AS THE OLD YEAR DREW TO A CLOSE and the new one began, it seemed to Susan that life began to draw in around them at Lillypot, trapping them there so they were all imprisoned together.
In the first days of the year it rained and rained, so that the road churned up and Mrs Foster struggled across the fields with her skirts tied around her waist and sacking bound around her legs. As January wore on, it froze, and then at the start of February the snow set in, so Mrs Foster could not come at all for three weeks together. For some days even John could not get out for supplies, and Mrs Scott not only had to turn cook, but had only the preserved stuff in the pantry at her disposal.
It made little difference to Susan what Mrs Scott cooked, as she could not eat anything anyway. She had been wretched for weeks, vomiting until her head swam and the floor seemed to pitch and sway below her feet like the deck of a ship. The muscles in her belly hurt from the retching and it felt as though the very nerves of her stomach were aflame.
Mrs Scott fussed over her like a mother hen, clucking worriedly as all of Susan but her belly grew thinner and paler and dark rings bloomed beneath her eyes. She brewed infusions of mint or ginger to settle her stomach, baked dry biscuits for her to nibble, had Mrs Foster cook her small bland meals and clear broths and chamomile jellies, in hope she might be able to keep them down. It was to little avail. The sickness persisted despite all their efforts, until Susan woke one day to find it a little less, and the next day less still, and a week or so later she found she could eat, and drink, and make her way from the sofa to an armchair without worrying that she would lose her footing altogether and crash to the floor.
After that it seemed that all was growing and growing, Susan’s body swelling faster than she ever thought possible, so Mrs Scott had to let out the seams on all her gowns and connive clever ways with net and lace to trim her bodices so her bosom might be decently covered. Fine red lines appeared on her flanks and her breasts and her back ached, while strange flutterings in her belly gave way to more definite jabs and proddings that Susan found odd and unsettling at first, only growing used to them as the weeks went on.
In the second week of April, there was a fluster as a cart pulled up outside the house. Having tied up his horse at the gate, the carter tramped to the door and called for Mrs Scott. She read the note he handed her and called for John to help the man unload. Then she and Elsie began to push the furniture in the dining room back against the walls and roll back the carpet while the men carried in great heavy chests and crates, piling them up in the middle of the floor.
‘Careful, John,’ Mrs Scott admonished as the two men set down a crate with a thud. ‘Those are the Doctor’s things in there. Dinnae break them!’
When all the crates were stacked to Mrs Scott’s satisfaction, two trunks and a carpet bag appeared. Mrs Scott produced a purse from somewhere about her person and paid the carter while John carried the trunks up the stairs and into the room beside Susan’s. Mrs Scott dispatched Elsie to lay Robert’s things on the bed and ascertain what might need ironed before it was hung in the press. Elsie hefted the carpet bag and scuttled up the stairs.
‘I’ll send John out for a chicken,’ Mrs Scott said to Susan. ‘Doctor Knox likes a chicken for his dinner. I’ll have the butcher come by next week and we can place a proper order for the next few months.’
‘Months?’ Susan said.
Mrs Scott looked at as though she was soft in the head.
‘Doctor Knox will be here until well on in the autumn,’ she said. ‘Surely you knew that? There’s no teaching in summer. It’s too hot, for . . . och, you know.’
But Susan didn’t know, and eventually Mrs Scott took pity on her.
‘The bodies dinnae keep in the warm,’ she said. ‘That’s what they do, isn’t it? Cut up dead bodies so they can learn the doctoring.’
‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘Quite.’ In truth, she had never thought much about what anatomists did. She had always pictured Robert working with a pen and paper, making notes or annotating diagrams. Of course, she knew he must also wield a scalpel but she couldn’t quite imagine the scene, and she had no real wish to; his hands touched her own flesh, after all.
In the end Robert did not arrive that night but the next, and he was in fine fettle, throwing off his jacket and loosening the stock at his throat even as he came through the door. He kissed Susan soundly and looked her up and down, patting her belly delightedly and saying he had missed her but was happy to find her so well and so comely, he knew he had been right that this was the place for her with its sweet air and clean water. He wished he could always be at Lillypot himself, he said, he never could relax in the city, always yearning for the time when he could lock the door of his rooms and come here to his real home.
Mrs Foster produced a good dinner and Robert and Susan ate together in the kitchen, very informally, since the dining room was full of crates. Those contained books and other materials for Robert’s great project, he told Susan, the work he must do to persuade the College of Surgeons to build a proper museum for the collection of his friend and partner John Barclay. Robert had in fact left the last few weeks of teaching to an assistant, the better to focus on instructions for how the museum should be designed to ensure it properly housed the collection and supported the teaching of anatomy. The lecture season had already been a great success, he said, with more students attending his and Barclay’s classes than any other in the city and a fine profit in the bank. Now he had other work to do, but plenty of time to do it, and hadn’t they managed things well so that he could be here at Lillypot with Susan until her lying-in was past?
Susan smiled a little queasily; she was very uncertain of the precise details of lying-in. One or two attempts at extricating information from Mrs Scott had led her no further than understanding that, before the thing that happened happened, she should braid her hair because otherwise it might become so knotted they would have to cut it off. That being largely useless information, she had questioned Elsie a bit while she set the fire of an evening. Despite having siblings, Elsie didn’t know a lot more than Susan herself, except for the general observations that there would ‘be Hell to pay’ and that babies ‘got out the way they got in’, but Elsie could not be quite sure how that was. Susan now knew how they got in – she did her best to communicate this to Elsie – but she couldn’t see how the parts involved in that business could possibly provide a route out for a full-grown infant. Robert would know, presumably, and at some point Susan would have to find a way to swallow her horror enough to ask him.
Robert refilled his wine glass, sat back in his chair and looked quizzically at Susan, who realised she had not been listening for the last few moments.
‘Have I spoken too much of work?’ Robert asked. ‘If I have, then I’m sorry. It is in my nature, I think, to focus too much on it and too little on pleasure. Perhaps I should take a holiday before I begin my writing. Would you like a trip to the sea?’
Susan forgot all her worries then, in the thought of a trip away from Lillypot, and she readily agreed. Robert promised to make arrangements for them to set out three days hence. Mrs Scott could have a holiday, he said, and John and Elsie, and return to see their people.
The place Robert chose was close, to the northwest of the city, in a wee village called Cramond. There was an inn where they lodged, with a great sandy beach a few minutes’ stroll away, and an island a little distance from the shore. Robert said it was possible to walk across the sand to the island, when the tide was out.
They arrived in time for dinner and went early to bed, Susan worn out by the carriage journey and Robert happy with a jug of wine and a good lantern for reading by. The next day, after they had breakfasted, they walked to the sea. It was a bright day, and warm, but Robert said the water would be frigid, it would not warm up until late in the summer. It would be too cold to bathe, he said, but then some spirit of wildness took hold of him and he stripped off his clothes to his underpants and ran into the sea.
Susan stood and watched, laughing, as he made his way out into the deeper water and at last dived in. Then, suddenly, she couldn’t bear not to be in the water herself. She kicked off her shoes and stockings, stripped off her coat and frock, kilted her shift up to her waist and waded in up to her knees.
The first touch of the water was hot and cold, like a brand, but in a few moments Susan’s feet seemed to grow used to it. She was always too warm, anyway, these last months, and the cold water soothed her feet and ankles, silly stems struggling under the weight of her swelling body. She began to plough through the water, wishing she could go in further, let the water take the weight of her and soothe the grinding ache that was always there in her hips and back. She waded a little deeper, to the thighs, but then a wave surprised her, wetting her shift and taking her breath away with its cold touch on her belly. She made her way out just a little, dug her feet into the sand, leaned back and breathed as deeply as she could.
Robert did not last much longer, coming out of the water at a run, gasping and shaking. They bundled themselves into their clothes as best they could, hands clumsy with cold and skin sticky with wet and salt, and then they made their way to the inn as fast as Susan could walk. Robert called for hot water and a tub, and when it arrived they fell about laughing, the tub was nothing more than a barrel cut in half. They took turns standing in it to sponge each other down, breathless with mirth and tickling and embarrassment, and then they went to bed, more at ease with one another than they had ever been before.
The rest of the trip passed in much the same way. Robert walked to the island and back at low tide while Susan looked in rockpools and sunned herself on the sands. They walked to see a mill driven by a man-made fall on the river and picnicked on the banks. On the last day the weather broke and Robert said he would teach Susan to play chess in the inn, but she managed to prevail upon him to play cards instead, teaching him Piquet and then, when he professed himself exhausted by the counting, beating him roundly at Vingt-et-un. She had so much money off him in the end that he promised her his mother’s jewellery box if only she wouldn’t ruin him by demanding payment. He said it in jest but then he seemed to grow thoughtful; Susan should have a share of his mother’s jewels, he said, was there anything she would especially like? Susan said she would like the locket his mother sometimes wore, made of clear rock crystal, she had always said it was lucky. Robert said he would send for it when they got home, but he didn’t believe in luck, just science, and he hoped Susan wouldn’t turn out to be a subscriber to quackery.
When the holiday was over and they were installed again at Lillypot, Susan half-expected that the easy atmosphere between them would vanish, but it seemed Robert did feel at ease there, where there was no formality and his temper barely showed. The second day back, he began the work of unpacking his cases, stacking books and papers in piles and placing odd bones in grids on the table. Susan asked if she could help, she wrote a fair hand, and he agreed and gave her pages and pages of words to copy out in separate lists ordered according to a set of symbols he marked against them. He said she should stop if she was tired, and indeed she found she could not sit more than an hour or two together before she had to move about a while and then find a new position to sit in that let her be comfortable again.
At night Robert and Susan sat together, Robert in his shirt sleeves with his collar open and Susan in a shift and dressing gown, and they played cards or he read to her, pausing now and then to help ease the aches and stiffness in her back and feet with the pressure of his hands.
Susan felt she would split apart if she grew much more. Mrs Scott said as much, one evening, as Susan and Robert sat together in the parlour. She had come to show Susan her work in letting out her dresses yet again, the second time in two weeks.
‘Is there any way you could have mistaken your dates?’ she asked, with a fretful glance at Susan’s belly.
Robert took offence at that, speaking sharply to Mrs Scott, who quickly withdrew, but when she was gone he frowned at Susan.
‘Come over here to the sofa,’ he said, and he helped her lower herself onto the cushions. Then his hands were on her belly, through her shift, and she saw him frown in concentration as he pressed and prodded here and there. He got up and left the room, returning with a sheet of parchment he rolled into a cone. He pressed one end to her belly and bent an ear to the other, moving it here and there, holding his hand at Susan’s wrist all the while.
‘What is it?’ Susan asked, feeling her heart flutter in panic. ‘Robert? Is something wrong?’
‘No,’ said Robert. ‘At least . . . No. But I think you have two in there, my love.’
‘Two?’ Susan couldn’t quite make sense of it.
‘Two,’ Robert said. ‘Twins. Here—’ He wove Susan’s fingers through his own and pressed her hands over her belly, on opposite sides, one high and one low. ‘One head is here,’ he said, ‘and another here.’
Susan tried to feel, but her fingers told her nothing.
‘Could you hear them?’ she asked. ‘With the paper?’
Robert’s laugh broke the tension. ‘I thought perhaps I might hear their hearts beat,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t.’
Susan had an idea. ‘Are there pictures?’ she asked. ‘In your books? That show what a woman with child looks like, inside?’
Robert thought for a moment. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Smellie. Not Hunter.’ The last he said with a shake of his head, and then he left the room. Susan kept rubbing her fingers across her belly but still she struggled to make any sense of the shapes below her skin.
A few minutes later, Robert was back with a slim volume.
‘It’s old,’ said Susan.
‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘But it’s still the best we have.’
He sat down beside Susan and leafed through the pages. Finding what he sought, he turned the book so that she could see.
‘The ninth table,’ Susan read. Opposite was an image of an infant, lying head down and facing away, inside a shape like an egg balanced on the narrow end.
‘That’s a babe at term,’ Robert said. ‘Its head is down, do you see? Ready to be born.’ He traced the egg shape around the infant with his finger. ‘This is its mother’s womb.’
Susan touched the drawing where a branching image like a tree sat above the feet of the infant. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.
‘The afterbirth,’ Robert said. ‘The proper name is placenta. It’s the link between the babe and its mother. One side is attached to the womb – here, see – and the babe is attached by its navel cord, here. That gives the means for the mother’s body to nourish the babe. There is a sac, you see, around all, and the waters are inside it.’
‘What are these?’ Susan asked, pointing at dark shapes below the babe that looked like the wings of a moth.
‘The mother’s hip bones, and her pelvis,’ Robert said.
‘And this?’ Susan pointed at an odd shape, a little like a mouth, directly under the child’s head.
‘The neck of the womb and the birth passage,’ Robert said. ‘When the child is ready to be born, the womb contracts – that is the reason for the birth pains – and the neck of the womb opens wide so the child can enter the birth passage.’
‘What happens then?’ Susan asked.
Robert looked at her thoughtfully and then turned the pages of the book.
‘This shows what happens,’ he said. He showed her a picture of the child seen from the side, its head tilted back, and briefly he explained its journey downwards through the birth canal. Then he turned to another drawing of a woman’s privy parts and pointed out how they were swollen, with the crown of the infant’s head visible as it made its way into the world.
Susan felt a little faint.
‘I’m sorry if I have shocked you,’ Robert said. ‘I didn’t know you didn’t know this.’
‘No one told me,’ said Susan.
‘No,’ said Robert. ‘I suppose no one did. It’s all perfectly natural. We were all born this way.’
Susan didn’t say what perhaps they both were thinking; her own mother had not survived the birth of her younger brother, and he had followed her to her grave.
‘Is there a woman with two?’ Susan asked. ‘In the book?’
Robert looked at a contents list and turned the pages again. Here the image was of two babes, one head down and one head up.
‘Some twins have two afterbirths,’ he said. ‘Some share only one. Those are the ones we call identical. I don’t think there is a way of knowing before they are born.’
Susan touched the image with a finger. ‘May I have the book to read?’ she asked.
Robert closed it sharply. ‘I do not think it wise,’ he said. ‘It is a treatise for midwives to hone their skills, and so it dwells on difficult cases. I do not want you doing likewise.’ He went out of the room, returning without the book.
On his return, Robert sat down at the desk and began to trim a fresh quill.
‘Twins are often born early,’ he said. ‘And I will ask Mrs Scott to make enquiries about a wet nurse to help you.’ He smiled at Susan, but she thought there was something strained in the smile.
‘Lots of mothers have two,’ Susan said. ‘Don’t they?’
‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘Lots.’ He picked up his pen and began to write. Susan left him there and climbed the stairs to bed, weary to the bone.
It transpired that Robert’s letter was to a man he knew, a Frenchman who called himself an accoucheur. This man was to attend Susan in her confinement. He wrote to Robert to advise they should engage a clean and competent midwife, and they should tell the woman that the reckoning was like to be two or three weeks before it might normally be expected. They should send for him only when Susan’s Time was upon her. There would be ample time for him to reach them and he would rest in the house until his assistance was needed, which he boasted he could perfectly judge from the cries of the labouring mother. For the last weeks, he advised that Susan rest at home, wearing only soft stays and bedgowns, and take her exercise only in the grounds of the house. He advised on diet and prescriptions for any costiveness, and he sent great lengthy instructions for the preparation of the birthing chamber and the gathering of necessities for mother and babes.
Susan’s cheeks burned at the thought of a man taking any involvement in matters. She thought Mrs Scott shocked at the idea, too, but that was balanced by her obvious delight in having a programme of activity to manage. Everyone else in the house was busy, it seemed, Robert with his museum project, and the servants with their work and their preparations; only Susan seemed to feel the time so very long. Her legs hurt, her ribs hurt, her skin felt tender and stretched, she couldn’t sleep or even sit comfortably without rising every few moments as a new ache or cramp assailed her. At times it seemed her innards had been entirely taken over. Mrs Scott said it was as well she was in her bedgown, she was so very large.
At the start of July the midwife arrived and was installed in the stifling attic with Elsie. She was a comfortable woman and Susan felt calmed by her presence. She helped Mrs Scott to ready the birthing room and wash and press the linens she had procured. She set Susan herself to folding these and putting them away, and she found her many other tasks to use the regular fits of nervous energy with which she found herself possessed. It seemed that Robert withdrew from Susan with her arrival, only appearing out of his study in the dining room now and then, apparently interested to have the opportunity to question and quiz the midwife about her experience, the signs by which she should recognise this or that phenomenon, cases she had managed previously. He seemed well enough satisfied, and the midwife herself said she was perfectly happy to refer to an accoucheur if she found herself at all difficulted; she had done so before and all cases had ended happily. She seemed determined to repeat to Susan that she had delivered many women of two and even three babes; one had delivered no fewer than three sets of twins, in fact, and another mother prone to twins had by that means increased her family by four children within fifteen months. Had they other children? Susan asked. The midwife said that most did, in her experience twins were more common in later births, but she had heard of first-time mothers delivering twins perfectly safely, of course she had.
At long last Susan rose one day to find her daily discomforts replaced with stronger pains in her belly and thighs, which became stronger and more frequent as the day wore on so that she groaned and struggled to move her body into any position in which she might find relief. The midwife helped her walk around the chamber until the pains became too strong, and then she helped her kneel before the bed.
Susan had forgotten all about the accoucheur, but it seemed that Robert must have sent for him as he planned, as long hours later, towards the next morning, she felt a change in the pressure in her loins and cried out in pain and panic, and a moment or two later the man entered the room with Robert behind him and a great leather bag in his hands. He had the midwife help him lift Susan onto the bed and onto her back. Susan howled at the increase in pain and pressure and the midwife protested that she could manage a while yet, but the man cut her short, demanding a clean bedsheet to spare Susan the sight of his work. From then Susan could no longer hold the thread of their discussions, focused only on the awful pressure that seemed ready to tear her asunder as her body strained and fought to expel its burden. She heard her own voice cry out, overwhelmed by pain, and then there was one more pain, one more great effort, a dreadful burning sensation as something in her split apart, and she heard the thin, reedy cry of an infant. The accoucheur handed the child to the midwife, who tied off its birth cord and cut it with scissors. Then she handed it to Robert, before she turned to aid the accoucheur with the delivery of the second twin.
The man’s hands were above the sheet on Susan’s belly now, feeling here and there. He said something to Robert that might as well have been in Hebrew for all Susan could understand it, and then he took a bottle from his bag and poured a dose of something into a glass. The midwife held it to Susan’s lips and Susan did her best to swallow, choking as another great pain rolled across her belly and flanks. The midwife put something between her teeth and then she was being pulled to the end of the bed so the midwife could climb up behind her, holding her steady with her hands behind her knees. With one hand, the accoucheur began to press on her belly, and then there was an awful intrusion, his hand slid through her poor abused privy parts, hurting her so badly she howled through the thing between her teeth, and then his hand was in the very body of her, rummaging and fumbling. Another pain came and the man grunted while Susan gave a mangled howl, and then he was pressing and pulling all at once, outside and in, until something moved downwards and outwards and Susan felt her privy parts stretch and fill again. There was a hot gush of fluid, but the pressure didn’t go. The accoucheur was still tugging and pulling and she was being ripped asunder again – she would surely die now, no one could survive this agony. And indeed it seemed she was dying; her vision was fuzzy and her lips were numb, and she closed her eyes on blessed darkness.
When Susan woke, she was in bed, in her own bed, and the midwife sat in a chair beside her.
‘Am I dead?’ Susan asked stupidly. Her voice was cracked and broken.
‘Heavens, no,’ said the midwife. ‘You had a very severe time, but it is over now and you will be well again when you have had your rest.’
‘Where are the babes?’ Susan asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ the midwife said, ‘sleep now.’
In the morning Susan woke to a baby’s cry and struggled to rise, crying out in pain as she put her weight on her nether parts. The midwife caught her by the shoulders and helped her back down, telling her it was normal, she had torn a little and bruised much, and the accoucheur had placed some stitches there. It would be sore for some weeks, and hot at first, but it would heal.
Then the midwife brought her the first twin, a little boy. She looked for the second, but the midwife shook her head.
‘Now you must be brave,’ she said. ‘The other was in a difficult position, and it was a dreadful effort for him to be born. The accoucheur got him out as quickly as he could, and Doctor Knox did all he could for him, but nothing they tried could get him breathing.’
Susan stared.
‘It happens,’ the midwife said. ‘Even with one. But it’s harder on twins if they share the afterbirth.’
Susan felt the tears come then, and the woman hugged her and soothed her. Then the baby began to cry and the midwife helped her put him to the breast.
‘I’m sorry,’ Susan said.
‘What for, lass?’ the midwife asked. ‘It was a hard one, a first birth and twins. Your man the Doctor was that afraid for you.’
‘I won’t be able to have more children, will I?’ Susan asked. The memory of the accoucheur’s hand in her belly made her gag, almost; she was convinced she must have been damaged beyond repair.
‘No reason why not,’ the midwife said. ‘It’ll go easier, another time, you’ll see. It’s bound to.’
Susan finished feeding the baby, and the midwife took him and put him in his cradle.
‘Where is . . . his brother now?’ Susan asked.
‘Doctor Knox took him,’ the midwife said. ‘He’s gone back to the city. He sat with you all night, and he only left when he knew you were safe. He’ll leave you to recover for a while, he says. It’s the best way. I’m here, and I’ll take good care of you.’