Please do not trouble yourself on my account,” he said.

  “Trouble yourself on mine, then.” Samuel muttered. “Is there something to eat?”

  Maggie put the medicines away, lit the candles against the dark. She prepared the tea, with a quiet efficiency and grace that did much to calm and comfort Ian.

  After the meal, Ruthie went to bed, and Samuel returned to his post at the rocking chair, gimlet eye upon him. Sarah’s eyes were closed, and her coloring had improved since the feeding.

  A spasm—of pain?—crossed Maggie’s face. She bent down and unlaced her boot.

  “Go upstairs and rest,” Ian said. “I can take charge of things down here for a while.”

  “That is not necessary.”

  Why would the woman shoot daggers at him when he only tried to ease her? Had no man ever shown her solicitude, no brother, father, ever expressed simple kindness and consideration? He looked to Samuel for support.

  “Maggie. I am sure this lad can manage a wee baby while you rest.” Samuel cleared his throat.