Birdman's Wife

by Melissa Ashley

I awoke to the smell of bread baking. I took myself out of bed, my mind foggy from the laudanum. I could not stand being in the quiet, dark room a minute longer. I craved the kitchen and its country sunlight, the bustle of Daisy and Mother preparing a meal, Lizzie and Louisa dressing their dolls in the sitting room. I eased myself down the stairs, feeling better than I had the previous day. I must have simply been weakened from many nights’ poor sleep. With a proper rest, I felt significantly improved. But Mother was not in the kitchen. I checked the cast-iron oven and saw a loaf of bread inside, its crust a rich gold. I recalled bringing butter home as a child, in an enamel bowl that I had borrowed from our neighbour. Twice a week we exchanged butter from her cow for eggs from our chickens. With the butter, Mother sweetened our bread, made with heavy flour. I used to sit and watch it grow inside the bowl, peeping under the wetted tea towel, breathing in the scent of the fermenting yeast. I helped Mother tip it from the bowl, watched her knead it with her hands on the bench, adding flour. She then set it back into the bowl to prove. We ate jam and butter scraped onto the old bread while we waited, and I imagined the creatures working inside the dough to cause it to rise. They were like the animals Charles studied under his microscopic slides, the skippers and mosquitoes that played on the surface of water, with their mysterious transparent bodies, their pincers and mandibles as thin as a piece of human hair, their abdomens and thoraxes like bits of sesame seed. Mother told me that she liked to think of bread as a living being that needed coaxing to life so it would make a good loaf.

  ‘Mother,’ I called.

  ‘She’s outside,’ said John, from the oak table where he attended his letterpress. He wore an open shirt and trousers. He looked tired and drawn.

  He greeted me with a kiss and asked how I was feeling. He observed that I appeared better than the previous day. I said the uninterrupted sleep from the laudanum had done me a world of healing. Somehow the vile leeches had been removed. I must have slept through Daisy’s ministrations.

  ‘I think your mistletoebird sketch is finished,’ he said. ‘You might want to pare back a few fronds at the base of the nest. But on the whole it is good.’

  I glanced distractedly at the sketch.

  ‘Just remove some of the excessive foliage. Bring the bird out more,’ he said.

  ‘You are right. But I think I might be finished for the time being,’ I said, holding on to my stomach. I felt a sharp kick. ‘I don’t know if I can sit at the table anymore.’

  John nodded, his mind already back on his corrections. I excused myself and wandered into the yard. I found Mother standing before an oak tree, a jar of honey in one hand, a butter knife in the other. She was slathering the creamy substance onto a fork in the tree’s bough, like buttering a piece of breakfast toast.

  ‘Don’t let John see you!’ I called, as I waddled over. The sunlight dappling the lawn felt overly bright at the edges of my eyes. She was leaving the honey in the boughs of the oaks to call robins into the yard.

  ‘But you used to love doing this as a child.’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I replied, ‘but you know what John’s like about folk beliefs.’

  ‘Come,’ said Mother, smiling, clutching the handle of the butter knife. It was then I saw Charlie, a knife in his hand, spreading the sticky substance in the bough of the adjacent tree. I wandered over and leaned against the rough trunk.

  ‘Mind if I have a turn?’ I asked. ‘And then we can eat some of this honey on Grandmama’s new bread.’

  ‘Goody, I’m famished,’ said Charlie, scooping a lump onto the knife for me and holding it out.

  I painted it onto the silvery bark and returned the knife to the pot. ‘I’ve done with it,’ I said to Mother, pushing myself off the thick bole. ‘I’m hanging up my pen for the season. Declare it to the world. I think I need some porter and a long nap.’

  ‘It’s certainly past time,’ said Mother, holding out her arm, looking relieved. I went to her, leaning heavily into her shoulder for support. We must have looked a fright, Mother rubbing at her rheumatoid fingertips, me broad and ungainly, my elbows purple with cold, patches of wet showing through my smock, my damp hair plastered to my scalp. Step by slow step, we made our cumbersome return to the cottage to warm our bellies with tea and bread and honey, to surrender our aching limbs to the fat cushions of the sofa.

  Chapter 25

  Norfolk Island Kaka

  Nestor productus

  Egham, Surrey 1841

  My eighth child arrived like a storm smashing Yarrundi: the sky purple and green, the drop in air pressure felt in the rising of the hairs on my neck. The crackle of some galvanic force gathered in the bloated cloud. The wattle leaves shivered in warning, but rather than take shelter inside the house I wanted to stay on the veranda with my skirts whipping around me, the storm up close to my face, its power licking my cheeks and unravelling my hair. I wished to stand firm, a human pole resisting like a tree, swaying and shimmering in the pounding rain.

  I leaned over the bed, counting breaths as the birthing room was readied. The candles were lit, the windows closed and the curtains drawn. Bowls of water were fetched, a screen set up in the corner for me to change behind. There were towels and cloths on the sideboard, my ladies’ syringe with its sheep’s bladder bag and yellow rubber hoses for douching, and an enamel chamber pot, ewer and bowl. John helped Mother spread an oilcloth to protect the mattress. A bowl of beef broth and a pot of camomile tea steamed on the table next to my bed.

  The accoucheur, Mr Price, from the Surrey General Lying-in Hospital, bore a leather bag, its accordion pleats bulging with medical cargo. He propped it on my duchess, unlatched the brass buckles and removed a small, hard cushion which he tied with ribbon to the railing at the foot of the bed.

  ‘A Prussian cushion, Mrs Gould,’ he explained, ‘to press your feet against during a pain. My patients hold it in the highest regard.’

  I might have offered my hand in greeting, but a contraction descended, strong and swift. Though I had experienced this state many times, it did not become easier with practice. Perhaps dilation proceeded more quickly, but there was no escaping the intensity of my suffering. It was as if one’s memory improperly stored precisely how deep the degree of discomfort. Until, like a mud-stuck ox, the agony bore down, the full force of terror streamed back. Arrgh, bellowed the body, of course.

  The room – darkened and quiet. No notion of the hour expressed on the clock’s face. Indeed, the idea of time dissolved. Nothing existed except my child’s impending nascence. Mother was to have been at my side as my labouring companion, but she had decided against it at the last moment. Childbirth was an affliction in her eyes, and for sound reasons she preferred to experience it at several steps’ remove. A lying-in nurse from the district hospital had been summoned as a replacement.

  When the pain subsided, Mr Price enquired if he might make an examination. He was a young man with curling brown hair and brushed muttonchops; efficient, though rather bustling. How many women had he attended, I wondered? I was regretting the absence of Dr Russell, my London physician, who had delivered all my children but Frank.

  Daisy drew a sheet over my lower body. ‘Hold your knees apart and upraised,’ said Mr Price. Like all male practitioners of the art of parturition, he proceeded by touch rather than sight. By the pinch of his mouth, I knew that I must have been in a more advanced state than he had reckoned. Daisy helped to change my underclothes and dabbed a warm cloth to my brow. Following several indescribably intense moments of clenching and straining, which caused me to bite hard on a knot of rag and claw at the ties attached to the bedhead, our eighth child, Sarah Gould, made her arrival. She slithered between my legs like a wet lizard. I held her, breathing in the oceanic scent of her scalp, meeting with her otherworldly eyes, which glanced about the dimmed bedroom. I saw her squashed nose and fattened lips, her sturdy brow, before surrendering her to the nurse to be washed and swaddled.

  Henry shifted his weight from his right foot to his lef
t, grubby fingers hidden behind his back, his untrimmed fringe falling in his eyes. His shirt was torn under the arms, showing skin, his trousers were short in the leg; in the past few months my eldest, now ten, had undergone a growth spurt. Beside him stood Charlie, seven, his cool blue eyes shining, his dark hair combed flat. His clothing was immaculate, and he waited with tremendous calm, absorbing the candlelit lying-in room, its smells and instruments, like a trained clinician. After Charlie came my Lizzie, stroking the crown of a baby robin. She had snuck the creature into the room, a new pet, rescued after falling from its nest. The children fed it jam-soaked biscuits and milk out of a dropper, hoping to nurse it back to health in a straw-filled box kept in the boys’ bedroom. Lizzie, now five, tended the feeble creature, its existence more significant to her than her new sibling. I understood her absorption, her hesitation to welcome this latest addition. How could she trust a mother such as me, who went on making children after abandoning her for two long years? I loved her all the more for it. Next, tugging at Lizzie’s elbow, was little Louisa – at three-and-a half, how she had thrived and grown, freckles sprinkling her nose and ringlets tumbling down her shoulders. She had developed a tan and lost the eye-lowering shyness that she had greeted me with upon my return from Australia. And, lastly, holding Louisa’s hand, toddled Frank, two years old, his breeches flecked with sand, sunburn reddening the cleft in his chin.

  Supported by pillows, I cradled my muslin-swaddled, black-haired daughter. Mother bookended one end of the descending line of Goulds, John the other. Each face looked tired and relieved, as was to be expected. I played up to their joy, willing a caprice I did not feel to enliven my features. Earlier, I had given Sarah her first suckle, and now I would pass her to her siblings for kisses and cuddles, as was our family’s tradition.

  Frank poked Sarah in the cheek. Lizzie remained convinced of the juvenile robin’s superior interest. My children were unchanged by their new sister. They were ushered from the room by Mother to go downstairs for lunch.

  John stayed at my side, kissing my hair and assuring me that I had done a superb job. Then he glanced at me with concern. ‘You seem exhausted.’

  I nodded, my eyes fixed on Sarah. I touched my finger to the fabric covering her hair. ‘I cannot ever repeat this,’ I said. Usually I was adept at hiding what I felt, fitting a visage over excruciating pain, but it had to be said. I hoped my husband noted the firmness of my tone.

  ‘We can see to that.’ Deep down, I knew John was proud of our easy fecundity. But, like any man, he lacked a woman’s intimacy with the toll that bearing a child exacted.

  John spent several hours with Sarah, allowing me to nap and drowse, letting me talk when I drifted awake, staying by my side, his presence lessening my pain. When John left to see to the children, Mr Price returned to check me over, suggesting that I try to make water. But when the nurse placed the pan on the bed I felt myself overcome by intense trembling. My legs shook as if I had almost been hit in the street by a carriage. My brow broke out in beads of sweat and my vision blurred out of focus. I grabbed the young nursemaid by the arm and mouthed ‘Daisy’ at her, before slumping against the sheets. When the chamber pot was taken from the bed, I glimpsed inside – it was filled with blood and fleshy matter. The third part of the birth had not proceeded well, to the deep consternation of the accoucheur. He inspected the afterbirth and was unimpressed. I was forced to swallow a horrid-tasting draught. I was told to lie back while he pressed on my abdomen and then put his arm into the canal down which Sarah had travelled. He pulled hard at the material within, but it would not budge.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Mrs Gould, I’m sending for the Surrey obstetrician,’ said Mr Price. ‘I’d like a second opinion.’

  ‘Is there anything to be concerned about?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s just a matter of routine.’

  Dr York, senior physician from the General Lying-In Hospital, had a stomach as eye-catching as a frigate bird’s red throat sac. He waved his thick fingers at Daisy, asking that she take Sarah from the room and put out an urgent call for a wet nurse.

  ‘If you’ll just relax, Mrs Gould,’ Dr York instructed, his tweed scratching at my arms, his porkpie breath all over my face.

  I barely registered the inspection. When it was over, Dr York, Mr Price and my husband conferred in whispers in a far corner of the lying-in room. Had I not felt so weakened, I might have informed them of my opinion of having my case discussed before my eyes but out of earshot. Dr York questioned Mr Price at length, rubbing his baby-delivering hands along the chain of his watch and tapping the buttons on his waistcoat in a sort of tic. Mr Price’s answers, which involved earnest head shaking, were promptly supplied. At one point in the conversation, Dr York dropped his hand into his coat pocket, bringing out a whisky flask, from which he took a long draught. He then passed it to John and my accoucheur.

  After an eternity of waiting, John approached the bed. He sat on the covers, his gaze fixed on the embroidered pattern. ‘Mr Price has offered to relinquish your case,’ he said, raising his head to meet my eyes. ‘Dr York is experienced in childbed fever and will take over from here.’

  All thought of a response escaped me. Childbed fever was the dread of confined women, a killer. Had I contracted it? Was this why I felt prickled with heat and then hollowed out by chills? But I was a strong woman. I had experienced difficulties in the past and survived. I had miscarried two infants, bleeding for several days after each incident. Treated around the clock by my expensive London physician, I had risen to resume my commitments. Surely the wound would heal and I would again be well.

  ‘Please, bring me Sarah?’ I asked John.

  Daisy was fetched from the drawing room, where she had been caring for the baby. I held my daughter to my burning cheeks, looked deep into her unearthly blue eyes. ‘I’ll see to you soon, little one,’ I told her. ‘I’m sorry to be taken ill. I want you to wait for me.’ When she became too heavy for my arms, I whispered to Daisy to take her away. ‘And, Daisy,’ I said, my voice low, ‘please don’t mention my affliction to Mother and the children. Not until John gives word.’

  ‘As you say, ma’am,’ she replied, gently patting my shoulder. I watched her press Sarah against her chest with one hand while piling swaddling cloths into the bib of her apron with the other. I wished I could nurse my child, but in truth I lacked the will to make the attempt. After Daisy retreated from the room, I relaxed onto the pillow. Alone, I let my face twist in fear, the ordeal of my daughter’s birth overshadowed by the piercing pain in my lower abdomen.

  It seems my situation is grave. I need to bring my fever down to below one hundred degrees. Dr York is a keen enthusiast of purging to combat inflammatory disease, which he assures me is the root of the problem. There is no question of a retained placenta. I have puerperal fever, sometimes deadly – the experienced doctor broke gaze with me when he said this – but from which, on the rare occasion, a woman can make a complete recovery. I’m to be treated by leech cures.

  A laudanum-drenched bandage wraps my middle. Something must be working, for I feel a delicious numbness in the area and am no longer aware of the after-pains. Nevertheless, I’m producing so much perspiration that I have soaked several sets of sheets. My diet is beef broth. Every couple of hours, Dr York holds a concoction of brandy and raw egg to my lips. I wash it down with camomile tea, in which has been dissolved a tablespoon of salt of magnesia. Wet towels are applied to my back and abdomen, such that my shivers are greatly increased.

  John’s hands feel cool against my arms. He whispers that I should not trouble myself with conversation. But there is so much for me to say. My thoughts rush and collide. He nests beside me in the bed, asks if there is anything I wish him to read to me. I suppose I should be reciting psalms from the bible, but to be honest, I do not wish to hear verses. I keep returning to news sent from the north of the country. Lord Stanley’s Norfolk Island kaka has expired after a brief flu at thirty-seven years of age. While the death of a
pet may not seem cause for concern to any but its beloved owner, the parrot was near the last of its kind. The kakas of Norfolk Island had fallen prey to the starving penal colony, and their eggs to the vermin that the Europeans unwittingly introduced. Of the few memorials the world now would have to remember it by was the lithograph I had drawn for our publication The Birds of Australia and the Adjacent Islands.

  I raise my head to speak, but the words exit my lips in jumbled form. John opens a bible and begins to read. The verses transport me back to the Zoological Society, to the mound in the back garden. It lies covered in a fine sprinkling of grass, greener than the surrounding lawn, daisies and crocuses and a species of moss fringing its edge. Nobody but the men working in the society’s preparation laboratory know that under the heaped earth are interred the bones and hides of the animals that fail to survive captivity. You might have thought they would be transformed into taxidermied specimens. But there are some species of which we have too many samples. The meat is distributed among the other animals or taken home to feed pets, but there is no use for the skeletal material, the hirsute skins, and they are ploughed in under the ground. They had formed a necropolis, though one without religious affiliation, not a mound belonging to the fey, no high-built grave to elevate an illustrious personality. What might this place, sliced open like an archaeological site, reveal about the obsessions of our times? What might we learn by cutting into the bony stratifications, the layers of ribs, the tough hairs pressed into the damp earth, the meat removed by beetles and grubs? It was impossible for me to notice the mound without imagining diamond-rough vertebrae, mangled pelvises, leg bones like sticks and canes, skull pans like the cup from which I drink my tea. More visions appear, like those that come when I struggle with a drawing, the blank paper a screen for images I cannot forget.

  The sun is set, the room thrown into darkness. John has left my side. Have I been sleeping? A woollen rug lies tangled at the foot of the bed. On the side table are bottles of medicine and a bowl in case I am ill. There is a cup of cold meat broth. The cottage is silent.