‘I only stopped to ask you how you are,’ I insisted.
‘And I have told you that it is nothing.’
‘Mama . . .’
‘Truly, Hanne, if you are not going to clean, please just get out of my way.’
I was relieved when, by the end of February, Mama’s nausea eased and the colour returned to her face. It was only when I returned to the Eichenwalds’ cottage and gave them the reason for my absence that Anna Maria explained to me that my mother may have been pregnant and, if so, had lost the baby to miscarriage.
I was angry then that Mama had let my fears grow wild and tangled. Angry that she had not shared with me this hopeful, miraculous thing. When I returned home that evening, I cornered her in the cellar and asked her why she had lied to me.
‘It was my own concern,’ Mama said.
I sat down on the steps and watched her open a crock. The smell of fermenting vegetables was thick in the air. ‘Are you sad?’ I asked her eventually.
‘I trust in the Lord with all my heart and lean not on my own understanding,’ Mama muttered, ladling pickled cabbage into a shallow dish. ‘In all ways I submit to Him, for He will make my path straight.’ She handed me the Sauerkraut. ‘Go set the table.’
‘Mama?’
‘Yes, Hanne?’
I stared down at the cabbage. ‘Do you remember when I was a child and I couldn’t sleep, and you would let me sit with you in front of the fire while you sewed?’
Mama did not look at me, but I saw her hands pause in their work. ‘I remember,’ she said.
‘I miss that sometimes.’
I turned to go. I did not want to give her an opportunity to wound me with derision or with yet another reminder that I was grown. But before I placed my foot on the stair, I felt Mama catch my elbow and turn me back to face her.
‘Hanne . . .’ She held my arm in her hands, as though I might run from her. ‘Would you like to sew with me tonight? Just us,’ she added, and there was something so tender and conciliatory in her request that I could not refuse.
That night, Mama waited until Matthias and Papa had retired to bed and then set two chairs in front of the fire. ‘I’m going to teach you how to whitework,’ she said, giving me a rare smile. ‘That way you can begin preparing your hope chest.’
My heart sank. ‘A hope chest?’
‘For when you are married. Whitework is lovely on a tablecloth. A christening gown. Bed linen.’
I was silent as Mama chalked a pattern onto fabric so I might practise. ‘Try this to begin with,’ she said. ‘Here, thread your own needle.’
‘I don’t know why you are so determined I marry,’ I said.
‘Oh, Hanne.’
‘I thought you wanted to spend time with me tonight.’
‘I do.’
‘No, you just want me to sew up things for a hope chest so you can be rid of me.’
My mother sighed. ‘It is not about getting rid of you.’
‘Why else do you keep talking about it?!’
Mama hesitated, then placed a hand on my knee. ‘Hanne, I need you to listen to me. Your future will be uncertain without the security of marriage.’
I opened my mouth to argue with her, but her face was gentle and searching.
‘Women who do not marry do not have children of their own,’ she said softly. ‘They must live with family, who must then provide for them. If they have family, that is. Take Rosina, for example. Her parents died. But when she marries Elder Christian she will be certain of a future. Of safety. A family and a roof over her head.’
‘What would happen to Rosina if she wasn’t marrying Christian?’ I asked.
‘She’d marry someone else.’
‘But what if no one wanted to marry her?’
Mama sat back in her chair and licked her thread. ‘There is always a man in need of a helpmeet.’
‘But, Mama, what if she married someone but she did not love him?’ I paused. ‘Does Rosina love Elder Pasche?’
‘Hanne, that is a private affair.’
‘I just –’
‘Love comes. In time she will love him.’
There was something in her voice that made my skull prickle. I looked at her, hair sleek and shiny from vinegar wash, eyes black against the darkness of her clothes. ‘Did you love Papa when you married him?’
Mama took a deep breath and blew it out, top lip pursing. ‘All wives must love their husbands. All husbands love their wives.’
‘But sometimes you can’t help not loving something. Like giblets and bacon.’
Mama smiled. ‘You love giblets and bacon.’
‘But what if I didn’t?’
‘Then you would love the children the giblets and bacon gave you.’ She tapped my hand holding the needle. ‘Begin.’
The year opened out into a blowy, blossomed spring. Petals fluttered to rest against doorways and walls, and I noticed bees hovering about the tight-budded flowers. A season of humming.
Mama began to run outside in the mornings, hand to mouth, and when I found her bent over, spitting into the new grass, I thought I knew the cause. Remembering our conversation in the cellar, I never asked her outright if I could expect a sibling. Still, Thea, as a midwife’s daughter, had an older woman’s understanding of these things, and she told me what I might do to ease my mother’s nausea. Mama did not refuse the small cups of mint tea or the dry slices of bread I brought her. She might have guessed that I had learned a thing or two at the Eichenwalds’.
Anna Maria had started to attend to some of the women in the area as a midwife, and those who had seen her work agreed that she was capable and calm and worthy. Rumour also had it that she was often already on the road when someone set out to fetch her. She would meet them on the lane, basket in hand. No one other than Christiana and Magdalena Radtke ever suggested out loud that she was a Hexe – there was no question that the family had suffered for their faith, and what witch would gladly suffer for Christ? – but it became known that Anna Maria had a preternatural ability to know when a woman was in labour. I was a little afraid to ask Thea about it. Thea, too, sometimes had an uncanny way about her, a way of guessing at my thoughts. Once she answered a question before I had the opportunity to ask it aloud. When I pointed out that I hadn’t spoken, she seemed a little taken aback. ‘Yes, you did, I heard you.’
‘I didn’t say a word.’
Anna Maria interjected, throwing flour upon the table in a steady arc. ‘You two are old friends recently met, I think.’ She smiled at me, handed over a wrapped cloth. ‘Take this to Johanne. It’s blood sausage, to fortify her.’
Mama gave birth one year after the quiet loss of the unmentioned, unnamed child. She sent me for Anna Maria at midnight, bracing herself against the doorframe to my room, face licked with sweat.