Last week, well after midnight, a banging on the brass knocker of the front door awakened us all. I had a good idea who it was that needed our attention. Downstairs I ran, clutching a quilt around me. I wanted to answer the call before Aunt Jane and Uncle Henry got themselves out of bed. They had both had a busy day and deserved their rest.
It was Mrs. Sykes, the local midwife, a plump middle-aged woman whose husband was the verger in Uncle John’s church. “I need you right now,” she said. “It is a pretty sad affair, I warn you. Young Ellen, the daughter of those no-good Mullinses, is in labour. She’s only thirteen, and I suspect she has been the victim of her monstrous father.”
“Come in,” I said, leaving her just inside the front hall while I ran back upstairs, donned my plainest muslin frock and a sturdy cambric apron in the pocket of which I put a folded sheet from the cupboard in the hall outside my bedchamber. In less than six minutes, I was back with Mrs. Sykes. We headed straight for the well behind the house. “You can never have enough clean water,” was one of Mrs. Sykes’s precepts. I filled two large pails, gave one to her, and off we went down the cobbled streets to the Mullins’s cottage.
When we arrived, we found the girl’s half-wit mother and unnatural father stupefied by gin and oblivious to the child’s screams of fear and pain. They were lying together on the only bed while Ellen was on the floor, watched over by two small brothers. The first thing Mrs. Sykes did was to shoo the boys away. “Get up into the loft,” she said so fiercely that they retreated up the ladder without a word.
The head of the babe was already thrusting through the girl’s pudendum (a word I had learned from Aunt Jane), and Mrs. Sykes began talking to Ellen in the comforting, matter-of-fact way she had, all the while encouraging her to push harder. I got busy boiling our pails of water in the open hearth.
A baby girl emerged finally. Mrs. Sykes slapped it on the back to get it breathing. No success. It was dead.
“I thank God for that mercy,” she whispered to me. “But now we must deal with the haemorrhaging.”
I had little experience to draw on, but fortunately Mrs. Sykes was able to stop the bleeding with an infusion of ergot. We washed Ellen from head to toe, placed the clean sheet under her, and made her drink the dregs of the gin bottle that was sitting on the table in a corner of the room. And then with the remaining water, we scrubbed all the surfaces of that wretched cottage.
Several hours had passed, the darkness had receded, and a pink sky emerged. “Time for us to get out of here,” Mrs. Sykes said to me, rolling the dead infant into her apron. “I’ll deal with this. You can tell Reverend Warren to come to our house later and say a few words if he wishes to. Then my husband will dig a place in the graveyard, and we shall lay the babe in it.”
We looked at Ellen. She had fallen asleep, the gin having done its work. Her no-good parents were still snoring in the bed. All seemed quiet in the loft. There was nothing more we could do.
* * *
There was, however, a happy conclusion to this sad story. Within a very few days, Aunt Jane, bless her, found the girl Ellen a place as housemaid at Athelhampton House, the squire’s manor, where she would be able to live safely away from her brute of a father.