Jane’s Cure

Chapter I ❖ Bluebird

Charlotte County Gaol

British Colony of New Brunswick, 

February 1, 1850

I hear a bluebird. 

It is February, and I know it is too early for him to be back. When I close my eyes, I see him, a piece of the sky, his breast brushed with a sunset. He sings for me. Tu a wee… 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 slot? He flew in from a wind blowing north and east, past the Yankees to this town in the colony of New Brunswick, its people clinging to the shore, the past, and a young queen across the sea. St. Andrews, my home for the past four years, shire of Charlotte county, "blessed" 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, something I crave.

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 that 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.