Nelly Dean never forgot her first sight of Betsey Archer, standing over Mary Earnshaw’s corpse.
On that Yorkshire morning in 1770, Nelly had entered the room to see her mistress lying perfectly still on what should have been the bed of childbirth. Dame Archer, the midwife, stood beside the bed, her face contorted in grief. Across from her stood a fourteen-year-old girl Nelly had seen before at church, but never up close: the midwife’s daughter Betsey, who’d been brought along to learn her mother’s trade. She had long ginger-colored braids, and bright blue eyes, and cheeks covered in freckles, and Nelly had never seen anyone so enraged.
“When I do this,” Betsey had shouted, “women will not die!”
From that day on, Nelly sought out every opportunity she could to see Betsey. She learned Betsey could run faster than all the other girls, and her laugh was the loudest, and even at fourteen she knew so much that Nelly was amazed, for Betsey could tell you about a plant to use to cure almost any ailment. Their friendship grew as they did, and the year they turned seventeen, took a turn that in our age, might have flourished in the open, but in their day could not. For Nelly and Betsey fell in love.
Nelly thought back often to that year’s harvest bonfire. She recalled Betsey’s face, flushed with firelight, framed by the sparks that flew up against the black sky; then her lips, as they kissed in the barn. And then the laughter that overcame them, the giddiness, the fluttering of Betsey’s petticoats flying up as she fell backwards into the hay. There were other nights, too, when they met on the moors; a few afternoons, when Betsey’s mother was away from home; and—most daring of all, so daring that in retrospect she could not believe her own courage—the time in the church vestry, just before Betsey’s wedding, when Nelly had held Betsey close in her arms.
That wedding was an unfortunate necessity. Betsey had already reached the age of twenty-one, and a woman of such an advanced age needed a husband—unless she were employed in the homes of the gentry, like Nelly, in which case she would not be expected to marry at all. Betsey had already turned away several suitors, and Sam Wilkins, though he was only a farmhand, was the son of Betsey’s father’s best friend. He said he admired Betsey greatly; and she could delay no longer.
Things had changed, of course, after that—and yet some things did not change at all. It was Betsey to whom Nelly always told all the events of her life, sharing a weekly chronicle of joys and sorrows—and one day in their mid-twenties, a huge and terrible grief.
Nelly was still in service to the Earnshaw family, which was now headed by Hindley Earnshaw, the family’s eldest son. Hindley’s wife had died of tuberculosis the winter after she gave birth to their little boy, Hareton, and Nelly had raised him from a babe. He was nearly five, and Nelly was just about to start teaching him his letters, when Hindley announced she must leave her current post to accompany Hindley’s soon-to-be-married sister, Catherine, into her new home, four miles away.
“I’ll have no more women in the house,” Hindley had bellowed, “You are dismissed!” He tore his son from Nelly’s skirts and thrust her out the door, and it was to Betsey’s hearthside that she fled. Betsey was the midwife who’d brought Hareton into this world, and she knew how he and Nelly loved each other. She listened to Nelly’s weeping, to her despair and incredulity: how could Hindley, whom she’d known all her life, treat her so? She’d grown up playing with him, because her mother was in service to the Earnshaws, too—Nelly’s mother had even nursed them both, and at the same tcomfortime, since they’d been born in the same year!
“In the end, you’re a servant like any other,” Betsey had said. Her tone was bitter, but her voice was soft: her older boy, now almost five, was dozing on a cot in the next room, while her baby slept in his crib before the fire.
As Betsey spoke, Nelly noticed a fine strand of ginger hair escaping her bun. As Nelly smoothed it gently behind her friend’s ear, she saw there was a dark bruise on one side of Betsey’s throat, just the size of a man’s thumb.
Sam. The name passed, unspoken, between them. Betsey’s gaze was blank, but Nelly’s flashed with fire.
She pressed her lips on Betsey’s and willed the warmth of their kiss to make the whole world disappear.
But the world most stubbornly remained. Nelly became the housekeeper for Catherine and her husband as the newlyweds settled in and soon enough, were expecting their own child. Meanwhile Betsey remained Sam Wilkins’ wife. And if Sam had turned out—as he did—to love his bottle more than his wife; and if his contribution to the family income was a negative one, his modest wages being more than consumed by his spending at Miller’s tavern, while Betsey’s midwifery paid the bills; and if—a few times a year—he had nights of drunkenness that were also nights of anger, in which he became violent and caused bruises on Betsey’s skin that in our day, would be crimes—none of these sins were generally considered, in that time and place, a justification for divorce. To be sure, Sam was held in generally low regard, and received many a lecture from the minister. Betsey could have received much commiseration, but she refused to be pitied; and so, she carried on, concentrating on her work and on her children, who were regarded even by Sam’s harshest critics as the man’s one positive contribution to the world. To Nelly it seemed as if everything in both their lives was settled, and would go on this way forever. But all that changed on the bright January morning when the kitchenmaid informed her that Samuel Wilkins was dead.
The kitchenmaid heard it from the milkmaid, who’d heard it from the blacksmith’s apprentice, who’d heard it from the miller’s daughter, who’d heard it from the brother of the barmaid, Sarah—each of them passing the news on with even more than the usual eagerness of small-town residents; for upon hearing of this tragedy, everyone in Gimmerton was at pains to suppress a chuckle. Sam had spent the previous night at Miller’s Tavern, partaking of shepherd’s pie, and sweetbreads, and copious amounts of ale. Mrs. Miller saw him out at closing time, expecting that as usual, he’d clamber onto his horse and fall asleep, since the animal knew the way home. She didn’t see that, instead, a sudden cramp sent him to the backyard privy. There it seems that Sam lapsed into unconsciousness before his business was complete. There he remained, his head leaning against one wall of the privy, as the deadly cold of the winter night pierced his skin and bones and heart. The process was a slow one, and given Sam’s state of intoxication, a peaceful one, for him. But the barmaid Sarah got the shock of her life the next morning, when she opened the privy door to find him sitting there, his trousers crumpled around his ankles, and his pale white member jutting out like a pointing finger, frozen stiff.
Nelly helped Betsey get mourning clothes for her boys, and arrange the funeral, and cook for the mourners, and pack up Sam’s things for donation to the poor. After all this bustle of activity, the two young women—for such they still were, at only twenty-seven—found themselves one evening in Betsey’s house alone, in rocking chairs before the fire, with both boys asleep and all the day’s chores done.
“Your mistress Catherine may not survive her baby’s birth,” said Betsey. After attending at many births, she had learned to be realistic about what midwives could do. While she did not have our term pre-eclampsia, she knew that Catherine showed a pattern of symptoms that despite a midwife’s best efforts, could kill both a pregnant woman and her child.
“If the baby lives, it will be yours to raise,” she added.
“Indeed,” said Nelly. There rose before her mind’s eye a pre-vision of the little girl soon to be born. The joy of seeing her grow would make the next decades the happiest of Nelly’s life—that, and the joy of being able to be here, sometimes, with Betsey, in a house from which all traces of a husband had vanished.
“We won’t be raising children together, exactly,” said Betsey, letting her voice trail off as she thought and yet, in a way, we will be.
“They told me to take a few days’ holiday,” said Nelly. “So I needn’t go back tonight.”
The women’s eyes met, and then their hands. Then Betsey spoke.
“Stay.”
