第14章 Loveday's Hooks

The cloth bags on the hooks above the fireplace had been Loveday Fenwright's, and Eudora had left them where they hung for six weeks out of a professional reluctance to unpick another woman's private things. The afternoon after she saw the shape in the reeds she took them down. There were nine of them. Each was tied at the neck with a waxed thread and each bore a small paper tag, and on each tag, in a cramped hand that had been writing on that shelf for forty years, was a name and a date. Eudora opened them one at a time on the table with the fire going, and inside each bag was a small thing and nothing valuable: a lock of hair cut and tied, a baby's knitted boot, a pressed reed, a half-penny, a scrap of ribbon, a scrap of the kind of blue paper that comes off a chemist's bottle. Nine children. Nine names. She recognized two of them from the ledger's left-hand column, and where she found them she found, in the ledger, the word Titled in the third column beside them, and she sat and looked at a woman's private collection of the children she had handed away and felt the cold come up through the floor of a warm room. At the bottom of the ninth bag, folded very small, was a packet of pages. They were not the ledger. They were in Loveday's own hand, and they were in no order, and they were the sort of thing a woman writes when she has no one to write to. Eudora read them by the fire while the light went out of the afternoon, and by the time she had finished the fire needed feeding and she had not fed it. The early pages were a midwife's ordinary book. Cases, cures, a running list of the village women and what each of them had borne. Then, in the third year, the tone changed. Loveday began to write about the marks in a different way. She wrote that she had found the mark on a child before the mother had and had spent a night deciding what to do, and had written the child down ordinary, and had told herself that a mark is a mark and a babie's skin is a babie's skin. And the child had grown, and lived, and Loveday had thought she had won. And then in the winter the child, two years old, walked out of a door onto the water-meadow and was found at the edge of the channel with his face down, and they said it was a child who wandered, and Loveday wrote, one line, underlined twice: I told myself the mark was nothing. The later pages were worse, and stranger, and made more sense. She had started to hide them. A child marked, she wrote, was put in a dark place and fed and kept, and she told the mother to say the child was dead and to say nothing at the Reading, and she wrote the child's name nowhere, and she had done it three times and saved three children, and each time the parish had paid. Once a lambing was lost. Once the chapel roof went. Once a man of the village drowned in a channel he had crossed a thousand times. The book counted the price of her mercy the way the parish counted everything. She had saved three children and the water had taken three other things, and Loveday had written, in a hand that was beginning to come apart, that she did not know which was worse, to hand a child to the water and know the price, or to keep a child from the water and learn the price afterward. The last pages were not dated. They were written fast and close, some of them almost illegible, and they were the writing of a woman who had decided something and had not yet done it. She wrote that she had gone out to the gate at night three times to look at the water and had not been able to make herself go down the last stretch of the path. She wrote that she had asked Drusilla Rennock, plainly, what happened to a parish that broke the Bond entire, and that Drusilla had answered, plainly, that the parish whose midwife would not keep the count did not lose a child, it lost the midwife, and that after the midwife was gone they hired another from outside, who did not know the village and would keep the count because she had nothing else to love in it. She wrote that Drusilla had told her this as a kindness, that it was the last kindness anybody had done her. And then, at the very bottom of the last page, in a steadier hand, in ink that was the same brown as the parish ink in the ledger, Loveday Fenwright had written four words. I will not count. Eudora turned back to the front of the packet and read the whole thing again from the beginning, more slowly, and this time she counted the dates and laid them against the ledger in her memory, and she found the gap she had been looking for. The ledger's thin weeks. The missing months Dr. Fenn would have written about in a different parish, if Dr. Fenn had been a midwife in this one. Three children Loveday had saved, and in the year of the third she had stopped writing in the ledger altogether, and then one spring night she had walked out to the gate, and the tide had brought her coat back and nothing else. Eudora sat with the pages in her lap and understood the book at last, all of it, in one cold piece. The midwife was a hand, and the Bond was a bargain about hands, and a hand that would not hold a thing out could be cut off. She had signed her own name under five other names in a chapel, and beside two of those names there were small crosses in the clerk's ink, and she had been told they were nothing, and she now knew what they were. She looked at her own name in her own book, and beside it the line she had written that afternoon — it knows my trade — and she did not have to ask, any longer, what the parish had hired her for. She was the new hand. She had been hired for the same reason a farmer hires a stranger at harvest: because the work has to be done and nobody who loves the field can make themselves do it. She sat with that for a long time. Then she did what a nurse does at the end of a bad shift, which is to put her instruments in order and wash the cups and lay the fire for the morning, and while her hands did that her mind turned over the one question that remained, and it was not whether the parish was wicked and it was not whether the Bride was real. It was a smaller, harder question, and she had been avoiding it for a week. If Loveday had saved three children and the water had taken three other things in their place, then Loveday had saved nobody. She had merely chosen, in each case, which of two losses she could bear to be responsible for, and had called it mercy because there is no other word that lets a woman sleep. ---