I was still studying the names when Lori knocked at the kitchen door, excited and bubbling over with some news. Winchester got to his feet to greet her. She was wearing sandals and he gave her a wet kiss on her toes.
She bent over to fondle his long ears, then straightened up again. “You are not going to believe this, China,” she said, “but I have found my grandmother!”
“Wow!” I exclaimed. “Really? Lori, that’s wonderful!”
“Yes, really!” Lori flung herself into the chair on the other side of the kitchen table. “I just got off the phone with Aunt Jo, who tracked her down through an acquaintance in Sherwood. She’s in her eighties now, but she’s apparently healthy and living not far from Dallas. I’m going to drive up and see her tomorrow. She’s very excited about the prospect of getting together.”
“Dallas!” I said. “I guess it’s a small world, after all. You’ve been so lucky, Lori. Some people look for years before they find their families.”
Her mouth trembled. “Not so lucky with my mother, I’m afraid. She died in a car crash three years after I was born. She didn’t have any other children.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “But it’s wonderful that you’ve found your grandmother. What did you say her name is? Her given name, I mean.”
“It’s Lorene,” Lori said. “Why?”
“Lorene?” I pulled in my breath and the hair prickled on the back of my neck. “Take a look.” I pushed the “Our Family” page across the table. “Under Crystal’s name. What do you see?”
Lori looked down at the page. “Why, it’s Lorene,” she said, frowning. “What is this page, China?”
“It’s a family genealogy,” I said. “Crystal was this family’s second daughter. Lorene was her first child.” I got up and went around the table. Over Lori’s shoulder, I pointed. “According to this, Lorene married a man named Gatley. Their daughter’s name was—”
Lori gasped. “Laura Anne! My Laura Anne! This is my mother, China! My mother!”
I put my hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I think your name belongs on that page, too.” I pointed at the photograph propped against the saltshaker. “This is Crystal’s mother. Her name is Annie. She used to live in the house where you have your studio. She is . . .” I calculated. “She is your great-great-grandmother.”
There was a long silence as Lori took it all in. “But how in the world did you find all this out?” she asked at last. Her eyes were brimming with tears. “China, I don’t understand!”
“I don’t, either,” I said, although I did, more or less.
Lori had been searching for her mother. Searching desperately, because she had lost everyone in the world she had loved. Because she needed to find out who she was.
Annie understood that need, because she had once been alone in the world, too.
And somehow, by some magic better known to shamans and sages than to us ordinary people, the two had found each other.
“Would you like some tea?” I asked, heading for the stove to turn on the kettle. “I’m ready for a cup.”
“Oh, please,” Lori said. “Tea would be wonderful.”
I might have been imagining it, but I thought I heard a bell.
Author’s Note
When I traveled through the countryside in Swabia and saw a savin [Juniperus sabina] bush in a farmer’s garden, it confirmed what I had in many cases already suspected, that the garden belonged to the barber or the midwife of the village. And to what purpose had they so carefully planted the savin bush? If you look at these bushes and shrubs you’ll see them deformed and without tops, because they have been raided so often, and even at times stolen.
An 18th-century German traveler,
quoted by Edward Shorter
A History of Women’s Bodies, p. 186
Rue in thyme is a maiden’s posy.
Scottish saying
Lad’s love is maiden’s ruin, but half of it is her own doing. [Lad’s love and maiden’s ruin are two folk names for the same abortifacient, Artemisia abrotanum, southernwood.]
Devonshire saying
For several years, I’ve been wanting to include the history of women’s use of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients in one of the China Bayles mysteries. But in our culture, today, these plants are almost never used for these purposes; in fact, the memory of these properties is buried and all but forgotten. So it wasn’t easy to imagine a fictional context in which they would be appropriate. When I thought of creating a historical tale bracketed by a modern story (a ghost story of sorts), the narrative began to take shape.
But it hasn’t been an easy story to tell, partly because accurate information about the plants women used in family planning has been difficult to come by. And partly because there are so many tragic stories—like the story of Delia Hunt, in this book, whose life was ended when she mistook one plant for another. (Or was it a mistake? There are many ambiguities, and to tell the truth, I’m not really sure how Delia died. All we know is that our fictional sheriff doesn’t feel that he can press charges.) Over the centuries during which women have been seeking ways to avoid pregnancy or end it in the first couple of months, many such mistakes must have been made, and that’s the real tragedy. Lacking a guide or adequate information, women took what they hoped would be an effective remedy. Sometimes it was. Sometimes it wasn’t.
As for accurate information, the whole issue is clouded—and for some very understandable reasons. In most cultures, in both ancient and modern times, a woman’s control of her fertility is a vexed question. A woman who wanted to avoid pregnancy could be faced with religious prohibitions, restrictive and punitive laws, and the disapproval of family and community. Whatever she did to control her reproductive process, she usually did in secret and in silence, with the support of only her closest female friends or a sympathetic sister or mother. She relied on folk knowledge that was shared among women, was rarely written down, and offered varying degrees of reliability.
What’s more, the folk knowledge that women possessed in earlier centuries, because it was orally transmitted and rarely written down, has been virtually inaccessible to us. When knowledge about women’s bodies was considered “black magic,” it was important not to possess any written evidence of the practices, to avoid being burned at the stake. When few women could read or write, most got their information from family and friends, often in the form of folk sayings, like the Devonshire ditty about lad’s love and maiden’s ruin, or “Rue in thyme is a maiden’s posy”—which often were not recorded until much later. In the early- and mid-twentieth century, modern medicine worked very hard (and quite successfully) to suppress information about all medical practices involving therapeutic plants. Documenting the uses of plants in the management of women’s fertility has been difficult.
Thankfully, there is more interest in and respect for folk medicine today than there has been in the past century. A number of contemporary scholars have worked hard to discover and share with us the long, long history of women’s uses of contraceptive and abortifacient plants. I have relied on the work of four for the herbal information in this novel. John M. Riddle’s study, Eve’s Herbs, is a history of contraception and abortion, primarily in the West. Ann Hibner Koblitz’s Sex and Herbs and Birth Control is a cross-cultural study that includes examples not only from the ancients and from Western Europe, but from Algeria, China, India, Vietnam, and indigenous North American peoples. Her work gives us a glimpse into the methods that women of many cultures have used to regulate their fertility and control their reproduction. A third is the chapter on “anti-fertility technology” in Autumn Stanley’s all-around excellent book, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. The fourth is Daniel Moerman’s Native American Ethnobotany, a massive catalogue of North American plants and their uses by indigenous peoples. Moerman lists forty-one plant species that were used by Native American
women as contraceptives and 102 as abortifacients. Women from different tribes frequently used the same plant. Artemisia, for instance, was used as an abortifacient by Blackfoot, Chippewa, Dakota, Kawaiisu, Menominee, Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, and Sioux. Autumn Stanley made a comment that I find interesting: she noted that often during ethnobotanical studies, informants claimed that they didn’t know or couldn’t remember the names of plants that were used to control female reproduction. Stanley adds, “I suspect that the women knew very well what plants were used but would not tell a male anthropologist such secrets.” Indeed!
Researchers who have tackled this thorny subject agree on a list of traditional herbal contraceptives that were used across cultures: parsley, rue, thyme, pennyroyal, juniper (savin), tansy, golden groundsel, artemisia, blue cohosh, acacia, assafoetida, Queen Anne’s lace, slippery elm, calamus (sweet flag), and cotton root. Most of these were described as emmenagogues, plants used to provoke or induce menstruation by causing uterine contractions—good to know if your period was late. These herbal preparations were usually taken orally as a strong tea (plant material steeped in boiling water) or as a tincture (plant material steeped in alcohol). If you were more than a few weeks late, some of these plant remedies might have been administered vaginally. Koblitz, for instance, tells us that both slippery elm (in North America) and mallow root (in medieval Turkey) were used as an abortifacient: “fashioned into a probe and inserted into the womb” with one end attached to the thigh by a string. The probe remained in place “for as long as two weeks until bleeding occurred” (Sex and Herbs and Birth Control, p. 21).
To prevent conception, plant-based barrier devices were used, depending on what was locally available and culturally acceptable. In coastal regions, women employed vaginal seaweed sponges or kelp treated with honey (an antimotility agent) or lemon juice (a spermicide). In North America, native women made diaphragms of birch bark, while in Sumatra, women made tampons dipped in tannic acid (another effective spermicide). And there was the lemon-half cupped over the cervix, said to have been used by American female slaves (Mothers and Daughters of Invention, p. 261). Women’s ingenuity was matched only by their desire to avoid pregnancy unless they could welcome the child into a supportive and caring family.
Both Koblitz and Riddle offer interesting comments on the use of the patent medicines that were popular from the 1870s to the 1940s. It is worth noting that Lydia Pinkham’s wildly popular tonic contained several of the herbs that were known to prompt menstruation, and that Sir James Clark’s abortifacient pills contained a potent mix of aloe, hellebore, juniper (savin), ergot, tansy, and rue, all of which could have acted as uterine stimulants, especially in the first eight weeks. Nobody knows how many women were tempted to swallow a whole bottle of the pills—and wash them down with a strong tea made of rue, thyme, tansy, and pennyroyal.
For the signature herb of this novel, I had many choices, but Queen Anne’s lace, or wild carrot (Daucus carota), felt just right. It is well known to be one of the more potent antifertility plants and was locally available in many regions (including Central Texas). Brought to North America by colonial women, it spread quickly, probably because women settlers took it with them wherever they went. According to Riddle (Eve’s Herbs, pp. 50–51), the earliest reference to wild carrot appears in a fourth century BCE work ascribed to Hippocrates, where it is mentioned as a powerfully effective abortifacient. In modern scientific experiments, extracts of the seeds tested on rats, mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits either inhibited implantation of a fertilized ovum or (if recently implanted) caused it to be released. Other, informal experiments by women have been reported online (for instance, at sisterzeus.com). Most online forums discussing the use of the seeds stress the need to correctly identify it, to be sure it does not come from its look-alike plant, poison hemlock (Conium maculatum)—the plant that so tragically ended the life of Delia Hunt.
If this is a subject that interests you (I hope it does!), you’ll want to take a look at all four of the books mentioned above. They contain excellent documentation, full bibliographies, and handy indexes (useful if you want to look up a particular plant). If you’re tempted to experiment with any plant for any therapeutic purpose, please, please, please do your homework. Plants don’t wear labels, as the characters in this novel learn from tragic experience. And even labels don’t always tell the full story. Be observant and careful, know what you’re doing, and don’t take risks.
Early on in the series, a Booklist reviewer wrote, “China Bayles is always trying to teach us stuff: it’s not annoying at all but somehow soothing and fascinating.” To that, I have to add that China Bayles is always trying to teach me stuff—and even when what she wants to teach me isn’t soothing, it never, ever ceases to be fascinating.
I hope you feel the same way, and that China’s herbal explorations will take you in directions you might not have thought of going by yourself.
Susan Wittig Albert
Bertram, Texas
Recipes
Carrots, wild carrots, and their Daucus relatives are worthy of a recipe collection all their own. Here are recipes for some of the foods mentioned in this book, to add to your own collection of favorite carrot recipes.
Cass’ Couscous Carrot Salad
If you prefer (I do!), substitute 2 tablespoons candied ginger for the grated fresh ginger. For an entirely different taste, omit the basil and add ¼ cup chopped fresh mint. I’ve also made this dish with white and brown rice instead of couscous.
½ cup slivered almonds
1 cup water
Grated rind of ½ lemon
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 cup couscous
¼ cup raisins
1 cup grated carrot
1½ tablespoons grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon allspice
½ cup chopped fresh basil
Juice of 1 lemon
Toast the nuts in a skillet over medium-high heat, stirring constantly, until they are golden (about 3 minutes). Set aside. Combine the water, lemon rind, salt, and oil in a saucepan, and heat until almost boiling. Add couscous and raisins, remove from heat, and cover. Let steam for 10 minutes, then fluff with a fork, breaking up any clumps. Add carrot, ginger, allspice, basil, lemon juice, and nuts. Serve warm or at room temperature to 4.
One-Dish Moroccan Chicken and Carrots
A slow-cooker recipe, easy enough for weekdays, exotic enough for a special meal. Traditionally served over warm rice, but it also goes well with pasta.
1 pound carrots, peeled and cut diagonally into 2-inch lengths
6 skinless, boneless chicken thighs
Juice of 1 lemon
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon cumin
½ teaspoon coriander seeds, crushed
Cayenne pepper, pinch
1 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon black pepper (or to taste)
1 lemon, sliced as thinly as possible
⅔ cup sliced onions
¼ cup golden raisins
¼ cup sliced almonds, toasted if desired
Rice, for serving (optional)
Place the carrots in the slow cooker. Layer chicken thighs on top. Brush lemon juice evenly over the chicken. Mix together garlic, cinnamon, cumin, coriander seeds, cayenne pepper, salt, and black pepper. Sprinkle evenly across the chicken. Add lemon slices and sliced onions. Cover and cook on high for 4 hours or on low for 8 hours. Add raisins and almonds before serving over warm rice. Serves 4–5.
China’s Peach-and-Carrot Cobbler
I use canned peaches for this easy cobbler. If you’re using fresh fruit, you’ll want 2–3 large peaches, sliced. If you like coconut, add ½ cup to the filling.
START WITH THE BATTER:
½ cup melted butter
1 cup flour
1
cup sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
⅔ cup milk
1 egg
Melt the butter in a 9x13–inch oven-proof dish or pan. In a separate bowl, mix together flour, sugar, baking powder, and salt. Stir in milk and egg, making sure there are no lumps. Pour evenly over melted butter.
TO MAKE THE FILLING, COMBINE:
1 (28-ounce) can sliced peaches, drained
1½ cups shredded carrots
1¼ cups sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon ginger
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ cup coconut (optional)
Mix all ingredients well and spread over batter—but don’t stir it in! The batter will rise to the top during the baking. Bake 35–45 minutes at 350 degrees F. Serve warm with ice cream to 6–8.
Queen Anne’s Lace Jelly
For refrigerator jelly, start by washing and sterilizing six 4-ounce jars and lids. If you want to store your jelly on the shelf, you will need to process the jars in a hot-water bath, following (carefully!) the instructions on the pectin box.
2 cups rinsed, prepared, and tightly packed Queen Anne’s lace flowers
3½ cups water, in a large saucepan
¼ cup lemon juice
1 package powdered pectin (Pomona’s, Sure-Jell)
3½ cups sugar
1 drop red food coloring (optional—makes a pretty pink jelly)
Rinse out any nectar-loving insects from the flowers. Snip the blossoms from the bracts. Bring the water to a boil, add the flowers, and cover. Let steep for an hour. Strain, discarding the flowers. Measure 3 cups of the liquid into a saucepan. Add lemon juice and pectin. Bring to a rolling boil. Add sugar, stirring, and return to a boil. Boil for 1 minute, and remove from the heat. If you want to color the jelly pink, add 1 small drop of red food coloring. Pour carefully into prepared jars and apply lids. For refrigerator jelly, cool and refrigerate. For shelf storage, process in a hot-water bath, cool, and store.
Queen Anne's Lace Page 26
