A Kiss For Midwinter (Brothers Sinister #1.5)(15)

When he saw Mrs. Hall, he didn’t see a woman who made curtains. She wasn’t slender to his eye. She was undernourished. On her skinny frame, the pregnant bump of her belly sat like a grotesque lump.

There was a disease that was peculiar to women, and Mrs. Hall had it. It wasn’t a disease that came from exposure to contagion. It didn’t have a name. It was a sickness that took years to come on, and it crept up so gradually that people rarely noticed what was happening. It ravaged the rich and the poor alike—although, as with all illness, it landed most heavily on the poor.

Miss Charingford moved from Mrs. Hall to her children, never once looking at Jonas. She hadn’t looked at him at all since her outburst.

Not that it mattered now; he had work to do. Jonas set about seeing to his patient.

“I lost another tooth,” Mrs. Hall said quietly. “I lost it two nights ago.”

Her skin was dry and scaly to the touch; she had dark bags under her eyes. Her children gathered around Lydia in a group. From Miss Charingford’s basket, she’d taken a mass of wool stockings, which she distributed.

“Good of you, to bring her by,” Mrs. Hall said. “Once was, I’d not take charity. Now…” She shrugged, as if to say she’d take anything she could get.

“Your heart rate is acceptable,” he said, letting go of her wrist. “Just acceptable. There’s a little fluid in your lungs. I think that so long as you have a chance to rest and recover, you should not suffer too much in the next month.”

She nodded at this. “I’ve done eight already,” she said. “I do know how it’s done, Doctor.”

“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…”