Spilt Milk (8 page)

Vivian held her baby girl in her arms, bundled up in a piece of blue velvet, pressed against her heart and the warmth of her chest, the way shepherds carried lambs, knowing the beating of their own hearts might just work miracles. She took the path along the river. The wind rushed over the water, running fast ripples across its surface. Ahead she saw a woman bent against the wind. She was in the arms of a man, and the two of them went away across the fields. For a moment Vivian thought of Joe and felt a sharp stab of envy. The passion of the couple stirred the lovesickness she still suffered with.

Outside Anna Moat’s cottage, Vivian hesitated. She had never been here before. But Anna Moats would be able to help her. She’d know how to make her baby strong. She crept to the window and peered inside.

What she saw nearly made Vivian drop the baby. Nellie was there, standing at the stove, candlelight illuminating her back. She was stirring a pot, and she stopped suddenly and turned her head towards the window. All this time Vivian had suffered alone and Nellie was at Anna Moats’s house?

She heard footsteps. Louisa Moats and a man talking together. That was who was on the riverbank. That ragbag woman and the wheelwright. Vivian felt herself chastised all over again. Nellie was here, punishing her still; but surely, after what she had endured alone, she deserved to be forgiven? She turned and hurried back to the cottage, tears stinging her eyes.

At home she lay in her bed with the child. The fire had gone out. The stove was cold. She had no coal left and no strength to get in wood.

‘Nellie will come,’ she whispered, drawing the baby closer. ‘Nellie has to come back now.’

‘I’m swollen up,’ said Mrs Thomas. ‘I can’t even get my shoes on. I need a doctor, but my husband says he’s drunk in the pub and won’t come out. You’d better know what you’re doing, you two.’

Mrs Thomas’s five children stared out from their seats beside the open hearth. Baby clothes were airing by the fire.

‘This is an infusion of blackthorn leaves,’ said Nellie, handing a bottle to Mrs Thomas. ‘From Anna, for your pains.’ Nellie took gloves from her pocket. ‘Can we boil some water? I need these to be as clean as possible.’

‘What is she going to do with another brat?’ whispered Louisa as Nellie boiled the gloves. ‘Don’t look like she can manage the ones she’s got. Do you reckon I should tell her how there are ways you can bring off a cure in the early months? Just in case she falls pregnant again after this one? Means you can keep your husband happy and yourself in a decent state too.’

‘You children should go and play,’ said Nellie loudly, though she knew it was far too cold for them to be outside. She wished Louisa would stop talking like this.

‘You should know too. Every woman should,’ whispered Louisa. Nellie coloured darkly. Louisa talked of purges and cures, pennyroyal and Epsom salts, castor oil, bitter aloes, a bit of gunpowder on a dab of margarine.

‘When I was a littl’un,’ Louisa said, fishing the gloves out of the water with a pair of wooden tongs, ‘there was always women wanting help, coming up our garden path. Coins in their hands and problems in their bellies. I helped me ma and I never looked away. Not once. I’ve seen stuff would have you on the floor in a dead faint.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Nellie, and wondered if she didn’t feel faint right now.

Anna Moats had been right. Mrs Thomas knew what she was doing. The baby was born quickly and without fuss. Nellie wrapped it in a clean sheet, trying not to notice the swollen genitals, scarlet as boiled beetroot. She set about tying off the cord with a shoelace as Anna had showed her.

‘This one’s called Christopher,’ said Mrs Thomas, lying back on the pillow. ‘Handsome little chap, en’t he? My lovely boy. Christopher Thomas. He’ll go far, when he grows up. I got a good feeling for him.’

Nellie thought he was anything but handsome. She handed him to Louisa, who dangled him upside down and slapped his buttocks. The older children stood in the doorway, scratching their heads, laughing when the baby screamed. Mrs Thomas was seedy with lice too. Nellie had seen them moving through her hair as she wiped sweat from her brow.

Outside in the cold night, Nellie stood with a spade in her hand. Snow was still falling. She had blood on her apron and her hands were shaking. She kicked the spade into the ground, making a hole. The frozen earth didn’t want to yield and she grew warm, chipping away at the soil. She bent to pick up the bucket and tipped it, pouring the afterbirth into the hole, kicking the earth back over it and stamping the ground down. Anna Moats said it was important to bury it deep. That way the child would never stray far from home. Like having your roots in the ground, Anna reckoned. You might go away, but you’d always come home because that’s where your beginnings were.

Nellie had been surprised when Anna had told her that her beginnings were in the orchard by the cottage. Vivian’s too. And if Anna had been their mother’s midwife, then why had Rose always disliked the old woman so?

Nellie gathered flat stones and laid them on top of the compacted soil to keep foxes away. She heard footsteps and stopped. It was Louisa.

‘The husband has turned up. I don’t think they need us any more. I forgot to say, I saw your sister earlier. She was outside the house. Ran off like the devil was after her. It en’t none of my business, but I reckon you should go and see her.’

Nellie felt snow melt on her eyelashes. She tasted the icy flakes on her lips. Yes. She would go and see Vivian. It was time.

‘I’ll come with you, shall I?’ asked Louisa.

Nellie hesitated. She dropped a last stone down on the turned earth.

‘If you like.’

She realized she would be glad of the company.

All around, white flakes of snow flew. Nellie and Louisa pushed through a gap in a hedge, crossed a wooden bridge over a ditch and continued down a track enclosed by trees. The wind picked up, tunnelling along the alley of trees, and the snow fell faster. As they came to the end of the track, the land rose slightly and there was the cottage.

The door was ajar. Nellie stepped into a room no warmer than the outside. She reached instinctively to the table and found a lamp and a box of matches beside it. She lit the lamp and looked at her old home like she was seeing it for the first time. Smoke from the cooking range had blackened the ceiling. A sampler stitched with red lettering and green leaves entwined around them hung on the wall.
God bless our mother
, the stitching spelled out. A small brown stone with a hole in it dangled from a length of string over the mantelpiece. Nellie recognized it. The hagstone.

There were footsteps on the stairs and Vivian came down, calling her name, a candle in her hand. Her feet were bare. Her hair hung matted around her shoulders. Nellie was shocked by her sister’s appearance, but she tried to smile. To make the moment seem less strange.

‘You came,’ cried Vivian, and dropped the candle, which flared and went out. She threw her arms around Nellie’s neck. ‘She’s
upstairs. My baby is upstairs. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been waiting for you. I’ve been so afraid, but I knew you’d come home.’

Nellie pushed her sister away. What was she talking about? Had she taken in an orphan child?

‘No. It’s my baby. Joe’s daughter. Come and see her. Bring the lamp.’

Vivian led them upstairs, her bare heels black with dirt, stepping over jam jars and tins filled with dead snowdrops.

The lamp lit the room softly and the ceiling looked low, the walls dark and indistinct. Vivian drew back the bedclothes where a baby lay on the pillow, swaddled in a blue velvet cloth. It was nothing like the newborn they’d just delivered, who had swung his fists like a fighter and was pink as a fresh boiled shrimp. This baby’s skin had a yellow tint. Louisa lifted the lamp towards the child to see it better. She sucked air in through her teeth, like a farmhand looking over a horse, assessing it for its usefulness.

‘A little girl, is it?’

‘This is Josephine.’

Nellie’s mind was full of memories of Mrs Thomas’s overheated little house, the children and the rudely healthy baby boy.

‘Who helped you, Vivian? Who birthed this child?’

‘I did it alone. I thought I might die. I wanted to but then there she was, my own little baby, and I was glad I was alive. Do you want to hold her, Nellie?’

Nellie shook her head. She felt Joe’s betrayal all over again, and she saw he had betrayed Vivian too. She remembered the day she had found Joe’s hat in this bed. The hatred she had felt for her sister. ‘We must get the fire lit,’ she said, struggling to know what to do. ‘We need to warm you both up. This place is freezing. A baby needs to be kept warm.’

She went downstairs and busied herself lighting the stove, relieved to have something to do. She told Louisa to fill the kettle, and Vivian came and sat with the baby by the stove.

‘I’m waiting for Joe to come back,’ she said. ‘I want him to see his daughter. And then we’ll all live here, together. All of us, Nellie. We’ll be happy, won’t we?’

Nellie didn’t answer her. Her heart had turned, in a matter of moments, to a cold damp stone, heavy and incapable of feelings. She would never live with Joe. How could Vivian even speak of him? She became practical and quiet, ignoring Vivian’s nervous chatter. She found some woollen socks and put them on her sister’s cold feet. She draped a blanket around Vivian’s shoulders too and blew on her icy fingers to warm them.

‘Get a blanket for the baby,’ she said to Louisa, who was also busying herself, tidying the kitchen, winding the clock that had not been wound since Rose died. Nellie brought logs in and managed to scrape a little coal from the stores. She saw she would have to chop more wood tomorrow. She went outside to get eggs, and Louisa followed her across the snow. Nellie opened the door to the hen house and felt cautiously inside until she touched the dry, warm feathers of a hen.

‘That baby’s ill,’ Louisa said. ‘I’ve seen them like that before. I’ve heard Ma say you’ve got to get the urine of the child and put it in a clean bottle. You put that bottle facing upstream in the river so the current runs over it, and as it clears so the baby’s yellow colour goes. But even Ma says she en’t sure that is a real cure. She always says there’s nothing you can do except wait and see with a yellow baby. We could take her up to the vicarage and knock on the door and leave her on their front step for them to take in. Thing is, that baby don’t want to be dying on us when nobody knows we got it here.’

Nellie didn’t reply. She buried her hand under the hen and took the warm egg she found there. Joe Ferier had done more than separate the sisters. He had ruined them.

They drank tea and ate fried eggs and potatoes. The baby lay in the crook of Vivian’s arm and Vivian held her fork in her other
hand, cutting the egg with the edge of it. It looked an awkward way of eating.

‘Give her to me,’ Nellie said. ‘Give me the baby while you eat.’

Nellie took the sleeping baby and cradled it. She looked like Vivian. You could already see she was her child. The soft abandon of its limbs and the heaviness of the child’s head troubled her. Nellie could feel a tight pain in her lungs, an ache in her breast, some deep emotion pulling at her guts.

‘She’s ours, Nell,’ said Vivian, smiling. ‘Yours and mine.’

‘Don’t go loving her,’ warned Louisa. ‘She’s sick, poor creature.’

‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ said Nellie, panic making her hand the child to Louisa. She reached for her coat. ‘I’ll get him out of the pub even if I have to carry him. He’ll have medicine to make her better.’

Louisa shook her head.

‘You en’t going.’

Louisa thought it was likely the doctor would call out the hygiene inspector. He might take the baby away to a hospital and then they’d never get it back. An unmarried woman giving birth on her own? Vivian could end up in the lunatic asylum, because surely only madwomen brought this kind of shame on themselves. And she’d never hold her head up in the village. The shame of it would be too much. She’d lose her job as laundress at the vicarage. She’d have no money and end up giving up the child in any case. The Langhams might throw her out of the cottage too.

So Nellie didn’t go. The fire crackled and spat, and the room began to warm. The three of them sat together, Vivian singing to the baby, the clock ticking loudly. Outside, the wind whistled and moaned. The poplar trees by the river were creaking and groaning as if they might be felled by the snow blizzard. The baby’s breathing was shallow. There was a deep anxiety between the sisters, a pulsing fear in each other’s eyes.

They were countrywomen and knew when death had entered
a house. They felt it settling on the child, the dreadful sorrow of it pressing against their own fast-beating hearts. When late that night the baby died, Nellie and Louisa stood over Vivian, watching her grieve, unable to take the pain from her. In the hours before dawn, Vivian took her baby and washed and dried her. Then she dressed her in clean clothes and wrapped her in the blue velvet.

‘Joe Ferier has to be found,’ Nellie said. ‘He has to see what he’s done.’

‘You can’t tell anyone,’ insisted Louisa. ‘We’ve got to keep things quiet. Things will be right as a mailer if you don’t let on.’

Louisa took charge. She began organizing, planning, deciding what to do. The baby must remain a secret. The police would want to know what had happened here. Vivian had hidden her pregnancy. She had given birth alone and the child had died. The police might say Vivian had killed her baby to be rid of the shame of it.

Vivian stirred then, crying out and protesting that she would never harm a child. She loved her baby. But Louisa would not be swayed. Vivian would have suspicion cast upon her if anybody knew about this. She’d have to prove her innocence. It was hard and it was unfair, but that was how things were and they had to understand that. Everything would be fine if they kept this secret.

Vivian insisted her baby must be baptized and buried in the churchyard. Louisa said it was impossible. The two women argued back and forth. Nellie watched the brown hagstone hanging from a length of string. It spun slightly in the breeze that Louisa made as she marched up and down the room, arguing with Vivian. Nellie remembered giving it to Joe, last summer, sitting by the river. She took it down and slipped it in her pocket.