Spilt Milk by Amanda Hodgkinson Page A

Nellie.’
    ‘I don’t think I am,’ said Nellie, and watched snow falling against the window.
    Anna Moats thought she would miss Nellie when she was gone. She was sure Nellie would go back to the sister she loved. That was obvious. Nellie was stubborn and acted tough and distant with folk, but it was plain to see the woman had a heart as tender as a naked heel in a new boot.
    After Louisa left, Anna sat back in her chair and told Nellie she had been the midwife who’d delivered both her and Vivian. What a laugh to see the girl’s astonished face! Of course Rose had never told her.
    ‘You were our mother’s midwife?’ asked Nellie.
    ‘For both of you. I brought you into the world, my dear. Your afterbirth is buried in the same place as your sister’s. Right under one of the apple trees in your orchard.
    ‘A slip of a thing Vivian was, born early and quickly. You were another story, Nellie. A long labour and a breech birth. You came feet first into the world, which is no way to arrive. An awkward birth makes for an awkward child, you know. Baby girls who make their mothers suffer at birth grow up contrary in later life, thinking themselves too good to get down on their knees and scrub a kitchen floor.’
    ‘Well, I’m not like that,’ said Nellie.
    ‘No, you’re not. Not at all. An exception, you are, Nellie Marsh. I’ll have a bowl of that soup now, if I may?’
    Anna sat by the fire, sipping from the bowl Nellie put in front of her. She wouldn’t say it, but Nellie’s mother had nearly died of exhaustion. All the long hours of labour she’d sat on the bed, back rounded, her white cotton nightdress bunched over her thighs, legs pulled up, her hands holding them apart, trying to look over the vast curve of her belly, crying as if she was calling the child out of her. Cursing the father of it and Anna too, for her inability to make the pain go away. Poor Rose Marsh. And soyoung. Rose’s mother had been a saint, claiming the children were her own daughters, and her husband going along with it. Oh yes, people said an awkward birth made an awkward person. But surely in this case it was the mother, Rose Marsh, unmarried, already shamed with one little bastard daughter, who had been turned awkward and hardened by Nellie’s birth?

Six
     
    Vivian held her baby girl in her arms, bundled up in a piece of blue velvet, pressed against her heart and the warmth of her chest, the way shepherds carried lambs, knowing the beating of their own hearts might just work miracles. She took the path along the river. The wind rushed over the water, running fast ripples across its surface. Ahead she saw a woman bent against the wind. She was in the arms of a man, and the two of them went away across the fields. For a moment Vivian thought of Joe and felt a sharp stab of envy. The passion of the couple stirred the lovesickness she still suffered with.
    Outside Anna Moat’s cottage, Vivian hesitated. She had never been here before. But Anna Moats would be able to help her. She’d know how to make her baby strong. She crept to the window and peered inside.
    What she saw nearly made Vivian drop the baby. Nellie was there, standing at the stove, candlelight illuminating her back. She was stirring a pot, and she stopped suddenly and turned her head towards the window. All this time Vivian had suffered alone and Nellie was at Anna Moats’s house?
    She heard footsteps. Louisa Moats and a man talking together. That was who was on the riverbank. That ragbag woman and the wheelwright. Vivian felt herself chastised all over again. Nellie was here, punishing her still; but surely, after what she had endured alone, she deserved to be forgiven? She turned and hurried back to the cottage, tears stinging her eyes.
    At home she lay in her bed with the child. The fire had gone out. The stove was cold. She had no coal left and no strength to get in wood.
    ‘Nellie will come,’ she whispered, drawing the baby closer. ‘Nellie has to come back