ABBESS

It was the tenth child her husband had put in her now, and she would not bring it forth alive. Could not without her mind unspooling like intestine tugged free of a wound; this Angeline had known since the family doctor, with a nervy, congratulative titter, had informed her of its conception.

Ethaniel—the father—had wanted the boy, had tried for it nightly under sheets dank with the sweat of a mother’s work until the seed stuck. He’d stood from his chair to shake the doctor’s hand without looking at his wife, who sat working a bit of tissue to crumbs in her lap.

He had never looked to her, in fact, had never asked her thoughts on family matters since the start of it, nor allowed the suggestion of protest to stir him.

When, a decade ago, he’d first spoken of rearing a brood of ten or more children Angeline had only laughed at him. The hyperbole of romance, so she’d thought it, then, like so many other lovesick murmurings in her ear from previous men that had not come to pass.

But he had meant it, and now her belly was to swell again Angeline knew that the child must be out of her. Not in the way of its predecessors—clenched, squealing, through a fringe of red flesh—but by other means less natural, at least in the eyes of Ethaniel’s god.

It was September now, and if it were not done the tenth brat would be whelped and screaming by the following year in a room with its sibling, the ninth, itself still an infant.

The eight others Angeline could hear somewhere in the skull of the farmhouse, their shrill voices mercifully dampened by the floor between them and the kitchen whose bounds she rarely seemed to leave.

Once Angeline had liked, though never wanted children. Now the sound of their shrieking laughter wrought from her imagined ecstasies of violence towards their father that only through her horror at their existence was she restrained from committing.

She turned her wedding ring on her finger, fighting the itch to set it down on the kitchen sideboard.

How she had married into such a life Angeline could only ascribe to a vanity that she has been so wanted, for she had never been lonely, nor had she been much concerned with love.

Angeline had been an actress, then, spending her days running from one job to the next as they came to her. She was rarely paid well, but she had realistic expectations of her career and its middling heights. Her talent was reasonable, her looks—the fair, freckled beauty of German-Irish parentage—pleasing enough that she was not in desperate want for roles.

Between auditions Angeline would sit on the steps of a favoured gallery to eat lunch with a view of the busy street below, and in this routine had been content enough.

Occasionally men would approach Angeline to comment on her beauty or ask for her telephone number, and each time she would either ignore them or laugh aloud until they went away.

One day before she had even reached the steps a young man’s voice came at her shoulder.

“Hi there. I always see you eating out here in the cold. Let me take you for lunch.”

Angeline had turned to see a slim, pale haired young man in round glasses, rather stiffly dressed in a white shirt and tie. He was, she supposed, good looking enough, but she recognised from his clothing and manner of holding himself that he was religious, belonging to a branch she’d seen handing out pamphlets from her taxi window on the way to work.

She glanced down at herself in her old, belted leather coat and suede boots scuffed at the toes from years of wear and was amused to consider what impression she’d made to suggest a want to convert.

“I don’t need saving,” Angeline said aloud. “Thanks, though.”

She’d turned away, smirking, and his voice had called her back with its youthful arrogance.

“It’s just lunch. I’m not trying to sell anything to you. I’d like to take you out. You’re beautiful, you know.”

“Yes,” she’d said. “I do know.”

But she’d gone with him anyway to an upmarket café, eating as much as she dared in the awareness this cocky stranger would pay for it gladly in return for her company.

Throughout the meal she rarely spoke, only smirked, imperious as a queen as the stranger talked at length about himself.

His name was Ethaniel Eaton, he said, the son of a hotel tycoon; he’d studied business at college, but ultimately dreamt of owning a farm out of state where his cousins lived, which he had longed to do since he was boy.

Angeline knew relatively nothing about agriculture, but what she did know was that even from a background of money this inexperienced young man had little chance of success, and in this she was oddly endeared to him by the sole trait they shared in common.

Nevertheless, she rejected his advances, and for the following week she ate her lunch on a park bench instead of the steps.

It was merely a week before Ethaniel found her again, sitting down beside her with a practiced nonchalance, one white hand going up to smooth his pristine shirt.

“Well,” said Angeline. “You’re obviously following me.”

She wasn’t at all threatened by the fact, or by him; though she’d been romantically pursued many times in her life she was flattered. Ethaniel’s type, as Angeline imagined it, was surely modest, church-going, soft-spoken, none of which she was.

She could offer him nothing, nor would she, selfish to the last.

“My Dad owns a hotel just over there,” said Ethaniel. “But now you mention it, sure. I’d like to follow you every day of your life, if you’d let me, that is.”

Angeline never ate on the steps again.

After many more lunches, dinners, and evenings spent together afterwards they were engaged to be married; Angeline had always made decisions on rapid impulse, and this one felt as justified as any.

She first met Ethaniel’s family at the wedding, and didn’t much like them, nor did her parents, or the nonplussed friends that she’d invited.

“They are odd people,” her mother declared. “So old-fashioned.”

This was the greatest insult Helene could have put forth without resorting to name calling, and had Angeline not been so taken up by the grand party and the outpouring of gifts from Ethaniel’s wealthy relations she might have taken it as the warning that had been intended.

Life after the wedding moved forth with unending rapidity. Angeline had expected to remain in the apartment she’d been sharing with Ethaniel for at least a year, but he began talking of her visiting the farmhouse his father had gifted to him as a wedding present with such insistent eagerness that she gave in and soon joined him there.

The old apartment had was sold, her things packed up by strangers and sent to their new residence in cardboard boxes, a process Angeline had no say in.

She found the countryside oppressive in its remote miles of foliate nothingness, its people an odd combination of conservative and overbearing at once.

They received no visitors in those first months but the armada of smiling blonde relations on Ethaniel’s side, so benevolently alien that Angeline was unable to relate to or engage with any of them beyond a bland surface level.

Marooned in acres of greenery she longed for the filth and perspiring, mad throng of the city, the honest slog of auditioning for parts against a hundred others and hoping to land one by the merest chance. Beautiful, all of it, she thought now she’d left it.

It was guilt that prevented her egress from the country, for she loved Ethaniel then, and it twisted her heart to think of him idling without her. Whenever she spoke of her longing for her other life he’d wind his arms around her neck and kiss her, gesturing to the fields beyond.

“I don’t get why you hate it so much out here. The country’s in your blood.”

“Not so much,” said Angeline, curtly. “My mother is a professor and my father was a scriptwriter. No shit smeared fields in those genetics.”

Ethaniel laughed and worked a warm hand up her dress.

“It’ll be great here once the farm’s really up and running. Cute little animals everywhere. You sure won’t be bored, then.”

They made love against the window where Ethaniel could see the land as he fucked her and think of that dream. Yet he had not worked the fields a day in his life; farmhands and other staff tended to them on his behalf while he watched and kept track of the figures.

Angeline forgave her husband his idleness, then, but she was soon pregnant with twins, and after nine months spent with her head in a bucket she began to nurse resentment for him at her breast.

There had been no debate as to whether or not they were to keep the children, no discussion as to whether Angeline ever wished to be a mother at all. Ethaniel had merely overwhelmed her with his delight at the news to the point that she believed she was excited too, and would love the unplanned sisters enough to forget her illness, afterwards.

Theirs would be a home birth, the presiding Eaton women announced; no argument as to other arrangements could penetrate their insistence, which Angeline would realise with each subsequent birth would remain unchallenged by Ethaniel. Nor did he speak up for her on the notion of pain relief, which, as Angeline discovered while squatting, half mad with labour’s excruciation on the living room floor, was discouraged in the family’s religion.

Only Ethaniel’s adoration of her as he pressed the slippery infants to her chest prevented her from hating him. She strained herself to trust in his love against each failure in him to present evidence of its being before her.

He insisted that she was to home-school the children, though Angeline was already so worn down from housework and cooking she couldn’t imagine where she’d find the time to do so, or the will. She felt nothing for the twins, suspecting the wretched birth had wrung all feeling for them out of her.

But Ethaniel wheedled and slid his slim form against her in bedtime darkness until she gave way to his will.

A year passed, and there was another child, their first son, near sleepless with colic. The days and nights seared into a madhouse corridor of time, but through hard-knuckled determination to scrape herself up above it all Angeline maintained a balance of sorts, though her heart squeezed in a perpetual fist behind her ribcage.

By the end of that year Angeline was pregnant again with twins, a cruel miracle.

Abortion was impossible, disallowed by the Eaton’s religion, and by the state they resided in; Ethaniel would never allow her to travel in pursuit of it, for he loved all their children, or the notion of them, at least. He was quite uninvolved with their rearing, had never bottle fed or bathed even the first of his brood.

Like a daughter at her father’s mercy Angeline begged Ethaniel to at least grant her help around the house. She was allowed it only through the Eaton women, who would cook or watch the children infrequently, and always with an air of disdain that Angeline couldn’t handle the workload in placid silence, as Ethaniel’s own late mother had done.

Angeline could not help but note that, in the photographs she’d seen of her, the poor woman had appeared at least a decade older than she was.

*

The years dragged like the stumps of docked limbs, blackening into thanklessness as the mite freedoms Ethaniel had allowed Angeline were subtly erased. The few telephone calls and family visits were now monitored, and she was only allowed as far as the neighbouring village without an escort, or at least three of the children in tow.

Any hobbies she showed interest in other than homemaking or religious pursuits were openly discouraged, and should Angeline attempt any independent venture she was handled coldly by all adults within the house, a united front against some vague crime she had nevertheless committed.

This cropping of the leash had come upon her with such slow and gentle progress that she had not realised the trap until she was within it, threatened not by a fist but by shame, a clever kind of punishment.

Angeline often wondered why Ethaniel had not chosen some willing follower of his religion as a wife over her so that he might achieve his fantasy without resistance. But then there was no sense of conquer in that; through forcing land and woman alike into his ideal he was a tycoon of his own making, truly a man.

By the time the eighth child was conceived Angeline had come to understand he did not love her, and by the ninth she knew that she hated him, and all of their offspring, as well.

They were not particularly terrible children, for all the chaos of their number; they were, as expected, loud and unruly, but ultimately blameless as to their mother’s position, this even she knew.

What Angeline hated was the concept of them, Children of the capitalised ‘C’. Their destruction of her body, which through them had stretched and changed, their many needs and demands, their high voices, and stinks and dirt, and their smothering intrusion of her privacy— she resented it all with a bitterness that cantered her with a physical ache.

The children knew by instinct that their mother did not like them, though she had hidden it, and did not, even at their worst, mistreat them. They suffered her absence of love indifferently; there was enough of it within the guild of women that had helped raise them for it not to matter. Were Angeline to ever leave them they’d be equally unmoved, she knew.

Only the family—Ethaniel’s—stood to lose something in her absence, or else gain it in the form of disappointment that they had not whittled her down into the shape of one of their own.

When Angeline became pregnant with the tenth child she telephoned her mother to inform her of the news, and broke down into wild sobs before the words were halfway out. Ethaniel took the receiver from her with a look of such vicious disapproval that she physically recoiled from him.

“Yes, he’s our sixth son, now,” he said into the phone through gritted teeth. “Actually, we’re really happy. Thank you, Helene.”

He refused to speak to Angeline for three days after that call, looking through her as though she were made of glass.

A week later Angeline received a parcel from her mother, which Ethaniel observed her open with narrowed eyes. The package contained several jars of dried plants and a book on the writings of Saint Hildegard, an Abbess, not of Ethaniel’s religion, a typical mistake.

Helene was a cynic to the bone and had so little liking for the family or their leanings that she’d made no attempt to understand them over the ten years of their acquaintance.

‘For your kitchen,’ said the accompanying note in her narrow, scribbling hand. ‘And for your mind.’

Ethaniel scoffed.

“Same old Helene. Knowing her she’s probably trying to poison us all.”

He allowed Angeline to keep the gift, losing interest in it almost at once. Helene was divorced, and reportedly lived with two lovers in at apartment in Berlin: a bad influence, but at sixty-seven she was no longer considered much of a threat in a war Ethaniel considered himself to have won.

So it was that Angeline found herself in the kitchen, eight weeks pregnant, looking at the gifted assortment of labelled glass jars with some bewilderment.

Tansy, wild ginger, yue, yarrow, aristolochia—

She had not heard of most of them, yet even with her basic knowledge of cooking—which through exhaustion and gradual spite she’d refused to advance since the sixth child was born—Angeline surmised that they were intended for medicinal rather than culinary purposes.

Perplexed, she sat with effort on one of the high kitchen chairs and thumbed through the book that had come with them. She saw immediately that the cover had been replaced; while by the same author, the contents were an education on healing plants and remedies, as well as those to be avoided in delicate health conditions.

Flipping through the pages her eye was drawn to a passage.

“…A pregnant woman will eat it, either on account she languishes or she aborts an infant which is a danger to her body…”

Angeline looked quickly about her, listening for footsteps or approaching voices; all were distant, on the floors above her, or beyond the house. Once she knew herself alone she opened the book again, a fearful giddiness taking over her.

All the plants in the row of little jars were abortifacients, if taken for that purpose.

Since the conception of this tenth child Angeline had wished for miscarriage, had strained at the notion as though like some witch of old she could bring death into being by the fabric of thought alone. She’d had dreams of the fetus spoiling within her, running like milk from the pail of her cunt to go sour on the floor of the barn.

The familiar illness of pregnancy had braided her mind into such styles that she near believed in her own power. Perhaps instead of cursing the birth she had summoned the means of ending it through some untapped psychic reach.

A woman might well be made a witch through suffering, or else something so akin to one that the difference did not matter.

Angeline had to believe herself somewhat responsible for what she was to do, that she was still an agent in her own existence rather than a doll of clay moved by the Gods of husband or mother as they willed it. She remembered when she had truly been so, young and unmoored; she might find that self again if this tenth child did not come.

Taking instruction from the Abbess’ book on how to prepare the plants for consumption she began to experiment with herbal teas, mixing the plants by thirds to drink twice daily. This was the maximum she dared take without poisoning herself in the process, being unable to telephone her mother to consult her on the proper method now that the Eatons watched her so closely.

She took pleasure in the notion that they would despise what she was attempting. The Eatons, who made a business of faith, were against termination not for true love of the child but a righteous satisfaction in the misery of those that bore them; the agriculture of suffering gave their narrow lives its purpose.

So she kept her work secret, playing up the quiet act of housewife, the aches and throes of sickness brought on by the tea waved away as ordinary pregnancy symptoms.

Ethaniel kept his distance, as had become his way when she was with child. Even before it showed in her body the presence of life within a life repulsed him, for all that he was against its excision.

Once Angeline had been stung by his avoidance of her pregnant form; now when Ethaniel announced his departure for a trip abroad with friends she smiled and waved him off at the farmhouse door.

Angeline was four days into her experiment then, and already cramps had set in like the bite of some unseen animal. She swallowed as many painkillers as she could tolerate and took frequent refuge in one of the bathrooms, heaving grimly until she emerged, damp and pale as oyster flesh as the Eaton women clicked their tongues in condescending sympathy.

“It’ll be worth it, in the end,” they said, just as Ethaniel had once spoken of the farm.

“Yes,” said Angeline, pressing a hand to the maelstrom of her abdomen with a pained grin. “It will be.”

The jars of abortifacient plants, now relabelled, had gone unnoticed on the spice rack; the Eatons were not great lovers of flavour, and so had rarely cause to look.

By the seventh day Angeline had such a close mental association between the tea’s bitter taste and the throes that followed that she began to gag even before the mug had touched her lips. Still she drank, knowing that this short path of agony was surely lesser than that of another unwanted birth.

On the eighth day she began to bleed, an event heralded by pains of such extremes that she put a chair against the kitchen door so as to writhe about the floor undisturbed. She help a folded towel between her legs and bled through it at once.

Angeline was struck with the panicked thought that she had mixed too many different components together, or the incorrect quantity of them. She dragged herself up to the sink, washed herself as best she could, and took another pain killer, no longer concerned with the risks.

Quite suddenly she was taken up with the notion that she must get out of the house, that walking against the agony would ease it, or else rush it on to its end. Huffing through clenched teeth Angeline staggered out of the back door into the foul humidity of the September afternoon.

The pain was now like a madness, stirring her very brain in its hold on her. With each step the cramps renewed their onslaught, and she went on only because to turn back would be to accept that she, Angeline, had died at the altar, that what had tripped loose from it had been a corpse churned into false animation by the maggots of unwanted life.

If death came to her now she would be much unchanged by it, only colder then than she’d been in the sweltering jailhouse her husband had made their home. Angeline took the ring he’d given her from her finger and dropped it in the blood that pooled in her footprints, treading it down under her heel.

The pain, the heat; they rocked her between them as she trundled on, half blind in the excruciation of each tide that dashed her in its swell. She made towards the path that cut through the fields and out of the farm, holding onto a fence to stabilise herself as she inched away from the house.

A redheaded farmhand bent over in a nearby pasture turned to look at her as he passed, his face screwed up against the glittering mace of the sun.

Angeline did not know the man’s name. She had tried to be part of the farm, once, for Ethaniel’s benefit, milked cows or collected eggs, and other such light work. But the more entrenched in birthing Angeline became the less and less she left the house, and so the men employed to tend to those abandoned tasks were all but strangers to her.

The contacts with directors and other actors Angeline had made in the city were likewise estranged from her, she considered. She’d been a nobody then, and was less than that now; they had no reason to remember her, and as she hauled herself along the fence she found that most of their names and faces had been likewise eaten from her memory by the ravening boar of time.

Behind her the red-headed farmhand had abandoned the pasture to give chase, his long, loping strides like the gait of some lunatic scarecrow come to life.

“Mrs Eaton! Mrs Eaton!”

Angeline ignored him, pausing only to vomit yellow silt into the grass. Then she walked on, reeking of dead blood and ammonia, the sleeve of her dress dangling off one shoulder like a vestigial limb.

Blood came so thick down her thighs now that her shoes squelched with it, followed by some denser substance she saw with dull vision on the path. What she’d carried in her lay there in the pieces her body’s cramping process had worked out of it.

The ninth, the nothing was done with, and in a rush of lightheaded glory came relief.

She’d get out of the farm, thought Angeline as she stumbled on, have someone drive her to the train station, or to the airport, and go back to the city to work.

She’d take up a flat, and loose men, and smoke cigarettes as she’d done before, drink coffee in mornings graphite with smog, and never cook.

She would be Angeline O’Mara, and she’d eat lunch on the gallery steps again.

“Mrs Eaton!” the farmhand was saying, and as Angeline’s legs slid out from under her his arms kept her from meeting the earth.

He was the age she’d been when she’d first come here, she realised, twenty-five or so; he even looked something like Angeline, as she’d been then, or perhaps it was only the expression in his eyes as he stared down at her that made her think so, the youthful innocence of having never glimpsed such pain before.

To him alone she felt she was a mother, having borne him through blood into the world.