Spilt Milk by Amanda Hodgkinson Page B

now.’
    ‘I’m swollen up,’ said Mrs Thomas. ‘I can’t even get my shoes on. I need a doctor, but my husband says he’s drunk in the pub and won’t come out. You’d better know what you’re doing, you two.’
    Mrs Thomas’s five children stared out from their seats beside the open hearth. Baby clothes were airing by the fire.
    ‘This is an infusion of blackthorn leaves,’ said Nellie, handing a bottle to Mrs Thomas. ‘From Anna, for your pains.’ Nellie took gloves from her pocket. ‘Can we boil some water? I need these to be as clean as possible.’
    ‘What is she going to do with another brat?’ whispered Louisa as Nellie boiled the gloves. ‘Don’t look like she can manage the ones she’s got. Do you reckon I should tell her how there are ways you can bring off a cure in the early months? Just in case she falls pregnant again after this one? Means you can keep your husband happy and yourself in a decent state too.’
    ‘You children should go and play,’ said Nellie loudly, though she knew it was far too cold for them to be outside. She wished Louisa would stop talking like this.
    ‘You should know too. Every woman should,’ whispered Louisa. Nellie coloured darkly. Louisa talked of purges and cures, pennyroyal and Epsom salts, castor oil, bitter aloes, a bit of gunpowder on a dab of margarine.
    ‘When I was a littl’un,’ Louisa said, fishing the gloves out of the water with a pair of wooden tongs, ‘there was always women wanting help, coming up our garden path. Coins in their hands and problems in their bellies. I helped me ma and I never looked away. Not once. I’ve seen stuff would have you on the floor in a dead faint.’
    ‘I don’t doubt it,’ said Nellie, and wondered if she didn’t feel faint right now.
    Anna Moats had been right. Mrs Thomas knew what she was doing. The baby was born quickly and without fuss. Nellie wrapped it in a clean sheet, trying not to notice the swollen genitals, scarlet as boiled beetroot. She set about tying off the cord with a shoelace as Anna had showed her.
    ‘This one’s called Christopher,’ said Mrs Thomas, lying back on the pillow. ‘Handsome little chap, en’t he? My lovely boy. Christopher Thomas. He’ll go far, when he grows up. I got a good feeling for him.’
    Nellie thought he was anything but handsome. She handed him to Louisa, who dangled him upside down and slapped his buttocks. The older children stood in the doorway, scratching their heads, laughing when the baby screamed. Mrs Thomas was seedy with lice too. Nellie had seen them moving through her hair as she wiped sweat from her brow.
    Outside in the cold night, Nellie stood with a spade in her hand. Snow was still falling. She had blood on her apron and her hands were shaking. She kicked the spade into the ground, making a hole. The frozen earth didn’t want to yield and she grew warm, chipping away at the soil. She bent to pick up the bucket and tipped it, pouring the afterbirth into the hole, kicking the earth back over it and stamping the ground down. Anna Moats said it was important to bury it deep. That way the child would never stray far from home. Like having your roots in the ground, Anna reckoned. You might go away, but you’d always come home because that’s where your beginnings were.
    Nellie had been surprised when Anna had told her that her beginnings were in the orchard by the cottage. Vivian’s too. And if Anna had been their mother’s midwife, then why had Rose always disliked the old woman so?
    Nellie gathered flat stones and laid them on top of the compacted soil to keep foxes away. She heard footsteps and stopped. It was Louisa.
    ‘The husband has turned up. I don’t think they need us any more. I forgot to say, I saw your sister earlier. She was outside the house. Ran off like the devil was after her. It en’t none of my business, but I reckon you should go and see her.’
    Nellie felt snow melt on her eyelashes. She tasted the icy flakes on her