Fourpenny Flyer

by Beryl Kingston

  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?’ sh
e 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?’

  ‘I cannot say,’ John told him sadly. Then, in an attempt to persuade his solemn child out of the room, ‘Would you like to see your new sister?’

  ‘Not very much,’ Will said. ‘She’s a baby, ain’t she? I don’t much care for babies.’

  So Rosie was called for to put him to bed. He kissed his mother’s clammy forehead and stroked her long hair with his fingertips.’ She will be better by morning,’ he said. And he sounded so determined about it that his father quite took hope from him.

  But the next morning was the beginning of the third day and Harriet was very much worse, with high fever and pain in her limbs and her belly so horribly distended she couldn’t bear to be touched. And to add to her misery she had no milk and the baby had found her appetite, crying for food with lusty insistence, ‘A-la, a-la, a-la,’ on and on and on, no matter what the midwife did to placate her.

  John was so distressed by it all he retreated into the parlour and covered his ears with his hands in a vain attempt to shut out the noise. Which was how Nan found him when, true to her promise, she came back to Rattlesden at a little after seven o’clock.

  ‘Leave this to me,’ she said at once. Getting a baby fed could be dealt with. And she went upstairs to deal with it.

  ‘She needs a wet nurse,’ she said to Mrs Babcock.

  ‘Early days yet, Mrs Easter, mum,’ the midwife said. ‘’Tis a matter of a-waiting for the milk to come in. Tha’s all ’tis.’

  ‘Waiting be blowed,’ Nan said. ‘Do ’ee know of a woman suitable?’

  ‘Not hereabouts,’ Mrs Babcock said firmly. Really the way this woman behaved you’d think she owned the earth and not just a newsagents. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Then I will find one,’ Nan said equally firmly, dusting the palms of her hands against each other. Annie would be sure to know of someone somewhere.

  Annie was in the rectory kitchen, helping Pollyanna and Mrs Chiddum with the breakfast. ‘Mrs Barnes maybe …’ she said.

  ‘Or me, mum,’ Pollyanna offered. ‘I’ve milk a-plenty an’ ’tis high time my Hannah was weaned. I could take the poor little mite for a day or two.’

  ‘It could be for a deal more than a day or two,’ Nan warned. ‘You could be taking her ’til she’s weaned too.’

  ‘Is Mrs Harriet as bad as that, poor lady?’ Pollyanna said.

  ‘I fear so. And getting worse.’

  ‘I’ll ask my John,’ Pollyanna said. ‘If he’s agreeable to it, I’ll take her, no matter how long.’

  And being as warm-hearted as his wife, he was agreeable to it, so the matter was settled. Baby Caroline was bundled into shawls and carried across to Mr Jones’s house to be fed with such abundance that she slept for five hours afterwards, her little belly as round as a drum.

  But helping her mother was a great deal more difficult. Towards noon Matilda and Bessie arrived, shocked by the news that a second surgeon had been called for and bearing a basket of dainties, calves’ foot jelly, a baked egg custard and little cakes made of honey and almonds, because they were the only things they could think of to show their concern.

  Ill though she was, Harriet was touched by their affection and did her best to eat a little of the custard, but after two mouthfuls she felt so sick she had to stop.

  ‘I am sorry,’ she said weakly to Matilda, ‘when you are so good to me.’

  ‘Hush, hush, my dear,’ Matilda said, patting her hot hand. ‘You ain’t obliged to eat it, for pity’s sake.’

  ‘Where is baby?’ Harriet worried.

  ‘With Pollyanna being nursed. And you ain’t to go a-fretting yourself. She’s fine and fair and full of health.’ Oh, if only you were too, poor Harriet.

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said, glad of the information. ‘Thank ’ee. Thank ’ee kindly.’

  Matilda and Bessie and Annie and Nan took it in turns to sit with her from then on, sponging her face and hands when she stirred from sleep, offering her sips of water or the juice of lemons or raspberry leaf tea, standing aside when Mr Brownjohn made his daily visit, and all of them anguished by the fear that whatever they did to try to help her, she was gradually slipping away from them.

  Now that the baby was gone and the room was peaceful, John sat by the bedside, too, and watched with haggard eyes, and said nothing. What was there to say?

  And Rosie brought Will in twice a day to see his mother. ‘There she is poor soul. Yes. There she is.’

  And James administered the last rites and prayed with her and for her until she slept again.

  And fifty-nine hours toiled past.

  Towards evening on the fifth day of her fever, Harriet struggled out from a confusion of pain and foul dreams and knew where she was. Rattlesden, of course, dear gentle Rattlesden, where she belonged. Here in her bedroom, with the curtains drawn and the candles lit and dear John beside her, asleep in his chair. I must wake him, she thought, and tell him how much I love him. For she remembered that James had given her the last rites and she knew she was dying. Her mother had predicted it, here in this house. ‘The wager of sin is death.’ she’d said. Harriet could still hear her voice, but it was a distant sound now, and drained of all malice and all power to harm.

  Death is painful, she thought. Pray God it may get no worse. But that was a foolish prayer, as she realized even while she was thinking it. Whatever was to come, she could not avoid it. It would have to be endured, whether she would or no. And she offered up another prayer more suitable even if it was only half formed: for the grace to endure. Then a merciful sleep washed her away from all thought into blackness.

  When she woke for a second time the candles had b
urnt a great deal lower and John was gone. There was a quiet figure in his place writing in a black notebook set close to the candles. For a few seconds she couldn’t think who it was. Her mind was stuck, unmoving and incapable of thought. Then with a sudden rush she knew a great many things and all at once. That the figure was Nan, that her diary was still under the mattress, that it would have to be destroyed, and quickly before it was too late.

  ‘Nan! she said and the word was almost too hard to speak, her lips and tongue were so swollen. ‘Nan!’

  ‘What is it, lovey?’ Brown eyes very close to her, full of tender concern.

  ‘Under … mattress …’ Then words so slurred and inadequate. Her right hand fumbling the sheet.

  ‘Do ’ee want to sit up?’

  ‘No, no.’ Shaking her head.

  ‘Do the bedclothes trouble ’ee?’

  ‘No, no.’ Clawing at the mattress.

  ‘Under here? Is that it?’

  Nodding.

  And the mattress being lifted. How hard it is! Like a plank of wood.

  ‘Is this what you want, lovey?’ The diary, mottled red as though it were streaked with blood, and heavy as sin, held in the candlelight before her eyes.

  Nodding. Struggling for words again. ‘Burn it … please burn … John … not … John mustn’t see it … please.’

  Complete understanding in those brown eyes. ‘Yes, my dear. Don’t ’ee fret. John shan’t see it. I give ’ee my word. I’ll burn it directly if that’s what ’ee wish.’

  Hot tears, scalding her cheeks. Dear, quick, loving Nan. Does she know why? Doesn’t matter now. Little matters now. John is protected. ‘John?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll fetch him for ’ee. He’ll not be far, depend on it.’

  Feet thudding like drums. Why is everything so loud? The door clicking. Feet on the stairs. Slipping into blackness again. Ah! Ah! I must stay awake for him. More feet drumming, drumming. Or is it my heart? Drumming. Drumming.

  After she’d called John from the parlour, Nan took the red notebook down to the kitchen to burn it as she’d promised. The kitchen fire was little more than a pile of glowing embers, and certainly too low to burn through such a thickness of paper, so she would have to tear it to pieces first. She opened it idly, glancing at the first page before she stripped it from the book, and was intrigued by what she saw.