After a moment Mrs. Blackwell opened her eyes again. They were clouded and full of anguish. “I never meant to hurt the baby. You must believe me.”

This was the opening Sarah had been waiting for. She stepped closer to the bed. “You were right not to stop taking the morphine. If you had, you most certainly would have lost the baby.”

She seemed relieved to hear this. “They said he would be fine, though. They said once he was born, he wouldn’t need it the way I do.”

“I’m sure they told you what you wanted to hear. It wasn’t in their best interests for you to stop using morphine, now was it?”

Her eyes filled with tears, but this time Sarah knew they were genuine and not an attempt to gain her sympathy. “I haven’t been able to stop taking the morphine, no matter how hard I try. How will he be able to stop? He’s so tiny…”

Her voice broke on a sob, and this time Sarah took one of her hands in both of hers. It was small and soft and icy cold. “I’ve seen this before,” she said. “With a baby, it’s possible to gradually decrease the amount you give him until he’s not dependent on it anymore. We’ll wait a few months, until he’s stronger, and then we’ll start weaning him off of it.”

“But I’ve tried to stop so many times! The first time almost killed me, and I’ve never been able to do it again. The pain is unbearable.” The tears were running down her cheeks unchecked now. Sarah felt her anger melting.

“We won’t let your baby suffer, Mrs. Blackwell.”

The younger woman looked at her with desperate eyes. “I know you’re a midwife, but will you take care of him yourself? Will you come back and make sure he’s all right and help wean him from that awful stuff?”

Sarah could not refuse. “Of course I will, if that’s what you want. Tell me, though, how did you begin taking the morphine in the first place?”

She closed her eyes and seemed to shudder. “It was… when I was hurt. I fell off a horse when I… I hurt my back and my neck. The pain was horrible, and they gave me morphine. It was the only way I could bear it.”

“Didn’t you consult any physicians?”

Mrs. Blackwell stared at her in amazement. “Of course! My father called in every doctor he could find. There were dozens. None of them could do anything for me. They said I’d be an invalid for the rest of my life. I didn’t leave my room for almost a year, and I hardly even left my bed. Walking was excruciating and I could only sit in a chair for a few minutes at a time. And then Edmund came.”

“Your husband,” Sarah said. “What did he do that the others didn’t?”

Mrs. Blackwell’s smooth brow furrowed as she struggled to explain. “He touched me. The others wouldn’t touch me. It caused me too much pain. But Edmund told me he could make me well if he could just do some simple adjustments.”

“What kind of adjustments?”

“To my spine. That’s how he cures people. It’s like a miracle. I felt better almost instantly. Within a few weeks my pain was completely gone.”

“But you still needed the morphine,” Sarah guessed.

Mrs. Blackwell closed her eyes again, and Sarah could only imagine the anguish these admissions cost her. “Edmund thought I shouldn’t need the morphine anymore because my pain was gone. My father thought so, too. I didn’t want to take it anymore, so I did what they told me and stopped taking it. I thought I was going to die.”

“Stopping morphine is extremely difficult. Few people ever succeed,” Sarah told her, not mentioning that some of the aids physicians sometimes used were even worse than the agony of withdrawal itself.

“But I did succeed!” she informed Sarah. “It was the hardest thing I ever did in my life, but I did it! I was finally free of both the pain and the morphine. I thought I could go back to my normal life again. That was all I wanted.”

“But you didn’t?”

Mrs. Blackwell sighed, and another tear slid down her cheek. “Edmund asked me to help him. He said he could cure many other people, just the way he’d cured me, but he couldn’t unless those people knew his treatments worked. He was going to give a lecture in the city, explaining his techniques and how successful they were, but he needed someone to testify, someone he’d cured. He said… I mean, after what Edmund had done for me, how could I refuse?” she asked, her eyes pleading for Sarah to confirm her decision.

“Of course,” Sarah said, knowing she could only imagine the pressure he must have put on her. “You must have been very grateful. But how did your father feel about it?” Sarah couldn’t imagine her own father allowing her to do such a thing as speak about her health problems at a public lecture.

“He didn’t really think it was proper, but he was so grateful to Edmund that he couldn’t refuse. I think he felt some sort of debt of honor to him. Edmund told me what to say. He wrote it out for me. All I had to do was read it, but I was so frightened! There were hundreds of people, and they were all looking at me. I was so terrified, I almost fainted. I don’t even remember giving the speech, but Edmund was very pleased, and many people came to him for his treatments after that. So of course he wanted me to speak again.”

Sarah was beginning to understand what had happened. “You must have been very frightened,” she guessed.

“I was so frightened, I knew I wouldn’t be able to get up on that stage again, but my father felt we owed Edmund for what he had done. Edmund hadn’t even accepted any payment for treating me, even though he’d been practically penniless. He only wanted my help. What could I do?”

“You could have told Edmund and your father how terrified you were,” Sarah suggested kindly.

“I did, but they couldn’t understand. They kept saying I’d get over it, that I’d be fine, just as I was the first time. But I hadn’t been fine the first time, and I couldn’t explain that to them! They made me do it, but the only way I could get through it was to take some morphine. Just a little,” she hastened to explain, lest Sarah think badly of her. “Just enough so I didn’t feel afraid. I wasn’t going to take it anymore after that, but…”

“But you couldn’t help yourself,” Sarah guessed. She’d seen the power of the opiate to hold someone in its thrall.

“Once I started again, I couldn’t seem to stop, especially when Edmund asked me to go to other cities for lectures. My father went with us, of course. It was all very proper, but I was still terrified of the crowds. I hid the morphine from them, so neither of them knew I was taking it. It was awful, lying to both of them and trying to buy the morphine when they didn’t know. They would have been so angry… and so disappointed with me.”

Sarah knew that morphine was readily available at any drugstore, but she also knew women of the upper classes had little freedom. An unmarried girl would have been chaperoned wherever she went. Mrs. Blackwell must have been clever indeed to manage to obtain her morphine without discovery.

“Then Edmund told me he’d fallen in love with me and asked me to marry him,” she went on, so anxious to tell her story that she hardly seemed aware of Sarah’s presence anymore. “I thought if he really loved me, he wouldn’t make me do the lectures anymore, but I was wrong. Once we were married, he could take me anywhere he went without worrying about a chaperon anymore. I wanted to stop the morphine again, but I couldn’st, not unless I told Edmund that I was taking it and unless he would let me stop doing the lectures. I tried telling him I didn’t want to do the lectures anymore, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He told me I had no choice, because without the lectures, he wouldn’t get new patients and he wouldn’t be able to make a living. He was my husband. I had to help him, didn’t I?”

Sarah chose not to answer that question. “I can understand that you wanted to do the right thing.”

“I don’t know what the right thing is anymore,” she said with a weary sigh.