by Sara Donati
Levi cleared his throat. “I want to say something first. Whatever Lorena got to say is new to me too. I ain’t asked her about her past. Not because I don’t want to know, but because I didn’t want to have to keep anything from Callie.”
He was looking at Callie as if he expected her to ask questions, but she only acknowledged him with a short bob of her head.
Lorena said, “I was born and raised up in Boston. My father was a preacher. At sixteen I went into service as a maid. I married at twenty-five.”
These facts she laid out in a line on the table, one by one, with no inflection. As if she were reciting verses from a primer.
Ethan interrupted her gently. “Just tell the story your own way. Tell it to Levi, if that helps you gather your thoughts.”
“I am breaking every rule Mrs. Focht laid down,” she said. “Excuse me if I hesitate.”
Then she turned to Levi, and concentrated on his face alone.
Lorena keeps house for her husband of one year, takes in sewing and mending so they can put a little aside, and waits for the birth of her first child. It is a simple life. They are both satisfied with their lot and each other.
On the day she loses everything, Lorena feels the first birth pangs early in the morning. She keeps this to herself. First babies are slow in coming, and there will be time enough for Jonah to worry when he comes home from work. She is thinking about what he will say to find the midwife with her when she hears the sound of something very large crashing to the ground.
She finds Jonah sprawled in front of the door, a hand clutched to his chest as if to grab hold of his heart and make it behave. That night she gives birth to a daughter who breathes fitfully for a quarter hour, and then stops.
The little bit of money they have put aside goes to the coffin maker and the grave digger. Then she walks home to find a note from Mr. George pinned to her door. Now that Jonah is gone, he needs the little house for another worker, a man with a wife and children. He can give her two more days. He is not a cruel man, Lorena knows this. She also knows that he will do nothing to help her.
She has no place to go. A hard birth has left her too weak to take on work in a scullery or washhouse; her clothes are so worn that she can’t present herself as a house servant. Her people are in Philadelphia. She has exactly enough coin in her pocket to buy a simple meal.
Lorena dreams of the baby. Her breasts ache, and there is a hole inside her that seems to grow by the hour.
A woman who turns her away when she asks for work takes the time to give her advice. The almshouse is the place for your kind, she says. Except of course they don’t take colored.
On her first day without a roof. Lorena finds a copy of the Boston Advertiser on a bench in the park. At the very bottom of the last column on the last page she reads an advertisement:
Wanted. Wet nurse. Clean, healthy, no thieves or degenerates.
Apply to 73 Barleycorn Street.
It takes her more than an hour to walk there. A house in a neighborhood of fine houses, the kind of place where successful businessmen raise their families with the help of nurses and cooks and maids-of-all-work. There will be meat on the table every night, fresh wheaten rolls for breakfast, ponies and pianoforte lessons for the girls, and when they are old enough, the sons will become members of the clubs their father favors.
The servant who answers the kitchen door is a true African, her English so turned around that Lorena has to ask more than once if she has found the right house.
The servant leaves her there with nothing more to do than study her surroundings. The kitchen is tidy and well scrubbed. On a long table are the makings of a cake: sacks of flour and sugar, a clutch of brown speckled eggs, a lump of butter. On a piece of paper are small hills of ground spices: nutmeg and cinnamon, cloves and cardamom. Lorena commands her belly to be quiet before someone comes into the kitchen.
Another servant who might have been a sister to the first takes Lorena through to the parlor where she will be interviewed by the lady of the house.
The parlor drapes are pulled so that the sun won’t fade the expensive fabrics. With one part of her mind Lorena takes note of the figurines on the mantelpiece, the thick carpet underfoot, the fragile teapot on a tray inlaid with ivory. With the foremost part of her mind, the part that understands what is at stake, she calculates what this woman—Mrs. Wilde, she names herself—needs to hear that will convince her to hire Lorena.
Mrs. Wilde wears a gown the color of muddy water, with jewels at her throat and in her ears and on her fingers. A plain woman, who puts Lorena in mind of the old-time Puritans, those who made it their business never to smile. There is no sign of a cradle, or of a husband. She wonders whose child needs suckling, if it could be Mrs. Wilde’s. There is nothing about her bearing that marks her for a mother.
She says, “Where were you born, Lorena?”
By rights she should be addressed as Mrs. Webb, but this white woman, like most of her kind, won’t be bothered with last names for blacks.
The questions come rapid-fire. Lorena names her place of birth, her parents, their occupations; yes, her father taught her to read, she owns a Bible, and she writes a clear hand. Mrs. Wilde reels off a list of numbers and Lorena adds them together in her head. Divides them by three, multiplies by eleven. She tells the story of how she met Jonah and how he died. Yes, she has her marriage lines.
“Tell me about your child.”
“A girl,” Lorena said, her voice catching. “Died almost right away. Just three days ago.”
“Ill-formed?”
Lorena shakes her head because she doesn’t trust her voice.
The questions turn to her health. Has she had smallpox, measles, whooping cough, lung fever? Is she clean in mind and spirit and deed?
She says it like that, though Lorena would not have taken offense at a more direct question. She has never prostituted herself. The only man she has known was her husband.
“I suppose you sound white because your father was a minister,” says Mrs. Wilde.
Lorena drops her gaze because there is nothing to say to this that won’t shore up the world of wrong ideas Mrs. Wilde has built for herself.
“Well, I was hoping for a white woman but every one of them who answered that advertisement had gin on the breath. You don’t take strong drink?”
“I never have.”
“Tobacco? Laudanum?”
Finally Mrs. Wilde leans back in her chair, her lips pursed while she thinks. With her right hand she strokes the silk embroidery on the arm of her chair.
“Well,” she says with a grimace. “Sugar water only goes so far. You’ll have to do. Go wait in the kitchen until Marjory comes to fetch you.”
There is no talk of salary or sleeping quarters, but those things can wait. She dare not make a sound that might change Mrs. Wilde’s mind.
The servant called Marjory brings the infant to her in the kitchen. It looks like all new infants, its crumpled napkin of a face blotched bright red. It mewls like a kitten and then breaks into a thin cry. With trembling hands Lorena begins to undo her dress, but Marjory stops her with a sharp word.
“No time for that. The coach waiting.”
She tells Lorena to bring her satchel, and leads her out into the rear courtyard where a coach is indeed waiting. The baby starts to cry in earnest. Lorena knows she should be asking questions, but she is so hungry and Marjory has put two baskets in the coach. From one comes the smells of roasted meat and new bread.
As the coach makes its way through the lanes Lorena looks to the child, who latches on to her breast with a furious purpose. Her bodice soaked with milk, she can no longer ignore her own hunger. With her free hand she reaches into the food basket. The bread is rough and dry, the mutton burned on the outside and blood-red at the bone, but she fills her stomach, pausing only long enough to burp the child and put him to her other breast. There is a bottle of elderberry water in the basket too, and Lorena finishes it off in three long swallows.
The child is asleep at her breast, its cheeks still working. There is the distinct smell of soiled clouts, and at that moment Lorena realizes she doesn’t know if this is a boy or a girl, or what name she should call it. In the half hour of talk in Mrs. Wilde’s parlor, she had said not one word about this baby.
There are fresh clouts in the basket, and she sets about undressing the baby.
A boy.
Lorena’s breath catches in her throat, in sorrow, in relief. When she puts this baby to the breast she might, one day, be able to put aside the memory of her own child.
When they stop to change horses Lorena learns that the driver knows no more than she does. He was hired only a few hours earlier, and his instructions are brief: He is to take the wet nurse and her burden to a house in Banfield, next to the Congregational Church, where Reverend TenHouten is expecting them. The rest Lorena can reckon for herself. She has been sent away from the city to take up the work of raising this unnamed, unwanted burden of a child who was most likely born on the same day, maybe in the same hour, as her own daughter.
He yawns, the silky white cheeks rounding like pillows, and Lorena wonders who she is weeping for.
Callie’s color had risen while Lorena talked. She had folded her hands on the table, but still they trembled. “Do you mean to say Jemima had nothing to do with raising him? It was all you?”
“Reverend TenHouten was kind. Nicholas thinks of him as an uncle.”
“But what of the baby’s name? He went almost ten years without a name?”
“Reverend TenHouten wrote to Boston and got a letter back saying we were to call the boy Nicholas.”
For once Ethan’s calm seemed on the verge of deserting him. “Jemima?”
Lorena’s brow lowered. “After the interview in Boston I never saw her again until the first of this year. First thing, she introduces Mr. Focht, says she’s remarried.”
There were so many questions to ask, Elizabeth could hardly order them in her mind. The others were not so hampered, and Lorena answered them one by one with a dignified calm.
“So you kept house for this minister—”
“TenHouten,” Lorena supplied. “A widower. I cooked and washed and kept his garden for him because he couldn’t anymore.”
“Wasn’t Nicholas frightened when Jemima showed up at your door? Had you told him about her?” Elizabeth asked.
“Of course I had,” Lorena said. “I told him everything I knew about his mother.”
“But you didn’t know if she was his mother,” Callie said. “You still don’t know. He could have been hers or some child she got out of the almshouse nursery.”
Lorena inclined her head, to acknowledge that Callie was right; there was no direct proof that the boy was in fact Jemima’s son by Callie’s father.
“What happened next?” Elizabeth asked.
Lorena was studying the table linen, her eyes tracing the pattern woven into the damask.
“They wanted to take Nicholas with them, to travel, they said. And they asked me along because Nicholas wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Ethan said, “Lorena, what do you know of Jemima’s plans? Why she brought him here just now, and what she hopes to gain.”
“They never talked about anything in my hearing,” Lorena said. “But they did talk in front of the other servants. The Africans, and Harper.”
That name hung in the air for a long moment.
“What did Harper know?”
“I don’t know. I never heard him talking about the orchard or apples or any bleeding heart.”
Levi put a hand on her shoulder in a gesture as simple and intimate as a kiss. He caught Elizabeth’s eye, his expression resolute. He was claiming Lorena as his own, which must be a good thing for them both, but was likely to confuse things even further before the current problem could be sorted through.
Ethan cleared his throat, and all faces turned toward him.
“It’s pretty clear to me that Jemima has been planning something for a good long while. The first step was making sure Martha didn’t marry in Manhattan. A husband’s claim nullifies a mother’s, and she would have been cut off right then.”
“Seems like Daniel and Martha handled that on their own. She is married now, after all,” Nathaniel said.
“And so am I,” Callie said. “But I think I understand now what is supposed to happen. If my father has a legitimate male heir in Nicholas, then the orchard and everything in it belongs to Nicholas and not to me. In that case it doesn’t matter if I’m married or not. But there is a solution. I’ll sell the orchard to Levi.”
Levi himself drew in a sharp breath, but Callie went right on. “We can draw up a sales contract right now. Everything goes to Levi for—how much would he have to pay for the courts to uphold the sale?”
“I don’t know that they would uphold it,” Ethan said. “Most likely they wouldn’t. But I am sure that any legal challenge they mount would take many years to come to trial.”
Nathaniel said, “Levi, could you pay a hundred dollars?”
Levi shook his head. “I got thirty, saved up over the last years. But Lorena has got some put aside too. Don’t you?”
In the silence that followed Callie said, “Does this mean you’re getting married?”
“We were hoping to,” Levi said.
“Well, then,” Callie said. A pulse was beating in her throat. “If you get married tomorrow and we settle the sales contract right after—” She broke off.
“What?” Ethan said. “Finish your thought.”
“Then I’d be free of it all, the cider press and the new house and the Bleeding Heart. And Jemima, once and for all.”
Lorena said, “What about Nicholas?”
Callie pushed away from the table so suddenly that her chair almost toppled. She looked at each of them in turn.
“Nicholas isn’t going anywhere,” she said. “I’ll see to it.”
Martha said, “I have never had so much fun playing a game. My ribs are aching from laughing so much.”
She yawned widely and put her head back against the wall of the new stable, watching Daniel as he went about the evening chores. Hopper was tugging at her skirts, and she tugged back companionably.
Daniel ran a hand over Little Jo’s back and the mare nudged him affectionately. Beside her Abel rocked his head and knickered.
“Two days and the horses are already under your spell,” Martha said. “Maybe horses talk to each other about men, the way men talk about horses. Maybe they heard from Florida that you speak horse and are generous with oats.”
Daniel grinned at her. “And what do they say about you, do you think?”
“That’s easy. They know I’m just another woman who sits a saddle well enough but is too dense to understand them when they talk to me.”
Daniel was still laughing to himself when they left the stable, walking toward the house. Tonight the stars were bright enough to throw a shadow, so that they didn’t even need a lantern. Hopper leaped ahead of them, and Martha yawned again.
Daniel opened the door for her and she went into the darkened house. Then he spoke a firm word and the pup slunk over to his blanket and settled down with a put-upon sigh.
Daniel said, “Does all this yawning mean that you’re so tired you want to go directly to sleep?”
She bit back a smile. “What else did you have in mind?”
“Chapter twelve of the French Lady,” Daniel said, his hand sliding down her back to cup the curve of her hip. “If you can stop yawning long enough to listen.”
A half hour later Martha interrupted Daniel and said, “I hate that she calls it that, the little death.”
Daniel slipped a marker between the pages and put the book aside. Then he took her wrist and pulled her up closer for a brief kiss.
“Wait,” Martha said. “It doesn’t bother you to compare that—that event—to death?”
He smoothed the hair away from her face. “You have heard how dram
atic the French can be on this subject, but yes, I suppose it is a strange way to describe it. Do you have a better suggestion?”
Martha fell back against the pillows. “I have no idea. I don’t think it’s possible to name something like that. Could you describe what it feels like to sneeze?”
“What an odd conversation,” Daniel said.
“Don’t you see? Everyone knows what it’s like to sneeze, so there’s no need to worry about explaining it.”
“You don’t like climax? The word, I mean?”
She made a face at him. “It’s a very cold word.”
Martha started to roll away from him, but Daniel pinned her down. “Are we done talking?”
“Not yet,” she said, and he kissed her through a broad grin. “I think I know what the problem is,” Daniel said. “It’s impossible to think clearly wearing clothes. Let’s take care of that first.”
Martha said, “I believe you could make a fortune wagering at cards. You are ruthless when you want something.” She took a deep breath and then another while her nerves kicked and her heart settled into a normal rhythm.
Daniel had collapsed beside her. He said, “Is that a complaint?”
“Lord, no,” Martha said, smiling in the dark.
“You haven’t come up with a substitute for ‘the little death,’ I take it.”
“Right now my own name is a bit of a challenge. And if you don’t stop that, I’ll have to pinch you.”
“I don’t remember you being so quick to retaliate as a girl,” Daniel said. “Except maybe for that time the Ratz boys put a snowball in your boots.”
“You remember that?” Her voice came muffled because she had turned onto her stomach. “I did love those Saturday afternoons playing in the snow.”
She sat up suddenly.
“What?”
“It’s like sledding,” she said.
“What’s like sledding?”
Martha wished she could keep from blushing and decided she should simply ignore what she could not control. She had something to say, and she could say it to Daniel. She could.