by Jane Steen
“Goodness, that’s better.” Julia stretched herself out on the chaise longue that took up most of one wall. “I hope you don’t mind deserting your mother, Hel.”
“Not at all. And I’m serious about the night nurse. Would you tell Belming to make inquiries? She’d be the best person to choose her own subordinate.”
“I will, with many thanks.” Julia leaned back, careful not to disturb her coiffure. “Perhaps it’s my condition, but I’m beginning to find the dowager rather exhausting.”
“It’s not just your condition. Poor Mama. I’ve been reading her journals from the early 1840s, you know, and it gives me pangs of sadness to compare the happy woman of those years with the poor, miserable wretch she is now.”
“Was she happy then?” Julia wriggled her shoulders. “Dash it, now I can’t get comfortable.”
“Wait.” I darted forward and fiddled with the cushions. “It might help if you got this book out of the way.”
“That’s what I’ve been meaning to tell you. I put it there to remind me. This is yours—O sent it with some other things Michael wanted from Scott House. She said she’d borrowed it from Whitcombe to copy the trees, if that makes any sense.”
I tucked the green-and-gold volume under my arm and continued adjusting Julia’s cushions until she relaxed. A memory flickered again, a feather tickling the edges of my mind, but I failed to grasp it.
“Yes, she seemed perfectly happy,” I said, reverting to our conversation about Mama. “She’d had three children, the twins and Blanche, at an interval of just sixteen months. Gerry was nearly eight, and from the look of the entries in the journal, Mama spent an awful lot of time curing the poor of Littleberry.”
“Curing them?”
“Well, not always. Some of the entries are quite funny—like when she gave a tincture of hops and valerian to Mrs. Pike for anxiety. The old lady spat it out onto the floor and said she’d rather worry. I hope Mrs. Pike wasn’t punished for her rudeness by the workhouse authorities. Mama spent a great deal of time there.”
“I wish I’d known her then.”
“She had become extremely knowledgeable. She wrote three pages on how she’d used foxglove leaf to help a Mr. Beamish—I think he must be the East Street butcher’s grandfather—with his heart ailment. She started off very cautiously and increased the dose until he began to show signs of improvement. And then there’s another two pages on the preparation of a liniment for rheumatism and neuralgia, made with belladonna and aconite. I don’t know if I’d ever dare use such dangerous plants. Mama used to tell me never to touch the aconite in her garden unless she was there to supervise.”
“That’s monkshood, isn’t it?”
“That’s right. I must show you the sketch she made of the flowers—it’s beautiful. She wrote ‘EXTREME CAUTION—MORE POWERFUL THAN PRUSSIC ACID’ underneath.”
Julia laughed. “I wish you could see your face,” she said. “Positively lighting up while you’re talking about poisons.”
“Healing plants,” I said. “Knowledge I don’t suppose I’ll ever obtain. I wasted so many years, Julia.”
My sister-in-law shifted her body so she could stretch out an arm toward me. I took her hand, feeling the heat that seemed to radiate from within her, and knew it for a healthy warmth, the incubation of a strong life.
“You’re young,” she said. “Your mother didn’t become knowledgeable in a day either. Stop worrying about the past—or the future—and concentrate on what you’re learning now. Which, from the sound of it, is already quite a lot.”
By the time I left Hyrst, it was growing dark. The weather had turned warmer—perhaps March was coming in like a lamb instead of a lion this year—and a pearly gray mist permeated the air. It was impossible to see more than a few feet ahead, even though my driver had lit an extra lantern. The gravel of the drive muffled the sound of the horses’ hooves as we headed away from the house, past the stable block on the left and the unseen bluff on the right. The air was scented with the musty fragrance of last year’s moldering leaves and an indefinable green smell that spoke of the coming spring, of the bright spikes of snowdrop and the circular ruffs of winter aconite, the blue monkshood’s innocent namesake. Yes, I reflected, Julia was right—I did know something about plants, and I was learning more every day. Perhaps I could make up for lost time.
We proceeded steadily onward under the great trees that occasionally showed stark and black as the mist shifted, reaching the lane and then the turnpike road without encountering man, beast, or carriage.
The world was quiet and somber on this first day of March, seemingly peaceful. It was an odd peace, mingled as it was with the tension inherent in being blinded and deafened by the smothering mist. In such a fog, anything could appear. The stagecoach, perhaps, to crash into us. Seventy years ago, my fears might have included highwaymen.
“Ridiculous,” I scolded myself. Making a deliberate attempt to relax, I rocked with the rocking of the carriage. I promised myself a pleasant evening spent alternately reading Mama’s journals and gazing into the fire in the small library. Perhaps the next morning would be fine and the going firm, and I could take Sandy out for a hack around fields awakening to the spring.
I ran my hand over the book that lay on my lap. I had recognized it at last, as a wedding present I had rather liked. Justin had laughed at it as a saccharine compilation of poetry and engravings of bucolic scenes, but we had read a few of the poems curled up together one evening in the small library. If it hadn’t been dark, I’d have leafed through the pages in an attempt to recapture that happy time of my life.
The mist seemed a little lighter as we approached Whitcombe House, and the close shadows of the lane gave way to the wide-open sky of the hilltop. The hedges and neatly clipped shrubs around the house loomed as twiggy black shapes, here and there haloed in the darkest of greens. I shivered a little as I felt for the carriage steps with my feet, the driver’s hand hard and impersonal under my palm.
The door opened at my approach, as I’d expected. But I hadn’t expected the look on Mrs. Eason’s face, drawn and gray with deep vertical lines in her cheeks.
“It’s the girl, m’lady.”
As she spoke, I thought I heard the sound of a distant wail.
“The—Susan?” I heard a sound again as I stepped into the Great Hall. We both looked upward, although the wide staircase led only to the family bedrooms, which I knew to be vacant.
“Yes, m’lady. She’s ailing again, but very bad this time.”
“Is it the fever?” I shucked off my manteau and looked around for Guttridge, who by rights should have been standing by waiting to help me with my outer clothing. She wasn’t there, so I deposited coat and book into the arms of a hovering footman without even noticing which one it was.
“She’s a little feverish.” Mrs. Eason followed as I turned in the direction of a service staircase reached through a green baize door to the rear of the house. “But it’s her belly that pains her. It came on quite suddenly about an hour ago.”
“Have you sent for the midwife?” I was hurrying now. How far along was Susan? Quite close to her time, I thought. But surely the unflappable Mrs. Eason wouldn’t be so worried if these were the pains of normal childbirth.
“Of course, m’lady.” I could hear the clicking of heels as Mrs. Eason, older and stouter than I, struggled to keep up with me. I racked my brain for any remedies that might ease Susan’s pain, but only gentle potions for stomachache came to mind.
The scream that assaulted my ears told me this was no stomachache. It was the cry of a woman in agony, a desperate, wordless entreaty for the end of torment, and it sent a wave of despair crashing through my own body. Even as I increased my pace, taking the stairs two at a time despite my heavy skirts, I felt the weight of my own inadequacy. I had been playing at healing, concocting imaginary dishes out of grass, leaves, and mud. Faced with real pain, I doubted I had any ability to relieve it.
I stopped abruptly, sw
inging round to face Mrs. Eason. She was several steps below me, panting hard.
“Send for Dr. Fortier,” I said, noting inwardly that I had called him “Doctor” for the first time.
“The French physician? Shouldn’t we try one of the proper English ones?” Mrs. Eason sucked in a deep gasp of air, having clearly exhausted her supply of oxygen by arguing. “Although none of them are accoucheurs, not to my knowledge. The old sawbones who attended the difficult childbirths was in Broadmere, and he died last year.”
“I trust Fortier,” I said shortly and spun back around to continue my progress. It was a clear signal to Mrs. Eason not to further the discussion, and I was glad to hear her footsteps heading downward.
I could feel perspiration on my upper lip and forehead as I reached the attic bedrooms. I turned the door handle, noting that my hand was not entirely steady.
I wasn’t surprised to find Guttridge bending over the narrow bed. For a second, the sight reassured me. Then Susan let out another cry that sounded as if she were being ripped apart from within, and this time it wasn’t muffled by an intervening door. The sheets and blankets that had covered her hung from the end of the bed, pooling on the floor as Susan alternately curled inward around her belly and flexed outward, bending backward in agony.
“My God,” was all I could find to say. A wave of panic sent pins and needles into my fingertips.
I bent over Susan in my turn, laying my palm on her brow in a futile attempt to calm her. She was sweating heavily, not dry with fever like before. She didn’t seem to notice I’d entered the room. Her eyes were screwed shut, her teeth clamped together in a rictus of pain. To my consternation, I noticed there was blood on her teeth.
“She bit her tongue.” Guttridge dipped a washcloth in the basin by her feet and swabbed Susan’s face with it. “She’ll take some water from time to time—I can’t think what else to give her.”
Guttridge’s plain, slightly heavy face was calm yet watchful, with the eyes of an officer on the field of battle. I wanted to hug her for being there with Susan—and with me.
I watched the writhing body for a few seconds. The thin nightgown Susan wore was sweat-soaked and indecently revealing. Her heavy breasts and belly looked as though they barely belonged with the wasted limbs and bony face. She had lost flesh from arms and legs, face, neck, shoulders—everywhere except for what was needed to sustain the baby’s life. She was an ugly sight.
“There’s barely any blood.” Guttridge indicated the bottom of the bed, where a few smears of crimson and some nasty-looking brownish clots did nothing to improve the appearance of the sheets. “I don’t understand why she’s in so much pain. I don’t think it’s normal.”
I shook my head. “Neither do I. I feel so ignorant.” But I knelt before the bed, taking the washcloth from Guttridge’s unresisting hand. Dipping it into the basin, I squeezed out the water, folded it, and laid it across Susan’s forehead. It was a futile gesture in the face of the agony expressed in the young woman’s every movement and posture.
“Would laudanum help, do you think, my lady?” Guttridge asked. “For the pain.”
“Laudanum? I don’t keep it in the house.”
“I can probably get some chlorodyne from Mrs. Foster.” Guttridge’s brow furrowed. “She swears by Freeman’s for her neuralgia.”
“The dowager countess thinks all these patent opiates and cocaines are bad for you,” I said absentmindedly—and then wondered how I could state Mama’s opinion so clearly. A memory surfaced of a long-ago day at Hyrst, Mama talking with determined cheerfulness while I stared blankly at the view below us, unable to comprehend a world without Daniel in it.
“We’ll wait until the midwife—or better still, Monsieur Fortier—arrives,” I decided. “Neither of us knows enough about what we’re doing.”
For the next twenty minutes or so, the two of us did the best we could to alleviate Susan’s pain. We helped her change position whenever she seemed to need to do so, and I discovered that rubbing her lower back helped a little. If we touched her belly, hard and round under her damp gown, Susan’s cries redoubled. I found myself constantly moving my hands over her back, soothing and hushing her as if she were herself an infant.
“The physician will be here soon,” I assured her when her eyelids fluttered open and she looked directly at me. “And the midwife. You’ll feel better once the child is born.”
“Feel better?” I was surprised by the sudden strength in Susan’s voice. “I’ll feel better if it dies. I hope I die too, and quickly, because I swear I’m splitting in two.” She panted for a few moments. “My belly feels like it’s ready to burst.”
A thought struck me, and I looked up at Guttridge. “Perhaps we should send for the rector.” I tried to form the words without Susan hearing, but the panting stopped and the word, “NO,” burst out of her.
“There’ll be no blessings for me and this child, whatever happens.” She grimaced. “My father was right; it’s the devil’s work. Better to let us both die and our memory fade from the earth.”
“Please don’t say that,” I whispered. I desperately wanted this baby to live. And, I suddenly realized, I felt almost as horrified at the thought of Susan dying. Not just for her own sake—however I had felt about her, I had never wished her any harm, poor Susan—but, I realized suddenly, for Justin’s. Susan was the last link with the truth that seemed to lay tantalizingly just out of reach.
I thought again of Fortier’s theory that Farmer Hatherall had fathered his own child’s child and heard him say that he could not justify basing such a theory on two words. What were those words? “Doves’ nest.” The words Lucius Hatherall had used to describe Dene Farm to his daughter.
And then the memory that had been prowling around the edges of my consciousness opened the door, walked in, and made itself at home. Poor Susan. A poem of that name, by Mr. Wordsworth, was in the book O had borrowed. Justin and I had read and discussed it not long after our marriage.
“Dash it all, he makes it sound like the girl’s father is her lover.” I heard Justin’s voice, light and yet a little cynical, a mature foil to my inexperienced ideas. “‘A nest like a dove’s’ indeed. Brain-rotting stuff, if you ask me, and degenerate to boot.”
“I like Wordsworth,” I heard myself say. The memory of Justin’s warm breath on my cheek as he laughed once more, the rise and fall of his chest, came so vividly to me that my own breath almost stopped in my throat.
One of the books Susan had asked for was a volume of Wordsworth’s poems. There it was, on the small shelf above her bed. A fine binding of soft calf leather and gilt, unusually fine for a man of Hatherall’s station in life. Perhaps he had bought it from a sale when the library of a great house was broken up—Justin had acquired a few books that way.
A theory built on two words—but a theory that had just gained credence in my mind. I leaned closer to the writhing figure on the bed.
“Are you sure you don’t have something to confess to the rector, Susan? I see no better time to unburden yourself. You see—I think I know what it might be.” I took a deep breath. “Did your father force you? Did he sire your child? Is that why he killed himself?”
A small, strangled sound made me look up at Guttridge, and I saw horror in her face. I instantly felt terrible about interrogating such a sick woman, and then my own guilt was obliterated by the screech Susan gave. Not of pain, but of laughter. It turned into a howl of agony, and for a few moments Guttridge and I busied ourselves trying to relieve Susan’s distress.
“I’m sorry,” I gasped as soon as Susan stilled for a moment. “I just thought—if your father raped you, Susan, you’re in no way to blame.”
“I won’t—” Susan panted for a few moments and then began again. “I won’t have you saying such things about Father.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Is that what you’re all going to think if I die?”
I opened my mouth to apologize again, to say I was in the wrong, that I had been cruel and unk
ind. But Susan’s next utterance stopped the words in my throat.
“You listen here, Lady La-Di-Da. There’s one thing I won’t have, and that’s you passing judgment on Father when you don’t know the half of it. If what went on between Father and me was anyone’s doing, it was mine. I wanted it, and he was lonely, and your old Ma knew a trick or two.” A sly grin flitted across her face, followed by a grimace as a fresh pain took her. “I nicked a bottle or two from her when she started to go dotty. After she threw me out, mind, but I knew how to get into Hyrst without being seen. It was a pity she sent it all away in the end, all those useful bottles. A woman’s powerful when she knows what’s in those bottles.”
“But why?” I shook my head, uncomprehending. “Why not another man? Why did it have to be your father?”
She shrugged. “I wanted him to spend what he’d saved on me, not on his damned sheep. Who cared if he had a bit of land of his own? It’d still be a farm, and me working on a farm and married off to some clodhopper farmer like Maggie was. I wanted better than that. I wanted to go somewhere else—somewhere far off, where nobody knew us. To find someone to teach me to be a lady and catch me a decent husband. The sin of pride, Father said, and perhaps he was right. Because God—or the devil—punished us right enough.”
The last words came out in a series of pants, forced out as if by a supreme effort. “So that’s why your father killed himself—” I began, only to have my words drowned out by a scream of such volume that I put my hands over my ears. Susan twisted like an eel, the tendons of her neck standing out as she arched backward. A bloom of dark red blood appeared on the back of her nightgown.
Guttridge grasped my arm. “Someone’s coming.” She was right—with immense relief I heard a commotion somewhere in the corridor, running footsteps. Help had come at last.
My relief was all the greater when I saw Fortier, the midwife at his elbow. I pushed my aching body upright, heedless of how ungainly I must look. I moved toward Fortier while the midwife dodged around me, rolling up her sleeves and hissing through her teeth with concern.