Outlawed(10)

“I built this library myself,” Sister Tom told me. “It has every book the medical students in Chicago use, and more. What else do you want?”

“I need to know what causes different diseases,” I said.

“Rawley’s Handbook of Flu Transmission should be over by the window, under the death records. He’s got one for rheumatic fever too.”

“Not those kinds,” I said. “I want to know what causes barrenness.”

Sister Tom rested her elbows on her desk.

“The bookseller can get us the latest tracts on problems with the reproductive system,” she said. “But they cost money.”

Mama had given me twenty golden eagles when I left, but the wagon driver had taken all of it. The fee, he’d said.

“I don’t have any money,” I told Sister Tom.

“That’s okay,” she said. “You can work for it.”

The library had a basement storeroom I’d never seen before, cooled by the earth around it, the small window at ground level looking out on grass and dandelion heads. Wooden boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, full of records dating back to the convent’s founding and books too rare and fragile to keep on display. In the center was a desk, lit brightly by a phosphorus lantern, with an inkwell and a sheaf of papers and a hand-bound book lying open to the middle.

“The big monasteries like Saint Joseph’s,” she said, “they have printing presses. But when I want to make books, I have to copy them out by hand. Then the bookseller buys them from me, or we do a trade.”

I shut the book to look at the cover: On the Regulation of the Monthlies.

“My mama taught me about this,” I said. “She was—she’s a midwife.”

“Good,” said Sister Tom. “Then you should find this interesting.”

After that I spent all my free time in the storeroom, copying the book onto a stack of loose-leaf paper so thin I had to be careful not to tear it with the pen. It was three days before I realized what I was copying.

The book started innocently enough, with a chapter on cramps and irregularity. At first it made me angry to read about women whose biggest problem was a little pain a few days out of the month, but copying down the names of familiar herbs soothed me. The second chapter was about remedies for hot flashes and melancholy during menopause. But the third one was called “Remedies for a Late Period,” and I didn’t have to read long before I knew what I was looking at.

I was twelve when Susan Mill came to see Mama. I’d seen scared girls before—girls with sores between their legs, pregnant girls bleeding, girls with black eyes and bruises on their arms. But Susan—funny Susan, usually chatty, just that year old enough to court—she scared me. She looked like a ghost in our house, walking so softly her feet made no sound, her eyes focused on nothing.

“I’m a month late,” she said. “Can you help me bring down my period?”

I didn’t know what she meant then but Mama did. She said, “Are you sure, Susan? If it’s money you need—”

“I don’t need money,” Susan said.

“If it’s a married man, it’s all right, you know. His wife might be mad, but now that you’re pregnant, everyone will support you. He’ll have to take you into his house, if that’s what you want. You have the power now.”

Then Susan gave Mama a look I’ll never forget, a look of total contempt.

“If you can’t help me, Mrs. Magnusson,” she said, “just say so.”

I expected Mama to get mad—she never liked people mouthing off to her—but instead she just nodded once and said, “Remember this, because I’m not going to write it down.”

Then she explained how to get to a hairdresser’s in Oxford, and told Susan to ask for a woman named Saphronia there, and to bring fifty golden eagles, which was five times what Mama got paid for a birth.

Afterward, when I asked what Susan was going to do, Mama explained that despite what we’d been taught in school, there was a way to end a pregnancy, but it was dangerous, because anyone who did it or had it done could go to jail, or worse. And so when someone wanted to do it, it usually meant something very, very bad had happened to her.

“What happened to Susan?” I asked.

Mama said she didn’t know yet, but for the next three days I saw her whispering with her friends from town, Mrs. Olsen and Mrs. White and Mrs. Barrow, and when Susan came back from Oxford, Mama helped her meet a man who was a miner, and that man married her and took her out to silver country with him, and she never came back to Fairchild as long as I lived there. And whenever people said what a shame it was that the Mills didn’t get to see their only daughter anymore, Mama’s eyes went ice-cold.

“I know what your book is about,” I told Sister Tom. She was reshelving the biographies of the saints. Sister Clementine always got them out of order.

“And?”

I wasn’t sure if I should be afraid of Sister Tom. It was possible she was trying to trap me somehow, get me in trouble with the Mother. My position at Holy Child was still uncertain—before I took my vows, I knew the Mother could simply kick me out if she wanted to, and then I’d have nowhere to go. So I gave what I thought was the safest answer I could.

“Does the Mother know?” I asked.