by Baird Wells
He shared a glance between the women, wide-eyed, seating himself once Hannah was in her chair. “Well! How fortunate is this? I hope you wouldn’t think me out of turn, asking for a trade. You’d be doing me two favors today.”
“Some shirts and pants, for doctor’s work?” Eleanor looked skeptical, while Hannah’s eyes were filled with an approval that warmed him.
“A doctor can earn his pay anywhere, but a button that won’t pop off in the middle of an exam?” He frowned while the ladies laughed and shook his head.
A slender girl of fourteen or fifteen hovered in the doorway, her hesitant arrival betrayed by a baby with adequate lungs. She had a woman’s features, broad nose set between doe eyes and full lips, her long braids pinned up into a golden crown. In a better part of London, she’d be thought a fine match. James shuddered at her sort of beauty in the lower commons, and how brutally it would likely be used.
“Mum, Frances and me have taken turns, but he’s not having us rock ‘im.”
Eleanor smiled, but her sigh was ragged when she reached for the baby. “Bring him here, then.”
“Oh, no!” Hannah set her basket beside Eleanor’s legs. “Jenny, bring Davy to me. I didn’t come all this way to be deprived of a moment to fill my arms.” She claimed Davy’s writhing body with confidence, even when his little flannel gown bunched above his diaper and made him awkward. Hannah cradled his bottom on her knees and his back in her hands. She raised her legs and jostled him with a firm stomp, and James held his breath in the baby’s sudden silence, braced for earnest wailing. Like all the blows Hannah aimed at him, she softened Davy’s, too, with a smile and gentle cooing close to his face. “You simply want to see what all the fuss is, here in the parlor.” She smiled, and chubby fingers uncurled to explore her cheek.
Eleanor said something, but he didn’t hear it, staring baldly at Hannah. As with everything else, she was competent in holding the baby, and despite a lack of resemblance, she made him think of Emily. She would have held their baby nervously, in a tender but uncertain embrace until she mastered it, in time. Like bread or ironing, Emily would have stubbornly kept at it until she was a natural, and he would have loved her through it. Every one of their children after would have known only sweetness and ease. Regret swelled until his heart beat hard against it, for Emily and for Hannah, who he thought might never have children, though clearly she ought to. He couldn’t look at her, at his own sad recollection, and turned his face away.
One child was a break in the dam, so that two and then four followed and crowded the small room in short order. Eleanor smiled at their intrusion with tired pride. “Doctor Grimshaw, this is Sarah, Jenny, Frances, Frederick, Mathilda, and Grace. Davy, just there,” she pointed to Hannah’s restless charge. “Edward, my oldest boy, is apprenticed to his father. They’ll be along home shortly.”
He nodded to each child in turn, and felt tired for Mrs. Fitz, who obviously took an active hand with her children.
“I have good news for Sarah, regarding the school.” Hannah adjusted little Davy into the crook of her arm.
“They’ve agreed to take me on?” Pretty, chestnut-haired Sarah flushed, hands clasped at what James guessed was much-anticipated news.
“As a boarder, now that you’re seventeen, in exchange for aiding the headmistresses.”
Sarah grabbed Jenny’s shoulders and the two engaged in a kind of jumping-dance, shrieking while Eleanor slumped in relief. One less mouth to feed in a family stretched so thin must lift a tremendous weight.
“I’ll be happy to tell you all about it, while Dr. Grimshaw speaks with your mother.” Working a hand free from beneath a contented Davy, Hannah fished inside her coat and produced a few wax-papered candies. “And a butterscotch for each of you while we give them a moment.”
Hannah was as devious and clever with the Fitz children as she ever was with Simon, but infinitely sweeter. He was loathe to follow Mrs. Fitz back out into the hall, watching Hannah over his shoulder in awe and confusion. Hannah seemed to have taught herself a language that most people only learned by hard study.
“I think it’s only the children,” protested Eleanor in the hallway, before he could pose a single question. “When it gets chilled out and they’re all cooped up, they get a might restless. It leaves me weary is all.”
‘Might’ was a generous appraisal of what he’d witnessed when she answered the door. His inspection of her was immediate; her pupils, her skin, how her chest rose and fell. “Weary how?”
“I sneak off to bed early as I can,” she admitted, fiddling with the embroidery on her apron bib. “Elizabeth’s taken on some household responsibilities; I’ve no idea how I’ll manage when she leaves.” Eleanor offered a guilty shrug. “I can’t hardly stir from the bed in the morning. First it was just that, but now my stomach don’t agree, and I’ve pains something fierce at times.” A shine to her eyes welled, and she snatched a handkerchief from her pocket to blot away the dampness. “It was the same, nearly, for Addie Timmons.” Eleanor patted her chest a moment, swallowing. “She was taken by tumors in her womb, back in the spring.”
James looked at her carefully, shadows beneath her eyes coloring an otherwise full face. Her eyelids and the skin at their corners was darkly pigmented against a pale complexion, but at a glance Eleanor Fitz was what he’d term healthy in appearance. He noted a fullness to her bodice, a lax tension around her bosom that hinted at slack in her corset overall, and not he surmised, just from nursing a baby. Nausea, fatigue; James turned her symptoms over in his mind longer than he needed to. “How are your monthly courses, Mrs. Fitz?”
She rested small, nervous fingers at her throat. “Mostly regular.”
Eleanor was equivocating, he was sure of it by her lowered eyes. “Your last one?”
“September, at least. The first since David came.”
“Any irregular bleeding, difficulty with your bladder or bowels since then?”
She set her eyes somewhere near his shoulder, cheeks flushed. “Not a bit.”
“Does your husband still share your bed?” By Davy’s slightly wobbly head and mostly-toothless gums, James put the baby at five months old, and thought he could guess the answer. Eleanor, face turned fully away now, confirmed his suspicion with a nod.
He took her wrist and circled it, feeling an insistent pulse beneath his fingers. She had to know the truth by now; with eight children, there could be no real mystery to her symptoms. James thought she knew, and just needed someone to tell her. “I can’t say for certain without a proper examination, but I’ve been at this sort of thing for quite some time. My educated guess, Mrs. Fitz, is that you are pregnant.”
Eleanor froze, arm suspended in his grasp, still staring the wall. It wasn’t disbelief that pinched her face, but a struggle with awful resignation. James caught tension in the fine skin of her cheek, and a stiffness to her jaw that predicted tears. She raised her handkerchief to her face and sobbed her heart out for a long moment, silently without disturbing the children, as he guessed only a mother could. He kept her wrist and squeezed it until the worst had passed.
“My older girls is gettin’ big enough to mind the wee ones,” she managed on trembling lips in a harsh whisper. “I’m forty now. I thought I could get out, find work outside the home to make ends meet. But now…” Her lip quivered, and he wondered at a strength that could swallow down anguish until her face became as placid as it had been on his arrival.
“There are measures you can take,” he whispered back, catching that Hannah was doling out assignments in the parlor, reminding the children that tea should be set for their father’s impending arrival home. “Simple things to prevent this in the future.”
Her head was already shaking a dismissal. “Our parson wouldn’t approve. And George doesn’t agree with that sort of interference,” she whimpered, making it plain that their protests weren’t hers.
“I could speak with George and perhaps –”
Eleanor’s fingers pressed over h
is, where he still held her arm. “I told him when he came to bed that night, I said maybe it was too soon. I was just starting to feel back in sorts, a little. I asked if he couldn’t wait.”
She didn’t discourage him from speaking to George; she didn’t have to. Eleanor’s unspoken message was that if George didn’t heed his wife’s concerns, he wouldn’t heed a stranger’s. “If you’re in desperate circumstances, there are families…loving homes that would take in a baby.”
Eleanor drew herself up, reclaiming her arm and smoothing out her apron. “It doesn’t do a woman credit, shirking a woman’s work.”
There were so many arguments he could make, mostly in the shape of infants left in a bin or out in the freezing night, in a miscarriage of morals and decency by fraying women who objected to ‘shirking’, as she’d called it, when there was no other help in sight. Eleanor, he gathered, was not open to those arguments, or not allowed to be. “No, of course not,” he muttered instead. He found Hannah’s eyes where she hung back now, in the parlor doorway, and tried without words to convey how utterly lost he was. Reading his need if not his meaning, she reached out and laid a hand on Eleanor’s slumped shoulder.
“Frances and Jenny have gone up to put the younger ones down. Sarah is helping the others see to the table. Why don’t you come back in and put your feet up, just for a few minutes?”
Despite her earlier proud refusal, James watched Eleanor waver at Hannah’s offer, and then crumble. “Just for a moment, I suppose. George will want me to take his coat when he gets here, and dry it by the fire. He doesn’t like for it to sit wet while we eat.”
“Of course not,” Hannah murmured, leading Eleanor back to the fire. “And if you just sit a moment, you’ll be so much more ready to help him when he arrives.”
“I can’t thank you enough, neither of you.” Eleanor’s words were thick, sleepy, and James recognized it as an exhaustion of feelings more than of her body.
“A visit is always my pleasure. I’ll see you next week, before Sarah leaves, so that we can purchase anything she needs for her stay.”
Eleanor nodded and rested hands at her belly, then snatched them back and folded them further up toward her chest. “You won’t think me rude, if I don’t see you out?” Her worry was pitiful, and James looked away for a second time that afternoon.
“Doctor Grimshaw will hold the door for me,” teased Hannah, tugging on her glove. “And I shall take immense pleasure in making him do so.”
He couldn’t force a laugh, and Eleanor nodded as if she hadn’t entirely heard.
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fitz,” Hannah offered in a final effort, and followed him back out into the street when the woman said nothing more.
He held beyond the doorway a moment after Hannah, staring further into the house, past the staircase, where he could just catch glimpses of children moving around the table. They were playful at their chore, oblivious or unconcerned with their low place in the world, happy. That was a sort of return on Mrs. Fitz’s suffering, he supposed. He watched them and wondered about his own house, his children with Emily, and then pushed it all back down before it swallowed him.
In some measurement of decorum that she understood but he didn’t, Hannah waited a certain distance before she spoke, one street up to be exact.
“What is it?” she asked, face in grave lines while she kept her eyes on the anonymous crowd ahead of them.
“With child, I’ve no doubt.”
Hannah’s sigh was long and deep, and seemed to give up something of her soul.
“She said that she asked him not to…” He trailed off, feeling unclean finishing the thought. “I’m not ignorant. I know that men take their rights as a husband, with a club or a feather.” He shrugged, no idea how he’d meant to wrap up the thought. Hannah was perceptive enough that maybe he didn’t need to.
She didn’t answer until they moved into the side streets, and even then, a few crisp gusts meted out punishment before she formed her thoughts into words. “George Fitz is what’s thought of as a ‘good man’. He’s steady in his employment and temperate about his drink. He doesn’t beat his wife, and he’s a lark to his lads at the card table.”
He knew that opinion wasn’t shared by Hannah, but he couldn’t help arguing just the same. “It seems an abuse of Eleanor’s nature, burdening her with so much. A man can’t hang his own coat by the fire?”
Hannah pressed closer as they wove through the thickest parts of an afternoon rush. “It’s not abuse, but a smiling, willful neglect. A man doesn’t have to beat his wife if he can ignore her into submission. When Eleanor says no, he just goes right on undoing his belt and unfastening his trousers, because that’s his place. And hers. If she has desires, or hopes that are not what he’s conceived for her, then he renames them as foolish daydreams.” Her next words held a stout familiarity, as though they’d lived inside her all her life. “He breaks her spirit a patronizing chuckle at a time.”
“But they’re married,” James ventured, still settling the implications of all she’d just said. “So what’s to be done? A man and a woman are charged to give their bodies to each other.”
She snorted. “Which is lovely, where God created both as heavenly equals, and convenient when one has earthly dominion over the other.” She paused and he could see her formulating something. “What if every Thursday I wished to jam my arm down your throat?”
The image of it startled him into slowing their walk. “Absolutely not.”
“But we’re married, and I wish to do so. Your body is mine; why can’t I just punch my hand inside of you to my contentment?”
He saw now what she was getting at, and colored a little at her grotesque euphemism. “Because I don’t want you to, and hopefully you think enough of me not to.”
“You mean hopefully I respect you.” Her brows raised high and her expression was sage. “I respect you enough to share my body with you, and you respect me enough to not take it by force of any sort.”
There was so much weight in his chest; it pressed down into his gut and up to constrict his throat. She’d done too much to him in the short course of an afternoon call, and he was raw around his heart.
“I’ve mortified you,” she said, when they’d passed out of the crowd and onto Dover Street’s narrow quietness.
He frowned at her, severe on purpose. “You ought to know me better than that. But I do wish that we weren’t walking together, a break so my mind could catch up to yours. I’m fairly certain you’re infinitely smarter than I am, and I’ll be thinking about what you’ve said for days.”
She stopped abruptly before they’d reached the mouth of the street, in the shadows of high brick buildings whose ancient backs stood to an inconsequential pair of people. Her gloved hand was still cooler than the burn that fevered his skin, and he leaned his face ever so slightly into the cradle of her palm.
“The fact that you will think about what I said at all proves that you are plenty smart enough.”
He started to reach up, to cover her hand with his own, but lost his nerve. “Thank you,” he offered instead. They walked the rest of the way to Grosvenor Park in silence, consoling even if it wasn’t comfortable.
.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Today, as had happened once every week for the last two months, was reckoning day. James dressed up smartly and made a trip along congested streets toward the west end to make his report to Simon Webster.
In the beginning, it had been ordinary, another errand like mailing post or picking up new shirts. He wasn’t troubled by reciting an altered account, editing Hannah’s remarks or behavior to leave out the red-tinted details, and he peppered in just enough of what Simon wanted to hear that another hundred pounds dropped into his palm and he was returned to continue his mission.
Now that he had a few patients and didn’t need the money, and he didn’t need Simon in order to reach Hannah, James shrank under the man’s weight, grown heavier in the last few weeks. The better he go
t to know Hannah, the deeper he felt her inside, the more information he was forced to leave out or paint over. He had to offer Simon something, some evidence that, even by the garden path, he was growing closer to exposing Hannah as a murderer. He balanced a tightrope, giving titillating but mostly useless details, while not giving anything that would provoke Simon to active wrath.
He massaged away tension at the bridge of his nose and rapped his frustration against Simon’s lacquered black door. Life had not been happier, but it had been easier in the days when he was still a shredded mess. No one tangle had stood out from another, a blissful state for a man who had considered sobriety a novelty. Now he was obliged think.
The butler showed him in and drifted ahead of him, specter-like, without a word, letting James know that his visits were rote and of less interest than those of the postman or the pretty girl who sold baskets of fruit.
James stepped from the dim hallway into Simon’s dim study, its thick green curtains drawn tight as though someone might peep in and catch them conversing.
Simon looked up from the jigsaw order of his desktop and then sat back, lacing his hands over his maroon waistcoat. “Doctor Grimshaw. What have you brought for me this week?”
He took up a chair in front of the desk, held quiet, and stretched a moment to feign indifference. “She’s asked me to visit when no one is home. I mentioned the rumors to her, and received no denial. I believe I’ve earned enough of her confidence that she may begin to allude, if not confess. She’s also given me an opportunity to search the house.”