10
'FATHER SAYS THAT you do not need to take ship again when the child is born. He will have you work with him in his shop. He says that you have good hands.'
'The sea is what I do. I shall go, for the season, but I shall return.'
'Last year when your ship did not come, I was afraid for you. Will you not stay with us?'
'There's money in a whaling voyage more than your father could dream of in a lifetime. I shall go back, once, twice, until we have what we need. But do not worry, I shall come back to you. Perhaps, if there have been many whales and a good season, we can build ourselves a new house, a bigger house than this one, somewhere new but close so that Hans can move his shop but people will know it still.'
'I should like that. But I should like to stay somewhere near to the Strand.'
'Or we could move to the island. They are building many new houses there. I saw when I went walking there just the other day.'
'A house with a carving about the doorway.'
'Perfect glass in all the windows.'
'With furniture made of oak and pictures on the walls.'
'A tiled floor, black and white in chequers.'
'And a rug on it to warm our feet, placed just so.'
'And you shall have a fine new dress, or dresses, many dresses, and white aprons, and collars of the most delicate white lace.'
'And caps, please, and ribbons, and silk threads for my embroidery!'
'And oranges to eat whenever you please.'
'I shall dry some of them then and put them out to scent our rooms.'
'And our children shall run in and out through the open door and see the ships and tell us who has come and from where and what they have brought with them.'
'How many children shall we have?'
'Oh, very many. After this one, many more.'
And Johanne fell silent and looked into the fire and he saw how her hand stroked her belly and did not know if she was conscious of it.
She became nervous as her time approached. 'Thank the Lord that you will be here still, that you will not be gone to sea.'
'You are a sailor's wife, you must know how to do without me.'
'Not for this. For this I want to know that you are here.'
'It is your doing, not mine. I can be of no assistance.' So vulnerable she looked when he said that, but he was out of his depth. 'I am a man, you understand. I know nothing of all this.'
He wished she would not make this demand which was beyond him.
'Well, I can call on Kirsten Pedersdatter if you like, if it is necessary.'
And he went to see Mistress Pedersdatter that same day and she gave him herbs to calm her, and when he asked if there was not something else, she gave him also a strange white stone that Johanne must wear on a string about her neck. It was egg like and rattled as if it had a loose piece inside and she said that it came from an eagle's nest. He paid much for the stone and did not know if his money was well spent. She took the coins in her clean white hands and smiled then to assure him that the words to follow came free of charge. Her smile was odd because of the length of her teeth in her narrow face, as if she was a very old horse, but her eyes were warm as chestnuts. 'See that she eats well. You don't want to have her pine away. See if you cannot get her some good greens, the darker the better, and red meat, liver; such dark foods will make her strong.'
'Will you come to visit her? You could speak to her and that I'm sure would help.'
'You would be wasting your money to have me there now. Wait and have me when you need me.'
And he went back to Johanne and she prepared her own tisanes, and he bought food at the market and she cooked it. What she needed was a woman, he saw, and felt then brutish and inadequate. Hans Jakobsen, though he was so talkative in his shop, was silent at home, far away. He tried to ask Johanne once if it had always been so, if her father had always sat like that at nights, silent in his chair, and let her play her games about him, even when she was small. Johanne had looked puzzled at his question and said of course, but wasn't it always thus, didn't every man like thus to quietly mull over all the words of the working day? So that, he saw, was how she had learnt the stillness of her evenings, those long evenings when she rustled and stitched and moved only to feed the fire; how she had learnt the appearance of self-reliance that, in all but this question of her pregnancy, gave her a presence beyond her years.
'Stay with me.'
He was about to go out, to the market and to the harbour. He had his hat and coat on and was tying his boots. That memorable winter had not let up although it was February; the cold had seemed only to intensify with the winds that swept in on them these last few days from the Baltic, that howled in from iron skies and drove even the skaters away indoors.
'Please stay.'
'Come on, girl. I'll only be a short time. And your father's in the shop.'
She was looking pale, now he thought of it, but that might be due only to the biting cold, which whistled in through the cracks in the shutters and through the door as he opened it.
When he came back she was leaning forwards across the bed, her face held in tightened hands, heaving with silenced pain. He dropped his things and went to her but could not touch her; a person in pain is so alone. He held her only when the spasm was gone.
It was too soon, she said. She knew that something was not right. Kirsten Pedersdatter had told her the day to expect, the time of the moon.
'You cannot be sure, Mistress Pedersdatter could be wrong. She is no physician after all.'
'No physician, but people about here say that she has more knowledge than any Latin-speaking doctor of medicine in all of Copenhagen.'
In the pause before the next pain came they prayed together. And when she rose from her knees he wrapped her shawl about her, placed pillows on the bed, made her comfortable as he could. He made to go downstairs to prepare a tisane but she would not let him at first, would not let him leave her alone in the room. He had to tear her hands from him and hold them by her sides before he could free himself from her, and then he went down and called to Hans, and went to the neighbouring women's houses to get them to come and help, and once they were with her and there seemed to be some relief or at least a pattern to the pains, he went out and walked a long way through iced and empty streets.
He had no sense of how long he was gone. There was little enough light in the sky, less to penetrate the narrow gap between the old houses that leaned towards one another overhead. The darkening of the end of day was scarcely perceptible save in the intensifying glow of candles and firelight from the windows he passed. He walked slowly, watching the ground, for the dark ice was deceptive and it was easy to slip. Once or twice he hovered before the rumble of noise from an inn or beer cellar. The idea of warmth enticed him, the thought of a shot of liquor spreading its warmth inside him, but each time he drew back thinking that he could not take the press of people. Such a crush of men you found in a bar, such brightness of face and voice. He was not a man for crowds, he had spent too much of his life apart from them and his soul needed space about it. So he walked to the water. That was what one did in that crowded city, one walked to the water for calm. He walked north until he had reached the ramparts and put all the houses behind him, and stood at the edge and gazed into space, a long view out beyond ice-bound ships into the blankness that had been sea, stood and thought until the wind cut through to his bones, and only then turned back, guilty for the stolen time.
When he came to the midwife's house he knocked at the door, and waited a long time until he heard a clatter on the stairs inside and a younger woman came and answered who he saw must be Kirsten Pedersdatter's daughter, so like her she was, only younger and her face a little plumper, more flesh about the teeth.
'My name is Thomas Cave. My wife is in urgent need of your mother, at least I guess that Mistress Pedersdatter is your mother.' The likeness in the young woman's face was so complete that he wondered that any father, any man, could hav
e had a part in the making of her.
'My mother is out. She was called away.'
'Will you tell her then soon as she comes back?'
'I cannot say when that will be.'
'Tell her anyway. Tell her we need her to come.' Almost he had asked the daughter to come instead, as if she must have inherited her mother's cunning along with her features.
'Wait one moment.' She left him standing at the door and disappeared down the dark passage that ran beside the stairs, came back a few minutes later with something in her hand. 'I think she would give you this for your wife.'
'What is it?
'For the pain. If it becomes very bad.'
The faces of the women at the house barely registered his return. He felt that they did not care that he had been gone or for how long, as if he was quite irrelevant to the event. Only Johanne wished to see him. She was walking about the room, her face taut, a glitter in her eyes.
She put out a hand to him. 'You went out. I told you not to go.'
'I went to look for Mistress Pedersdatter.'
'You were gone such a long time.'
'It is the state you are in, my dear, that makes a few minutes seem like an hour.'
At that moment a wave of pain broke in her and she gasped and bent forward across the bed and held her weight up on clenched fists that dug into the covers. She did not speak again until it had receded.
'Where is she then?'
Kirsten Pedersdatter did not come until after midnight. There was no sleep in the house save for the apprentice up in the attic. Hans had kept up in his shop working in a fixed silence that he did not break even when he unlocked the door to her. He made no acknowledgement that he knew either her or the cause of her coming, but let her pass him and go to Cave who had descended the stairs at her knock.
'At last,' said Thomas Cave. 'You said you would come when she needed you. What kept you?'
She did not bother to reply. Her lips pursed over her teeth and the look in her eyes was too sharp for him. She told him to make the women who were watching go. And when they were alone, she had Johanne lie on her back on the floor where she could handle her most easily and pulled up her nightgown to expose the great pained whale of her belly. She knelt then beside her and with those pale hands felt her systematically, prodded and pressed, spread her legs wide and folded them up and felt between them.
'I thought so. I thought it was too soon. It is far sooner than it should be. I do not know why it has started now.'
'What can you do?'
'I? I can do little but wait, like you. And tell her also to wait, to be patient. Have her waters gone?'
'No. Nothing has occurred but the pain.'
'Then there is still a chance that this may settle. The baby is the wrong way up, and too high in her. Perhaps I could give her belladonna to still the spasms and that would give more time for it to move.'
'Do that then.'
'Wait. Not so urgent. I will watch awhile, I will see how it is going.'
And she told him to sleep and he went to sleep in the room next to that one which was Hans's room, and as he left he saw her go down on the floor again and press and pummel with her strong white hands, and heard her begin to speak some long spiel in a rhythmic undertone whose words he could not catch.
He must have gone to sleep still listening to it because when he woke the first thing he noticed was the silence in the house. There was not a sound from her room, barely a sound from the sleeping city save for the clock chimes and the early cockerels. Hans slept on the bed beside him: so he had at last put away his work and pulled himself upstairs, and Thomas Cave had been unconscious of his coming. There was grey light enough to make out his form, scrunched to the side with the blanket pulled over and one thin leg bent from it, shuddering slighdy with his exhalations ofbreath. When a dog barked somewhere close to the house he rolled over and began to snore, a soft rattling snore, as another dog took up the call and a wave of barking spread through the district. Thomas Cave took himself up then, gentle beside the other man, and creaked through to the room where the women waited.
Kirsten Pedersdatter sat in an upright chair close to the window, arms dangling, body limp as if she slept but her eyes open, watching. Her patient lay on the bed now, coiled as far as her bulk would allow her. He could not see if she was asleep or awake, and before he could come closer Kirsten Pedersdatter put a finger to her lips and led him out to the landing and down the stairs.
In the thin daylight of the parlour below she spoke.
'I have given her something to help her sleep a little. She is going to need all the strength that God can give her.'
It had begun, she said, not as childbirth but as a disturbance of the womb. She could not tell the cause but looked out where the last star faded and the sun rose between the roofs in a painful streak of pink. She shrugged: God's will; an evil eye.
'Or just luck,' said Thomas Cave. 'Chance? Or the way she is made, some inherited feature like that hair of hers or her blue eyes, but this a flaw, some flaw in her body passed down from her mother? Did you know that her mother died at her birth?'
'I know because I was there. But be reassured, it was not like this, it was not the same.'
For five days it went on. The pains came and racked her and she gasped and screamed cat's screams, and sometimes she would growl and bite on a piece of leather he brought up from the shop downstairs, thick hide that she gnawed through with her teeth and clenched and kneaded with her hands. In the intervals she breathed with deliberation to quell the whimpers and then sought him with her eyes. And then he looked into them and saw a calm deep inside her and thought of a madonna with dark-gold hair tumbling about a face of childish innocence.
'Will you play for me, Thomas?'
He took his fiddle down and played a sad slow tune that he knew, played at first as delicately as he knew how, but then he saw that any kind of music affected her and began to play the most unlikely things: dance tunes, church tunes, the banging rhythms of bawdy songs, anything at all with sound to draw her away from her sensation. He was a scratcher at the fiddle, no musician worth the name; if he played for others he played for them to dance and drink and sing, not for listening. He had no subtlety. Yet here in the small upstairs room before the bed he played and lost himself in it, and for moments she was lost in it too, and there were moments when the other women were there that from the atmosphere it might have seemed a celebration instead of what it was.
Each day, once or twice, Kirsten Pedersdatter came by, came without speaking through the shop, where still Hans did not appear to see her though Cave knew by her word that she had attended on his own wife's fatal confinement, and went up to Johanne, and felt and pummelled and put her ear to her great drum of a belly to listen for the baby's heart, put her fingers inside the woman to measure how far she was open, put her hand to her head to feel its heat, looked at her eyes that were mapped with red veins from the straining. Thomas and the women stood back when she came, sometimes leaving the room and sometimes watching from a distance, and she did not speak to them at all and barely even to her patient, though she muttered frequently under her breath, sometimes at such extended length that he believed she spoke some incantation. Once she brought something and tied it about her middle beneath her clothing, and when the women looked at it later they said that it was the skin of a snake.
He took courage towards the end and followed her into the street. How it dazzled him; he had not been out for days and there was sun trying to break through the sea fog.
She looked at him with eyes hard as little nuts.
'Your wife is very weak. The pain has drained all her strength.'
'Is there nothing you can do?'
'You have seen that I do all I can.'
'At least, can you give her something else for the pain?'
'The drugs she has had already are strong. They cannot be taken for much longer without becoming killers themselves.'
11
I
THINK I HAVE not seen here in Greenland - if this island, as I now know it to be, be indeed Greenland - snow of the gentle kind we have in our southern latitude. What snow there is, in the depths of this unforgiving winter, is a hard, mean, constipated snow that swirls about in the wind and strikes like pinpricks on any little patch of eyelid or other exposed skin. Three days ago I killed a bear, praise be to God for His care of me in this wilderness, a kill in which I had much luck, the bear being caught astride a steep slope so that though the range was not close a single shot sufficed to knock him down and disable him. Only that the place was distant from my cabin and it has taken all of these past days to skin and butcher him and bring in the pieces to hang, the chore performed in stages as my gloveless fingers became bitten with the cold. Were it not for the new meat my spirits would be very low. There is great anxiety in these interminable days of half-light and spitting snow.
The snow that last day fell so softly, he remembered, that he had thought it a sign that God had relented. What would he not give, in this hard place, for snow like that? From dawn onwards it fell, light and thick at the same time, and covered the filthy ice and the stained drifts about the streets with a thick white down, and when he went out he had turned up his face to feel the flakes drop like feathers against it and slip away, felt some of them catch and thaw in the crack between his lips. The chilling easterly had dropped, the temperature perceptibly lifted, and he knew that this snow would not last with them as the earlier snows of that winter had done, but cover only for a brief time and melt away, and that there was every chance that the sun would come in its wake. He had a sense of all the warmth and light of the sun being there but only waiting behind the softness of the snowcloud.
The Solitude of Thomas Cave Page 8