Jane's Cure

By D. K. Kennedy

Jane Angier won't stop helping women, even if it kills her. And it might.

 

Trapped in a granite cell, a nineteenth century midwife awaits her trial for the crime of helping women time their pregnancies. Or is she guilty of something far worse?

 

A trapper's daughter, Jane Angier is a woman of the woods, a free spirit, and a misfit in the Loyalist colony of Queen's Bay, New Brunswick, a beautiful seaside town with ugly secrets. The community is suffering through a set of economic and social disasters. A boatload of Irish immigrants threatens the town with a typhoid epidemic, the bottom has fallen out of the timber trade, and cheap rum turns everyone mean. When Jane loses her family to typhoid, the Queen's Bay midwife takes her on as an apprentice. After Jane takes over the practice, she develops and sells "Jane's Cure for Female Irregularities," a very effective and popular remedy for late periods.

 

Jane's success threatens the poorly trained doctor trying to grow his practice. He is also threatened by Jane's very close relationship with his wife, a brilliant woman mired in a bad marriage. When Jane helps a rape victim abort, the community's powerful men unite to get her out of Queen's Bay, preferably at the end of a rope.

 

Jane's Cure is a harrowing tale of women who dare to exercise control over their bodies as they struggle against the first, but not the last, laws banning abortion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bedazzled Ink Publishing
• Release date: Apr 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215306758

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Praise for Jane’s Cure

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"Jane’s Cure is about a young midwife who sells an effective ‘term regulator’ in the Canadian Maritimes in the 1850s—a time dominated by fatal diseases and men wielding dangerous power. Jane may pay the ultimate price for outperforming the crudely trained local doctor and for giving women control over their prescribed role of motherhood. D.K. Kennedy’s many gifts in storytelling include vivid writing, great details and sense of place, a dynamic balance of action and lyrical moments, suspense to the very end, and a protagonist we cared about so much. Jane’s Cure deepens our understanding of what women endured during this crucial time in history. Then, as now, we witness the courage that midwives summon to support women with their skilled and life-affirming care." — Jane Pincus and Wendy Sanford, co-authors of Our Bodies, Ourselves

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"We should all be in jail with Jane, the main character in Jane’s Cure, if we believe in a woman’s right to personal reproductive autonomy since we have states which now ban it. Jane’s Cure takes us to the 1850s when it was outlawed in British Canada. Like an Outlander novel, the plot thickens and the main character may feel the hangman’s noose around her neck. You read on to see if that will happen." — Cynthia Bittinger, Professor of History, author of Vermont Women, Native Americans and African Americans: Out of the Shadows of History

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© 2023 D.K. Kennedy

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I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide." — Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Historians might note that the Court’s majority opinion refers to ‘history’ sixty-seven times, claiming that ‘an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.’ Our brief shows plentiful evidence, however, of the long legal tradition, extending from the common law to the mid-1800s (and far longer in some American states, including Mississippi), of tolerating termination of pregnancy before occurrence of ‘quickening,’ the time when a woman first felt fetal movement. The majority of the court dismisses that reality because it was eventually—although quite gradually—superseded by criminalization. In so doing the court denies the strong presence in US ‘history and traditions’at least from the Revolution to the Civil War of women’s ability to terminate pregnancy before the third to fourth month without intervention by the state. — Amicus curiae brief to the US Supreme Court presenting the relevant history to the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case. The Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, July 2021

A Bluebird

February 1850

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I hear a bluebird.

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IT IS FEBRUARY, and I know it is too soon for him to be back. When I close my eyes, I see him, a piece of the sky, his breast brushed with sunset. Did he follow the steamer packet from somewhere south, Boston, perhaps? Or maybe Maryland? Did he chase a line of slaves escaping to the north? Every day more of them cross the St. Croix River from Maine to Queen’s Bay, where they are free and despised. How did my bird find his way to the ash tree outside my window? He flew on a wind blowing north and east, past the Yankees to this town in the colony of New Brunswick, its people clinging to the shore, to the past, and to a young queen across the sea.

Queen’s Bay, my home for the past two years, shire of the county, graced with a new courthouse and a granite jail built for the likes of me.

The stone blocks glisten with frost and I think of salt.

Why am I here? The editor of The Loyalist Gazette is happy to tell me. The angry letters pour into the paper. Mostly doctors from all over New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Upper Canada, and of course, from our neighbors in Maine. Because I am a midwife, they write I am uneducated, a quack, a heathen, a hag, one step from a witch. They write I kill the ignorant and unwary. They write I endanger women with my cure, that is Jane’s Cure, and they call it a quack medicine. They write I do not know what I am doing. They write  hanging is too good for me, that I should be burned at the stake, as in the olden days, but that the queen’s law now forbids such punishments, more’s the pity. They write  I am an unnatural woman who shuns men and children. They write I kill babies.

And they write the one thing that is true: I threaten the sacred duty of women, which is to bring forth children.

I am battered by these letters, I must admit. I want to turn to my ledger where I kept my notes, my words nestled up tight against Biddy’s, the midwife before me. No doubt the doctor stole it from my cabin where he will paw through it looking for both evidence and guidance. Evidence that I broke the law and guidance for how to help the suffering souls of Queen’s Bay. He is an ignorant ass, but an ass with power, the worst kind. I know he will steal our remedies and recipes and take credit when the wart disappears, the headache fades, the infected finger stops weeping pus and grows a scab.

It is all there in the brief notes: our hands giving strength to a laboring mother and all who labored with her, the sisters and neighbors, aunts and grandmothers—a net of women catching that little fish of a baby. I imagined being an old woman and running a gnarled finger over the entries, a few brief notes holding the beginning of a new life. There now, Kate, it’s not so bad. You are such a strong one! Millie, Cassie, help her walk around the room again. Pour her more tea, would you, Sarah? Give our Kate lots of sugar so her baby will be a sweet one. It won’t be long, now. Don’t push yet, not quite. Soon I’ll have you squat down like you’re in the privy.

Deaf in my old age, my faded notes would allow me to hear the crying out, the gasp of recognition between the baby and mother, the laughter and the soft hello of the men whose dirt-stained hands cradled the heads of their newborn sons.

Babies and mothers, children with coughs, fathers with bad teeth, broken fingers, a splinter in the eye, and everyone with fevers, putrid throats, measles, chickenpox, smallpox. The columns: Dates, People, Treatments, Fees. The plasters and purges, the ointments, teas, tinctures, all manner of cures, the history of our work.

There were the particular remedies women needed that smoothed the childbearing years into a manageable course and limited terms or brought them on. My tincture was an improvement on the simple recipes known to midwives and many others over the years, and my success with it is certainly a part of the reason I am here. But if the doctors have anything to say about it, the recipe for Jane’s Cure will crumble into dust. The unsold vials will be smashed. I wonder what they will do with the midwives?

Perhaps a few bottles of Cure will nestle beneath some folded white shifts for a woman’s future use. I’d like to think so.

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KATHRYN COMES, HER face high-colored from the wind, smelling of cold. She surprises me by giving me the barest kiss on my cheek. I step back, putting my hand on the spot where her lips had been. I calculate the months since her lips had been on my cheek and elsewhere: fifteen. She moves her snowy shawl off her hair, dark and piled up higher than she used to wear it, more in fashion than her usual low coil against her nape. She pokes  into her basket, pulling out a chicken wing, dried apple slices, and a lump of maple sugar made from the first sap run of the season. I eat while Kathryn chatters about the new preacher as if I care about such things.

Looking at her, I wonder how I could have missed the corset around her heart, its invisible whalebones molding her into a fine wife for a weak and arrogant doctor who wanted me gone, if not dead. Comely Kathryn. Not pretty, but what is called handsome: a regal neck, nose long, but straight, eyes and ears a little too large. Mannered Kathryn. Unknowable Kathryn.

The jailer provides a chair for the lady. Kathryn sits stiff and straight as usual, the chair back many inches from hers. I finish eating the chicken wing and try not to lick my fingers in front of her, but I can’t resist the salty fat, daring her to correct my manners as she did so often in the past.

She closes her pale brown eyes briefly against my uncouth hand cleaning and says, I see you like the chicken. Before I wiped  my hands on my apron, she hands me her handkerchief, one of her best ones, edged in lace and embroidered with the initials she had before marriage, KIS, Kathryn Isobel Sterne. I wonder if her husband Charles knows she keeps these connections to her unattached self before she became a doctor’s wife with the ugly name of Clawson.

It goes well with the county’s oats cooked in cabbage broth, my breakfast this morning. I ball up the greasy hanky in my fist, embarrassed at how I dirtied it, the grease sliding the filth off my hands.

How dreadful! She glances at my fist then back up to my eyes.

It is. Perching on the edge of my bed, the iron frame makes  an icy seat, so I arrange the blanket into a cushion and sit back down.

She looks around my cell, stares at the frosted stones. The morning light tries to push its way through the narrow window, but it isn’t having much luck. She turns her head away from my night bucket in the corner, unemptied for the past two days. It is full and foul. We are far from her parlor with its delicate tea tables holding cream pitchers and pink saucers.

I struggle to say thank you. I don’t want to seem weak or beholden, to owe her anything, yet I gobble her food and steal her handkerchief. I choke out the words, Thank you.

As if my thanks released a demon, the night bucket suddenly explodes with the smell of my shit, and although I cannot help it, I am ashamed.

Kathryn is flustered and shifts slightly in her chair. She reaches into her bag for her handkerchief to cover her nose before realizing  she has already given it to me.

Is cabbage gruel a big part of your diet? Of course, digested cabbage accounts for the particularly awful smell, something we both know from long winters without fresh greens. Her question is said in a conversational tone as she attempts to ignore the frosted stones, the stink, the dark.

I snicker at the words cabbage gruel as the funniest two words in human creation, and I start laughing, and I try telling her what is so funny, but I can’t and I snort, and then she laughs at my snorting the way she always does. We shriek with laughter, share the grease-stained hanky, repeating cabbage gruel as soon as one of us pushes down a giggle, we erupt  again. The jailer opens the door, and Kathryn stiffens into her lady self and sends him away.

I have some news, she says. She blows her nose in a decidedly unladylike fashion. I found myself listening at the door like a common housemaid the other night when Charles and the other magistrates were discussing what to do with you as you await the spring Assize. There won’t be a trial until mid-spring after the roads have dried. There was talk about sending you to the penitentiary, but the warden in St. John won’t accept someone who hasn’t been convicted. And the lunatic asylum wouldn’t take you without getting considerable tax for your upkeep.

But I am not a lunatic!

Of course, you aren’t, but all it takes is two magistrates to say you are. Do not concern yourself with such thoughts. You are too expensive for them. So, you’ll remain here. She shudders as she looks at the iron-clad door, red from rust.

Have you heard anything else?

Kathryn will not look at me. She is hiding something.

What is it? What are people saying?

"There was an ugly article written by a doctor from Fredericton in the Gazette accusing you of horrible things. All lies and quite ridiculous."

I don’t care what some doctor in Fredericton says. I want to know what your husband is saying.

I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s all nonsense anyway. No one believes the charges are true. Kathryn’s eyes slide away from me to where the view of Queen’s Bay is less disagreeable, a patch of gray sky through a jail window. I know she will not say more. I want to take both my hands to her cheeks and force her to look—at what? At the very least, I want her to look at me.

What does he say? Her husband, both a doctor and a magistrate—there are many magistrates in Queen’s Bay, all men of consequence—knew a great deal about what my future might hold.

Charles won’t tell me anything. We barely speak these days. Kathryn runs her hands over her skirt as if she is wiping off unpleasantness. Women are signing up to bring you food, but a few men are forbidding their wives from having anything to do with you, even bringing you something to eat.

She is lying. There is more, but before I wheedle the information out of her, the jailer interrupts us. Shirts are here.

He hands me the bundle of what will occupy my hours: needle, thread, shirts pieces which I sew into shirts for the Irish orphans as my contribution to the costs of my imprisonment. The cloth is scratchy, linsey-woolsey. It feels awful to my roughened hands, so it must claw at the tender skin of a child. One more way to punish the poor for the crime of being poor. Yet it is  good to have something to do, and I have one extra candle provided to me because I need the light to sew.

Freeing his hands of the shirt pieces, the jailer moves toward the bucket, but the cell doesn’t allow much movement with three people, one of them a lady in a full skirt, a bed, a chair, and a dangerously full substitute privy, so he backs away, saying, You best be going, Mrs. Clawson. The prisoner has to get to work.

Jane. Her name is Jane Angier, Kathryn says. Of course, he knows my name as I know his. But he is his job, a jailer, as I am mine, a prisoner. A midwife, too, but not employed at present. The jailer grunts and leaves. 

She shrugs and stands up. You know Charles. He thinks he knows more than he does.

She packs up her basket, puts on her cloak and hat. She moves toward me, for a kiss I think, but she only brushes away a crumb of maple sugar clinging to the corner of my mouth. I taste the sweetness left behind.

The door clangs shut, and I berate myself for not asking about the baby.

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MY MIND IS slippery, filled with eels impossible to hold. This must be what insanity feels like. My rage at these granite walls is the only heat I have, so I hold on to it. It crowds out my fear. These gray stones, massive and ugly, are crushing the breath out of my body.

Who was the man who imagined this horrible place, who drew it on paper, made a plan? Why are the windows so narrow? The granite had to be ferried over from a quarry far from here, although there is pink granite much closer, but it was said to be too pretty for a jail. It is this small detail that consumes me. A pink jail would have been cheaper, but the tightfisted town found the extra money for these gray stones. I am unreasonably angry I have been denied a pink cell. Everything surrounding me has been designed to punish, to crush, to degrade. I have months of this left. My only escape is to sleep.

It is snowing, and I feel like a bear in her den. When I was a little girl struggling with a new pair of snowshoes, my father showed me a deep hole at the base of a tree holding a sleeping bear, unaware of my father’s hands pulling a tiny cub away from her breast. He let me hold the cub for just a second, and then he carefully put it back, explaining how sleeping mothers give birth to their cubs in the winter.

Do winter bears dream of being wild and carefree, perhaps sitting in a chokecherry bush, pulling down branches, and delicately nipping off the red fruit, unburdened with hungry cubs biting at nipples? Likely not, but it amuses me to think of it.

I would like to sleep through this winter and awake in the spring when my trial has already happened, and I have been found not guilty, and then I would unfold myself out of this awful hole, blinking from the shock of the sunlight.

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FEBRUARY BEGINS AND ends in winter. But in the woods, I know the maple trees on the south-facing hills are sending up sap, wolves are filling dens with pups, deer browse on cedar tips. The hares are still white, invisible in the snow. If I were free, I’d be setting snares for the unwary or the merely frightened, peeling off their pelts and sprinkling the skin side with salt. I think of these things to push away the thoughts of an ugly trial ending in hanging. I visit the past and watch myself as I make my way to this place.

I walk through my memories, unwalled.

Queen’s Bay

MANY IN QUEEN’S Bay thought me wild, not quite civilized. I let them believe it. I now know this was a mistake. I hoped that as a woman of the woods, I could be excused for not wearing a corset, for keeping my skirts short so they wouldn’t drag in the mud, for wearing my hair loose or tied back with a string, not even a ribbon. While I wasn’t the only person not to attend church, I was the only one who stupidly and publicly said I didn’t believe in God, which made me a devil to some. I thought if I poulticed enough wounds, delivered women from the pain of childbirth, tended to the feverish, the frostbitten, and the dead, I would be accepted like the stray calico cat everybody loved and nobody owned. I wanted to believe that my oddities would be overlooked if not forgiven. I didn’t grow up in a town, or Boston, or in an Irish cottage or on a farm. I am the daughter of a trapper, from away like my bluebird— here on a gale and singing out of season.

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TWO YEARS AGO, we arrived at the spring salmon camp with our pile of salted and stretched furs, the winter’s bounty. The four of us had full packs; my parents and I carried the heaviest bundles, but even my sister Sylvie bent from the weight of her pack. She had turned five, and she couldn’t wait to see children. I think it was hardest on her over the trapping season when we were enveloped in the winter life of snow, ice, mud, blood, salted hides, and long stretches of profound darkness and silence. Sylvie craved company; I avoided it. My parents, both loners at heart, fitted into each so completely they had lost the need to talk about much of anything.

There weren’t many trappers left who wanted our life. Small villages sprouted on waterways with flat land along the banks. Trappers became farmers and shopkeepers, while ancient game trails became rough roads. The animals fled such intrusions, and we followed them, retreating deeper into the forest, competing with the wolves for our furs.

The winter days were short, so we were very busy making the best use of the sun, checking the traps, laying new lines, traveling to another cabin, gutting, scrapping, salting hides. If a trapline took us too far away from our cabin, during the worst cold or blizzards, we would huddle in a tiny log tilt, doing nothing, just staying warm. In the spring, we’d pack up and head toward a trading post, someplace near a fort, or a new-sprung town. We stayed away from any place with a church because my mother feared the missionaries who stole girls, forcing them to learn to scrub a floor, to kneel on it, and to pray.

Salmon camp brought the remaining woods people together for a few months, a spring gathering filled with barking dogs, shrieking babies, people laughing, and late at night, low voices telling stories around a fire. It was also where the unattached were expected to pair off. Mother had high hopes for me that spring, casually mentioning one man or another we might run into at camp, then looking to see if I was rolling my eyes. I was.

At twenty-two, I thought I would remain single, which seemed much simpler than any other arrangement. A few escapades with bumbling, panting boys left me cold; wives worked harder than was fair, and they had to care for the old ones and the children. I preferred to dress like a man and trap with my father, leaving the talk of love and marriage to other women my age who found me stranger the older I got.

Nearly twenty families lived in tents lined up along the river, now calm after the violent spring melt. Everyone was busy building fish-drying racks, mending last year’s nets, patching tents, fixing worn sleds. Children chased each other with sticks, threw rocks in the river, danced around the low fires beneath the drying fish.

After setting up, we learned that the nearest trading post had burned down over the winter, which meant we would have to go much further south, to Queen’s Bay on the coast, to unload our furs.

Queen’s Bay is a mean town, Bill said, an old friend of my father’s. Meaner than most, especially to anyone might be French or Indian or Black. Bill was sawing up slab wood for the front entrance to his tent. Most of the tents had similar wooden porches to catch the mud. He seemed eager to take a break and dug out a fresh plug of tobacco which took some hard chewing to soften up.

That’s about the whole north country, Father said. Don’t know what it is about some Englishmen.

They ain’t much for the Irish, either,  Bill’s wife Nora said, her red hair in wild curls.

There aren’t too many people left to be mean to. Bill had been into the rum bottle, and I remembered he could take offense easily. They like the English. Just them. We don’t go nowhere close to Queen’s Bay. We send our furs down with Alcott. He’s got people there, and so he gets a fair price. He don’t do it for free, though. He watched Nora pick up a whining baby with hair nearly as red as hers. If you can’t shut her up, take her out of here. I’m trying to talk. He spat brown tobacco juice near Nora’s feet before turning back to Father.

He’s away, but he’ll be back in a couple of days. I bet Alcott’d take your furs if you asked.

I don’t need Alcott. I’ve got English in me somewhere, a great-grandpa on my mother’s side, the name of Cooper. A good English name. It’ll come in handy. Father tilted his head and stroked his chin. They can’t care that much. Money is money, after all—no sense in paying another man to do my business. You been there, Bill? Been to Queen’s?

Years ago. I worked on a logging crew one winter. There was a lot of work. Nowadays no need for loggers. It’s the market. I don’t understand it. Men with no work can be ugly. I’d steer clear of Queen’s Bay if I was you. I’m telling you, Alcott is your man.

I’ll pass myself off as English. My blue eyes and curls should do the trick, don’t you think, Nora? Father grinned at the baby who stared at him before offering a gummy smile in return.

You might pass as English, Nora said, sticking her finger into her baby’s mouth. But I can’t say about your family. Your wife, especially, she said, looking sideways at Mother, who had her black hair in a braid that day.

We’ll make a two-day trip to Queen’s Bay, sell our furs and lick back here, Father said.

I think he meant it when he said it. Later, I heard him arguing with Mother, who didn’t want to go anywhere near Queen’s Bay, but she wouldn’t say why except