fright, but Sarah called, “It’s Mrs. Brandt, Officer Murphy!”
The policeman, who had been checking all the doors along his beat to make sure they were locked, stepped into the glow of the gaslit streetlamp and squinted over at them. “On a call, are you?”
“That’s right.”
“Not going far at this hour, I hope.”
“Oh, no, just to Mrs. Higgins’s house.”
He nodded, the light winking off the star on his domed helmet. “Get along with you then.”
She knew better than to expect an offer of safe escort. The New York police were notoriously corrupt, in spite of recent attempts at reform, and Sarah couldn’t afford to pay for their protection. She had to satisfy herself with winning their goodwill with small gifts for their children and the occasional sweet, baked in her makeshift kitchen. All she could hope was that if she ever truly needed help, they would come to her aid.
Obviously, Ham Fisher had no desire for a police escort. He was already hurrying away, pulling his cap back down over his head when Sarah reached him. She wondered for a moment if he had some reason to avoid notice by the police, but the thought was gone as soon as it formed. No one poor and powerless wanted to be noticed by the police, who might arrest you simply because they felt like it and might then beat a confession out of you for some crime you hadn’t committed but for which they needed a suspect.
Sarah had long since denied herself the luxury of outrage over such things. One woman couldn’t change the world. She could just make small parts of it better. That’s what she was doing tonight.
She was fairly running to keep up with her companion now, and they reached the wide, snow-covered sidewalks of Fifth Avenue in mere minutes. Checking for traffic, Sarah glanced down the street toward Washington Square where she could see the outline of the enormous arch they’d built there recently, practically on the doorstep of the house where she’d grown up. It’s edges were dulled by the mounds of snow, but it’s distinctive shape was still plainly visible against the night sky. Then she glanced up the street, toward where her parents had moved a few years ago, escaping the influx of artists and freethinkers who had changed Greenwich Village from an enclave of the rich to a community of bohemians. The same street, but what a change it made in the fifty blocks that lay between her old home and the brownstone town house where they now lived.
Sarah wondered if they ever appreciated the irony. She could have asked her mother, of course, except she hadn’t spoken to either of her parents since Tom’s funeral. The fifty city blocks that separated her humble office- formerly Tom’s doctor’s office and now hers-might as well have been an ocean since she and her parents now lived worlds apart from each other.
Sarah turned her attention to crossing the cobblestone avenue. In the daylight, crossing against the flow of carriages, hansom cabs, and motor cars would be a dangerous and nearly impossible proposition, but because of the storm, even the prostitutes and their clients had retired for the evening. All Sarah had to worry about was picking her way through the piles of horse manure and garbage that the street cleaners hadn’t yet carried away and which were now hidden beneath the snow.
A few more blocks, then they cut across Broadway to the tiny zig that was Astor Place and the quiet residential neighborhood beyond where Mrs. Higgins’s boardinghouse lay. It had once been home to only her and her family, but when her husband’s eyes had failed and he’d lost his prosperous tailoring business, they’d had to move their growing family into two back rooms and let the others out to lodgers.
Fortunately, one of the rooms was vacant at the moment, so Mrs. Higgins was laboring in relative privacy with the assistance of one of her neighbors. After shedding her cloak and stamping the snow off her boots, Sarah joined them.
“I’m glad to see you didn’t start without me,” Sarah said cheerfully as she quickly surveyed the situation. The room was spartan and bare, but perfectly clean, as were the bedclothes. Many doctors and midwives didn’t see the need for cleanliness, but Sarah had long since observed that mothers who gave birth on laundered sheets did much better than those who did not.
The neighbor woman smiled, but Mrs. Higgins saw no humor in the situation. “The pains is coming one on top of the other. I don’t think this one’s gonna wait ’til morning. Oh, here it comes again!”
Sarah saw immediately that Mrs. Higgins was already pushing, a sure sign of advanced labor. She was right, this one wasn’t going to wait until morning. Mrs. Elsworth would be very disappointed.
Sarah glanced at the gold watch she had pinned to her bodice, a Christmas gift from her parents in some year long past, to time the contractions. “I’ll wait until you’re finished before I examine you,” Sarah said, “but I’m glad your lodger made me hurry. How long has she been pushing?” she asked the neighbor.
The woman opened her mouth to reply, but an anguished wail from the doorway startled them both. Sarah turned to find a young girl standing there. She could not have been more than sixteen or seventeen, her beauty still fragile and unformed, although unmistakable. Her golden hair lay in silken ringlets to her shoulders, and her hastily-donned gown gave proof that she had been awakened and had come to see what the commotion was. Plainly, she was horrified by what she saw. Her china-blue eyes were even wider than Ham Fisher’s had been, and she had covered her mouth with the back of her hand, as if afraid she might be sick.
Sarah knew she’d never seen the girl before-she would have remembered such a lovely creature-but still, a name came to her lips. “Mina?” she asked before she could think better of it.
The girl’s glance shifted instantly from the woman writhing on the bed to Sarah, and the horror in her beautiful eyes turned to sheer terror.
“Get her out of here,” Mrs. Higgins gasped as her pain subsided. “This ain’t no place for her.”
“Come along now, dear,” the neighbor woman said, hurrying to do Mrs. Higgins’s bidding. “We don’t want to put you off having children of your own, now do we?”
At that, the girl’s naturally pale face grew chalk white, and Sarah knew a moment’s fear that she might actually faint. But the other woman was shooing her out. If she fainted in the hallway, she wasn’t Sarah’s problem. Banishing all thoughts of the girl from her mind, she turned back to her patient.
“Now let’s see what’s going on in there,” she said, unbuttoning her cuff to roll up her sleeve for the examination.
SARAH DIDN’T THINK of the girl again until a day and a half later when she was paying her first postpartum visit to Mrs. Higgins and her new son. Ordinarily, she went the very next day, but since the baby hadn’t actually been born until nearly the next day, Sarah had waited until another night had passed to pay her usual call.
The city was very different this morning than it had been the other night. All traces of the snow had been shoveled into carts and dumped into the river, and with it had gone the silence of that night. The roar of the elevated trains over on Sixth Avenue was a constant backdrop to the usual sounds of urban activity. Wagon wheels and horseshoes clattering over cobblestone streets, drivers shouting to their animals or to other drivers, street vendors hawking their wares, women calling for children or to neighbors. Sarah might dream of peaceful meadows, but this was what she truly loved, the vibrant sounds of city life.
While she walked, she replayed the events of the other night and recalled the girl she’d called “Mina.” Sarah knew exactly who she’d been thinking of. Mina VanDamm had been a classmate of hers at the exclusive private girls’ school she’d attended. They’d also traveled in the same social circles, something that Sarah had once considered important, but which she now knew mattered not a wit. Perhaps Mina VanDamm had looked like that girl back when they were sixteen, but she certainly didn’t look like that any longer. Mina was Sarah’s age, over thirty now, and probably a plump matron with a houseful of children of her own.
As this girl would be, before long. Because Sarah knew something else about her, too. Something she hadn’t realized until this moment. She was still mulling over her realization when she rounded the comer and saw the crowd gathered in front of the Higgins’s boardinghouse. Several women, still in their plain housedresses beneath their heavy shawls, were huddled together on the sidewalk, which meant an emergency had called them out. Otherwise, they would have changed into their street clothes.
The women talked quietly while children ran around, playing games and rolling hoops, oblivious to whatever unfortunate event had brought their mothers together. Sarah thought of Mrs. Higgins and her new baby inside the house. If there was trouble, why hadn’t they sent for her?
She hurried up to the nearest woman, Bertha Peabody. Sarah had delivered her of the fat baby now perched on her hip and contentedly sucking on his middle two fingers.
“What’s happened?” she asked Bertha.
