Chapter Eighty-Four: Shadowed

Make love to me first with words.

He had done that, and then some. I had stacks of his letters in my dresser drawer, written since I had asked him to give me words. I would take them out and reread them each night by lamplight. 

Sometimes certain phrases or even the simple curve of a letter would send my fingertips tingling. 

I looked down at the hand holding mine, the fingers that had written those powerful words of apology and devotion. There was a charge there that raced from his hand to my fingerstips to my lower spine. I had almost forgotten how intoxicating that sensation was.

He leaned forward tentatively. 

I closed my eyes in anticipation, awaiting the feel of his rough beard against my face. I could smell his soap.

Just as his lips touched mine for the first time, there was a cry from Anne in the other room. Not her sleepy whimpering wake up cry. It was a full on, angry sob as if she knew that I was betraying her father’s memory at that very instant. He kissed in earnest until it was clear that she would not settle down.

He moved away, amusement playing on his lips. A half smile hung suspended there.

“I will get her,” I sighed. 

“No, I will go.” He applied gentle pressure to my shoulder indicating I was to sit down and wait for his return. 

I eased myself down onto the sofa and folded my hands onto my lap to wait.

He knew nothing of changing diapers or feeding or soothing a child. It would not be long.

As expected. Anne would have nothing of it, of this man. The wailing creacendoed as she refused to calm down. 

Two minutes later he returned with a red faced, tear stained Anne who turned silent as soon as she saw me. 

He placed her on my lap, apologetically.

“It’s alright. Shhhhh,” I murmured.

I held her close. She rested her warm, damp head on my shoulder, fuzzy hair tickling my chin. A quiet hiccup, then a contented sigh as she drifted off to sleep again.

“I will go,” he whispered. He bent down and kissed my forehead, then the top of Anne’s head. “Until next week…”

I watched him grab his hat and let himself out.

Tonight I would not need his words. My lips felt raw from his earlier kiss. Love lingered there.

Chapter Eighty-Three: Pudding

Such joyful sounds…. giggles and coos.

A man’s laugh.

I peeked around the corner, wiping my hands on the apron tied around my waist.

He was in the floor playing with Anne. She looked up at the Reverend with adoring eyes as she waited for the wooden ball to roll back to her. 

“Are you ready? Here it comes!”

He rolled again gently and she caught it between her good hand and the bad one.

She used the damaged hand as if she did not need for it to work like the other, as if she did not recognize that the hand was not normal. She did not need for it be normal, as it did what she wanted regardless. She knew nothing else.

Still, it hurt to watch. Joy and pain and sadness intermingled. Life. It was relentlessly bittersweet.

I went back to the formidable black oven. 

Cooking for myself was easy. Subsistence did not require anything fancy. Cooking for him was another matter. I would practice during the week, trying something new, then whip it out for his visits. 

Why was I trying so hard?

Truth be told, I had started looking forward to his visits, the gifts he brought. Sometimes they were for me. An ornately carved tortoise shell hair comb. Oranges and dates. Heavy stationary paper and ink. Sometimes the gifts were for Anne. A doll that was much too old for her. Or the ball today.

Each Sunday I would stand at the window and watch for him.

At times I worried that loneliness clouded my judgement. There were whispers about him around the town. Attendance at his church fell. Out and about I found the animosity toward me enhanced and magnified.

And then there was the question of where friendship ended and romance began. What did he want from me ultimately? Penance? Or a wife?

There was an easy familiarity developing between us, dangerous in its potential.

I cracked open the oven and tapped a towel wrapped hand on the dish resting in the water bath. 

Not yet set.

I closed the heavy door again. 

Why did I decide on baking an orange custard pudding? Granted it was with the oranges he had given me but it was taking much longer than I had anticipated. It would still have to cool before it would be edible. 

A throat cleared from behind, causing me to jump. It was then that I realized I was standing in the middle of the kitchen with my right hand still wrapped in the towel, unmoving, lost in thought. I must have been an odd sight.

“I am sorry! I did not intend to startle you,” he said.

The Reverend was now standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Anne perched primly on the crook of his elbow. When she saw me she opened her arms, indicating that her loyalty still lay with me, at least in so far as carrying duties went. He stepped forward and handed her off to me.

“Come to mama, baby girl…” I kissed her fat cheek. It felt cool against my lips. 

She hugged my neck tightly enough to squeeze my heart.

The room was warm and I could sense strands of hair stuck to my forehead by beads of sweat. I brushed them away with the back of my hand, suddenly self conscious.

He stared at me for a long moment. 

He was close enough to touch. In fact he reached out his hand toward my waist as if he would, but thought better of it, instead shoving the offending hand quickly into a pocket.

My heart beat harder in my chest. 

He had almost crossed into territory from which there would be no return. 

I realized that I could not decide if I wanted him to cross that point or not.

I stared back.

Edinburgh felt as if it was shrinking up, fading into the distance.

“I think I should go.” His voice sounded thick and deliberate.

I nodded. 

Yes.

Chapter Seventy-Five: Red

“That will be two pounds, six pence.” The shopkeeper glared at me as she stood expectantly, arms folded across her chest. Her index finger tapped out a message of annoyance on her forearm.

Counting out money one handed with a child on your hip was an arduous task and it seemed to take forever. Rather than assisting me, the woman continued to stare, boring holes of hate into my forehead. She sighed loudly, clearly wanting to communicate her displeasure further. 

My fingers fumbled self-consciously. 

At last I handed her the required change and she set about wrapping the purchases. She was deliberate, taking her time as Ann squirmed impatiently in my arms, reaching for the canisters of bright candies that lined the far side of the counter.

“How do you even know what those are, baby girl?” I whispered into her ear. “Maybe they are poison. You never know about pretty things…”

Eventually the woman was done and she unceremoniously shoved the parcels across the wooden countertop. She turned her back to me, pretending to rearrange the bars of soap that already rested in orderly and pristine rows on the shelves behind us. 

I gathered the brown paper wrapped bundles and placed them into a large brown fabric sack I had brought from home. The cook had sewed it some months ago and had used it for this purpose. Thankfully, she had left it behind…

Anne sneezed as she always did from the bright sunlight as we stepped out of the dim shop and into the street. We started the journey back home.

After several blocks I caught a glimpse of the back of a deep scarlet dress as the wearer rounded a corner. I picked up my pace. I had recognized it.

The beautiful woman in red.

Dreams.

My dreams. 

What were dreams anyway? Ephemeral taunts from on high; gauzy, misty things impossible to grasp.

But I had just seen her. 

Here.

Back home in New England dreaming of a beautiful woman dressed in red meant a move. But here now, across the world, was the meaning the same?

I knew that I needed to speak to her. Somehow I knew the key to my happiness lay with her.

The corner loomed just ahead. I picked up my pace, the bag slapping hard against the crinoline with each step. I quickly dodged around a man in a grey waistcoat to make the turn, breathless. Anne laughed with the sudden evasive movement. She enjoyed this game of pursuit.

There she was.

Her back was to me. She was across the street, listening intently to the Reverend Drummond. Curls of dark hair peeked from beneath a matching bonnet decorated with velvet and wine colored roses.

He looked up at the sound of Anne’s happy gurgling. 

My heart stopped beating.

The man paused in mid sentence as our eyes locked across the cobblestones for a split second.

A choice.

I could turn and walk obviously away sending a message of disdain or keep going forward as if none of this chance meeting mattered to me at all.

Forward. Always keep going forward…

A carriage rattled by. I shifted Anne to the other hip and kept walking, one foot in front of the other. I wanted to turn and look over my shoulder, to catch a glimpse of the woman’s face, but that would be too obvious. I resisted.

I made a long loop around the neighborhood, moving deliberately as if I knew exactly where I was going and why. My arms felt like rubber from Anne’s weight as what had started out as a quick trip to the grocers had turned into quite the journey. Eventually I ended up back in my own neighborhood. As I closed the gate and walked through the small garden to the house with the bag of goods on my arm, I found myself stopping short again.

She was sitting there on the steps at the front door, clearly waiting for me.

She stood, smoothing the red silk of her dress absently.

I was haunted in so many ways. Every smile from Anne’s face was his. I had wrongly believed that it would only be a joy having some small piece of him here with me. A miscalculation to be sure. I loved her dearly but I was tortured by her at the same time. Guilt. Shame. I carried all of these with me every day.

The woman on the porch smiled at me. 

It was Anne’s smile. 

His smile. 

“Who are you?” I asked.

Chapter Seventy-Four: Visitation

“Come on, Evelyn. You have to do better…” In the silence and emptiness of the house I had taken to speaking aloud to myself. This time the words twisted a lock in my heart and sobs poured from me, buckets of grief that had been buried deep.

Anne had finally cried herself to sleep and the loneliness had crept in on the wings of a cricket that sat chirping somewhere by the hearth.

I wanted it to die but I could not find it.

After the stress and anxiety and days without feeding, my breasts had become empty sacks and no amount of suckling could bring the milk back to its previous plenty.

Anne, having survived the infection, was slowly starving to death it seemed. She screamed and fussed, her thin little arms beating against my chest as she wailed, more irritable by the day.

I began scouring books for suggestions of what to feed an infant. She was too young yet for any table food.

Her right arm had been saved but the infection had left her ring and little fingers curved under grotesquely, like a claw. She could not move them.

Each day I tried to straighten the fingers out, hoping that someday she would regain use. I did not want them to become frozen stiff and unbending as I had seen of the injured limbs of soldiers in the Crimea.

I am losing hope.

God had left our house along with the Reverend Drummond, and with them the maid and housekeeper. There were whispers about that I was a witch, that no one should have, could have, done what I had done. Hiring new staff became impossible and people around town went so far as to cross to the other side of the road when they saw me coming.

As a consequence, no wet nurse would agree to hire.

Don’t you see that you are all conspiring to kill her!?!??!

There was no choice but to attempt to bring her up by hand but this was fraught with hazards.

Some recipes insisted on gelatin and arrowroot and varying amounts of cream, though no logical reasoning for such was presented.

I opted for simplicity, the use of fresh cows milk diluted with an equal quantity of barley water and a teaspoon of added sugar. As spring broke into summer, I knew diarrheal illness lurked. It was impossible to use milk from only one cow as we did not live in the country. What was delivered made the trek of miles in the back of a creaky wooden cart. Runny stools with subsequent death was a hazard to spoon fed infants in warmer months and to combat that, I began to include a bit of beef suet as the books suggested.

Scrofula was also a constant fear. The books instructed not boil the milk before use but I scrubbed the feeding cups and mouth pieces as thoroughly as I could, all the while praying that no further ill would befall her.

Remember, God, if she dies…

Some color came back to her little cheeks but Anne continued to fuss, angry with each sip and spoonful so I made a pap of stale bread, milk sugar, and beer and began to give her that with a weak beef tea that seemed to sate her. She was not particularly happy to be eating from a pap boat but she liked it better than the bottles and truthfully it was much easier to clean.

Feedings became an all consuming ritual as procuring supplies and the preparation and clean up were labor intensive. It became my religion.

Her curled under fingers did not improve despite my work with them. I fashioned a contraption with two forks and blocks of wood to hold her fingers open and left it on for days at a time, but the fingers did not stay that way once it was removed. When she swung her arm at me, the wooden and metal bits caused great pain… I abandoned the idea.

And so on this night as I fell into a fitful, exhausted sleep, I dreamed of a beautiful woman dressed all in red.

Chapter Seventy: Innoculation

“Haven’t you registered her birth?”

The shopkeeper at the millinery shop was a middle aged woman with greying black hair and an extra wide double chin peeking out from the tightly wrapped black shawl about her neck. She stared at me with a single eyebrow raised.

“Registered?” Confusion and some degree of panic washed over me. Was there a rule or law I had broken? “How?”

The woman rolled her eyes. Yes. I saw her do it! She had not been terribly friendly to me and I had wondered about her…

It had not occurred to me, though, that I was required to register. Surely they would just know? From the midwife? From the Reverend after the christening?

No. I suppose not.

“How?” I asked again.

“At the registrars. You register at the registrars.” She spoke slowly, enunciating carefully. “That will be two pounds twenty.” As I dug for the correct change, she added, “You probably don’t know then that you will have to show proof of vaccination.”

“Vaccination?” I lost count of the money and sighed, starting again.

“Smallpox.”

Oh, smallpox.

I paid for my purchase, a new dark blue silk bonnet trimmed in velvet, and travelled home as quickly as I could. My breasts felt heavy, I knew it was time to feed.

On my arrival at the cottage I was greeted by a cooing, giggling baby girl who was obviously delighted to see her mother. I took her from the maid and sniffed her white capped head. Heaven.

Three months old, today.

I put little Anne to my breast. I winced as the sudden sensation of pins and needles signified the let down of milk. Fists balled tight, she slurped greedily, her eyes blinking as they watched me closely.

Smallpox vaccination. I had not even entertained the idea of her ever contracting smallpox. She could, though, couldn’t she? She would be forever disfigured, scarred for life with pockmarks over her face and entire body… if she lived through it.

The vaccination was required? Since when? Was it safe?

By the time Anne was finished with the second breast, she was dozing peacefully. I placed her in the cradle by the fire and went in search of the housekeeper.

I found her in the kitchen head bowed over a chicken carcass, readying it for roasting for dinner. She was deftly wrapping the legs with twine but looked up when I entered.

“Did you know that I needed to vaccinate Anne and register her?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She waited silently, not sure if she should keep working.

“I will need to see a doctor to vaccinate her?”

“Well, you could see one of the public vaccinators but I wouldn’t go and do that.” She went back to the twine and whispered, “They kill people.”

“What? They kill people?”

She tied off the knot. “Oh, miss, I knew of a baby whose arm rotted off when they took him to the public vaccinator and another who died with convulsions eight days later.”

“What do they do?” All of my medical training had been on the battlefields of the Crimea. I had no knowledge of smallpox vaccination practices.

“Oh, ma’am, it’s terrible! They cut the arm and inject lymph from another person into it. Such screaming.” She shook her head disapprovingly.

She tossed the bird into a roasting pan after rubbing it with salt and pepper and sprigs of rosemary and slid it into the oven. The heavy metal door slammed loudly.

Wiping her hands on her apron, she turned back to me.

“It’s the law, though. Bless those fools who think they know better than us folks.”

At that precise moment Anne began wailing.

“Here, you should give her another dose of this.” The maid handed over a large brown bottle. It read:

Atkinson & Barker’s Royal Infants’ Preservative

It is no misnomer Cordial! —no stupefactive, deadly narcotic! —but a veritable preservative of Infants!

I turned the bottle of dark liquid to read the ingredients. None were listed.

“How long have you been giving this to her?”

“Almost a month now, three times a day.” She grinned proudly then busied herself with some potatoes in a pail.

I left the bottle on the table as I left to console the sobbing child, resolving to ask the druggist about the ingredients next time I was in his shop. If that was why she stopped fussing so suddenly back then, I just might be a believer.

Chapter Sixty-Five: All Through The Night

Her screams were muffled by the bits of cotton jammed into my ear canals. She bellowed out her displeasure at everything I tried to do to sooth her. I felt guilty that I had to resort to this, but I had no choice. All of those elderly women who were deaf…they must have had a child like this…

Face red and scrunched up. The screams pierced like tiny knives and inflicted real pain, physical and emotional, that bored itself into my heart.

How to love you, my baby girl?

Every evening it was like this. Screaming, crying for hours. Food, clean diapers, cuddling…nothing calmed the raging beast.

It was not at all how I dreamed motherhood would be…

The midwife was called. She made an elixir of oil of dill and sugar. I rubbed her bowels with warm olive oil at the suggestion of the cook. Caraway tea. Even rhubarb and magnesia. Nothing helped. Between the hours of 8 and 11 at night, she kept us all awake.

“Give her time,” the old women said. “Eventually it will stop.”

She fed like a greedy monkey during those times. I began to think that I should have hired a wet nurse… but no. I wanted to do this myself. She was my only connection to him. It was my duty, my privilege, my penance.

So each evening I plugged my ears with the bits of cotton and paced the floor with her, whispering and singing.

Sleep my child and peace attend thee,
All through the night
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and vale in slumber sleeping,
I my loving vigil keeping
All through the night.

While the moon her watch is keeping
All through the night
While the weary world is sleeping
All through the night
O’er they spirit gently stealing
Visions of delight revealing
Breathes a pure and holy feeling
All through the night.

Love, to thee my thoughts are turning
All through the night
All for thee my heart is yearning,
All through the night.
Though sad fate our lives may sever
Parting will not last forever,
There’s a hope that leaves me never,
All through the night.

Her creamy smooth complexion was now marred with tiny red pustules. The hair, that foreign brown hair, was falling out at the crown, leaving a ragged fringe about the periphery of her scalp that gave her an appearance more like a miniaturized wizened old man than the sweet, beautiful baby girl she had once been. I kept her head covered perpetually with a tiny white bonnet to avoid seeing the hair, or rather lack of it.

My heart ached with sadness for her secret and for myself that I could not take away her pain.

But sometimes, sometimes she looked at me with understanding eyes, piercing the depth of my soul. Then she would give a light, sweet laugh and drift off to sleep. Those moments kept me a slave to her.