then grasped my arm and urged me upstairs. We ascended by a narrow back stair to the second floor, where a very young and frightened-looking maidservant was waiting.
“Oh, you’ve come, sir, at last!” She bobbed a curtsy to Mr. Webb, giving me a curious glance. “Is this the midwife?”
“Yes. Mrs. Fraser—Dilman.” He nodded at the girl, giving only her surname, the English fashion for house servants. She curtsied to me in turn, then beckoned me toward a door that stood ajar.
The room was large and gracious, furnished with a canopied bed, a walnut commode, armoire, and armchair, though the air of elegant refinement was somewhat impaired by a heap of mending, a ratty sewing basket overturned and spilling its threads, and a basket of children’s toys. In the bed was a large mound, which—given the evidence to hand—I rather supposed must be Mrs. Martin, the Governor’s wife.
This proved to be the case when Dilman curtsied again, murmuring my name to her. She was round—very round, given her advanced state of pregnancy—with a small, sharp nose and a nearsighted way of peering that reminded me irresistibly of Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. In terms of personality, not quite so much.
“Who the devil is this?” she demanded, poking a frowsy, capped head out of the bedclothes.
“Midwife, mum,” Dilman said, bobbing again. “Have you slept well, mum?”
“Of course not,” Mrs. Martin said crossly. “This beastly child’s kicked my liver black and blue, I’ve puked all night, I’ve sweated through my sheets, and I have a shaking ague. I was told there was no midwife to be found within the county.” She gave me a dyspeptic look. “Where did you discover this person, the local prison?”
“Actually, yes,” I said, unslinging my bag from my shoulder. “How far gone are you, how long have you been ill, and when’s the last time you moved your bowels?”
She looked marginally more interested, and waved Dilman out of the room.
“What did she say your name was?”
“Fraser. Are you experiencing any symptoms of early labor? Cramping? Bleeding? Intermittent pain in the back?”
She gave me a sideways look, but did begin to answer my questions. From which, in the fullness of time, I eventually was able to diagnose an acute case of food poisoning, likely caused by a leftover slice of oyster pie, consumed—with quite a lot of other edibles—in a fit of pregnancy-induced greed the day before.
“I have not an ague?” She withdrew the tongue she had allowed me to inspect, frowning.
“You have not. Not yet, anyway,” honesty compelled me to add. It was no wonder she thought she had; I had learned in the course of the examination that a particularly virulent sort of fever was abroad in the town—and in the palace. The Governor’s secretary had died of it two days before, and Dilman was the only upstairs servant still on her feet.
I got her out of bed, and helped her to the armchair, where she subsided, looking like a squashed cream cake. The room was hot and stuffy, and I opened the window in hopes of a breeze.
“God’s teeth, Mrs. Fraser, do you mean to kill me?” She clutched her wrapper tight around her belly, hunching her shoulders as though I had admitted a howling blizzard.
“Probably not.”
“But the miasma!” She waved a hand at the window, scandalized. In all truth, mosquitoes were a danger. But it was still several hours ’til sunset, when they would begin to rise.
“We’ll close it in a bit. For the moment, you need air. And possibly something light. Could you stomach a bit of dry toast, do you think?”
She thought that one over, tasting the corners of her mouth with a tentative tongue tip.
“Perhaps,” she decided. “And a cup of tea. Dilman!”
Dilman dismissed to fetch the tea and toast—how long was it since I had even seen real tea? I wondered—I settled down to take a more complete medical history.
How many earlier pregnancies? Six, but a shadow crossed her face, and I saw her glance involuntarily at a wooden puppet, lying near the hearth.
“Are your children in the palace?” I asked, curious. I had heard no sign of any children, and even in a place the size of the palace, it would be difficult to hide six of them.
“No,” she said with a sigh, and put her hands on her belly, holding it almost absently. “We sent the girls to my sister in New Jersey, a few weeks ago.”
A few more questions, and the tea and toast arrived. I left her to eat it in peace, and went to shake out the damp, crumpled bedclothes.
“Is it true?” Mrs. Martin asked suddenly, startling me.
“Is what true?”
“They say you murdered your husband’s pregnant young mistress, and cut the baby from her womb. Did you?”
I put the heel of my hand against my brow and pressed, closing my eyes. How on earth had she heard that? When I thought I could speak, I lowered my hands and opened my eyes.
“She wasn’t his mistress, and I didn’t kill her. As for the rest—yes, I did,” I said as calmly as I could.
She stared at me for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Then she shut it with a snap and crossed her forearms over her belly.
“Trust George Webb to choose me a proper midwife!” she said—and much to my surprise, began to laugh. “He doesn’t know, does he?”
“I would assume not,” I said with extreme dryness. “I didn’t tell him. Who told you?”
“Oh, you are quite notorious, Mrs. Fraser,” she assured me. “Everyone has been talking of it. George has no time for gossip, but even he must have heard of it. He has no memory for names, though. I do.”
A little color was coming back into her face. She took another nibble of toast, chewed, and swallowed gingerly.
“I was not sure that it was you, though,” she admitted. “Not until I asked.” She closed her eyes, grimacing doubtfully, but evidently the toast hit bottom, for she opened them and resumed her nibbling.
“So now that you do know . . . ?” I asked delicately.
“I don’t know. I’ve never known a murderess before.” She swallowed the last of the toast and licked the tips of her fingers before wiping them on the napkin.
“I am not a murderess,” I said.
“Well, of course you’d say so,” she agreed. She took up the cup of tea, surveying me over it with interest. “You don’t look depraved—though I must say, you don’t look quite respectable, either.” She raised the fragrant cup and drank, with a look of bliss that made me conscious that I hadn’t eaten anything since the rather meager bowl of unsalted, unbuttered porridge provided for breakfast by Mrs. Tolliver.
“I’ll have to think about it,” Mrs. Martin said, setting down her cup with a clink. “Take that back to the kitchen,” she said, waving at the tray, “and have them send me up some soup, and perhaps a few sandwiches. I do believe my appetite has come back!”
WELL, NOW BLOODY WHAT? I had been whisked so abruptly from gaol to palace that I felt like a sailor decanted onto land after months at sea, staggering and off-balance. I went obediently down to the kitchen, as instructed, obtained a tray—with a most delectable-smelling bowl of soup—and took it back to Mrs. Martin, walking like an automaton. By the time she dismissed me, my brain had begun to function again, if not yet at full capacity.
I was in New Bern. And, thanks be to God and Sadie Ferguson, out of Sheriff Tolliver’s noisome gaol. Fergus and Marsali were in New Bern. Ergo, the obvious—in fact, the only—thing to do was plainly to escape and find my way to them. They could help me to find Jamie. I clung firmly to Tom Christie’s promise that Jamie wasn’t dead and to the notion that he was findable, because nothing else was tolerable.
Escaping from the Governor’s Palace, though, proved more difficult than I had anticipated. There were guards posted at all the doors, and my attempt to talk my way past one of them failed utterly, leading to the abrupt appearance of Mr. Webb, who took me by the arm and escorted me firmly up the stairs to a hot, stuffy little garret, where he locked me in.
I
t was better than the gaol, but that was all that could be said for it. There was a cot, a chamber pot, a basin, ewer, and chest of drawers, the latter containing meager bits of clothing. The room showed signs of recent occupancy—but not immediately recent. A film of fine summer dust lay over everything, and while the ewer was full of water, it had obviously been there for some time; a number of moths and other small insects had drowned in it, and a film of the same fine dust floated on the surface.
There was also a small window, painted shut, but determined banging and heaving got it open, and I breathed a heady lungful of hot, muggy air.
I stripped off, removed the dead moths from the pitcher, and washed, a blissful experience that made me feel immensely better, after the last week of unalloyed grime, sweat, and filth. After a moment’s hesitation, I helped myself to a worn linen shift from the chest of drawers, unable to bear the thought of putting my own filthy, sweat-soaked chemise back on.
I could do only so much without soap or shampoo, but even so, felt much improved, and stood by the window, combing out my wet hair—there had been a wooden comb on the chest, though no looking glass—and surveying what I could see from my perch.
There were more guards, posted round the edge of the property. Was that usual? I wondered. I thought perhaps it was not; they seemed uneasy, and very alert; I saw one challenge a man who approached the gate, presenting his weapon in rather belligerent fashion. The man seemed startled and backed up, then turned and walked away fast, glancing backward as he went.
There were a number of uniformed guards—I thought they were perhaps Marines, though I wasn’t sufficiently familiar with uniforms as to be sure of it—clustered round six cannon, these situated on a slight rise before the palace, commanding the town and the harbor’s edge.
There were two nonuniformed men among them; leaning out a bit, I made out the tall, heavyset figure of Mr. Webb, and a shorter man beside him. The shorter man was strolling along the line of cannon, hands folded beneath his coattails, and the Marines, or whatever they were, were saluting him. At a guess, this was the Governor, then: Josiah Martin.
I watched for a little while, but nothing of interest happened, and I found myself overwhelmed with sudden sleepiness, borne down by the strains of the last month and the hot, still air that seemed to press upon me like a hand.
I lay down on the cot in my borrowed shift, and fell instantly asleep.
I SLEPT UNTIL THE middle of the night, when I was again called to attend Mrs. Martin, who seemed to be having a relapse of her digestive difficulties. A slightly pudgy, long-nosed man in nightshirt and cap lurked in the doorway with a candle, looking worried; I took this to be the Governor. He looked hard at me, but made no move to interfere, and I had no time to take much notice of him. By the time the crisis had passed, the Governor—if indeed it was he—had disappeared. The patient now safely asleep, I lay down like a dog on the rug beside her bed, with a rolled-up petticoat as pillow, and went thankfully back to sleep.
It was full daylight when I woke again, and the fire was out. Mrs. Martin was out of bed, calling fretfully into the passage for Dilman.
“Wretched girl,” she said, turning back as I got awkwardly to my feet. “Got the ague, I suppose, like the rest. Or run away.”
I gathered that while several servants were down with the fever, a good many of the others had simply decamped out of fear of contagion.
“You’re quite sure I have not got the tertian ague, Mrs. Fraser?” Mrs. Martin squinted at herself in her looking glass, putting out her tongue and surveying it critically. “I do believe I look yellow.”
In fact, her complexion was a soft English pink, though rather pale from throwing up.
“Keep off the cream cakes and oyster pie in hot weather, don’t eat anything larger than your head at one sitting, and you should be quite all right,” I said, suppressing a yawn. I caught a look at myself in the glass, over her shoulder, and shuddered. I was nearly as pale as she was, with dark circles under my eyes, and my hair . . . well, it was almost clean, that was all that could be said for it.
“I should be let blood,” Mrs. Martin declared. “That is the proper treatment for a plethory; dear Dr. Sibelius always says so. Three or four ounces, perhaps, to be followed by the black draught. Dr. Sibelius says he finds the black-draught answer very well in such cases.” She moved to an armchair and reclined, her belly bulging under her wrapper. She pulled up the sleeve of the wrapper, extending her arm in languorous fashion. “There is a fleam and bowl in the top left drawer, Mrs. Fraser. If you would oblige me?”
The mere thought of letting blood first thing in the morning was enough to make me want to vomit. As for Dr. Sibelius’s black draught, that was laudanum—an alcoholic tincture of opium, and not my treatment of choice for a pregnant woman.
The subsequent acrimonious discussion over the virtues of blood-letting—and I began to think, from the anticipatory gleam in her eye, that the thrill of having a vein opened by a murderess was what she actually desired—was interrupted by the unceremonious entry of Mr. Webb.
“Do I disturb you, mum? My apologies.” He bowed perfunctorily to Mrs. Martin, then turned to me. “You—put on your cap and come with me.”
I did so without protest, leaving Mrs. Martin indignantly unperforated.
Webb ushered me down the gleamingly polished front stair this time, and into a large, gracious, book-lined room. The Governor, now properly wigged, powdered, and elegantly suited, was seated behind a desk overflowing with papers, dockets, scattered quills, blotters, sand-shakers, sealing wax, and all the other impedimenta of an eighteenth-century bureaucrat. He looked hot, bothered, and quite as indignant as his wife.
“What, Webb?” he demanded, scowling at me. “I need a secretary, and you bring me a midwife?”
“She’s a forger,” Webb said baldly. That stopped whatever complaint the Governor had been going to bring forth. He paused, mouth slightly open, still frowning at me.
“Oh,” he said in an altered tone. “Indeed.”
“Accused of forgery,” I said politely. “I haven’t been tried, let alone convicted, you know.”
The Governor’s eyebrows went up, hearing my educated accent.
“Indeed,” he said again, more slowly. He looked me up and down, squinting dubiously. “Where on earth did you get her, Webb?”
“From the gaol.” Webb cast me an indifferent glance, as though I might be some unprepossessing yet useful bit of furniture, like a chamber pot. “When I made inquiries for a midwife, someone told me that this woman had done prodigies with a slave, another prisoner, having a difficult lying-in. And as the matter was urgent, and no other cunning woman to be found . . .” He shrugged, with a faint grimace.
“Hmmmm.” The Governor pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve and dabbed thoughtfully at the plump flesh beneath his chin. “Can you write a fair hand?”
I supposed it would be a poor forger who couldn’t, but contented myself with saying, “Yes.” Fortunately, it was true; in my own time, I had scribbled ball-point prescriptions with the best of them, but now I had trained myself to write clearly with a quill, so that my medical records and case notes should be legible, for the benefit of whoever should read them after me. Once again, I felt a sharp pang at the thought of Malva—but there was no time to think of her.
Still eyeing me speculatively, the Governor nodded toward a straight-backed chair and a smaller desk at the side of the room.
“Sit.” He rose, scrabbled among the papers on his desk, and deposited one in front of me. “Let me see you make a fair copy of that, if you please.”
It was a brief letter to the Royal Council, outlining the Governor’s concerns regarding recent threats to that body, and postponing the next scheduled meeting of the council. I chose a quill from the cut-glass holder on the desk, found a silver penknife by it, trimmed the quill to my liking, uncorked the inkwell, and set about the business, deeply aware of the scrutiny of the two men.
I didn’t kno
w how long my imposture might hold up—Mrs. Governor could blow the gaff at any time—but for the nonce, I thought I probably had a better chance of escape as an accused forger than as an accused murderer.
The Governor took my finished copy, surveyed it, and laid it on the desk with a small grunt of satisfaction.
“Good enough,” he said. “Make eight further copies of that, and then you can go on with these.” Turning back to his own desk, he shuffled together a large sheaf of correspondence, which he deposited in front of me.
The two men—I had no notion of Webb’s office, but he was obviously the Governor’s close friend—returned to a discussion of current business, ignoring me completely.
I went about my assigned task mechanically, finding the scratch of the quill, the ritual of sanding, blotting, shaking, soothing. Copying occupied a very small part of my mind; the rest was free to worry about Jamie, and to think how best to engineer an escape.
I could—and doubtless should—make an excuse after a bit to go and see how Mrs. Martin did. If I could make shift to do so unaccompanied, I would have a few moments of unobserved freedom, during which to make a surreptitious dash for the nearest exit. So far, though, every door I’d seen had been guarded. The Governor’s Palace had a very well-stocked simples closet, alas; it would be hard to invent a need for anything from an apothecary—and even then, unlikely that they’d let me go alone to fetch it.
Waiting for nightfall seemed the best notion; at least if I did get out of the palace, I would have several hours before my absence was noted. If they locked me in again, though . . .
I scratched away assiduously, turning over various unsatisfactory plans, and trying very hard not to envision Jamie’s body turning slowly in the wind, hanging from a tree in some lonely hollow. Christie had given me his word; I clung to that, having nothing else to cling to.
Webb and the Governor murmured together, but their talk was of things I had no notion of, and for the most part, it washed over me like the sound of the sea, meaningless and soothing. After some time, though, Webb came over to instruct me in the sealing and direction of those letters to be sent. I thought of asking why he didn’t lend a hand himself in this clerical emergency, but then saw his hands—both badly twisted with arthritis.
“You write a very fair hand, Mrs. Fraser,” he unbent enough to say, at one point, and gave me a brief, wintry smile. “It is unfortunate that you should have been the forger, rather than the murderess.”
“Why?” I asked, rather astonished at that.
“Why, you are plainly literate,” he said, surprised in turn at my astonishment. “If convicted of murder, you could plead benefit of clergy, and be let off with a public whipping and branding in the face. Forgery, though—” He shook his head, pursing his lips. “Capital crime, no pardon possible. If convicted of forgery, Mrs. Fraser, I am afraid you must be hanged.”
My feelings of gratitude toward Sadie Ferguson underwent an abrupt reappraisal.
“Indeed,” I said as coolly as possible, though my heart had given a convulsive leap and was now trying to burrow out of my chest. “Well, we’ll hope that justice is served then, and I am released, won’t we?”
He made a choked sound that I thought passed for a laugh.
“To be sure. If only for the Governor’s sake.”
After that, we resumed work silently. The gilded clock behind me struck noon, and as though summoned by the sound, a servant whom I took to be the butler came in, to inquire whether the Governor would receive a delegation of the town’s citizens?
The Governor’s mouth compressed a bit, but he nodded in resignation, and a group of six or seven men came in, all attired in their best coats, but plainly tradesmen, rather than merchants or lawyers. None I recognized, thank God.
“We have come, sir,” said one, who introduced himself as George Herbert, “to ask the meaning of this movement of the cannon.”
Webb, sitting next to me, stiffened a little, but the Governor seemed to have been prepared for this.
“The cannon?” he said with every evidence of innocent surprise. “Why—the mountings are being repaired. We shall fire a royal salute—as usual—in honor of the Queen’s birthday, later in the month. Upon inspecting the cannon in anticipation of this, though, it was discovered that the wood of the caissons had rotted away in spots. Firing the cannon is of course impossible until repairs shall be effected. Would you wish to inspect the mountings for yourself, sir?”
He half-rose from his seat as he said this, as though personally to escort them outside, but spoke with such a tinge of irony to his courtesy that they flushed and muttered refusals.
There was a bit more back and forth, in the name of courtesy, but the delegation then left, exhibiting only marginally less suspicion than that with which they’d come in. Webb closed his eyes and exhaled audibly, as the door closed behind them.
“God damn them,” said the Governor very softly. I didn’t think he meant it to be heard, and pretended I hadn’t, busying myself with the papers and keeping my head lowered.
Webb got up and went to the window that overlooked the lawn, presumably to assure himself that the cannon were where he thought they should be. By craning a bit, I could see past him; sure enough, the six cannon had been removed from their mountings and lay on the grass, harmless logs of bronze.
From the subsequent conversation—salted with strong remarks regarding rebellious dogs who had the temerity to put the question to a Royal Governor as though he were a bootblack, by God!—I gathered that in fact, the cannon had been removed because of a very real fear that the townspeople might seize them and turn them upon the palace itself.
It dawned on me, listening to all this, that things had gone further and moved faster than I had expected. It was mid-July, but of 1775—nearly a year before a larger and more forceful version of the Mecklenberg Declaration would flower into an official declaration of independence for the united colonies. And yet here was a Royal Governor, in obvious fear of open revolt.
If what we had seen on our journey south from the Ridge had not been enough to convince me that war was now upon us, a day spent with Governor Martin left no doubt.
I did go up in the afternoon—accompanied by the watchful Webb, alas—to check my patient, and to make inquiries regarding anyone else who might be ill. Mrs. Martin was torpid and low in spirits, complaining of the heat and the
A Breath of Snow and Ashes Page 107
