The Alchemist's Daughter by Katharine McMahon

Author:Katharine McMahon
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780307345363
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2006-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

[ 9 ]

AFTER SARAH HAD gone, I was triumphant at first. Good, she obeyed me. But what with the long trek home, her shrieking, and the blow of finding both babies dead, I began to tremble so hard that my teeth knocked together.

To calm myself, I dipped my hands in the pail of water. The sight and feel of the metal reminded me of home and Mrs. Gill. Everything she touched got clean in the end. Then I had a good idea—I’d wash the babies anyway. That’s what you did with the dead. So I picked up a baby and lowered her into the bucket, but her head on its thread of a neck flopped onto my wrist and then down into the pail, dragging the rest of her body with it.

I shook harder but managed to haul her out, though gray bruises appeared on her arm where I’d held her too tight. “Well, Emilie. It’s just as well that your own child died. What a mess you’d have made of bringing her up. A ducking like that would have killed her,” I said briskly as I soaped her downy head. I even began to hum a melody from yesterday’s Te Deum.

Then the door burst open, and my husband appeared. “By Christ, Emilie, what have you done?” and I was jolted back to the reality of my parlor, where scum floated on tepid water in the bucket, a heap of dead flesh lay on the red lining of my cloak, and lice crawled through the folds of my filthy skirts.

I clutched my hands tight together to stop them flying off my wrists. “I couldn’t leave them in a dung heap. They deserve a proper burial.”

He was pale and dull-eyed. I hadn’t seen him angry like this since the day he came out of the library after the interview with my father. “Deserve. Emilie. They’re bastards. Some whore throttled ’em and slung ’em away. A hundred such are tossed into the gutters every month. Christ knows what infection you’ve brought into the house.”

“But they are babies. They have a soul.”

“Women have hanged for less. Who’s to prove you didn’t kill them yourself? This is London, Emilie. You’re supposed to behave in a civilized way.”

The horror of the dung heap and the blank eyes of those watching children came back in such a rush that my knee jolted one of the babies off my lap. “I expect the priest will be here soon. A guinea or so should be enough for their burial.”

“There’ll be no burial.”

“They must be buried. I could take them back to Selden, if you like.” For a lovely moment, I was in the grassy graveyard near my mother’s little plot. Just the place. She would take care of them with her silken hands. Gill could make them a box lined with flannel to keep them warm, and surely Shales would agree to bury them. He and I would try to understand why some poor woman took them to that dreadful place and abandoned them, dead or alive.

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