The Midwife's Tale (22 page)

“She’s bleeding heavily. Too heavily, I think. I didn’t want to alarm Daniel or Adelaide, for that matter, but I . . . well, I’ll feel better if you took a look.” She led Martha to the table in the corner of the room where she had stored the cloths Adelaide had been using.

Martha counted them and inspected all four. “The blood is bright and clear, and I don’t see any sign of infection. There certainly appears to be more than normal, though.”

“And those are just from this morning. I already washed yesterday’s.”

Concerned, but not yet alarmed, Martha cocked her head. “How many did she use all told since the birth?”

“Seven or eight, not counting what’s on the table, but they weren’t anywhere as saturated as those. Poor darlin’. She’s getting paler by the hour and getting weaker.”

“Well, let’s see if we can’t get this mama feeling better. It was a difficult birth, so I’m not too concerned. I have some sawbrier root in my bag. We’ll let her rest while we brew some tea. I’ll stay to make sure this is all she needs and show you how to make more. It won’t hurt to let her use the tea for a few more days.”

Aunt Hilda let out a sigh. “I knew you’d have something to help.”

Martha gave her a reassuring hug. “We need to get the water good and hot,” she suggested, but kept her own counsel about what might need to happen if the herbal tea did not stem the bleeding. She usually reserved the sawbrier root to help dispel the afterbirth, but she had used it once before to stem a heavy flow.

At the moment, she was also worried about what Aunt Hilda would say when she found Thomas Dillon waiting for them with Daniel.

17

W
hen Martha opened the bedchamber door, Daniel was standing there with his eyes glazed. He looked like he had been staring at the door, willing it to open.

He took one look at her and his eyes simmered with worry and hope. “Is Adelaide going to—”

“Sh-h-h,” she whispered, noting that Thomas stood by the hearth warming his hands. “She’ll be fine in no time.”

Daniel backed up as she inched forward until Aunt Hilda closed the door behind them. “Why don’t you add some wood to the cookstove? We need to heat some water for tea as quickly as we can.”

His gaze darted back and forth from the bedchamber door to the kitchen and back again. “Wood for the stove,” he murmured. “Anything else? There must be something else I can do. I can’t just stand idly by—”

“Maybe you should sit with Adelaide and call us if she wakes
up,” Aunt Hilda suggested as she stepped around them. Her eyes widened when she saw Thomas, who acknowledged her with a broad smile. “I see Thomas is here. He’ll take care of loading the wood, won’t you, Thomas?”

Her voice reflected no surprise or wonder, as if finding Thomas there was not unusual.

“Certainly.” He looked around and walked directly to the wood stacked in the front corner of the cabin.

“Go on, Daniel,” Martha urged. “Be sure to let us know the moment she wakes up.”

Without further prompting, Daniel slipped past both women and into the room, and Martha averted her gaze from Aunt Hilda’s as she went directly to the table and opened her bag.

Aunt Hilda busied herself by pumping water into a large kettle. “What brings you all the way out here, Thomas?”

He stopped in his tracks, adjusted the logs in his arms, and nodded toward Martha. “Just trying to protect Martha from herself. It’s been quite a downpour, so when Daniel showed up at the market looking for her, I insisted we use my buggy. We can’t have her taking sick now that she’s finally home, can we?”

The older woman chuckled. “Martha’s got the constitution of a plow horse. It’s going to take more than a little rain to put her in a sickbed.”

Martha cringed. A plow horse? She might be middle-aged, but she was still a woman! The image of a plow horse was not exactly the one she might have picked for herself. She much preferred the image of a sturdy chestnut tree, with firm roots and graceful limbs, that came to mind, along with a self-conscious awareness she was being vain. “Thank you for the compliment. I think,” she grumbled.

“I meant it as one,” Aunt Hilda insisted as she set the kettle on the cookstove. “Did you say you were at the market? Today?”
she asked as Thomas finished loading wood into the cookstove and closed the door.

While Thomas explained all about the prank she had missed seeing while tending to Adelaide, his visit to the academy, and the public confessions and punishment that continued even as they spoke, Martha retrieved the sawbrier root and proceeded to snap it into smaller pieces.

“There are still places in the fence to be mended,” he commented as he stood up and brushed his hands against his trousers, “but I think the boys handled themselves very well. Reverend Hampton really won most people over. He’s quite a preacher, for a man who hasn’t taken to the pulpit for most of his ministry.”

Aunt Hilda cocked her head. “What kind of minister doesn’t use the pulpit?”

“He worked with inmates at several prisons. Lemon Hill in New York was his last one, I believe,” Martha interjected, annoyed by the thin layer of skepticism that laced Thomas’s opinion of the minister. The moment she blurted out her words, she realized what she had done. When she looked directly at Aunt Hilda and Thomas, a blush warmed her cheeks. She really had no intention of telling anyone about her visit to the academy last night, but she had no choice now. Not with both of them looking at her with quizzical expressions on their faces.

Aunt Hilda broke the awkward silence first. “He worked as a chaplain in a prison? How’d you learn about that? The man’s been rather mum about his former life, at least on his few visits to town when folks had a chance to talk with him.”

Thomas narrowed his gaze and spoke up before Martha had a chance to say a word. “You went out there. To the academy, didn’t you? I thought I detected an unusual sense of familiarity when you were talking with his wife.”

She nodded, but once again, before she could fashion an accounting of her visit that would not betray any confidences, especially where Will was concerned, Thomas’s face lit up. He paused as if he were mentally replaying the morning’s event in his mind. “There
were
seven boys at the market, not six. The missing boy! You found him and took him home.”

Drat. The man really could read her mind! “Well . . . I . . . yes, as a matter of fact, I did find the boy. To be more precise, Leech did, when the boy decided to hide in the stable loft. The other boys had left him behind after he fell and hurt his knee. I managed to patch him up, but I didn’t take him home. I followed him. More or less. He’s only eight or so, but he wears the armor of a knight who’s seen a lifetime of misery that’s been squashed into a few years. If the other boys are like him, Reverend Hampton has a plate that’s overflowing. He needs all of us to help,” she suggested.

A seasoned realist, Thomas approached the fire in the hearth and leaned his shoulder against the mantel.

“Notwithstanding yesterday’s prank and today’s events at the market, the academy makes people . . . They’re uncomfortable, even uneasy. Most of them, except for Dr. McMillan, would have accepted that prank as uncommonly clever, had a hearty laugh, and dismissed it. Unfortunately, since Reverend Hampton arrived with his charges in tow, people have been quick to set blame on those boys’ shoulders for ’most anything that goes wrong. Just last week, George Rottham up on Candle Creek summoned the sheriff because his hens stopped laying eggs.”

Aunt Hilda snorted. “The sheriff can’t do much about that.”

“No,” he countered, “but it turned out George finally realized the hens were fine. He caught sight of someone, a boy, hightailing it off the property with the eggs. He only saw the
boy from behind, but he laid the blame on one of Reverend Hampton’s charges.”

He raised his hand to silence Martha when she started to protest. “Before that, Amos Wilkes found two sacks of grain missing from his barn. One day, Simeon Brooks’s sow had eight piglets ready to be weaned; the next day, she had four.”

Martha sighed. “And they all blame the academy boys.”

“Exactly. No one has any proof, of course, but word is starting to spread back to town, and suspicions can take on a life of their own.”

Martha lowered her gaze and toyed with several pieces of the root.

She wanted to argue that neither Reverend Hampton nor his wife would condone pilfering eggs or grain or even piglets. The boys themselves had learned to steal to survive when they lived on the streets, but their basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing were being met now, albeit with conditions.

Pulling a prank on Dr. McMillan to even a slight fit these boys’ natures. Stealing unnecessarily did not, but Martha knew better than to proffer any argument against what Thomas said without proof of her own. People would not stop to think the issue through. They would react instinctively, and the academy boys would become scapegoats because the root of the question was more painful: Who, in their own community, had become a thief?

She shuddered and refused to even contemplate the answer for fear of unjustly putting someone’s name on the list—a list she might be able to compile better than anyone else in the community. No one, not the mayor or the sheriff or Wesley Sweet at the general store, knew the faults or needs of the people in Trinity better than Martha. As a midwife and healer, she had visited or lived in their homes when they were the most vul
nerable, unable to conceal the depths of their characters, for good or for bad, or the state of their worldly existence, whether bountiful or desperate.

She had earned their trust and goodwill, if not their rewards, by keeping her own counsel about all she saw and heard and refraining from gossip, even when she might have used the knowledge she had about people for their benefit. It was no easy task to be always on guard or to stay neutral, but with Grandmother Poore’s example as her guidepost, she knew it was the only path she could follow—if she wanted to use her skills to serve her friends and neighbors.

A troubling notion that Thomas might ask her to help narrow the search for the real culprit or culprits made her hands tremble, and she tried to focus only on the work she needed to do now. She dropped a small piece of root into a mug and carried it with her to the kettle on the stove.

Thomas took her silence as an opportunity to continue. “People live and work and raise their families here in Trinity because they choose to. They’re good, honest folks. Most of them, anyway. They don’t like change, and they surely don’t want the sins of the city staining their community. Frankly speaking, bringing those boys here, however well-intentioned, invites a kind of self-righteousness and even snobbery. Now, it’s all well and good for Reverend Hampton to speak in platitudes and to tweak people’s consciences, but the truth of the matter is this: If we don’t find out who’s responsible for the thefts, and they continue, I don’t think there’s much of a future here for the academy.”

Aunt Hilda let out a long sigh. “That would be sinful and downright wrong, but you shouldn’t be too quick to think the worst of folks, Thomas. Show a little faith. We may not live in Paradise yet, but we’ve got ourselves a good place here in Trinity,
with good people who have good values based on faith and trust in God as well as one another. From what you’ve told me, most of the townspeople at the market today seemed to accept the boys’ confessions and apologies.”

Thomas pulled away from the mantel and flexed his shoulders. “For the most part, they did,” he agreed, although he appeared to be less convinced than Martha.

“That’s precisely my point,” the older woman countered. “When it comes to being fair, folks just need a good opportunity, and it sounds like you and Reverend Hampton gave them that opportunity today.”

Thomas shook his head. “That was all his idea. I only spread the word so folks might come.”

“Which they did. You did well today, Thomas.”

He nodded and looked directly toward Martha. “Actually, there’s something the others asked me to talk to you about. In strictest confidence, of course.”

She stiffened, and the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach warned her she might have been right to suspect Thomas would ask her to help identify possible suspects. Disappointment in Thomas, as well as the others, laced her spirit. Resolve to be true to her calling as a woman of trust stiffened her spine.