The Midwife's Revolt (23 page)

The question of motive could not be solved, though our consensus was that two willful acts of murder had occurred, probably a Tory plot. We passed on, finally, to the subject of what to do.

Here, unfortunately, there was sufficient disagreement, particularly between Richard and the colonel, to involve us in nearly two hours of debate. We took no refreshment in that time, not wanting to alarm the servants, which made it doubly tiring.

Richard believed—vehemently—that we needed to notify the constable and coroner immediately, followed forthwith by an inquest. He thought that this was certainly the most direct route to the truth, and that knowing the truth of the matter was the only way to proclaim ourselves safe from further attacks.

The colonel, also a believer in the truth, disagreed about the means by which we should discover it. Older and more experienced, he had little regard for the judicial system. Indeed, he called our judges “His Royal Incompetencies.” (I did not remind him that my own father had been among their numbers.) Furthermore, such public proceedings would have the effect of terrorizing the town and alerting the criminals.

“By your means,” the colonel said to Richard, “we embrace a false sense of security by sharing knowledge of these heinous acts, having been committed, while allowing the perpetrators this same knowledge. Perhaps we even aid those who shelter them.”

In the end, I had to concur with Colonel Quincy. However unfortunate it might be, our government was in a state of anarchy and corruption.

“Not to mention,” I pointed out, “that even if exposed, the perpetrators, if found to have just political cause, might suffer no penalty at all but merely find themselves shipped back to England.”

It was then resolved, with even Richard acquiescing, to call Parson Wibird and the undertaker and say that the unfortunate Mr. Thayer had felt unwell at dinner and apparently suffered an apoplectic fit during the night.

Richard would write to his brother-in-law, Parson Peabody, in an attempt to locate a wife and children or other immediate family of Mr. Thayer.

Abigail promised to call upon me in the next few days.

“A moment, Abigail,” I said before she departed.

“Yes, Lizzie?”

“Perhaps you should—go away. Perhaps you should return to Betsy’s home, in Exeter.”

“Betsy’s, in Exeter?” Abigail looked as if I would send her to the moon. “I dislike her husband, Parson Peabody. What’s more, I have a farm to tend. And who knows that these killers—whoever they are—seek to harm me? It is most doubtful.”

“Rest not uneasy, ladies,” said Mr. Cranch. “The colonel and I shall do everything in our power to ensure your safety.”

I bowed, thinking,
And how, pray, will you do that?
I said nothing further, however, and went home exhausted, depressed, and shaken. The day had begun with such promise and had ended thusly, mired in fear, tragedy, and loss.

It would be a comfort to tell everything to Martha, good Martha, whom I imagined would still be working in the fields as I had left her. I would tell her everything. Together we might even draw up a list of suspects.

As was so often the case, how I imagined finding Martha that day was quite different from how I actually found her.

She was bent over the cornflowers, having a puke.

“Martha, dearest, are you ill? Not again!”

She looked up at me when she was able to, wiped her mouth with her sleeve, and then put an arm on her stomach. “I have been most violently ill. But it is nothing serious. A bad egg, perhaps. Poor cornflower,” she said, attempting to smile.

“Come, let me make you something, for indeed you are white as flax. Nay, whiter. I will make you a dish of chamomile tea and tell you the news. Come, dearest.”

Martha lay down on her bed in the kitchen, which we pushed over nearer the dairy, as it was cooler there.

“I hate this room,” she said peevishly, looking around.

“You shan’t be here long if you are ill from an egg. But I don’t like you being ill again so soon after the other. You are very weak still and must take care.”

“I will kill the chicken what gave me her bad egg!” She smiled, then grasped her stomach and hunched herself into a fetal position.

I made a sudden, unwelcome connection between Mr. Thayer’s death and Martha. I asked, my heart suddenly racing, “You did not eat anything at Colonel Quincy’s last night, did you?”

“What mean you?” she inquired, looking at me oddly. “I ate the same as everyone else. It was all quite delicious.”

“I mean, nothing else? No tea or coffee?”

“Again, only what everyone had. Why?”

“It is not the cause of your illness, then. Thank goodness.” I sat beside her. “Shall I tell you, dearest, what transpired, or is it better to wait?”

“I should like that tea,” she said weakly.

“Of course,” I said, having forgotten my offer. I hurried to make her a good hot dish of tea. When I handed it to her a few minutes later, she sat up, sipped at its consoling warmth, then lay back down.

“I think I shall sleep. But when I wake, tell me all about it.”

She let me unloose her bodice as I pulled off all but her thin shift.

Martha did not wake up that day but slept until late the next morning. I tested her pulse every hour and remained awake all that night, so anxious was I. At a certain point, I thought to check my own store of belladonna. I crept into the dairy with my candle, careful not to wake Martha. The vial was as I had left it; the amount looked unchanged. I breathed a sigh of relief that at least I had not been the unwitting vehicle of evil. I was left to wonder only from whence the poison had come.

When Martha woke later the next morning, she seemed almost entirely recovered. She made to get up, but I would not let her accompany me to the fields.

“Have you fed the animals?” she asked.

“Rest assured, it is all done.”

I had risen early, as usual, and had taken consolation in nature. Several of our maple trees had just begun to turn, their leaves tinctured here and there with golden yellow. A breeze from the ocean was soft and caressing, and the air smelled sweet from the red, ripe apples. Nature was so good. What made us, her children, less so?

I said merely, “I believe it is entirely possible you gave yourself a sunstroke. For now, let us spare the life of the poor maligned chicken.”

As if on a playwright’s cue, one hen strutted nervously through our back door, which we had left open to circulate the air.

“There she is!” Martha cried. She spoke to the hen: “If you wish to avoid a bath of plum sauce, be gone! Shoo!”

The hen ran back outside, leaving a small agitated parcel as its parting gift.

“Now you may tell me everything,” Martha said. “And when you are done, I shall write to my brother.”

“When I’m done, you may wish to leave the parish forever and live with your brother.”

“Indeed, I am not so cowardly!”

“It would not be cowardice, dear Martha, but prudence.”

“Tell me what you know and be quick about it.”

Our decision had been to exclude Martha from our reckoning, but I had not that talent of lying by omission. Not, at least, to Martha. And so I told her everything about my determination of foul play by poisoning. I further told her that inquiries were underway to locate Mr. Thayer’s family. Finally, I told her of our decision, after much debate, not to reveal to the authorities what we knew. I gave her some of our reasoning behind this decision.

“It was the right decision, Lizzie,” she asserted, “as best as one can judge.”

“I hope so. While I am no lover of the Tories of this town, I believe history will look favorably upon our tolerance of them. To persecute civilians would be to commit the very sins of which we accuse our enemy.”

“Although perhaps sin is sometimes necessary.” Martha stood shakily from her bed and looked out the window upon the shimmering dunes.

“Oh, Martha, I have no wish for a philosophical discussion right now. And you cannot have the strength for one. Let us leave off for another time.”

Turning toward me with real entreaty in her voice, she replied, “But I do
fear
these men, Lizzie. I fear they’re plotting more mischief. Mr. Cleverly must be careful. You should warn him.” She gave me a hard look I could not read, for I knew her to be no lover of Mr. Cleverly.

“Mr. Cleverly!” I started up. “Oh, Martha—I omitted him in my account. But perhaps the news will lift your spirits. Apparently you won’t be getting rid of me after all. For he is gone from our midst. He has fled for his life. It’s now fairly certain I will die in bed by your side, an old maid.”

Martha grew thoughtful. “I do confess it: I am glad. Not because I disliked Cleverly—though I did, but because it should crush me to part from you. It is selfish, I know.”

We hugged each other then and sipped our tea like the little spinsters we felt certain to become.

28

LATE AUTUMN, 1778. As autumn descended on
Braintree, everyone feared to leave their homes, even for meeting. Despite all our attempts to instill the idea that Mr. Thayer had died of a heart attack, rumors flew regarding the deaths at the Cranches’, making our poor parish believe, and rightly so, that the war had come home to roost. And yet, within several weeks, even the fear instilled by these deaths could not compare with the greater terror of illness, drought, and starvation.

Indeed, there were some among us who might have preferred poison. Our parish had gathered barely enough harvest to survive the winter. Prices were such that currency was useless. No one could afford the least item, not even the Quincys. Not pins, not meat, not rum. There was no grain to be had, and many lived on old moldy stores of oats and Indian meal, with no meat at all, save the occasional sacrifice of a chicken.

We harvested the corn and the apples, but they gave us no joy, knowing as we did that our friends went without. I had not quite forgiven Cleverly for leaving without so much as a letter to me. Surely that would have involved little risk to his person. He could not have loved me very much, I decided. Thus, the apples no longer seemed quite so tempting as they once had, and only the thought of sharing our bounty eased our spirits. We would have wonderful gifts for all our friends that fall.

I had been four years in Braintree by this time, and from those early days of loneliness when I was shunned and looked upon with suspicion, I had reached a position of respect. The less educated no doubt still whispered behind closed doors that I was a witch, a mistress of alchemical arts. But even they sought me out when the sickness was upon them.

By the fall of 1778, I had delivered near two hundred babes. Each one occasioned a pie, or a bottle of spirits, or service of some kind. Susanna Brown, the woman who had foolishly chased her husband out to Grape Island in the summer of 1775, became a particular friend, and I safe delivered her of another child that autumn, a boy this time.

In October, Martha received a long letter from her brother with the news that he would shortly be arriving with Miss Eliza. In the midst of our turmoil, I’d forgotten all about her! Eliza’s presence in my home was the very last thing I wanted.

But I had promised. And as the unfortunate woman had nowhere else to turn, I made preparations for her arrival, readying my own chamber upstairs until I changed my mind and prepared the bed in the parlor.

I also learned, much to my great dismay, that Martha had told her brother about Mr. Thayer’s murder.

“Martha, how could you? I told you we had resolved to tell no one. I assumed you understood.”

“I just had to tell him, Lizzie, for I did not feel safe otherwise.”

“And how can your brother, of all people, keep you safe?” I blurted, my manner making my opinion perfectly clear: I thought Mr. Miller was as like to warn the Tory perpetrators as bring them to justice.

“Oh, no, not my Thomas,” Martha objected to my silent accusation with a gentle smile.

“And why not ‘your Thomas’?” I asked. “Is he not sympathetic to the Tories?”

“Perhaps. But he would never do anything to endanger me. Or you. Besides, I swore him to secrecy, and he has sworn. Look—” She handed me his letter. It was written in a beautiful hand and filled with tender concern for his sister. Oddly, I thought, it did not suggest she return to Boston, where he could better protect her. But he had stern advice for both of us: to avoid the houses of the Cranches, the colonel, and the Adamses, for the present.

“What advice can this be?” I said. “To avoid our most dear friends?”

“The advice is sound, Lizzie. For surely if the danger is anywhere, it is there in those homes. And while we may fall inadvertent victims ourselves, he can do nothing to protect them.”

“I will not cease calling on my friends, if invited, Martha. I cannot. Do you think Abigail would shun us, were the situation reversed?”

She smiled ruefully. “Certainly not.”

“You see.”

“But we must take great care. Perhaps we could bring our poor hen and have her taste the food and drink before we do.”

We met each other’s eyes and laughed. It was but a momentary relief of tension.

That same week, Richard received a letter from Parson Peabody in New Hampshire, Abigail’s brother-in-law. But the news was not what any of us had expected. According to the parson, no Ebenezer Thayer existed—or at least, he had not heard of any such Thayer in his or any nearby parishes.

That was shocking news, and quite dismaying. Surely someone must live to grieve for the man, we reasoned. Since his death, no letters had come for him. If he had received any letters prior to his death, there were none among his effects. We thought that very strange as well. Had Cleverly been misinformed? Colonel Quincy was disturbed to hear the news. “They must have been using pseudonyms,” he said.

“They must have been important to the Cause to have need of pseudonyms,” I offered.

“It would appear,” mused the colonel. “Yet they came out of nowhere and disappeared into nowhere as well. It is quite distressing.”

This news merely served to fuel my desire to learn more about these men and their killers. For while our group had made a pact of silence, I had little doubt that servants would talk. The Cranch servants had already spoken to others. And while people always gossiped and rumors always flew about that were subsequently repudiated, such as John Adams and John Hancock having jumped a British ship or the assassination of Benjamin Franklin in Paris,
this
rumor had a heat and urgency that would not be extinguished.

The town continued to whisper, and I thought it was only a matter of time before whispering would turn to accusation, accusation to condemnation. Now our townspeople were whispering in meeting that poor Mr. Brackett, the innkeeper, had been heard to be critical of His Excellency. The tanner had been abroad for nearly a week. Perhaps he was meeting in secret in town and plotting mischief! As the Salem of our forefathers had taught us well, once such panic takes hold, there is hardly a fact on earth that can serve to dislodge it from the minds of men.

Thus, it was imperative—a Christian duty—that we find the perpetrators and bring them to justice, not in the eyes of the royal court, upon whom we could not depend, but to Washington himself, who would not spare the rope for enemies. Death by hanging for traitors was His Excellency’s one borrowing from British rule.

Though these events be many years in the past now, and memory, my faithful companion, grows old like myself, I believe it was at this moment that I began to envision a plan of action. I had grown impatient of ignorance. Why could I not know, why could I not seek answers as a man would? What did I lack? The will, I decided. One could learn what one willed oneself to learn.

The plan would have to wait several weeks, however. For, on Saturday the tenth of October, Thomas Miller arrived with a very large, very fretful Eliza Boylston.