Place Called Bliss, A

by Glover, Ruth

  S ophia awoke in her own bed and in more pain than she could have imagined. If she could have blinked out into unconsciousness again, she would have gladly. How odd it was to listen to a piercing shriek and know it to be yours, yet have the sensation it was a thing apart, with a mind of its own.

  Hugh’s face with its thin nose, high forehead, and deepset eyes, hung over the bed with an expression that frightened her. Grim, that’s what it was. Was she in that much danger? Or—heaven forbid—was Hugh angry?

  “Hush now,” he was saying firmly. “If you cooperate, it will soon be over and you’ll have our son in your arms.”

  Cooperate? How could she even listen when searing pain was tearing at her loins and gouging at her back? Hazily she felt Kezzie’s hand on her forehead but had no time to wonder about Mary and her condition except to think Is this what it’s all been about? and to dimly regret she hadn’t been concerned for poor Mary from the beginning of her labor.

  Across her vision floated the bulbous nose and ruddy complexioned face of the ship’s doctor. Was it . . . could it be . . . or was it distortion of the light . . . but was that a drop on the end of the vein-marked nose? Surely this was a nightmare from which she would soon awaken!

  “When is the child due?” the gravelly voice was asking.

  “We were told we had plenty of time to make land,” Hugh explained shortly, obviously as repelled as was Sophia and yet caught in their need of his services. “But, as you know, we’re considerably overdue on that. I’d say it’s her time or near it.”

  Hugh swung his inquiring gaze to Kezzie, who nodded her affirmation.

  “What was she going down there for, anyway?” the doctor growled.

  “On an errand of mercy, I believe,” Hugh spoke sharply. “She was concerned—we’re all concerned—for Mary Morrison. What seems to be the trouble down there, Doctor?”

  “No trouble,” the man reported quickly. “Woman just keeps going to sleep, won’t work at the job properly. If she’d only cooperate—”

  Kezzie’s quivering, indrawn breath was enough for her Mr. Hugh. “When we’re done here, Doctor, I want you to get back down there and take care of that situation. Understood?”

  Sophia, weary of the talk, thought wildly, Let the wretch get on down there and keep his hands off me and my child .

  Unspoken in words, the thought was expressed by a wild shriek that was half despair, half fury. Fury for Hugh, for Mary, for herself, and especially for the bumbling man of medicine whose bloated face hung over her and whose hot hands fumbled at her body.

  “Get him out of here!” she hissed, threshing her arms and legs and remembering Kezzie’s report of the man’s intimate examination of the inert Mary.

  “Hush now,” Hugh said again, soothingly.

  “I’ll not!” And Sophia’s voiced objections grew in vigor and clarity. “Kezzie shall care for me! Get that creature away from me!”

  “Sophia,” Hugh said, his lips only inches from her ear, “Kezzie has the responsibility of Mary—”

  “Well, let this idiot get below to Mary! I want none of him. Kezzie—”

  “I’m here, Missy.” Kezzie’s instant response brought the first quiet to Sophia’s wild eyes and arching back. “It’ll go better, Mrs. Hugh, and faster, if you’ll just not fight it. Now—that’s it . . . relax between times. . . .”

  Hugh was handing the doctor his bag and turning him toward the door, speaking to him in a low voice, nodding toward the bed, taking out his watch and looking at it, and eventually turning back to the bed.

  “This is no place for you, Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie said. “We’ll get along fine, now.”

  “But Mary,” Hugh said with concern. “You’ll need to be with Mary.”

  “She has Angus, and he’ll send for me if I’m wanted. If you’ll step in here occasionally, Mr. Hugh, I’ll take a run doon there. Now ge’ along wi’ ye!” Kezzie was in charge of her Mr. Hugh, as she had been when he was a small child. That it brought relief to him seemed obvious; Hugh took a deep breath, smiled at his old nurse gratefully, and made his way to the bar and the slow passing of time throughout a long evening and into the night.

  Kezzie battled as fiercely as did Sophia. Having heard her beloved Mr. Hugh’s muttered words to his wife and knowing how much having a child of his own meant to him, she gave herself, as always, to fulfilling his wishes. He should have his child, even at the cost of her own daughter’s pain and suffering, if need be. It was a wrenching thought, but not arguable; her years of service and accountability to the Galloway family were part of her very fiber.

  But hasty trip after hasty trip to the dark hold below brought Kezzie, white-faced and trembling, back to her mistress’s side. Sophia was resting more comfortably between pains, due to the laudanum Hugh had asked of the doctor.

  “Take some of it to Mary,” Hugh urged on one occasion when he had been with Sophia while Kezzie was absent, and noting the old attendant’s anguished face when she returned.

  “’Twouldn’t do any good, Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie said, sighing. “She couldn’t swallow it. She just lies there like she’s dead, except she breathes slowly and lightly. Looks like the baby is not going to be born at all. Looks like,” Kezzie’s eyes filled with tears, “we’ll lose them both.”

  “Kezzie,” Hugh exclaimed, “we can’t just sit by and let that happen! That doctor will just have to do something!”

  “He looks in once in a while, that’s all.”

  “I’ll see to it,” Hugh Galloway said, and when Hugh Galloway spoke with that imperious tone of authority, lesser beings could but obey. Kezzie had no doubt the doctor would descend to the side of her daughter. But would he be sober, and would he, could he, at this juncture, be of any help?

  When an urgent knock came on the cabin door, Kezzie opened it to find a shaken Angus.

  “Can you come?” he asked simply.

  “Go find Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie responded immediately. “As soon as he gets here, I’ll come.”

  Angus disappeared on the run.

  Kezzie reached her daughter’s side to find the doctor rolling up his sleeves, wiping his sweaty face with his hands, and drying his palms on his soiled breeches. He threw back the blanket and bent to his task. Kezzie knelt and cradled the head of the unconscious woman in her arms. Unconscious or already dead, for Mary’s head lolled with the doctor’s savaging of her body, and her hand remained limp in Angus’s grip.

  Like a rag doll she was tossed about as the doctor struggled by sheer muscle power to wrench the living child from the dead or dying womb. Torn free at last, the bloody scrap was all but tossed Kezzie’s way.

  Sympathetic hands held out a blanket, and Kezzie wrapped the baby in it even as the doctor was pulling a blanket up over the face of Mary, wiping his hands on the corner of it before he let it go.

  The baby clutched to her, Kezzie fled the scene. Inside the Galloway cabin, leaning for a moment, white of face, on the door at her back, it was to find herself thrust into another birth scene, for Sophia was groaning and pushing, obviously swept into the bearing-down contractions from which there was no escape. Mr. Hugh’s face lifted to Kezzie with relief, only to blanch at the spectacle: Kezzie in disarray and blood-spattered, a stained bundle in her arms.

  Somewhat dazedly, Kezzie laid the newborn aside and turned her attention to the woman on the bed. Sophia’s face was red, her eyes were screwed shut, and from her twisted mouth issued animal-like sounds as her body made its decision to expel its temporary inhabitant.

  “I’ll take over from here,” Kezzie said briefly, and Mr. Hugh made a hasty and obviously glad escape.

  So busy was Kezzie for the next half hour that she had no time to give to the grief that waited, just outside the door of her heart, ready to rip and rend, as the invading fingers of the brutal doctor had ripped and torn at the flesh of her only child. Nor was there time for her grandchild, except to take a rag and wipe mucous and blood from the tiny face.

  Though to Kezzie it seemed bu
t a few minutes, enough time elapsed for Hugh Galloway to make another check on the situation. He could see immediately that the birth was imminent. But his attention was caught by the small, blanket-wrapped figure on top of the goods in an open steamer trunk where Kezzie had laid it. Struck, perhaps, by the coincidence of two births, he leaned over the baby, and before hurrying to the head of the bed, Hugh touched the thatch of black hair that even as it dried, showed evidence of a curl, and caressed the soft cheek.

  Sophia, caught in the desperate toils of nature’s relentlessness, could no more have stemmed the forces at work in her body than to hold back the tide itself, and knew not, or cared, that Hugh was present. The indignity of the moment was beyond concern. Like an animal caught in a trap, she fought to be free.

  Kezzie watched the crowning, the emergence of the narrow shoulders, and with the slippery rush of expulsion, reached, and caught her Mr. Hugh’s own child. Another Galloway. Another favored and blessed human for whom life would be generous in a world of deprivation and cruel want; gentle, when to the masses it was harsh and uncaring. Blessed, favored baby.

  Gasping, sobbing with a sound between relief and joy, Sophia fell back in Hugh’s arms, only dimly aware that Kezzie was giving the baby rigorous spanks, eventually clearing its breathing passages, wiping it, wrapping it in a blanket.

  “Oh,” Sophia was crying with relief. “It’s over . . . it’s over, and my baby . . . give me my baby!”

  “It’ll be a moment, Mum,” Kezzie spoke from the other side of the cabin.

  “What is it, Hugh?” Sophia asked, turning her splotched face up to her husband.

  “Why—a boy,” Hugh responded, tenderly smoothing the tumbled hair. “Am I right, Kezzie?”

  Kezzie was a moment in answering. In a daze of weariness and tears she looked down, down on two faces wrinkled and red, two heads misshapen from difficult births, two heads covered with black hair, bloody and matted. Gently she touched a small hand of each.

  “Kezzie?”

  Drawing a deep and quavering breath, “Girl, Mr. Hugh,” Kezzie said. “It’s a girl.”

  “Oh, Hugh!” Sophia said. “It doesn’t matter!”

  Hugh cradled his wife, eyes on his old nurse. “Did you say girl, Kezzie?” he asked over Sophia’s head.

  Kezzie turned and faced him, her eyes ablaze in the half light. “It’s a girl, Mr. Hugh.”

  With a soft touch of her lips to the forehead of each child, Kezzie took up the softly mewing baby, walked to the bed and the man she adored and served, and laid the small bundle in his arms.

  Blinded with tears, Kezzie watched as her Mr. Hugh studied the small face, then, turning his attention to the expectant face of his wife, transferred the child into her waiting arms.

  “Here, my dear,” Hugh said gently, “is your child.”

  F rom weakness or happiness, perhaps a bit of both, Sophia’s tears ran down her face, spotting the clean gown Kezzie had put on her after sponging her weary, wracked body. Kezzie had also bathed the baby and dressed her in clothes dredged from the depths of the trunk, clothes they had been assured would not be needed “aboard ship.”

  But now it was over. Her child was here, safely here, she added, giving a thought to poor Mary. A euphoria never known in all her life flooded Sophia’s heart. Turning back the blanket she let her hungry eyes feast on the tiny face and dark patch of hair, and she caressed the perfect wee hands that tended to wave aimlessly in their first taste of freedom.

  Hugh stood silently looking down on the wrapped baby still in the steamer trunk. Too still, it was. Too silent.

  “Dead.” Hugh’s eyes misted; his gaze went from the dead infant to the live one, safe and loved in Sophia’s arms.

  “Did it live at all, Kezzie?” he asked softly.

  “Never took a breath, Mr. Hugh.” Kezzie stood by her Mr. Hugh, also weeping. In an unexpected gesture Hugh Galloway put his arm around his loved nurse, and together they mourned the passing of one they had not known, would never know.

  “Both gone,” Kezzie said in a thick voice. “Mother and babe. It’s just as well, Mr. Hugh. If Mary had to go, it’s just as well the wee’un went with her.”

  “Poor Angus,” Hugh said feelingly, glancing again at the contented scene just a few feet away where Sophia was crooning words of love to the child snuggled against her breast.

  “He has Molly and Cammie,” Kezzie answered quickly. “Dinna forget that. And that’s all and more he’ll be able to manage.”

  “Kezzie, I release you to go with him to the frontier. You’ll be needed there even more than with us.”

  “Never, Mr. Hugh!” Kezzie said with such passion that Hugh blinked. “My place is here—with Mrs. Hugh and the bairn.”

  “Think about it,” Hugh urged kindly. “Now, what will we do about this little man?” And he indicated the dead babe.

  “It’s . . . it’s a girl, sir.”

  “A girl, Kezzie?”

  “My Mary,” Kezzie said steadily, “gave birth to a girl.”

  “Ah, yes, and Angus helped deliver it.” And Mr. Hugh turned from the small body, adding, with a sigh, “You take care of it, won’t you? Take him . . . her into your room, perhaps, and prepare it for burial.”

  “With Mary.”

  “Yes, with Mary. That way,” Hugh finished with a broken note in the usually brisk voice, “it won’t have the journey alone.”

  Sophia was dozing, and Hugh was wondering if he could escape the cramped quarters when Kezzie returned, the dead child sweet and clean in some of the Galloway selection of infant clothes and wrapped in a white blanket.

  “You feel free to go, Mr. Hugh,” she said, interpreting Hugh’s indecision and knowing him well. “Mrs. Hugh will be fine for a while. I think,” her eyes dropped to the waxy face in her arms, “this wee bairn should be in its mother’s arms. I’ll go now and prepare my Mary for . . . for burial.” The wrinkled face sagged suddenly, and the eyes, blue beyond believing and no whit faded by age, filled with tears. Kezzie’s last few incredible hours told on her at last.

  “I’ll go with you, Kezzie,” Hugh said. “Let me carry the bairn. I need to have a few minutes with Angus, puir mon.”

  The transfer was made; Hugh and Kezzie closed the door behind them and turned toward the tragedy below, expecting to double it by the addition of the dead infant.

  The Morrison bunk had been shut from public view by kindly loaned and hung blankets. Pulling them aside, Hugh and Kezzie were unprepared for the face Angus lifted to them from the bedside. It was ablaze with hope.

  Angus on one side and an elderly woman on the other, Mary’s wasted limbs were being massaged. Though her eyes were closed, there was a faint tinge of color in the sunken cheeks.

  “Mary—” Kezzie stammered. “But I thought—”

  “We all did,” Angus almost sang. “I know the doctor thought her gone. It was while I was clasping her in my arms . . . speaking her name. . . .” Angus broke down. The strong face, ravaged by the last few days’ despair, was run with rivulets of tears, which he let flow freely, unashamed of his sorrow or his blessed relief.

  He turned momentarily from his ministrations, which were apparently meant to stimulate blood flow and were possibly all he knew to do.

  “Mrs. Simms,” and Angus indicated the woman still working over the prostrate form, “cleaned her up, and we’ve changed the blankets—”

  “We know she’s no’ dead,” the old midwife said. “An’ that’s a’ we need to keep us workin’. More warm oil, Libby.”

  “The bleeding has stopped, all thanks to God. And none to the doctor,” Angus said, and who could blame him for sounding bitter, even outraged.

  Cameron and Molly crept from the shadows where they had been restrained by kind hands, and Angus gathered them into his arms.

  Peering at his mother, Cameron asked, “What’s wrong, Da? Why is Mum so still?”

  “She’s tired, Cammie, very tired. Just be patient; be a good boy a little longer. She’ll be f
ine; you’ll see.”

  Angus spoke with an assurance he could not have felt, but it satisfied the children. Holding them over Mary, Angus allowed them each a kiss to the white cheeks.

  “That’ll be just the medicine she needs,” he said and set them on their feet and sent them off into the shadows again to the caring family who tended them.

  “We’re going up, Da,” Cameron called back, excitement in his voice. It had been a nightmare, in the ship’s bowels, that none of them would forget, even the young. A breath of fresh air on deck was a rare and treasured happening.

  All this while Kezzie seemed as one in a daze, standing beside Hugh with the baby in his arms.

  “Kezzie,” Angus said now, with concern. “You look ill . . . very ill. But,” his voice lifted, “isn’t it marvelous? Our Mary—” His voice broke.

  “It’s wonderful!” Kezzie whispered through trembling lips. “If I’d only known! Oh, Angus,” Kezzie’s eyes were tragic in her white face, “her baby . . . oh, Angus—”

  “What about the baby, Kezzie?” Angus turned eyes clouding with apprehension on Hugh and the blanket in his arms.

  “The baby . . . oh, Angus, the baby is dead!”

  A t the brief committal that consigned the Morrison baby to the ocean depths, Hugh stood shoulder to shoulder with Angus, longtime friend and faithful retainer. Heatherstone, Scotland, would be the poorer without Angus’s services; Heatherstone, Canada, would be the poorer for never having had them.

  Here, in this inbetween place aboard ship, in the middle of the ocean, between countries, Hugh fancied he had already glimpsed the equality that was to mark their relationship from this time on. Angus continued his polite deference to his former master, but his innate politeness and good manners would dictate that. There was no obsequiousness, but then, there had never been the rank-and-file lick-spittle service from Angus as from others of his rank; from the beginning Angus had been different. It was that difference that Hugh’s father had noticed, and being a kindly man as well as a wise one, had turned it to the advantage of Heatherstone, as well as to Angus himself.