BALLARD’S MILL         

I am almost to Mill Creek Bridge when it clicks. The thought. Loud and clear as though someone has just snapped their fingers beside my ear.

Lace.

Twice Rebecca mentioned Joshua Burgess ripping that strip of lace from her hem. He used it to tie his hair back before he raped her. And I found a piece—just as Rebecca described—at the bottom of Burgess’s saddlebag. It is hers, no doubt. He kept it as some macabre souvenir.

So why does Sam Dawin have a piece of lace in his pocket?

I saw it yesterday, with my own eyes.

Was it only yesterday?

Time has started to play tricks on me. All or nothing. Minutes or years.

I have been at home.

This is the phrase I write most often in my journal. And that is true. Untold hours I’ve spent in my workroom, puttering about with the normal business of domestic life. But I have also lost days at a time with births and deaths and burials. I am in the business of mortality. Its beginning and its end.

Yes, of course, I am tired. That is nothing new. I have spent the better part of the last thirty years tired. Elspeth told me to expect that.

“We are midwives,” she told me once. “We will sleep when we’re dead.”

That was the first thing I thought when she passed. When we buried her in Oxford.

Sleep well, my friend.

None of this has anything to do with Sam, of course. Or the lace. But that is how the mind works late at night, after a good meal and a good cry.

Yes, I cried leaving the tavern. So much has happened in such a short amount of time.

Questions skitter across my mind like shooting stars, all of them possibilities that flare, then burn out quickly for lack of sense. I cannot find any scenario in which Sam fits into the Foster case. But the connection was right there, in his palm. Tied with a knot.

If I only knew what I was seeing.

I let my mind wander, hands loose on the reins. Brutus senses my mood, slows his pace from a trot to a walk, and drifts off the muddy center of the road and onto the edge, where the heavy clop of his hooves is muffled by tufts of old grass peeking through the fading snow. He knows the way home, and for once, I am content to let him lead.

Lace.

It is important, though I cannot fathom why.

We continue like this for another quarter of a mile—Brutus meandering very much like my thoughts—until the bridge comes into sight.

I press against his side with my left knee.

Tug gently on the reins with my left hand.

Home.

Sleep.

That’s all I want.

But, as so often has been true in the last three decades, I cannot have it.


I wait up for Jonathan. Long after his brothers and sisters get home and go to bed. I wait up so long that my eyes are heavy, and the fire is low. A clever move on Jonathan’s part. See if he can wait me out, sneak in once I’ve finally given up and gone to bed. No doubt he’d be up early and off to work before dawn to avoid me again. But I’ve been thinking about what I want to ask him all day, and I won’t miss this opportunity. Not even if it means that I must sit here until dawn.

It is after midnight when I hear the squeak and rattle of the wagon coming down the drive, and another fifteen minutes before he’s done putting up the horse and makes his way to the house. I count his footsteps—seventeen—slow and wary, as they approach the door.

Then the latch.

The hinges.

A breath of cool air at the back of my neck.

And, finally, a heavy sigh.

“Hello, Mother.”

“Jonathan,” I say, then sniff. “Are you drunk?”

“I’ve had a few pints. You’d be in your cups too if you’d a mother waiting at home to scold you.”

“I am not going to scold you, Jonathan.”

He looks up through eyes that are heavy with drink, uncertain whether to believe me.

“That’d be a first.”

It would be easy to arm myself in return, fire off a wounding shot. But I am too tired for that, and besides, it would do no good. What’s done is done. Instead, I pour two fingers of brandy into a glass and hand it to my son. A peace offering. He takes it warily. Downs half in one greedy, desperate swallow.

“Did you know?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “It was as much a shock to me as everyone else.”

It is the first time he makes full eye contact, and I see that he’s not entirely drunk after all, wrapped up in warm flannel, perhaps, but there’s no cloud drifting across the blue sky of those eyes. They are every bit as bright and clear as an October afternoon.

“But when I found you two in the woods in January, she had to have been near six months. Maybe you couldn’t see it under all those clothes, but certainly you could have felt it.”

Jonathan has the good grace to blush. “It wasn’t her belly that I was touching at the time. Not that you need the details.”

“I’m not asking for details, Jonathan. I’m asking how something that important could have escaped your notice. She got pregnant in July.

“And every stolen moment since has been rushed. Hasty. She gave plenty, and I took what I could get, and that time in the woods was about as much privacy as we ever found. Now you know. Are you happy?”

“Happy? I’m the farthest thing from it.”

“You and me both.”

“Self-pity is not a thing you get to feel right now, son. You can’t take a girl like Sally Pierce to bed and not think there will be consequences.”

“I didn’t take her to bed, Mother. I took her to the barn. In July, as we’ve established, after the summer Frolic.”

He isn’t fully sober. I know that. Which is the only reason I don’t hold this admission against him.

“Have you not seen her since January?”

“Only once. At the hearing.”

He drains his glass, swishing the last mouthful of brandy around his mouth before swallowing. He sets it down on the table, and I add another finger to the glass.

The look he gives me is quizzical. This is new, it says.

I smile. It’s a sad one. I can feel it there in the tremble at the corner of my mouth.

“What are you going to do? Sally has declared you the father.”

“I won’t abandon them if that’s what you think.”

“But will you marry her?”

“I don’t have a choice, do I?”

“There’s always a choice, Jonathan. You had one in the beginning. And you have one now.”

“You’d have me pay maintenance but leave him a bastard?”

I am strangely encouraged by how appalled he is at the idea. “I would have had you marry a girl before getting her pregnant. But we’re long past that. I just want to know what you will do now.”

“I’m not so bad a man as you might think, Mother. I posted our intent to marry outside the tavern tonight.”

This news is both a relief and a sadness. It is past time for him to settle down, but I would have hoped that love would factor in.

“He looks like me,” Jonathan says, and I detect a note of wonder in his voice.

“Yes. He does.”

“I didn’t expect to feel anything when she handed him to me.” His eyes are glassy, whether from drink or tears I can’t really say. “But I did.”

That feeling he doesn’t yet recognize is love. And if he loves his son, I have hope that he might yet grow to love Sally as well.

Jonathan watches the fire pop and fizzle. He does not apologize for anything, but neither is he antagonistic with me any longer. This is the decision I made while sitting here all evening: sacrifice one thing to gain another. Sally Pierce, puzzling though she might be, is not a piece of the puzzle I need to solve right now. Rather, my mind is bent on untangling the question that has been nagging at me the last few hours.

I reach out. Pat Jonathan’s hand. “Can I ask you something?”

Again, that wary look. He draws away as though I might bite him.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m certain Sally got pregnant on purpose.”

“I suspected as much myself. But this has nothing to do with Sally.”

Jonathan nods, still cautious. “What then?”

“That night, last November, when Sam fell through the ice?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve never really told me what happened.”

“There isn’t much to tell.” Jonathan settles back in his chair, takes another sip. I note that his eyes go to the fire and stay there. He does not look at me again. “We set off from Sam’s wharf well after midnight.”

“That’s a late start.”

“We’d originally planned on leaving the next morning. But the river was closing, so we decided to leave after the Frolic. But we were late getting out. And a good thing too. If we’d left earlier, we’d have been two hours farther downriver when he fell through. No way I could have gotten him here in time. He’d be dead.”

“Instead, you found a dead man.”

He works his jaw back and forth, like a cow chewing its cud. “None of us were happy about that. Particularly Sam. But it makes sense if you think about it.”

“How?”

“Everything gets caught at Bumberhook Point. The peninsula reaches out into the water. Ice or no ice, that’s where logjams happen.”

“How long do you think Burgess had been there?”

“Couple hours. Probably. It was his hair—all frozen in the ice—that stopped him from sinking into the current.”

I am careful, so careful with my next question. “You said Sam was upset to find him?”

“I reckon anyone would be. But Sam cursed more ’n I ever heard ’im.”

There. Finally. Jonathan’s enunciation slips. Just a bit, but it’s enough to convince me that I can press harder.

“Did they know each other?”

He shrugs, a sloppy lift and fall of the shoulders. “They wasn’t friendly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sam’s never liked the man. But after what he did at the Frolic…” Jonathan’s voice fades off and is replaced by a scowl that he directs at the hearth.

“What happened after you got Sam out of the water?”

“The shock hit him. All that cold, all at once.” Jonathan runs the glass along his lower lip—back and forth—before tilting the liquor into his mouth again. He empties it with a single swallow. “Sam’s lucky he had that rope. ’E would’ve been swept away otherwise.”

Click. There it is. Another piece of the puzzle snaps into place.

“You told me before that the rope was looped at Sam’s waist?”

“Yes.” Jonathan leans his head back against the chair, eyes closed, fingers loose around his glass.

My final question is asked with the voice I used when reading him to sleep as a child. Soft and deep. Comforting. It’s not a benign question, but I do everything in my power to make it seem so.

“Was it bloody?” I ask.

It takes him so long to answer that I think he’s fallen asleep. The glass tumbles from his hand, and I reach out to catch it as a single word slips out in the form of a whisper.

“Yes.”


I reach out to shake Jonathan’s shoulder, to wake him up, when I am startled by a soft knocking at the door, followed by a voice calling my name.

“Martha.” The voice is female and heavily accented in French.

Doctor.

I’m up and at the door. When I pull it back, I see that she hasn’t even bothered to dismount Goliath, but has ridden him through the garden gate and right up to the door. She sits on his back, regal. Impatient.

“You must hurry,” she says. “Rebecca Foster is in labor.”