by Ann Birch
The tea ceremony dragged on. Though Emma Robinson seemed a sweet little woman, her conversation was limited. In a few moments, however, who should appear, recipe in hand, but the Attorney-General himself. He gave the recipe to Eliza, and then, while she and his wife were talking, he bent low over Annie’s chair and whispered, “When is dear Miss Powell returning from England?”
“I have no idea at the moment, sir. She is evidently enjoying herself with her aunt and uncle in Tolpuddle.”
He backed away at that point and left the room without further comment.
A very improper question you have asked, sir. You have always been, in my opinion, a mere weathercock, though I would have rejoiced had Anne settled with you in a respectable marriage.
* * *
Later, on their walk home, Eliza complained of the March winds beating against the dampness of the coat the maid had sponged. “But I liked Emma Robinson, Mama. I think we shall be friends. And what did the Attorney-General want to know?”
“He asked about your sister Anne—a truly inappropriate comment, I thought--and I gave him a setdown. I sense that he is already tired of domesticity.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Tolpuddle, October, 1818
By the time I was on my way to Tolpuddle, I had lost my earlier vision of new beginnings. I wished only to remove myself from the stink of Mrs. Grundy’s privy and the sound of Papa’s voice constantly nagging about my failure to “nail down John Beverley Robinson,” accompanied by an ongoing moan about the fact that Mr. Robinson no longer seemed to find his patronage of importance. I half expected to find my Aunt Jane—Papa’s sister—a female version of himself. At least, however, I kept repeating inwardly, her nagging and moans would be on a new variety of topics. From Uncle Henry Warren, the vicar of Todpuddle, I expected only morning and evening prayers and lengthy dissertations on God, the Holy Spirit, and Christ.
It was a pleasant surprise, then, to find my aunt and uncle waiting for me at the coach stop at Tolpuddle Inn with smiling faces and tender words of welcome. In a moment they had helped the coachman unload my trunk; another moment and they had each grasped a leather thong so that they could carry it between them. “The vicarage is just a few steps away,” Aunt Jane told me, and we set out immediately, heading down a cobbled street flanked by thatched cottages.
The vicarage was beside the Church of St. John the Evangelist and its ancient graveyard. Like the church and cemetery, it seemed to date back several centuries. It was surrounded by a stone wall with a gate leading to the front door, through which we entered into a huge room with a ceiling of strips of wood and plaster, an enormous open hearth, and walls of books. Two servants immediately took charge of my trunk and led me upstairs to my bedchamber, a pleasant room with stone walls, a narrow bed tucked into one corner, and a window looking out on a river. A chamberpot lay near the bed, and—thanks to St. John or Whomever—there was no stink.
“Beautiful,” I said, looking out the window at the river and its tree-lined banks. It was only later that I found out from Uncle Warren that the lovely stream was called the River Piddle. We had a good laugh over that!
* * *
Life here over the next months was happy. For once, I found purpose and direction in my daily activities. When I first came to Tolpuddle, I told Aunt Jane that my sisters and I spent our waking hours in York sitting in the withdrawing room making over dresses for balls we were not allowed to attend—especially if the Odious Mrs. Small was to be present.
She laughed. “There will be no time for stitchery in this household. Did you notice the cottages that line the main street of this village?”
“Picturesque from a distance,” I said. “Small and dirty up close.”
My aunt’s bottom lip poked out in a manner that reminded me of Papa when he was about to deliver a verdict, professional or personal. But the words that came from her mouth were nothing like Papa’s. “They belong to the farm workers who plough the fields, shovel sheep dung into the soil, milk the cows, plant and harvest the crops, and do a hundred other rough tasks for which the wealthy landowners in Dorset pay them six or seven shillings a week.”
“And most of those cottages have but one room in which the whole family—sometimes, as many as ten people--must dine and sleep,” my uncle added. “You may have wondered why dear Jane spends all her mornings in the kitchen with Cook. They make stews, soup, and bread, and in the afternoons she takes it all to these people.”
“I will gladly help you in any way I can,” I said.
My aunt rose from her chair and gave me a hug. “Dear niece,” she said, “what have I done to deserve such an offer?”
“And I have assisted at the lying-in of several women in York, and I can—”
“You are a midwife! Oh, Henry, we are blessed!”
My uncle moved from his chair and went to the shelf of books that lined the walls. “Midwifery is such an honourable profession,” he said, “going back in time to the Roman era.” He pulled down a book in Latin from the shelf and translated a passage for me by a second-century Someone called Soranus. “A midwife should be literate, with her wits about her, and respectable. She must be capable of allaying the anxiety of the mother and knowledgeable about obstetrics and pediatric theory.” He looked at me. “Yes, Jane, we are indeed blessed to have Anne with us.”
I hugged Uncle Henry so hard he dropped the book on his gouty toe.
* * *
And thus began my new career. In the mornings Cook taught me the fine points of open-hearth cooking, and in the afternoons, Aunt Jane and I took baskets of food to the cottagers on the main street of the village. The squalor of these places was distressing, but I quickly learned how to behave.
“We must never show pity or disgust,” my aunt said. “The smell will be bad, but you must not put a handkerchief to your nose. And be sure to dress warmly so that you do not shiver in the dampness caused by the broken walls and damaged floors. These people cannot remedy their condition, and we must not seem to condescend.”
Uncle Henry was always busy too. Child mortality was high. Often we would see a small child crawling about on the cottage floor in a condition nearing starvation. Not surprisingly, a few days later, my uncle would conduct a funeral service.
Boys as young as seven or eight worked in the fields clearing stones and weeds from the fields. But the income of the household never seemed to be adequate for the expenses of rent and food. Aunt and I did what we could to alleviate conditions, but at times it seemed hopeless. Stealing and poaching were commonplace, and Uncle Henry spent a good deal of time in the magistrate’s court defending the men who had tried vainly to alleviate the sordid conditions they and their families lived in.
I had never a spare moment during these days in Tolpuddle, but here in rural England I felt happy and fulfilled. I began to understand the courage of the men and women who lived here, and the grit with which they faced the pangs of their circumstances. I even started to think about my eventual return to York where I could perhaps persuade Papa to loosen his purse strings and do something worthwhile to bring surcease of pain to the poor people of our little Canadian town.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Tolpuddle, November, 1818
Last week, well after midnight, a banging on the brass knocker of the front door awakened us all. I had a good idea who it was that needed our attention. Downstairs I ran, clutching a quilt around me. I wanted to answer the call before Aunt Jane and Uncle Henry got themselves out of bed. They had both had a busy day and deserved their rest.
It was Mrs. Sykes, the local midwife, a plump middle-aged woman whose husband was the verger in Uncle John’s church. “I need you right now,” she said. “It is a pretty sad affair, I warn you. Young Ellen, the daughter of those no-good Mullinses, is in labour. She’s only thirteen, and I suspect she has been the victim of her monstrous father.”
“Come in,” I said, leaving her just inside the front hall while I ran back upstairs, donned my plainest mu
slin frock and a sturdy cambric apron in the pocket of which I put a folded sheet from the cupboard in the hall outside my bedchamber. In less than six minutes, I was back with Mrs. Sykes. We headed straight for the well behind the house. “You can never have enough clean water,” was one of Mrs. Sykes’s precepts. I filled two large pails, gave one to her, and off we went down the cobbled streets to the Mullins’s cottage.
When we arrived, we found the girl’s half-wit mother and unnatural father stupefied by gin and oblivious to the child’s screams of fear and pain. They were lying together on the only bed while Ellen was on the floor, watched over by two small brothers. The first thing Mrs. Sykes did was to shoo the boys away. “Get up into the loft,” she said so fiercely that they retreated up the ladder without a word.
The head of the babe was already thrusting through the girl’s pudendum (a word I had learned from Aunt Jane), and Mrs. Sykes began talking to Ellen in the comforting, matter-of-fact way she had, all the while encouraging her to push harder. I got busy boiling our pails of water in the open hearth.
A baby girl emerged finally. Mrs. Sykes slapped it on the back to get it breathing. No success. It was dead.
“I thank God for that mercy,” she whispered to me. “But now we must deal with the haemorrhaging.”
I had little experience to draw on, but fortunately Mrs. Sykes was able to stop the bleeding with an infusion of ergot. We washed Ellen from head to toe, placed the clean sheet under her, and made her drink the dregs of the gin bottle that was sitting on the table in a corner of the room. And then with the remaining water, we scrubbed all the surfaces of that wretched cottage.
Several hours had passed, the darkness had receded, and a pink sky emerged. “Time for us to get out of here,” Mrs. Sykes said to me, rolling the dead infant into her apron. “I’ll deal with this. You can tell Reverend Warren to come to our house later and say a few words if he wishes to. Then my husband will dig a place in the graveyard, and we shall lay the babe in it.”
We looked at Ellen. She had fallen asleep, the gin having done its work. Her no-good parents were still snoring in the bed. All seemed quiet in the loft. There was nothing more we could do.
* * *
There was, however, a happy conclusion to this sad story. Within a very few days, Aunt Jane, bless her, found the girl Ellen a place as housemaid at Athelhampton House, the squire’s manor, where she would be able to live safely away from her brute of a father.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Tolpuddle, March, 1819
I sat in my bedchamber rereading Papa’s letter. In it was an ultimatum that had been pressing on my mind all day. As usual he had chastised me for not writing oftener—though I found it so difficult to reply to his tedious letters with their ongoing complaints about my expenditures. As I skimmed through the letter again, I could not avoid reading the last sentence. “You must return to York at once.”
Papa had no reason to chastise me about spending money. Here in Tolpuddle, though Aunt Jane and Uncle Henry gave most of their income to the poor, they had cheerfully borne the cost of my daily food and lodging, and I had spent only a few shillings for the necessities of life.
Nevertheless, over the course of the day, I came to the conclusion that I must comply with Papa’s order to return home. I felt that there was something more than money behind his demand to see me once again ensconced in York. Perhaps he missed our daily squabbles! More likely, he wanted my unpaid labour at home.
Mama and Eliza now bore the duties of the household. My nieces were still in New York with Mama’s brother. My sister Mary now lived in Queenston, having married Samuel Jarvis, a man with a violent past who killed a young man in a duel in 1817 and spent a few months in the jail in York. Of course, he was eventually set free. No doubt it helped that Papa was the judge at the trial and that Sam was the son of one of Mama’s best friends. Moreover, the Jarvis family was at the top of York’s social ladder.
Without Mary, Mama and Eliza would need my help, and I would give it to them freely as long as I was able. I was now thirty-two years of age and I would never marry. But I hoped that over the next few years, I could persuade Papa to give me enough money to set up a school for midwives. With the death toll of mothers and babes in our small community of York, we needed so desperately to train a corps of women to assist in childbirth.
I went downstairs to tell my aunt and uncle of my decision. Aunt Jane, after a day of taking food to the parishioners, was lying on the sofa with her feet up. Uncle Henry was sitting at his desk with his wall of books behind him. Also in the room was Geoffrey Loveless, a young farmer who frequently visited my uncle when he had some hours free after his long day toiling in the fields outside Tolpuddle. My uncle had taught Geoffrey how to read and write, and he had hopes that the young man would someday move away from farming into a better life, perhaps as a preacher or a teacher. But I knew something of Geoffrey Loveless’s thoughts, and I knew he had other plans for the future.
He was a tall, emaciated young man in his late teens. Everything about his face showed fierce determination. He had piercing brown eyes under heavy straight eyebrows and a straight mouth from which issued a few terse words. Only a cleft chin served to soften his expression.
He rose from his chair and bowed when I came into the room. “Miss Powell,” he said, “you and Mrs. Sykes saved Ellen. Thank you.”
I smiled in acknowledgement. “I fear that I shall have very few more days to assist Mrs. Sykes. I must return to York.”
Aunt Jane and Uncle Henry leapt to their feet. “Surely not. Surely not,” my aunt said.
“Surely not, dear niece,” my uncle echoed. “Why? Why”
“I shall leave now,” Geoffrey said. “This is bad news, but undoubtedly you want to discuss it in private.”
“Stay,” Uncle Henry said, putting his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Let us all sit down. This is a shock, and I know you share in it. Please tell us, Anne, the reason for this sad news.”
As briefly as I could, I told them of Papa’s letter, saying nothing of his complaints about money, and dwelling only on Mama’s need to have me back home to help her. ”She has so much entertaining to do now that Papa is Chief Justice, and I feel that I must lend her my assistance, for what it’s worth. But, oh, I shall miss this place and you, dear Aunt Jane and Uncle Henry. You have given me so much love and support over these months.” I began to cry.
Uncle Henry got up, took a bottle of Scotch whisky and glasses from his desk drawer and poured a tot for us all, including Geoffrey. We downed it and sat in silence. Finally, Master Loveless spoke up. “You must come back when you can, Miss Powell. I know that your aunt and uncle need you. But the young men of this village need you even more.”
I had often, in my spare moments, talked with these men of whom he spoke. Often, when I was returning from shopping in the village grocery, I would find six or eight of them seated under the big sycamore tree on the village green. They would call to me to join them, and I would go and sit on the grass with them and listen to their dark tales of hard labour and pitiful wages, but most important, of the one light that shone for them in the coming years.
Though labour unions were at the time illegal, they had hopes of forming a society of agricultural labourers that would band together and oppose the injustices that faced them. “If we all refuse to work for six or seven shillings a week,” Geoffrey often said, “the bastards will be forced to pay us a living wage.”
They always turned to me in these moments. Of the group that showed up to talk under the sycamore, only Geoffrey and I could read and write. “When the time comes, Miss Powell,” they would say, “we will rely on you to write our speeches and on Geoffrey to deliver them. Here on this village green, we will turn our world upside down and put it right again.”
And now, it seemed, I must also say goodbye to these young farmers. I was overcome with sadness. I had been totally free in Tolpuddle. My aunt and uncle had given me unstinting encouragement in all my ende
avours. I had helped the poor, delivered healthy infants, and done my best to encourage Geoffrey and his friends in their hopes for a new life.
In two months I would be back in York, bound by my parents’ notions of propriety. If I could establish a school for midwives, that would be something, but I had to face the reality that such a dream might not happen. What lay ahead for me then?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
York, June 30, 1819
Annie Powell sat down to supper with Eliza, Anne, and her husband William. She hoped that it would be a pleasant occasion since Cook had been able to obtain two ducks and wild rice from the Indians who came to the back door from time to time to swap their offerings for milk and butter. Cook had stuffed the birds with rice, onion, celery, and green pepper and basted them with an orange sauce made from currant jelly, bay leaves, gravy, oranges, and peppercorn. Dear Eliza had obtained the recipe from Emma Robinson with whom she had become friends, and really, the effect was delicious.
“Very tasty, my dear,” William said, helping himself to a second portion. “And what have you and my daughters been up to this afternoon?”
“I have finished knitting a pretty new shawl for Mary, Papa, and I now ask your permission to cross the lake to Queenston and present her with it.”
Annie waited with trepidation to hear William’s reply. Mary had been downcast since the birth of her stillborn child, and she knew that Eliza’s presence at this time might soothe her.
