“Well, perhaps she did, but ’tis all in the marriage vows, and I’ve made those, so I would have to go if he insisted.”
“Most women would not. Plenty of men go over to the colonies and their wives stay behind in England.”
Kathryn sighed. “I’m tired. I need to sleep, only I can’t find any position that doesn’t make my back ache. Rub it for me again, will you? And don’t worry about us being dragged off to Cupids Cove. ’Twill never happen. Master Nicholas will come home and see his son, and we will all be together. The only thing that keeps my spirits up is seeing it all in my mind like a painting—myself with the babe, and my husband by our side—and then he will never want to go over the sea again.”
Nancy drifted off to sleep feeling that conversation had gone oddly wrong: it ought to have been she who was comforting Kathryn, reassuring her that Nicholas would come back. Instead, it had somehow become Kathryn’s job to reassure Nancy.
She was woken by hysterical sobbing. “Nancy! Nan! Get up, help me! Something’s amiss with the baby!”
Nancy woke to see Kathryn sitting up in the bed. From the adjoining chamber, Mistress Gale was already out of bed, rushing to her daughter’s side. The sheets were wet all around Kathryn, but as near as Nancy could tell in the faint glow of moonlight through the shutters, they were not bloody. The midwife had said that, when a woman’s time was near, something called the “bag of waters” in her womb would burst, and it might seem as if she had pissed the bed. “Nothing is wrong,” she soothed Kathryn. “All is well; I think the babe is on his way.”
When Kathryn’s mother pulled aside the bed curtains, she confirmed Nancy’s guess and sent her husband for the midwife. Aunt Tib came upstairs and bundled the younger children, who were still half-asleep, down to finish the night by the fire. She sent Nancy for clean linen and warm water.
“’Twill be an easy birth, I allow,” Aunt Tibby said as Nancy returned with the linens. “She’s built for birthing, our young miss. Good broad hips and all.”
“She’s built like me,” Mistress Gale said, “but I can’t say I had an easy time of it—you remember, don’t you, Tibby? When I bore our Kathryn, how the midwife near lost both of us? And the little boy after that, the one who died in the womb?”
Nancy looked up sharply at her mistress’s mother. She knew of Mistress Gale’s trouble in childbearing—Kathryn’s difficult birth, and the dead baby that followed a year later. Not to mention the two little ones who died before they were a year old. But these were no fit stories to recount at her daughter’s lying-in.
“Have you a draught made up, to ease her pains once they start to come?” Nancy asked. That was enough to distract Mistress Gale, who was very proud of her store of herbs and simples, and had things in the storeroom even the midwife could not boast of. She went off downstairs to see what she had to offer her daughter.
“Are you in pain, love? Feeling the birth pangs yet?” Nancy asked, rubbing Kathryn’s back as she had done so many times these last few months. Beside her, Aunt Tib, who was a great one for charms and blessings, muttered something under her breath. Nancy put little faith in charms, but anything that might ease Kathryn’s labours could not hurt.
“No, nothing yet. It is too soon for the birth pains, if the waters have only just broken, isn’t it?”
Aunt Tib broke off her incantation to say, “I’ve heard tell—,” but was interrupted by the midwife, Granny Hayward, coming up the stairs.
“Pains can start before the waters break, or afterwards, or during—there’s no rule to it at all,” Granny Hayward said. “I’ve known a mother be labouring half a day and finally have to reach in and break the caul myself. But if ’tis broken already, that’s a good start. Now, lay back and let me have a look at you, young mistress.”
The other women withdrew while the midwife performed her examination, putting her hand right up into Kathryn’s privy parts as if she could haul the baby out of there. But when Nancy moved towards the stairs, thinking she might help Mistress Gale with the brewing of a healing draught, Kathryn called out, “Stay by me, Nan!”
The midwife looked up. “If she wants her maid by her, then you ought to stay, girl.”
Nancy went back to sit beside the bed. “Stay by me, keep rubbing my back or at least hold my hand,” Kathryn insisted.
She regretted her promise to stay by Kat’s side before the day was over. She would have done anything to flee that room, to be far away from the smell of blood and Kathryn’s moans and screams as the pains rolled over her body.
At first, the midwife was pleased at how things were going. The waters had broken, the pains begun and had come about the right time apart. “Will it all be well?” Mistress Gale asked, fluttering around in the background with a posset in a mug of ale. “Is the baby strong and well? Will she be all right?”
“Only God can say, Mistress,” said the midwife, but she hummed and smiled as she wrung out the cloths and handed them to Nancy to wipe Kathryn’s sweating brow.
Nancy could feel the moment the midwife’s mood changed. The older woman’s brow furrowed as she ran her hands over the great mound of Kathryn’s belly. “The babe should be moving down now. I’m going to rub her belly, try to force him down. He’s loath to come out, needs a bit of coaxing.”
“Ooohhhhh!” A moan burst out of Kathryn’s lips. “Make it stop! Tear this thing out of me! I can’t do this! I don’t want to!”
“Well, you’ve little choice about that, my love,” said her mother, coming to the other side of the bed to help cradle her daughter. “There’s no going back. When I was having our Lily, now...”
“What is it?” Nancy asked as she heard the midwife take in a little gasp of air. “Is something wrong?”
It was a long time before the midwife would say it out loud, hours of Kathryn groaning and screaming and even cursing—curses Nancy wouldn’t have even thought her young mistress knew, much less would speak in front of her mother. Nancy tried to keep her eyes on Kathryn’s tear-stained, weary face, her mat of tangled dark hair—anything to avoid the terrifying sight of the midwife with her hand up between Kathryn’s legs, reaching in, coming away bloody up to the wrist.
Granny Hayward sent Tibby down to the kitchen, rhyming off a list of instructions for a simple to make that sometimes hastened the birth. “Mugwort, motherwort, mint,” Tibby recited under her breath, mixing the words with what sounded like another charm. She lacked Mistress Gale’s gift for brewing remedies; even Nancy was better at it, but neither Mistress Gale nor Nancy would leave Kathryn’s side.
“There’s mugwort and motherwort on the shelf above the preserves, and mint in a pot lower down,” Mistress Gale said, and Aunt Tib came back half an hour later with another posset that Nancy held to Kathryn’s lips. Kathryn gagged over and over but finally choked some down, then threw up all over herself within a few minutes.
“She’s been pushing for hours,” Mistress Gale said. “How can the baby live through this?” Granny Hayward looked up and met Mistress Gale’s eyes, and that was when Nancy understood that the baby’s survival was no longer what the midwife was fighting for.
All day, all night. Whenever Nancy thought those nightmare hours had to end, time doubled back, twisted upon itself. It had been predawn darkness when Kathryn first woke, then daylight had flooded the room, and then it was dark. Now the sky was lightening again: a full day, almost.
Mistress Gale was crying, praying under her breath. “Merciful God, spare my poor baby, my poor girl. Your own virgin mother went through this, Lord. Have mercy, have mercy.”
Kathryn’s face was white. She could die, Nancy allowed herself to think for the first time. She had bled so much, laboured so hard, and all for nothing.
But Kathryn did not die. Weak, exhausted, pale, she had given up trying to birth the child, but her body had not. In the end, it seemed to have little to do with her—she had gone beyond anything but cries of pain, no longer answering her mother or Nancy, only whimpering in between the
spasms. The midwife almost seemed to pull the slimy white thing out of her, when it came. It was no longer a triumphant burst of energy, bringing a child into the world, but the last exhausted writhing that expelled something no longer wanted, no longer needed.
“There, there, it’s done. You’re done. It’s all over, you can rest.” Mistress Gale leaned Kathryn back onto the pillows. Looking at the still white bundle as the midwife wrapped it to take away, Nancy hoped Kathryn was unconscious. But her eyelids fluttered, and it was at Nancy, not at her mother, that she looked when she said, “What... what was it? The babe...was it...?”
“Hush now. Hush. All will be—you will be well,” Nancy said, and prayed Kathryn would not ask again.
“But the baby...?”
“Do not fret about the babe, now. You need to sleep. You’ve had a long, hard day.”
Her eyelashes fell shut again, and she seemed to have fallen asleep. The other women all breathed sighs of relief. “Show it to me,” Mistress Gale said to Granny Hayward. “Before you take it away, let me see it.”
“Best not to, Mistress.”
“No, I want to see. ’Tis better to know—that would have been my grandchild, if it had been born live. Kathryn need not see it, but I must.”
“Very well then, come here, Mistress.”
Nancy had no desire to see the thing that was supposed to have been Kathryn’s baby. She sat by Kathryn’s side, stroking her hair, trying to piece together the words to tell her about the baby. She sat there and waited, while Aunt Tibby came back to clean the room and change the sheets, and came back again with trays of food, while Mistress Gale paid the midwife and wiped away her own tears, while the midwife took away the blanket-wrapped bundle.
The room was restored to order. While she slept, Kathryn was washed and changed; she stirred and moaned but did not wake. After a time everyone had gone, even Mistress Gale, to see to things down in the hall. No one was left in the sleeping chamber but Nancy, sitting beside her sleeping mistress.
When Kathryn woke again she stretched and yawned like a kitten, and looked, for a moment, like her old self. Nancy had the wild thought that she might not remember, that the whole agony of childbirth might have been erased from her mind. They might go back to the time before, when none of this had happened.
Instead, Kathryn said, in a voice as clear as St. Stephen’s bell, “Where is my babe? Is it a boy or a girl?”
“It was—” Nancy realized she did not know. “The child did not live. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Kat.”
Kathryn gave a strangled little gasp, then was silent. After a moment, in a small, choked voice, she said, “Was it—can I see?”
“The midwife took it away. Your mother can tell you more; she looked on the babe, she’ll know if it was a boy or a girl. Shall I go get her?”
“In—in a minute.” Kathryn closed her eyes again. “It hurt so much—so much, Nan! And all for nothing. Oh God, for nothing.”
CHAPTER SIX
The Winter is Ended and Spring Has Come
Wise men, wise Sir, do not the fire abhor,
For once being singed, more wary grow therefore.
Shall one disaster breed in you a terror?
With honest, meet, wise men mend your first error.
CUPIDS COVE
APRIL 1611
IN BRISTOL, NANCY SAT BY KATHRYN’S BEDSIDE. AN OCEAN away, Ned Perry also sat by a bedside, watching a sick boy burn with fever.
“Fortune has smiled upon us here,” Governor John Guy was fond of saying. “The poor wretches out in Virginia—half of them were dead of disease or starvation after the first year. And look at us, men—look how well we have come through. God has blessed us, and the worst of the winter is over now.”
He had said it in February, when John Morris succumbed to the fever and ravings he had suffered ever since he was wounded. He said it again in March when James Stone died after weeks abed, unable to walk on his sore and swollen legs. Governor Guy had urged Stone to get up, move about, even when the man protested he could not. When he was found dead in bed one cold morning, Guy had insisted the man had brought it upon himself—sheer laziness, till his limbs became paralyzed and his heart ceased to beat.
Three deaths, then, over the winter: Tom Percy, whose guilt had driven him to self-murder; then Morris and Stone whose illnesses had lingered since autumn. But the food held out; there was no outbreak of plague; the dead were buried in a clearing a little away from the dwelling-house and the living held on, hoping spring would come soon.
Then Marmaduke Whittington, the youngest of them, fell ill. George argued with Governor Guy, insisting his brother’s ration of food and ale be increased. “He only wants building up! Trying to get by on short rations has taken the good out of him!”
“He was ever too frail to have come out to the colony,” Governor Guy said. “We were lucky we all ’scaped getting the smallpox when he had it aboard ship, but ’tis clear he never recovered fully.”
“If anything happens to Duke, I’ll blame myself for bringing him out here,” George told Ned, once Governor Guy had gone back to work. “He was never strong, and when he fell sick on the boat I should have known this life would be too hard for him. I thought I could look after him.”
“And you are doing,” Ned assured him. He liked the gentle, soft-spoken Duke far better than his braggart elder brother, but he felt some pity now for George. “Look here, today is my day for kitchen duty—I’ll keep an eye to him while I work. You can go on down to work at the boatbuilding.”
The governor was determined to keep the men busy over the winter months, even when there was no planting or fishing to do. Idleness was deadly, and so apart from the round of domestic tasks that included feeding the animals and themselves, everyone took turns in the enclosed work space, building the barque that Governor Guy hoped to launch in the spring to explore the coast, as well as some smaller boats for fishing. Most of the men knew nothing of shipbuilding, but they learned by doing, and Ned found he enjoyed learning this new skill.
But for now he was scrubbing out pots, baking bread, and roasting several small wildfowls on a spit over the hearth for the next meal. Those duties left a little time for him to look to Duke, who tossed and turned in his narrow bed, crying out in his sleep but never fully waking. For five days now, the lad had had a fever that seemed impossible to break. The surgeon had bled him yesterday, but his condition had not improved.
The men came back in from their various tasks around the site late in the afternoon and gathered for the main meal of the day. “Tough little birds, these are,” Matt Grigg said, gnawing at a leg of one of the fowl. “Or mayhap ’tis only that Perry here is no cook.”
“I did the best I could with them—tended them all day as if I were the mother hen herself,” Ned said. “These wild ducks are on the wing all the time, not like barnyard chickens. They’ve no time to grow plump.”
“Between Tipton shooting them and you cooking them, we’re lucky enough to have fresh meat at all,” said Nicholas Guy, and other voices chimed in agreement. They were all heartily sick of the salted fish that had been preserved back in the autumn, and there were too few of their own livestock to slaughter for any but the most special occasions. Anytime wild game was hunted or snared, it proved a welcome addition to the men’s diets. Throughout the winter they had trapped small animals, both for furs to sell back in England and for meat to feed themselves. They had hunted, too, for larger game, including a huge antlered stag, bigger and stranger than any deer they had ever seen in England. It would have made good eating if they had been able to shoot it, but even with the help of their eager hunting dog, the hunters had had no luck in bringing it down.
In the middle of March they had seen seals on the harbour ice offshore. Going out onto the ice after them was a risky business and Ned was glad to be one of those who stayed on shore, skinning and gutting the beasts as the more daring men brought them in. The strong-tasting, fishy flesh had been grand while it lasted,
but the seal meat was all gone now.
“Truth be told, I am growing proud of my cookery,” Ned said now. He had rarely done more than put his own bread and meat on a trencher back home, but along with several of the other men in the colony he had now learned to bake bread, roast and stew various meats, as well as cook the ever-present pottage that fueled every morning’s work. “If I were back in England, I could give up stonemasonry and take a post as a cook at some big house.”
“Nay, I’d not give up masonry if I were you—I could repair yon wall out there with this bread,” Jem Holworthy said, gnawing away at a hunk. When Ned pretended to throw a crust at him, Jem cowered in mock fear.
“Outside of the big houses, cooking be housewives’ work,” Frank Tipton said, “and ’twill be a good thing, Governor, when you bring us over some women to do it.”
A chorus of voices joined in, wanting to know when the long-promised women would arrive. “I have made plans to return to Bristol in the summer,” the governor announced. “I expect to be there over next winter, raising more funds and supplies, but also recruiting new colonists to join us the following year. And yes, there will be women among them, I do promise you that.”
“But that’s another year to wait!” grumbled Tipton, and several other voices around the hearth took up his complaint.
“Can you bring my missus?” Sam Butler asked, and another man said, “Can you leave mine behind, and bring the tavern keeper’s wife from over the road instead?” Much laughter and bawdy talk, as well as a few sincere requests. Matthew Grigg had been betrothed to marry a girl back in Bristol, a dairymaid on one of the big estates, who had agreed she would come and join him in the New World if the prospects seemed favourable. “I will find her,” John Guy promised Grigg, “when I am back in England, and if she be still willing, I’ll bring her over. Perchance she has friends who would make the journey—a few comely dairymaids would not go astray among the unmarried men here, I am sure.”
A Roll of the Bones Page 7
