Chapter 26
Spanish Town, Jamaica
“Bjorn?” Mary called out. Her skin felt aflame. Wet. Like she’d been doused with water. Why was she lying on a mound of straw? Scratchy. Itchy.
A swollen stomach.
A baby. A baby! Her heart leapt, knocking tables over in its thrill.
A dream?
No. Not a dream.
She was with child. After ten years of trying. It would be here soon.
“We were discussing the Fleming officer. How your intense feelings clouded rational judgment and rendered you negligent in the army,” came a man’s voice.
She lifted her head. Tried to lift her head.
“Miss Read?”
Why couldn’t she lift her head?
“I’m with child,” Mary said in a thin sound she didn’t recognize. “Will you tell Bjorn? Did someone tell Bjorn?”
“Yes, we know—nearly seven months along, a month shy of Anne’s condition. You told the court. You ‘pled your belly,’ remember? They agreed to spare you both until your time?”
She tried to push herself up, then collapsed. Why didn’t her arms work?
“Miss Read. Rest. You need—”
She elbowed herself up. She didn’t need rest, she needed Bjorn. She needed to get back to the Three Horse-Shoes. Someone had to put the soup on and change the bedding. The officers and other ranking soldiers enjoyed coming by for drinks in the evening. Good men. Friends.
She held out her hand for support. It shook. Why did it shake?
“The wedding. You were telling me about the wedding.”
Her vision blurred, then focused again, this time settling on the man. His captain’s hat with an ostrich feather. He held a quill. What was he writing? She could read it—she could read many things now.
“What happened after the wedding?” he asked.
“That is private,” Mary said. What a question from a stranger. But this captain looked familiar. Had they met? Was he an officer who frequented the Three Horse-Shoes? She must have poured him a drink.
Where had she put his glass?
The captain yelled for help through bars. Iron bars.
“You’re fevered, Miss Read,” he said, turning to her. “Lie down. You’re seeing things that aren’t there.”
“Bjorn,” she wheezed.
The captain spoke with someone through the slats. She heard the word “doctor.”
“I don’t need a doctor. I need Bjorn,” she said, calm and gentle and firm. “Where is he?”
The captain turned toward her again, this time with a look of caution. “I don’t know, Miss Read. That was something you were just telling me.”
Another man entered. A doctor? A surgeon? She swallowed a scream. She’d trained, all her life, to not scream like a woman.
She clutched her stomach. Her baby. This was her blessing to love and protect.
“She’s mad with fever,” the captain said to the doctor. “Do you have something for this?”
Mary held herself tighter and felt the world tilt.
“I’m not mad,” she said, her eyes closed as she felt hands on her, adjusting her body.
“I was never mad. Bjorn told the army that so we could marry—so I could be discharged. So we could make a home and make our fortune another way. The Three Horse-Shoes. Have you heard of it? The ordinary near the castle of Breda?” She stopped there.
She did not offer an invitation, as she might have done otherwise.
She was not sure she liked this company.
“Bloodletting should help,” the doctor said, rifling through a medical box.
Blood? No.
“No more blood,” she breathed. The metallic smell.
The pools on the ground and color on her blade.
The hospital tent and the amputee and the shot through Bjorn’s chest. Blood, so much blood.
Month after month after month. The crimson stamping her undergarments.
The black clots in Bjorn’s lungs. The coughing. The coughing that never stopped.
Until, one day, it did.
“Bjorn needs a doctor,” Mary said, her pulse racing with memory as her eyes flung open. “Not me. Him!”
The doctor gripped her arm and made a gash. She gasped. Iron. Tangy. Thick. She knew it so well.
I’m with child, she thought, before everything went dark again.
Bjorn, I’m carrying a child.
We have to find Ma.