moment or two to master her emotions. She breathed deeply, her thin chest rising and falling with the effort. "She wasn't right." Her voice was choked. "Little Phemie was deformed. Her face. Her mouth. Her lips were all twisted. Dolly couldn't suckle her herself. She was too upset. She got a wet nurse in, but even she had terrible difficulty getting the baby to feed. She was a poor little thing for long enough, but in the end she did survive."
"I'm sorry," Hester said quietly. She had almost no knowledge of caring for babies. All her experience had been with the results of violence and disease, and always with adults. There was something particularly wrenching to the heart about a tiny creature, new in the world, struggling to live.
Martha drank some of her tea. "It wasn't until Leda was born about two years later that they realized Phemie was deaf too."
Hester said nothing. She knew from Martha's face that she was trying to collect her self-control sufficiently to say something else which still tore at her, over twenty years afterwards, intruding into Perdita Sheldon's grief and confusion and, for a moment at least, pushing it aside.
"Leda was deformed as well," Martha said in a whisper. "It was her mouth and an eye. She could see, but she couldn't hear either, except a tiny bit." She looked at Hester, waiting for her to say something.
"I'm so sorry." Hester could only try to imagine what the mother must have felt, the overwhelming tide of pity, anger, confusion, guilt, and also consuming fear for the future of the children she had borne into a world which would treat them with terrible cruelty, sometimes without even realizing it. What would become of them when she was not there to protect and defend and love them?
"What happened?" she asked.
"Sam loved them," Martha answered, biting her lip and staring straight ahead. "He looked after them, even when Dolly was too distraught to manage." She stopped again, unable for a moment to continue.
Hester sat motionless, ignoring the tea and the shortbread; in fact, she had forgotten them.
"Then Sam died," Martha said abruptly. "It was something with his stomach. It was very quick. Dolly couldn't manage without him. She was completely distracted with grief. Phemie and Leda were put into an institution and Dolly went away. She didn't tell us where. I expect she meant to, but something inside her just... collapsed." She looked at Hester, her eyes filled with tears. "I would have taken the girls, if I could have. But I was in service. There was no place for two little children. Phemie was barely three, and Leda only a year... and-and they weren't pretty children. They were... deformed. And they couldn't hear, so they would never be any use to anyone..."
Hester reached out and took Martha in her arms, holding her thin body closely and feeling the dry sobs that racked through her.
"Of course, there was nothing you could do," Hester said gently. "You had to work to eat. So do all of us. Sometimes it is all you can do to support yourself, and if you go under, what use is that to anyone?"
"I wish I knew where they were!" Martha said desperately. "I look at Lieutenant Sheldon with his face all twisted and burned like that until half of him hardly looks human, and I see the look in Perdita's eyes, and she was so in love with him... and now she can hardly bring herself to look at him straight, let alone touch him... and I wonder what happened to those poor little souls. I should have found some way to help! Who's going to love them, if not me?"
"I don't know," Hester said honestly. False words of comfort now would only leave Martha thinking she did not understand or believe the enormity of her anguish. Hester held her even closer. "We can't change what has already happened, but we can try to do something about Gabriel and Perdita. She's got to learn to understand, to forget his disfigured face and see the man inside... that beauty matters so much more. That is what will love her in return. To the devil with Athol Sheldon and his ideas."
Martha gave a jerky little laugh, half choking. "He means well," she said, straightening herself up and pushing back some of her hair which had fallen askew from its pins. "He just doesn't realize..."
Hester poured fresh tea, which was still hot and steaming fragrantly. She