Chapter 10

Slowly, slowly the balance of the village looked to be restored. If the men were keen to be seen to be whole men, they were keener to have children to call their own. By common consent each wife’s child was baptised as that husband’s child. The shame – if shame it was – of the village was not to be trumpeted too loudly or widely.

Pastor Wilton may have found his sermons less effective now that a man had been found to impregnate women in the village successfully. Surely the logic was that the men were the ones at fault and the women were blameless (or as blameless as a sinful human can be). Finally he found a larger, wider audience for his loveless ministry. He was offered the church at Gifford. I, for one, encouraged him to take his theological knowledge and spread it wider than our little community. To my surprise, Goodwife Wilton supported me; she was indeed my principle ally. Naturally he prayed and fasted to get a clear answer. When he told the church elders that he was minded to accept and wrote to tell them in Gifford, only then did his wife tell him she had receive guidance from God to stay. She had become the midwife through a natural progression of caring and loving; she would have been a sad loss. Naturally, she said, if her husband insisted, she was bound by her vows to follow him; but she left him in no doubt that it would be a selfish act unbefitting a man of God to take away the village’s midwife. She stayed.

In many ways she is the Godmother or Grandmother or Aunt of all the children we see running around. It is to her that women go with their problems, Maeve helps in matters more explicitly sexual.

The danger, as we know, is the children all have the same father, no matter what the records show. We have tried to moderate this risk by ensuring that children from cousins (and especially children of sisters; or in one case children of a mother and daughter – that was an interesting meeting of minds and bodies) did not take time to experiment with each other, and certainly not to form tighter relationships.

After the good man had left for Gifford, mother and daughter came together to see Maeve. “Husband, how would it be to mate with mother Eliza and daughter Elizabeth? Eliza was brought to term when only fourteen by being sold to a rude man in England. He left for the New World, promising to send for her, but never did. She came to look for him, not realising the vastness of the country. So she feels she has lived in sin with Master Jack, which I cannot gainsay except that her husband from England may well be dead, so it may be bigamy or it may not. She recognises that she knew she was married though. In her favour, she told Master Jack her story before they consummated the marriage. To her detriment, she waited until after the marriage ceremony. Elizabeth is ... she has ... that is Master Jack has proposed that he take her as true wife and the two continue living under the same roof. It would be condemned in all normal places of course, yet they two are content to acquiesce and I am not sure what to say.”

“Well, it is not as if Master Jack is the girl’s father. Nor, I suspect, that he has had carnal relations with either for some time. I think we may be charitable in accepting that loving relationships may not always fit our traditional attitudes may we not?”

“Husband, I sometimes think that you would agree to anything if it meant you had another attractive woman in your bed.” She laughed. She knew me too well. “Still, perhaps we are too hidebound and tied to rules that were never in the holy book.” She was well read, especially for a woman. I was fairly sure that there was nothing explicit to say that a man should have only one wife, nor that there were rules to deal with this specific situation. “Did not Moses have two wives who were sisters?”

“Well argued, wife. You should be the pastor, not me.” (for I had replaced Reverend Wilton).