“What do you think your… husband is going to do?”
Susannah shook her head. “Somethin’ that makes it dutiful to do whatever he wants.”
She wouldn’t say anything more. Stavia was too tired to ask anything more. She fell onto the hard, straw-filled mattress in the attic room with a sense of fatality. Let happen what would. She couldn’t do anything about it until morning.
She was considerably surprised at what she was asked to do about it first thing in the morning on the steps of Susannah’s house.
“You take this thing,” Resolution Brome told her, handing her the implant, “and put it in Susannah.”
“Susannah!” she blurted in disbelief.
“She’s had babies afore their time. There was two dropped early afore this last one. You put this thing in Susannah.”
Susannah had been watching and listening. When they were inside the house, she began to keen, a little moaning sound in her throat building into a low, hideous howling, “Oh, ahh, ahh, ahh. I can’t. I just can’t. Oh, don’t make me. Oh I can’t.”
“Shhh,” Stavia said automatically, as though Susannah had been a patient in the quarantine center. “Hush. You can’t what?”
“I can’t have another one. I get so sick. I can’t have another one. I’m so tired.”
“How old are you?” Stavia asked.
“Twenty-nine,” she replied. “I’m too old. Oh I can’t. I can’t.”
Stavia wanted to laugh. Oh, by the Great Lady but this was a mockery, a comedy. “Susannah! Hush. Can you keep a secret from that man out there?”
The keening faded into sniveling, then into silence. “What?”
“I lied about what this thing is for.”
“What?” Dazed. Uncertain.
“It actually prevents pregnancy, Susannah. That’s why I had it. So I wouldn’t get pregnant on this trip. If you don’t want another pregnancy, let me go ahead. If I can figure out some way to sterilize the damn thing….”
“How long?” the woman begged. “How long is it good for?”
“Years. Four years. Five. Maybe longer.”
“You got another one?”
“Why would I…? No. Just this one.”
“Ahh,” the woman cried. “Oh, let me think a little. Just a little.”
Uncertainly, Stavia filled the kettle and set it on the stove. There was good herbal tea among her supplies, better than anything Susannah had yet offered her. By the time the kettle had boiled and the tea steeped, Susannah had stopped crying. She was gasping now, in a fashion somehow resolute, as though deeply frightened but determined to meet whatever it was with courage.
“Stavia. You do something for me, I’ll try to do something for you. You do something for me, I’ll try to help you get away from here.”
“What? What is it?”
“You make some kind of wound on me to make him think you did what he told you. Then you put that thing in my little girl.”
“In Faith! She’s only a child!”
“No, no. You put it in Chastity. They’re goin’ to marry her off, maybe soon. It’s so hard on the young ones. If she had four or five years to grow up a little….”
“I see. And what are you going to do?”
“You’ll have to tell him it doesn’t always work. Or maybe it got ruined, bein’ taken out that way. Probly I’ll drop another baby or two then he’ll let up on me. I wish he’d do it to somebody else. Oh, I do!”
“Me, for instance,” Stavia said cynically.
“Anybody but me,” Susannah admitted. “But I’ll help you get away. I swear I will.”
Stavia stared at the woman through the steam from her teacup. How many times had she sat across a table, staring at someone through the steam? Morgot. Myra. Septemius. Trying to understand why people were as they were. Here was no need for much analysis. Susannah was simply beaten down, worn down, worked down. “I could use it on you and come back with one for Chastity,” Stavia whispered. “We could arrange to meet out in the woods somewhere. I could bring you a dozen of them, if you like.”
Susannah shook her head. “They might catch you again. Besides, there’s no need. It’s comin’ to an end, can’t you see? More’n more babies born dead or put out to die because there’s somethin’ wrong with ’em. It’s all comin’ to an end, and I’m glad. It’s just… you know, you get to love your girl children….”
“If that’s what you want.”
“That’s what I want. What d’you need to do it with?”
“I suppose the men drink? Beer? Something stronger than that?”
“Somethin’. Yes.”
“I need a little of whatever that is to sterilize this thing as best we can. I need something like—like an awl?”
“I got one I use to make shoes. Is it goin’ to hurt her a lot?”
“I think we’d better be sure we don’t hurt her at all,” Stavia said. Susannah might be able to keep a secret. She wouldn’t bet her life on Chastity, however. The girl looked as though she would fade away if anyone said boo.
There were ampoules of local anesthetic in the medical kit, hidden in the lining along with a few other supplies which were, more or less, “secret.” Susannah’s obvious wound was inflicted painlessly. After Chastity had drunk a strong barbiturate and while she slept, Stavia inserted the implant—after soaking it in something alcoholic, since she dared not boil it—deep in Chastity’s buttock, a place which, according to Susannah, no man would ever see.
“Might be he’d feel it in her arm,” she said. “But not back there.”
“It’ll hurt when she wakes up.”
“I’ll tell her I kilt a big old spider in her bed. Must’ve bit her somethin’ awful.”
Susannah reported to Resolution Brome that she had the medicine in her arm. What she actually had in her arm was an injection of beeswax, which was all either she or Stavia could think of to make a raised lump of the proper size and shape. It had been heated enough to sterilize it, or so Stavia hoped.
That
