The Midwife's Tale (18 page)

“There are few things more horrible than investigating the murder of an infant,” I said as we neared Coneystreet. “And sometimes finding the culprit only makes matters worse.” I didn’t have to tell her that most infanticides were committed by servants, pregnant by their masters and desperate for escape. Sometimes the infant’s body was carefully wrapped and left at a church door in the hope that he would receive a Christian burial. Other times the body was thrown away like so much trash. I could not decide which case was more heartrending. We turned onto Coneystreet and immediately saw where the child’s body had been found. A crowd gathered around the entrance to a courtyard, and I could see a footman holding Edward’s horse. As we approached, Edward emerged from an alley and waved us over.

“One of the neighborhood children heard crying from inside the privy,” he said. “By the time they got the baby out, he was nearly dead. He was a boy.”

“Someone threw the child in the privy while it was alive?” Martha asked in horror. Edward glanced at her and nodded.

“I need to see the body,” I said.

Edward led us through the crowd and into a courtyard. A distraught woman stood by herself, holding a small bundle that could only be the child’s body. I motioned for Martha to wait. I went to the woman and held out my arms. Sobbing, she handed me the child. The boy’s eyes were closed as if he were sleeping, but his skin had a waxy texture that bespoke death. Taking the child’s body into my arms made me think of my Michael, but I pushed that memory away. I could grieve for him later, but right now this child needed me. The swaddling clothes were clean, and one of the neighborhood women had washed him after he had been retrieved from the privy. I gently unwrapped him and examined his body. Whoever had cut the cord did a poor job of it, hacking rather than slicing, and it was clumsily tied. I looked at his fingernails and found them long—he was born on time. I wrapped him and handed him back to the woman.

“Did you retrieve the body?” I murmured. She nodded, tears coursing down her face. “How was he wrapped when you found him?”

“He’d been swaddled in fine linen.” She pointed to a soiled cloth lying next to the privy. As she spoke, she realized the significance of this. No mother would wrap her child in expensive cloth and then cast him away. “This was someone’s bairn,” she whispered in horror. “Someone took him from his poor mother and killed him.”

“You might be right,” I said, “but you should keep such thoughts to yourself. If we are going to find whoever did this, we must keep our knowledge secret.” I went in search of Edward to tell him what I’d found.

“He was newly born, and not delivered by a midwife. His color was such that he had taken a breath.” Edward nodded—we knew all this. “I don’t think he was killed by his mother; more likely it was his father.” At this, Edward looked at me sharply. Infanticides rarely involved fathers, and it raised the prospect of a scandal touching on a citizen. “The child had been well tended until he was murdered. He was wrapped in expensive linen, and I believe he had fed at his mother’s breast.”

“No doubt it was a servant got with child by some apprentice or another,” Edward said. He was eager to turn my attention to one of the city’s meaner sort. After the murder of Stephen Cooper, he would be loath to see another respectable man pulled down.

“Few servants or apprentices could afford the linen that the child was swaddled in. This child came from a wealthy home.”

“The linen proves nothing. A woman who would murder her own child would not hesitate to steal from her master.”

“In recent days you’ve shown yourself ready to credit flimsier evidence than this,” I noted testily. “A poor woman would not steal expensive linen so that she could then throw it away with her child. If the child was born to a maidservant, the father was a wealthy man, and
he
was the one who killed the child.”

Edward pursed his lips in annoyance. “Whatever the case, it will be easiest to find the mother. I’ll send word to all the midwives in the city,” he said. “They will enquire if any servants or other singlewomen have been pregnant or given birth of late.” Martha and I exchanged a glance, each of us thinking of Anne Goodwin. The look was not lost on Edward.

“Lady Bridget,” he warned, “if you know whose child this is, you must tell me. The Lord Mayor and I have had enough surprises from you for the week.”

“I do not know anything yet,” I said. “I will make enquiries as I always do.”

“All right,” he said. My years of work for the city had earned his trust. “So long as we are speaking of enquiries,” he continued, “I must say that the Lord Mayor was quite furious with your letter regarding Mrs. Cooper.” I could tell that he enjoyed tweaking the nose of an unelected Lord Mayor, but he still considered Stephen Cooper’s murder a serious matter. “Are you
sure
that she is pregnant?”

“I have examined her body, and told you what I found,” I said. Anger rose within me at this challenge to my authority. “Judging a woman’s body is no easy task, for it is a deceitful thing, but in this
I
will be the judge. You may rest easy, though. If she is not pregnant, you will still have the pleasure of burning her—perhaps for Christmas.” I considered telling him about Lorenzo Bacca’s threats, but I knew that if Bacca chose to strike, Edward could not protect me.

“Lady Bridget, you do me an injustice—,” he protested, but I cut him off.

“Let us go,” I said to Martha. “We can make some enquiries into the present matter before nightfall.” As we walked away I could hear Edward calling after us, but I ignored him.

“Do you think it is Anne Goodwin’s child?” Martha asked.

“The timing is right,” I said. “But they say there are ten thousand people in the city, and it is possible that the child belonged to another maid. Let us go to Rebecca Hooke’s and we will know the truth soon enough.”

“Why would she let us see Anne now when she refused us before?”

“Before there was no body,” I said. “Thanks to Edward’s order to search out pregnant servants, we can demand to see Anne.”

We walked quickly in anticipation of the conflict that would surely come. I considered summoning some of the neighborhood women to assist me in my enquiry—few people could withstand the pressure brought by a dozen angry matrons bent on finding a murderess. While that tactic would convince most women to yield their servant for interrogation, I feared that such an approach would only further antagonize Rebecca. She was so sensitive about her own birth, any public scandal touching on an illegitimate child would send her into a fury. It would be better to keep things quiet for now—I could always return with more women. We approached the Hookes’ front door, and this time the footman stood his ground.

“We are here to see Anne Goodwin,” I demanded. “We have orders from Alderman Hodgson to search for pregnant servants.”

The footman looked at me with undisguised insolence. “Anne has been discharged from Mrs. Hooke’s service. She left this morning. Or perhaps it was last night, I cannot recall.”

“What?” I sputtered. “Where has she gone?”

A broad smile crossed the footman’s face as he enjoyed my reaction. “Where she went was none of my affair, and it is none of yours. I cannot help you.” He turned and went into the house, slamming the door behind him. I imagined Rebecca Hooke’s glee when her footman recounted our conversation, and it enraged me further.

I looked up and saw Rebecca staring down at me from a second-story window, a thin smile on her face. She had bested me again, and she knew it.

“Come,” I said to Martha. “I can’t bear to have her staring at me.”

“What can we do now?” Martha asked as we started toward my house. “We can’t just go home and hope for the best.”

“We can go back to her parents’ house,” I said after a moment’s thought. “If she was discharged, she’d have few options other than going home.”

We turned toward St. John del Pyke. As we passed the Minster, the bells tolled the hour. This put me in mind of the child we’d left on Coneystreet—no bells would toll for that poor creature, and he would have justice only if Martha and I found it for him.

As soon as we reached Daniel Goodwin’s shop, I knew that Anne had not returned home. Margaret was sweeping out the shop as if nothing unusual had happened. I tried to escape unseen, but Margaret saw me and rushed out to meet us. When she was close enough to see our faces, she stopped.

“I take it you don’t have any news,” she said.

“Not yet,” I said.

“Then why have you come?” she asked desperately. “Something has happened, hasn’t it? What has happened to my daughter?” Margaret was a tough, perceptive woman, and I wouldn’t be able to fool her even if I tried.

“We don’t know anything,” I said. “We went to Rebecca Hooke’s today, and they said she had been dismissed from service. We came here to see if she’d come home.”

“Rebecca Hooke is a lying whore if she says she dismissed Anne. She would have come straight here, and she hasn’t even sent a message. She is still in that house, and they’ll keep her there as long as they can. Until the baby is born if it hasn’t been already.”

“That seems likely,” I replied. I couldn’t tell her that her grandson had probably died earlier in the day after being cast into a privy, not until I knew it to be true.

“Well, I’d better get back to my work. My husband needs me.” She turned and walked back into the shop. From behind, her gait resembled that of a woman twice her age. The loss of a child carries a terrible weight.

Martha and I walked back to my house, talking over the facts of the case and in the process becoming increasingly dispirited. An infant had been murdered, his mother had vanished. While Rebecca Hooke seemed the most likely suspect, we had no evidence to bring before the Justice of the Peace.

“Perhaps one of the servants knows something,” Martha said. “We could question one of them the way we did Anne.”

“You saw the footman and that witch who snatched Anne from under our noses. They’ve already joined in Rebecca’s black-hearted ways.”

“I could use a drink,” she said, and without waiting for a response she turned in to an alehouse. I followed her and we sat at a rough wooden table. Neither of us spoke until the barmaid brought us cups of ale.

Martha drank most of hers in one gulp. “I would say we’re back where we started,” she said, staring into her drink. “Except that yesterday the child was alive and we knew where Anne was. Now we have a child’s body and no idea where to find Anne.” She paused. “My lady, do you think we will find justice for that child?”

“Under the best of circumstances, most crimes such as this one go unsolved, especially here in the city,” I said. “There are simply too many people to be sure who the child belonged to. And in this case, if Rebecca is behind the murder, our chances are far worse.”

“So you’ve done this before?” she asked. “Investigated a child’s murder?”

“A few times. The death of the child is horrible, but oftentimes finding the killer is worse. In your heart you want the murderer to be someone you can hate, someone you can rejoice to see hanged. But in most cases it’s a poor serving-maid, who was scared out of her senses.” I shuddered involuntarily. “If a child dies after being born in secret, the mother must prove her innocence or be hanged for murder. Even if we found Anne, she would face a trial for killing her son. And unless she could prove that someone else threw the child in the privy, she would be executed.” Martha grew visibly pale, and I realized that I had very nearly described what had happened to her. If someone had discovered her son’s body and traced the child to her, Martha would have been hanged for his murder. We finished our drinks and went home.

When we arrived, I sent her to her quarters, and I retired to my chamber, intending to write to friends in the city who might be willing to hire Ellen as a maidservant. When I reached my desk I found my valise where I had left it—in all our running about, I had forgotten that I had a bag full of letters that might tell us who had murdered Stephen Cooper. I put aside my plan to write for Ellen and sat down to read. While I did not envy Esther’s marriage to so exacting a husband, I do admit that his precise ways made reading his correspondence much easier. The first packet included copies of letters to and from his various business associates, as he bargained with merchants in London and Hull, with the shipowners responsible for transporting goods, and even with overseas contacts as far away as Venice. From these I learned much about Stephen’s business practice—he drove a hard bargain and sought any opportunity to reduce his payment due to delays—but I gained no insight into his murder. While some of his partners complained about his hard dealings with them, nothing pointed to violence.

I opened the second packet of Stephen’s letters and found that it concerned his lawsuit with Richard Hooke. Stephen’s letters to his representatives at court confirmed what Charles Yeoman had said about the financial stakes. Over ten thousand pounds were at risk—whoever lost the suit would be destroyed. As I read, however, the picture became less clear. Yeoman had said that Stephen had nearly beaten the Hookes in court, but Stephen’s letters painted a rather different picture. While the suit seemed to be running in Stephen’s favor, in no way had the Hookes been defeated. Either Stephen had lied to Charles Yeoman about the suit, or Charles Yeoman had lied to me. But why would he want to implicate the Hookes in Stephen’s murder?

I found a part of my answer in the final set of letters, which detailed a heated battle among York’s leaders concerning the fate of the city. Though they maintained a unified face in public, Stephen’s letters made clear that, much like the rest of the nation, the council had divided their loyalties between the King and Parliament, and Stephen was among the most violent supporters of the rebels. To my surprise, I found that my brother-in-law Edward’s name loomed large in the correspondence as he and Stephen argued over where the city’s best interests lay. Stephen had clearly begun a campaign to convince the godly members of York’s city council—including Edward—to take up arms against the Lord Mayor and the Royalist garrison and expel them from the city. While Edward had no love for the Lord Mayor or the King, he wrote against Stephen’s plan, saying it was too risky. In his opinion, the most likely end to such a rebellion would be execution for the conspirators and suffering for the city. Edward had won that debate, but more recent correspondence made clear that Stephen had not given up. In a letter Stephen sent to Edward the week before he died, Stephen claimed to have made contact with the besieging armies and told Edward of their plans to assault the city. He begged Edward to help him gather men and arms so that he could lead an attack on the King’s men from inside the city at the precise moment the rebels attacked the city walls. In the final letter between them, Edward sounded much like Charles Yeoman, arguing that the city would suffer far more from a rebel assault than it did under Royalist rule. He urged Stephen to give up his plotting and warned of dire consequences if he did not. The letter was dated two days before Stephen was murdered.