1

October 28, 1818. My father once told me I had the mind of a man.  He meant to say I was a freak of nature, as was, he suspected, my mother. But I feel no such mind within me now. Now I am soft, and tired, and feel like weeping, but I cannot bring forth any tears, even though I must perform a sacred task: I must wash the body of my beloved friend, Abigail Adams.

In death she rests peacefully. The fever that had her body trembling for near two weeks is gone. The fluid no longer rattles in her poor chest. And the telltale rash of the typhus has begun to fade on her belly.

She lies in the master chamber at Peacefield, the estate John bought whilst still in London and that was such a disappointment to her upon her return. It was nothing like she remembered it as a child. It was smaller, and sadly neglected. John, disappointed with the soil, dubbed the place Stony Field. Now the home, with its fine additions and gardens, is rather grand and quite fertile. But she is no longer.

They said in youth she looked like Venus: fair, and so harmonious in all her parts that men grew awkward around her. But John was never awkward around her. No, he who was awkward everywhere else—a fiery Humpty Dumpty to the laughing world—around his Portia grew tall, and young, a confident lover.

He called her Portia like faithful Brutus’s wife; but she is no Portia now, no Venus, neither. Her body, at seventy-two, has wasted to skin and bone. The assaults it has borne these many years—the death of Charles, and poor Nabby, her eldest, who died in agony in this very room, of a cancer in the breast—they lie upon her as defeated folds of flesh. Calluses mark her fingers from days and years of sewing, husking, weaving, and gathering. And there are faded burn marks, too—burns on arms, elbows, palms, all scorched so often through the years, her mind on other things.  She hardly felt them, but wondered afterward from whence they came.  And all those years away from John—those marks are there, too, around the eyes that I have shut, lines that tell the pain of loss. I will anoint them with precious rose oil crushed from her roses.  I will put balm on her lips and hands, and rub it in gently, with the love I still feel and have felt for her for more than forty years. I need only a moment to compose myself.

There are half a dozen people in the house on this terrible day. Family, neighbors, doctors. It is terrible within—there is death within—but without it is a fine autumn day. I look out the window—the same window Nabby must have looked out as she died—to see Abigail’s gardens as she left them: the roses and hollyhocks are gone to sleep for the winter, but violet asters and pink sedum still line the paths. The maples have rained their golden, red, and orange tinctured leaves upon the ground; the wind has scattered them throughout the garden. No one has thought to rake them. Her last sojourn into the garden had been with John, to pick apples for a pie. But in these two weeks John halted all work, except to feed the animals.

The gardens at Peace Field are more formal than they had been at the old farm, more befitting a president and his first lady. Beside them stands John’s library, his pride and joy, filled with books I myself have borrowed and returned over the years, books that kept me company throughout many a cold, dark winter and that Abigail and I read together, to keep us sane when God himself seemed to have abandoned us.

One day last week she seemed to revive. And when she looked out her window across the grounds where the orchards lay, she was appalled that the apples, bursting with ripeness, had not been picked.

“John!” she called, although Dr. Holbrook had forbidden her to speak. “Fetch John, Eliza.”

Eliza is her niece, daughter of Abigail’s older sister Mary Cranch, who stays here in the guest room. A bright and obliging woman of thirty, she ran to fetch John who, believing his wife to be out of danger, had gone to work in his study down the hall.

Now he came running, panic in his old, stricken face.

“John,” she turned upon hearing his footsteps, “why are the apples not picked? They will rot.”

John replied, “My love, I had thought it prudent to cease the farm work while you were ill. I did not want the noise to disturb you.”

“Nonsense,” Abigail replied. But I thought I saw her smile faintly. “They must carry on, or it shall all go to waste. I could not bear that.”

She glanced at me then, and I knew we were both recalling the summer of the terrible drought, 1778, when mine were the only apples to survive, thanks to the ingenious watering invention of Mr. Cleverly.

Indeed, she never could bear waste of any kind, as John well knew, and when she was able to see the workers pick the ripe fruit from the trees that afternoon, she grew calmer.

But the next day her fever returned, and I knew then it would not spare her. She lay close to death all weekend, conscious but perfectly still. On Monday, I packed to go home, as my husband had sent a messenger with news of a sick grandchild—but she stopped me. She must have heard a change in my foot steps, the way dogs know when its master plans to go abroad. She called weakly,

“Lizzie, don’t leave.”

I went in to her room, sat down on by the bed, and took her hand. John was already there, on the other side, and a more stricken man I have never laid eyes on, though I have seen many deaths in my day.

“I feel I am dying,” she said, “and I am ready to go to my Maker. Except that I hate to leave him—” here she turned to her husband. “It is parting from you I cannot bear.”

I turned away to hide my tears.

John kept a brave face, even managing a smile for his Portia.

“We shall not be parted for long, my love. Rest now.”

She seemed to fall into a doze then. I got up, gently taking my hand from her, and went downstairs to speak with Louisa and Thomas. There, in her large parlor, filled with the French furniture I never did think suited her (and told her so) sat Dr. Holbrook, and their good neighbor, Harriet Welsh. Dr. Holbrook woke from his doze by the fire. He looked at me inquiringly, but I merely shook my head. Eliza began to sob; Tom raced up and took me by the shoulders, begging to know what had transpired.

But in another moment he disengaged himself from me, as his father, barely able to stay on his feet, walked in.

John Adams passed a trembling hand over his head.

“I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to see her this way. I wish—” and here we all held our breaths, wondering what this remarkable man, our great Patriot and second President, wished as his wife of fifty-four years lay dying.

“I wish to lie down and die with her.”

Tom went to his father and embraced him. Then they sent for a messenger; the President, John Quincy, had to be notified that his mother was dying.

I waited upon her devotedly, but she spoke no more after that. We took turns in the room with her, never leaving her alone, for we knew the end to be near. And I recalled so vividly all our many days and years together—before she left for Europe, then afterwards, when she returned much changed on the outside, like her fancy furniture, though not at all within. In particular I recalled those first, hard years of our friendship: I, a new widow, she a widow to the Cause, with four children and not a morsel of bread for months and months. I recalled the terrible cold, and our trembling terror every time the sun went down for the night; and the two (as-yet unsolved) deaths of those men we called the Patriots, who had been staying at the Cranches; the unseen menace we felt, not just for ourselves but to everything we held most dear…

It was death that first drew us together. First, my husband, Jeb, in April of ’75, then her dear mother in October of the same year, of the bloody flux. We call that the dysentery now. Her mother lingered for two weeks, too—and she herself only just recovered, and the children ill and John away. Oh, terrible memory! We did everything we could for her. Dr. Tufts came, his own son ill with the same sickness, and eight buried in our own parish alone, just that Sunday.

I made her a dish of willow bark tea, which relieved her suffering, but could not save her. And when I washed the body and dressed it, so slowly and carefully, the way I had learned to do from my own mother, Abigail looked on in fascination, almost smiling though in the most terrible grief.

“Dear friend,” I said to her gently, “What makes you smile at a time like this?”

She turned to me and said, “When it is my turn, I want you to wash my body like that.”

“Oh,” I said, shrugging off her comment. “I am sure to go to my Maker long before you. You are made of impenetrable stuff.”

But she would not be put off. I did not know her well then, as I do now.

“Promise me,” she said.

And by her mother’s eyes, which I then closed, I promised her. That was forty-three years ago.

Now I must go fulfill that promise. Later, there will be time to tell the story of those hard days. She would have wanted me to, for posterity. For otherwise, as she might say, a very good story would go to waste.

2

Saturday, June 17, 1775. At around four in the morning, just before dawn, our entire parish was awakened by what sounded like a terrible explosion north of town.  I bolted up in the darkness.  I felt the blood that had pooled between my legs during the night but I could not stop to wash myself.  I lifted my chin to force the tears back into my head. No time for tears. He has no heir, I thought. I changed my pad of cotton, wishing desperately to steady my shaking body by a cup of ladies’ mantle tea, but was driven abroad by the thunderous noise.

It was a good mile’s walk to the base of Penn's Hill from Mt. Wollaston, where Jeb and I had our farm. But that was where everyone was headed, as it afforded the best possible view of Boston. I recall bodies passing me in the darkness, vague, shadowy figures, some in their bedclothes, some with torches. The tanner and Parson Wibird, Brackett the innkeeper and the Cranches—and me, a young wife among many, tho some had babes beneath their shawls. We all headed through town to climb the hill.

And, oh, how I prayed it was Boston under siege. For my husband, my Jeb, was in Cambridge with Colonel Prescott’s regiment.  At last I found myself atop the hill, where many others stood that night, watching in awe and terror.  Whispering or quietly sobbing.  I did neither that I recall, merely stood there, feeling the rumble and watching the flames shoot up, higher and brighter. There was the rumble of fear upon that hill, mixed with the rumble of the cannons. Occasionally, a cry pierced the darkness; and children clung to their parents’ legs while the older ones ran about, excited by the commotion, and everything done by hellish torchlight. I didn’t speak, but only watched smoke form above Charleston, gray against the black sky.

As the sky lightened I noticed a woman standing by my side with her arm around a small boy of about seven or eight.  She too said nothing, spoke to no one, but merely watched in horror, clutching her child.

Someone with a torch passed by, and in that momentary flicker of light I saw: it was Abigail Adams, wife of our delegate John Adams, with their eldest boy John Quincy.

When our eyes met briefly, her face softened in recognition, but still, I saw she could not quite place me.

“Jeb Boylston's wife,” I offered.  “Elizabeth.  Lizzie.”

“Oh,” she said, surprised.  “Of course.  Then we are related.” Jeb’s mother was a cousin of Josiah Quincy, which is how we had procured our farm that autumn past.  It had been our wedding gift from the great Patriot, the Colonel himself. Abigail's mother was a cousin of Jeb's mother. “I am Abigail and this is Johnny.”

Johnny looked up at me from under his mother's arm.

“Is Jeb not here?” she looked around. 

“No, he is there,” I nodded in the direction of the smoke, “with Colonel Prescott.”

Suddenly, there was a terrible crack!  It sounded like lightning hitting a tree.  I could feel my knees buckle beneath me. 

“Are you hurt?” Abigail fell at once to her knees, searching.  “Where? Where is it?”

“No, no.”  I shook my head, smiled, endeavored to stand. “I feel—I have this feeling—” and here I sobbed into my shawl, as I could not give voice to what I felt, what I knew: Jeb was on his way to Charlestown. Those cannons were meant for him.

I struggled up. 

“I must go,” I said.

“Go?  Where do you plan to go at this hour?” she asked me, thinking Reason had left me, as indeed it had. For all around was darkness, save for the hectic torches blurring swathes of firelight.

“I must go to him.”

“There?” She nodded towards the smoke over Charlestown. “You know that is impossible.  Oh, my dearest,” she placed her arm around me.  “I know what it is like to be separated from your beloved.  But you must bear it.  There is nothing else to be done.  Tomorrow,” she sighed.  “Tomorrow we will know more, perhaps.”

“But I will not bear it,” I cried.  “I must go, and go now.  I will borrow a horse of Colonel Quincy.”

I moved away, to walk the mile down the hill and towards home in the dark, when I felt her hand on my arm.

“If you must go then take John’s mare,” she said.  “Tell Isaac to accompany you.  It will be faster that way.  And far safer.  Go to Cambridge.  They will have news there, and answers—if anyone has.”

I cried, hugged her to me, knowing that in this darkest moment of my life I had made a friend.

3

A shimmer of dawn was just rising to the east, casting faint hope across the village.  I found myself knocking at the shack of Isaac Copeland, who lived behind the small barn on the Adams property. He seemed to have slept through everything.  Only my frantic knocking woke him, and when I finally stated my business, he—a very young, dirty lad—rubbed the sleep from his eyes with his black knuckles.

“We have no ladies’ saddle, Ma'am. The Missus always rides in the chaise.”

“It is of little import to me, so long as you have one.”

He moved out of the doorway and I noticed other farm hands sleeping on straw mats in that tiny shack. They were shadowy figures who would soon rise up to muster on the training field, much to Abigail's loss. 

He went to the barn—more a lean-to, really, as it had but three walls and a sorry thatched excuse for a roof—and brought a sweet little mare out to greet me.  I took consolation in her warm breath, her soft muzzle. He then offered his dirty hands to my grimy foot, and up I went, sitting astraddle just like a man—hardly convenient given my condition.  But I was heedless of such trifling discomforts then.  I would go to him. I would go to him whether he be dead or alive.  For I considered that motion—whether towards, or away from—was all we had to offer others in this life. Perhaps in the next Our Maker has seen fit to give us other means of expressing our finest emotions. 

The dawn grew brighter on my right flank as I made my way up the Coast Road towards Boston.  With the light my strength rallied. Fear calmed, and I left Isaac at Milton. He was obviously relieved to be going no further with me, anxious only lest his mistress should scold him for his neglect.

Many were already awake and running about in Milton when I arrived in that town; it was Sabbath morning, but there would be no Sabbath that day.  Not even the most fervent pastors could draw the people off their hills, as the pummeling of Charlestown by British cannons continued all throughout that day, with its thunderous din and choking black smoke.

I ignored the stares as I passed through the center of the town, for a woman upon a man's saddle had never been seen before, and I thought bitterly how such an irrelevancy fought for attention with the burning of Charlestown and the immanent deaths of many young men.

The closer I came to Cambridge, my birthplace, the more fearful I grew. At Roxbury, I came across a camp of ragtag militia. A band of boys with bayonets and giving themselves airs of soldiers, were stopping all those headed west towards Cambridge. I wished to water and rest John Adams’s little mare, and longed for a dish of tea and a biscuit. I reasoned I would need my strength, tho I had no wish to tarry.  But as I tied the mare to a post and made to cross the street to enter the Greyhound Tavern, one of the bayonet-holding boys held me back.

“State your purpose, Miss,” he said to me, barring my path with his bayonet. He was a young man, hardly older than Jeb, with pale eyes that were not unkind.

“To have a dish of tea,” I said to him, and smirked. “Is that still legal?”

He looked at me as if I were an odd creature, not entirely human. I went and had my dish of tea; a servant boy went out to water and oat the little mare while I did so. When I exited the tavern the soldier was still there. He came up to me and stood before me, warningly.

“They say the fighting intensifies at Charleston.”

“My husband is there, with Colonel Prescott,” I said simply, and moved to cross the street.

He let me pass, but at the last moment called after me.

“Colonel Prescott is already upon Breed’s Hill. You cannot reach him. It is foolish, what you do! Everyone seeks to leave Cambridge, not enter it!”

I merely hopped upon the little mare and urged her on with my calves, west towards Cambridge and the Great Bridge. It was neither the first nor the last time I would be called a fool.

My flagging strength rallied from the tea and biscuit. The little mare and I continued up the road, through Brookline. On the way we saw many fleeing in the other direction: families with all their worldly possessions heaped into carts; crying children, dogs darting wildly across the road, and young men on horseback with the guilty expressions of deserters. They stared at me as if I were a madwoman, but I pressed on. I could almost feel my Jeb’s presence as I approached Cambridge. Prescott’s regiment, I reasoned, would have spent the night at the Common or perhaps upon Prospect Hill farther east. I would have news of them if nothing else.

At last I arrived at the bridge. The late morning air had grown hot, and for a moment, alone upon the bridge, I was able to enjoy the grandeur of God’s earth, for the Charles at this point was beautifully winding and tranquil and the trees were all in bloom. I recalled how, but two months earlier, the very planks upon which I stood had been removed, to prevent the British from crossing over.  The ruse failed, alas.

My enjoyment was brief in the extreme. I, too, crossed the river then, into the world men had made—brave men and cowards, struggle and unnatural death.

At the Common, a strange scene awaited me: on the one hand, there lay all across the yard the vast detritus of a recently-abandoned camp: heaps of ash, coal, and animal bones. The stench of urine and foeces and horse dung. Tents of those men too ill, or feigning illness, to have moved east with the others. The groans and cries of illness. I shrank before the sound and the stench, everything made worse by an unnatural summer heat.

But upon this image lay another: Parson Boardman, whether of the First Parish Church or elsewhere I knew not, was in the midst of a sermon en plein air. Though clearly meant for the soldiers, not half a dozen men of fighting age sat in the audience. Women and old men listened with half an ear to a large man in a huge wig, perspiration raining down upon his black habit in this hottest of days, decrying human frailty, while all around them officers and servants scrambled belatedly to gather their tents and munitions and head east.  I stopped one dirty boy as he raced off with half a dozen muskets in his arms and inquired as to the whereabouts of Colonel Prescott’s regiment.

“There,” he nodded towards Charlestown with his chin. “They passed the night at Charleston. There’s some of us what’s bringing aid.”

Aid indeed. I looked at the dirty boy and his pile of bad muskets that I doubted could kill a crow at a rod’s distance.

“Well, God be with you,” I said. I considered giving him a message for my Jeb, but stopped myself. Even were the boy to get through to Breed’s Hill, it would only make Jeb fret to know I was nearby. He could neither be with me nor protect me. I doubted he could even protect himself. I said nothing more to the boy.

It was, in all, a journey towards death. You must not suppose me fool enough to believe otherwise. And yet I hoped; I saw him running towards me, dirty yet whole. I saw him stumble towards his beloved Star, press his weary head upon his warm flank. Oh, I saw many a ghost of things that could be in those hours before I saw what truly was.

I turned back to the parson and felt only a mounting anger. Of what earthly use were his words, words about human frailty? Let him take up a bad musket like all the rest and risk his frail human life upon the hill, like my Jeb!

The sun was by now quite high in the sky. The clock in Christ Church, now given over to a barracks, told the time: past one o’clock. To the east, I could hear cannon fire.  It seemed, of a sudden, to intensify. And still the parson droned on. Though hot and faint with exhaustion, I could not bear it upon the Common a moment longer, and made the decision to move down the road to Charleston. This time, unlike in Roxbury, no one stopped me. There were no orderly rows of soldiers upon the road, no organization of any kind. Only chaos: frightened boys fleeing, some bloodied, some looking at me wildly as I rode the little mare onwards.

At the base of Prospect Hill, I found evidence of the men: a few horses, too, were there. No sign of Star, however. I pressed on, and within five minutes came at last to our “army”: a bedlam of sick and dirty men and boys, of blood and gore such as I dare not describe. I had arrived at the ninth circle of Hell, but such as even the great Italian poet could not have imagined. The clear, still air was pierced by unceasing and wild cries of the wounded and dying. 

I was grateful only for the presence of the other women in the camp, for by then I had passed many hours among staring townsfolk and leering guards. Although no direct danger had befallen me, I felt weak and shaken.

I had little time to rest. I tied my horse to a post and approached a group of women. They were run off their feet doing what they could for the wounded, and washing the bodies of them for whom no medicine could save.  I immediately fell upon one such woman who seemed ready to collapse with exhaustion. She looked to be a lady of aristocratic background. Her face, though streaked with blood and dirt, was pale and fine; her forehead was quite tall, and overall her demeanor bespoke a British family treasure. She reminded me, achingly, of my own mother.

All around, the suffering of our boys was extreme—some were black with burns; others had multiple bayonet wounds and leaked like stuck sausages on the grill. I asked this woman if I could help her, and without a word she nodded to a boy some ten yards off, lying on a pallet of straw.  He was blue-white in color, his lips drawn back across his teeth in suffering.  He could not have been more than sixteen.

“Hold his hand,” she said.  “It cannot be long.”

I went to his side, took his hand.

“I'm here,” I said.  “I won't leave you.”

His eyes rolled to the side, catching me in their enlarged pupils.  He grasped my hand, and when I looked down I saw that half his torso had been torn away.

“Marmy,” he said.  “I would like my Marmy.”  His eyes leaked tears, for he knew his “Marmy” was very far away.

“I won't leave you, brave soldier,” I said.  Those two words seemed to give him some faint comfort, because he soon shut his eyes.  His face relaxed, and in five minutes more, he was gone.

Oh, Lord, the suffering of this world!

After what I had seen that morning, it would be too much to describe my own suffering that afternoon, when they brought my Jeb to me. I say “to me,” but it wasn't to me—for no one knew who I was. Those stopping to presume at all must have presumed I was another nurse come to help the wounded.  For I had that skill and used it now as best I could.

It must have been around five in the afternoon, when for the better part of an hour we had ceased to hear any sounds of war, when I espied him lying face-up upon a rustic cart, beside another dead boy, even younger than himself.  Jeb was dead, as I knew at once.  And may the Lord forgive me if I say that this understanding was a great, a selfish relief.  Had there been time for a parting scene with him I surely would have gone mad.

No, as it was, I was half numb; my own blood leaked to the ground and mixed with the blood of those lost boys, of whom my beloved was but one.

“This is my husband,” I said to the gentlewoman whom I had been helping all morning.  She looked at me in astonishment, at my apparent calm.  She asked,

“Do you wish for me to wash him? It is more than a wife should have to bear,” she said. 

“No, I should like to.” I did not say that I wished to feel something, for I had grown so cold and numb.

Should I describe that final caress?  I will leave my reader to imagine it: the young, healthy, boy and his single, fatal wound, which I gently felt around, marveling at how so small, so insignificant a thing as a bayonet tip could bring down such a strong spirit as that of my Jeb.  The linen string I had tied in his hair the morning he departed was still there; I took it and tied it around my neck.

When I had washed his body, I felt I should collapse.  Such was, by then, my exhaustion.

I knew I could not make it back to Braintree, and so I sent a boy to the Boylstons west of the Common, to let them know their son was dead, and that their daughter-in-law requested help. In the note, I mentioned John Adams’s little mare, and suggested they search for Star among the officers at the Common. I did not know then he had left Star with them before mustering on the Common.

My wait was long. It was near night before I was delivered of my agony among those dead and dying. I must have lost consciousness, for the first thing I recall after being lifted from that field is someone saying, “Gently, gently!  Lift her gently!” Then I recall being helped to my feet before the house on Brattle Street. 

I heard no horses’ hooves and asked, agitated,

“Star, where is Star?  Did you find him? And the little mare?” I worried lest they be stolen—the last living thing to touch my husband, and John Adams’s precious mare.

“Bennett is bringing the mare,” assured one of the Boylston servants.

“But did you find Star? He was perhaps at Hastings’s place.”

Jonathan Hastings’ house on the Common was at the time the headquarters of General Ward. He was a great Patriot, and both his sons distinguished themselves in the war.

“No, Ma’am. He is in the stables, rest you easy.”

“In the stables? Oh, that is good.”

Knowing the animals were safe, I was greatly relieved. And then I was led to bed upstairs, and someone came in to bathe and change me, for I was so filthy and blood-besmirched as to be a danger to myself.  Outside, it was still quite warm, but within the Boylston home, with its thick walls and dark, north-facing chambers, it was cool.  A soft bolster of pure down caressed me. Soon, though the house be in nearly as much chaos as its environs, everything went blissfully dark. A prayer formed on my lips for Him to take me as I slept. I did not wish ever to wake.

4

To die, to sleep, perchance to dream—aye, there’s the rub.

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause.

It is not a Christian sentiment, to wish for death. But I understood Hamlet perfectly. Indeed, I have always understood the sentiments of Shakespeare’s men, as I have never entirely understood the sermons of my church.  Death defines us: our goodness in sacrifice, or our evil in cruelty. It is death we fear, or long for. It our unceasing awareness of death that makes our life a joy and a tragedy. Parson Wibird never spoke in this way; but I always thought so nonetheless.

I was twenty-one, and I wanted to die. But would that sleep be once of peace? My sleep that night was dark yet restless. Images from waking life kept invading it. I kept dreaming of our parting scene, Jeb’s kiss goodbye the morning he rode off to Cambridge.

It was a bright May morning, one month earlier. He sat on his beloved Star, a sprightly Narragansett pacer, and I handed him up his sack, which I had made for him and filled with cheese, bilberry preserve, and good dried meat. I had to shield my eyes from the sun.

“You are tan,” he remarked, looking at my arm. “May you be a good little farmer while I'm gone. Watch Thaxter (that was one of our field hands) doesn't drink all our rum.”

He laughed, and I smiled.  Everything he said to me had an ironical tone, for we were both quite new at this farming business, and still felt ourselves to be play-acting at it.  Jeb and I had grown up surrounded by city comforts, in staunch British families, right there on Cambridge’s Tory Row.

Then he looked at me so thoughtfully, so tenderly.  “You're a strong woman.  Oh, how I love you, Lizzie Boylston!”  And with that he blew me a kiss began to head up the road towards Boston.

Strength, my curse! Could I bear it? Could I bear it without at least a final kiss? I could not. Why should he think I could? Because I hauled bushels of corn? Because I delivered healthy babes in the dead of night, with no help save from ignorant servant-girls? Because, bored and shut-in as a girl, I had read my father’s library?  Shakespeare, Dante, Ovid, Pliny, St. Augustine!—Of what use were they to me now? I wanted to cry out that I was not strong; I was soft inside, and could not bear it.

As if sensing my agony, Jeb slowed. He turned Star around, leapt off him, and came running into my arms. He kissed me then. I felt his soft, blond curls, which I had pulled back with a piece of my finest homespun linen, brush against my neck.

“Be careful, my love,” I said.

“Yes, Sir!” he laughed, saluted me. Then he mounted Star, nudged him with his knees, and disappeared up the Coast Road, towards Boston.

When he was truly gone, I sat myself in the open doorway of the kitchen garden.  The chickens, thinking I had something for them, came pecking at my feet.  I had nothing for them except tears.

Suddenly I felt quite done in, quite alone. I had no one in the world save his family, whom I ardently disliked.  My own mother died of the throat distemper in the terrible epidemic that hit Boston in 1769. And my father, who had been a judge in his Majesty’s court, fled to England at the start of the troubles.  A man of great secret sympathy for the Cause, he had intended to return once the rebels had been “put down.” But he caught pneumonia and died within a month of landing there. Finally, there was my brother Thomas, who joined a privateer ship in the fall of ’74, just after Jeb and I moved to Braintree. I knew not whether he lived, but greatly doubted of it. I missed them all terribly now, and felt heartily sorry for myself.

To shake off my gloom, I stood up. I walked back inside my house, wandered it like a ghost that had been dumped from the cart on the road to heaven. I entered the dairy, to gaze upon my medicines. “Witch’s potions,” Jeb called them. I ran my fingertips over the jars and vials of powder, potions and poultices. Senna, manna, Glauber’s salt, snakeroot. Here’s rosemary. That’s for memory. Of what use were they to me now? None of them could return my Jeb to me.

He wrote me every day from Cambridge, and I wrote him back.  It was all I could do to keep myself from borrowing a horse and riding out to him.  But that would not have pleased him.  Conditions, while they were to get much worse, were already bad.  The water was putrid, and our soldiers, drinking cider all day, were dirty and unruly.  Many were sick, he wrote.  The canker rash was everywhere, and some also had the bloody flux.  No, I could not ride to Cambridge.  It would have pleased me to do so, but not him. I was just learning to be a woman—to give pleasure freely, and to take it when offered.  But mainly I was learning to defer. My Jeb was no bully; he was the best of men. But to defer was the lot of womanhood.

But then, in the second week of June, I received a message that made me shiver: a rumor was going around that his regiment would soon be marching to Charlestown.  The British were poised to fire from Cop’s Hill and they must hold them back.

I can tell you no more at present. But know that you are dearer to me than anything in the world. I will write from our new camp. 

But I heard nothing more.  I wrote once more, but whether my letter reached him I did not know.  I had all the while hoped and prayed I was with child.  Then I began to bleed: late, and profusely, accompanied by terrible cramps.  I lay in bed all that day, ill and with a terrible foreboding, until the guns woke me up along with the rest of the parish, and we all drove ourselves in the dark, dawning morning up Penn’s Hill.

It was with this last memory, the memory of walking up Penn’s Hill, that the mantle of sleep lightened. I rose up through my uneasy dreams to find one of the Boylston servants standing over me with a dish of tea.

5

The maidservant, a plump woman of middling age, with her starched white pinafore, had the bright, morally superior manner of someone who has been up for many hours. 

Handing me my tea, she said, “Whenever you are ready, Ma’am, the Mister and Missus wish to see you.”

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Past one,” she replied.

I had only yesterday been at a field hospital upon Prospect Hill.  I now found myself amidst the fading luxury of those whom Time had not touched.  The Crown had done quite well by the Boylstons.  Their home, now on its third-generation, bespoke a timeless sense of ease.  But for the Boylstons it was less an issue of finance than of class: the Rebels could simply never achieve the level of finesse and breeding that they expected of Society. 

Facing the Charles River, the Boylston house presented six large, glitteringly clean glass windows to the world.  Behind the house lay vast gardens and stables.  On this day, cotton tree blossoms had fallen from the trees and made a gauzy, white carpet on the front lawn.

Only the open crates scattered everywhere, and a slight agitation among the servants, bespoke a family in crisis.  They were packing, readying to leave as soon as Jeb were buried.  Where they planned to go, I knew not.  Jeb's mother was one of three surviving Boylstons in Cambridge. Two older children had died of the distemper when my own mother did, as had a baby, a boy.  Now her Jeb was gone, too.

The losses left Mrs. Boylston with an outward glaciality. Inwardly she was fragile, afraid of further loss. She had been beautiful once, and still was: white skin, thin, grim mouth, graying yellow hair mounded high above her crown. I can recall a first, faint hope that in grief we could comfort each other. But in this I was to be disappointed.

Mr. Boylston had a haughty, self-satisfied air, yet I detected softness in him, some quality that might have developed further given a warmer, more encouraging mate.  He gave poor Jeb much grief for not wanting to be a merchant like himself, for preferring to have a bit of land to work, and to fight for the Cause—

“As useless and foolhardy a pursuit,” he once bellowed at me, “as ever I’ve seen! It’ll as soon get you killed as win you glory.”

Mr. Boylston had been right about that.

But it was Eliza, Jeb's older sister, who was the most heartless of the three.  Mrs. Boylston’s heart had been damaged; Mr. Boylston kept his own in check; but Eliza seemed to have been born without one.  Rumor had it she had already turned away a dozen suitors, finding all of them inferior. What’s more, Eliza had tried to talk her brother out of marrying me. For this I had not forgiven her.

Some of what she had said to him was true: in his hasty flight back to England, my father had left me little, and our house had soon thereafter been confiscated. But my father had been a man of excellent learning and solid, if not exalted, family background. My mother, on the other hand, could trace her background back to one of the English Queens. I had nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, by strict British standards of blood and breeding, the Lees trumped the Boylstons rather soundly.

I rose and dressed slowly. My limbs refused to move without constant command. While I was dressing, Eliza—looking just as tall and haughty as I remembered her, her fair hair set in the mountainous European heights of the day—banged furiously into my chamber.  Tears stained her red face, and she wiped them with the silk ruffle of her French gown. 

“I see you are awake,” she said with a disdainful smile, as if I had merely been lounging about. 

“Yes, I hadn’t slept since early Saturday morning.  I was overcome—” and upon the word “overcome,” I was indeed overcome, and could not say another word.  For there is nothing so base or humiliating as the show of grief before someone whose heart is unmoved.

“Indeed, none of us has have slept.  You have slept nineteen hours together. Mama despairs of your ever getting up. Shall I tell her you are coming? Papa is waiting, too—we have things to discuss.”

“I wish to see Jeb,” I said.  “Where is he?”

“He lies in his room across the hall.  You may go when you wish,” she said.

“Indeed, I shall.” 

As if I needed her permission to see my dead husband! 

“I must finish dressing,” I said. As I stared at her, her signal to leave, a smile played across her thin lips.

“Your skirts and bodice and stays are hung over there,” she nodded to the deep closet across the room—a real sign of the Boylston wealth.  Jeb and I had not a single such closet. Each room in our house looked like a workshop of some kind: tannery, spinning shop, butcher’s or bakery. At the Boylston's, a great deal could be hidden away in those spacious closets.

“We cleaned them, as they were—”

“Very dirty, yes, I know.”

As if the dirt of struggle and sacrifice were a moral flaw!

Eliza moved toward the door, her own long, gleaming black skirts shuffling.  Just when I thought she would leave me she turned and said,

“From the look of your petticoats, it would seem you left us no heir.”

And with that she turned and fled.  I was left speechless by her heartless blow. But instead of crying, I grew inwardly cold.  Never, under any circumstances, would I love Eliza Boylston.

I soon drove her from my mind and made my way across the hall.  My heart beat quickly as I pushed open the door. Twice I nearly turned away, losing courage.  But I told myself, as I had on other occasions, that some things are more important than one's own grief.  I had to say goodbye.  I had to do him that honor. 

He lay in an unfamiliar blue vest and jacket and clean breeches, his hair neatly brushed and pulled behind his ears. Scented candles surrounded him, casting a torpid yellow glow upon his face. In the very neatness of his dress he had already ceased to look like Jeb.  In life he had been far too impulsive, too quick, to be tidy.  But someone had tidied him, probably one of the maids, and I was glad of it. To see him look like himself would have been far too much to bear.

His arms were by his sides, and I touched one.  It was quite cold.  Then I kissed him and turned away.  I cried, even though I felt certain that Jeb was not in that room.

His articles—small, pathetic things—were, however.  They stood on the dresser. Some were still in the sack he bore over his shoulder when we said goodbye. Other items, like his ring and billfold, lay alone.  I took them all up in my arms and brought them to my own room, to go over with great care later.  But now I had to hurry to the parlor, where I thought the Boylstons awaited me.

There, I found only Mr. Boylston.

He was dressed in black and sitting in a tall-backed wing chair by an unlit fire. His hands rested on his knees, as if to steady him.

“Sit, Elizabeth,” he said, pointing to the couch across from himself.

“Would you like tea? Mary can bring us some.”

He pointed a finger at Mary, a young parlor maid, who stood by the entrance to the room.

“Some tea for us. And cakes.”

I had no heart to tell him I’d already had my tea.  As we waited for the tea, Mr. Boylston informed me that the funeral would take place on Wednesday. Jeb would be buried at King’s Chapel.

“In Boston?”

“I’m afraid we have no choice in the matter.”

The church by the Common had been closed for regular service for many months now. Here again, I had no heart to suggest that Jeb would have preferred to be buried on our own land in Braintree rather than in King’s Chapel in Boston.

Then suddenly, in the midst of this rational discourse, Mr. Boylston blurted out,

“Damn troublemakers!”

I bounced up from my seat with the sudden force of his explosion. 

“The damn so-called Patriots! He was smitten by the Devil! He was no more one of them than you are.”

Again, I kept my eyes down, my beating heart mute. For I feared that if I opened my mouth, a wind the likes of Aeolus’s sack upon Odysseus’s ship might blow Mr. Boylston back to England.

“After the funeral, we will send a man to return Mrs. Adams's mare which she graciously lent you, and to pack your things.”

That is when I finally lifted my eyes, and the sack of wind ripped open.

“Pack my things?” I cried.  Many things had occurred to me since first standing on Penn's Hill and realizing that Jeb might not live.  But one thing had never entered my thoughts, and that was to move in with his family.  For that would be the death of me as well.

“Mr. Boylston,” I began more gently, “I thank you for your kindness.  But I cannot possibly live with you.”

“Of course you’ll live with us.  Where else could you be? We cannot in good conscience send you back to that hell-pit of a North Parish with the likes of the Adamses and Hancocks getting people killed every day. We cannot possibly abandon you, a gentlewoman and wife of our son, alone to tend a farm.  What would people say of us?”

I smirked to think how Mr. Boylston had just revealed his truest motives: to uphold his own reputation.

“It is my home,” I replied quietly.  “And I will return to it.”

Mr. Boylston turned red in the face, muttered, “Obstinate creature! I always said as much!”

Then he added, by way a final enticement, “You could practice your—arts—here.”

“Mr. Boylston, the women need me there.  They have no midwives such as myself.  And soon there will be no men, either.  I hardly need mention that we could not see more differently upon the subject of the current conflict.”

“Yes,” he grumbled.  “How that happened, and you with a father so respectable, I cannot guess.”

I smirked at this.  For his own son had “turned” in just the same manner.

I reflected then upon my words. What I had said was not entirely true.  While the women needed me, they still called upon me only in the direst extremity. They did not yet trust me.  In Braintree, certain things were known and not others: that my father had been a Tory judge and fled the country.  That my mother had practiced the alchemical arts—(untrue) and that I myself grew strange plants in my garden, powerful potions and poisons (partly true.  I grew belladonna, which, dried, served me well for stubborn cervixes. I enjoyed tomatoes as well, quite delicious, the seeds of which a friend of my mother's sent her from Europe many years earlier.) But the women of Braintree believed it all to be equally poisonous and myself a throwback to Salem days.

“All the more reason why it is impossible for you to return!  It is unsafe, woman.”

He grasped my hand hard and a cry caught in his throat.

At that moment I thought perhaps the man was a little fond of me.

“Come now,” I said, feeling a surge of compassion. For Jeb’s father had just lost his only son.

But he stood up, wresting free of my grasp.

“I can't reason with you now.  We will discuss it by-and-by.”

I stood up, too, curtsied, and left just as Mary was bringing us the tea. I walked right by her, eager to get back to my treasures. 

I shut my door, bolted it.  I took Jeb's sack and musket.  I could smell the powder and knew he had fired it—vain action!  I pressed the sack to my face, smelling for traces of him.  Then, carefully opening the sack, I removed its contents: the rye and Indian meal bread I'd given him, now but a dry crust remaining; a bladder that had once contained water, but now had neither top nor water. My heart flooded: had he been thirsty at the last? A small piece of dried pork. A lock of my hair, tied with string.  Then, tucked far at the bottom, my last letter to him. I unfolded it and read:

Dearest Jeb,

I am grieved to hear you move closer to danger. But what can I, a mere woman, do to steer the course of generals, colonels, and the world?  I steer my niddy noddy, to fashion you a shirt, and the plough, to make a reasonably straight line for the corn. You see I keep my promise to be your good little farmer while you are gone. Come back, and I’ll be your better wife. Your ever-loving, Lizzie.

Tears leaked in the corners of my eyes. Overcome, I lay back in my bed clutching the sack, and fell into a stupor until dinner, when one of the servants woke me.

The funeral two days later was a solemn affair, and in neither the Church nor the cemetery were we alone, but were surrounded by several other families, some very prominent ones. They too looked flushed and hectic, as if at war within themselves: to leave Boston as soon as may be, or to grieve their dead.

It was yet another hot day. Women in black skirts fanned themselves, looked upon the point of fainting as they listened to an unfamiliar parson and wept.

It was a group service, a group burial, and a group grief. And perhaps because of this I felt buffered from my own private pain. I looked about me and felt a welling pride for all those boys whose families had discouraged them, who had nothing to give, going off to Breed’s Hill, except their mortal selves.  I cried for these boys then, but not for Jeb. No, that would come later.

As the parson had finished his business and gone off to condole with each family, and we were all walking slowly away, toward a carriage, to return to Cambridge, I saw an officer emerge from the crowd and approach me.  He was quite tall—over six feet—and wore the costume of a man of high rank.  His hair, parted in the middle, was braided in the back, revealing a high forehead and bright, brilliant blue eyes.  His face, despite the regret and indecision of approaching me, nonetheless betrayed an unnerving kindness. As he approached, I saw he was holding something in his gloved hand. Then I knew who this man was. 

“Madame Boylston?”

“Yes.”

“Colonel William Prescott,” he bowed to me formally, then kissed my gloved hand.  “I am so sorry for your great loss.  Would you allow me to give you this—”

He handed me a folded paper.

I took it from him without breathing.  For I knew that while I had managed to feel nothing during the morning’s pomp and circumstance, this humble paper would undo me.

I began to buckle. 

“Ma'am,” he said.  “Let us sit. There are things I would like to tell you.”

He took me by the arm and led me towards a stone bench.  I looked back at the Boylstons, who were making their way slowly towards us. Colonel Prescott sat down by my side and began his narrative, sensing his time alone with me was short.

“Your husband was among the few who did not desert me when the fighting began.  He fought like a wild man, right by my side “ he whispered, not looking at me. “I have rarely seen anything like it.  But we were far outnumbered. Outnumbered, and easy targets stuck there behind our redoubt.  Still—” he took my arm, “he would not hide himself behind a barricade, but stood tall, even reached to meet them.  I've never seen a braver man.”

“He was a bloody fool!” I cried.

I could hear no more, and stood up.  The Colonel stood up as well.

“You will be anxious no doubt to read that.  He gave it to me the morning of the battle.  Why he believed that I would make it out alive, I know not.  I was as close by his side in the battle as we are now. It was only blind chance that the Regular’s bayonet ran him through first, before I killed him.  He was but a boy himself, perhaps sixteen.”

I shut my eyes at the horror of Colonel Preston’s narrative.

“But what is done cannot be undone.  If you need anything, anything at all,” he took my hand.

“Thank you.  You are very kind.”

People always said that as a matter of convention, but I endeavored to infuse my voice with particular warmth, for his words eased my pain greatly.

I was left alone on the bench.  Carefully, I broke the letter’s seal.  I had to read quickly; soon, the Boylstons would be upon me. 

I looked down, felled by the familiar handwriting that breathed to life his very form and spirit, like a genie let out of a bottle:

Dearest Lizzie:

I hope and pray you never have to read this Letter, for I of all People know the Joy and the Suffering of which your fine soul is capable.  I know you would not distract yourself from the grief of my Death, and this alone gives me pain now.

I am glad to hear you carve a straight row for the corn.  You are a good farmer, and all the  wife I should ever want.  Now, though it shall give you pain, I must say this: Resist the Attempts of my family to o’ertake your life.  You should remarry, if at all possible given your unsightly intelligence. Tho you cant keep a fellow from hoping that he will never be quite so Handsome or so Gallant as your First, your Always—Jeb.

P.S. Cherish my Star, if he survives.  I love him second only to you. 

“What's that you read?”

It was Eliza, standing over me, her black parasol casting a sudden shadow.

I was awash in tears, but hastily folded the letter and put it in the pocket of my skirt.

“Something Jeb left me.” 

“Oh, I’m sorry to intrude,” she said, sincerely. For a moment I thought perhaps she wasn't quite so hateful as I knew her to be.  But then she said, “We must hurry.  Dinner is set for two o'clock and our guests will be there before us.”

I felt neither hungry nor inclined to society, especially not those who at best were indifferent to the Cause and at worst strident Tories who might have secretly rejoiced at the British victory. But I resolved to bear it as best I could. 

Once arrived back in Cambridge, quite exhausted, I nonetheless pushed forward with my plans. I engaged a servant boy to take two messages home for me.  The first was to Abigail Adams apologizing for having detained her mare and letting her know she would be returned the following day.  The second message was to my Thaxter, asking him to borrow a horse and chaise of Colonel Quincy, and to come fetch Abigail’s little mare. 

At the reception, Mrs. Boylston seemed to have passed into a state of non-existence.  She did not cry or make a sound of any kind.  She smiled at her guests but spoke to no one.  She behaved as if her soul had fled to somewhere very far away.

I had earlier thought we might comfort each other, that this shared sorrow might finally bring us together as mother and daughter.  But I was wrong.  While she had never approved of me for Jeb's wife, now she ignored me entirely. I could tell that in my suffering—so obvious, so overt, I was an anathema to her.  To console with me she would have to be prepared to feel pain.  And that she had not the courage to do. 

My messages sent, I rested easier, and while the small gathering was still politely eating the funeral baked meats, I slipped off for a few moments to gather my and Jeb's things.  I wanted to be ready the moment the guests had left. 

Once in my room, I fell down on my bed in my hot, black funeral clothing, and there lay as if dead.

But I had yet one more letter to write.  I knew it to be a great rudeness to leave without so much as a by your leave, but Reader, I had not the energy for another confrontation.  I thanked Mr. and Mrs. Boylston for their kindness and condoled with their grievous loss.  I wished them a safe journey, although I could not say to where. I left the note on my desk and slipped out to the stables.

The stable boy seemed surprised to see me. 

“I hadn’a any message to ready the carriage,” he said apologetically.

“Oh, a carriage won’t be necessary. If you could saddle Star, that would be sufficient.”

Once more he looked at me as if I were mad. But I stood there quite resolutely until at last he made a step with his hands. I mounted Star and rode off into the darkening afternoon light, down Brattle Street, across the Common, across the Great Bridge, and East towards home. I felt the saddle warm against me. I felt the aura of my husband's thighs on mine, one last time.

6

The morning after my return from Cambridge, I wandered my house like a newly blind person, brushing my fingers across once-familiar objects. I touched the pewter tankard Jeb liked to take his cider in, after milking the cows. I grazed my fingertips across his pillow next to mine on the bed. I lay my cheek against his farming breeches—grass-stained, smelling of hay and sweat—cast heedlessly where he had left them, across a chair back in the corner of our chamber. Oh, his smells lingered! I smelled them once per hour, fearful that this act might rob them, little by little, of their scent.

Without, trance-like, I fed my animals, milked my cows. I sat by one of them and allowed my face to press into her flank, for the living warmth. She pressed back against me, as if knowing I needed her. Having set my pails on the table, I approached the dairy, smelling its sour pungency well before I opened the door. Here, too, I could only look at the former signs of my industry. Upon the table where I worked, as well as shelves above and below, all my tools lay neatly arranged or hung by hooks: a brass kettle, a sieve, a gourd, a pair of tongs, several galley pots, a cork, pewter spoons, two strainers, a small cauldron, an iron mortar & pestle, a tin funnel, a glass mortar & pestle, a pair of sheers, a press, and many vials in a wooden box.

I kept a strict list of my medicines. These were my most precious commodities. Some of the oils and powders took whole days to make, such as the rose oil, and the belladonna. Neither could be had for love or money. I kept the list in chalk on the door, carefully keeping track of each remaining amount.  Nowadays I keep my accounts in ink, in a special book. But then my list looked something like this:

ArticleAmount remainingUse

Senna1ph½ ph. ¼ ph. The punk

MannaEtc.

Glauber’s Salt1 sm. bottle¾ b.2/3 bEtc.

Ipecac1 lg. bottle ¾ b.½ b.Etc.

Powdered rhubarb

PennyroyalLate menses

The headache

HyssopLarge jar ½ jr

MugwortCramps

Basswood poulticeWounds

Raven’s Claw

Wormwood oilSmall jar ¾ jar  ½ jar

Gum armoniacumAsthma

Willowbarkfever

Indian PhysickBloody flux

Queen Anne’s laceNo babies

Carolina PinkrootWorms

Witch hazelLg. Jarrashes

Broom snakebloodSpeeds delivery

Belladonna**Softens cervix

***poisonous

Etc, etc.

I kept a column of “Uses” not for myself but in the event I needed to send someone else to fetch the medicine. I had a horror they would mix them up in my absence. Now, I looked at my precious supplies and wondered if I would ever have the strength again to use them.

In those first days and weeks after Jeb's death, I hardly went abroad.  I did not want to be seen in the village, to receive condolences from those who did not know me or Jeb. 

We were a close parish, then, but I was hardly a part of it.  I had no friends, and saw my state clearly now: I was in a sort of Purgatory, neither earth nor heaven, neither Cambridge nor Braintree. 

In those darkest of days and nights, I suppose I should have been afraid.  Indians, murderously angry, still lurked about the parameters of our parish. British soldiers trawled the Coast Road, looking for women. Failing to find them, they sometimes ravished children or night-capped grandmothers. Bears, wolves, and thieves roamed the land, taking advantage of our chaos. And wayward sailors, whom I could see beyond my kitchen window, stared at the shore, longing for one night in a warm bed.

I should have been afraid, but I was not. Come scalp me. Come ravish me. Stick a knife in my heart, I wanted to say. Thou can’st not take from me anything I would more willingly part withal.

That was how I felt in those first few weeks. Had anyone actually broken into my house, they might have thought Death itself had met them at the door, asking: “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for you.”

I milked the cows, fed the chickens, watered the young plants, saw that the boys were at their chores, and hauled water from the well. It still had not rained, and while I was tempted to let everything on the farm die with Jeb, I had made him a promise, and so I suffered through the risings and settings, the waterings and feedings of life, though I neither ate, nor slept, nor drank much myself. 

While I had not the energy to walk the mile to her house, I did send a message to Abigail, inquiring about the safe return of her little mare.  Then, a few days after I had sent my note, I received a reply—not in the form of a letter, but of a neat and dainty little woman walking with great determination up the path from the road.  She lifted her skirts to avoid the dust, and from my window I saw her turn her head left and right to admire my fledgling plantings—yellow lilies, from bulbs I had planted in the fall, and pink roses, fragrant lavender, and behind these, my medicinal herbs: hyssop, ladies’ mantle, musky tansy, mint, sage, and many others as well.

I reached the door before she needed to knock, and as I looked down upon her (I was rather tall in those days; I seem to have shrunk some now), saw she carried something in her arms. A cloth covered it.

She was ready to condole. But when she looked up at me, her expression changed from sorrowful compassion to one of alarm. I reached a hand to my hair, realizing that I had not brushed it in—well, I could not remember when.  

“You look like something I could stick in my cornfield, to scare the crows away.”

I laughed at that—such tart and simple honesty from the mouth of such a dainty thing! My voice, unheard by me for many days, sounded strange. Smelling the pie, I tried but could not recall when last I had eaten a meal, and I bid her enter and went into the kitchen and set the parcel down on the table. Then I asked,

“Would you like a dish of tea?”

Her bright, pale blue eyes widened.

“Real tea?” she inquired.

“Yes.  Quite real.  My father left me a great quantity of it.  Though I do realize I should probably dump it in the bay.”

“Oh no,” she said, “don't do that.  I'd sell my firstborn child for some right now.”

And with that, this remarkable woman sat down, and together we had tea and pie, like the real ladies we might have been in another time and place.

Abigail came bearing not just pie but heartening news as well: General Washington had reached Cambridge and taken command of the army.  I watched her twirl her wedding band nervously around her finger as she spoke. No doubt she was thinking of John, who had been in Philadelphia since April and had been the first to suggest Washington for General of the Continental Army.

“But do you think he can really make the difference?  Our men seem neither very willing, nor very able.”

“He will make them able,” she said with conviction.  “Certainly, my husband believes so.”  And then she smiled at her own words, as if “husband” were too grand a word for the ethereal memory that was John Adams.

I had seen only glimpses of our illustrious citizen since my arrival that past fall.  I watched him descend from his carriage at meeting on Sundays. I recalled him as I last saw him: standing beneath the carriage to take the arm of his wife. I watched him lift the three boys from the carriage.  Johnny was eight, Charles six, and little Thomas but two. Young Nabby climbed down last, shy of company and society. 

The boys were a rambunctious lot, and only Abigail's harsh stares kept them from dispersing down the main street of town instead of going into the meetinghouse, in hot pursuit of a bird, or ball, or badger—or any other number of exciting distractions.

John was more indulgent: you could see he would never have the heart to scold them. Were it not for Abigail, they would be terribly spoiled.

This memory brought a smile to my face. 

“What makes you smile, dearest?” asked Abigail, who had been speaking about George Washington and the likely first step of the Continental Army: would they attack the British and, if so, when? My smile must've seemed incongruous.

“Oh, I was remembering when I first laid eyes upon your John.  He was helping his children from the carriage and I noticed how fond he was of them—and of you.  I was thinking how he looked to spoil them horribly, for there was nothing stern in his entire countenance.”

“You are correct in that perception,” she averred.  “He is like that with his family, if not the rest of the world.  With the world he is a lion; with us, a Tabby cat. He sees his children so rarely these days, he hasn't the heart to discipline them.  That falls to me.”

For just a moment as we finished our tea, I felt past my own grief to that of my new friend's. I took her hand, which she pressed gratefully against mine.

“By the by,” she said, after a moment, for she was not one to wallow in sentiment, “would you like a dog? Our bitch just had five pups. We could gladly spare one.”

“A dog? Heavens, no. What for?”

She looked through the window, out over the dunes and the dark sea.

“It is far too quiet here, too desolate.”

“And what should I do with a dog? It is just something else to care for.” Abigail looked at me strangely, but said nothing. It was as if she could see right through me: I dearly loved animals. But a dog was just another thing to love and lose.

7

After Abigail's visit, I resumed eating, if not with a great relish, then at least with a small desire to survive.  I tended my garden, and slowly wove the flax gathered and spun the year before, I had meant to make Jeb a new shirt; now, I spun thread to make myself a new petticoat. At night I fell asleep exhausted from these exertions, leaving the dirty dishes for the next morning, in slovenly fashion. Leaving doors ajar.  Any savage—British or native—could enter easily enough. But who was there to scold me for it?  No one.

It is perhaps God's will that we are not left alone to create our own fate; others, for good or ill, will impose it upon us.  I was thus taken from my solitude forcibly a few days later, when, around seven of an evening and the sun had already descended in the sky, I was called upon by a frantic servant of the Thayer household, unknown to me except by name.  Betsy Thayer was in travail, and could I come quickly. The boy, who looked about thirteen, was panting.  His freckled little face looked hectic; his feet were oddly wet and muddy.

I told the boy to wait, and excused myself to get my shawl and bag. Within my medical bag were the following necessities: Uvula spoon, plaister box, forceps (though I had never yet used these in my life), spatula lingua, incision knife, razor, stitching quill, waxed silk thread, square needles, launcets, and salvatory, and several boxes of tea. It was a goodly weight.

As we left, I asked the boy, “is this Mrs. Thayer’s first child?” 

“Oh no, Ma'am, her third.  It was Dr. Crosby delivered the others, but he went to join the army.”

“Her third—then we must hurry.”

I set off with great haste down the shortcut through the dunes, the heavy bag knocking against my shoulder. But the boy called me back.

“Miss Boylston! Miss Boylston! This a‘way!” He was shouting and pointing to the road.

“What mean you, pointing there?” I inquired, running back to him with my cumbersome load.

“She’s not at home. She’s on Grape Island. We must go on horseback.”

“Grape Island? What is she doing there?”

“She received word that her husband was there, and wished to see him; but when she arrived, he had already joined his regiment.”

“It is a long way off,” I sighed, understanding her foolhardiness perfectly, “and it grows dark.”

I looked about me; the sun had descended in the sky; it nearly touched the sea. The water looked black, foreboding. I never had liked boats; I liked nothing about the irregular rocking feeling; or the wind; or the salt on my clothes. I easily lost my balance and grew nauseated.  No crisis would have induced me to go with this boy, save a woman alone and in travail.

“All right,” I finally said.

“Come, Ma’am, this way.”

He helped me onto his horse and together we set off to Hough’s Neck, where a little boat, hardly more than a dinghy, awaited us. The wind was strong; my hair swept out of its pins. The beach was empty save for a pair of young lovers who’d escaped the eyes of their relations. They pressed against each other, oblivious to the wind. But when they heard us the man disengaged himself and they strode, hand in hand, down the beach in the other direction.

The boy held the boat for me; it swayed in the water. I set my bag in first, then lifted my skirts and stepped in. The boy took a running push and jumped in after me. And off we went, through rough waves, towards Grape Island. I thought I might faint, and did something I don’t often do: I prayed.

The boy, small as he was, was a skillful rower.  We arrived only slightly worse for wear about forty minutes later. It was near dark and the boy had brought no torches, so we had to grope our way towards a shack in the moonlight, from which we heard faint moans. Within, we found Mrs. Thayer and a servant girl alone in the gloom.

“Is there no fire?” I called to the girl.

“I’ve not had time to tend it, Ma’am,” she said, tears in her voice.

“Well then, go now. Take—”

“Peter,” the boy offered.

“Yes, well, go. Fetch wood. Anything dry will do.”

They left the shack in haste and as they opened the door I heard the wind screaming in front of them. The island seemed all but abandoned. That April, there had been a skirmish with the British here. A munitions building was set afire, and one of our boys had been killed. Now, we were all alone, with nought but screaming wind and crashing waves. What a lonely place.

I approached my patient. Her waters had broken and her sickness was full upon her. Mrs. Thayer lay on a bed of straw by a cold fire. No husband paced the hall, no women sat chatting. 

I bent down and took the woman’s hand.

“It shall be warmer in here presently,” I said.

The door banged open and Peter entered with an armful of branches. When the fire had been got going again, I handed the girl a pouch of dried broom snakeblood and bade her make some tea of it.  My mother had learned about the herb from an Indian woman of her acquaintance.

Turning back to the mother, I asked gently, “How long have you been having pains?”

“Near three hours, but they have not been regular,” was her reply.

Here another one came upon her. She cried out, and I shooed Peter out of the shack.

“Allow me to touch you,” I said. “It will relieve you to know how long you have to bear this suffering. It cannot be long now.”

I washed my hands with the hot water the servant girl had put on the boil for the tea. Then I placed a cloth beneath her and felt. Almost immediately, I knew there was a problem, and drew back with fright. This babe was breech. I looked up at the dark ceiling in silent entreaty. Oh Lord, why dost thou seek to test me?

It would be an untruth to say I was worried for the mother and child alone. Were they to expire, and this my first real trial as a midwife, to make a livelihood in Braintree would be impossible. I might as well pack my things and join the Boylstons.

I composed myself and braced the mother for a battle:

“The baby is breech,” I said, but calmly. “We must find a way to turn him about.”

I had never delivered a breech baby, but had seen my mother do it once. And she had thankfully spoken to me about it. I strained to recall that conversation now.

“I would like you to stand here,” I said, pointing to the foot of the bed. “Peter!” I called. “Peter!”

The boy re-entered the shack at a run, his hands full of wood.

“Roll up this pallet, and find a second. Quickly, please.”

Betsy looked worried, but I endeavored to explain to her calmly what I needed from her.

“We must use gravity to let this baby fall. I shall guide it as best I am able.”

At last, the pallets rolled, Betsy straddled them in a sort of crouching stand. I was obliged to kneel down on the floor at her feet. I knew that once I saw the umbilicus I had but little time to get the baby out, as he would be pressing upon the cord and could die within minutes. Very silently, Betsy had begun to cry.

“At this moment, I am all my children have.”

“And they shall continue to have you,” I said, more confidently than I felt, watching for the umbilicus.

“Are you married?” she asked me suddenly. 

“Yes,” I said, dreading this line of questioning. But her pains came too fast for her to continue, and then I saw: a little arm!

I endeavored to keep the baby horizontal while rotating him. I successfully delivered the first arm and shoulder, then rotated it once more, this time in the opposite direction.

“Do not push, Betsy.”

I waited for the neck to appear, cleared it, then waited for the next contraction, gently supporting the frail little neck. “Now, push!” I cried, and with a heroic and an ear-splitting cry, the babe came into this world.

I rose from my kneeling position with the babe, a tiny girl with a mass of dark red hair. She took a gulp of Grape Island air and let out another loud cry.  I cut the cord, tied it with a bit of string, unrolled one of the pallets, and guided Betsy back onto it to await the placenta.

“A beautiful girl she is,” I said, drying her off and presenting her to Mrs. Thayer.

At the sight of her daughter, seemingly alive and well, Betsy Thayer burst into tears.

“Where did she get her beautiful hair?”  I asked, ignoring all discussion of how close they had both come to death. I myself was drenched in blood and sweat, but in a visionary flash, saw many lives suddenly open up to happy flourishing, including, quite selfishly, my own. For, grieving and alone as I was, I had no wish to leave Braintree.

“Her father has red hair.  He is with Prescott’s regiment in Cambridge.”

Colonel Prescott’s regiment. I said nothing.  My story, while it might have provided me some relief to tell it, could provide none to this poor soul.

I merely said, “Oh, then you are most brave.”  

“But I'm not,” she objected. “It was thoughtless of me to take such a risk.”

“It was passionate,” I smiled. “You must love your husband a great deal.”

“He’s a good man,” I saw her smile at her babe, who had found her breast.

I gave her Pennyroyal and soon delivered the placenta quite whole. I then made the mother comfortable and sent the girl off to find Peter, no doubt lingering on the beach so as to clear his senses of the bloody scene of birthing, Betsy suddenly realized she had never introduced herself.

“I'm Betsy, by the way,” she smiled. “And this,” she nodded to the babe at her breast—” this is Anna, for my husband's mother. It has the look of vigorous life about it.”

“It does indeed,” I smiled.  Often, parents held off naming their children—for days and even sometimes months, for fear of growing too attached.

“And you must be Mrs. Boylston?” she asked shyly.

“Elizabeth. But you may call me Lizzie.”

“People say you are related to our Mrs. Adams. Is it true?”

“Only distantly,” I said, “through my husband.”

“And is your husband in Braintree, or has he gone off like all the others?”

Here was the question I had dreaded.  I had thought to lie, but it is not in my nature to lie, even when such would be beneficial in all conceivable ways. 

Little Anna was already asleep in her mother’s arms. The fire grew dim; I hoped Peter would hurry back to tend it.

“He has—” I began. “He is dead.  On Breed’s Hill. Three weeks ago.”

“Oh,” her already wan face looked stricken.  “I am so sorry.”

“It won't happen to you.  Washington is there now.” I smiled as reassuringly as I could, willing the tears to stay at bay.

There was no question of my rowing back with that boy in the dead of night, so when he returned and had tended the fire, I bid him fetch some straw, if there remained any in the old burned barn behind the garrison, and make us pallets. We all slept in the shack alongside the mother and babe. There were no more blankets, though Betsy offered me one of hers, which I refused. I was cold all night and slept very ill.

I woke the next morning to find Betsy up and around, the baby in her arms. She was not a new mother; she was used to be up and about to tend her chores after a night’s sleep. I would have preferred she remain in bed but she seemed restless, eager to be active.

“Who minds your household and children?” I asked her, taking a tiny morsel of biscuit and tea for my breakfast.

“My mother. She will by now be in a panic about me.”

“Oh, you are right. We must go, and I shall tell her directly.”

“That would ease my mind greatly.”

She would have left with us, but I advised her to heal a bit more before endeavoring to travel. I would send Peter back with the boat to fetch her.  In bidding her goodbye I let her go no farther than the shack door, as there was a fierce wind. But she embraced me tenderly, reserve and suspicion all gone. Her precious child dozed in her arms.  I gently touched Anna’s cheek. It was soft as butter on a summer’s day.

“I will pray for your husband,” I said. “I am sure he cannot be long from you. And I will visit you at home, in two day’s time.”

“Oh, do. Please. I should love to see you, Lizzie. And you shall meet the others. They are spirited children, but not all bad.”

“I am sure they are not,” I smiled. “But you must tell them they now have a very special sister. For they say breech babies are God’s special children.”

It was a rare lie on my part; breech babies had been born under a cloud of sinister omen for centuries. But I thought it did no harm to initiate a more salutary superstition to replace the old one. It made Betsy smile.

“And you shall meet some neighbors, too. It is high time. Our women are busy, but not cold. I imagine they shall even invite you to quilt with them.” Her tone was ironic, as if she might have shared my dread of group quilting. Then she burst out laughing, and I joined her.

Having at last broken from Betsy’s long and tearful embrace, I walked down to the shore once more, where the boy held the little boat for me in the strong wind. I threw my sack in first, then lifted my dirty petticoats and stepped in. I felt damp and chilled. But my spirit was light as I nestled myself in my shawl. I had done some good in the world, and felt myself no longer entirely alone.

8

It was from my mother that I learned my medical arts, and much else as well. Though of a genteel background, my mother rejected in large measure the life that had been offered her.  She was practiced in healing, and the women of our neighborhood relied upon her.  I believe she first learned of these arts from a family slave, with whom she snuck off in the dead of night, to watch her bring slave children into the world. 

Soon, my mother herself was taking calls him at all hours of the night—to deliver a baby, or nurse the sick or dying.  I often went with her, although she never asked me to.  Once you see how grateful they are, how much they need you—well, if your heart does not break that first time, you are called for life. 

I loved the feeling of bundling myself in cloaks and hats and mitts, my father grumbling from his room at our “ungodly” pursuits. 

“The whole town will think you’re a pair of witches! Heaven knows I do sometimes, myself.”

I found my father fearsome, but clearly, my mother did not.  A true aristocrat, she had that grounded sense of self-worth that no man could take away. Usually, she just laughed at him.  Nothing could touch her will or her spirit.

But her flesh, oh my Maker! Her flesh was mortal. It was on such an excursion as I have described that my mother herself first became exposed to the devilish malady.  The woman, Mrs. Whitcomb—wife of our local blacksmith—was in travail, her throat much inflamed. The baby, a healthy boy, lived. But Mrs. Whitcomb, burning with fever, died two days later.  Laying her out, I saw my mother grimace, push me away from her and from the body, and I was hurt, not comprehending. 

Only several days later did I understand.  She took to her bed, burning with fever, her throat so raw she could not swallow.

When I brought her tea she would not let me touch her.  She pointed to her bedside table.

“Leave the tea there,” she nodded. 

The second day passed, and she was no better.  I sent for my father, who was in New Hampshire on business.

When I came in her room after giving the letter to a servant, she was lying very still, her eyes wide and fixed on the ceiling.  Oh, it frightened me!  I reached to her but she drew her hand away.

“Send for the doctors,” she said, “I feel I am dying.”

I ran.  No servant could run faster than I, although it was not becoming for a young lady to fly down the streets.  Nonetheless, I was before the residence of Dr. Bullfinch before eight minutes’ time had elapsed. 

He was at home, and looked quite astonished at my sweaty, unkempt appearance.  He walked towards our house with maddening slowness, not wanting to bother calling his servants for the chaise. 

“Can you not walk a bit faster?” I urged him. I will not say aloud what I thought of Dr. Bullfinch then. 

At long last, he arrived.  My mother was alive but breathing shallowly.  Her skin looked dried, yellow, and parched.  She glanced at me wildly and reached out her hand, whether to repulse me or draw me near I could not tell.  But in any case, Dr. Bullfinch shut the door on me.  I knew he would draw out her blood.

Later that afternoon, she was resting easier, and my brother Thomas finally returned from wherever he had been. I flung myself at him like a wildcat ready to scratch out his eyes.  I loved my brother but where had he been? 

At cards, gambling, drinking no doubt.  He was fifteen, and full of beans. Headed for nothing, our father said, but ruin.  He had refused a place at Harvard College, finding books “awfully dull.”

Tom wasn't a bad boy, but his mind needed action, not books.  And in a few years he would get his action: the Revolution, and a privateer ship upon which he sailed gaily out of Boston Harbor in search of treasure.  At that time, he cared nothing for the Cause. It was a matter of deepest indifference to him.

That would be another reason for disappointment. But now I wanted to kill him for having left me alone. He held me to him, stroked my hair.

“Lizzie, Lizzie, I'm sorry,” he said, and I did believe him from the tone of his voice.  “She'll recover, I'm sure.  She's made of stone.”

Ah, yes, these gay young men always think strong women are made of stone.

But she did not recover.  The next morning, with Dr. Bullfinch asleep in a chair by her bed and my father galloping down Brattle Street towards our door, she expired this life.

It was my first great loss.

I lived in solitude with my father for the next five years. He was often abroad, and in that time I read much of his library.  I spent time not reading chatting with my two favorite servants, Bessie, my mother’s maid, and Giles, my father’s manservant and a former slave.

Bored and alone a great deal of the time, I begged him could I have a tutor.  And he, seeing no great harm in it, and with only the warning that I should not learn to speak in tongues, agreed to a tutor.  He came thrice weekly, in the mornings, and old, sickly looking fellow, with a balding pate and gray nose hairs, but in this way I learned to read Greek and Latin just like a boy.  Upon hearing the tutor’s report, my father gave me this greatest compliment: “You’ve the mind of a man, Lizzie.”  It was a great compliment, I knew, and I was glad of it. But from that moment I counted myself an unfortunate freak of nature. For I knew not to what use the mind of a man could put the body of a woman.

Then one Sunday, in the summer of 1774, when I was but nineteen, I espied a family in our meetinghouse who had not been there before. They sat two pews in front of ours and looked quite unhappy to be there.  I did not know at that time that their own church had closed.  My mother had a decade earlier prevailed upon my father to switch to the congregational church, finding her own, and its perpetual prayers for the king, “dreadfully tedious.” My father, being only as religious as need be, consented willingly enough.

The family consisted of a rather pompous-looking man and his fair, frail wife, a rigid but beautiful girl my age, and a restless boy, slightly older. His eyes roved about the meetinghouse and finally caught me staring at him. He grimaced and raised his eyebrows mischievously. I began to giggle; my father shushed me. That was Jeb. The next day, he paid me a formal visit.

When the actual fighting began the following April, my father found himself on the wrong side. Not in his heart, perhaps, but he was in the service of the Crown and could not abandon his position without also abandoning his livelihood. He made his decision to return to England, and wanted me to go with him. But I was by then engaged to Jeb and refused to leave.

“You must come, Lizzie,” he urged in his most passionate tones.  “There shall soon be nothing left here. What shall I do without you?”

Indeed, our house was in disarray; he had packed as much as he could take on board ship, sold off some furniture, and let all but two of the servants go.

Though I loved my father, I was of an age to love a man more. Jeb and I were engaged and I would not leave him. Nor did I wish to leave my patients, for by then I had a goodly number, the same ones who had called upon my mother to deliver them of their babes, and more. They trusted and needed me. Although young, I was already renown for being able to remove a stubborn babe.

I had seen my mother many times reach into a womb and turn a babe, or lift the head off the os pubis, where these little ones can lodge themselves like seals beneath a sea shelf. Reaching in and turning them caused mothers terrible pain.  My mother hated to do it; sometimes the womb cramped around her hand so firmly she had to withdraw and try again several times before she succeeded in her mission. 

But my mother never harmed the woman except momentarily.  They survived, and were grateful.  They none of them wanted Dr. Bullfinch to attend them. Dr. Bullfinch with his frowns, his hems and haws, and his big metal forceps as like to crush the very skull of the babe as draw it out safely.

Between pain and harm, my mother taught me, lies is a vast moral divide. Sometimes, one must cause pain to avoid harm. This lesson was my mother’ greatest gift to me, one I would call upon a great deal in later years.

After my mother’s death, I took a vow never to cause harm, if I could help it. I reasoned that while I would cause my father pain, it would cause the women actual harm to leave them. My father and I reconciled ourselves to a parting; we believed it to be temporary, of a few years’ duration at most. If the rebels won—an unlikely event, my father believed—judges who knew British constitutional law might prove useful. If they did not—well, he would have done nothing wrong in the eyes of the Crown. In all, he was a fence-sitter hoping to climb down successfully on either side.

But Fate had other ideas. My father left for England but caught the throat distemper and died soon after his arrival there.  I hardly had time to mourn him. His death, so far away, seemed unreal to me. For fays after I received word of my father’s death I wandered the upturned house marveling at the spirit I still felt there. His books were still on the shelves, his desk held his papers. A portrait of my fair mother, but which he dared not take aboard a ship, still stood above the parlor mantle.

Jeb and I married and went to housekeeping on a parcel of land given to him by owned by Josiah Quincy of Braintree, Massachusetts, at Mount Wollaston.  When we arrived there, we found a newly-built, splendid estate of three hundred acres. It stretched all the way from the road to the sea, and of these three hundred acres we were carved out a plot of forty acres, including several sheds and outbuildings, and a simple cottage, all in great need of repair.  Our cottage stood about midway between the great house and the sea, and on days when the wind was out of the northwest, we could smell the pungent aroma of the Colonel’s stables waft over us. The stench made us laugh.

Less than one month after Jeb and I moved to Braintree, my brother Tom joined a privateer ship bound for the West Indies.  He sent me a hasty word by messenger along with a chaise, and I bumped my way in that old open chaise to Boston harbor, arriving at dawn.

I pleaded with him to the last.  “Why not come live with us.  There's plenty to do right here.”

“Me, a farmer?” he laughed with a toss of his fair head.  “I'd as soon be a midwife.”

I smacked him across his head, and he laughed some more.  Then I hugged him to me. 

“I'm afraid.  I'm so afraid I'll never see you again.”

“Oh, you'll see me all right.  And I'll be tan and hale, a stranger bearing gifts.”

“The Greeks taught us to beware of strangers bearing gifts,” I replied.

“Oh, Lizzie,” he sighed, casting a brotherly arm about me. “You really must try to be more stupid.  A handsome fellow has little use for a brainy woman.”

But before I could reply it was time for him to board the vessel.  I waved to him until I could see him no longer.  I thought it possible that I would never see my brother again, and wept my fill before I arrived back at the farm.

Thomas had wished to leave as soon as possible; he had neither the time nor the inclination to sell the house. What was I to do with it? I knew not. And my father’s will was not to make matters clearer, for he’d left the house and much of its contents to Thomas. I thought to let it, but before that could happen it was confiscated by the Continental army. Bessie, my mother’s maid, and Giles, my father’s former servant, helped me pack for safekeeping what we could, and pray for those precious items that remained.

Winter in Braintree made Jeb and me intimate by its very harshness.  We had not enough wood despite Jeb's efforts to clear the brush, and he was obliged to wade through shoulder-high drifts of snow, up the hill to the colonel’s house. The old colonel suggested Jeb take what he needed without coming inside to ask.

But Jeb did not like to make free use of others' labor.  And so, borrowing as little as we could, we slept by the fire in our kitchen. Someone had placed a window in the kitchen, and oh, what a view we had! How many hours did we spend, lying naked together, looking out that window, across the dunes and toward the sea?

In the parlor—a grand word for what it was—we had a settle by the fireplace, which we lit only for company.  Parson Wibird stopped every week after meeting, to see how we were getting on, which was kind of him.  We were still adjusting to our new church as well. Parson Wibird was a gentle but—God forgive me—a somewhat overly earnest man. In our youth we found him ridiculous, with his bent and wiry frame, his toothless, open-mouthed expression when he listened to you, the way he rode bumpily down the lanes in his rusted curricle and one sorry horse.  Parson Wibird and his meetinghouse were a far cry from the haughty, bewigged reverends Jeb had known in Cambridge. Jeb liked him very well, but we always had to stifle our laughter at his back. He is gone to his Maker now.

I was happy to lie close to my Jeb in the darkness.  From time to time, we heard the drunken groan or whistle of Thaxter making his way to the necessary behind the corn shed, and though we had been sleeping one moment earlier, upon hearing Mr. Thaxter groan Jeb and I would burst out in laughter.

By the firelight he touched my face, and he teased me that I’d be quite fat by spring, so frequently did we obey the holy command to go forth and multiply. And all around us there was only silence, save for the crackling embers, the ocean’s roar, and the howling of the wind.

9

My past returned to me in all its vividness when I stepped back into my house later that morning. My mother would have been proud of me, laying aside my grief to tend to another.  I had little time to congratulate myself, however, for no sooner had I sent Thaxter off to report the good news to the Thayers, and lain down for a nap, than I was awakened by a knock at the door. It was Abigail, come to tell me that old Deacon Williams had fallen ill with the bloody flux, and two others besides. 

“I am terrified, Lizzie,” she said. “This must be some new calamity the Lord has seen fit to try us with.”

“Nonsense. It is those filthy soldiers marching to and from town.  They bring sickness on their clothing, on their boots.”

Abigail looked at me, at my own sandy boots and muddy, blood-besmirched petticoats, and smirked.

“Yes, all right. I have been to Grape Island to deliver Mrs. Thayer of a little girl. I have not had the opportunity to change.”

Abigail said nothing. But I thought I perceived a glimmer of new admiration in her eyes.

I asked her did the Deacon wish me to attend him, but she said no. She only came to warn me of things to come.

“Well, I hope you will not hesitate to send for me, Abigail, if I am needed.” Then I blushed at the manly self-confidence of my words. I was but twenty-one years old, and she a grand thirty. 

“Never fear, Dr. Boylston,” she smiled ironically.  “I shall call you at the sign of the slightest sniffle.”

I shall always remember Abigail’s ironic tone.  From nearly our first meeting she had the ability to expose all my flaws. She checked my tendency to self-pity; she laughed at my occasional grandiosity; she pitied my fear of men, which masqueraded as independence; and she could always put me in my place with a well-timed joke.

Very soon, however, there would be little for either of us to joke about.  The air grew hotter, and more people sickened and died.  The disease acquired a lusty taste for us. So many men were gone that women were left to suffer alone, with only ignorant child-servants to help them.  The youngest and oldest died first.

In early August, our own Parson Wibird fell gravely ill, and then there was no meeting on the Sabbath during August or September.  God had abandoned us, it seemed. From our homes, rivers of blood and feces ran, so that no one dared step anywhere.  Houses, hot and filthy, stank.  I shrank from going inside them—and yet I did, and tho people will say I was brave to do so, I will say: it was the path I took back to life. 

Nothing eases one’s own pain more than to ease that of others. I often wonder whether the Lord in his all-seeing greatness fashioned us as one person, each sharing a little bit of our soul. Abigail, hearing this opinion, would call me a romantic. On August 2nd, I delivered the tanner’s wife, Suzanna Baxter, safely of her third child, Samuel.  And on the 11th, I was called in the middle of the night to tend farmer Elisha Niles, who seemed to be expiring.  When I arrived, he was conscious but very low.  His skin was hot to the touch, and dry.  I cooled him down as best I could, but I knew he was near his end; there was nothing I could do but hold his hand and console him.  He shut his eyes and expired this life without struggle at dawn.

I stayed to wash his body, as his own children—a diffident girl of eighteen, and a boy of about fourteen—feared to enter the house.  God grant I never have children like that!  It was a silly prayer, I knew. At that time, I believed that the Lord had not seen fit to grant me fertility.

I bathed the body and, with a servant’s help, got poor Elisha into his burial clothes. After I had finished my work, the sun was just rising across the sea. It had never quite cooled during the night; the air was already warm.  I hurried home, greatly fatigued, and went to bed having stripped down to my skin, so close and hot was it in the house.

August of 1775 wore on with no abatement of disease.  Indeed, it seemed to get worse.  I did what I could, glad to be too busy to think of myself. Word began to spread that I was a goodly midwife. Betsy Thayer made good on her promise to introduce me to her family: I tended to one of her sick children, played with little Anna, and met the wives who gathered each month for quilting.

“They some of them still say you have magical powers,” Betsey whispered to me at that first gathering. “That you save people by alchemy or witchery.”

“And what think you, who have had first-hand experience of my ‘powers’?” I smiled calmly.

“I’m inclined to think they are correct.” Here she laughed, and with such a winning, tender look upon her face, that I knew she spoke in jest.

“I do what I can to dispel their ignorant superstitions, Lizzie. But I am one lone woman. Their knowing you is the only cure.”

I came away from that gathering determined not to dwell upon the women’s ignorance. I told myself that it was enough to be engaged in useful work and that I needed only their trust, not their friendship. Very soon, however, as, one by one, the women called upon me to tend their sick children, what few who trusted me had their trust turn to gratitude when the children lived. And gratitude was a fine first step towards friendship.

By the middle of September, the bloody flux had seized Weymouth as well. Every last household contained the sick and dying. Abigail’s mother fell ill with it. After several days, it seemed as if the crisis had passed. But then, on September 30th, she had a relapse and fell unconscious.

I knew that Abigail had removed to Weymouth to be with her mother, but did not know how gravely ill she was until I received a panicked boy at my door with a garbled message, which I unraveled to mean could I come quickly to the parsonage in Weymouth, Abigail's mother had expired or was thought to be expiring. 

“Well, which is it, child?” I asked with ill-concealed impatience. I couldn't get the poor, flustered boy to choose. The first indeed required haste; the other, none at all.

Once again, I had my boy, Thaxter, saddle Star, and once again, I set off astride him.  I resolved to gaze neither left nor right as I passed through town, as if, not seeing them, the people of the parish could not see me.

This time Abigail made no joke as she saw me arrive at last at her father's parsonage.  She came flying out the door of the old house on the knoll, long-since devoured by flames, as I dismounted and tied Star.  She hugged me close, whispering, “Thank God.  Lizzie, I am despairing.”

I asked her for water for my horse, as it was a warm day, and I had not stopped once for him.  Isaac being called for that purpose, I walked up the knoll, for which effort I was awarded a fine view of the broad, white beach, dark blue bay, and Boston beyond. The leaves of the maple trees had just begun to turn, and to my left Weymouth village was awash in fine warm reds and golds. How indifferent Nature can seem, at times, to our suffering!

There was no such heartening view within.  I found Abigail’s mother alive, but very gravely ill.  I touched the woman's arm—she turned and groaned.  Even a slight touch upon her skin tortured her.

She was shut in and bundled against her chill, even on this warm day.  I took it upon myself to open a window and remove the bolster. 

“Could you fetch me some cool water in a bowl, please?” I asked one of the Smith’s servants.  The girl nodded and returned with a bowl of water.  Very gently, I proceeded to cool Mrs. Smith down, pressing the wet cloth to her arm and legs and neck.

At one point she opened her eyes, saw me—a total stranger to her—and appeared frightened.

“Do not be alarmed,” I smiled.  “I'm Lizzie Boylston, a friend of your daughter.”  Abigail had been dozing in a chair by the bed, but upon hearing my words she stood up.

“She is an angel,” added Abigail, touching her small hand upon my shoulder.

“I thought my eyes played tricks,” the mother whispered.  She seemed to fall asleep then, but in the middle of the night awoke, unable to breathe.  Parson Smith entered, with Dr. Tufts. Together we watched her final struggle.  There was nothing at all to be done for her.  When there is a struggle for life it is always much worse, and so, while I didn't know if she would hear me, I bent over and whispered:

“You may go to your Maker knowing you did good on this earth: you created one of the greatest women alive.”

My words seemed to calm her, for her breaths became easier, but also farther apart.  Soon they ceased; she was gone.

Abigail wept inconsolably.  I made her a good strong tea, which she took, and when she was able she turned to me and asked, “What did you say to her?  She seemed to rest easier after that.”

“I told her she could be proud of you,” I said simply.

She thanked me, then wept again. 

“Oh, my poor mother.  My poor, dear mother.”

When she had calmed herself somewhat, and it was already near dawn, I asked her if she would like me to wash the body or if they had a servant, for I did not wish to intrude upon this most sacred task.

She said her father had no particular person in mind.  And so I did. I can still see Abigail staring in mute awe as I washed her mother's body, then asked me, almost in a moment of levity that comes with great exhaustion and grief, whether, God willing, I should live to see the day, would I wash her body in such a loving fashion.  And after a slight argument as to which of us would be called first, on that dawning morning of October 1, 1775, I solemnly promised her that I would.