THE ROBIN’S NEST
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 28
“I told Dr. Page that his services would not be required today.” Mrs. Ney, the prim, gray-haired housekeeper shuts the bedroom door behind me, adding, “He was none too pleased.”
“I don’t care what pleases him,” Eliza Robbins says, breathing through her teeth, air hissing in and out as the contraction seizes her. She stands at the window, hands upon her belly. Even in travail I can hear the sophisticated lilt of a well-bred Englishwoman. “I won’t let him anywhere near me.”
“Your husband wasn’t pleased either. He called for Dr. Page, after all,” Mrs. Ney chides.
She rolls her eyes. “He has no say in the matter. Not unless he wants to push this child out.”
Clever girl, I think. Despite the slow encroachment of modern obstetrics into the realm of childbirth, it is still—thankfully—a woman’s prerogative to decide who will deliver her child. Although I worry this, too, will change.
Mrs. Ney appears unperturbed. “Dr. Page did not leave. He’s keeping Mr. Robbins company downstairs.”
Eliza snorts. “With lit pipes no doubt.”
“They are attempting smoke rings. The sitting room will have to be aired out tomorrow.”
“Harvard men.” Eliza shakes her head. “Always trying to act like Oxford men.”
She groans then, deep and guttural, and I spring from my chair to go stand behind the young woman to make sure she doesn’t fall.
“I’m fine,” she says, voice thick with pain. “It’s just that this one… ggggrrrr.”
I’m not sure why the girl is still standing. Most women—those in labor for the first time at least—refuse to walk the room after a certain point in labor. Eliza isn’t in transition yet, but she is close—her water finally having broken an hour ago—and she paces before the window, hands on her lower back, wet footprints trailing behind her.
She wears only a shift, and her fine, brown hair is loose, curling against her damp forehead. With the warm glow from the hearth and the candles scattered about the room, she looks like something out of a Renaissance painting. Pink cheeks and round body. Every so often, I tend a patient who makes the act of birth a thing of beauty. They make it look like what it really is, at its most elemental—right and natural—and I cannot help but marvel.
Eliza Robbins has no family in attendance—or at least none that are blood related. Mrs. Ney—once her governess, now her housekeeper—has been friend and family since the girl was born in Manchester. When Eliza married Chandler and moved first to Boston, then to Hallowell, the wiry sprite of a woman came as well, and is at ease in the delivery room as before the cookstove. It is not duty that brought Mrs. Ney here, but devotion. The woman, widowed young, has no children of her own. So it is Eliza she lives for, and soon, the child she carries will inherit that devotion.
Upon my arrival, Mrs. Ney assessed me, head to foot, and pronounced that I would do nicely. Eliza Robbins has not questioned my instructions once as a result.
“May I ask why you sent Dr. Page away?” I ask.
Eliza answers with another grunt, rounding her spine and grabbing onto the window sash for support. After thirty seconds the contraction subsides, and she takes a long breath through her nose.
“Because Grace Sewell told me he is an idiot. She said he nearly killed her with all that laudanum. Said you were right about everything, but no one would listen—not even her.” Eliza finally makes her way to the bed, and we help her scoot back against the pillows. She sighs in relief. “This might be my first child, Mistress Ballard, but I am the oldest of five myself, and I’ve seen several come into the world. Haven’t I, Ney?”
“More’n enough.”
“Chandler and I tried for two years for this baby, and I don’t want some clod of a doctor killing me before I can see it.”
Chandler Robbins hails from Boston—as so many of the newer residents in Hallowell do—and, like his friend David Sewell, is a Harvard graduate. But whereas Sewell set his sights on starting a business across the river, Robbins has, for the last several years, been methodically building a boatyard on the peninsular outcropping of Bumberhook Point, a mile and half south of the Hook. Like any good entrepreneur, he knows that profitable industry relies on raw materials, easy transportation, and ready energy. The Kennebec provides him all three. Hallowell and its booming lumber trade provide the rest. He owns the point and everything on it, but his home is in the Hook, on Water Street, overlooking the river. It sits on a rise and has been dubbed the Robin’s Nest, no doubt a nod to both its elevated position and the crow’s nest atop every ship that Chandler builds.
For all his wealth and prominence, he chose a wife who—at first glance—seems below his station. Eliza is not pretty. She looks rather owlish with her big, brown eyes and feathery hair, but what she lacks in appearance she more than makes up for in heart and intellect. Having met her, it isn’t hard to understand that Chandler—resourceful, practical, affluent—has chosen a partner and not just a wife.
“Eliza,” I warn, “I will have to touch you now. To see how far along you are.”
“Do what you must. But don’t think less of me if I curse. My mother was French.”
And that is all it takes for me to like the young woman. Sometimes it is easy to bond with a patient. Sometimes it is impossible. Usually, I don’t bother myself either way because I have only one job in a birthing room. But the instant camaraderie does make that job easier, and I help Eliza scoot her shift up under her breasts. I can tell by the shape of her belly that the baby has dropped into the birth canal.
“Ready?” I ask.
“No.” Eliza laughs, then gasps as her stomach turns to a vice.
My inspection will hurt less during a contraction, so I slide my hand into Eliza’s body once the grinding pain reaches its peak. Inches. That’s all it takes before I find what I’m looking for. “The head is down. Your baby is in position. Are you ready to push?”
Those wide owl eyes fill with tears, but not of pain. Fear. It is the most natural emotion, and I grab her hand.
“I am here. So is Mrs. Ney. You can do this. And we will help you. But on the next contraction you must begin to push.”
And she does. Not hard or well. Eliza is tired and inexperienced and afraid. But for the next hour she bears down over and over and over. Crying. Panting. Grunting. And swearing—but only once, and in French, an astonished merde!—when the head, covered in thick black hair, pops from her body. One and a half more pushes for the shoulders and then I pull a slimy, wiggling baby boy from Eliza’s body.
“Hello little one.” I greet him as I do every child, but this time I laugh.
He is enormous. Easily nine pounds. I roll him over, counting fingers. Toes. I rub him down with a soft cloth. Check his palate. His eyes. And, when the afterbirth is delivered, I snip and tie the cord with a smooth, practiced movement.
I set the boy gently on Eliza’s chest so they can meet each other. He is bawling, loud little lungs shrieking his displeasure at all the light and noise. He does not like the air on his skin. He does not like being removed from his safe, warm home. But when Eliza says, “Thomas, hush now,” he stops crying, and, much to everyone’s astonishment, lifts his head right off her chest and looks directly at his mother. And in that short silence, as we are speechless at the strength of this new little Robbins, we can hear his stomach growl. I choke out a boggled sort of laugh.
Mrs. Ney jumps into action then, plucking Thomas up with one arm and helping Eliza prepare to nurse with the other. “Let’s get you a meal then, hungry boy.” She looks at her young ward, beaming with pride, and says, “Your boy has arrived wanting meat and potatoes!”
The rest of my job is easy. There is no tearing. No excessive bleeding. Only the bathing and changing. The wrapping of linen cloths and the disposal of afterbirth. I help Eliza get Thomas latched onto her breast, then Mrs. Ney and I sit by the new mother and praise all her good work. We commend her on a beautiful baby. And, once they are situated, Mrs. Ney slips away to prepare a simple, cold meal for me and the famished new mother.
It is well after sunset when I tell Eliza, “I will be back shortly,” and I leave the room with the bucket of waste.
“Will you ask Chandler to come up?” she calls after me.
“Of course.”
I slip through the kitchen and out the back of the house to the privy. First I relieve myself, then empty the bucket.
“Leave that here,” Mrs. Ney says, nodding toward the bucket, when I come back inside. “I’ll wash it.”
I watch the older woman cut cheese and bread and thick slices of smoked ham. She pours milk. Arranges shortbread. Makes tea. Clucks like a proud mother hen.
“Eliza is lucky to have you,” I say.
There are tears in her eyes when she looks at me. “ ’Tis is the other way ’round. Her mother would be so proud of her.”
“Is she…?”
“Aye. Not long ago. Passed the year after Eliza married. A terrible shame. She was a good woman.”
“I am sorry to hear that.” I pat Mrs. Ney on the shoulder. “I’ll go get Chandler.”
Dr. Page is passed out, on his back, on the chaise in the drawing room, one arm thrown over his face, and a leg dangling off the side. There is an empty brandy snifter balanced on his chest and it wobbles with each breath.
He has no staying power, I think. Then I look at Chandler, also asleep, but sitting upright in his chair, head lolled to the side. The pipe still sits in his hand, curling gentle strands of smoke into the air. The men never do.
I gently shake Chandler’s shoulder, and he snorts awake. “You have a beautiful, healthy son,” I whisper.
He leaps up and is about to shout his joy, but I set a firm finger across his mouth, shake my head, and point to Dr. Page. I would rather not have to converse with the man again unless I have to, so I guide Chandler into the hall and close the drawing room door behind us.
“Eliza was magnificent. They’re both resting upstairs.”
“A son.” He runs his hands through his hair. “What will we name him?”
“Thomas, apparently. But if you disagree, you’d best tell your wife soon. She’s been calling him that from the moment she saw his face.”
“Thomas.” He smiles, wide as the ocean, and then, as if realizing for the first time that he’s still holding his pipe, puts it to his lips. He draws in a mouthful of smoke, then forms his mouth to make a ring. No such luck. The smoke comes out in a white ball, then dissipates, but he is undeterred. “Thomas it is!”
Ever since being called to the Robbinses’ this afternoon, I have wondered how I would broach this subject. There is no easy way, so I dive right in.
“May I ask you something? Quickly. Before you go up?”
“Of course.”
“It’s a strange question, so bear with me.”
“All right.”
“You helped the others cut Joshua Burgess from the ice that morning? In November? He was found right off Bumberhook Point, near your boatyard.”
“Yes, he was. They came to me since the property’s mine. There were seven of us who did the job. Eight maybe. I can’t remember. It was dark and cold, and it was months ago now.”
And you were drunk by the time I got to the tavern, I think but do not remind him.
“But you had lanterns that morning? You saw well enough to cut him out? To know who it was?”
“Yes.”
I am careful, lowering my voice to a whisper in case Dr. Page has woken. “And what did you think?”
“Same as you, Mistress Ballard. That he’d been hung. Seemed obvious enough. All of us thought so.”
“But there was no rope?”
“Only the one they pulled Sam Dawin out of the river with. But nothing near the body.”
The sharp wail of a baby’s cry interrupts us, and Chandler looks to the top of the stairs.
“Thank you,” I say. “Now go see your son.”
He turns away and is about to bound up the steps, but I grab his jacket just in time.
“Not with this,” I tell him, and pluck the pipe from his hand. “No smoking near the baby. Bad for his new lungs.”
Chandler runs up the steps two at a time, and when he’s out of sight, I put the pipe to my own lips and draw. Chandler’s tobacco smells of cherries and chocolate. It is cased with molasses and topped with vanilla but tastes—as all smoke does—like smoke. Only a nicer, classier kind of smoke. The kind you pay for. The kind that comes in little pouches and smells of gentlemen and scholars. Tobacco. There is no soot or ash, and I don’t bother trying to blow a ring. I simply stand at the bottom of the stairs and let the cloud rise around my head as I ponder what Chandler has told me.
“Give me that,” Mrs. Ney says from behind me. For one moment I think the housekeeper is going to scold me. But instead she adds, “You’re doing it wrong.”
Then the wiry old silver-haired woman puts the pipe to her lips, hollows her cheeks, pulls, puffs, and blows out a perfect smoke ring that grows and grows as it rises until—a foot wide—it dissipates altogether.