Bone House_ A Novel - Betsy Tobin [9]
She stops suddenly and looks at me, her face a mask. “There was no need,” she says after a moment. “The baby died with her. I am sure of it.”
I stare at her a moment. “How long was she with child?” I ask.
“Some months. Five, perhaps six. She did not know.”
“But you did.”
My mother shrugs. “Six,” she says.
“She kept it secret?” I ask a little incredulously. Dora had never before made a secret of her pregnancies. That she would do so now strikes me as strange.
“She did not want it known.”
“Why?” I demand.
My mother hesitates. “She had her reasons,” she says finally. I stare at her expectantly. She looks at me and shakes her head. “But I was not aware of them.”
I sigh and lower myself into a chair while my mother continues with her work. She takes a bowl of bread dough from near the fireplace and turns it out on the table, punching it with vigor. I watch her turn and slap it for a minute, listen to the sound of each blow bounce off the stone mantel. When she is through she shapes it with her hands, patting and rotating it in her palms until it forms a wheel. I think of Long Boy and his appetite: who will make his bread tomorrow?
“Her death does not make sense,” I say.
“It was her time,” she says brusquely.
“You cannot believe that,” I reply. My mother purses her lips, but says nothing. I rise and look her in the eye. “Why did she die?” I say. My mother stares at me a long moment.
“She met with fear,” she replies finally. “It killed her.” She starts to turn away from me but I grab her arm.
“What do you mean?”
She glances over at Long Boy, then lowers her voice.
“Two weeks ago she came to see me. I have never seen her thus,” she says. “She believed there was something wrong with the baby inside her. She claimed . . . it was the devil’s child.” For the first time I see the fear in her eyes.
“What did she mean?”
My mother shakes her head. “She would not say.”
I stare at her a moment. “Have you spoken of this to anyone?”
“No.” She pauses. “What good would come of it? She is dead.”
“Yes, but—”
She stops me with a shake of her head. “You know as well as I what would happen were I to bring the devil’s name into it,” she says, a little accusingly. Her eyes are flashing now, angry.
I look at her but the face I see is that of Goodwife Kemble, who was tried for witchcraft in our village not three years ago. She had fallen out with her former employer and was accused of casting spells over his household, resulting in the death of first his livestock, then his second son. Less than a fortnight after the altercation the boy succumbed to a mysterious fever that appeared suddenly and without warning. His cap was found buried in a dungheap behind her cottage, and this was the principal evidence used against her in court. At trial she admitted to base feelings against her former employer but swore that she had not consorted with the devil. She was an old woman, a spinster who had a reputation as a gossip and a scold, which served her poorly in the end. As a final test of her guilt, she was taken to the village pond where she was ducked repeatedly under the icy waters until she finally succumbed.
My mother picks up a rush broom and begins to sweep the floor with vigorous strokes. She is right: it would be very risky for an older woman of the village to raise the devil’s name in connection with any death. The magistrates are known to be swift in their condemnation and merciless in their sentencing of anyone connected to sorcery, and over the past decade I have heard tell of at least half a dozen women, most of them my mother’s age or older, who have come to such an end.
“She must have told you something,” I insist, leaning forward.
My mother ignores me and continues sweeping. At that moment, her mean-spirited cat appears in the window and hisses at me. Irritated, my mother waves the broom in its direction and the cat jumps clear, landing deftly beside the table where it finds a scrap of suet.
“Who fathered the child?” I ask. My mother stops and looks at me.
“What kind of nonsense question is that?!” she