Fourpenny Flyer (66 page)

Harriet was already flushed and pain racked, groaning as each new contraction took hold.

‘Well now,' Mrs Babcock said, sidling into the room with her willow basket. ‘I brought 'ee cocoction o' motherwort, me dear. You try a-sippin' this. Brings a birth on lovely, does motherwort.'

But Harriet didn't want to bring the birth on lovely. She wanted to stop it or at least delay it and she fought it with all her might. So, despite its strong start, it progressed slowly.

Will spent the evening with his cousins in the rectory and to his surprise and delight was allowed to sleep there. And John came home to wait and worry as he'd done
when Will was born.

‘Is she well?' he asked anxiously whenever anyone came down from the bedroom.

But the answer was always the same and always unsatisfactory. ‘As well as you'd expect.'

At midnight Frederick Brougham arrived in his barouche to see why Nan hadn't come back to Bury. They walked in the garden together for a few minutes, for Nan said she needed cool air.

‘I shall be home by morning,' she promised, as the night breeze swished the branches all around them and owls hooted in the high woods. ‘The child should be born by then.'

‘We will breakfast together,' he said. ‘I've to be in Norwich by ten.' He had a case in sessions there.

‘Depend upon it,' she promised, kissing him.

And so they went their separate ways, he to sleep and she to watch. But they didn't have breakfast together.

‘She don't push,' Mrs Babcock complained when Nan returned to the bedside. ‘I don't understand it. She should ha' been pushing long since. Why don't she push?'

But Harriet was still fighting the birth, even in this last and most powerful stage. ‘Sinner,' she panted, her voice slurred with effort. ‘Grievous sinner. Wages a' sin. Oh I mustn't. I mustn't.'

‘Delirious,' Nan said. ‘that's what 'tis.' And she turned all her attention to her daughter-in-law. ‘Come you on, my dear,' she said, ‘hold my hand. You shan't do nothing you don't want. You got my word.'

‘Promise?' Harriet panted, opening her eyes.

‘Promise.'

‘I am a grievous sinner …'

‘No you en't. You're a dear good girl and my John loves 'ee.'

‘John …'

‘Arrived, my dear. Down below. Don't 'ee fret about John. Come on now, give a good push. You'll come to no harm, I promise.'

And at last, and to Mrs Babcock's relief, Harriet relaxed and began to push. Forty minutes later the baby was born.
It was a fine eight-pound girl, an exact replica of her mother but with a shock of black hair.

‘Oh,' Harriet said, weeping freely. ‘She's just like me. Just like me.' She was so relieved she paid no attention to the afterbirth which Mrs Babcock was pressing out of her belly. But the midwife did. She paid very particular attention to it.

‘Just like me. Oh you dear little thing. Just like me.'

‘With her father's dark hair,' Nan said. ‘Shall he come in and see her?'

‘Her father?' Harriet asked bemused. Was Caleb here then? No surely not. He was transported.

‘Her father, your husband,' Nan said, grinning at her confusion. ‘Have 'ee forgot the poor man?'

‘Yes,' Harriet said. ‘No. I mean …' Oh she couldn't face John with this child. Not yet. What would he say?

But Nan was already letting him in. And he said all the right things. Dear, dear John. ‘A daughter, Harriet. What could be better? Now we have a pigeon pair. Are you well, my dearest?' Kissing her so tenderly, seeming to accept. Dear, dear John. ‘What shall we call her?'

‘Could we call her Caroline? After the poor Queen?'

So Caroline it was, and as soon as she was named the baby opened her big blue eyes and looked solemnly at them both. Caroline Easter.

‘Now you must rest,' Mrs Babcock said, joining them at the head of the bed. ‘Just drink another concoction for me, will you dear?'

‘You must need your sleep too, Mrs Babcock,' John said when the baby had been settled in her cradle and Harriet had been tucked up for what was left of the night. He and Nan and the midwife were standing on the landing together looking at the first lightening in the dawn sky outside the window.

Her answer was rather alarming. ‘No, no,' she said. ‘I shall stay with her till morning, sir. The afterbirth en't all come away. Not just yet. I shall stay with her till morning.'

The words struck chill into both her listeners.

‘We should send for a surgeon,' Nan said. ‘'Ten't a matter to be left. Tom shall ride into Bury directly.'

‘Is there danger in it?' John asked, looking from one woman to the other. ‘You must tell me the truth.'

‘Mortal danger,' Nan said. ‘And the sooner dealt with the better.'

‘Motherwort should bring it away,' Mrs Babcock said, trying to soothe him. ‘Howsomever, a surgeon would be wise precaution.'

So Tom was sent.

When Harriet woke the next morning, for a moment or two she couldn't remember where she was or what had happened the night before, although she knew in a vague sort of way that it was important and that she was happy about it. Then she realized that she was bleeding and she remembered her daughter and tried to sit up to see her. The rush of blood her movement caused was really quite shocking. Surely she hadn't bled so heavily when Will was born? ‘Mrs Babcock!' she called. ‘Mrs Babcock!' Then she started to shake.

The midwife had been snoozing in the armchair beside the embers of the fire. Now she woke at once. ‘I'm a-coming,' she said. ‘Don't 'ee fret. I'm a-coming.'

The rigor lasted for nearly an hour and by the end of it Harriet was completely exhaused. ‘What is it?' she asked. ‘What is the matter?'

Mrs Babcock made professional light of it. ‘'Tis nothing, my dear. Many a mother has the shakes. That's the loss of the baby from your body as does it, that's all 'tis.'

But when Mr Brownjohn arrived half an hour later, he examined her belly for so long, prodding and peering and muttering to himself, and all with such an anxious expression on his face that she couldn't believe it was truly nothing. ‘What is it?' she asked again, and now there was fear in her voice.

‘Has your baby fed?' he asked.

‘Why yes. Twice.' As she remembered very well because it had been surprisingly painful.

‘I think we should wake her and you should feed her again.'

So the baby was woken and put to the breast, which didn't please her at all because she'd been sleeping very
peacefully and wasn't ready for more food. Nevertheless Mrs Babcock insisted and after a fit of irritated coughing and sneezing, the little creature obliged them and began to suckle.

‘La, but she makes my womb pull so,' Harriet said, holding the baby's finger. ‘She's so strong. And just like me, aren't you my precious?'

But her two attendants were down at the other end of the bed, pressing on her belly. ‘You hurt me,' she said. ‘Must you hurt me so?' She tried to roll her belly away from them but she didn't have the strength to do it. I am very weak, she thought, and that worried her. ‘Please don't hurt me so.'

‘We have to hurt you, I fear,' Mr Brownjohn said. And told her what was the matter.

She surprised herself by how calm she was at the news. ‘Then I might die,' she said. ‘That is so, is it not?'

‘We will do everything in our endeavour,' Mr Brownjohn said.

‘Yes,' she said politely. ‘I know you will, Mr Brownjohn.' And she began to shake again. ‘Oh take the baby, pray do take the baby. I cannot hold her.'

They took the baby right out of the room, and they put hot bricks at her feet and a warm compress on her head and they packed her about with blankets, but none of it did any good. The fit went on and on and on. And when it finally stopped she was too weary to lift her hand from the coverlet. ‘Oh dear,' she said. Then she lost consciousness.

Downstairs, John was frantic with anxiety. ‘What news?' he asked, rushing into the hall whenever he heard footsteps on the stairs. But they were too busy to tell him and their lack of response frightened him even further.

It wasn't until Nan came down that he managed to get an answer.

‘She'll not die, will she, Mama?' he asked, when she walked rather wearily into the parlour and sat down beside the window. ‘Oh please say she'll not die. They will save her, won't they?'

Tired as she was she told him the truth. There was no point in dissembling. ‘Mr Brownjohn says he thinks all the
afterbirth is clear but he en't sure, and either way there's a likelihood of blood poisoning.'

‘But what is he doing?' John said, bolt-eyed with distress. ‘Surely he should be helping her!'

‘There is little he can do, my dear,' Nan said, closing her eyes against his anguish because she couldn't bear to see it. ‘If poison is in her blood she must fight it herself. There en't a medicine known to man that's proof against this sort of fever.'

‘She will not die,' he said flatly and he thought, she is too young and too precious and I love her too much, but these were things he couldn't say aloud. ‘We will hire another surgeon.'

So another medical opinion was sought and arrived that afternoon and had to admit ‘with uncommon sadness, Mr Easter sir' that he agreed with his colleague Mr Brownjohn ‘in every particular'.

‘The testing time is the third day,' he told John. ‘That is the point at which the fever will recede or take hold. If it recedes we may nurse her to health again, with caution and good food and so forth.'

‘But if it takes hold?' John said, his heart thudding most painfully.

‘If it takes hold Mr Easter, sir, the prognosis is not good.' ‘You mean she will be very ill.' Oh give me this little hope, at least.

‘She will certainly be very ill, Mr Easter, sir. In fact she will be very ill indeed.'

‘But we shall recover her …' John started to say.

But the surgeon was pressing on, telling him the worse, while his courage was sufficiently high for him to do it. ‘In fact, Mr Easter sir, she might die.'

‘No!' John said, and the sound he made was more like a howl than a word. ‘No! No! No! She won't die. You are not to allow it.'

‘John, my dear,' Nan tried, putting her hand on his arm. But he shook her voice and her touch away.

‘It is in God's hands, Mr Easter sir, not mine,' the surgeon said, wincing to be the cause of such distress.

But even the sight of the poor man's face was more than
John could bear now. ‘You are dismissed, sir,' he said. ‘Pray send me your account in the morning.'

Then he went upstairs to prove to himself that she was still alive and was fighting her sickness, that she would survive and become herself again and prove all their foolish predictions wrong.

She was half lying half sitting, propped up among the pillows with her long hair combed over her shoulders, as straight and fair as flax. The curtains had been drawn to keep out the sunlight in case it disturbed her, and there was a candle burning night and day on the table beside her bed. It cast long, ominous shadows across her face, deepening the hollows under her eyes into terrifying pits, making her nose appear sharp and giving her skin an unhealthy pallor. She looked more than half dead already. He simply had to wake her.

He sat beside the bed and took her hand and gave it a little shake. ‘Oh Harriet, my dear love,' he said, ‘wake up. Look at me.'

She opened her eyes, very slowly, and focused with an effort, like a child puzzled by unfamiliar circumstances. ‘Have I to see another surgeon?' she asked. The last one had hurt her poor tender belly so very much.

‘No,' he assured her. ‘Only Mr Brownjohn.'

‘Ah!' she said, and seemed to sleep a little.

He sat beside her, holding her limp hands and listening to the muffled sounds of the day outside the curtain. He felt so strong and so desperate and so utterly useless. If only he could find a way to transmit his strength into her weakness, down his fingers and through the palm of her hand, like new, strong, warm blood straight from his heart to hers.

She opened her eyes again. ‘Am I very ill, John?' ‘No,' he lied stoutly. ‘You are weak after the birth. That is all.'

They both knew he was lying, he with anguish, she with the most tender affection. ‘You are so good to me,' she said. And slept again.

‘I'm off back to Bury for an hour or two,' Nan said,
tiptoeing into the room to stand beside him. ‘I shall be back at first light tomorrow.'

‘Should Will come home, do 'ee think?' he asked. He was suddenly exhausted, incapable of making any more decisions.

‘If I were you,' she said gently, ‘I would leave him where he is for the time being. Let the third day pass.'

‘Yes,' he said, looking at her thankfully. ‘Yes that is best.' Let the third day pass. It would be cruel to let the child see his mother in such a state.

But as they were both to discover, even though he was only eight years old, Will had a mind of his own. That evening he decided he had stayed with Aunt Annie quite long enough. Despite the usual welcoming atmosphere in the rectory, he had caught a sense that there was something the matter at his house, a whispered conversation stifled when he entered the room, anxious glances flickered from Aunt Annie to Uncle James across the dining table, furtive comings and goings at the kitchen door. So that evening, when dinner was over and the cloth cleared, he told Uncle James that he was going back home, announcing his intention in tones so firm and irrevocable that he could have been his grandmother speaking.

Ten minutes later he was in his mother's bedroom.

He took everything very calmly, being curious rather than alarmed. ‘Why is she ill?' he asked his father, looking down at his mother's flushed sleeping face. ‘Is it the smallpox?' And when he was assured that it wasn't, ‘Shall we catch it too, Papa?' And being assured about that too, ‘When will she get better?'