As Catherine shouldered her way through the crowd, she felt hands grabbing at her sleeve. She was spun around, and for a moment she lost sight of Phyllis. Someone said, “I’ve got her,” but Catherine pulled away. Phyllis emerged from behind the man who was holding Catherine’s arm. A woman placed her face right in front of Catherine. She was missing her front teeth, and her breath was sour. She held a smoldering torch in one hand, and she brought it down near Catherine’s face.
“Here, mistress,” the woman said, “we’ve been waiting for you, we have.”
Phyllis forced herself next to Catherine, shielding her from the woman.
“Go,” Catherine said to Phyllis, “to Master Woolsey, and tell him to come here right away.”
Phyllis pushed her way back through the crowd, which was advancing with a deliberate inevitability toward the house. Catherine moved with the energy of the crowd, but at a faster pace, so that soon she reached its leading edge, some ten or so feet away from Henry and Ned Jameson, who stood with their backs to their house. Ned had his arm around the Irish servant girl, flattening her breasts and squeezing her hard against his side. She held a pitcher in her hand. It was tilted toward the ground and water dripped from it. The girl’s eyes were wide and staring as they found Catherine.
“Please,” she said, but then Ned pulled her even harder toward him, and whatever else the girl was trying to say was lost in the breath exploding from her mouth.
The Jameson girls, ranging from a toddler to the oldest, a twelve-year-old, were gathered around their mother, who stood off to one side. Martha’s gown was unlaced and one heavy breast hung free as though she were about to give her babe suck. Her eyes moved back and forth between her husband and the crowd, seemingly unable or unwilling to focus. The toddler amused itself by walking ’round and ’round through her mother’s legs. The oldest girl seemed to be whispering comfort to her younger siblings. Then the girl turned to her mother and laced up her gown. Martha looked at her daughter’s hand as though it were a fly buzzing about her, but she did not swipe it away.
Henry was holding the babe, wrapped in swaddling, and unmoving. It was quite clearly dead. He took a step toward Catherine and held out the babe toward her. His face glowed red in the glare of a torch.
“Here she is,” he shouted. He lowered his voice a little. “Tell us, then, if you please, Mistress Williams, was this babe born alive?”
“Who says nay?” Catherine asked. She looked at Martha, who stood mute, and then at the Irish servant girl, who did not seem to understand what was happening. Always the finger of blame, she thought, lands on some poor woman while the men stand around pointing that finger with self-righteous and hypocritical arrogance. She recalled how Henry had asked first what sex the babe was before he inquired as to his wife’s health. “Henry will be glad,” Martha had said as Catherine had held the babe in front of her so that she could see its genitalia. And then Martha had collapsed onto the bed, a woman exhausted by fifteen years of being pregnant, giving birth, suffering miscarriages, and nursing the babes that were born, and always there had been the poverty. She had not wanted to take Ned in, for there was never enough food.
“Just answer the question,” Henry insisted. “We have heard how soft your heart is for a savage. How is it with this babe? Here, look at it, which is not breathing now who was when it was born. Was it not very much alive when you pulled it out of my wife’s belly not three days ago?”
A voice came from the back of the crowd, strong, male, and insistent.
“An answer, mistress, we need to know the truth.”
Catherine turned toward the voice, but she could not identify the speaker. It came from a knot of people that had gathered just beyond Ned in the shadow of a tall tree.
“The truth,” the voice said again, and then was joined by other voices, male and female, rising from the group beneath the tree, and then spreading across the surface of the crowd like whitecaps in a storm-tossed sea. “The truth,” they clamored, “tell us the truth.”
“What says the mother, then?” Catherine demanded. “What says Goody Jameson?”
“Nothing,” came the response from the group.
Catherine turned back to Henry.
“Your wife, Henry, what does she say?”
“Nothing,” Henry repeated. “She no longer speaks. She came to me not an hour ago, holding the babe in her arms, and handed it to me, and she does not speak.”
Catherine studied Martha’s face. Its expression did not change as her children moved about her. She did not seem to see that her husband was holding her dead infant in his arms, and she did not hear the insistent cries for the truth. It was as though she were standing in a meadow daydreaming while butterflies circled her head. Every moment or two she extended her hand toward the toddler that clung to her knees, but the gesture was vague and inconsequential, and her hand never found the child’s head.
Catherine stepped close to Martha, close enough to feel the woman’s breath on her face.
“Martha, you must speak,” Catherine said, and Martha’s eyes now focused on her, as though she had just returned from that distant meadow. She shook her heard, slowly at first, and then with increasing agitation. Catherine took Martha’s shoulders in both hands and squeezed and then the nodding motion stopped. Still Martha did not speak.
“My poor wife is distracted by the death of our babe,”
