“It is not the childbirth itself that worries me.”
He didn’t know the name of the disease she had, but he knew its symptoms. A man who wouldn’t breed his mare two seasons in a row for fear of causing her an injury would be at his wife within weeks of childbirth. He’d plant his seed in a field that had not lain fallow for years, and like an overproduced field, the wife inevitably failed. Her back stooped. Her skin changed. Her eyes yellowed. Teeth fell out; bones that were once strong would snap at the smallest slip on icy pavement. Carrying a child was hard on a woman’s body, and eight children, delivered ten months after one another, left a woman no room to recover.
Every time he tried to make the argument, though, he found that women disliked being compared to mares and fields, no matter how apt the analogy was.
As for the men—a fallow field, apparently, said nothing about a man’s virility. But a wife who bore child after child formed a living, walking boast, one that he could parade in front of his compatriots. Look at me! I’m a man!
“The stuff that babes are made of comes from your own body, Mrs. Hall.” He straightened and put away his stethoscope. “If the babe needs the material of bones, it comes from you. If it needs the material of skin, it comes from you. There’s a reason you’re losing your teeth, Mrs. Hall.”
She looked away.
“You need to take a rest from bearing children. This babe likely won’t kill you. The next one might.”
Mrs. Hall glanced over at Lydia, now handing out oranges to the children. She lowered her voice. “And how am I to feed them all if I take a rest? I know they might not look like much to the likes of you, but they’re precious to me.” Her tone caught.
“How are you to feed them all if you perish?” he countered. “It is not a question of if, Mrs. Hall. It will happen. You’re scarcely getting enough to eat. At some point, a child will come, and the act of producing it will exceed your strength. If you want to live, if you want to stay healthy for your little ones, you must stop bearing children.”
Lydia could hear what he was saying, even though she didn’t look in his direction. When Mrs. Hall had said that her children were precious to her, she’d smiled and looked down. But when Jonas spoke, her chin went up a few notches, and her grin turned into a show of teeth.
“What else am I to do?” Mrs. Hall said.
“No excuses,” he said. “There is a way.”
And he leaned in and told her.
“I DON’T THINK YOU’RE TRYING VERY HARD,” Lydia said to Doctor Grantham as they left. “In fact, I don’t think you’re trying at all. She has a loving family and beautiful children. Did you notice that she had shoes for them all?” They’d been lined up in a row by the door, clean, if worn. “That takes a great deal of love. While I am sure that matters are difficult for her, with her husband deceased and her so recently pregnant…”
“Miss Charingford.” Grantham was shaking his head and looking down, a little smile on his face. “Her husband passed away five years ago.”
“Oh.” She swallowed. “Dear. Will not the man who got her in that situation marry her, though?” She knew as she said it, though, that she’d just made herself look naïve again. Unmarried for five years? There must have been four children under that age in the house. If the man who was getting her with child hadn’t married her yet, he was unlikely to do so now.
But Grantham didn’t point out these obvious facts. He looked over at her and said, quite deliberately, “It’s likely that she doesn’t know who he is.”
Lydia fell silent. That would imply that there were…a good number of men. “But she does honest work. She takes in laundry and mends and…”
“She doesn’t walk the streets, if that’s what you mean. And I have no doubt that with eight children, she is on her feet working as long as she can, as hard as she can, every day.”
It made Lydia’s back ache simply thinking about it. “I suppose,” she finally said, “that she deserves…comfort, too. No matter what has happened to her.”
Grantham gave a snort. “Comfort? Miss Charingford, you know precisely what is going on, even if you won’t say it aloud.”
Lydia felt her cheeks flush.
“Mrs. Hall is on her feet every minute she can work during the day, and when she can no longer stand, she works on her back. It’s a common enough arrangement in tenement halls such as these. Likely she has ten or twelve men who visit her on a regular basis, who help to make up the difference in her expenses. The men can’t afford a wife and a family; she can’t afford not to have a husband.”
Lydia was silent a moment longer. She thought of those shoes lined up, the curtains in the window. The note in the woman’s voice as she said her children were precious to her.
Lydia now knew precisely how she valued them.