Louisa and the Missing Heiress (19 page)

“There!” I exclaimed. A carriage, black and completely enclosed, emerged from the darkness, and the ringing of the wheels grew deafening.

“It is coming quickly,” I said.

And before Sylvia could respond, it was upon us, forcing us to cower against the building and cover our faces against the wind of it, for the driver had whipped the horses to a reckless gallop and the carriage passed within inches.

“You madman!” Sylvia yelled at the driver, but he raised the whip and urged the horses even faster, and was gone around the corner.

“That was a close call. We could have been trampled,” she muttered. “That driver should lose his cabby license.”

“That was not a public cab, Sylvia,” I said. “There was a monogram on the door.”

“Did you see it?”

“Maybe. I don’t say for certain, but I think it was a W.”

“Well, whoever the driver was, he should be more careful,” Sylvia complained, smoothing her crumpled skirt.

“Indeed,” said I, wondering.

THE VERY NEXT MORNING, at dawn, Queenie’s baby decided to arrive.

I was already up and at my first chores of the day, rolling out biscuits for a first rising, cleaning irons for the next day’s laundry, and correcting May’s composition written the day before.

When little Brendan from the Home came to announce the event, he used the kitchen door, knowing it was closest to the cookie jar, and that I was always liable to be there, instead of in the parlor. He was right.

“Now? I must go there,” I said, tearing off my apron and running to the bottom of the staircase. “She must be terrified. Abba! Abba! I’m going to the Home! It’s Queenie’s time!”

“Go, Louy,” Abba yelled back, leaning over the upstairs railing. “Take a cake of soap with you and some bread. There’s never enough there.” And then, more softly, “I’m sure you’ll be some time, Louy. This being her first and her so little. Keep your courage.”

Already buttoning my cloak, I smiled up at my mother. Wasn’t that just like Abba? Bread and soap and courage.

When I arrived at the Home half an hour later, a midwife was already there in the birthing room, kneeling beside Queenie and holding her hand. Rather, Queenie held her hand in a grip so strong that the midwife winced but did not pull away. The lamps cast long, well-defined shadows in the small room used exclusively for this purpose. A huge fire roared in the fireplace, and a double layer of curtains had been drawn to keep out all drafts, for it was deemed beneficial for women in labor to perspire and all but melt from heat. The room was so close I could barely breathe.

Queenie was in the bed, with its single well-used sheet over a thick layer of straw to absorb the various liquids associated with this particular process. The linen was twisted and tossed about like whitecaps on a stormy sea.

“The contractions are ten minutes apart,” the midwife said, looking up at me. “They have been ten minutes apart for hours now.”

I could not help thinking dark thoughts about Edgar Brownly. Oh, if only he could be here now to see his handiwork . . . I asked the midwife when Queenie’s labor had begun.

“Last night,” the midwife said. She wore a light muslin gown with no crinolines or laces, and I realized for the first time the true purpose of the simplicity of nursing garb—it makes the warmth of the illness room bearable. “Around midnight. I had her walking around the room till just about an hour ago, to get it moving.”

I did some quick mental math. Queenie had been in labor six hours. If her labor proceeded normally, it would last about another eleven hours, according to Abba’s prediction.

“I don’t want to do this,” Queenie said, curling up on her side and weeping. “Make it go away.” Her voice cracked with exhaustion.

“Ergot?” I suggested, myself on the verge of tears. This was the herb cordial commonly administered to increase contractions.

“She’s already had as much as I dare give her,” the midwife said. “We could take her to Harvard Medical. . . .”

“No!” Queenie shrieked, trying to sit up but unable. “Not the hospital. I’ve heard what they do there. They make you go to sleep and cut it out.”

“Sometimes it is necessary,” the midwife said, stroking Queenie’s damp hair. “Didn’t Queen Victoria herself let them give her chloroform for her seventh delivery?”

“I won’t go there. Miss Alcott, don’t let them take me.” She twisted toward me, her hands in supplication before her thin chest.

“Hush, Queenie. Rest and gather your strength between the contractions. No, we’ll just have to wait a bit more. And, Queenie, you’ll have to be strong.” I took a deep breath. I’d have to be strong, too.

A new contraction swept over her, and Queenie’s face crumpled, her body writhing; she screamed and cursed.

“There’ll be none of that language, missy,” the midwife said. “There’s young’uns out there, a-listening.”

The pain seemed to lessen for a moment then, because Queenie stretched a bit and took a deep breath. She closed her eyes, and long, childish lashes rested against her damp cheeks. I had never seen her look younger and more helpless than at that moment, when she was beginning the first and perhaps most dire responsibility of motherhood—bringing her baby alive into this world, and somehow surviving it herself.

The midwife took me off to the side. She looked unhappy. “Too small,” she muttered. “The girl’s too small.”

“Oh, Queenie.” I sighed. I knew what that meant. In my days at the Home several expecting mothers had died in childbirth, and for most it was because they were undernourished and painfully thin, too thin to come through the ordeal alive.

Queenie had a long day ahead of her. Perhaps several. Perhaps worse.

“Ether?” I asked, desperately wanting to find a way to reduce Queenie’s pain.

“Later, if it gets too bad,” the midwife said. “Though I don’t like to use it, not like those medical gentlemen from the Boston Medical Society do, and the girl is right to be afeared of it. Ether can kill as well as old-fashioned childbirthing. But get the forceps out of my bag, in case.”

At the word
forceps
, Queenie let out a howl such as I had never heard before. Between waves of pain, she managed to roar, “I’ll kill him for this!” her first verbal response to her seduction. “I don’t care that his namby sister was found in the water. She deserved it as well as he does!”

I sat at Queenie’s side all through the morning and afternoon, and by evening, when Queenie was slipping in and out of a strange sleep between bouts of screaming and pushing, I, too, was exhausted. The midwife was napping, sitting up in the rocking chair. Sweat streamed off both of us from the cloistered heat of that room.

Other women brought us cups of tea and bowls of soup. The lamps had been lighted inside the Home, and the smoke from the roaring hearth in the room mixed with the soot of the oil lamps, creating an interior fog that gave the scene a nightmarish quality. The room had become all angles and shadows, smoke and obscurity, except for the white sheets roiled over the delirious Queenie. She looked so young, so small.

“I wonder if it was as bad for my mother,” I mused, trying to slip some of my own soup between Queenie’s white, cracked lips. “And to think she went through it time and again, knowing what was to come.”

“One forgets the pain, my dear, and remembers only the joy of holding the baby,” the midwife offered. “It is true but indeed hard to believe.”

I let my thoughts slip back to Dottie. Dot yearned for children and always talked about how she would fill her nursery someday with babies. Perhaps it was because she grew up surrounded by two sisters and a brother. Strange how the kind, lovely Dot was like a rare, unusual bird compared to the selfish brood that made up the rest of her siblings, always grumbling and thinking of themselves. Suddenly I was struck by an idea. Dot was different from her sisters and brother, truly different. It seemed important to clarify, finally, what had caused that difference, for it seemed a key to her sad death.

But at that moment, Queenie’s baby decided to cease her delay.

“It’s coming. Thank God,” the midwife said, peering between Queenie’s knees.

I gathered round the bloody theater of new life and watched, holding my breath. What would present first? The top of the head? Well and good. If it was a foot, that was a real problem. If it was an arm, and we saw that the baby was lying transverse . . . well, I refused to think about that one. Most likely both mother and child would die. I saw those gleaming forceps on the table and tried hard to ignore them, to pretend they would not be needed.

Queenie screamed and pushed so hard her teeth ground and threatened to break.

She panted, then screamed again.

The soft, domed top of a head appeared. We fought back the dangerous impulse to pull the infant free and then, one last push, one final scream . . . and Queenie had a daughter.

The noise of it was astounding, and reminded me more than anything of the noise a ship at sea makes, when the waves roll so high that the undertow sucks at the boat and tries to pull it under and the sailors yell for their lives. But this little ship had decided not to let the storm defeat her.

“Queenie!” I shouted, my eyes huge and moist. “Queenie, it’s a girl! A perfect little girl. See, ten toes, ten fingers . . . she’s perfect!”

She might have had ten of the required digits, but she was also red and mewing and flailing with clenched fists as if she were already having a temper tantrum.

“She’s beautiful,” Queenie whispered when the washed and swaddled infant was put to her breast. “See! Hair already. Poor thing. I was hoping she’d be ugly—safer that way. Oh, blue eyes.”

“All babies have blue eyes,” the midwife said, wiping her glistening red hands on a gruesomely stained apron and stepping closer to admire her handiwork.

“Oh . . . didn’t know.” Exhausted, Queenie fell asleep, words forming on her lips.

“Poor bugger.” The midwife tickled the infant under the chin. “They’ll both starve or worse, end up in a mill, working and starving.”

A moment before, my spirit had soared. Now it sank back to earth. The Charles Street Home enforced a rule that women must leave three weeks after birth to make room for others, for there was a never-ending river of women abandoned or driven away by their menfolk. Where would Queenie go? Who would be willing to take her in?

“Maybe she can find someone to adopt the infant,” the midwife said. “It would be a kindness to her, to let her go. That’s what some mothers do when they can’t care for the child.”

I stood over the sleeping Queenie and brushed her hair with my fingertips. “A kindness . . .” I repeated. I looked at the midwife, startled, then looked back down at Queenie, wondering.

 

 

THE NEXT DAY I knew I had a fearsome task ahead. I had to brave, of all places, the Boston Athenaeum.

The Athenaeum was a private library founded ages ago by the Puritans of the early colony, and recently relocated to a new Italianate brownstone on Beacon Street, behind the Old Granary Burying Ground. It smelled gloriously of new mortar and wallpaper paste and leather . . . and that sacred odor of books. Boston gentlemen housed their special collections of books there, and went there to read, smoke their pipes, and pursue other gentlemanly activities, safe from the distraction of females and children and domesticity. Women, who frequently traveled
en caravane
with regiments of children in tow, were distinctly unwelcome, had, in fact, been forcibly turned away at the front door. But as the daughter of such a noted philosopher and abolitionist, I had acquired unofficial visiting rights to both the bookcases downstairs and the stacks upstairs.

Later that morning, dressed in a subdued gray wool jacket and skirt, I signed in at the Athenaeum’s front desk, adding Mr. Amos Bronson Alcott’s name after my own by way of reference.

Charles Agwerd was on duty that day: an elderly gentleman with scanty white whiskers bristling from nose, cheek, and ears and a suit cut in the style of fifty years before, with huge cuffs and a low, ruffled collar. He was old enough to remember having his milk cup broken on the day when Daniel Shays and his fellow rebels marched to the State Supreme Court in Springfield to protest the high land taxation that followed the Revolution. He reminded the patrons of the Athenaeum often of this fact, and usually concluded the rather lengthy retelling of that anecdote and others of his personal history with the opinion that men weren’t men anymore, and women certainly weren’t women. Despite my subdued costume and lack of prattling toddlers and babes-in-arms, he gave his usual disapproving glance when I signed the register.

“You look sensible,” he admitted with reluctance. “Can you make squirrel stew?” he asked testily.

I admitted I could not.

He sighed as though his heart would break and then muttered his old refrain that women had lost their femininity and good sense. Strange, I reflected, how many gentlemen associated femininity with the goriest of tasks. Yet when their own children were born, these men were nowhere to be seen, usually cowering behind the locked and bolted doors of their studies, fingers in their ears. I wondered if a time would ever come when fathers would also help see their own offspring into the world. If so, that should help population control.

Despite my poor knowledge of colonial cuisine, Charles Agwerd allowed me entrance and gave me a tag in exchange for my coat and hat.

Heads, all male, turned as I—that foreign, exotic animal, woman—walked down the long carpeted hall to the head librarian’s desk. The long room smelled most pleasantly of leather and cigar smoke, reminding me of Father’s study.

“I would like assistance researching the life history of Katya Mendosa,” I told the head librarian, who had risen in obvious alarm.

“Katya . . . ?” he repeated.