A Daughter Rebels Page 5

  “There is one good thing that has come from all this,” John said.

  “What?” Isabella and I said, both at the same time.

  “By currying favour with the Gores and attending this hound’s obsequies, Father was undoubtedly rewarded with my position as Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. The stipend that comes with that title has enabled me to purchase this house and make you, my darling Isabella, secure for life.”

  “I too must take credit for your clerkship, John. Spot had a ‘viewing’ for several hours before his burial, and when I looked down into his little oaken casket, I noted that he was wearing the stockings I knitted for him. I only hope that St. Francis—or whichever saint met him at the Pearly Gates—did not notice my dropped stitches.” I wanted also to tell them that I had given Spot a fan with sixteen blades but that drama had three acts to it, so I decided to postpone its telling for another day. I had been disappointed, though, not to see the fan inserted into his closed, dead jaws.

  At that point, even Cook started to laugh. Then John reached for his portmanteau, and he, Isabella, and I headed for the wharf.

  * * *

  Back in my room that evening, I reflected on a day filled with love and laughter. Mama had been happy that John had made a “prudent match.” She’d told me a hundred times of John’s wild youth, how much she feared at one time that he would be prone to vice in a frontier colony, perhaps taking a native woman as his mistress. But when she heard of his tie to Isabella, daughter of Aeneas Shaw, an important Scotsman who had helped to found York, she was delighted. I recalled her announcement to Eliza, Mary, and me, as we put away our stitchery on a hot spring afternoon. “At last, at last,” she proclaimed, “at thirty-four years of age, he has come to his senses and found himself a strong woman who will support and guide him.”

  And in my room in John and Isabella’s home, I began at that moment to recognize the validity behind Mama’s constant harping about prudence. Isabella was not conventionally beautiful. She had flyaway blonde tresses and a body that was sturdy rather than curvaceous. Her dresses, though always clean and comfortable, were never in the current style. But she knew how to run a household with ease. She was steadfast. As the eldest of a large family, she had always had the responsibility of looking after her younger sisters and brothers. A worthy woman, to be sure.

  Most important, she loved John, laughed with him, and shared his antic spirits.

  Perhaps a career as a midwife was an impossible dream. Perhaps I too could find someone to love. Not St. George. Not Lieutenant Stretton. Who?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Coming downstairs late the next morning, I found Isabella in the withdrawing room, knitting needles clicking away. She looked up from her task and smiled. “Cook and I made some pancakes this morning. Help yourself to whatever you want. While dear John is away, I want to finish this scarf. It’s a surprise that I will present to him on the first day that the cold winds blow in from the lake.”

  I poured maple syrup over my pancakes and went out onto the back stoop where I sat on the steps and watched Cook picking chives from the garden. The hens ran about, one of them scurrying and squawking to avoid the attentions of the rooster chasing her. I laughed inwardly. Obviously she did not think he would be a prudent mate.

  I’d walked through the garden on another morning and could find not a trace of celandine or madder among the herbs. Dyeing was not going to be one of the day’s activities in married life here in Niagara.

  “Lots of them tomatoes ripe now,” Cook said, coming towards me. “With these chives here I can make a real tasty soup for supper.” She smiled and gestured at the blue expanse above our heads. “I love a broad sky.”

  I thought of our household at York, the servants always dour-faced, burdened by the chores that lay before them, and the women of the family, too, forever stifled by the drudgery of the tasks that Mama set out for us or the tedium of her lessons on propriety.

  But here in Niagara with John and Isabella, I had nothing before me this day but a promised visit to Mrs. Dickson who lived nearby with her husband and three sons, all in their adolescent years. I looked forward to seeing Mrs. Dickson again. We had met at tea two days earlier and bonded immediately in an enthusiastic discussion of the subscription library her husband and my brother had set up in the town.

  I rinsed my breakfast plate in the stream that ran along the edge of the property, placed it on the kitchen table, and went back into the withdrawing room.

  “I told Mrs. Dickson I’d call on her this morning,” I said to Isabella. “Will you need me for anything?”

  “Not at all. Stay as long as you like.”

  Once more I reflected on how glorious it was to have no strictures laid out: no warnings about the impropriety of walking unaccompanied, or reminders about the need to donate hours of stitching for the church bazaar. I tossed a light shawl over my shoulders and set out.

  It was a short walk, not more than half a mile, and I trotted—yes, that was the word—down the well-worn path that led to the Dickson house, relishing the warm breeze ruffling my hair. About half way there, three young boys galloped by me on their ponies, forcing me to step into the long grass that bordered the path. “Halloa,” they shouted as they surged forward, “Mama is waiting for you.” The Dickson boys, obviously. I had met them only once before, but they had remembered me.

  A few moments more and I was walking up the cut-stone path to one of the most impressive homes in town. John told me that Mr. Dickson had built it for his bride Charlotte in 1794. It was a two-storey brick structure in what Mama would call “the Georgian style.” The household had evidently been on the lookout for me, because as I raised my hand to bang on the lion-head doorknocker, a maidservant pulled the door open, and I almost fell forward.

  The girl took my shawl and pointed towards the withdrawing room. “Missus be waiting for you, ma’am.” Then she whispered in my ear, “She be feeling poorly this morning. You will bring the cheer.”

  Thus warned, I entered Mrs. Dickson’s presence with some trepidation. She was sitting in the warmth of the morning sunshine, a book in her hand. When she saw me, she put her hands on the arms of her chair and tried to rise.

  “Dear Miss Powell . . . ,” she began and then, clutching the arms of her chair, sat down again suddenly. With a shaking hand, she pushed at a lock of greying hair that had tumbled onto her forehead and pulled a blanket, which had fallen to the floor, back over her lower body. Her face was flushed as if with a fever.

  “You are ill, Mrs. Dickson. May I ask one of the servants to make you a cup of tea?”

  “Please, please, no tea. The very thought of it makes me puke.”

  This was a strange comment. Surely the whole social order of Upper Canada revolved around the tea ceremony. I must have looked puzzled, for the lady gestured for me to sit down and then reached over to pat my arm. Her breath was rank.

  “What is the matter, my friend?” I asked.

  She gestured towards the door that separated the withdrawing room from the hallway. “Please . . .”

  I closed the door and came back to my chair. “Now no one can hear us. If you want to tell me something, I’m here to listen.”

  “Dear girl,” she said, “may I call you Anne? And will you call me Charlotte? I recognize you as a kindred spirit though I have talked with you only once. Yes, a kindred spirit was what I called you in my mind that day. And now I have the opportunity to converse with you again.”

  As I listened to her speak, I reflected that I was twenty-one years of age, and she was close to forty, or so I judged from the fine lines on her delicate face and the veins on her hands. Mama had always trained me to speak to women of her age with a respectful “ma’am” or “Mrs.” But Mama was on the other side of the lake, and I was here with a woman who needed me to listen. Of course I would call her Charlotte.

  And now that I was close to her, I could smell blood. The stink came from under the blanket that covered the bottom half of her
body. “You have had an accident,” I said.

  “A termination,” she said, and seeing my look of puzzlement, she added, “I was with child, but now I am without child.”

  It was a shock to hear her talk so freely about an event that women in York would strive never to mention. “How did it happen?” I asked, thinking that perhaps she had tripped on the stairs or exerted too much energy in the cleaning of her house or in any of those female tasks that plagued us all.

  “I made it happen.”

  This was perhaps even more shocking. I could not imagine any woman anywhere admitting to such a decision. The “gentle sex,” as we were called, had to bear whatever fate was laid upon us, or so Mama would have me believe. Perhaps I displayed my shock in my countenance because Mrs. Dickson—Charlotte—stretched a trembling arm towards me and pulled at the skirt of my dress.

  “Do not judge me. You are young. You have no husband and perhaps do not understand the pull of marital congress. You have no children to nurture. Put yourself for a moment, if you can, in my situation. Imagine the horror of finding yourself with child at age forty-two and with three growing sons.” Her voice rose in anger.

  “I do not judge you,” I managed to say. “Please, please let me help you if I can.”

  She sat back in her chair, her face furrowed, but with a half-smile emerging. “I hoped you would listen. When your brother John visits my husband—they both share an interest in the public lending library as you know—he always talks about you with such admiration and love. As you know, I too liked you immediately when we met over tea.”

  “I also felt that rapport,” I said. “Please, tell me everything you need to tell me. I give you my oath of secrecy.”

  “When I saw that my monthly flux had not come for several weeks, I called on Granny McCall.”

  “Who is . . .?”

  “The local midwife. She came, I told her about my condition, and she proposed a remedy. She would insert a tool of some sort into my . . . my nether region. Then I was to add bits of leaves of dried pennyroyal to my cups of tea three times a day for six days or until the embryo erupted. Vile, vile, vile . . . but it worked. Yesterday . . .” Her voice broke. “And now I feel so sick . . . as if I might die . . .”

  I thought of the foulness of her breath and the stink that came from her body. Immediately I guessed what might be wrong. A drum began to beat in my head. “This McCall woman who assisted you . . . do you remember . . . were her hands clean? Were her garments clean?”

  “How can I remember anything beyond the foulness of that tea and the pain of yesterday?”

  “Think, think, it’s important.”

  “She brought the pennyroyal with her. I remember the purple flowers and my thoughts that such a pretty plant did not merit its reputation. What else comes to me. . .?” She paused, seeming to gaze somewhere into the far-distance.

  “Recall that moment more clearly, if you can,” I said. “Think about how she looked, what she did.”

  “She had me lie down on the bed. She poked at me with a dull knife. Her fingernails . . . now I see them in my mind . . . they were filled with the dirt from her garden.”

  The drumbeat in my head grew louder. Childbed fever. That’s what Charlotte suffered from. And it had to be dealt with. Now.

  “We shall go upstairs together. You will undress and lie on the bed. I can help you to feel better. But we must move quickly. And I must tell you that I may not be able to keep all your secrets from the servants though I shall do my best. But they must already know about your visitor.”

  She put her arm over my shoulder, and I managed to hoist her out of her chair and wrestle her up the stairs into a big, bright bedchamber with a huge window overlooking Oak Grove. I pulled back the covers on the four-poster bed and noted with relief that the sheets had been newly washed. They had just come from the clothesline evidently for I inhaled the sweetness of fresh air.

  I helped Charlotte undress. Her pelvis was bloody. I laid her down on her back and put a clean towel from the washstand under her body. Then I ran downstairs, through the hallway, the breakfast-room, and into the belowstairs kitchen where the hearth fire had been lit, and the cook was sweating over something in a pot on a trivet.

  “Madam is sick,” I said. “I need someone to carry boiling water upstairs to her bedchamber. I will also need some clean cloths and a spoon with sharp edges.”

  “Why do you be needing these things, ma’am? Should not the mistress be giving the orders?”

  “Do as I say. Immediately.”

  I went back to Charlotte’s bedchamber. In a short time, a maidservant hoisted a tin bucket of boiling water into the room and set it near the washstand. From her pocket she took a spoon and several white napkins. “Thank you,” I said. “Now please be gone and close the chamber door behind you.”

  I moved the bucket of water close to the bed. Then I went to the washstand where I poured water from the pitcher into a bowl and scrubbed my hands and arms. Next, I went back to the bed where my sick friend lay watching my every move, her dark eyes alight—with pain or fear, I could not tell which.

  “I have had some experience observing child-bearing,” I told her. “I believe that you may be suffering from childbed fever. I think I may have a solution, and we must proceed with it immediately. Do you have laudanum in this house?”

  “Laudanum, no. I do not believe in having any form of opium in this household.”

  “Well then, if the procedure I must now undertake causes you pain, you must be brave and not cry aloud. As far as possible, we must try to keep your secret safe.”

  I took the sharp-edged spoon that the girl had given me, dipped it into the boiling water, and bent over the poor woman, opening her “cunt,” the only word for this part of the anatomy that I knew then, having heard it whispered in giggles by my small nieces. I took the spoon and scooped out pieces of bloody effluvia that dripped onto the napkins I held. I heard her soft whimpers of pain, but I forced myself to continue to scrape and scrape until everything looked clean. Then I washed her thoroughly with the water, which was no longer boiling but still hot.

  I put her into a clean nightdress. “You will be fine now,” I said, though I was by no means sure that it was true. “Try to rest. I shall sit here beside you for an hour or two while you sleep.”

  I wrapped the bloody scrapings into a towel and threw the mess into the bucket of hot water. I would have to think of a way to dispose of it later. Then I pulled a chair over beside Charlotte and sat down. I looked at my patient. Her eyes were closed, but she was not yet asleep. “Thank you, my dear,” she said. “You have saved me.”

  An hour or two passed. Charlotte sank into slumber. The flush in her cheeks had already subsided, and the stink of decay had dissipated. I looked around the room. There was a huge looking-glass on a pedestal in one corner, and along one side of the wall framing the window was a tall bookcase with glass sliders. I might perhaps in another life have looked at the contents of that bookcase, but at that time, I was afraid to wake up my patient. Besides, I was exhausted with the strain of the last hour. My whole body felt heavy.

  I must have fallen asleep. When I awoke, the sun had moved from the bedchamber window, and long shadows from the trees fell upon the polished pine floor of the room. Charlotte lay on her back, her face tranquil, and the occasional gentle snort coming from her open mouth.

  I sat quiet, thinking of the burdens that married women suffered. In these brief weeks away from York, I had seen two marriages: one newly enacted and one of long standing. Both were happy unions. John and Isabella’s attraction to each other was plain to see, and Charlotte, even after years of marriage, had talked of the “pull of marital congress.” It was obvious to me that, in spite of Mama’s teachings, the purpose of matrimony was not solely for the procreation of children. But if women wanted to limit the number of children they produced, their only solution, it seemed, was misery.

  A day ago, I considered throwing off my hopes for a ca
reer in midwifery. This morning in fact I had thought instead of finding the right consort and making a happy marriage, like that of John and Isabella. But now I was forced to ponder a pressing question. Did I wish to endure the pain of child-bearing and the ever-present threat of an unwanted child?

  Why, oh why, were women always to be victims? We were not the “weaker sex.”

  This day I had observed the stoical bravery of Charlotte Dickson. Marriage, no matter how happy or prudent, how brief or how long-standing, had its tribulations. Surely, somewhere, there was an answer to its woes. Was there not a way of preventing unwanted child-bearing? There was no one I could ask. Such topics were not discussed.

  Now, as I sat in Charlotte’s bedchamber and listened to her gentle snoring, I made a fresh resolve. If procreation could not be prevented, I could at least provide surcease from the dangers of aborted childbirth.

  That’s what I had done this day. It was something I could be proud of.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Niagara, October 1809

  Annie Powell enjoyed her morning sleep-ins at her son John’s house. She had come over the lake from York to help with Isabella’s lying in, but she had been superfluous. Her daughter Anne, who seemed to have forged a special friendship with Isabella, had been the one who attended on the birth of the baby boy. She had actually been glad to hand over the duties to Anne. The cries and bloody emissions that came with childbirth brought back her own sufferings. She had borne nine children, four of whom had already passed into the Lord’s hands. Though it was necessary in this world for women to marry and procreate, the process was fraught with hardship and pain, the only comfort coming from the help of sympathetic relatives who often knew little about how to relieve the fever that inevitably followed childbirth. Annie herself had been thankful for the help of an experienced midwife during her own travails. Her own daughter Anne was now obviously skilled at easing the birthing process. She had no idea how the girl had acquired a knowledge of childbirth. Whatever its source, however, she had no intention of encouraging Anne in this pursuit.