A bucket of ashes

by P. B. Ryan

  Pausing at a closed door halfway down the hall, Mrs. Mott turned to the maid. “Mary Agnes, shouldn’t you be turning down beds?”

  “Mrs. Bouchard wants me here in case I’m needed.”

  “You don’t answer to Mrs. Bouchard, though, do you? You answer to me. For pity’s sake, girl, stop chewing on that—”

  “Oh, God.” From behind the door came a woman’s ragged moan. “Oh, God. Oh, Jesus.” She was young, her voice high and thready. Another woman started to say something, but her words were drowned out by a wail that trailed off into whimpers. Mrs. Mott shrank back from the door. Mary Agnes looked at the ceiling as she started back in on the thumbnail.

  Dr. Greaves knocked. “It’s, Cyril Greaves, the doctor. May I—”

  The door swung open. “Thank the Lord.” Stepping aside for them was a solidly built Negro lady with a great copper bowl of a face and hair like hoar frost on gray moss. “My name is Mrs. Bouchard,” she said in a sonorous voice seasoned with a peculiar accent, not quite southern and not quite French. “I’m Mrs. Hewitt’s nurse. She asked me to help.”

  “Yes, thank you.” If Dr. Greaves shared Nell’s curiosity as to why Mrs. Hewitt should employ a nurse, he gave no hint of it. Nell followed him into the room, noticing as she turned to close the door that Mrs. Mott was already halfway down the hall, her tread as silent as if she were barefooted, although Nell couldn’t imagine that was the case.

  Leaning over the narrow bed, Dr. Greaves felt the forehead of the young woman lying in it, a heavily pregnant, china-doll blonde with big, panicky eyes. “How are you holding up, Annie?”

  “N-not so good,” she panted. “Something’s wrong.”

  Mrs. Bouchard said, “The baby’s lying transverse, Doctor. Hasn’t budged through fourteen hours of labor.” It wasn’t a servant’s uniform the nurse wore, but rather a severely unadorned black dress that looked to have been dyed from some other color. Her only jewelry was a small enameled watch pinned to her bosom. Was the household in mourning for some reason? Nell, in her faded blue basque and plaid skirt—hand-me-downs from Dr. Greaves’s niece—felt suddenly rather shabby and conspicuous.

  Dr. Greaves whipped off his frock coat and handed it to Nell, who laid it, along with her shawl and bonnet, on a chair in the corner of the small, tidy room. Rolling up his shirt sleeves, he nodded toward a wash basin in the corner. “Is that water clean?” he asked Mrs. Bouchard.

  “I boiled it.”

  “Annie,” he said as he soaped and rinsed his hands, “I’m going to have to examine you, but it shouldn’t hurt. This nice young lady—” he nodded to Nell as she turned back the bedcovers from the bottom up “—is Nell Sweeney, my assistant. She’s about your age, I should think.”

  “Let me guess.” Nell smiled at Annie as she sat on the bed next to her. “You’re...twenty?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “Exactly my age, then.”

  Annie grimaced, her head thrown back. “No...” she groaned.

  “Ride it out,” Nell softly urged, holding her hand and smoothing damp tendrils of hair off her face. “This will all be over soon, and then you’ll have a lovely baby to—”

  “Oh, God...oh, God.” The girl cried out hoarsely during the contraction, trembled as it subsided; she was clearly exhausted.

  Noticing Annie’s wedding ring, Nell said, “Tell me about your husband.” She’d learned not to ask Where is your husband? in case he was lying in a grave near some far-off battlefield.

  “He...he...” Annie hitched in a breath and glanced down at Dr. Greaves, who must have begun his examination.

  “Annie, look at me,” Nell said gently. “What’s his name?”

  “M-Michael. Only...” Annie swallowed. “Only everybody calls him M-Mac, on account of his last name—McIntyre.”

  “He’s one of our drivers,” offered Mrs. Bouchard as she straightened a stack of clean sheets on the dresser. “Or was, till he signed up with the Boston Volunteers.”

  “The Eleventh R-regiment,” Annie managed.

  Mrs. Bouchard said, “He lost a leg at Spotsylvania in May. Been in the hospital since then, but he wrote to say he’s coming home next month.”

  “Then you’ll be seeing him soon!” Nell said.

  Annie’s head whipped back and forth on the pillow. “I’ll be dead. Something’s wrong.”

  Dr. Greaves said, “Annie, I’m not going to lie to you. Something is wrong. But it’s nothing I can’t fix. Nell.” He gestured for her to stand. “I want to show you this so you’ll know it next time we run across it. See how wide her abdomen is from side to side?”

  She let him position her hands on either side of Annie’s distended belly, over her linen chemise.

  “Feel that?” Dr. Greaves asked. “The head’s on one side, buttocks on the other—the worst position a baby can be in for delivery. Cord’s prolapsed, too.” Folding the bedcovers back down, he asked Mrs. Bouchard, “How long since her water broke?”

  “Around dawn, just as she was going into labor.”

  “I’ll need to operate as soon as we can gets things set—”

  “Operate!” Mrs. Bouchard exclaimed.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Annie moaned. “You’re going to cut it out of me? I am going to die!”

  “Annie.” Dr. Greaves turned her face toward him. “If you try to deliver this baby normally, your womb will very likely rupture, and you will assuredly die. Or the baby will. I’ll use chloroform. You’ll sleep through the whole thing.”

  “But, Doctor...” Mrs. Bouchard cast him a look that said she knew exactly what happened to women who underwent Caesareans.

  “I’ve had excellent success with this procedure,” Dr. Greaves assured her. “The secret lies in suturing the uterine wall. And no, it doesn’t cause infection to leave the stitches in, so long as you keep things clean. Do you have any experience with surgery, Mrs. Bouchard?”

  Her chin shot up. “My father was a surgeon in New Orleans. I assisted him for twenty years, through hundreds of operations. I won’t faint dead away, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “Good—you and Nell can both help me, then.”

  “‘Excellent success,’” Annie said. “W-what does that mean? Some of them still die, right? The mothers? When you do this operation?”

  Dr. Greaves’s hesitation was telling. “It’s your only hope, child. And you’re young and strong. There’s no reason to think you won’t make it, and...well, the baby almost always does.”

  “Do it,” she rasped. “But first I need to speak to...” She mewed in pain as another contraction mounted. “Send for...”

  Mrs. Bouchard patted her hand. “Father Donnelly’s on his—”

  “Mrs. Hewitt. I need to speak to M-Mrs. Hew—” Annie broke off with an agonizing howl.

  Nell held her hands and comforted her until the pain had eased. Mrs. Bouchard said, “I’m sorry, Annie, but I’m not about to disturb Mrs. Hewitt at this hour. If you’ve got something to say to her, tell it to me and I’ll give her the—”

  “No!” Annie was trembling again, badly. “I have to speak to her myself, alone. Just her and me.”

  “Out of the question,” Mrs. Bouchard said resolutely. “With everything that’s befallen that poor woman of late, she doesn’t need you troubling her with—”

  “Then there will be no operation.”

  The nurse sighed with exasperation. “Annie, for—”

  “Just do as she asks,” Dr. Greaves quietly implored her.

  Mrs. Bouchard marched out with a hiss of crinoline, hands in the air as if there were a rifle to her back.

  “We can operate in the kitchen,” the doctor told Nell, “on that big tiled table. See if there’s someone who can’t improvise some sort of stretcher. I’ll need the gas jets turned up, and some lanterns hung from the rafters. Here.” He dug the square-sided bottle of carbolic out of his leather bag. “You know what to do. Get that creature out in the hall to help.”

  * * *

  �
��What is this stuff?” Mary Agnes winced at the tarlike stink of the rag Nell had given her to wipe off the table.

  “Carbolic acid,” Nell said as she scrubbed down a big enameled butcher tray that would hold the surgical instruments. “It’ll get that table as clean as it can get.”

  “What’s the use, if he’s fixing to cut her open on it? It’ll be a right bloody mess by the time he’s done.”

  “He says it helps.”

  “Are you a nurse, like Mrs. Bouchard?”

  “Not like Mrs. Bouchard. He’s trained me in that sort of thing, but mostly I just...help with things. I go on calls with him, keep his books, do a little cleaning and cooking...”

  “Don’t he have a wife for that?”

  “She’s been ill for some time.” That was what Dr. Greaves called it, anyway—an illness. But Nell knew that the Boston “hospital” in which his beloved Charlotte had spent the past eight years was, in fact, some sort of fancy lunatic asylum.

  “What does he pay you?” Mary Agnes asked. “Or is it just room and board?”

  “Room and board,” Nell said. “But he teaches me things, too. Not just about medicine, but about history and music and how to speak and conduct myself with people. He’s taught me how to read real books and write a proper letter and work with numbers. He—”

  Mary Agnes cleared her throat as she speeded up the pace of her scrubbing. Catching Nell’s eyes, she glanced meaningfully toward the door.

  Nell looked that way to find a woman entering the kitchen in a Merlin chair, something Nell had seen only in pictures until now. Mrs. Hewitt was wheeling the upholstered wooden chair herself despite the presence behind her of Mrs. Bouchard, who could presumably have pushed it for her. Two ivory-handled folding canes and a needlework bag were hooked to the back of the chair.

  Viola Hewitt was tall—even in the chair, you could tell that—and angular and aristocratic, with black, silver-threaded hair in a braid draped over one shoulder. In lieu of a dressing gown, she wore over her nightdress a purple and gold silk robe of Oriental design, much like those worn by the women in Dr. Greaves’s book of Japanese prints; kimonos, he’d called them. She was a handsome woman, striking even, despite being an apparent cripple, and of a certain age. But there was an aura of melancholy in her eyes, in the set of her mouth, in her very posture, that robbed her of any claim to true physical beauty.

  Mrs. Hewitt glanced once in Nell’s direction as she rolled through the kitchen toward the hallway, wheels rattling over the slate floor; Mrs. Bouchard brought up the rear.

  “That’s not what I would have expected her to look like,” Nell said when she was out of earshot. “Aren’t her sons fair?”

  “The three younger ones are.” Annie smiled dreamily. “You never saw such lovely men, like angels in a painting. They got their coloring from Mr. Hewitt. He’s the kind of blond that looks almost white. He really is going white now, but you can hardly tell the difference from before.”

  Nell shook out a tea towel to lay on the instrument tray, thinking back to one of the paintings in the greenhouse, the only one whose subject was standing. He was an older gentleman in white tie, holding an opera hat and gloves in one hand, walking stick in the other. He had hair like tarnished silver, radiant blue eyes and a grimly regal bearing: August Hewitt.

  Dr. Greaves and Mrs. Bouchard entered the kitchen, having been asked to give Annie and her employer some privacy. Mrs. Bouchard sent Mary Agnes off for three clean bib aprons and as many freshly washed towels and dish cloths as she could carry. Taking the surgical kit from Dr. Greaves, Nell gathered up the ivory-handled instruments to be doused with carbolic: scalpels, bistouries, tissue retractors, artery forceps...

  A muffled wailing, just barely audible over the pattering of rain on the windowpanes and the slight hiss of the turned-up gas lamps, made them turn toward the hallway. At first Nell thought Annie was having another contraction, but it soon became clear that she was crying.

  “That girl has no business bringing any more woe on that woman’s head,” lamented Mrs. Bouchard as she unfolded a sheet onto the table. “She’s aged a decade this past month, as it is.”

  “Why?” Nell asked. Too late, when Dr. Greaves’s cut his eyes toward her, did she realize her tactlessness. She asked too many questions; he always said so. One could often learn more, he claimed, by keeping quiet and fading into the background.

  Thankfully, Mrs. Bouchard didn’t seem to mind. “The Hewitts lost their two oldest boys, both of them, just a day apart. They were captured back in February, at Olustee—that’s in Florida—and thrown in that godforsaken hell-hole down in Georgia.”

  “You mean Andersonville?” Dr. Greaves asked. Even Nell, who had little time for newspapers, had heard about the notorious Confederate prison camp, a fenced-in sea of tents housing three times as many Union soldiers as it could reasonably accommodate. Rumor had it thousands had already starved to death or succumbed to one of the many forms of pestilence that thrived in such conditions.

  Mrs. Bouchard nodded, dabbing her eyes with the edge of her apron. “They died last month, of dysentery—Robbie and Will. Dysentery. Lord, what a wretched way to go. It isn’t right. It just isn’t right.”

  “Both sons were in the same regiment?” Nell asked as she lined up the disinfected instruments one by one on the tea towel. Dr. Greaves was asking questions; why shouldn’t she?

  “They enlisted together in the Fortieth Massachusetts Mounted Infantry, on account of being such good horsemen.” Mrs. Bouchard smoothed down the sheet with a bit too much vehemence. “Robbie, he was a regular volunteer. The older one, Will—he signed on as a surgeon.”

  Dr. Greaves, washing his hands at the sink, glanced over his shoulder. “He was a surgeon?”

  “Just finished up medical school over in Scotland. University of Edinburgh.”

  Dr. Greaves let out a low, impressed whistle.

  Mary Agnes returned with a towering stack of linens, including the three aprons, which Mrs. Bouchard distributed to herself, Dr. Greaves and Nell. “Poor Mrs. Hewitt hasn’t done much of anything since she got the news, which isn’t like her. I’ve told her she must rise above it, get on with things. After all, she still has Martin and Harry—those are the two younger ones. She was painting them when the cable came about Robbie and Will.”

  “Martin’s the youngest, yes?” asked Dr. Greaves as Nell helped him on with his apron. “The one I see at church?” The one with the champagne hair and insightful eyes.

  Mrs. Bouchard nodded. “He was all fired up to enlist next month, when he turns eighteen, but now his father’s forbidden it. Says it’d kill his mother to lose another son. Mr. Hewitt, he pulled some strings and got Martin into Harvard so he can stay at home with his mama. He’s already gone back to Boston, so as not to miss too much of the first term.”

  “And Harry?” Nell prompted.

  Mrs. Bouchard turned away to fuss with the sheets on the table. “Mister Harry’s needed at his father’s textile mill in Charlestown.”

  It would appear that Harry Hewitt had chosen, like so many other young sons of wealthy families, to sit out the war and let his neighbors and servants—and brothers—fight it for him. Nell thought back to his image in the big unfinished painting—the beguiling grin, the lax fingers cradling the snifter.

  From the direction of the greenhouse came men’s voices. Opening the glass door, Nell greeted portly old Father Donnelly, her parish priest, and relieved him of his sodden overcoat.

  “You’ll have to wait your turn, Father,” said Mrs. Bouchard. “Mrs. Hewitt and Annie are—”

  “Mrs. Hewitt and Annie are done talking,” Dr. Greaves declared. “If I wait much longer to operate, it will be too late. Father, do you think you can...do whatever you have to do while we’re moving Annie to the kitchen?”

  “I...suppose—”

  “Good. Mrs. Bouchard, if you would give me a hand with Annie... Nell, make sure we’re all set up in here.”

  It took mere minutes to g
et Annie settled on the table and prepared for surgery, with Father Donnelly muttering over her all the while. The poor girl, her face red from weeping, shivered with fear despite their reassurances.

  Banishing everyone but Mrs. Bouchard, Nell and himself from the kitchen, Dr. Greaves said a brief prayer—a Protestant prayer, but Nell and Mrs. Bouchard crossed themselves just the same. He attached the drip spout to the tiny brown bottle of chloroform while Nell fitted the inhaling mask with fresh gauze.

  “Close your eyes, Annie,” Nell murmured as she placed the mask over the girl’s nose and mouth. “When you wake up, you’ll have a baby.”

  * * *

  “I say—she’s a beautiful little thing, is she not?”

  Nell, cradling the swaddled infant in her arms, smiled across the kitchen table at Viola Hewitt. “All babies are beautiful,” Nell said.

  It was well past midnight; the gas lights were low again, casting the immense kitchen into amber-tinted semidarkness as the storm continued to rage outside. Dr. Greaves and Mrs. Bouchard were down the hall with Annie, watching for post-operative complications. Mrs. Hewitt, ignoring her nurse’s exhortations to turn in, had lingered in the kitchen to oversee Nell’s bathing and diapering of the newborn.

  “They’re not all as beautiful as that one.” Mrs. Hewitt returned Nell’s smile, her melancholic fog having dissipated over the past couple of hours. She had a distinctive voice, deep-throated and a little gritty, its rough edges burnished a bit by the remnants of a genteel English accent. “She’s so plump and pretty, with that big, lovely round head. My boys all had a rather squished, stomped-upon look, as I recall.”

  “The round head is because of the Caesarean. She didn’t have to pass through the...” Nell looked away, chastising herself for having made such a reference in polite conversation, especially with the likes of Viola Hewitt; what would Dr. Greaves say?

  Mrs. Hewitt chuckled. “I’m afraid I’m not particularly easy to shock, Miss Sweeney. Mr. Hewitt is of the opinion that I ought to be a bit more prone to swooning, but I could never quite get the knack.”

  The baby yawned, quivering, then settled down again, weighty and warm in Nell’s arms; how it gladdened her heart whenever she had the chance to hold a baby. She tried to fluff the thatch of black hair, but it was still matted, despite her bath. “Is her father dark?” she asked, thinking of Annie’s golden locks.