Laurie Alice Eakes - [Midwives 03]

by Choices of the Heart

  If she made herself unattractive . . .

  She’d been trying for months, wanting to slip into the background in the hopes people of Seabourne would forget her and the great scandal she had caused, the least of the disasters that cold winter night. In Seabourne, though, she had parents and brothers to stop her. If she didn’t brush her hair until it shone, Momma or Papa would tell her to make repairs. They expected her to dress neatly, and the only soaps in the house smelled sweet or fresh, pleasant and apparently alluring to some people’s senses. Her clothes must always be neat, washed, pressed, free of obvious repairs. In the habit of a midwife, she kept her nails short and her hands scrubbed clean at all times.

  She couldn’t compromise on her hands. But as for the rest . . .

  As the night slipped into dawn, she began to ready herself for the day. She washed with the lye soap the Tollivers had given her for her bath the first night at their house. It irritated her skin, stung her nostrils, and made her feel nauseated to smell it. A good first step.

  She bundled her hair into a knot and skewered it with hairpins without the benefit of a mirror or brush. To the touch, the texture felt rough. Her cheeks burned from using the caustic soap on her face.

  She could do nothing about her dress. She had only brought a few of her plainest dresses. She chose the plainest, a gray one she had worn to more than one lying-in. Near the bottom, if anyone looked, a bloodstain that had resisted her efforts with warm salt water made a minutely darker splotch on the slate-colored fabric.

  Still without looking at a mirror, she declared herself ready for the day. Everyone else seemed to be ready, awake and going about their morning chores. Brenna and Liza milked the cows. The boys fed the chickens and gathered eggs. Griff passed the school cabin with a bucket in either hand, empty from the way he swung them. He returned moments later with them weighed down. Water, perhaps. Once he departed again, empty-handed this time, his stride long and purposeful, Esther crossed the yard and arrived in the kitchen in time to assist Mrs. Tolliver in preparing breakfast.

  The older woman glanced at Esther. Her eyes widened, but she said nothing other than, “If you insist on helping, you can stir that porridge.”

  Esther stirred. Steam rose from the pot of corn mush. Her face grew damp and hopefully red.

  “What gets you up so early?” Mrs. Tolliver asked. “The children are barely up doing their chores.”

  “I think it was a cat chasing some poor creature that woke me early.”

  Bless the creature for dragging her out of the dream before the end, the pain of her head hitting the floor, the screaming wife that had too often been Esther crying out in her sleep.

  “I didn’t mind it, though,” she added.

  “You look a fright.” Mrs. Tolliver took the spoon from Esther. “Go scrape those potatoes for frying. It’s cooler at the table.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Esther crossed the room in two strides. “Should I slice them too?”

  “Yep, knife’s in that jar and pan’s hanging overhead.”

  Esther scraped, carried the peels to a bucket on the back stoop presumably full of slops for pigs, and set to slicing the potatoes paper-thin like Papa preferred them. She caught a glimpse of herself in the gleaming blade of the knife, a tiny image of a female with a ruddy face and wildly frizzing hair. Distorted by the beveled edge of the knife, or did she truly look that bad? She wanted a mirror.

  The kitchen didn’t possess one, but the pots had been scrubbed to a coppery sheen. Not as good as a silvered bit of glass, but close enough.

  Esther took one down suitable for the potatoes. Before she filled it, she gazed into the bottom.

  “That, my dear,” Mrs. Tolliver said from across the room, apparently without turning around and looking, “is pure vanity to gaze upon your reflection in a mirror. Not the kind of example we want for our young’uns.”

  “You misunderstand, ma’am.” Cheeks hotter than they were when she stirred the porridge, Esther dropped the pot onto the table with a clang. “I’m ensuring that I don’t look like anything vain.”

  Mrs. Tolliver dropped her spoon and spun, her full skirt coming dangerously close to the hot stove in the breeze of her motion. “What are you talking about, gal? You don’t look as neat as you did yesterday, but you couldn’t be unattractive if you wore a flour sack and tied your hair up in twine.”

  “Don’t say that.” Esther pressed her potato starch–covered hands against her cheeks and added a belated, “Please.”

  “Odd. Never met a body who didn’t like to be told she’s pretty. You don’t want to be pretty?” Mrs. Tolliver’s eyes seemed to grow even wider. “Never heard the like.”

  “I don’t want the young men to be attracted to me. That is . . .” Esther concentrated on laying the potatoes in the pan just right. “I know you and Mrs. Brooks had thoughts about your sons finding a finer female now—now that you have the lead mine, but I don’t think I’m ready to be a wife.”

  She didn’t know how she could ever be ready, despite dreaming to the contrary at times.

  Mrs. Tolliver’s face softened. “My dear child, even if you don’t want to take one of our sons as a husband, you can’t go around looking frumpy. You need to be an example of neatness and cleanliness to our boys and girls.”

  “Oh no, I didn’t think.” Esther’s hands flew to her hair this time, feeling a knot she hadn’t brushed out, a straggling strand creeping down her neck. “But I have to hide it.”

  “No you don’t. Beauty is a gift.”

  “It’s a curse if it leads men astray.”

  Mrs. Tolliver snorted. “Men lead themselves astray. If they’re wanting to stray, they don’t need no pretty female to make them do it. Now go back to your room and fix—”

  An unpleasant noise from upstairs brought her up short. She tilted her head back, and her face twisted as though she tried not to weep. “Speaking of not needing beauty to have a man stray—that’s my Bethann. We raised her on the gospel, but she went her way anyhow, and now . . .” She shook her head, and a tear slid down her surprisingly smooth cheek. “She won’t tell me and she won’t let me help her. But I shouldn’t even hint at this to an unmarried girl.”

  “My mother—” Esther stopped. “Mrs. Tolliver, I’m a fully qualified midwife. I learned it from my mother.”

  “And you never mentioned a word of it when you wrote?” Mrs. Tolliver’s pale blue eyes narrowed, grew a bit cold as her eldest son’s could. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “I—I’ve left that behind. A few months ago—” Esther’s stomach cramped. “We don’t talk about patients to others unless the court demands it, but I decided I shouldn’t practice anymore.”

  “Did you have someone die on you?”

  Esther started at the bluntness, but nodded. “One mother. Babies, yes, a few . . . Sometimes they are just too small. Sometimes they are born too early and never breathe. That’s happened to me a few times.”

  “Once too often?” The blue eyes warmed a fraction.

  Esther hesitated over the absolute truth. “I decided I’d rather teach those children who survive than risk working with those who don’t.”

  “I lost a few early on.” Mrs. Tolliver returned to stirring the porridge. “Makes me love those who live all the more.”

  She’d lost a few infants. The poor woman.

  A groan and a thud sounded from above. Mrs. Tolliver jumped and headed for the door. “Not that she’ll let me do anything for her.”

  “May I?” Esther whipped off her apron and strode toward the back door. “I have some ginger. If you can get her to drink tea, it should help.”

  She wasn’t still practicing midwifery if she gave the other woman a ginger tea to settle her stomach. If Bethann lost more weight, she would die. It happened.

  “I’ll get her to drink it and tell me who the father is too.” Lips pressed together so hard they all but disappeared, Mrs. Tolliver stalked from the room.

  Esther raced for her cabin an
d her precious store of ginger. She didn’t know how she would replenish her supplies. But the mountains surely yielded many herbs she could use. And she had brought her copy of Gerard’s Herbal. It might help, even if it was written by a British man who didn’t know about many plants growing in North America. Surely some were the same, or local women would know what worked on what.

  But what was she thinking? Those were a healer’s thoughts. She. Was. Not. A. Healer. God had taken that from her as certainly as Alfred Oglevie had taken her innocence from her because no one said no to him and got away with it.

  Feeling as sick as Bethann seemed to be, Esther collected the ginger and carried it back to the house. She shaved a minute amount off the root and set it in a cup of boiling water to steep. The sweet, pungent aroma filled the kitchen, clean and refreshing compared to the greasiness of lard and the blandness of corn mush and potatoes. Corn mush that needed to be stirred and removed from the heat. Potatoes that needed to be set on the stove and fried along with slices of ham.

  First she carried the ginger tea upstairs. She could guess where Bethann’s room lay—along the back wall and in the corner—to be above the kitchen. The chamber formed the bottom edge of an L-shaped hallway with rooms opening on both sides—not an imaginative design, but large and growing more comfortable as work progressed. The doors stood open along with the windows, so a pleasant breeze swept along the corridor. No curtains hung at the windows, and the walls shone a uniform white. But every bed bore a neatly spread quilt in bright colors and intricate designs.

  Esther reached Bethann’s room, the only one with a closed door, and knocked. Mrs. Tolliver opened it.

  “Tell her to go away,” Bethann called from inside. “I don’t need no witch doctoring.”

  “She’ll drink it.” Mrs. Tolliver took the pewter mug. “You fetch Liza to help with the breakfast as soon as she’s done scrubbing out the milk pails.”

  “Whatever it is I can do.” Esther nodded and turned away.

  Again she caught the neatness of each room—plain and swept floorboards with handmade rugs pounded free of dust.

  Her hands flew to her hair. She explored the tangles, the frizz, more slipping pins. She would get Liza, all right—get her to take over for ten minutes while Esther returned to her mirror and brush.

  When she returned to the kitchen, the potatoes and ham sizzled in their pans, and Brenna stomped around the table setting out plates and flatware.

  “There’s a stain on your dress,” Brenna announced.

  Esther scowled at the blotch as though its presence were its own fault. “Blood is difficult to get out of cotton.”

  “Blood?” Liza squealed.

  Brenna’s eyebrows rose. “How’d you get blood on your dress?”

  She shouldn’t have said that.

  “I got too close to someone who was bleeding.” Esther hedged the response only a little.

  “I can fix it,” Liza said. “We can cover it up with some ruffles down the front. Wouldn’t that be pretty?”

  “Fit for a party.”

  Why hadn’t she thought of that? Ruffles, some braiding, any number of decorations would have covered up the blood. Surely she didn’t need that kind of reminder keeping her from making better use of her gown. And wearing the dress with its stain wasn’t right in this neat-as-a-pin house and equally well-groomed inhabitants.

  Female inhabitants anyway. The four Tolliver males came in, all grimy, uncombed, glowing from their morning’s exertions, even Mr. Tolliver.

  “Wash before you come to the table,” she commanded, without thinking that she spoke to her employers and students.

  She looked at her own hands. Clean. Good. She must be an example. They had hired her to be a good example of civilization so their children could go out and find their place in the world and not be shunned for their rough talk or appearance.

  “Where’s Momma?” Jack asked.

  “Busy,” Esther said. “She left me in charge of breakfast and everyone.”

  “Including me?” Griff flashed her his heart-stuttering grin.

  “If you want to eat, yes.” She frowned back at him.

  He smiled wider. “What if I just—” He reached for a slice of ham Liza was lifting from the pan.

  She smacked his wrist with her heavy, two-tined fork. “You leave that ’lone, Griffin Tolliver. I ain’t gonna throw no food away because your filthy hands touched it.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He snatched his hand back and glowered at Esther. “You teaching backtalk to my sisters?”

  “I didn’t need to teach them. I’m going to try to unteach them.”

  “You’re gonna need my prayers with this lot.” Chuckling, Griff departed from the kitchen.

  “I’m a good student,” Liza said, “when I can get schooling.”

  “I don’t want no schooling.” Brenna slammed forks onto the table. “I wanta get married and have a house bigger than this and real silverware.”

  “You need to be older,” Esther said.

  “And find someone who’d want to marry you,” Liza added.

  “I don’t think she will,” Ned piped up from the doorway.

  “Are your hands clean, Mr. Ned?” Esther reached out to take the child’s hands in hers. She pronounced them fine, and he charged to the table.

  Mrs. Tolliver descended carrying an empty tankard. She nodded at Esther and took her place at the table along with everyone else gathering. Mr. Tolliver asked the blessing in his quiet, deep voice, and bowls and platters began to fly about so quickly Esther hoped no one noticed she didn’t take a serving of porridge.

  When everyone was eating, she asked, “When would you like me to start teaching?”

  “Soon as you can.” Mrs. Tolliver wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and Esther cringed. “Can’t do it all day like some places, which is why we’re wanting you here now.”

  “I thought as much.” Esther toyed with a bit of ham. “I’ll need some time to work out my lessons. Today is Friday. Would a week from Monday be soon enough?”

  Mrs. Tolliver nodded. Mr. Tolliver’s face twisted as though a spasm of pain had coursed through him.

  “Are four hours a day good enough?” Esther continued.

  “Four hours!” the youngest three children cried.

  “That’ll do.” Mrs. Tolliver nodded. “And maybe a bit extra to my girls for—what’s it called? Portment?”

  “Deportment.” Esther glanced at the girls.

  Liza leaned forward. “What’s that?”

  “Teaching you how to walk and talk and carry on conversation.”

  “I know how to carry on conversation.” Brenna screwed up her face and started talking with an affected accent. “I seen a lady in town who was oh-so-fine she stuck her nose in the air and tripped because she couldn’t see where she was going.”

  Everyone laughed except for Griff. He leaned forward and tapped his sister’s arm. “The word is saw, brat. You saw a lady in town. That’s what you need to learn how to talk like.”

  Brenna flushed. “I forgot, you beast. I hate you.” She slammed her chair back hard enough to send it toppling, then ran from the room.

  “Griff, you shouldn’t have embarrassed your sister like that,” Mr. Tolliver said. “She hasn’t had much schooling.”

  “She can read, but she doesn’t try.” Griff sighed and rose. “If you excuse me, I’ll go apologize.”

  He left the room and a silent table. No one looked at Esther. Blaming her for the conflict? They probably hadn’t cared about grammar before she arrived.

  “So, Miss Cherrett,” Liza said too brightly, “do you have a pretty dress for the Independence Day celebration? If you don’t, I can help fix one up for you. We got time.”

  “Perhaps—” Esther swallowed a sudden lump in her throat at the unexpected offer of feminine kindness. “I’d like that. You can look and see if I have anything appropriate.”

  She had celebrated the last Fourth of July with her family and a young seminary s
tudent helping Papa for the summer. The family threw them together so much that Esther suspected their intentions. But the shy young man never looked her in the eye without blushing. Annoyed, she’d stopped speaking to him.

  Her conscience pricked her. If she treated all males that way, no wonder she was twenty-four and never so much as engaged.

  Heavy-hearted, she stood and began to gather up the dishes. Mrs. Tolliver offered a protest, but with Brenna still gone, Liza had no help.

  “I’ll go see to Brenna and Griff.” Mr. Tolliver rose and exited from the house with his stiff-legged gait.

  With Liza chattering about her Fourth of July dress and how she could put her hair up this year, the cleanup flew by. Brenna never reappeared, but Bethann slipped into the kitchen and served herself a tiny amount of food. It was food nonetheless, and an equally tiny thrill of pleasure at the sight ran through Esther.

  Finished with the cleaning up, Esther returned to her cabin with Liza, where they sorted through her few gowns until Liza declared that a white one with tiny blue flowers patterned across it was perfect.

  “Now then,” Liza announced with a sideways glance, “we need to get you an escort. Should I ask my brother to invite you?”

  The clenching thrill that usually only accompanied his smile, his touch, the sound of his sonorous voice, leaped through Esther at Liza’s suggestion, and a “No!” burst from her.

  “You don’t like my brother?” Liza asked slowly. “Or do you like Zach more?”

  Esther didn’t answer such a direct and potentially dangerous question. She began to return her dresses to their hooks behind a curtain along one wall of her room and talked to Liza about her hair for the celebration. “Do you have ribbons?”

  The question distracted the young woman from talk of an escort for Esther. The celebration was more than a month away, after all. Much could change between now and then.

  Talk of hair ribbons and her own mention of the day at breakfast reminded Esther of home, of the family readying itself for Sunday. Papa would be practicing his sermon in his study. Esther should be with the choir working on Sunday’s music, though she hadn’t sung before the congregation since January. She’d been gone for a month now. They would be looking for her. Perhaps Zach and Hannah had left some clues behind. They couldn’t arrive in a town as small as Seabourne without a few people noticing them. Yet some people—too many of them—in the village wouldn’t help the Cherretts find their prodigal daughter. They would consider her absence welcome.