The Midwife's Revolt (41 page)

I blushed and had no ready rejoinder.

And so he came to his third purpose (he did itemize these said purposes, and in this very legalistic manner): to tell me that I could retire my mustache forthwith, for they had exposed all the members of that despicable, dangerous ring. Three men in New York had been hanged, including a wealthy merchant whose family had pleaded for him even as he mounted the scaffold.

I winced at this news, for I didn’t like to hear of killing. Mr. Adams then recounted that, unfortunately, Mr. Cleverly—Benjamin Thompson—had managed to escape to England. He was soon to flee once more to Bavaria, where he lived as one Count Rumford.

Let it never be said that criminals cannot be charming and gifted. It is thanks to this evil plotter that we now have the Rumford stove. It is, I hear, a very great modern convenience, though I myself have certainly never thought to purchase one.

Finally, just as Mr. Adams was about to take his leave, he came to Purpose, the Fourth. He removed a letter from his waistcoat pocket.

“Mrs. Boylston, Miss Miller, you will wish to read this,” he said. He bowed deeply to us, turned as if to leave, and then hastened back to kiss us both. He departed, and our hands lingered upon our cheeks where his illustrious lips had been.

Once he had left, Martha and I pounced upon the letter, breaking the large red seal at once. There, upon a piece of finest parchment, appeared before our eyes the following:

To the venerable Mrs. Elizabeth B. and Miss Martha M.

Dear Patriots,

Through Channels that shall go unmentioned here, I wish to congratulate you upon your very great and heroic Actions for the benefit of the Cause. I have known others of your sex to behave bravely and to give the Ultimate Sacrifice helping our soldiers on the Fields of Battle. But never have I heard tell of anything like the sustained Effort that you, Miss M., have made in conjunction with your Brother, Thomas M., to the great Good, both of your Community and our irreplaceable Leaders, one of whom indeed, you know more intimately than I. Mrs. B., I have been apprised of your guileful Bravery upon a most beloved Animal once belonged to your Husband, who fell fighting for our young Nation in one of our first and most important Conflagrations. It will no doubt be small Recompense to you, but it is a small Thing I can do to show my appreciation.

In fervent hopes that imminent Victory will make it unnecessary for you ever again to mount a Horse in Mustaches—I remain,

Your ever obedient, Geo. Washington

I dropped the parchment upon the table. Martha and I raced out of doors to the stable, where we found a beautiful young mare groomed and waiting. I buried my face in her neck. She rolled her eyes off to the side and snorted a greeting. And for years hence, when I rode my beautiful Victory, as I called her, I could tell myself that she was a gift to me from our great leader and first president, His Excellency, George Washington.

From these heady days of danger, intrigue, and—yes—a bit of glory, we soon distanced ourselves. Our lives became easier. Goods and men reappeared, as did babes aplenty. Our days were far less dramatic and grew more mundane. Martha and I never spoke of her deeds again. We both knew that in opening that wound, she might bleed to death.

When Harry returned, he and Martha went to housekeeping in Cambridge, much to the delight of Bessie and Giles. I can only hope and presume they were able to console each other in privacy. I knew Martha to be too deep a soul to forget her sins, though I pray that in time she forgave them.

As for my own housekeeping, I was soon to have a partner in it, at least for a little while. Thomas Miller returned in May with a white feather in his hat, the mark of a brigadier general. I teased him that he was now too tall to fit through my cottage door. But, oh, I was proud to bursting! He would not tell me the details of his campaigns then, but waited near a year before divulging them for fear of causing me anguish.

Mr. Miller found me a great deal larger than when he had left me. Reader, do not be shocked: such was often the case in those days. We had not the luxury of ceremony. For me, this event was all the more joyous since, clearly, my doubts regarding my fertility, which I had entirely believed, had been entirely mistaken.

Thomas needed to return to the South, but before he did so, he arranged for Parson Wibird to marry us. It was a small ceremony, with only Abigail and the Quincys as witnesses. No one was under any illusion as to my altered physical state; being my dearest friends, however, they had the good decorum to pretend that it was not so.

After the ceremony, we returned to Colonel Quincy’s, where we were jolly and where a toast was made to our future health and happiness. In the few weeks I lived with my new husband before he left to join General Washington, I learned many things I had not known about Thomas when I fell in love with him.

Thomas Crane Miller was a gentleman of Loyalist parents. He had studied at Harvard, near the top of his class, and had begun his legal apprenticeship in Boston when the Troubles erupted. By the time Colonel Quincy called upon him, he was ready to serve the Cause.

Although Thomas was never to practice law, he enjoyed his many conversations with John Adams regarding our new government, when Mr. Adams was in Braintree.

And yet, despite his interest in the law, like John Adams, my Tom desired first and foremost to be a good husband and farmer. Without the war, he had not that agitated ambition I had sensed earlier, and which some men possess even in peacetime. No, he loved me and the land—our land, now. He loved taking me by the hand of a morn and running out across the dunes toward the sea or toward the orchards to see how the apples fared. He loved watching me sow seeds beside him.

One day, as he was working outside, Tom came across that invention of Mr. Cleverly’s, coiled serpent-like against the well.

“What is this?” he asked, picking it up by two fingers, nose wrinkled in disdain. When I told him, we agreed at once to a ritual burning, choosing to put our crops’ fate in the hands of our Redeemer, unlike the man who had thought himself a god.

I returned to my midwifery, though I myself—well, very soon I would have my own babe to deliver and care for. And though I had not my beloved husband by my side when my illness came upon me that July, I had all my women friends. Susanna Brown, Mary Cranch, and my dearest friend, Abigail, were all there to support me. Of course, I also had my midwife, Martha Miller Lee, who had, in fact, joined the Religious Society of Friends, the attendance of whose meetings were thankfully less fraught with danger than they once had been. Martha had sworn to herself and God to bring one hundred lives into the world for each of those she had taken. She has been as good as her word.

Martha safe delivered me of a boy and four other children besides. She herself went on to have six of her own, though one died soon after birth. And when, finally, John and Abigail, our president and first lady, occupied the newly built President’s House on the Potomac, we visited them, and we also met His Excellency at Mount Vernon. He was a very tall, shy man of few words and great virtue. He remembered us quite well, though our actions were by then many years in the past.

As for his letter, we dared not frame it for the world to see. We kept it safe in a box, and dry, amid all our other great and good bounty in the cellar: pompions and apples, oats and corn, wool and tow, and great barrels of dried tomatoes. Occasionally, we—me, Martha, and our husbands—would take it out to gawk at it, read it again, and hug each other in gratitude that such a time had come and gone. We never did tell another soul or boast of it. It was enough for us to know it was there, in so many words.

E.L.B.M., October 19th, early morning, 1818, Peacefield. Having lovingly washed the body of Abigail Adams, as I promised her to do long ago.

Acknowledgments

A HISTORICAL NOVEL would be difficult to
write without the help of many people. First, I would like to thank Dr. Edward Fitzgerald, executive director of the Quincy Historical Society, for giving me my first tour of Quincy, Massachusetts, originally called Braintree. Also, Ms. Leah Walczak, regional site manager for Historic New England, for granting me a private tour of the Josiah Quincy house, where several important scenes of the novel take place. The Massachusetts Historical Society allowed me to see the diaries of Abigail’s sister Betsy Smith, and their excellent online publication of the Adams letters and diaries was a godsend.

To create the setting of
The Midwife’s Revolt
, I needed to become well versed in a number of arcane fields: cookery, soldiering, farming, horse care, weaving, herbals, and early midwifery. Old Sturbridge Village helped me visualize many of these activities. I would also like to thank the following authors for writing their inspiring histories: David McCullough for
John Adams
and
1776
; and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich for
A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812
.

So many people helped with the manuscript. Carol Daynard and her reading group were among the novel’s first readers, as were Matthew and Nancy Daynard and her reading group. Many thanks also go to Nancy for taking a superb author photo. Marty Levy, Karen Backus, and Julie Pretzat gave me much-needed words of encouragement. My father, Harold Daynard, was my biggest fan and most astute critic. Lynne and Don Flexner have supported me in innumerable ways over the years. When I thought the novel was finished, Vivian Sinder-Brown let me know that it wasn’t. Finally, to my husband, Peter, who loved me and this novel from the very beginning, and supported both of us one hundred percent.

A Note from the Author

IF A HISTORICAL novel does its job,
the reader will be hard-pressed to know where fact leaves off and fiction begins. In writing
The Midwife’s Revolt
, I myself confused them after a while. But it may help those who are interested for me to reveal the process by which I wove the two together.

I began my research by taking notes on a monthly calendar. This calendar ran from June of 1775 through November of 1778. Before I even knew who my characters were, I knew their world: the children who were born, the diseases that ravaged, the snowstorms that blocked the roads, the events of the war—not merely when they happened, but when they would have reached the ears of the townspeople of Braintree and Boston. Thus, on June 17, 1775, when Lizzie eventually goes off to find Jeb, I knew it was a hot day. I knew the names of the babies she was obliged to deliver that July, even in her grief. When I learned that the selectmen of Braintree had voted to remunerate its citizens for killing the crows that were threatening their food supply, I knew Lizzie and Martha would have to learn how to shoot a musket and kill the crows, for the few schillings it would earn them. This is how the actual world shaped my story and my people, much as, I suppose, it does to us real folk.

As for John and Abigail Adams and their family, I took special care to know their whereabouts and communications throughout this time period. I knew when Abigail was in Boston taking the smallpox “cure.” I knew that she had a stillborn child on the day Lizzie delivers it, although this fact was not readily available: I unearthed it among the complete papers of John Adams at the Quincy Historical Society. Finally, when I have John set sail for France on February 15, 1778, I include the brief note he actually scribbled to Abigail from the frigate
Boston
.

I took more liberties with the secondary characters Josiah Quincy, Richard Cranch, Mary Cranch, Stephen Holland, George Washington, Betsy Cranch, and Mr. Cleverly (aka Benjamin Thompson). With them, fact and fiction become harder to sort out. Still, I tried to remain true to everything I knew about them, both as personalities and as actors upon an extraordinary stage. Stephen Holland was in fact a Tory counterfeiter; he was arrested at one point but escaped to the British Army. Abigail’s sister Betsy was a gifted writer; here again, this “fact” made me wonder how such a large spirit might chafe inside a conventional marriage to a country parson.

Lizzie Boylston is my own creation; she is not related to any real Boylstons of Massachusetts. Her married name conveys wealth and status to me only in the most general way. Martha and Thomas Miller, Harry Lee, Eliza Boylston, Giles and Bessie are likewise entirely fictional. The plot against the Adamses—
this
plot, at least—is a figment of my imagination.

Thus, George Washington never wrote any letters to Josiah Quincy about Thomas Miller; nor, sadly, did he ever write my heroine Lizzie Boylston to congratulate her on a job well done. Of course, I take great pleasure in his having done so within the fictional world of
The Midwife’s Revolt.
It was a profoundly generous gesture, and neither Lizzie nor Martha will ever forget it.

About the Author

Photo © 2013 Nancy Daynard

Jodi Daynard is a writer of fiction,
essa
ys, and criticism. Her work has appeared in numerous periodicals, including the
New York Times Book Review
, the
Village Voice
, the
Paris Review
, 
AGNI
, and the 
New England Review
, as well as several anthologies. She is the author of 
The Place Within: Portraits of the American Landscape by 20 Contemporary Writers
and
the translator and editor of Gaito Gazdanov’s
An Evening with Claire
. Daynard’s work has received notable mentions in 
Best American Essays
as well as Pushcart Prize nominations. She has taught writing at Harvard University, at MIT, and in the MFA program at Emerson College.