by Sara Donati
“That’s the heat,” Hannah said. “And a child ready to come into the world.”
“It could hardly be more impatient than I am,” said Jennet. She closed her eyes and without opening them she said, “What does it mean, do you think, that I’m so much more tired this time than the last, with the girls?”
“No doubt it’s a boy,” said Hannah. “Already set on mischief.”
“And for Lily?” Jennet asked. “Another boy?”
“Oh, a girl,” said Lily. “Ma won’t have it any other way, though she wouldn’t admit it. I hope she’s right, though if it’s to be my one and only—well, it seems that Simon should have a son to carry on the family name.”
“Listen to her,” Jennet said. “Have ye been keeping count of the Ballentynes at Carryck? Simon’s brithers have been putting out sons one after the other. Like rabbits. And beyond that, why should you not have a daughter to carry on your mither’s line? Is that no just as important?”
“She’s right,” Hannah said. “And beyond that, I don’t see why this should be your one and only. You may have one a year for the next ten years, now that you’ve got the hang of it.”
They laughed for a while, but then Lily’s expression sobered. She said, “I am starting to wonder if the doctor I saw in Rome might have been right about my problem.”
“The wee mannie who said you had to choose between art and childbearing?” Jennet snorted.
“No, that’s not what he said, not exactly.” Lily sat up a little straighter. “He said that if I insisted on painting I wouldn’t be able to carry a child to term. Since Italy I’ve only used charcoal and pencil and ink, no paints of any kind because I didn’t want the smell in Ma’s parlor. It’s probably just a coincidence.” But the look she sent Hannah’s way said she didn’t believe this herself.
“There are herbals and medicines enough that interfere with a healthy pregnancy,” Hannah said. “Dittany. Black cohosh. Vervain and rue. There might be something in paint.”
Lily’s expression was pained. “Do you really think—”
“It could be,” Hannah said.
Lily’s high color faded a little. “I may have to write and tell him he was right,” she said. “If all goes well in the end.”
“No need,” said Jennet. “The idea that he might have been wrong would never occur to him.”
“Well then,” Lily said slowly. “If I seem so healthy to you, and there’s no sign of trouble—do you think I might be able to … walk around, at least a bit? A few minutes every day?”
“We’ll put the question to Curiosity and your ma this evening,” Hannah said. “You’ll have to win them over.”
Lily collapsed back and blew out a breath so that the curls at her temples jumped. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
Jennet sat up straighter to look out the window. “Who is that coming? One of the LeBlanc girls, but which one?”
Hannah stood up to see. “Alice.”
“Alice LeBlanc?” Lily’s tone was half amusement, half doubt.
“It is odd,” Hannah said.
“Och,” Jennet said. “Is she the one who’s so angry that Martha got Daniel?”
“She is,” Hannah said. “Good thing Martha isn’t here. I’ll go see what Sour Apples wants.”
Alice was the prettiest of the LeBlanc girls, but she had earned her unflattering nickname. When Hannah’s daughters asked her why Alice was called Sour Apples, Hannah had reminded them of one of Elizabeth’s sayings: Pretty is as pretty does. There were many such expressions Elizabeth had brought over with her from England; this was one that made sense to Hannah.
It was one of the mysteries of life, how children born and raised in the same family could turn out so different from each other and from both parents too. Becca was one of the kindest and most generous women Hannah knew, but she was also very gruff. Alice had only got the gruff. The six LeBlanc girls were a mix that always took her by surprise, like coming across a white cat with a litter of kittens every color of the rainbow, from black to ginger to calico. It made sense to Hannah that Alice had it hard, the first girl after six boys, but why she held on to that resentment though it did her only harm, that was unclear.
Now Alice was coming on at a good clip, her frown focused on the ground at her feet. Then she caught sight of Hannah on the porch and her expression shifted from preoccupation to worry.
She called out, “I’ve been looking for you all over.”
Hannah owed Alice LeBlanc no explanations, and so she cut right to the heart of the matter.
“Somebody hurt?”
Alice took a moment to catch her breath. “No,” she said. “Sick. A lady in one of our rooms, she’s been vomiting since last night.”
“Is she in pain?”
“Belly cramps,” Alice said.
Something was off about this, but Hannah couldn’t put a finger on it. She said, “Good of you to come up here with word.”
Alice’s mouth turned down at the corner and she looked more herself. “Everybody else is at the games, and Ma’s busy in the kitchen. It was me or nobody. If you don’t care to come—”
“I’ll be there,” Hannah said coolly. “Start straight down and I’ll follow you in ten minutes.”
The truth was, she didn’t mind being called out. Things had been very quiet in Paradise since the flood. Sore ears, a few broken bones easily set, two deliveries, fever teas. She considered the ailments that might account for the symptoms that Alice described, which was most likely nothing more than indigestion that camomile tea could put right.
Jennet dismissed her reservations about leaving them with a wave of the hand. “I can get to the kitchen when Simon wakes, and I imagine Elizabeth will be back soon, anyway. We’re fine, aren’t we, Lily?”
“More than,” Lily said, yawning. “There’s no reason to worry about us.”
Hannah had her bag with her—she always did, these days—and so it was just a matter of tying a kerchief over her hair and washing her hands. Then she dashed down the hillside on a deer path that would take her to the Red Dog by the back way. It was a sensible precaution, because if any of the little people caught sight of her it would be next to impossible to resist their pleas that she come watch the foot races or bob for apples or buy them sweets. Just now she didn’t have the time, but if this visit didn’t take too long she could spend an hour with them.
She had just come around the corner to the back of the Red Dog when somebody caught her by the elbow and swung her around and up against a wall.
“What—”
Ben pinned her by the wrist held over her head, and he kissed her. He was good at it too, and always had been. Even when she was disinclined or distracted, Ben could bring her back into the here and now like this. He kissed her so expertly that she felt the tug of it in her womb.
When he pulled away she said, “How good to see you too,” and he laughed and kissed her once more, this time running his hand up her leg to cradle her buttock.
“Ben!”
“Hmmm?”
“Anybody could come around that corner.”
“I don’t mind an audience.”
She put her free palm on his chin and made him look her in the eye.
“You wouldn’t mind Baldy O’Brien grading your performance?”
He went very still, and then he pulled away. “There’s the school-house,” he said, wiggling one eyebrow.
Hannah closed her eyes briefly. “I know I’ve been neglecting you—”
“Hush. I’m as much at fault as you are.”
It was true that they went to bed exhausted and fell asleep before they could even think about the things they were missing, but that was the price of bringing children into the world. The irony was, the thing they both wanted to do here, in broad daylight, would give them release, but the possible result nine months down the road would only compound the problem.
Hannah counted the days in her head as Ben did his best to win her over to his way of se
eing things, and when she had calculated as best she could, she pulled away again.
“Here’s what we can do,” she said. “Tomorrow morning we can leave the house at first light. I’ll make noises about going to see the patient upstairs—” She gestured with her chin to the upper floor of the Red Dog. “And we’ll meet at the pond.”
Oh, when he smiled like that. She’d be thinking about it all day.
Alice said, “That was more than ten minutes.”
“Was it?” Hannah would not let Alice get the best of her, and so she only smiled. “If you’ll take me to the patient—”
Huffing like a newborn with colic, Alice led Hannah through the empty public room and up the stairs. In Paradise folks took the Fourth of July seriously and nobody wanted to miss any part of it, not even the men who spent every free hour cradling a tankard of Becca’s ale. And still Hannah had the strong sense that something was not as it seemed.
She touched the sheath that held her knife, and the gesture both calmed her and made her laugh at herself. Alice LeBlanc might be mean-spirited, but she wasn’t homicidal; and more than that, Hannah would only have to shout out the window to get someone’s attention.
In the hall Alice opened the door and stood aside for Hannah to enter, a simple act that stopped her cold. The Alice LeBlanc she knew would never let Hannah precede her through a door; she had too high an opinion of her own worth.
Alice frowned at her. “What?”
“If you do not tell me exactly who is in that room, I will turn around and leave,” Hannah said.
“It’s all right,” a voice called. “Alice, it’s all right. Hannah, come in, and shut the door behind yourself.”
Jemima.
Alice was smiling now, a superior and self-satisfied smile that said she was enjoying having got the best of Hannah Savard. Hannah waited until Alice had taken her smirk down the stairs, and then she went in and closed the door.
A sickroom has a smell all its own, and Hannah had entered enough of them to get a sense of what was waiting for her on that basis alone. Here there was bile and vomit and strongest of all, the oily stench of unhealthy stool. There was something wrong here, something far worse than indigestion.
Jemima was sitting in a large upholstered chair by the window. The curtains were drawn and the air in the room was close and hot and heavy. Hannah went to the windows and pushed back the curtains to let in light. Then she opened both sashes as far as they would go.
“I don’t like the breeze,” Jemima said.
“And yet you need fresh air.” She drew in a deep breath and turned to face Jemima. “When did you get here?”
There were new lines in Jemima’s face, brackets around her mouth that spoke of pain, along with streaks of iron gray in her hair. And there was a struggle going on too; Hannah could see it happening in her eyes. Jemima didn’t like this situation, but she was forcing herself forward.
“Last night just before dark.”
“Alone?”
“Alone,” Jemima said.
“You came masked, in a costume?”
Jemima’s mouth jerked at the corner. “I was wearing a veiled hat, if you must know the details.”
“I find it hard to believe you traveled, as sick as you are, and by yourself.”
“It wasn’t so bad yesterday,” Jemima said. “Came on a little after I got here.”
“Your husband—”
“My husband is none of your concern. I have money, and I can pay you for your services. What I need, first of all, is laudanum. And then a diagnosis.”
The anger that Hannah had been holding at bay kicked up, but she pushed it back down. “I am not interested in your money and I think you’d be better served by another doctor.”
Jemima said, “I’ve seen eight doctors in the last six weeks, and none of them would or could tell me what’s wrong with me.”
That made Hannah laugh aloud. “And so you came to me? To me? You never had any opinion of me or my skills as a doctor. You accused me of killing children out of incompetence.”
“I don’t think much of you,” Jemima agreed. “But others do. And desperate times call for desperate measures.”
Hannah studied the woman sitting by the window for a full minute. In that time Jemima never moved, though her breathing came quick and shallow. She was in pain, and trying not to show it.
“I’ll examine you and charge what I always charge, and I’ll tell you what I find. And that’s as much as I’ll promise.”
“And laudanum.”
“Yes. I see you are in great pain.”
“And how that must thrill you.”
Hannah looked at her calmly, and waited.
Finally Jemima said, “All right, I take it back.”
Hannah put down her bag and sat down on the chair opposite Jemima. “Tell me,” she said. “Every symptom and when it started. And leave nothing out.”
Later Jemima said, “I came to you because I knew you wouldn’t mind giving me bad news.”
Hannah considered, weighing words and phrases, trying to recall extracts she had read and autopsies conducted long ago when she had been studying under Dr. Valentine and Dr. Savard—who would one day be her brother-in-law—at the almshouse in Manhattan. It was the thought of Dr. Savard that gave her a way to talk to Jemima. She imagined what he would say, and she said it.
“It will go like this. The pain will get steadily worse, far worse than it is now. Far worse. In a week or two, if you’re lucky you’ll fall into a coma and stay there until you die. You have questions?”
“Do you have enough laudanum to see me through?”
“No,” Hannah said. “But I can send for it.”
“You are saying I have cancer.”
“Most likely, yes. In the digestive organs and the liver, at the very least.”
“If I stop eating and drinking can I end this quicker?”
“Then it will be two or three days at most.”
“I don’t suppose you’d be willing to give me something to end it now. Think of the satisfaction you’d get. In fact, you could auction off the privilege of killing me.” Her laugh was hoarse and phlemy.
Hannah stared at her.
Jemima sighed. “How much do I owe you?”
Hannah said, “You owe me nothing but answers.”
—
Despite the pain, Jemima could laugh in a way that evoked memories Hannah would have preferred to leave buried.
“Go on,” she said. “Ask your questions. I might even answer some of them. When you’re done I want that laudanum.”
There were dozens of things Hannah wanted to know, but she had never thought she might one day get answers. The idea was so strange that for a moment she couldn’t think where to start. Old mysteries or newer ones? Once they had been schoolchildren in the same classroom. What Hannah remembered best about Jemima was the fact that she never smiled unless it was at someone else’s expense.
Except that wasn’t entirely true. The only time anyone got a sense of the person that might have been was when Jemima sang. Elizabeth had encouraged her singing for that reason, and maybe it had even helped a little, for a while. Then her father had been killed and her mother and brothers died of typhus, and Jemima had let anger and bile drag her down. Others had lost just as much; others had lost far more, and survived. They took comfort in the Christian Bible and its promises of another world, or lost themselves in work, or in founding another family. Some drank themselves to death. Jemima vented her fury at those closest to her.
Hannah said, “Do you still sing?”
Jemima closed her eyes, as if that could make the question go away. When Hannah thought she would never get an answer, Jemima opened her eyes again.
“Until last fall I sang almost every night.”
That was more information than Hannah had expected, and it raised more questions than it answered. She considered.
“What made you stop?”
A flush of annoyance moved across
Jemima’s face. “What kind of questions are these?”
“You chose to pay my fee in answers.”
“Ask something else.”
“Did your coming back here have anything to do with that, the singing?”
Jemima scowled at her. “Ask something else.”
“All right,” Hannah said. “What was it that Harper was supposed to be finding out for you?”
“Harper is my husband’s creature,” Jemima said. “I don’t know exactly what arrangement they had.”
Hannah said, “Harper is dead. He drowned.”
Jemima went very still. Then she said, “That boy could swim all day. He was half fish.”
“Anybody can drown,” Hannah said. “There was no evidence that it was anything but an accident.”
“Of course you’d say that. It was probably one of yours who did it.”
Hannah counted to ten. Then, very calmly she said, “For someone who wants favors of me, you are very free with unfounded accusations. And may I point out to you that there have been other accidental deaths over the years.”
Jemima drew in a sharp breath. “Go on with your questions, but you are trying my patience.”
“You want the orchard, and leaving Harper behind had something to do with that.”
“Christ, no,” Jemima said. “I wouldn’t care if I never saw an apple or an apple tree ever again.”
“Your husband is the one who wants the orchard, then.”
“You must realize,” Jemima said, slowly, “that by rights, the orchard should go to Nicholas.”
She got up stiffly to walk over to the bed. Hannah waited until she had settled herself and she said, “So you know about the Bleeding Heart.”
A flicker of a smile. “Now I do.”
“You knew before. You heard about it by chance, from a farmer near Boston.”
“If you know the answers, why are you bothering to ask?”
“So the long and short of it is, you came back here to claim the orchard for Nicholas. You are worried about what will become of him when you’re dead. Did it ever occur to you to just ask Martha or Callie to take him in? Why do you assume they are as small-minded and selfish as you?”