There was almost no light in the hospital barracks, only a rush-dip near the door and what little illumination came from the fires in the courtyard. I couldn’t judge of Stebbings’s color, but I saw the flash of white as he half-opened his eyes. He grunted when he saw me, and closed them again.
“Good,” I said again, and left him in the tender charge of Mr. Dick.
The Guinea man had been offered the chance to enlist in the Continental army but had refused, choosing to become a prisoner of war with Captain Stebbings, the wounded Mr. Ormiston, and a few other seamen from the Pitt.
“I am English, free man,” he had said simply. “Prisoner maybe for a little, but free man. Seaman, but free man. American, maybe not free man.”
Maybe not.
I left the hospital barracks, called in at the Wellmans’ quarters to check on my case of mumps—uncomfortable, but not dangerous—and then strolled slowly across the courtyard under a rising moon. The evening breeze had died down, but the night air had some coolness in it, and moved by impulse, I climbed to the demilune battery that looked across the narrow end of Lake Champlain to Mount Defiance.
There were two guards, but both were fast asleep, reeking of liquor. It wasn’t unusual. Morale at the fort was not high, and alcohol was easily available.
I stood by the wall, a hand on one of the guns, its metal still faintly warm from the day’s heat. Would we get away, I wondered, before it was hot from being fired? Thirty-two days to go, and they couldn’t go fast enough to suit me. Aside from the menace of the British, the fort festered and stank; it was like living in a cesspool, and I could only hope that Jamie, Ian, and I would leave it without having contracted some vile disease or having been assaulted by some drunken idiot.
I heard a faint step behind me and turned to see Ian himself, tall and slender in the glow of the fires below.
“Can I speak to ye, Auntie?”
“Of course,” I said, wondering at this unaccustomed formality. I stood aside a little, and he came to stand beside me, looking down.
“Cousin Brianna would have a thing or two to say about that,” he said, with a nod through the half-built bridge below. “So has Uncle Jamie.”
“I know.” Jamie had been saying it for the last two weeks—to the fort’s new commander, Arthur St. Clair, to the other militia colonels, to the engineers, to anyone who would listen, and not a few who wouldn’t. The folly of expending vast amounts of labor and material in building a bridge that could be easily destroyed by artillery on Mount Defiance was clear to everyone except those in command.
I sighed. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen military blindness, and I was very much afraid it wouldn’t be the last.
“Well, leaving that aside… what did you want to speak to me about, Ian?”
He took a deep breath and turned toward the moonlit vista over the lake.
“D’ye ken the Huron who came to the fort a wee while past?”
I did. Two weeks before, a party of Huron had visited the fort, and Ian had spent an evening smoking with them, listening to their stories. Some of these concerned the English General Burgoyne, whose hospitality they had previously enjoyed.
Burgoyne was actively soliciting the Indians of the Iroquois League, they said, spending a great deal of time and money in wooing them.
“He says his Indians are his secret weapon,” one of the Huron had said, laughing. “He will unleash them upon the Americans, to burn like lightning, and strike them all dead.”
Knowing what I did of Indians in general, I thought Burgoyne might be a trifle overoptimistic. Still, I preferred not to think what might happen if he did succeed in persuading any number of Indians to fight for him.
Ian was still staring at the distant hump of Mount Defiance, lost in thought.
“Be that as it may,” I said, calling the meeting to order. “Why are you telling me this, Ian? You should tell Jamie and St. Clair.”
“I did.” The cry of a loon came across the lake, surprisingly loud and eerie. They sounded like yodeling ghosts, particularly when more than one of them was at it.
“Yes? Well, then,” I said, slightly impatient. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Babies,” he said abruptly, straightening up and turning to face me.
“What?” I said, startled. He’d been quiet and moody ever since the Hurons’ visit, and I assumed that something they’d told him had caused it—but I couldn’t imagine what they might have said to him regarding babies.
“How they’re made,” he said doggedly, though his eyes slid away from mine. Had there been more light, I was sure I could have seen him blushing.
“Ian,” I said, after a brief pause. “I decline to believe that you don’t know how babies are made. What do you really want to know?”
He sighed, but at last he looked at me. His lips compressed for a moment, then he blurted, “I want to know why I canna make one.”
I rubbed a knuckle across my lips, disconcerted. I knew—Bree had told me—that he had had a stillborn daughter with his Mohawk wife, Emily, and that she had then miscarried at least twice. Also that it was this failure that had led to Ian’s leaving the Mohawk at Snaketown and returning to us.
“Why do you think it might be you?” I asked bluntly. “Most men blame the woman when a child is stillborn or miscarried. So do most women, for that matter.”
I had blamed both myself and Jamie.
He made a small Scottish noise in his throat, impatient.
“The Mohawk don’t. They say when a man lies wi’ a woman, his spirit does battle with hers. If he overcomes her, then the child is planted; if not, it doesna happen.”
“Hmm,” I said. “Well, that’s one way of putting it. And I wouldn’t say they’re wrong, either. It can be something to do with either the man or the woman—or it may be something about them together.”
“Aye.” I heard him swallow before he went on. “One of the women wi’ the Huron was Kahnyen’kehaka—a woman from Snaketown, and she kent me, from when I was there. And she said to me that Emily has a child. A live child.”
He had been moving restlessly from foot to foot as he talked, cracking his knuckles. Now he stilled. The moon was well up and shone on his face, making hollows of his eyes.
“I’ve been thinking, Auntie,” he said softly. “I’ve been thinking for a verra long time. About her. Emily. About Yeksa’a. The—my wee bairn.” He stopped, big knuckles pressed hard into his thighs, but he gathered himself again and went on, more steadily.
“And just lately I have been thinking something else. If—when,” he corrected, with a glance over one shoulder, as though expecting Jamie to pop up through a trap, glaring, “we go to Scotland, I dinna ken how things might be. But if I—if I was to wed again, maybe, either there or here…” He looked up at me suddenly, his face old with sorrow but heartbreakingly young with hope and doubt.
“I couldna take a lass to wife if I kent that I should never give her live bairns.”
He swallowed again, looking down.
“Could ye maybe … look at my parts, Auntie? To see if maybe there’s aught amiss?” His hand went to his breechclout, and I stopped him with a hasty gesture.
“Perhaps that can wait a bit, Ian. Let me take a history first; then we’ll see if I need to do an examination.”
“Are ye sure?” He sounded surprised. “Uncle Jamie told me about the sperm ye showed him. I thought maybe mine might not be quite right in some way.”
“Well, I’d need a microscope to see, in any case. And while there are such things as abnormal sperm, usually when that’s the case, conception doesn’t take place at all. And as I understand it, that wasn’t the difficulty. Tell me—” I didn’t want to ask, but there was no way round it. “Your daughter. Did you see her?”
The nuns had given me my stillborn daughter. “ It’s better if you see,” they had said, gently insistent.
He shook his head.
“Not to say so. I mean—I saw the wee bundle they’d made of her, wrapped in rabbit skin. They put it up high in the fork of a red cedar. I went there at night, for some time, just to … well. I did think of taking the bundle down, of unwrapping her, just to see her face. But it would ha’ troubled Emily, so I didn’t.”
“I’m sure you’re right. But did… oh, hell, Ian, I’m so sorry—but did your wife or any of the other women ever say that there was anything visibly wrong with the child? Was she… deformed in any way?”
He glanced at me, eyes wide with shock, and his lips moved soundlessly for a moment.
“No,” he said at last, and there was both pain and relief in his voice. “No. I asked. Emily didna want to talk about her, about Iseabaìl—that’s what I would ha’ named her, Iseabaìl—” he explained, “but I asked and wouldna stop until she told me what the baby looked like.
“She was perfect,” he said softly, looking down at the bridge, where a chain of lanterns glowed, reflected in the water. “Perfect.”
So had Faith been. Perfect.
I put a hand on his forearm, ropy with hard muscle.
“That’s good,” I said quietly. “Very good. Tell me as much as you can, then, about what happened during the pregnancy. Did your wife have any bleeding between the time you knew she was pregnant and when she gave birth?”
Slowly I led him through the hope and fear, the desolation of each loss, such symptoms as he could remember, and what he knew of Emily’s family; had there been stillbirths among her relations? Miscarriages?
The moon passed overhead and started down the sky. At last I stretched and shook myself.
“I can’t be positive,” I said. “But I think it’s at least possible that the trouble was what we call an Rh problem.”
“A what?” He was leaning against one of the big guns, and lifted his head at this.
There was no point in trying to explain blood groups, antigens, and antibodies. And it wasn’t actually all that different from the Mohawk explanation of the problem, I thought.
“If a woman’s blood is Rh-negative, and her husband’s blood is Rh-positive,” I explained, “then the child will be Rh-positive, because that’s dominant—never mind what that means, but the child will be positive like the father. Sometimes the first pregnancy is all right, and you don’t see a problem until the next time—sometimes it happens with the first. Essentially, the mother’s body produces a substance that kills the child. But, if an Rh-negative woman should have a child by an Rh-negative man, then the fetus is always Rh-negative, too, and there’s no problem. Since you say Emily has had a live birth, then it’s possible that her new husband is Rh-negative, too.” I knew absolutely nothing about the prevalence of Rhesus-negative blood type in Native Americans, but the theory did fit the evidence.
“And if that’s so,” I finished, “then you shouldn’t have that problem with another woman—most European women are Rh-positive, though not all.”