“After we buried Mrs. Holdsworth, my courses stopped. I told myself it was an excess of wind or water, and that my body would be right soon enough. But I knew that I was with child. The prospect was so terrible I hid it as best I could. I started bundling up my skirts and wearing a cloak even when the weather did not require it. Nobody suspected.”
“What did Mr. Holdsworth say?”
“I never told the swine,” she said. “I knew he would call me a whore and turn me out of his house. I would have wandered from parish to parish, and soon enough I would have been reduced to the whore he had tried to make me. When my time approached, I slipped into the woods not far from Mr. Holdsworth’s house. There I gave birth to a boy, dead.
“Ah, how I cried,” she continued. “He never drew a breath or saw my face, but I loved that child. But you know this pain, too.” Here, Martha’s mask slipped, and I saw the grief she still felt for her lost child, a grief I knew all too well. I nodded, fighting my own tears. “I wrapped him in a piece of linen I stole from Mr. Holdsworth, blessed my boy, and then buried him deep so the animals couldn’t get him.
“Do you know what I did the afternoon after I buried my baby? I went back to work washing and mending Mr. Holdsworth’s breeches. Such was my lot. The next day was the Sabbath, and Mr. Holdsworth took me to divine service. The minister said servants should obey their masters as they would God Himself. When we got home, Mr. Holdsworth repeated the sermon and then troubled me again. After that I lost interest in what the priests had to say about God. If God wanted Mr. Holdsworth to rape me, then I’ve no interest in Him or His plans.”
At that moment, my mind returned to the conversation we’d had as we’d walked to Margaret Goodwin’s house. I remembered her reaction when I told her of losing Michael and Birdy and her scorn at my suggestion that the death of my babies had been a part of God’s plan. Now I understood both her sympathy for me and her wrath toward God. I also knew that she was telling me the truth. The look in her eyes as she told me of her son’s death was the same one she’d had when we’d talked of my lost children. While she might be an accomplished dissembler, no woman could lie so convincingly about the death of her own child.
Martha took a breath, and her face hardened. I did not yet know what had happened to her master, but I knew that fate had not been kind. “That day Mr. Holdsworth must have realized I had a child, and for a time he left me in peace. But he never asked what happened, and I hated him for it. It was during this respite that I found my escape from Mr. Holdsworth. One afternoon, he sent me to deliver five pounds he was loaning to a neighbor. As I passed a hedgerow I heard a familiar voice call my name.”
“Tom,” I said.
“He’d returned from the wars the very picture of health—another part of God’s plan, I suppose,” she said with a sneer. “He told me that he’d done his best for God, and now he would do his worst for himself. Without warning, he tore the coins from my hands. ‘Well, you’ve done it now,’ he said. ‘You’ve become a thief just like me.’
“I protested that I had done no such thing, but even then I knew the truth didn’t matter. Mr. Holdsworth would beat me within an inch of my life for losing such a sum no matter what happened. Tom had made sure I could never go back even if I wanted to. Then he offered to take me with him on the road. He said he needed an assistant to replace the pocky wench they’d hanged in London.”
“You went with him willingly?” I asked, aghast.
“I promised to tell the truth, and I will.” Her voice took on a harder edge. “But tell me, my lady, if I had come to you then and asked you what I should do, what would you have said? Would you have sent me back to Mr. Holdsworth to tell him that I’d been robbed by my own brother? The best I could hope for would be a whipping. Would you have told me to return to that goat and his lechery? He’d have raped me again and again, and soon enough I’d have become pregnant. Would you have asked me to do that? Would you have asked me to lose another child, or be turned out of his house as a whore?” To my relief she did not wait for me to answer, for none presented itself. “No, my lady,” she continued, “it was far better to go with Tom than to suffer for Mr. Holdsworth’s sins. I know many would say my decision was wrong, that I should have gone back. And I know that I could still hang for my crimes. But I had no choice, and I have no regrets.” I nodded. While I could not condone her decision to become her brother’s accomplice, I could understand it.