The Alchemist's Daughter (43 page)

The summer warmth heightened the stink, and there were more animals on the streets than in the spring, more country people with their pigs and donkeys, more children too weak to work but not too young to beg. We were jostled like marbles, leered at, pleaded with, cursed, teased, and pushed aside until at last we turned into a lane behind Red Lion Street, where a whiff of gin belched from a distillery hidden in a row of cottages, and then at last we came to a courtyard that was overshadowed by an inner block of temporary dwellings. The bricks were shiny with the recent drizzle, and there was a reek of juniper and raw alcohol, but also the poignant touches of someone taking pride in this once gracious place—geraniums in pots, polished brass. I thought it a sure sign we had found Sarah, who had such a gift for small things that give a show of elegance.

On the far side of the inner alley was a house three stories high that retained, somewhat chipped, the ornate masonry of its former glory. A woman stood on the step tapping a closed fan against the doorframe and shifting from foot to foot as if she’d been waiting a long time. My heart missed a beat because she was wearing, of all things, my feathered gown, embellished here and there with knots of blue ribbon, patched up at the bodice and skirt, but otherwise much as when I had last worn it in the cellar with Aislabie.

For a moment, a sense of dislocation made me speechless, then I asked for Sarah Holborne. She looked at me as if I was vermin.

“Sarah Holborne,” I repeated. “I believe she lives here.”

“She might. Why, who sent you?”

Annie breathed in my ear while I stared stupidly. The woman spoke as if to a couple of idiots. “We sent for ’er man Aislabie. Where is ’e?”

“I don’t know. But he gave me this address. I’m his wife. May I see her?”

“I doubt it. She took sick. She’s in no mood for visitors.”

“The baby?”

“The baby is still unborn.”

“Please, can I see her? I have come to help.”

She stared past my left brow until I produced a shilling, whereupon she came to herself and turned into the house. We followed and found three or four others lolling in the hallway with their skirts pinned up and their bodices cut beneath the bosom. They were dull-eyed and listless, rather like their wealthier counterparts at the tail end of my husband’s card party. Draperies covered the doors, and there was a smell of the privy under the fusty scent of sex and perfume. A very young girl with a country bloom on her cheeks darted forward but was pulled away.

The woman at the door had disappeared, so what with the bare nipples and fleshy nymphs disporting themselves in prints on the wall I was hard put to know where to look. The other women stared and whispered behind their hands. I recognized a pair of pink stockings with gold clocks I used to wear before my father died and an embossed silk slipper kicked aside so that its new owner could pick at the skin between her toes. The little country girl had by now been shoved out of sight altogether.

When the feathered woman came back, she had thrown a shawl round her shoulders and her painted features were slack with dismay. “You can come up if you like. She hasn’t said you can’t because she’s past saying anything.”

One of the women drew a tearful breath as Annie lodged herself behind my left shoulder and we climbed the creaking stairs. Our guide had hauled her skirts above her knees, exposing veined calves and the whiff of menstrual blood. Up we went to a landing festooned with yet more crimson draperies made from the stuff that had once adorned Selden for my husband’s birthday party. From behind a closed door came the slap of flesh and a creak of bedsprings. Our guide slid me a look from under her mouse-skin brows as she led us up another, narrower stairway and opened a door at the top. There, in a sour, airless room, propped against pillows, her hair trim as ever in her little cap but her huge body spilling from the crumpled sheets, was Sarah.

I pushed back my hood and went closer. She was too weak to lift her head, but for a moment we stared at each other. I’m not sure if she recognized me; perhaps I imagined a glint of the old hostility, but after a moment her eyes closed. If I’d met her in the streets, I would have walked past her, she was so unlike herself. Folds of flesh covered her once-delicate wrists, and her face was so swollen that her pointy chin was submerged in her neck.

Annie stepped forward and pressed Sarah’s hand. A white patch formed.

The feathered woman said, “She’s been like it for weeks. We told her to get a doctor, but she’s refused until today. At dawn, she sent me for her man Aislabie.”

Trust Aislabie, I thought as I stood helplessly by Sarah’s bed. Of course he wouldn’t pay for a doctor, so instead he sent me, thereby discharging all responsibility. But I was of no use whatsoever to a sick woman.

Then I realized that Annie had shed her usual air of diffidence and inertia, turned back the bedclothes, exposed Sarah’s mountainous belly, laid her hands on it, and put her ear to the navel. Then she replaced the sheet and led me to the door. “I seen this. Mrs. Gill showed me. She will die, and the babe if it’s not already dead. She will get so sick that she will have fits and then go into a stupor. She’s bound to die.”

The strangeness of the house bore down on me—the thumping of bedsprings now reaching its crescendo, the little gathering of silent women in the hall below.

“What can we do?”

“If Mrs. Gill was here, she’d know what to do. Get the baby out.” She chewed a flake of dry skin on her lower lip and frowned with concentration.

“Have we time to get Mrs. Gill?”

“I couldn’t feel the baby move. We have no time. She will die.”

“She’s alive now, Annie. We must act. What would Mrs. Gill have done?” I couldn’t allow Sarah to die. Harford could engineer a cascade of water, Newton could split light, Harvey could transfuse blood; surely we could prevent a simple death in childbirth. And I wanted not just Sarah’s life, but the baby’s, too. I wouldn’t allow it to be dead. Now that I was within inches of it, I longed for that child.

“Mrs. Gill would bring on the baby,” said Annie.

“How?”

“Don’t know. Some herb. Something.”

“Think, Annie.”

“We must get a midwife.”

The girl was a genius of Newtonian proportions. We extracted a guinea from my petticoat, summoned the feathered woman, and told her to go with Annie and fetch the best midwife she could find.

Which left me alone with Sarah. The other women stayed downstairs, though I sensed they were watchful and anxious. Perhaps they were afraid of Sarah’s state. I certainly was. I had something of the old fear of her superior knowledge—she had entered an experience far beyond what I had ever known—but I was also terrified that she might die on me. Sometimes her body twitched, sometimes she snored or moaned; generally, she was quiet. From below came a yelp of pain, then a scream and a sudden rush of feet and hammering on a door. I thought about my mother and wondered whether she had resembled the blousy feathered woman or the bright-eyed country girl. Sarah stirred and turned her head from side to side while I bathed her face and adjusted her cap because it was unthinkable that her hair should get untidy—though I was cautious, as if she might bite my hand off at any moment.

It was by now late in the afternoon, and still Annie didn’t come back. Flies buzzed on the chamber pot and the walls billowed with my stolen clothes—I recognized the wrap-over party gown, the dark blue dress I had worn sometimes as I came out of mourning, and my embroidered petticoats. The sight of those bodices, let out to accommodate Sarah’s girth, made me weep, as did a swath of crimson draped on the back of a chair—my ill-fated cloak. I prayed to the God of Shales, the reasonable God of the wider picture, the divine architect who had set all in motion, to please to save this girl so that we might make amends. I would have given everything—my own life, I think—to have had the old Sarah back with her trim waist and annihilating shrug.

After two hours more, a midwife came, not unpromising despite her size. The stairs and the summer heat had worn her out, and she sat fanning herself by the closed window while Annie introduced her as Mrs. Jane Calder. There was a faint air of Mrs. Gill about her, certainly competence and a care for her appearance that Sarah would have approved; she wore a clean apron and gown, and her face was kind under a layer of paint. When she’d recovered, she performed the same checks as Annie, whom she seemed to regard as a worthy colleague. Then she went to the door and called out in a voice that must have cut through even the most frantic coupling, “Bring me savin.”

“Rue,” whispered Annie. “That’s what it is. Mrs. Gill will give it to girls sometimes if they’re late.”

There was, of course, a plentiful supply of that particular drug in the house. A bottle was brought and a spoonful poured between Sarah’s lips. Clean water was ordered up, and the midwife washed her hands. “Lord knows what I’m doing here,” she muttered. “They’re both done for, but at least if we get the baby out we can say we tried.” Annie and I were instructed to hold up Sarah’s knees while Mrs. Calder greased her hand from a tub of fat and pushed it hard up inside, worked away energetically and gave a sudden stab that made Sarah screech and come wide awake for an instant. A yellowish, bloodstained fluid gushed from the ruptured membranes so suddenly that for a heady moment I thought the baby would follow, ripe and pink and perfect, but instead Sarah gave a deathly moan and woke up again as pain took hold.

We shuttered the windows, ordered candles, clean sheets, and a tray of toast and gin for the midwife, and settled down for a long wait. Annie became a bustling professional; she massaged Sarah’s belly, stroked her hands and wrists, bathed her face, and spooned water between her lips, while Mrs. Calder dozed and ordered more gin and I watched as if just by paying attention I could make a miracle happen.

When at midnight the contractions began in earnest, I wished myself in any hell but that. I tried to transpose myself to the woods at Selden or to Shales’s quiet study, but I couldn’t escape that hot room, which stank of excrement however often we changed the sheets, where the light flickered up the walls and made devilish shadows, where below us men came and went to spend themselves inside some overused woman or another, or, presumably if they had the cash, to pin down the country girl and jab at her tender flesh. Meanwhile, Sarah was roused time and again and flung into a cage of pain so that her eyes flew open in terror and her hands clutched the air. We whispered endearments, stroked and soothed her, but the contractions contorted her into a howling beast whose nails gouged the wall and teeth closed on the pillow as she disappeared into some hideous place where we couldn’t reach her until she came panting out, looked into my eyes, and at last recognized me. I saw a most welcome hint of the old hatred, and her lips formed the word “You.” Then she lay gasping and sucked on the sponge Annie put to her lips. “Will he come?”

Before I could make up an answer, a distant look came in her eye, and the pain swallowed her up again and tossed her about, and that dreadful cry came from her throat.

This went on until it was bright daylight; then, as the room grew hotter and hotter and the sun shone brighter on the window, Sarah began to fade. Either the contractions slowed or she no longer noticed them. I stared at her face and willed her to survive. Though it was such an unsymmetrical face, as if drawn in a hurry, there was a delicacy in repose that was strangely endearing. I thought that if she woke one last time, she might forgive me.

The midwife had lunged forward and thrust in her hand again. “This is very bad. She’s barely opened the womb a couple of inches. We’ll let her rest for a while and then give her another dose.”

“A doctor?” I said.

She snorted. “You can throw your money away if you like, but he’ll be nothing but trouble and expense. This sort of thing has to take its course.” Then she went back to her chair and dozed with her hands folded.

Every hour or so a woman peeked in to see how we went on or to bring us tea. All day Annie and I took it in turns to sleep and watch, and it occurred to me as I put my head back on the hard chair, pillowed by the lining of my old cloak, that I had never spent any significant time with women before and that I had no women friends or expectations of women beyond Mrs. Gill, because I had been taught that women were frail and incapable, except for me. And I thought of Sir Isaac inside his crimson-draped coffin, and Aislabie with his grand ambition and greater greed who had masterminded my courtship, the purchase of
Flora
, and the rebuilding of Selden, and I wondered how they would fare in this room, in the face of a dying woman and her dead baby. In their mechanical universe, in their scheme of things, when it came to this essential matter of birth itself they would be at least as helpless as me. Only Shales would have understood.

Sarah died in the small hours of the following morning. Her breathing had become more labored until she exhaled and simply didn’t breathe in again. Then there was a deep silence in the room, like the silence in the laboratory when the fire went out and the clocks stopped.

The midwife leaned forward, listened, and put the back of her hand to the dead mouth. Her other hand fell heavily on Sarah’s belly, and she suddenly sprang to her feet and spread her fingers. “Jesus Christ, it’s alive.”

She dived into her bag, produced a knife, wiped it on her skirt, had Annie bring the candles close, made a swab of Sarah’s shift and the soiled sheets, and drew a neat incision with the blade. Then she spread open the lips of the wound and lifted from Sarah’s body a curled fetus that seemed to me still and hopeless until she tapped it sharply on the back and breathed in its mouth, whereupon it gave a little cough and then a feeble cry.

Annie fetched a cloth, bundled up the baby, and thrust it into my arms, where it lay with its head thrown back, its tiny mouth gaping and a tuft of hair, dark as my own, sprouting from its little skull. When I kissed its forehead, I smelled new bread and blood. It lunged its head to my breast and mewled again and again until the midwife left her work with the body, picked up my hand, and showed me how to let it suck on my finger. For a moment the baby looked at me with intent, dark eyes, then fell asleep with its mouth latched on so tight I thought it might swallow me whole.